Ben & Jerry’s Co-founders: Nothing ‘Anti-Semitic’ about Ice Cream Embargo of Illegal Israeli Settlements

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop on Washington Street in New Jersey. (Photo: Luigi Novi, Wikimedia Commons)

July 30, 2021

Ben & Jerry’s co-founders have pushed back against claims of anti-Semitism following the company’s decision to stop offering its ice cream products in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, noting that they themselves are Jews.

Writing in the New York Times, Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield said they were “proud Jews” who view Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as a barrier to peace.

“It’s possible to support Israel and oppose some of its policies, just as we’ve opposed policies of the US government. As such, we unequivocally support the decision of the company to end business in the occupied territories, which a majority of the international community, including the United Nations, has deemed an illegal occupation,” they argued, in an op-ed published on Wednesday.

The move to pull Ben & Jerry’s from shelves in Israeli-occupied territories was in keeping with the firm’s “progressive values.”

The iconic ice cream duo noted that, while they no longer have operational control of the company, they nonetheless felt that the boycott was “one of the most important decisions” that the firm has made in its more than 40-year history.

The co-founders also wanted to make it absolutely clear that they didn’t hate Jews. “That we support the company’s decision is not a contradiction nor is it anti-Semitic,” Cohen and Greenfield wrote. On the contrary, the boycott is in support of justice and human rights, “core tenets of Judaism.”

The op-ed comes amid ongoing uproar over the ice cream embargo. Earlier this week, reports emerged that an Israel Defense Forces soldier was attempting to sue Ben & Jerry’s, arguing that he had been unfairly deprived of his “preferred” dessert.

The Israeli government has expressed similar angst. Last week, Israeli President Isaac Herzog described the boycott as “a new sort of terrorism, economic terrorism,” against the Jewish State.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was also distraught over the ice cream embargo, and claimed that that Ben & Jerry’s had rebranded as an “antisemitic ice cream.”

The Vermont-based ice cream brand, which has developed a reputation over the years as a champion of progressive causes, announced in July that it would be “inconsistent” with its values to sell its ice cream in occupied territories in Gaza and the West Bank.

 

Israel carried out the world's first airliner hijacking; the BBC needs to acknowledge this

A general view outside the BBC Studios on 27 May 2021 in England [Nathan Stirk/Getty Images]

Yvonne Ridley yvonneridley-uly 14, 2021

The BBC has become embroiled in a fact-checking row with demands for an apology over a presenter's claims that Libya was the first nation to carry out a state-sponsored hijacking of an airliner in the Middle East. According to the broadcaster's flagship radio show, "The Long View", the assertion was based on a hijacking incident in 1971. Counter-claims have emerged, though, pointing out that it was actually Israel which was the first ever state to carry out an act of sky piracy when, in 1954, it hijacked a Syrian civilian airliner.

The 29 June episode of "The Long View" was presented by Jonathan Freedland. He looked at the history of state-sponsored hijackings following a recent well-documented incident in Belarusian air space, involving a Ryanair plane en route from the Greek capital, Athens.

Belarus scrambled a fighter jet to force the Lithuania-bound plane to land in Minsk on 23 May; the pretext was an alleged bomb threat. However, this was simply a ruse to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich, 26, who was removed by Belarusian police when passengers disembarked from the aircraft.

Journalist Freedland used the major news story to link to similar historic incidents for the weekly show. However, after the broadcast, several listeners contacted the BBC accusing Freedland of using his platform to conceal Israel's pioneering role during the programme which, according to the BBC website, explored "the history of state sponsored air-hijacking". Complainant Mick Napier, one of the co-founders of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, insists that the claim is demonstrably false. "Freedland must have known – half way competent programme researchers would have told him — that 16 years earlier [than the Libyan incident] Israeli warplanes had forced a Syrian Airways scheduled flight over the Mediterranean to divert from international air space to Lydda Airport in Israel."

READ: UK tutor escapes disciplinary action over anti-Semitism allegation

This was on 12 December, 1954: Israeli war planes forced a Syrian Airways Dakota aircraft carrying four passengers and five crewmen to land inside Israel. The passengers were interrogated for two days before international protests, including strong complaints from the US, finally persuaded the Zionist state to release both the aircraft and its passengers.

"I have no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the US State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice," wrote Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, in his diary. "What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the short-sightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the state of Israel may — or even must — behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle."

Some observers might claim that Israel still operates in such a manner, as it continually flouts international laws and casually ignores countless UN resolutions. For a state which claims that its legitimacy stems from a UN resolution, this is indeed ironic.

The unprecedented act of aviation piracy was down to Israel's Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan. He needed hostages to trade for the release of five Israeli soldiers who were caught red-handed and arrested for trying to retrieve tapping devices on telephone wires on the Syrian Golan Heights. Israel expressed outrage at their imprisonment, but despite appeals the government in Damascus refused to release them.

