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By Manlio Dinucci

Not everything in Europe is paralyzed by the anti-Covid lockdown: in fact, the mammoth annual exercise of the US Army, Defender-Europe, which until June mobilized on European territory, and beyond this, dozens of thousands of soldiers with thousands of tanks and other means, has been set in motion. The Defender-Europe 21 not only resumes the 2020 program, resized due to Covid, but amplifies it.

Why does the “Europe Defender” come from the other side of the Atlantic? The 30 NATO Foreign Ministers (Luigi Di Maio for Italy), who physically gathered in Brussels on March 23-24 explained: “Russia, with its aggressive behavior undermines and destabilizes its neighbors, and tries to interfere in the Balkan region.” A scenario constructed with the reality overturning technique: for example, by accusing Russia of trying to interfere in the Balkan region, where NATO “interfered” in 1999 by dropping, with 1,100 aircraft, 23,000 bombs, and missiles on Yugoslavia.

Faced with the Allies’ cry for help, the US Army comes to “defend Europe.” Defender-Europe 21, under the US Army Europe and Africa command, mobilizes 28,000 troops from the United States and 25 NATO allies and partners: they will conduct operations in over 30 training areas in 12 countries, including fire and missile exercises. The US Air Force and Navy will also participate.

In March, the transfer of thousands of soldiers and 1,200 armored vehicles and other heavy equipment from the United States to Europe began. They are landing in 13 airports and 4 European ports, including in Italy. In April, over 1,000 heavy equipment pieces will be transferred from three pre-positioned US Army depots – in Italy (probably Camp Darby), Germany, and the Netherlands – to various training areas in Europe, they will be transported by trucks, trains, and ships. In May, four major exercises will take place in 12 countries, including Italy. In one of the war games, more than 5,000 soldiers from 11 countries will spread across Europe for fire exercises.

While Italian and European citizens will still be prohibited to freely move for “security” reasons, this prohibition does not apply to the thousands of soldiers who will move from one European country to another freely. They will have the “Covid passport,” provided not by the EU but by the US Army, which guarantees that they are subjected to “strict Covid prevention and mitigation measures.”

The United States is not only coming to “defend Europe.” The large exercise – explained the US Army Europe and Africa in its statement – “demonstrates our ability to serve as a strategic security partner in the western Balkans and the Black Sea regions while sustaining our abilities in northern Europe, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Africa” For this reason, Defender-Europe 21 “utilizes key ground and maritime routes bridging Europe, Asia, and Africa“.

The generous “Defender” does not forget Africa. In June, again within the framework of Defender-Europe 21, it will “defend” Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal with a vast military operation from North Africa to West Africa, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. It will be directed by the US Army through the Southern Europe Task Force with its headquarters in Vicenza (North Italy). The official statement explains: “African Lion exercise is designed to counter malign activity in North Africa and Southern Europe and to defend the theater from adversary military aggression”. It does not specify who the “maleficents” are, but the reference to Russia and China is evident.

The “Defender of Europe” is not passing through here. The US Army V Corps participates in Defender-Europe 21. The V Corps, after being reactivated at Fort Knox (Kentucky), has established its advanced headquarters in Poznan (Poland), from where it will command operations along NATO’s Eastern flank. The new Security Forces assistance Brigades, US Army special units that train and lead NATO partner countries’ forces (such as Ukraine and Georgia) in military operations participate in the exercise.

Even if it is not known how much Defender-Europe 21 will cost, we citizens of the participating countries know we will pay the cost with our public money, while our resources to face the pandemic crisis are scarce. Italian military spending rose this year to 27.5 billion euros, that is 75 million euros a day. However, Italy has the satisfaction of participating in Defender-Europe 21 not only with its own armed forces but as a host country. It will therefore have the honor of hosting the final exercise of the US Command in June, with the participation of the US Army V Corps from Fort Knox.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

1 April 2021

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

Written by Joan Martinez-Alier and Patrick Bond

Now in retreat, Total talked “net zero” emissions while pursuing ultra-risky gas extraction

On March 26, In a tropical site of great beauty and a centuries-old peasant lifestyle, scores of local residents and a few foreign workers died violently, as a major French oil company allied to a climate-unconscious African government gambled far too much in search of what they assumed would soon be the continent’s biggest fossil fuel bonanza – and ran into guerilla army resistance.

At the northern end of Mozambique, the country’s politicians and state officials (who tellingly are concentrated in Maputo in the country’s far south) should have known, that if you want trouble on your territory, then count on the notoriously corrupt Paris firm Total to exploit your wealth. Total supposedly aims for “net zero” emissions by 2050, its website pledges, but in reality, its 2020 Climate Report promotes the highly dubious voluntary carbon offset market and plans a radical increase in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) production: from 34 million tons per annum (MTPA) in 2019 to 50 MTPA in 2025, as far north as the Arctic’s fragile Yamal Peninsula.

Total claims gas is a bridge fuel to renewable energy, in spite of LNG-related wreckage of local ecologies due to fracking and greenhouse-gas climate damage when methane is flared, vented or leaked. Ironically, this damage was confirmed late last year by the French government’s own climate-catalysed retreat from gas, in spite of the resulting losses in massive Texas LNG export potential sustained by the partially state-owned firm Engie.

As for social responsibility, Total often funds regimes guilty of human rights violations and socio-economic oppression. Twenty years ago, Total was taken to several international courts, including by EarthRights International, for complicity in crimes against humanity by providing moral and financial support to the Myanmar military government as it built the Yadana Gas Pipeline to Thailand. It is besieged by protests across the world, according to the EJ Atlas.

Until the Palma massacre at the end of March, Total had joined Rome-based ENI, Dallas-based ExxonMobil and Beijing-based China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in hoping “counter-insurgent” Mozambican military support would allow more rapid gas extraction offshore Cabo Delgado, near the Tanzania border. For decades, this province witnessed severe socio-economic exploitation and growing anger at environmental injustices.

In the most recent injustices, reports Ilham Rawoot of Friends of the Earth Mozambique/Justiça Ambiental! (JA!), oil companies led by Total – which took over a concession of Anadarko’s in 2019 – were in the process of displacing thousands from homes and livelihoods, including fisherfolk, without adequate compensation:

Residents face the danger of environmental disaster due to the gas drilling. According to Anadarko’s 2014 environmental impact study, the project will produce a large amount of greenhouse gases and sulphur dioxide, introduce new species into the sea, and cause soil erosion. There are growing fears that gas drilling will affect biodiversity in the area, especially the Quirimbas Archipelago, a UNESCO biosphere which is located just 8km from one of the gas fields off the coast of Cabo Delgado. The archipelago is home to 3,000 floral species, 447 bird species, eight species of marine mammals, as well as lions, elephants, buffalo and leopards. The dredging, waste disposal and the physical construction of onshore and offshore facilities will significantly diminish much of this ecosystem. Many species will flee the area due to noise and habitat degradation, while the impact of a potential gas leak or spill will be disastrous.

The gas fields are said to be worth $128 billion, with Total’s stake in the area closest to shore valued at $20 billion. But a full-cost accounting would subtract major ecological, social and economic debits, including the country’s massive uncompensated natural wealth depletion. By deploying ecosystem valuation, even the World Bank admits, Africa as a whole loses the net equivalent of 3% of its income annually due to resource extraction, twice the rate at which funds are lost to “Illicit Financial Flows.”

No less important is the adverse impact on the global environment: the metabolic contribution in terms of fossil fuel energy that will be taken out and exported to industrial areas including Mozambique’s neighbor South Africa. To prevent climate catastrophe, the global energy transition requires an urgent cut in coal, oil and gas extraction to about half the current amount, so that the CO2 produced can be absorbed by oceans and new vegetation without further increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere.

The search for new materials and energy sources is speeding up because industrial economies are not circular but instead entropic, dissipating fossil fuel energy, tending towards deterioration and chaos. To feed the machine, new extraction frontiers are continuously discovered and commodified, especially natural gas given how extraction technologies have improved. This is the logic behind the unfolding catastrophe at Cabo Delgado.

Inequality, evictions and abuse create conditions for local ‘terrorist’ insurgency

The Islamic insurgency, generally credited to some version of localised (not Somalia-sourced) ‘al Shabaab’ or ‘Islamic State’ extremism, began in earnest in 2017. But the region’s grievances date back many decades, to Portuguese colonial underdevelopment, to post-colonial neglect after independence in 1975, to recent disruptive ruby mining and timber extraction which failed to trickle the wealth back, and now to abuses committed by the gas companies and their white mercenary armies.

Having been attacked earlier, Total retreated from building its main LNG plant, but returned in January during the rainy season, demanding the Mozambican government provide it a 25 km safe zone perimeter at Afungi Peninsula (ENI, ExxonMobil and CNPC are further offshore). It did so using for-profit military allies: the notorious Wagner Group from Moscow, and from South Africa, the Dyke Advisory Group – run by an ex-Rhodesian soldier whom Amnesty International last month accused of authorising random fire by his troops into civilian sites (even a hospital) – and the Paramount company, a major weapons supplier to regimes across Africa and the Middle East. More ominously, U.S. and European armies have recently been “training” Mozambican forces.

