Sunday, September 5, 2021
OPINION: How Has Joe Biden Become So Unpopular?
JAMELLE BOUIE
President Biden’s job approval rating is on the downslope. As of Friday morning, he was at 45.8 percent approval and 48.5 percent disapproval — from a high of 54 percent approval, 41 percent disapproval at the end of his first 100 days.
There is a laundry list of reasons for this. Not only is the United States still in the grip of a pandemic, but also the Delta variant of the coronavirus has led to record infections and deaths in Florida, Texas and other states with relatively low vaccination rates (and where officials have taken a stand against mitigation efforts). At the same time that Delta took hold, Biden also faced a huge backlash from the press and his partisan opponents over the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which began in chaotic fashion with the collapse of the Afghan National Army, the subsequent advance of the Taliban and of course the suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members. The administration quickly adjusted to the chaos, though, and by the time the last American soldiers left on Monday, the U.S. military and its allies had evacuated around 124,000 people, including thousands of U.S. citizens and tens of thousands of Afghan nationals. And as seen in the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy is growing at a slower rate than it did at the start of the summer. Taken together, you have a pretty good explanation for why Biden is doing much worse with the public than he was at the beginning of the year. One of the most consistent findings from the past 20 years of public opinion research is that each new president is more divisive than the last. George W. Bush was more divisive than Bill Clinton; Barack Obama was more divisive than Bush; Donald Trump was more divisive than Obama; and Biden may well end up more divisive than Trump, at least in terms of approval rating by partisan affiliation. Some of this reflects circumstances, some of it reflects the individuals, but most of it is a function of partisan and ideological polarization. Modern presidents have a high floor for public opinion but a low ceiling. This is a major change from the 1970s and 1980s, when the public was less polarized and numbers could swing from the low 30s (even the 20s) to the high 60s and beyond. At the peak of his popularity, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, George H.W. Bush had a job approval rating of 89 percent, including 82 percent among Democrats and 88 percent among independents. Those numbers are just not possible in today’s environment. Biden’s slide is noteworthy, but it is also exactly what we should expect given the structural conditions of American politics in the 21st century. But this cuts against the unstated assumption that a president should have an approval rating above 50 percent. It’s an assumption that, as Sam Goldman, a professor of political science at George Washington University, observed, is “another example of how we’ve adopted the deeply exceptional midcentury interlude as our baseline — partly because it remains our vision of normality, and partly because that’s when reliable data start.”The “deeply exceptional midcentury interlude” — roughly speaking the years between the end of World War II and the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 — is the source of a lot of our normative understandings of American politics, despite the fact that the conditions of that period are impossible to replicate. When politicians and political observers pine for an era of bipartisanship, they are pining for the 1950s and 1960s (and to an extent the 1970s).If we were to look farther back in time, to say, the late 19th century, we might find an era that, for all of its indelible foreignness, is closer to ours in terms of the shape and structure of its politics, from its sharp partisan polarization and closely contested national elections to its democratic backsliding and deep anxieties over immigration and demographic change. We don’t have polling data for President Grover Cleveland. But we do know that he won his victory in the 1884 election by 37 votes in the Electoral College and a half-a-percent in the national popular vote. His successor, Benjamin Harrison, lost the popular vote by a little less than 1 percent and won the Electoral College by 65 votes. Those narrow results suggest, I think, a similarly narrow spread for presidential approval — high floors, low ceilings. American politics eventually broke out of its late-19th-century equilibrium of high polarization and tightly contested elections. In the 1896 presidential election, William McKinley became the first candidate in decades to win more than 50 percent of the popular vote, beating his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan, by 4.3 percent. He won re-election in 1900 and after his assassination the following year, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, would win in 1904 by the most lopsided margin since Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 re-election victory. What changed in American politics to produce more decisive national victories? Well, that’s not a happy story. Suffrage restrictions of immigrants in the North, the rise of Jim Crow in the South, and the success of capital in suppressing labor revolt and setting the terms of political contestation had removed millions of Americans from the electorate by the turn of the 20th century. Political power was concentrated and consolidated in a bourgeois class (mostly) represented by the Republican Party, which, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s twin victories in 1912 and 1916, held the White House from 1897 to 1933. It would take another catastrophe, the Great Depression, to change that landscape. As for the tectonic force that might break our partisan and ideological stalemate? It is impossible to say. Oftentimes in history, things seem stable until, suddenly, they aren’t. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/opinion/biden-job-approval-rating.html
Pakistan faces accusations of undercounting Hindus, Christians in latest census
- The results of Pakistan's sixth Population and Housing Census were delayed after some provinces, including Sindh and Balochistan flagged the issue of undercounting.