Tensions mounted a month later when one of the Israeli soldiers, Uri Ilan, the son of a former Israeli politician, committed suicide in jail on 13 January, 1955. Although the Israeli media accused Syria of torture, an examination by the UN showed "no signs of physical ill-treatment" of Ilan. Despite his death, Syria still refused to release the remaining prisoners, and accused Israel of holding Syrian civilians as prisoners.

The impasse spiralled out of control in December 1955, when two Israeli paratroop battalions backed by artillery and mortar fire under the command of Ariel Sharon (who went on to be held responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila Massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut, among other atrocities) attacked Syrian military posts at Buteiha Farm and Koursi near the north-east shore of Lake Tiberias. It was Israel's largest military raid inside Syria at that time and resulted in 56 Syrians being killed, including three women; many more were wounded.

Sharon's troops also took 30 prisoners, who were later used by Israel as hostages to exchange for the four Israelis held by Syria. The US expressed its "shock" at the raid and supported a resolution by the UN Security Council that condemned Israel for its "flagrant violation" of the armistice agreement. Clearly, back in the 1950s Israel did not hold sway over Washington as much as it does today.

READ: Israel's FM: 'This is not the time to carry out two-state solution'

That was the fifth time that the Security Council had condemned, censured, called upon and otherwise passed resolutions critical of Israel. Since then, there have been countless more, but the occupation state simply ignores them. The support that it gets from the US means that it gets away with this with alarming frequency.

It's a mystery why the award-winning Freedland, editor of the Guardian's opinion pages, appears to have airbrushed this episode from the history of state sponsored hijacking in his programme. Did he allow his own Zionism to dictate his output? Maybe we will never know if the BBC's dismissive response to Napier's complaint is anything to go by. That response is available in full in an article that he has written for the SPSC website.

His complaint centres on the "untruthfulness of Freedland's claim that the 1971 Libyan and not the 1954 Israeli air piracy was 'the first ever case where a commercial scheduled passenger [aircraft] had been hijacked, taken over by a government'."

Napier told me that his point is not that the Israeli crime wasn't highlighted but that the Libyan example was falsely claimed to be "the first ever case" of such an incident. "Freedland ignored Israel's trailblazing role in state air piracy, and attributing that role to an Arab regime is not indicative of any bias, despite Mr Freedland's very prominent role defending the Israeli state and attacking its opponents. The programme concealed from the public a historical fact that Israel introduced air piracy into the Middle East and falsely attributed that innovation to Libya. My complaint is that he claimed that Libya rather than Israel introduced the practice (hijacking) into the Middle East; this is false. He is entitled to his own militantly pro-Israel opinions but not to his own facts."

Napier says that he and others will not let the matter drop until the BBC puts the record straight and issues an apology. At the time of writing, Jonathan Freedland could not be reached for a comment.

The BBC Complaints Department says that it will respond to Napier's follow up complaint within 20 days. As the veteran pro-Palestine campaigner insists, this is not about trying to change someone's opinion, but to ensure that facts are presented accurately. That Israel carried out the first state-sponsored hijacking of a civilian airliner isn't open to interpretation. The BBC needs to acknowledge this history lesson, and issue a correction without delay.

 

CDC warns that delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may make people sicker than original Covid

KEY POINTS

• The CDC warned the delta variant sweeping across the country is as contagious as chickenpox, has a longer transmission window than the original Covid-19 strain and may make older people sicker.
• A confidential CDC document said delta is more transmissible than the common cold, the 1918 Spanish flu, smallpox, Ebola, MERS and SARS.
• Health officials said federal and state leaders should communicate to the public the benefits of getting vaccinated.

Gottlieb: Wouldn’t be surprised if we were infecting 1 million people a day

Berkeley Lovelace Jr.@BERKELEYJR-JUL 30 2021

The CDC warned House lawmakers that the delta variant sweeping across the country is as contagious as chickenpox, has a longer transmission window than the original Covid-19 strain and may make older people sicker, even if they’ve been fully vaccinated.

The warning on Thursday was made in a confidential document that was reviewed by CNBC and authenticated by the federal health agency.

Delta, now in at least 132 countries and already the dominant form of the disease in the United States, is more transmissible than the common cold, the 1918 Spanish flu, smallpox, Ebola, MERS and SARS, according to the document. Only measles appears to spread faster than the variant.

“The war has changed,” officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote.

Healthcare personnel work in a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) intensive care unit where they are dealing with a surge in cases of the Delta variant at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah, U.S., in this handout photo provided July 23, 2021.

Intermountain Health | Reuters

Health officials said federal and state leaders should communicate to the public the benefits of getting vaccinated, adding the Covid vaccine shots reduce the risk of severe disease and death “10-fold or greater” and reduce the risk of infection “3-fold.”

Vaccines prevent more than 90% of severe disease, but may be less effective at preventing infection, they said, making community spread among the vaccinated more likely. The document said 35,000 symptomatic infections are occurring per week among 162 million vaccinated Americans.