But thanks to the thick bush and their integration into civilian populations, the guerrillas escaped detection last month. The end of the rainy season left the town closest to Afungi – Palma – vulnerable to what was a terrible attack on March 26, leaving dozens dead, including several international consultants and expat managers.

Leaving the gas offshore, in exchange for a climate debt downpayment?

Among the most eloquent critics of Total, the Mozambican state and the mercenaries is London-based journalist Joe Hanlon, who regrets how a corruption-riddled state elite became “dazzled by the gas, and believed Mozambique would be like Abu Dhabi, Qatar, or Kuwait. Gas would make the elite fabulously wealthy and also trickle down to ordinary people.” Instead, the insurgents have disrupted the corporate-state extraction strategy, as Hanlon reports: “Total says work ‘is obviously now suspended’ and will only resume when government really can provide security. ExxonMobil has made clear it is unlikely to go ahead; ENI has said nothing about anything more than the initial floating platform.”

But South Africa remains a dangerous player, because not only is the country’s main oil company – formerly state-owned Sasol – already drilling and piping gas from offshore wells 1900 kilometers to the south (and desirous of access to the northern fields), Pretoria’s SA National Defense Force troops are available, according to foreign minister Naledi Pandor. As she testified to parliament last September, a “great opportunity exists for South Africa to import natural gas from Mozambique, thus the security of Cabo Delgado is of great interest to South Africa and her energy diversification strategy. South Africa’s security agencies need to enhance their capacity.” (However, in other parts of Africa, Pretoria’s troops have suffered severe humiliations in similar crony-capitalist deployments.)

There must be an alternative, and indeed one presents itself: the concept of a downpayment on the “climate debt” that the Global North – including CO2-addicted South Africa – already owes Mozambique. According to a proposal made by Ecuador’s government from 2006-13 to prevent oil drilling in the Yasuni Park (on its eastern Amazonian border with Peru, the world’s main biodiversity hotspot), such financing for state social and development programmes – and in Mozambique’s case also ensuring a Basic Income Grant is available to Cabo Delgado communities – could justify a halt to fossil fuel extraction.

After all, unprecedented cyclones tore through Mozambique in March-April 2019, killing hundreds and doing at least $2 billion in damage, including in Cabo Delgado where Cyclone Kenneth was devastating. As Rawoot remarks, there must be a way for the country to avoid future reliance upon fossil fuels, for otherwise the country’s “coal and LNG projects – which are more carbon-intensive than the regular extraction and processing of natural gas – will only further contribute to global warming.”

Mobilising grant finance to “leave fossil fuels underground” in wretched sites like Cabo Delgado should be a top priority for the coming COP26 in Glasgow. Even as Boris Johnson is trying to reduce already-miserly British overseas aid, Christian Aid’s leader Amanda Khozi Mukwashi demanded (just after the Palma massacre), “Vulnerable countries on the frontline of a climate emergency they did not cause need financial support.” The urgency now for Mozambique is apparent, not only as an impoverished majority-peasant country that certainly did not cause the crisis, but as one that might in future, since it is so vulnerable to further rounds of multinational corporate fossil extraction fused with imperial and sub-imperial militarisation… unless an alternative is urgently identified.

The conflicts at Cabo Delgado are multifaceted. They arise from neo-colonial extractivism – of which Mozambique is both villain and victim – whether it is coal from Tete province mined destructively by Brazil’s Vale and by Coal of India, hydropower electricity for smelting exported aluminium for BHP Billiton, eucalyptus monocrops for paper pulp and illegal hardwood harvesting, cashews exported raw not processed, or other sites of unequal ecological exchange. But in addition to Sasol’s gas fields, the potential dimensions of the Cabo Delgado plunder of energy from gas have no precedent in Africa. The robbery taking place is just one further instance of commodity frontiers being pushed to extremes, by destructive changes in the eco-social metabolism of the world industrial economy – a process we must strive to reverse by any means necessary.

Joan Martinez-Alier (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Patrick Bond (University of the Western Cape)

3 April 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

Viewpoint By Kalinga Seneviratne

“The Core Group chaired by the UK tabled a shoddy motion based on a hostile UNHRC Report riddled with factual errors and unproven allegations going back to 2009; none of which qualifies as robust evidence” said Lord Naseby. Conservative party member and the President of the All Party Parliamentary UK – Sri Lanka Group in a statement issued on Tueday following a vote at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva on March 23rd that called for intrusive human rights intervention in Sri Lanka’s domestic affairs.

The resolution, which was tabled at the 46th sessions of the UN body by the UK on behalf of what is called a “Core Group” consisting mainly of western nations such as UK, Canada and Germany, would involve UNHRC spending some $2.8 million to set up an office “to collect, consolidate, analyse and preserve information and evidence, and to develop possible strategies for future accountability processes for gross violations of human rights” that could be used to mount war crimes cases against Sri Lankan military personnel, as well as economic sanctions against the country.

The resolution was adopted with 22 voting for it and 11 against with 14 abstaining among them India and Japan, while China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Philippines and Venezuela voted against it. Lord Naseby argues that it “is a gross intrusion on the sovereignty of a state (to adopt a resolution) based on a simple majority vote when Motions of this significance would need a 2/3rds majority”.

Sri Lanka has strongly rejected the resolution. Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunewardena said the resolution lacked authority and it “was brought by countries supported by Western powers that want to dominate the Global South.”

Speking before the vote, China’s ambassador to the UNHRC Chen XU said that this resolution is an attempt to “interfere in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs and undermine its development and stability under the pretext of human rights”. He commended the Sri Lankan government for improving human rights by advancing sustainable economic and social development, to improving peoples’ living standards. Russia, Cuba and the Philippines speaking in support of Sri Lanka also expressed similar sentiments.

This week’s battle in Geneva reflects a fundamental difference in the way human rights is viewed by the East and West. Ever since Sri Lanka crushed the Tamil separatist terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009, western countries have been using the UNHRC in a witchhunt against Sri Lanka, mainly because the Sri Lankan government led by President Mahinda Rajapakse ignored western calls for a ceasefire to ship the LTTE leaders overseas – to fight another day. The war was won mainly due to Chinese and Rusian diplomatic support and military aid.

In January 2015, there was a regime change in Sri Lanka, where Rajapakse was defeated in elections that was mainly fought on human rights and corruption allegations mounted by NGOs funded by the West that influenced young voters. The new government led by President Maitripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe were very subserviant to the West and openly expressed anti-China sentiments. In September 2015, Sri Lanka co-sponsored a resolution that called for setting up war crimes courts in Sri Lanka with foreign judges to try Sri Lankan military personnel. Many Sri Lankans saw it as similar to the 1815 Kandy Convention where the Kandyan chieftains signed away sovereighty to the British.

The 2019 Easter Sunday Islamic terrorist attacks in Colombo turned public sentiments against the government when it was realised that undermining of the intelliegence services and the military, where many of these personnel were in jail, awaiting trials percipated by the UNHRC resolution Sri Lanka co-sponsored, were a major reason for the attacks.

These attacks helped to solidify a national-security focussed Sinhala nationalist wave that catapulted the Rajapakses – who are still credited with having ended a 30-year terrorist war – back to power. After coming to power, the new government informed UNHRC last year that they are withdrawing the co-sponsorship of the resolution, and this year opposed a new resolution.

Initially the UNHRC resolutions called for accountability for 40,000 deaths during the final push to defeat the LTTE in 2009. The UN, international human rights organisations nor the western media that transmitted these claims were never able to provide evidence. Now UNHRC has quietly dropped this claim and instead the latest resolutions talks about reconciliation and militarisation of civil administration.

In an interview with Sri Lanka’s Derana network, Foreign Secretary Jayanath Colombage said “some powerful countries don’t want us to be neutral. This is the crux of the matter” he argued, adding “this resolution is not about human rights. Its all about international politics. This resolution only has a brief mention about the conflict we ended 12 years ago. It talks about internal domestic politics. Human rights are weaponized, heavily politicised by powerful countries when they want less powerful countries to toe the line and kneel down”.

“The impact on thousands of survivors, from all communities, is devastating. Moreover, the systems, structures, policies and personnel that gave rise to such grave violations in the past remain – and have recently been reinforced” said a statement by Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “The growing militarisation of key civilian functions is encroaching on democratic governance” she added.

UNHRC seem to be out of touch with recent developments in the country, where at the general elections in August 2020 there was a significant shift in Tamil voter sentiments towards development based empowerment as opposed to rights-based constitutional changes the UNHRC resolutions have been promoting. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) which has been working with Tamil dispora groups to pressure western governments such as UK, US, Canada and France to move resolutions against Sri Lanka, had their vote share and seats reduced by over a half. For the first time in 60 years, Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) – a party traditionally identified with Sinhala nationalism – grabbed a seat in the Tamil bastion of Jaffna attracting over 45,000 votes fielding a local Tamil candidate.