Religious minorities in Pakistan have accused the government of undercounting them in the latest census data published in May, four years after the survey was conducted. The survey for the sixth Population and Housing Census was undertaken under former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and got completed in 2017. The results, however, were delayed after some provinces, including Sindh and Balochistan flagged the issue of undercounting.Pakistan Bureau of Statistics published the data of the sixth Population and Housing Census after approval from a constitutional body that resolves power-sharing disputes between the provincial and federal governments. While Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan caved in under pressure from the Imran Khan government, Sindh continued to raise objections on the census data. According to the 2017 census data, Pakistan’s overall population has grown to 207.68 million, an increase of around 75 million since 1998 when the country recorded 132.3 million people. The census suggests that the Muslim population in Pakistan grew by 96.47% while the population of other religious minorities reported negligible growth and even shrank in some cases. Hindus in Pakistan account for 1.73% of the total population while Christians make up for 1.27% of Pakistani residents. Other minorities like Ahmaddiyas account for less than 0.1% of Pakistan’s population. Karachi Supreme Court attorney Neel Keshav claimed that the Hindu population in Pakistan is likely to be much higher, reported Pakistan Today. "The 1998 census data showed a Hindu population of nearly 2 million. Yet the new census showed that it had only risen to 3.5 million in 20 years," the Pakistani daily quoted Keshav as saying. Human rights groups have frequently raised concerns over the condition of religious minorities in Pakistan. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) had said in a 2019 report that both the Hindu and Christian communities in Sindh and Punjab continued to report cases of forced conversion. "Even though Christians have migrated overseas and converted to Islam, our church records make us suspect that Christians may have been undercounted by at least half a million. We're struggling to find accurate data, and somehow the government is not helping. It is not investigating," Pakistan Today quoted Center for Social Justice Director Peter Jacob as saying.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news
How the Taliban's Afghanistan takeover could hurt US-Pakistan ties
By S Khan
NATO has said Pakistan has a "special responsibility" to make sure Afghanistan lives up to its international commitments. But some Pakistanis say they refuse to be the "scapegoats" of the West's failure in Afghanistan.The fall of Kabul to the Taliban has left many people in Pakistan questioning their country's future relations with the US.
Some hard-liners in Pakistan say Washington will blame Islamabad for the Islamic fundamentalist group's takeover of Afghanistan.
Pakistan's Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari wrote an article on Tuesday asserting that "her country would no longer accept being scapegoated for the failures of others."
Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist, wrote last week in a commentary for Project Syndicate that "the blame" for failure in Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban "lies largely with Pakistan and America's inability to bring the country onside."
Pakistan is said to be the largest backer of the cloistered group of the Taliban whose regime was recognized by Islamabad when they governed Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
Husain Haqqani, the South and Central Asia director at the Hudson Institute — a Washington-based think tank — says Pakistan's past role in Afghanistan has always created friction between Washington and Islamabad.
"Most Americans believe Pakistan's consistent support enabled the Taliban to succeed," Haqqani told DW.
"There is resentment against Pakistan's role in Afghanistan which may not help improve US-Pakistan ties in the near future," he added.
Waning interest for Pakistan
Pakistan in the past relied heavily on the US military and financial assistance, with some estimates suggesting that the country may have received over $30 billion (€25.5 billion) from Washington since 2001.
Islamabad also received generous aid packages and financial assistance during the Cold War when it was a close ally of the US.
But Haqqani says there is very little support in Washington "for resuming large-scale economic or military assistance for Pakistan right now." Author Ayesha Siddiqa believes Washington has "lost interest" in Islamabad. Pakistan has always sought funds and military assistance from the US, but such support would no longer be on the cards, Siddiqa told DW.