Separately, the CDC has said 5,914 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized or have died with Covid infections as of July 19, the most recent data available. Breakthrough cases, which occur in the fully vaccinated, happen more frequently in gatherings of people and in groups at risk of primary vaccine failure, according to the document.

Health officials also said federal and state leaders should consider vaccine mandates, particularly for health-care workers, universal masking and other community mitigation strategies. President Joe Biden announced on Thursday his administration would require federal workers to prove their vaccination status or submit to a series of rigorous safety protocols.

The documents presented to lawmakers came two days after the CDC reversed course on its prior guidance and recommended fully vaccinated Americans who live in areas with high Covid infection rates resume wearing face masks indoors. The guidelines cover about two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to a CNBC analysis.

“My first thoughts in reading it was that everything is a little bit worse than I thought,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, who reviewed the document.

“This document and some of the other information says you’ve got to be open to the possibility that delta is worse in a number of ways and may upend some of our prior assumptions in ways that are meaningful,” he said.

Dr. Paul Offit, who advises the FDA on Covid vaccines, said Friday it is “profoundly” upsetting that the U.S. hasn’t gotten a critical portion of the population vaccinated, adding delta has “changed the game.” About half of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.

“Yesterday, you had 90,000 cases and close to 400 deaths,” Offit said. “Those are same numbers you saw last summer. I mean, last summer, you had a fully susceptible population and you had no vaccine.”

He said the CDC documents highlight just how “frustrated” federal officials are, given that there are safe and effective vaccines.

“The war isn’t against the virus anymore. It’s also at some level a war against ourselves,” he said.

People infected with the delta variant carry up to 1,000 times more virus in their nasal passages than other strains, resulting in higher transmissibility, even among the vaccinated, according to federal health officials. The CDC noted that studies in Canada, Singapore and Scotland found higher odds of hospitalization, ICU admission, oxygen needs, pneumonia or death among people infected with the delta variant.

While the variant, which surfaced in India, continues to hit unvaccinated people the hardest, some vaccinated people could be carrying higher levels of the virus than previously understood and are potentially transmitting it to others, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday. She added the variant behaves “uniquely differently from past strains of the virus.”

“This pandemic continues to pose a serious threat to the health of all Americans,” Walensky told reporters on a call.

Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, said Walensky and White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci briefed the committee on the new data Thursday.

“I am deeply concerned about the rapidly increasing rates of coronavirus infections in states around the country that is being driven by the Delta variant,” Clyburn said in a statement, noting that Covid cases have increased by 145% in the last two weeks and hospitalizations and deaths are rising again, particularly in areas with low vaccination rates. “This sudden turn of events threatens to undermine the significant progress we have made this year to overcome the pandemic.”

–CNBC’s Rich Mendez, Robert Towey and Nate Rattner contributed to this report.

  Pregnant women urged to get Covid jab by England’s chief midwife

By Jane Deith-30 Jul 2021

Pregnant women in England are being urged to get the Covid vaccine, as new research suggests they are at greater risk of becoming seriously ill with the Delta variant.

The study shows 99 per cent of pregnant women who are taken to hospital with Covid are unvaccinated and they appear to have more severe symptoms.

Across the UK, the number of new daily cases has fallen slightly to just over 29,500, while a further 68 deaths have been recorded

In England, the R number, which shows how far the disease is being transmitted, is also fractionally lower than last week.

 

Covid war: Aggressive diplomacy by China

30 July 2021 

There is a bizarre connection between a Reuter news agency picture of a Chinese female athlete winning a gold medal in the weightlifting event at the ongoing Tokyo Olympics and the politics of the pandemic. The common thread is China’s aggressive diplomacy.
China’s Colombo embassy took to Twitter to slam Reuters for distributing a picture which the embassy initially thought was ugly. The picture had captured Chinese weightlifter Zhihui Hou’s facial expression as she lifted the weight in the 49 kg event in a Valsalva manoeuvre of holding her breath on her way to win her country’s first gold medal. 

In a Twitter message, the embassy said: “Among all the photos of the game, @Reuters has chosen this one, which only shows how ugly they are. Don’t put politics and ideologies above sports, and call yourself an unbiased media organization. Shameless. Respect the spirit of #Olympics.”
The message created a social media debate on what beauty or ugliness was. The saying ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is apparently lost on the Chinese embassy’s tweet writers, who seem to be in overdrive with their aggressive public diplomacy these days. 

Later, drawing attention to Reuter pictures of beaming athletes of other countries, the embassy in another tweet tried to clarify its position. It said: “Same day, same Olympics, same @Reuters, different faces. Maybe it’s because everything good in life comes easier for the white westerners? We said that these biased MSM {Main Stream Media} are ugly. Never the athletes. They’re beautiful.”
Obviously, the Chinese embassy’s twitter war is in line with Beijing’s new counter-offensive against the Western media and governments as the cold war over the covid virus intensifies.