“Tamils have voted for change (and) this is a big change and the Tamils in Jaffna have spoken in one voice,” the newly elected Jaffna MP Angajan Ramanathan, who joined the ranks of the government as SLFP is a consituent party of the Rajapakse led alliance, told the Sunday Observer. “When it comes to the North, some politicians only focus on the rights of the Tamils. The Government will provide the peoples’ basic needs and infrastructure, and help them to improve their economic status”.

The Rajapkse regime believes in the Chinese and Singaporean model of economic development which Ramanathan’s statement reflects. Whereas the UNHRC resolution tends to go in the opposite direction. After abstaining from the vote in Geneva, which most Sri Lankans see as voting against them, India released a statement saying that they could not support Sri Lanka because devolution of power to Tamil areas agreed to with India in the late 1980s, has not been properly implemented and the Provincial Council (PC) system that is part of it is being undermined by the current government.

India may have unintentionally given a boost to increasing public sentiments in the country to abolish the PC system because it is seen by most people as an added tier of corruption. People in Sri Lanka want less politicians, not more, and they would much prefer to see development funds equally distributed to the provinces via existing central government structures.

Sri Lanka’s UNHRC battle is without doubt part of the geo-political power play with the West and India trying to use the UNHRC to control Sri Lanka, while China’s influence is achieve with heavy investments in the island and support for Sri Lanka in UN forums. The UNHRC’s vote has pushed Sri Lanka further into China’s embrace, and since UNHRC’s resolutions are not binding – unlike UN Security Council ones – Sri Lanka will bank on “trusted” China to veto any such moves. Though China could not win the vote for Sri Lanka, China may have won another battle for influence in the Indian Ocean.

Writer is a Sri Lankan born born journalist, broadcaster, documentary make and international communications scholar. He is the author of Myth of ‘Free Media’ and Fake News in the Post-Truth Era. (SAGE,2020)

28 March 2021

A version of this article was published by IDN.

 

Thus says the LORD: Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed. Isaiah 56:1

Your sisters and brothers in Palestine implore you to resist the State of Israel’s impending eviction of 15 families from their homes in the Israeli occupied territory of East Jerusalem. Israeli courts have ruled in favor of lawsuits undertaken by settler organizations to remove these families—yet another instance of Israel’s illegal policy of forced transfer. Evictions are scheduled to take place on Sunday, May 2, which happens to coincide with the Greek Orthodox celebration of Easter.

Most of these families, totaling 37 households of around 195 Palestinians, are refugees who in 1948 were forcibly transferred from their homes during the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe). They reside now in the Karm AlJa’ouni area of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood in Silwan.

We don’t understand the reluctance of many leaders in the global church to use the words apartheid and ethnic cleansing to describe the laws and practices of the State of Israel in relation to its Palestinians citizens and the nearly 5.2 million Muslims and Christians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. We reject their hesitancy to condemn the political program of Zionism, fearing the charge of antisemitism. Many Jews and Jewish organizations—both in Israel and around the world—have led in exposing the reality of Israel’s apartheid regime and decried its impunity on the international stage.1

Daily we experience the restrictions, the dehumanization, the brutality and loss of life resulting from these apartheid laws and policies. Daily we suffer the abuses of Zionism, which as practiced in Israel and Palestine clearly favors the rights of one people, one ethnicity, over another.

On one hand, Israel supports its settler groups taking back their alleged properties by force, while refusing any Palestinian lawful claims to their original properties in West Jerusalem where they were forced out during the 1948.

Kairos Palestine, the most extensive Palestinian Christian ecumenical non- violent movement, is based on Kairos Palestine document: A Moment of Truth, launched in 2009, affirming that the Palestinian Christians are part and parcel of the Palestinian nation, calling for peace to end all suffering in the Holy Land by laboring for justice, hope and love, embraced by the Christian community, signed by all historically recognized Palestinian Christian organizations, and endorsed by the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem.

Surely you understand our disappointment – bordering on despair- that the global church has not more fully embraced our many urgent calls for concrete and practical acts to end the occupation, the latest being our 2020 Cry for Hope: A Call to Decisive Action. Still, we place our hope in your solidarity.

What are we imploring you to do?

Regarding the impending May 2 evictions—and the hundreds more expected in the neighborhood of Batan al-Hawa in East Jerusalem’s Silwan – Kairos calls on its networks to write to their governments, insisting that they intervene to stop this action on the basis of human dignity and international law. Source

The Nakba of Sheikh Jarrah: How Israel Uses ‘the Law’ to Ethnically Cleanse East Jerusalem (Excerpts from an article by Ramzy Baroud*)

A Palestinian man, Atef Yousef Hanaysha, was killed by Israeli occupation forces on March 19 during a weekly protest against illegal Israeli settlement expansion in Beit Dajan, near Nablus, in the northern West Bank. Although tragic, the above news reads like a routine item from occupied Palestine, where shooting and killing unarmed protesters is part of the daily reality. However, this is not true. Since right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced, in September 2019, his intentions to formally and illegally annex nearly a third of the occupied Palestinian West Bank, tensions have remained high….

In occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a massive battle is already underway. On one side, Israeli soldiers, army bulldozers and illegal armed Jewish settlers are carrying out daily missions of evicting Palestinian families, displacing farmers, burning orchards, demolishing homes and confiscating land. On the other side, Palestinian civilians, often disorganized, unprotected and leaderless, are fighting back… On March 10, fourteen Palestinian and Arab organizations issued a ‘joint urgent appeal to the United Nations Special Procedures on forced evictions in East Jerusalem’ to stop the Israeli evictions in the area. Successive decisions by Israeli courts have paved the way for the Israeli army and police to evict 15 Palestinian families – 37 households of around 195 people – in the Karm Al-Ja’ouni area in Sheikh Jarrah and Batn Al-Hawa neighborhood in the town of Silwan.

These imminent evictions are not the first, nor will they be the last. Israel occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem in June 1967 and formally, though illegally, annexed it in 1980. Since then, the Israeli government has vehemently rejected international criticism of the Israeli occupation, dubbing, instead, Jerusalem as the “eternal and undivided capital of Israel”. To ensure its annexation of the city is irreversible, the Israeli government approved the Master Plan 2000, a massive scheme that was undertaken by Israel to rearrange the boundaries of the city in such a way that it would ensure permanent demographic majority for Israeli Jews at the expense of the city’s native inhabitants…

While news headlines occasionally present the habitual evictions of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan and other parts of East Jerusalem as if a matter that involves counterclaims by Palestinian residents and Jewish settlers, the story is, in fact, a wider representation of Palestine’s modern history. Indeed, the innocent families which are now facing “the imminent risk of forced eviction” are re-living their ancestral nightmare of the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine in 1948.

Two years after the native inhabitants of historic Palestine were dispossessed of their homes and lands and ethnically cleansed altogether, Israel enacted the so-called Absentees’ Property Law of 1950. The law, which, of course, has no legal or moral validity, simply granted the properties of Palestinians who were evicted or fled the war to the State, to do with it as it pleases. Since those ‘absentee’ Palestinians were not allowed to exercise their right of return, as stipulated by international law, the Israeli law was a state-sanctioned wholesale theft. It ultimately aimed at achieving two objectives: one, to ensure Palestinian refugees do not return or attempt to claim their stolen properties in Palestine and, two, to give Israel a legal cover for permanently confiscating Palestinian lands and homes.

The Israeli military occupation of the remainder of historic Palestine in 1967 necessitated, from an Israeli colonial perspective, the creation of fresh laws that would allow the State and the illegal settlement enterprise to claim yet more Palestinian properties. This took place in 1970 in the form of the Legal and Administrative Matters Law. According to the new legal framework, only Israeli Jews were allowed to claim lost land and property in Palestinian areas. Much of the evictions in East Jerusalem take place within the context of these three interconnected and strange legal arguments: the Absentees’ Law, the Legal and Administrative Matters Law and the Master Plan 2000. Understood together, one is easily able to decipher the nature of the Israeli colonial scheme in East Jerusalem, where Israeli individuals, in coordination with settler organizations, work together to fulfill the vision of the State.

Palestinian human rights organizations describe the flow of how eviction orders, issued by Israeli courts, culminate into the construction of illegal Jewish settlements. Confiscated Palestinian properties are usually transferred to a branch within the Israeli Ministry of Justice called the Israeli Custodian General. The latter holds on to these properties until they are claimed by Israeli Jews, in accordance with the 1970 Law. The Israeli State claims to play an impartial role in this scheme, it is actually the facilitator of the entire process. While the above picture can be dismissed by some as another routine, common occurrence, the situation in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem has become extremely volatile. Palestinians feel that they have nothing more to lose and Netanyahu’s government is more emboldened than ever. The killing of Atef Hanaysha, and others like him, is only the beginning of that imminent, widespread confrontation. Source

27 March 2021

Source: palestineupdates.com

 

By Kenny Stancil

While Myanmar’s military celebrated Armed Forces Day on Saturday with a parade through the capital, the ruling junta’s security forces killed more than 100 people elsewhere throughout the country in the deadliest crackdown on peaceful pro-democracy protesters since last month’s coup.

According to Myanmar Now, soldiers and police had killed at least 114 people, including children, nationwide as of 9:30 pm on Saturday in Myanmar.

