Category: World

Abdul Khaliq Farahi was Afghanistan’s Consul General to Pakistan in 2008, when he was kidnapped in Peshawar. He had already been chosen for promotion to ambassador, and was just weeks away from taking up his new post.

The kidnappers were insurgents from both Afghanistan and Pakistan, but they were not directly affiliated to or controlled by Al Qaeda. But they were aware that their best course of action would be to pass their hapless captive to Al Qaeda.

Negotiations then started, with Al Qaeda demanding a ransom of $5m for his release.The initial demand was for an exchange of Mr Farahi for prisoners held by the Afghanistanis. No demand was made for prisoners held by the US invasion force, as they were well aware that such a demand would be dismissed out of hand.

The negotiations were long, and it was not until 2010 that the deal was sealed, with the assistance of the Al Haqani faction acting as go-betweens.

Where did the money come from? Well, we know that the USA does not pay ransoms for hostages. But they do send vast amounts of unaudited money to people who do.

In the course of a recent court case in the USA (Abid Naseer was convicted in Brooklyn of supporting terrorism and conspiring to bomb a British shopping centre) documents were presented which indicated where the money came from. Approximately $2.5m was contributed by Pakistan. Another $1.5m came from Iran and other states in the Persian Gulf. The remaining $1m was provided by the CIA.

This was not a case of the CIA blatantly breaching the directives of the US government. They have done that many times in their history. But not this time.

The papers released in the Abid Nasser case reveal the truth about US cash payments to Hamid Karzai since the invasion in 2001. Just as in Iraq, the CIA were delivering huge amounts of cash to the corrupt regimes they were bankrolling at the time. The CIA were delivering sacks of cash to Hamid Karzai’s presidential palace every month.

According to the New York Times: ‘The money was used to buy the loyalty of warlords, legislators and other prominent — and potentially troublesome — Afghans, helping the palace finance a vast patronage network that secured Mr. Karzai’s power base.’ So a corrupt regime of bribery and graft was funded by the CIA in cash.

To quote the New York Times again:

‘The cash flow has slowed since a new president, Ashraf Ghani, assumed office in September, Afghan officials said, refusing to elaborate. But they added that cash was still coming in, and that it was not clear how robust any current American constraints on it are. “It’s cash,” said a former Afghan security official. “Once it’s at the palace, they can’t do a thing about how it gets spent.”

The murder of Boris Nemtsov was Vladimir Putin’s fault.

There is absolutely no doubt about that, at least not in the minds of the editors of the mainstream media.

The first reports I heard on the shooting were on Radio 4, and they were repeated evry half hour or hour through the day. They unfailingly reported that Boris Netsov, “an opponent of Putin” was shot “near the Kremlin”. The juxtaposition of the two phrases was intended to have one effect, and one effect only; to imply that Vladimir Putin was behind the murder. Very few articles or reports mentioned the fact that Putin enjoys extensive support within Russia from ordinary people for his opposition to the west’s attempts to weaken Russia, and that Boris Nemtsov posed no significant threat to his position. Nevertheless we are supposed to buy the story that Putin is behind the murder.

Now I do not know whether Putin played any part in the death of Boris Nemtsov. But crucially, nor does the BBC or any of the newspapers peddling the”near-the-Kremilin” line every time they report the story. So why do they do it?

I am sick and tired of being told about the various bogeymen around the world. Life and politics is not that simple. And there are plenty of nasty dictators and killers whose regimes are not constantly described in grossly pejorative terms. First it was the Ayatollahs in Iran. Then it was Saddam Hussein. Gaddafi was the monster who kept ‘killing his own people” we were told. Most recently it was Assad in Syria. They were not so sure about him to begin with. But we knew he was the new bogey-man when the reports started including the phrase ‘killing his own people’ – shades of Gaddafi.

What is sickening is that the western media like to vaunt themselves as independent. Yet every time their rulers decide it is time to prime the public for a possible war with someone, they fall into line with horror stories and reports of atrocities.

Sure, there are lots of nasty regimes out there. And some of them are close allies of the west. Do you not think that, if international politics changed, and the west wanted to declare war on Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka or numerous other countries, the media could not dig up horror stories about those regimes?

If it is just, fair and ‘independent’ to criticise a vicious regime, it is equally just and fair to criticise them all. But if you select the ones that your lords and masters want to wage war against, and focus on their misdeeds, you are simply doing the bidding of the powers that be.

Independent press? The so-called free press is as blatantly partisan as the state-controlled press in the regimes they criticise.

The victory of Syriza in the Greek elections on 25 January show the willingness of the working class to stand up to vicious attacks by the ruling class on their living standards and hard-won rights.

Syriza is vaunted as “radical leftics”, “communist” or even “Marxist” in the right-wing press. They are none of the above.

While the working class of Greece suffers and struggles to scrape by, their hatred of the “austerity” programme struggles to find an expression. Alexander Tsipras and his allies spring to the defence of capitalism in its moment of need. With their rhetoric and left-sounding phrases, they work to divert the working class outrage away from outright opposition to capitalism. They tell the working class that it is not capitalism that is at fault. It is “bad” capitalism. Those ogres in the troika (the IMF, ECB and European Commission) are the culprits. If they would only follow Syriza’s programme, capitalism, the Euro and the Eurozone could all be saved.