China believes that Western media are part of a campaign which seeks to undermine China’s vaccines against COVID-19 and give some credence to the claim that the virus began in a Chinese laboratory. The Chinese also allege that western media bosses have a stake in western pharmaceutical companies that have developed vaccines against COVID-19. Therefore, the Chinese the western media often give prominence to reports questioning the efficacy of China-made Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines, while downplaying stories that speak of the Chinese vaccines’ success, especially against the Delta variant.

In recent week’s China has hit back hard on calls to reinvestigate the claim that the covid virus originated from a lab in Wuhan, China.  This came after the World Health Organisation (WHO) sought fresh permission to visit China to carry out what the world body referred to as the second phase of the investigation. 
China rejected the WHO’s call, with China’s National Health Commission deputy chief Zeng Yixin saying the plan smacks of disrespect for common sense and an arrogant attitude toward science. “We cannot accept this kind of plan for origin-tracing,” he said.

China’s counter-offensive also includes calls for international investigation to find out whether the virus originated from a United States military laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland. China insists that the WHO should also investigate whether the virus was manufactured in the US military lab and released in Wuhan via frozen food. China has also said that months or weeks before the disease was detected in Wuhan, countries such as Italy had been treating patients for illnesses caused by an unknown virus.

In Colombo, the Chinese embassy re-tweeted a tweet from China’s state-affiliated China Daily. It said: “Over 10 million Chinese citizens have signed an open letter calling on the @WHO to investigate the US’ Fort Detrick lab over #COVID19 origins. The server of the petition campaign was under #cyberattack twice on Saturday night with the hackers’ IP addresses detected from the US.”

China’s aggressive diplomacy with regard to the covid war went up by several notches after WHO’s Director General Tedros Adhanom on July 16 announced a research plan over the covid virus origin. The research will focus on geographic areas of the virus’ circulation, a study on the Wuhan wet market, animal track-back activities and an audit of laboratories and institutions in Wuhan. 
Needless to say, for China, the WHO’s call appears as part of a pre-determined campaign. In China’s eyes, it is nothing but politicization of the war against the pandemic.

The world body was initially soft on China. Perhaps, it did not want to earn the wrath of its biggest funder after US withdrew from the WHO during the Donlad Trump presidency. Now that the US has rejoined the WHO after President Joe Biden took office this year, Washington appears to be wielding more influence within the world body. The WHO is now seen to be toughening up its stance on China. The WHO chief knows well that China will not accept his proposal for a second phase of the investigation; yet he is calling on China to be more co-operative and more transparent with the WHO’s second phase of the investigation.  

The call for an investigation into the origin of the virus first came from Australia last year. The call was supported by the US with the then US president Trump describing the virus as “China virus” and “Wuhan virus” in an apparent bid to make China criminally responsible for the pandemic. President Biden has also called on the US intelligence agencies to submit a report before the end of next month on the origins of the virus, especially the claim that it originated from Wuhan. His call was endorsed by G7 leaders when they met last month.
For its part, China did allow a WHO experts’ team to visit Wuhan in January, of course after months of foot dragging. The WHO in an interim report said there was no evidence to prove that the virus originated in Wuhan. China has been insisting that the world body should look in other directions also if it is keen on tracing the origin of the virus. 

Why make only China a suspect? Although the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) prohibits the development, production, stockpiling or acquisition, or retention of biological weapons, a loophole in the convention allows countries to carry out research and produce viruses in labs to find vaccines and treatment methods in case of an outbreak of a pandemic or a rogue state resorts to biological warfare. If viruses originate in labs, then every country possessing expertise in bio-engineering or gene splicing is a suspect. 
It is high time the United Nations revised the BWC with the aim of closing the loopholes and bringing every virus research lab under UN inspection. 

 India: When politicos pass the buck to military

 After decades-long wait, Modi 2.0 appointed Gen Rawat as the CDS in 2019 but the Defence Planning Committee fell short of groundwork

by Ashok K Mehta-July 28, 2021

Before the monsoon session of Parliament, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh invited two former Defence Ministers for a briefing. He did not dirty his hands but asked the CDS and COAS to brief them. In the UK, it would not happen. Politicians pass the buck to the military. Expectedly, the Army and Air Force have clashed over the transformational reforms underway. CDS Gen Rawat described the IAF as an extension of artillery and a combat support service. Air Chiefs have been kept out of the loop during the 1965 and 1971 wars, reflecting mistrust of IAF which is about air power required for “shaping the battlefield”. But boots on the ground are essential.

Rewind: Gulf War I (1991) lasted 44 days: 38 days of aerial bombardment and four-day land offensive. In Bosnia (1995), air power alone won the war in 17 days. Kosovo (1999), air war was 78 days with no ground offensive. The Afghanistan campaign (2001) lasted 65 days with 11 days of ground operations. The Iraq war (2003) lasted 21 days of air and land battle. In Sri Lanka, the IAF performed its modest role effectively. The IAF’s sterling performance though was the Balakot bombing — politically and strategically a turning point, marking the threshold of counter-terrorism response. The omission in employing IAF in 1962 was part of the political and military fiasco. Still, IAF insecurities arising from jointness, including rotation of three-star slots by merit, have to be addressed to achieve unification to obviate IAF Chief having to ask the Army Chief to requisition in writing that air support was required during Kargil.