“The military celebrated Armed Forces Day by committing mass murder against the people it should be defending,” said Tom Andrews, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar. “The Civil Disobedience Movement is responding with powerful weapons of peace.”

“It’s past time,” Andrews added, “for the world to respond in kind with and for the people of Myanmar.”

Saturday’s brutal massacre, which came just one day after a regional human rights group reported that the total death toll since the military regime seized power on February 1 had climbed to 328, was widely condemned by diplomats around the world.

“This bloodshed is horrifying,” said U.S. Ambassador Thomas Vajda. “Myanmar’s people have spoken clearly: they do not want to live under military rule.”

The European Union’s delegation to Myanmar tweeted: “This 76th Myanmar Armed Forces Day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonor. The killing of unarmed civilians, including children, are indefensible acts.”

This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour. The killing of unarmed civilians, including children, are indefensible acts. The EU stands by the people of Myanmar and calls for an immediate end of violence and the restoration of democracy.

— EUMyanmar (@EUMyanmar) March 27, 2021

British foreign secretary Dominic Raab said that “today’s killing of unarmed civilians, including children, marks a new low. We will work with our international partners to end this senseless violence, hold those responsible to account, and secure a path back to democracy.”

In a statement issued Thursday, Andrews had warned that “conditions in Myanmar are deteriorating, but they will likely get much worse without an immediate robust, international response in support of those under siege.”

“It is imperative that the international community heed the recent call of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres for a ‘firm, unified international response,’” Andrews said. “To date, however, the limited sanctions imposed by member states do not cut the junta’s access to revenue that help sustain its illegal activities, and the slow pace of diplomacy is out of step with the scale of the crisis.”

Andrews noted that “the incremental approach to sanctions has left the most lucrative business assets of the junta unscathed. It needs to be replaced by robust action that includes a diplomatic offensive designed to meet the moment.”

“Without a focused, diplomatic solution, including the hosting of an emergency summit that brings together Myanmar’s neighbors and those countries with great influence in the region, I fear the situation of human rights in Myanmar will further deteriorate as the junta increases the rate of murders, enforced disappearances, and torture,” he said.

Andrews’ fears were realized Saturday as the military escalated its use of lethal violence against anti-coup demonstrators and other civilians.

“They are killing us like birds or chickens, even in our homes,” resident Thu Ya Zaw told Reuters in the central town of Myingyan. “We will keep protesting regardless… We must fight until the junta falls.”

The resolve of pro-democracy protesters is evident. According to Al Jazeera, citizens defied a “military warning that they could be shot ‘in the head and back’” in order to take to “the streets of Yangon, Mandalay and other towns.”

Kyaw Win, the director of the Burma Human Rights Network in the United Kingdom, told BBC News that the military had shown it had “no limits, no principles.”

“It’s a massacre, it’s not a crackdown anymore,” Win added.

In his statement released prior to Saturday’s wholesale killing, Andrews emphasized that “it is critical that the people of Myanmar… the duly elected illegally deposed parliamentarians who make up the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, and opposition leaders and activists see that the international community is working towards a diplomatic solution in support of the peaceful Civil Disobedience Movement.”

“This combined course of action—domestic peaceful resistance, sustained pressure, and international diplomatic momentum—will have a greater chance for success than taking up arms,” Andrews continued, “and will save untold numbers of lives.”

“Member states have an opportunity to demonstrate this alternative, but the window in which this can be achieved is closing rapidly,” he said, adding: “I fear that the international community has only a short time remaining to act.”

That warning has become even more urgent since it was first shared.

Originally published in Common Dreams

28 March 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Cook

22 Feb 2021 – I have spent the past several years on this blog trying to highlight one thing above all others: that the institutions we were raised to regard as authoritative are undeserving of our blind trust.

It is not just that expert institutions have been captured wholesale by corporate elites over the past 40 years and that, as a result, knowledge, experience and expertise have been sidelined in favour of elite interests – though that is undoubtedly true. The problem runs deeper: these institutions were rarely as competent or as authoritative as we fondly remember them being. They always served elite interests.

What has changed most are our perceptions of institutions that were once beloved or trusted. It is we who have changed more than the institutions. That is because we now have far more sources – good and bad alike – than ever before against which we can judge the assertions of those who claim to speak with authority.

Hanging out together

Here is a personal example. When I started work as an editor at the foreign section of the Guardian newspaper in the early 1990s, there were few ways, from the paper’s London head office, to independently evaluate or scrutinise the presentation of events by any of our correspondents in their far-flung bureaus. All we could do was compare the copy they sent with that from other correspondents, either published in rival newspapers or available from two or three English-language wire services.

Even that safeguard is far less meaningful than it might sound to an outsider.

The correspondents for these various publications – whether based in Bangkok, Amman, Moscow, Havana or Washington – are a small group. Inevitably they each bring to their work a narrow range of mostly unconscious but almost identical biases. They hang out together – like any other expat community – in the same bars, clubs and restaurants. Their children attend the same international schools, and their families socialise together at the weekends.

Similar pasts

Correspondents from these various newspapers also have similar backgrounds. They have received much the same privileged education, at private or grammar schools followed by Oxford or Cambridge, and as a result share largely the same set of values. They have followed almost identical career paths, and their reports are written chiefly to impress their editors and each other. They are appointed by a foreign editor who served a decade or two earlier in one of the same bureaus they now head, and he (for invariably it is a he) selected them because they reminded him of himself at their age.

The “local sources” quoted by these correspondents are drawn from the same small pool of local politicians, academics and policymakers – people the correspondents have agreed are the most authoritative and in a position to speak on behalf of the rest of the local population.

Nowhere in this chain of news selection, gathering, editing and production are there likely to be voices questioning or challenging the correspondents’ shared view of what constitutes “news”, or their shared interpretation and presentation of that news.

Working in the guild

This is not the news business as journalists themselves like to present it. They are not fearless, lone-wolf reporters pursuing exclusives and digging up dirt on the rich and powerful. They comprise something more akin to the guilds of old. Journalists are trained to see the world and write about it in near-identical terms.

The only reason the media “guild” looks far less credible than it did 20 or 30 years ago is because now we can often cut out the middleman – the correspondent himself. We can watch videos on Youtube of local events as they occur, or soon afterwards. We can hear directly from members of the local population who would never be given a platform in corporate media. We can read accounts from different types of journalists, including informed local ones, who would never be allowed to write for a corporate news outlet because they are not drawn from the narrow, carefully selected and trained group known as “foreign correspondents”.

My latest: A short video of settlers disrupting a family picnic may be the best field guide yet to Israel’s complex apartheid system of state-sponsored Jewish supremacy https://t.co/5RqMrNbgwy

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 17, 2021

A partial picture

In this regard, let us consider my own area of specialist interest: Israel and Palestine. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have been beating up and shooting at Palestinian farmers trying to work their land or harvest their olives for more than half a century. It is one of the main practical means by which the settlers implement an ethnic cleansing policy designed to drive Palestinians off their farmland.

The settlers have thereby expanded their “municipal jurisdictions” to cover more than 40 per cent of the West Bank, territory under Israeli occupation that was supposed to form the backbone of any future Palestinian state. This settler violence is part of the reason why Palestinian statehood looks impossible today.

But until a decade or so ago – when phone cameras meant that recorded visual evidence became commonplace and irrefutable – you would rarely have had a way to know about those attacks. Correspondents in Jerusalem had decided on your behalf that you did not need to know.

Maybe the correspondents refused to believe the accounts of Palestinians or preferred the explanations from Israeli officials that these were just anti-Israel lies motivated by antisemitism. Or maybe the correspondents thought these attacks were not important enough, or that without corroboration they themselves risked being accused of antisemitism.

Whatever the reason, the fact is they did not tell their readers. This absence of information meant, in turn, that when Palestinians retaliated – in acts that were much more likely to be reported by correspondents – it looked to readers back home as if Palestinian violence was unprovoked and irrational. Western coverage invariably bolstered racist stereotypes suggesting that Palestinians were innately violent or antisemitic, and that Israelis, even violent settlers, were always victims.

Unreliable experts

This problem is far from unique to journalism. There are similar issues with any of the professions – or guilds – that comprise and service today’s corporate establishment, whether it is the judiciary, politicians, the military, academics or non-profits. Those supposedly holding the establishment to account are usually deeply invested, whether it be financially or emotionally, in the establishment’s survival – either because they are part of that establishment or because they benefit from it.

And because these self-selecting “guilds” have long served as the public’s eyes and ears when we try to understand, assess and hold to account the corporate elites that rule over us, we necessarily have access only to partial, self-justifying, establishment-reinforcing information. As a result, we are likely to draw faulty conclusions about both the establishment itself and the guilds that prop up the establishment.

Very belatedly, we have come to understand how unreliable these experts – these guilds – are only because they no longer enjoy an exclusive right to narrate to us the world we inhabit. The backlash, of course, has not been long in coming. Using the pretext of “fake news”, these institutions are pushing back vigorously to shut down our access to different kinds of narration.