The programme advocated by Syriza is surprisingly similar to the programme advocated by The Economist magazine for several years. In June 2011 The Economist wrote of the EU leaders: “their strategy of denial—refusing to accept that Greece cannot pay its debts—has become untenable”. They went on to suggest, “While the EU’s leaders are trying to deny the need for default, a rising chorus is taking the opposite line. Greece should embrace default, walk away from its debts, abandon the euro and bring back the drachma (in a similar way to Britain leaving the gold standard in 1931 or Argentina dumping its currency board in 2001).”

Defaulting on debt is a fine capitalist tradition. It does not make you a socialist to merely acknowledge that Greece cannot repay its debts.

Instead of trying to get the Eoropean leaders and the IMF to agree to reduce their debt by 50 per cent (Syriza’s policy) the Greek working class should repudiate the whole debt. That money was not lent to the Greek working class. It was lent to the thieves and brigands who ran capitalism on behalf of the ruling classes. It is time for all working class Greeks to repudiate not only these capitalist loans, but the capitalist system itself. If refusing to pay back the punishing debts to capitalist lenders results in any furtherlowering of living standards, the Greeks should take over the banks, insurance companies and finance houses and put them under workers’ control. Workers’ control, in this context, means control by a government voted for and directly answerable to the Greek working class. Not a government elected for 4 or 5 years, and subject to manipulation and control by foreign governments, corporations and institutions.

The Greeks, who pride themselves in being the founders of democracy, have an opportunity to lead the world again in establishing the first workers’ democracy in an advanced capitalist economy.

When I read accounts of mass killings, like the attack on the military school in Peshwar on 16 December, I experience horror and disgust.

The accounts remind me of watching documentaries about England in the 17th century. I remember recently watching one of those dramatised documentaries in which a royal female (I forget who) had a man executed. In addition to the normal process of hanging, drawing and quartering, the poor victim had his testicles cut off and held before his eyes before they were thrown on a fire in front of him. Then we was hung by the neck, choking and struggling, but only for long enough to make him suffer. He was cut down before he could suffocate, as that would have been too merciful. Then he was disembowelled while still alive so he could see his entrails, before being beheaded and hacked to pieces.

When you watch documentaries on the Tudor period it is not unusual to listen to accounts like that. And however horrifying and disgusting we find the acts of some of the most extreme groups in the world today, it also gives me cause to reflect on how recently such practices were part of the accepted norms of behaviour in England.

My objection to this type of extreme sickening violence is not based on a feeling of moral indignation or superiority. Certainly the indignation and horror are there. There is a difference between the cruelty of killing over a hundred children in a single attack, snd killing hundreds of children in drone strikes and as collateral damage using conventional weapons like bombs and missiles. But the difference is not huge.

It strikes me that often the most atrocious acts are signs of desperation on the part of the perpetrators. In this case even the Afghan Taliban have distanced themselves from the actions of their Pakistani allies. But they are fighting different wars, on different territory. The Afghan Taliban see their long struggle coming to fruition with the “withdrawal” of active foreign troops from their country. Even the decision of Obama to retain 10,000 non-combatant military personnel after his self-imposed Dec 3 deadline has not dampened their hope of eventual victory.

In Pakistan the disparate groups that constitute the Taliban in north-eastern Pakistan face an onslaught by the Pakistani military. They resort to extreme measures to hit back. The fact that the school was run my the military, and a substantial proportioj of the children in the school are the children of Pakistani military personnel does not mitigate the horror of hearing of so many children being massacred.

I can only echo the words of Imran Khan: “Fight with men, not innocent children”.

One of the most common words used in reporting on events in the Middle East is “radicalisation”. And in the UK the current media furore centres on a debate about what to do with “radicals” returning from the Iraq/Syria conflict. The fear is that these “radicalised” people will pose a threat to security in this country.

I do not want to get into that debate in this article. What I want to do is question why people who went to Syria to fight the Assad regime are now being described as “radicals”. The way the word is used has been changed, and the reasons for the change have sinister overtones for those of us who want to see the end of capitalism and the start of a fully democratic socialist society.

A radical is someone who wants to see a fundamental change in society. Until recently the word was always used to describe groups who agitated for the forward movement of society, to a future. When you look at the ideology of Islamist funamentalism, you find a world view based on the outlook of a medieval society. The main thrust of the ideology is of going backwards; it is a “return” to true faith, as interpreted by its adherents. It is a reversion to the fundamental and original teachings of the man they call the Prophet.

But backward movement is not radical. It is reactionary.

I am a radical. I think the capitalist system of production and social control has long since run its course, and the time to move forward to a new, more advanced, rational and equitable society is long overdue. That is radical.

What I do NOT want to see is a return to some form of pre-capitalist economic system. And I definitely do not want to see a return to the strictly hierarchical society that existed in the Middle Ages. I do not want to see the return of an absolute monarchy (or a caliph, or a sultan). I do not want to see the return to dominance of the Church (or of imams, or of religious scholars). That would be a backward step.

And stepping backward is reactionary. So let’s get the terminology correct.

They are not radicals. They are reactionaries.