The CDS traces its history to Admiral Mountbatten when he sounded Prime Minister Nehru about its utility. After the 1971 war, Prime Minister Gandhi had informed Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw he would become CDS but nothing came of it. The CDS was resurrected by a 2001 GoM containing 100 recommendations, most of which were implemented except CDS. When an attempt was made to appoint CDS, Air Chief Marshal OP Mehra accompanied by a posse of former Air Chiefs met the President and blocked the enterprise. In 2002, a CDS actually appeared on the horizon: His office was prepared in South Block, Guard of Honour rehearsed by Delhi Area and NDTV announced Adm Sushil Kumar’s elevation. But between the cup and the lip was a slip. The Naresh Chandra Task Force in 2013 revived the CDS in its less truculent avatar: Permanent Chairman Chiefs of Staff Committee. But Defence Minister AK Antony sat on the proposal. It was not until Christmas Day 2019 that Modi 2.0 Government issued a gazette notification appointing Rawat as “primus-inter-pares-CDS” — tasking him to implement jointness  by January 2023. A Department of Military Affairs was also created under MoD. Appointing a CDS has been an article of faith for the BJP.

Two questions arise from the reform process. First, did GoI do the necessary thinking and research — and who did it — before issuing the gazette notification? Why were the known historical IAF insecurities not addressed by the political authority? Unfortunately, the newly minted Defence Planning Committee under NSA AK Doval merely issued a charter of work to Rawat without the DPC doing any groundwork. Clearly such an epic transformational exercise should have begun by launching an SDSR (Strategic Defence and Security Review), preferably an Integrated Review, on the lines the UK did in March this year followed by enunciating a National Security Strategy. The DPC conveniently left the thinking to CDS, ignoring the inevitable repercussions.

I recall UK Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine explaining to me on the back of an envelope at RCDS London in 1984 how he had rewired the CDS system for unification and whose implementation he ordered in the face of revolt from Service Chiefs. The reforms were ordered top-down without passing the buck.

Modi had announced the appointment of CDS from Red Fort in 2019. The Government simply issued a fiat to CDS on jointness despite knowing opposition to it. This lack of consensus (which all militaries have had to overcome) emerged clumsily last month during a seminar organised by Global Counter-Terrorism Council in which both Rawat and Air Chief Marshal Bhadauria spoke. It was one of the ugliest public spats between a service chief and CDS, which has triggered an ill-informed debate. The remedial measure of an Experts Committee headed by CDS with Vice Chiefs of single services for more consultation and discussion is a bad idea: the medicine worse than the malady. The Defence Minister ought to have intervened and done a Heseltine.

The IAF’s concerns including integrated use of air power have to be addressed, given that IAF has only 30 fighter squadrons. Appointments of CDS and Combatant Commanders of other joint/integrated/unified commands and organisations be made by merit and not in Robin’s turn. The concepts of air-land and tri-service battles have to be revised and updated. Joint Professional Military Education should become mandatory for promotion to flag rank. An equivalent of US Goldwater-Nichols Act 1986 will ensure jointness to diminish inter-service rivalry. India was a pioneer in integration through Joint Services Wing/ National Defence Academy/ Defence Services Staff College/National Defence College. But long ago, the political class responsible for defence of India stopped thinking, leaving it to the military to self-reform. The politician is required to do and say more than “giving a befitting reply”.

(The writer, a retired Major General, was Commander, IPKF South, Sri Lanka, and founder member of the Defence Planning Staff, currently the Integrated Defence Staff. The views expressed are personal.)

 

India & China at Odds over Taliban, Afghanistan Peace Process

China hopes the Afghan Taliban will put Afghanistan's national interests first, uphold commitment to peace talks, embrace the goal of peace, create a positive image and adopt an inclusive policy. | Photo: Twitter @MFA_China China government official

Published 29 July 2021 

India, a close defense and development partner of Afghanistan’s government, has called for an “Afghan-led, Afghan-owned and Afghan-controlled” peace process. With the withdrawal of U.S and NATO troops approaching, and the Taliban´s increasingly wider foothold on large swaths of the insurgency-ravaged country, the stakes are high for both India and China.

India on Thursday lashed out at the Taliban while referring to the recently concluded discussions between the group's political leadership and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tianjin.

RELATED:

Taliban Control Half of Afghanistan, US General Acknowledges

“I would like to reiterate that India, and the world, wish to see an independent, sovereign, democratic and stable Afghanistan, at peace with itself and neighbors,” Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said at a weekly briefing when asked to comment on the discussions.

“Unilateral imposition of will by any party will not be democratic, cannot lead to stability, and cannot provide legitimacy. Gains over the last two decades should be preserved”, remarked the Indian official.