Plague of deficiency

All this is by way of a very long introduction to a follow-up post on an article I wrote last week about the failure of doctors to press governments to finance proper, large-scale studies on the treatment of hospitalised Covid patients with Vitamin D – an important immunological hormone created by sunlight on our skin.

The role of Vitamin D on our general wellbeing and health has come under increasing scrutiny over the past two decades after it was discovered that it is the only vitamin for which there is a receptor in every cell in our body.

Long before Covid, researchers had begun to understand that Vitamin D’s role in regulating our immune systems was chronically under-appreciated by most doctors. The medical profession was stuck in a paradigm from the 1950s in which Vitamin D’s use related chiefly to bone health. As a consequence, today’s recommended daily allowances – usually between 400IU and 800IU – were established long ago in accordance with the minimum needed for healthy bones rather than the maximum needed for a healthy immune system.

Today we know that many people in northern latitudes, especially the elderly, are deficient or severely deficient in Vitamin D, even those taking government-approved, low-level supplements. In fact, it would be true to say there is a global plague of Vitamin D deficiency, even in many sunny countries where people have lost the habit of spending time outdoors or shield themselves from the sun.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

8 March 2021

Source: www.transcend.org

By Manlio Dinucci

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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About six years ago, when we titled “Are the missiles returning to Comiso?” in il Manifesto (June 9, 2015), our hypothesis that the US wanted to bring their nuclear missiles back to Europe was ignored by the entire political-media arc. Subsequent events have shown that the alarm, unfortunately, was well founded. Now, for the first time, we have the official confirmation.

A few days ago, on March 11, one of the top US military authorities, General James C. McConville, Chief of Staff of the United States Army confirmed it. Not in an interview with CNN, but during a speech at an experts’ meeting at the George Washington School of Media and Public Affairs – here we have the official transcript General McConville not only reported that the US Army is preparing to deploy, evidently aimed at Russia, new missiles in Europe, but revealed that they will be hypersonic missiles, an extremely dangerous new weapon system.

This decision creates a very high-risk situation, similar or worse than that one Europe experienced during the Cold War, as front line of the nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR.

Hypersonic missiles – their speed is 5 times faster than that of sound (Mach 5), that is more than 6,000 km / h – constitute a new weapon system with a nuclear attack capacity superior to that of ballistic missiles. While these follow an arc trajectory for the most part above the atmosphere, the hypersonic missiles instead follow a low altitude trajectory in the atmosphere directly towards the target, which they reach in less time by penetrating the enemy defenses.

In his speech at the George Washington School of Media and Public Affairs, General McConville revealed that the US Army is preparing a “task force” with “a long-range precision fires capability that can range anywhere from hypersonic missiles to mid-range capability, to precision strike missiles and these systems have the ability to penetrate an Anti-Access Aerial Denial environment”. The General stated that “ We see the future of that being in the Pacific, probably two in the Pacific ” (evidently directed against China); we see one in Europe (evidently directed against Russia); and we’re building them as we speak”.

In an official statement DARPA informed to have commissioned Lockheed Martin to manufacture “a ground-launched intermediate-range hypersonic weapons system”, that is, missiles with a range between 500 and 5500 km belonging to the category that was prohibited by the Treaty on Intermediate Nuclear Forces signed in 1987 by President Gorbachev and President Reagan; the treaty was torn apart by President Trump in 2019. According to the technical specifications provided by DARPA, itt will be “a novel system enabling hypersonic boost glide weapons to rapidly and precisely engage critical, time-sensitive targets while penetrating modern enemy air defenses. The program is developing an advanced booster capable of delivering a variety of payloads at multiple ranges and compatible mobile ground launch platforms that can be rapidly deployed”.

The Army Chief of Staff and the Pentagon Research Agency therefore informed that the United States will soon deploy hypersonic missiles, armed with “ a variety of payloads” (that is, nuclear and conventional warheads), in Europe (there are rumors of a probable first base in Poland or Romania). Intermediate-range nuclear hypersonic missiles installed on “ mobile ground launch platforms “, that is, on special vehicles, could be rapidly deployed in the NATO countries closest to Russia (for example the Baltic Republics). Having already the ability to fly at around 10,000 km/h, the hypersonic missiles will be able to reach Moscow in around 5 minutes.

Russia is also building hypersonic intermediate-range missiles but, by launching them from its own territory, it cannot hit Washington. However, the Russian hypersonic missiles will be able to reach US bases in a few minutes, first of all nuclear ones such as Ghedi and Aviano bases, and other targets in Europe. Russia, like the United States and other nations, is deploying new inter-continental missiles: the Avangard is a hypersonic vehicle with a range of 11,000 km and armed with multiple nuclear warheads which, after a ballistic trajectory, glides over 6,000 km at speed almost 25,000 km/h. Hypersonic missiles are also being built by China. Since hypersonic missiles are guided by satellite systems, the confrontation is increasingly taking place in space: for this purpose, the US Space Force was created in 2019 by the Trump Administration.

Air and Naval Forces, that have greater mobility, are also equipped with hypersonic weapons. These weapons open a new phase of the nuclear arms race, making the New Start Treaty, just renewed by the US and Russia, largely outdated. This race passes more and more from the quantitative level (number and power of nuclear warheads) to the qualitative level (speed, penetrating capacity and geographical location of the the nuclear delivery vehicles). In the event of an attack or presumed attack, the response is increasingly entrusted to artificial intelligence, which must decide the nuclear missiles’ launch in a few seconds or fractions of a second. It exponentially increases the possibility of a nuclear war by mistake, a risk that occurred several times during the Cold War. “Doctor Strangelove” will not be a mad general, but a supercomputer gone mad. Lacking the human intelligence to stop this mad rush to catastrophe, the survival instinct should at least be triggered, so far only awakened by Covid-19.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

24 March 2021

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Alfred W McCoy

Empires live and die by their illusions. Visions of empowerment can inspire nations to scale the heights of global hegemony. Similarly, however, illusions of omnipotence can send fading empires crashing into oblivion. So it was with Great Britain in the 1950s and so it may be with the United States today.

By 1956, Britain had exploited its global empire shamelessly for a decade in an effort to lift its domestic economy out of the rubble of World War II. It was looking forward to doing so for many decades to come. Then an obscure Egyptian army colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal and Britain’s establishment erupted in a paroxysm of racist outrage. The prime minister of the day, Sir Antony Eden, forged an alliance with France and Israel to send six aircraft carriers to the Suez area, smash Egypt’s tank force in the Sinai desert, and sweep its air force from the skies.

But Nasser grasped the deeper geopolitics of empire in a way that British leaders had long forgotten. The Suez Canal was the strategic hinge that tied Britain to its Asian empire — to British Petroleum’s oil fields in the Persian Gulf and the sea lanes to Singapore and beyond. So, in a geopolitical masterstroke, he simply filled a few rusting freighters with rocks and sank them at the entrance to the canal, snapping that hinge in a single gesture. After Eden was forced to withdraw British forces in a humiliating defeat, the once-mighty British pound trembled at the precipice of collapse and, overnight, the sense of imperial power in England seemed to vanish like a desert mirage.

Two Decades of Delusions

In a similar manner, Washington’s hubris is finding its nemesis in China’s President Xi Jinping and his grand strategy for uniting Eurasia into the world’s largest economic bloc. For two decades, as China climbed, step by step, toward global eminence, Washington’s inside-the-Beltway power elite was blinded by its overarching dreams of eternal military omnipotence. In the process, from Bill Clinton’s administration to Joe Biden’s, Washington’s China policy has morphed from illusion directly into a state of bipartisan delusion.

Back in 2000, the Clinton administration believed that, if admitted to the World Trade Organization, Beijing would play the global game strictly by Washington’s rules. When China started playing imperial hardball instead — stealing patents, forcing companies to turn over trade secrets, and manipulating its currency to increase its exports — the elite journal Foreign Affairs tut-tutted that such charges had “little merit,” urging Washington to avoid “an all-out trade war” by learning to “respect difference and look for common ground.”

Within just three years, a flood of exports produced by China’s low-wage workforce, drawn from 20% of the world’s population, began shutting down factories across America. The AFL-CIO labor confederation then started accusing Beijing of illegally “dumping” its goods in the U.S. at below-market prices. The administration of George W. Bush, however, dismissed the charges for lack of “conclusive evidence,” allowing Beijing’s export juggernaut to grind on unimpeded.

For the most part, the Bush-Cheney White House simply ignored China, instead invading Iraq in 2003, launching a strategy that was supposed to give the U.S. lasting dominion over the Middle East’s vast oil reserves. By the time Washington withdrew from Baghdad in 2011, having wasted up to $5.4 trillion on the misbegotten invasion and occupation of that country, fracking had left America on the edge of energy independence, while oil was joining cordwood and coal as a fuel whose days were numbered, potentially rendering the future Middle East geopolitically irrelevant.

While Washington had been pouring blood and treasure into desert sands, Beijing was making itself into the world’s workshop. It had amassed $4 trillion in foreign exchange, which it began investing in an ambitious scheme it called the Belt and Road Initiative to unify Eurasia via history’s largest set of infrastructure projects. Hoping to counter that move with a bold geopolitical gambit, President Barack Obama tried to check China with a new strategy that he called a “pivot to Asia.” It was to entail a global military shift of U.S. forces to the Pacific and a drawing of Eurasia’s commerce toward America through a new set of trade pacts. The scheme, brilliant in the abstract, soon crashed head-first into some harsh realities. As a start, extricating the U.S. military from the mess it had made in the Greater Middle East proved far harder than imagined. Meanwhile, getting big global trade treaties approved as anti-globalization populism surged across America — fueled by factory closures and stagnant wages — turned out, in the end, to be impossible.

Even President Obama underestimated the seriousness of China’s sustained challenge to this country’s global power. “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” two senior Obama officials would later write, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.”

Breaking with the Beltway consensus about China, Donald Trump would spend two years of his presidency fighting a trade war, thinking he could use America’s economic power — in the end, just a few tariffs — to bring Beijing to its knees. Despite his administration’s incredibly erratic foreign policy, its recognition of China’s challenge would prove surprisingly consistent. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster would, for instance, observe that Washington had empowered “a nation whose leaders were determined not only to displace the United States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic and governance model globally.” Similarly, Trump’s State Department warned that Beijing harbored “hegemonic ambitions” aimed at “displacing the United States as the world’s foremost power.”

In the end, however, Trump would capitulate. By January 2020, his trade war would have devastated this country’s agricultural exports, while inflicting heavy losses on its commercial supply chain, forcing the White House to rescind some of those punitive tariffs in exchange for Beijing’s unenforceable promises to purchase more American goods. Despite a celebratory White House signing ceremony, that deal represented little more than a surrender.

Joe Biden’s Imperial Illusions

Even now, after these 20 years of bipartisan failure, Washington’s imperial illusions persist. The Biden administration and its inside-the-Beltway foreign-policy experts seem to think that China is a problem like Covid-19 that can be managed simply by being the un-Trump. Last December, a pair of professors writing in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs typically opined that “America may one day look back on China the way they now view the Soviet Union,” that is, “as a dangerous rival whose evident strengths concealed stagnation and vulnerability.”

Sure, China might be surpassing this country in multiple economic metrics and building up its military power, said Ryan Hass, the former China director in Obama’s National Security Council, but it is not 10 feet tall. China’s population, he pointed out, is aging, its debt ballooning, and its politics “increasingly sclerotic.” In the event of conflict, China is geopolitically “vulnerable when it comes to food and energy security,” since its navy is unable to prevent it “from being cut off from vital supplies.”

In the months before the 2020 presidential election, a former official in Obama’s State Department, Jake Sullivan, began auditioning for appointment as Biden’s national security adviser by staking out a similar position. In Foreign Affairs, he argued that China might be “more formidable economically… than the Soviet Union ever was,” but Washington could still achieve “a steady state of… coexistence on terms favorable to U.S. interests and values.” Although China was clearly trying “to establish itself as the world’s leading power,” he added, America “still has the ability to more than hold its own in that competition,” just as long as it avoids Trump’s “trajectory of self-sabotage.”

As expected from such a skilled courtier, Sullivan’s views coincided carefully with those of his future boss, Joe Biden. In his main foreign policy manifesto for the 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Biden argued that “to win the competition for the future against China,” the U.S. had to “sharpen its innovative edge and unite the economic might of democracies around the world.”

All these men are veteran foreign policy professionals with a wealth of international experience. Yet they seem oblivious to the geopolitical foundations for global power that Xi Jinping, like Nasser before him, seemed to grasp so intuitively. Like the British establishment of the 1950s, these American leaders have been on top of the world for so long that they’ve forgotten how they got there.

In the aftermath of World War II, America’s Cold War leaders had a clear understanding that their global power, like Britain’s before it, would depend on control over Eurasia. For the previous 400 years, every would-be global hegemon had struggled to dominate that vast land mass. In the sixteenth century, Portugal had dotted continental coastlines with 50 fortified ports (feitorias) stretching from Lisbon to the Straits of Malacca (which connect the Indian Ocean to the Pacific), just as, in the late nineteenth century, Great Britain would rule the waves through naval bastions that stretched from Scapa Flow, Scotland, to Singapore.

While Portugal’s strategy, as recorded in royal decrees, was focused on controlling maritime choke points, Britain benefitted from the systematic study of geopolitics by the geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, who argued that the key to global power was control over Eurasia and, more broadly, a tri-continental “world island” comprised of Asia, Europe, and Africa. As strong as those empires were in their day, no imperial power fully perfected its global reach by capturing both axial ends of Eurasia — until America came on the scene.

The Cold War Struggle for Control over Eurasia

During its first decade as the globe’s great hegemon at the close of World War II, Washington quite self-consciously set out to build an apparatus of awesome military power that would allow it to dominate the sprawling Eurasian land mass. With each passing decade, layer upon layer of weaponry and an ever-growing network of military bastions were combined to “contain” communism behind a 5,000-mile Iron Curtain that arched across Eurasia, from the Berlin Wall to the Demilitarized Zone near Seoul, South Korea.

Through its post-World War II occupation of the defeated Axis powers, Germany and Japan, Washington seized military bases, large and small, at both ends of Eurasia. In Japan, for example, its military would occupy approximately 100 installations from Misawa air base in the far north to Sasebo naval base in the south.

Soon after, as Washington reeled from the twin shocks of a communist victory in China and the start of the Korean war in June 1950, the National Security Council adopted NSC-68, a memorandum making it clear that control of Eurasia would be the key to its global power struggle against communism. “Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass,” read that foundational document. The U.S., it insisted, must expand its military yet again “to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions.”

As the Pentagon’s budget quadrupled from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion in the early 1950s in pursuit of that strategic mission, Washington quickly built a chain of 500 military installations ringing that landmass, from the massive Ramstein air base in West Germany to vast, sprawling naval bases at Subic Bay in the Philippines and Yokosuka, Japan.

Such bases were the visible manifestation of a chain of mutual defense pacts organized across the breadth of Eurasia, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe to a security treaty, ANZUS, involving Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. in the South Pacific. Along the strategic island chain facing Asia known as the Pacific littoral, Washington quickly cemented its position through bilateral defense pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia.

Along the Iron Curtain running through the heart of Europe, 25 active-duty NATO divisions faced 150 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact divisions, both backed by armadas of artillery, tanks, strategic bombers, and nuclear-armed missiles. To patrol the Eurasian continent’s sprawling coastline, Washington mobilized massive naval armadas stiffened by nuclear-armed submarines and aircraft carriers — the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean and the massive 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early 1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive, multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975, some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South Vietnam.

By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and espionage.

Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60 bases for its growing arsenal of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved, in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez disaster.

China’s Eurasian Strategy

After all that, it seems remarkable that Washington’s current generation of foreign policy leaders, like Britain’s in the 1950s, is so blindingly oblivious to the geopolitics of empire — in this case, to Beijing’s largely economic bid for global power on that same “world island” (Eurasia plus an adjoining Africa).

It’s not as if China has been hiding some secret strategy. In a 2013 speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University, President Xi typically urged the peoples of Central Asia to join with his country to “forge closer economic ties, deepen cooperation, and expand development space in the Eurasian region.” Through trade and infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea,” this vast landmass inhabited by close to three billion people could, he said, become “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

This development scheme, soon to be dubbed the Belt and Road Initiative, would become a massive effort to economically integrate that “world island” of Africa, Asia, and Europe by investing well more than a trillion dollars — a sum 10 times larger than the famed U.S. Marshall plan that rebuilt a ravaged Europe after World War II. Beijing also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with an impressive $100 billion in capital and 103 member nations. More recently, China has formed the world’s largest trade bloc with 14 Asia-Pacific partners and, over Washington’s strenuous objections, signed an ambitious financial services agreement with the European Union.

Such investments, almost none of a military nature, quickly fostered the formation of a transcontinental grid of railroads and gas pipelines extending from East Asia to Europe, the Pacific to the Atlantic, all linked to Beijing. In a striking parallel with that sixteenth century chain of 50 fortified Portuguese ports, Beijing has also acquired special access through loans and leases to more than 40 seaports encompassing its own latter-day “world island” — from the Straits of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline from Piraeus, Greece, to Zeebrugge, Belgium.

With its growing wealth, China also built a blue-water navy that, by 2020, already had 360 warships, backed by land-based missiles, jet fighters, and the planet’s second global system of military satellites. That growing force was meant to be the tip of China’s spear aimed at puncturing Washington’s encirclement of Asia. To cut the chain of American installations along the Pacific littoral, Beijing has built eight military bases on tiny (often dredged) islands in the South China Sea and imposed an air defense zone over a portion of the East China Sea. It has also challenged the U.S. Navy’s long-standing dominion over the Indian Ocean by opening its first foreign base at Djibouti in East Africa and building modern ports at Gwadar, Pakistan, and Hambantota, Sri Lanka, with potential military applications.