The comments follow a nine-member Taliban delegation´s meeting with the Chinese foreign minister and Assistant Foreign Minister Wu Jianghao on 28 July. The Taliban delegation was led by the head of the political committee, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

During the discussions, Wang recognized the Taliban as an "important military and political force" in Afghanistan. Wang further stated that he expected the Islamist insurgent group to play a significant role in Afghanistan's peace process.

"As a military and political force to be reckoned with in Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban has in recent years maintained dialogue and contact with the Afghan government and the international community," FM spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at the daily briefing on 29 July.

"We hope the Afghan Taliban will put the interests of the country and nation first, hold high the banner of peace talks, set the goal of peace, build a positive image, follow an inclusive policy, return to the political mainstream in moderate ways, and play an important role in the peace, reconciliation and reconstruction process," the Chinese official further stated.

The Taliban, for its part, has assured China that it won't let terrorist groups such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) use Afghanistan's territory for actions against Beijing. The ETIM is a United Nations (UN)-proscribed terror outfit advocating for a separate Uyghur homeland.

The meeting between the Taliban and Beijing drew a reaction from the Afghan government too, which said in a press release on 28 July that the "purpose" of the meeting was to convey Beijing's concerns about the presence of foreign terrorists in Afghanistan.

"Given the common security threats and mutual political and economic interests, and in light of recent talks between the Presidents and Foreign Ministers of the two countries, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan expects the Chinese government to play its valuable role in strengthening regional consensus and exerting international pressure on the Taliban to end violence, establish a ceasefire, ensure peace and end the presence of foreign terrorists in Afghanistan," Kabul said in its official statement.

Meanwhile, U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken has welcomed the discussions between the Taliban and China, describing the development as a "positive thing."

"Everyone has an interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict and some kind of government that emerges that's truly representative and inclusive. And so if China is acting on those interests, if other countries are acting on those interests, that's a positive thing", Blinken remarked during an interview with an Indian news channel during his visit to Delhi on 28 July.

Blinken also reckoned that no power, be it the U.S., China, Russia, India, or Central Asian countries, favored Afghanistan's "military takeover" by the Taliban.

As of July, the Taliban was in control of 212 of Afghanistan's 426 districts, with the Afghan government in charge of 111 districts. The Islamist insurgents also claim to control around 90 percent of Afghanistan's border crossings, including those that lead to Tajikistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

 

The prospects for developing countries are not what they once were

Twenty years on, growth in the BRICs has slowed

Jul 31st 2021 edition

In 2000 this newspaper wrote that “the most pressing moral, political and economic issue of our time is third-world poverty.” At the time, 28% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, which is to say on incomes of $1.90 a day or less. Nearly one billion of those 1.7bn people lived in India and China.

Just a year later, Jim O’Neill, then the chief economist for Goldman Sachs, a bank, grouped those two countries, along with Brazil and Russia, into one of the defining acronyms of the 2000s: the brics. Though at the time the quartet accounted for only 8% of global economic output, Mr O’Neill argued that, given their population, even modest growth in their output per person would increase that share significantly, and that such growth looked likely. Investors were urged to take note. So were policymakers.

By 2003 Goldman Sachs’s researchers were forecasting that the bric economies would, by 2025, have a combined gdp at least half that of the g6 (America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan). By 2040 they expected the brics to have pulled ahead. A dramatically different world was on its way, one in which the big emerging economies had pretty much caught up with the developed economies of the North in economic heft if not in terms of income per person.

The first prediction was too conservative. From 2000 to 2011, the brics grew on average by a startling 17% per year, in nominal us dollars at market-exchange rates, while the g6 grew at just 4%. They reached half the g6’s gdp by 2017, not 2025. In 2021, the imf projects, bric gdp will be worth about 57% of the g6’s (see chart 1). Last year China announced that it had eradicated extreme poverty. As of 2018 the number of people living in extreme poverty in India had fallen below the estimated 99m people living in extreme poverty in Nigeria. It is a historic achievement.

The 2040 prediction looks more troubled. Growth in advanced economies and developing ones slowed a lot in the 2010s. From 2011 to 2019, g6 growth fell by more than half to below 2% per year. Growth across the brics, on the other hand, dropped by nearly 70%, to just 5% per year.

The picture across other low- and middle-income countries looks broadly similar. From 2000 to 2011, the weighted average annual growth rate of gdp, in us dollar terms, was a robust 9% for emerging economies when the brics were excluded. Real income per person in developing countries as a fraction of real incomes in America (generally considered the ne plus ultra in economics) was 12.1% in 2001. By 2011 it was almost half again as much: 17.8% (see chart 2).

 

But by the time that measure reached its peak—18.4% in 2013—incomes in the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America were already in decline relative to those in the United States. By the next year incomes in Africa were dropping further behind those in America, too. Only South and East Asia and the emerging parts of Europe have kept gaining on American incomes. For the developing world as a whole, real income per person has fallen back to 18.1% of what it is in America; not a terrible reverse, but definitely a stagnation.

Playing catch-up

The 2010s were hardly a terrible decade. Indeed in terms of emerging-market growth they were the second-best decade in history. The problem is that the 2000s were so much better. In terms of the impact on human lives, there can be few bigger questions than whether growth in the 2020s will return to the heights of the startling 2000s, hang around the levels seen in the adequate 2010s, or continue its downward trend. Such a trajectory would make talk of any significant part of the developing world “catching up” with the advanced economies look increasingly foolish.

Economists once thought that poorer countries ought naturally to catch up with richer ones. Becoming rich seemed little more than a matter of borrowing technologies from more mature economies and equipping workers with more capital, of both the physical and human sort.

Yet in the aftermath of the second world war joining the ranks of the rich was revealed to be harder for the previously colonised world than had been thought. Investors occasionally grew enthusiastic about the prospects for poorer countries, as in 1981, when a World Bank employee named Antoine van Agtmael coined “emerging markets” as an eye- (and money-)catching name for a new third-world investment fund. But only a few countries made the leap from poor to rich over the latter decades of the 20th century: a South Korea here and a Taiwan there.

It was against this background that the rise of the brics seemed truly startling. But it was hardly an overnight success. In the late 1970s China began a long process of economic liberalisation; India started relaxing state control over its economy in 1991. Debt and financial crises which had dealt devastating setbacks to growth from the 1970s saw a broad-based shift in policy across the developing world towards what is often referred to as the “Washington consensus”: becoming more open to trade and keeping government borrowing and inflation in check.

To this already healthy soil three further fertilisers were added. One was the arrival of persistently low interest rates and globalised finance, which provided a lot of money willing to seek out opportunities in emerging markets judged to be more stable than they had been. Another was a broad and sustained rise in commodity prices, which boosted the fortunes of many developing-world economies.

The third was explosive growth in trade. Manufacturing for export, a time-tested route to catching up, had once required the slow and difficult process of building up an indigenous industrial base. But as production processes once contained within a single plant or country spread out along global supply chains it became possible for poorer economies to begin producing for export by grabbing hold of small pieces of production networks, rather than recapitulating everything.

As a share of global gdp, trade rose from 39% in 1990 to 51% in 2000, eventually reaching a peak of 61% in 2008. China, through which most of the new supply chains ran, saw its share of global exports rise from about 2% to 9% over the same period. Its share of global gdp rose from 4% to 12%.

The added effects of two of the three fertilisers, the commodities boom and the boom in trade, both wore off in the 2010s. The imf’s index of commodity prices roughly tripled from 2000 to 2011. After that it began to fall, and in doing so exposed those economies which had enjoyed a superficial boom built on higher prices for their resource exports and easy credit.

Trade growth also slowed. Having recovered encouragingly after the global financial crisis of 2007-09, in the mid 2010s trade began to decline slightly as a share of global gdp (see chart 3). There were a number of reasons for this, but an important one was a decisive shift in Chinese policy. The pace of reform slackened; state intervention increased as the government made a push for self-sufficiency.

Slowdown boat to China

The Communist Party’s interest in reducing the role of state-owned enterprises, key to the dramatic increase in the size and importance of privately owned firms during the boom years, waned in the 2010s. Such firms generate lower returns on their assets than their private cousins while carrying higher levels of debt.

China’s failure to go on liberalising has slowed traffic on the most desirable path to development for the rest of the emerging world. If China had grown more and its consumption patterns had converged with those of advanced economies it would have become an ever greater market for other developing countries. But insufficient reform has also left consumption well short of the level common in economies with comparable incomes (like Mexico and Thailand), to say nothing of those in the rich world.

China’s domestic market, while still enormous, is thus substantially less massive than it might have been, and its imports a lot less than they could have been. To exacerbate matters China remains much more dependent on manufacturing than many comparably rich economies. Countries typically begin to shed some industrial production as incomes rise and producers seek out low-wage workers elsewhere. But China has resisted this trend, thanks partly to its stalled progress on reform and partly to a deliberate effort to become more self-sufficient.

An analysis by Shoumitro Chatterjee of Pennsylvania State University and Arvind Subramanian of the Centre for Global Development notes that, though China has not given up ground in terms of manufacturing exports in aggregate, it has ceded some market space in particularly labour-intensive manufacturing industries such as production of footwear, clothing and furniture. And yet its losses have, on the whole, been quite small, and have led to limited and concentrated gains in export-market share for other economies. China’s share of global footwear exports declined from 40% to 32.5% between 2008 and 2018, for example; Vietnam—the biggest beneficiary of changes in China’s export profile—captured 5.9 of the 7.5 percentage points in export space vacated by China.

China’s failure to import manufactured goods on the scale that might have been expected exacerbates what Dani Rodrik of Harvard University has dubbed premature de-industrialisation. Producing goods for export no longer seems able to propel a developing economy as far down the road towards rich-world incomes as was once the case. Low Chinese demand is far from the only factor. Greater manufacturing productivity has pushed the global price of manufactured goods down. It is increasingly common for even low-income countries to import them rather than learn to make them for others.