By now, the inherent strength of Beijing’s geopolitical strategy should be obvious to Washington foreign policy experts, were their insights not clouded by imperial hubris. Ignoring the unbending geopolitics of global power, centered as always on Eurasia, those Washington insiders now coming to power in the Biden administration somehow imagine that there is still a fight to be fought, a competition to be waged, a race to be run. Yet, as with the British in the 1950s, that ship may well have sailed.

By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass — home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships redundant, even irrelevant.

As Sir Halford Mackinder might have put it, had he lived to celebrate his 160th birthday last month, the U.S. dominated Eurasia and thereby the world for 70 years. Now, China is taking control of that strategic continent and global power will surely follow.

However, it will do so on anything but the recognizable planet of the last 400 years. Sooner or later, Washington will undoubtedly have to accept the unbending geopolitical reality that undergirds the latest shift in global power and adapt its foreign policy and fiscal priorities accordingly.

This current version of the Suez syndrome is, nonetheless, anything but the usual. Thanks to longterm imperial development based on fossil fuels, planet Earth itself is now changing in ways dangerous to any power, no matter how imperial or ascendant. So, sooner or later, both Washington and Beijing will have to recognize that we are now in a distinctly dangerous new world where, in the decades to come, without some kind of coordination and global cooperation to curtail climate change, old imperial truths of any sort are likely to be left in the attic of history in a house coming down around all our ears.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

22 March 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

“A nation at peace and a region in harmony are thus essential prerequisites for attainment of national security in the true spirit. No national leaders of today can ignore these factors,” said Army chief Gen Bajwa, marking a significant iteration of Pakistan’s latest security policy.

“…, it is an almost universally acknowledged fact that the contemporary concept of national security is not only about protecting a country from internal and external threats but also providing conducive environment in which aspirations of human security, national progress and development could be realised.

“Surely, it is not solely a function of armed forces anymore…”

Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa said this in the keynote address he delivered, at the first-ever Islamabad Security Dialogue (ISD) on March 17-18. The Dialogue was inaugurated by Prime Minister Imran Khan. The ISD was organised by the National Security Division, together with five leading think-tanks of the country, the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies, Islamabad Policy Research Institute, Institute of Strategic Studies, Institute of Regional Studies and National Defence University’s Institute of Strategic Studies, Research and Analysis. The broad composition indicates the united political will of the Pakistani state.

Reuters from Islamabad thus reported the event, March 18, 2021:

“Pakistan’s army chief called on arch rivals India and Pakistan to “bury the past” and move towards cooperation, an overture towards New Delhi that follows an unexpected joint ceasefire announcement last month between the two countries’ militaries…. The militaries of both countries released a rare joint statement on February 25 announcing a ceasefire along the disputed border in Kashmir, having exchanged fire hundreds of times in recent months….

“The United States immediately welcomed the move, and encouraged the two to “keep building on this progress”.

PTI reported: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had said on Feb 25 that the Biden administration remains “closely engaged with a range of leaders and officials in the region, including those in Pakistan.”

“This is a positive step towards greater peace and stability in South Asia which is in our shared interest and we encourage both countries to keep building upon this progress,” she said.

At a separate news conference, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the administration had called on the parties to reduce tensions along the LoC by returning to the 2003 ceasefire agreement. “We have been very clear that we condemn the terrorists who seek to infiltrate across the Line of Control,” he said.

The USA sells peace as well as war as it suits from time to time. In the eyes of the merchants of death, peace is the time between two wars. And it indulges in trade war too, which calls for shifts in policy. For India and Pakistan, both dependent on USA, unfortunately this nudge from the super power was needed, fortunately this time for peace.

Notably those engaged in backchannel talks with India were also associated in the ISD. Further, on Kashmir, the General simply said : “It is time to bury the past and move forward. But for the resumption of the peace process or meaningful dialogue, our neighbour will have to create a conducive environment, particularly in Indian-Occupied Kashmir.”

Who has to take the initiative? “The burden was on India” said Bajwa. Nay, the onus is on Pakistan, said India. Notwithstanding this refrain, it shows the thaw on both sides.

*** ***

Further, it was really not so “unexpected joint ceasefire,” and it is based on political economy, as this report by indiatoday.in , March 19, 2021, indicates the chain of recent events:

“Bajwa said that “stable” Indo-Pak relations is a “key” to unlock the untapped potential of South and Central Asia by ensuring connectivity between East and West Asia…he also said that the potential of the region has “forever remained hostage to disputes and issues between two nuclear neighbours”.

“Calling the Kashmir dispute the “heart of this problem”, General Bajwa said, “It is important to understand that without the resolution of Kashmir dispute through peaceful means, the process of sub-continental rapprochement will always remain susceptible to derailment due to politically motivated bellicosity“…

“Our position is well known. India desires normal neighbourly relations with Pakistan in an environment free of terror, hostility and violence. The onus is on Pakistan for creating such an environment,” Anurag Srivastava, spokesperson at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), said during his weekly briefing on February 4.

“This came in the wake of General Bajwa’s earlier offer of peace, February 2, while speaking at the graduation ceremony at the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). He had said, “Pakistan and India must resolve the longstanding issue of Jammu and Kashmir in a dignified and peaceful manner as per the aspirations of people of Jammu and Kashmir.”

“India and Pakistan had announced on February 25 that they have agreed to strictly observe all agreements on ceasefire along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir and other sectors. The ceasefire continues to hold, which is a positive sign.

“India had last month said that it desires normal neighbourly relations with Pakistan in an environment free of terror, hostility and violence. India had said the onus is on Pakistan to create an environment free of terror and hostility.

“General Qamar Javed Bajwa stressed however that the burden was on India to create a “conducive environment”, and said Washington had a role to play in ending regional conflicts.

“Pakistan and India, both nuclear-armed countries, have fought three wars, and in 2019, tensions rose dramatically post the Pulwama terror attack and the Balakot aristrikes…”

[https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/pakistan-offers-conditional-peace-india-says-onus-on-islamabad-to-end-terror-1780962-2021-03-19?utm_source=recengine&utm_medium=web&referral=yes&utm_content=footerstrip-3&t_source=recengine&t_medium=web&t_content=footerstrip-3&t_psl=False]

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Dr. Tara Kartha, Former Director, India’s National Security Council Secretariat, explained and underlined the significance of the events. See this extract from tribuneindia.com, Mar 20, 2021:

“These are stirring times in Islamabad, where the rich and the powerful gathered for the ISD….In Pakistan, the rich and the powerful are either politicians, businessmen or those in khaki, or even all three. And since it is they who run the country, what they say usually matters.

“The ISD was organised by the National Security Division, a body originally set up under Nawaz Sharif to serve as the secretariat of the Cabinet Committee on National Security which replaced the Defence Committee of the Cabinet. Later called the National Security Committee, it was notified as the ‘principal decision-making body on national security’ in a move quite unlike the advisory role such bodies have in most countries. That it included the service chiefs hardly needs to be said….”

“The idea is aimed at bringing think-tanks and policy-makers together, in a praiseworthy effort to benefit both. Bureaucracies the world over are not very different from each other, particularly in South Asia, where there is usually a solid brick wall between the two. The first move to break that wall is the first ever advisory portal, an integrated platform to exchange ideas with universities, think-tanks and the bureaucracies. The second was obviously to get the army chief to lay down the proposals…

“This (singular obsession with India) now seems to be changing, just a little. It started at the beginning of this year. In February, there was talk of Pakistan prioritising geo-economics over other issues. That was echoed by Foreign Minister Qureshi soon after Khan’s visit to Colombo where he rather surprisingly talked about Sri Lanka being part of CPEC. Now at the ISD, PM Khan is talking of comprehensive security astonishingly, saying that security is not just about defence. Unsurprisingly, he praised China’s model, as he does at every forum available…

Then he places national security within ‘South Asia’, as the least integrated of regions…

If that’s not astonishing enough, there is the offer of regional connectivity. That’s not just about China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), though that is offered up as an ‘inclusive, transparent’ project for global and regional participation, particularly Afghanistan. What follows is best quoted in full.

The General says, “Let me also emphasise that while CPEC remains central to our vision, only seeing Pakistan through the CPEC prism is also misleading. Our immensely vital geostrategic location and a transformed vision make us a country of immense and diverse potential which can very positively contribute to regional development and prosperity.”

In simple words, he’s offering up Pakistan as a node for regional connectivity… This means that Pakistan is ready for roads, railways and shipping to cross its territory into the rest of the world, including India. That’s turning South Asian politics on its head…

Delhi had better consider this connectivity push and its pros and cons rather than dither about Bajwa’s hostile antecedents. Here is an opportunity. Take it up. It might mean money, and a lot of it.

[https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/pakistans-changing-idea-of-national-security-227726]

It goes against the simplistic and inobjective notions spread in India that the Pakistan army decides everything.

Bajwa spoke of “politically motivated bellicosity“…And it reminds former Pakistan Gen Musharaff’s statement that the armed forces know better about, and suffer the vagaries of war.

In this context, it is instructive to recall words of wisdom:

“24. WAR IS A MERE CONTINUATION OF POLICY BY OTHER MEANS.