Very poor countries in Africa could still enjoy a big boost to productivity and incomes by increasing the role of manufacturing in their economies. But as Mr Subramanian notes, the development of machines which can handle ever more of the tasks now done by human workers at ever lower costs cannot help but limit the scope for convergence via industrialisation.

With the boosting effects of commodity prices and trade growth in abeyance, what of the third factor that kicked off the glory years of the 2000s: interest rates? They remain low. But a post-covid-19 rich-world boom, which would in general be a good thing for developing countries, carries some risks on that front. Some economists warn that big spending in America threatens to unleash inflation in a way which could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates earlier, and perhaps more sharply, than currently expected. The spread of high interest rates could wreak havoc, leading to crashing asset prices and drawing a lot of capital away from the emerging world.

Even a modest rise in American interest rates in coming years, prompted by healthy growth and falling unemployment, could catch out some overstretched governments, much as the Fed’s decision to stop stimulating the economy by buying assets led to acute discomfort for a “fragile five” nations (Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey) in 2013.

But for now the risk of calamity seems to be low. Interest rates are an unreliable guide to future inflation, but yields on American government bonds have actually declined in recent weeks at all maturities. A robust recovery across advanced economies without a long-term shift towards higher interest rates is quite plausible as well as highly desirable.

Delta blues

If the effects of covid-19 are not felt in the form of developed-world monetary policy, though, they will still be devastating. In 2020 output across the emerging world fell by 2.1%. That average is skewed upwards, however, by the fact that China, having managed to contain its initial outbreak, actually saw its economy expand. Other major emerging markets fared far worse. India’s economy shrank by 7.3%, Brazil’s by 4.1%, South Africa’s by 7%. The World Bank estimates that the ranks of those living in extreme poverty are likely to have swollen by 150m.

Hopes for a robust turnaround in 2021 have foundered on the spread of the Delta variant and the slow pace of vaccination outside rich countries; more than half the developing-world population may still not be vaccinated by the end of this year. On July 27th the imf, which in April had expected India to grow by more than 12% this year, cut that estimate to 9.5%. Across the emerging world as a whole it expects 6.3% growth this year and 5.2% in 2022.

And the effects will linger. One of the conditions for catching up is investment in human capital; that has been badly hit by the pandemic. Although students around the world lost schooling time to the interruptions caused by the pandemic, those in the poorest nations suffered most. While children in advanced economies missed the equivalent of 15 or so days of instruction on average in 2020, those in emerging markets missed about 45 and children in low-income countries 70. Poor economies can scarcely avoid educational setbacks. The pandemic has also exacerbated problems of governance and political instability in much of the emerging world.

In the 1990s and 2000s, rapid growth in trade and output was associated with a decline in inequality between countries but a rise in inequality within them, emerging markets very much included. When growth slowed in the 2010s, the distribution of economic gains within economies became relatively more important in determining whether living standards continued to improve, stagnated or fell. A more fractious politics became the norm around the world, and countries slid either towards or further into autocracy. The democracy index produced by The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company, has declined every year from 2015 to 2020.

Politicians from the political fringes have enjoyed surprising success, often on the back of unrealistic promises. The policies they have pursued frequently undermine growth, from the surprisingly abstemious fiscal policy of Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the unexpected enthusiasm for welfare spending on the part of India’s Narendra Modi. Mr Subramanian sees increasing evidence that slower growth contributes to political instability, feeding a vicious cycle.

The costs of instability are likely to rise further before they fall. Unrest will in some cases limit governments’ ability to tackle pressing policy problems and could deter foreign investment. Reforms aimed at business at home, which have already declined, may become yet more rare. Across low- and middle-income countries, the cost of starting a new business, as a share of income per person, declined steadily in the 2000s, according to the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report. But it bottomed out in the 2010s well above that in rich economies and has not shifted since.

Should global financial markets turn on stressed economies, an absence of social consensus could prevent leaders from taking the macroeconomic steps needed to fend off a crisis. In the worst cases, political instability could deteriorate into internal or even interstate violence.

And this is before one accounts for climate change. Its economic costs are already detectable, will only grow, and are generally felt most heavily in poor countries. Emerging-market governments will face loss and damage, the fiscal burden of adaptation and, often, refugee flows. Both political instability and interstate tensions may well increase.

The winds of climate change

The first two decades of the millennium demonstrated that sustained, broad-based growth in developing economies was possible—a big surprise to some, and a boon for hundreds of millions. In the absence of the particular boosts it received in the 2000s, growth has slowed, and it now faces both the stumbling block of the pandemic and the persistent headwinds of climate change. But the last of those only serves to stress the moral case for the world as a whole to try to do better; development is at the heart of adaptation.

The catch-up pace of the 2000s may never be seen again. But if things do not worsen further it is still possible for the brics to match the output of the g6 by 2040 and for associated growth to spread out quite widely. The gate which was opened at the end of the 20th century has narrowed, but it has not shut. The challenges of passing through it, though, are undeniably greater than they were.