We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means…the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.” (Carl von Clausewitz, (1780-1831), On War)

The text of Gen Bajwa’s speech, given below, gives a fuller picture and deeper insights of what is going on.

*** ***

Appendix

Full text of Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa’s speech at the Islamabad Security Dialogue, March 17, 2021.

Worthy Guests, Diplomats, Panelists, Participants, Ladies & Gentlemen!

Assalam-o-Alaikum & Good Afternoon!

It is my profound privilege and pleasure to address this august gathering of some of the best Pakistani and global minds. “Together for ideas” is a very appropriate theme chosen by the organisers for this dialogue. I am certain that the policy practitioners and scholars present here or participating virtually, will not only discuss Pakistan’s security vision but also formulate ideas to guide us on how best to tackle Pakistan’s future security challenges.

I would like to appreciate the National Security Division for identifying the need for Pakistan to have its own security dialogue. I commend the NSD and its Advisory Board for putting together the first iteration of this Dialogue. I hope this trend of integrating intellectual input into policy-making continues to grow.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an almost universally acknowledged fact that the contemporary concept of national security is not only about protecting a country from internal and external threats but also providing conducive environment in which aspirations of human security, national progress and development could be realised.

Surely, it is not solely a function of armed forces anymore.

National security in the age of globalisation, information and connectivity has now become an all-encompassing notion; wherein, besides various elements of national power, global and regional environment also play a profound role.

National security is thus multi-layered: outer layers being the exogenous factors of global and regional environment and inner layers being the endogenous factors of internal peace, stability and developmental orientation.

A nation at peace and a region in harmony are thus essential prerequisites for attainment of national security in the true spirit. No national leaders of today can ignore these factors. I also firmly believe that no single nation in isolation, can perceive and further its quest for security, as every single issue and security dilemma faced by today’s world is intimately linked with global and regional dynamics. Whether it be human security, extremism, human rights, environmental hazards, economic security or pandemics, responding in silos is no longer an option.

Ladies and gentlemen!

The world has seen ravages of World Wars and Cold War, wherein polarisation and neglect of virtues blighted human future and brought catastrophic consequences for humanity.

On the contrary, we have witnessed how multilateral rule-based platforms contributed towards good of mankind.

Today we face similar choices; whether to stay etched in the acrimony and toxicity of the past, continue promoting conflict and get into another vicious cycle of war, disease and destruction; or to move ahead, bring the dividends of our technological and scientific advancements to our people and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.

We must not forget that the desire to achieve autarky was historically divisive and a stimulus for grabbing more, leading to “haves” and “have nots”. History has taught us that the way ahead has always been through an interconnected, interdependent and collective sense of security…

Today the leading drivers of change in the world are demography, economy and technology. However, one issue which remains central to this concept is economic security and cooperation.

Frayed relations between various power centres of the globe and boomeranging of competing alliances can bring nothing but another stint of cold war. It is naive to apply the failed solutions of yesteryears to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

It is important for the world that the leading global players must reach a stable equilibrium in their relations through convergences instead of divergence.

In this environment, developing countries like Pakistan, today face multi-dimensional challenges, which cannot be navigated single-handedly. A similar situation is confronted by other countries in our region as well, therefore, we all require a multilateral global and regional approach and cooperation to overcome these challenges.

Dear Participants!

You are well aware that South Asia is home to one quarter of world’s population. However, despite tremendous human and resource potential, the unsettled disputes are dragging this region back to the swamp of poverty and underdevelopment.

It is saddening to know that even today it is among the least integrated regions of the world in terms of trade, infrastructure, water and energy cooperation.

On top of it, despite being one of the most impoverished regions of the world, we end up spending a lot of money on our defence, which naturally comes at the expense of human development.

Pakistan has been one of the few countries, which despite the rising security challenges has resisted the temptation of involving itself in an arms race. Our defence expenditures have rather reduced instead of increasing. This is not an easy undertaking especially when you live in a hostile and unstable neighbourhood.

But, having said that, let me say profoundly that we are ready to improve our environment by resolving all our outstanding issues with our neighbours through dialogue in a dignified and peaceful manner.

However, it is important to state that, this choice is deliberate and based on rationality and not as a result of any pressure. It is our sincere desire to re-cast Pakistan’s image as a peace-loving nation and a useful member of international community.

Our leadership’s vision is Alhamdullilah transformational in this regard. We have learned from the past to evolve and are willing to move ahead towards a new future, however, all this is contingent upon reciprocity.

Ladies and gentlemen!

The world knows that we are geo-strategically placed, to be a bridge between civilisations and connecting conduit between the regional economies.

We are a nation of significance due to our large and enterprising demography, fertile soil and adequate logistical infrastructure. We intend to leverage our vital geostrategic location for ours own, regional and global benefit.

Our robust role in current quest for peace in Afghanistan is proof of our goodwill and understanding of our global and moral obligations.

Our close collaboration and crucial support for the peace process has led to the historic agreement between Taliban and US and paved the way for intra-Afghan dialogue.

We will continue to emphasise on a sustained and inclusive peace process for the betterment of people of Afghanistan and regional peace. Moreover, besides offering our all-out support to Afghanistan peace process, we have also undertaken unprecedented steps to enhance Afghanistan’s trade and connectivity by:

• Re-energising Afghan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement and also providing access to Afghanistan to export her goods to India
• Improving economic and trade environment along Pak-Afghan border by establishing border markets and development of infrastructure
• Being part of energy and trade corridors binding Central. South and West Asia through land routes and inviting Afghanistan to be part of CPEC.

Dear Participants!

Stable Indo-Pak relation is a key to unlock the untapped potential of South and Central Asia by ensuring connectivity between East and West Asia. This potential however, has forever remained hostage to disputes and issues between two nuclear neighbours.

Kashmir dispute is obviously at the head of this problem. It is important to understand that without the resolution of Kashmir dispute through peaceful means, process of sub-continental rapprochement will always remain susceptible to derailment due to politically motivated bellicosity.

However, we feel that it is time to bury the past and move forward. But for resumption of peace process or meaningful dialogue, our neighbour will have to create conducive environment, particularly in Indian Occupied Kashmir.

Ladies and gentlemen,

today we are a nation with tremendous geo-economic potential. In order to carve a promising future for our people, it is important for us to embark upon a solid economic roadmap, backed up by infrastructural developments and regional integration. Our choices with respect to the same have been clear and explicit.

This geo-economic vision is centered around four core pillars:

• One: Moving towards a lasting and enduring peace within and outside
• Two: Non-interference of any kind in the internal affairs of our neighbouring and regional countries
• Three: Boosting intra-regional trade and connectivity
• Four: Bringing sustainable development and prosperity through establishment of investment and economic hubs within the region

Pakistan has been working towards all four aspects with unity of purpose and synchronisation within the various components of national security.

We had realised that unless our own house is in order, nothing good could be expected from outside. Now, after having overpowered the menace of terrorism and tide of extremism, we have begun to work towards sustainable development and improving economic conditions of under-developed areas.

Pakistan Army has contributed tremendously towards this national cause by rebuilding and mainstreaming some of the most neglected areas through massive development drives besides ensuring peace and security.

Our long campaign against the tide of terrorism and extremism manifests our resolve and national will. We have come a long way and yet we are a bit short of our final objective but we are determined to stay the course.

Dear participants!

CPEC has been at the heart of our economic transformation plan and we have left no quarter to declare its necessity for addressing our economic woes.

Our sincere efforts to make it inclusive, transparent and attractive, for all global and regional players, with the aim of bringing its benefits to everyone.

Let me also emphasise that while CPEC remains central to our vision, only seeing Pakistan through CPEC prism is also misleading.

Our immensely vital geostrategic location and a transformed vision make us a country of immense and diverse potential which can very positively contribute to regional development and prosperity.

This vision however remains incomplete without a stable and peaceful South Asia. Our efforts for reviving Saarc, therefore, are with the same purpose. Our efforts for peace in Afghanistan, responsible and mature behavior in crisis situation with India manifest our desire to change the narrative of geo-political contestation into geo-economic integration.

While we are doing our bid, a major contribution is to be made by the global players through their cooperation.

I am sure that an economically interconnected South Asia is much more suited to them instead of a war-torn, crisis-ridden and destabilised region.

We also see hope in the form of incoming US administration which can transform the traditional contestation into a gainful economic win-win for the world in general and the region, in particular, South Asia can be the starting point for regional cooperation.

I have firm belief that economic and sustainable human development can guide us into a future, full of peace and prosperity.

And finally, it is time that we in South Asia create synergy through connectivity, peaceful co-existence and resource sharing to fight hunger, illiteracy and disease instead of fighting each other.

I thank you.

Courtesy : Dawn.com, March 18, 2021.

[https://www.dawn.com/news/1613207]

In conclusion, Dr. Tara Kartha’s words are worth repeating:

“Delhi had better consider this connectivity push and its pros and cons rather than dither about Bajwa’s hostile antecedents. Here is an opportunity. Take it up. It might mean money, and a lot of it.”

Hope jingoists in India are listening and will heed.

22 March 2021

Source: countercurrents.org