Pakistan’s Support to the Taliban is One of the Greatest Feats of Covert Intelligence
The presence of the Inter-Services Intelligence chief in Kabul this week is an in-your-face reminder of Pakistan’s role in protecting and promoting the Afghan Taliban during the course of the latter’s war with the United States. Pakistan’s aim throughout was to use the Taliban as a proxy to curtail Indian influence in Afghanistan. and, circumstances permitting, to perhaps escalate violence in Kashmir. During this period, India invested $3 billion worth of goodwill in Afghanistan – building civilian infrastructures like dams and schools – but its efforts came to naught in a matter of few days. This is because the Indian strategic establishment’s military assessment of the war in Afghanistan – which relied on ‘wisdom’ borrowed from the United States – was wrong from the very beginning. It should have been clear to New Delhi that something was fundamentally flawed in the American strategy when the 21,600 pound MOAB (Mother of All Bombs), the 15,000 pound Daisy Cutter and 2,000 pound Thermobaric bombs failed to break the will of the Taliban to continue fighting. However, India persisted with American blinkers on its vision. We did not wake up even when the Taliban, beginning in 2005, stopped engaging the Americans in direct combat and started laying emphasis on asymmetrical warfare tactics like suicide bombing and IED attacks. We could never appreciate the fact that the US counterinsurgency strategy floundered because ‘securing’ the territory won or liberated proved enormously difficult, both operationally and in terms of cost. What Pakistan has gained and stands to gain On the other hand, by helping the Taliban come back to power, Pakistan has ensured that its eastern frontier is rendered safe from two of its old fears: Afghan alignment with India; and a refugee flow that could cause destabilisation among Pakistan’s Pashtuns. The Taliban have also, as Anatol Lieven points out, given the Pakistani military an assurance that they will not, at least for the time being, support any Pashtun Islamist rebellion within Pakistan. Contrary to what some Indian diplomats think, the mere fact that the Taliban still do not recognise the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is not likely to make much difference to the equation. The Durand Line might not be buried but there are issues and forces much larger than that which are at work, and its ghost cannot haunt Pakistan to its detriment.On August 17, Noor Wali, the emir of the TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) congratulated the Taliban. However, so far there is no indication that the Taliban will help the anti-Pakistan establishment TTP merely on grounds of ethnicity. Even if morality is not their strong suit, they know that fighting Pakistan on Pakistani soil would be materially different from fighting the US on Afghanistan soil.More importantly, the Taliban know that the Pakistani army had never gone whole hog in its 2003 counterterrorism operations in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) bordering Afghanistan against pro-Taliban insurgents enjoying a safe haven there. Gen. Musharraf undertook the action basically to appear to be doing a favour to the US under its pressure. However, as K. Alan Kronstadt et al had pointed out in their 2008 study for the Congressional Review Service, long-held doubts existed about Islamabad’s commitment to some core US interests and the operations were largely ineffectual with the militant groups having only grown stronger and more aggressive in 2008. Finally, I do not think that too much should be read into the release of TTP ex-deputy Maulvi Fakir Mohammad from a Bagram prison. When the Taliban freed hundreds of prisoners, there was no good reason that they would hang on to a TTP leader. Pakistan’s 22-month long counterterrorism operations in North Waziristan were undertaken after 2014 far more seriously and were effective too, having killed some 3,400 militants. However, by that time their concerns were different. The fate of Afghanistan was sealed by then. In 2011 itself, Robert Gates had confirmed that the US was holding reconciliation talks with the Taliban; two agreements were signed in March-April 2012. This time, Pakistan knew that investments from China would not materialise if Chinese workers kept getting killed. How US intelligence floundered in Afghanistan Christine Fair writes that Washington failed to understand the perturbing nature of Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan, and ignored very early signals that Musharraf had in fact done a U-turn on its U-turn on the Taliban. This assessment, though corrret, does not capture the whole sordid story. Pakistan’s support to the Taliban prior to 9/11 was not a closely-guarded secret. When analysts say that the Taliban regrouped across the border in Pakistan at the end of 2001, from where they waged an insurgency for 20 years, they forget that the ‘border across Pakistan in FATA’ was not a black hole where the Taliban simply got lost. The US was using Pakistani air bases and was in full contact with the Pak military. It stretches credulity to believe a nation that spent over $500 billion during 2001-13 on intelligence – as revealed by the Washington Post – and $527 billion more during the next seven years, was so utterly inept that it had no idea of Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban for over two decades. Logically, only two conclusions are possible: either the famed capability of US intelligence is a hoax or, finding itself mired in a faulty strategy in Afghanistan, Washington was left with no option but to ignore what Pakistan had been doing. It was an open secret that Pakistan had given safe haven and support to the Taliban while overtly denying their presence on Pakistani soil except in the FATA on the border with Afghanistan. The Pak army even had the gall to claim that they had carried out a 20-month long operation in the area and cleared it of the Taliban. In 2016, Sartaj Aziz had admitted in a talk at Washington’s Council on Foreign Relations, “We have some influence on them because their leadership is in Pakistan, and they get some medical facilities, their families are here. So we can use those levers to pressurise them to say, ‘come to the table’.” Had the US not given up on Taliban by then, could they have not pressurized Pakistan or used their HUMINT to take those leaders out? Were they so naïve as to blindly believe in the claim of the Pak army regarding military operations against the Taliban in FATA? Could US intelligence not verify their claims? If they chose not to verify, it was their mistake. Apparently, the ISI was so persuasive that they took the US for a ride or the US had run out of options. Later also, it was indeed very clever of the ISI to make it clear that Pakistan could not negotiate with the Taliban on behalf of the Afghan government. ISI gained its expertise during mujahideen war The US-driven mujahideen war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s was one of the most brilliant covert operations ever designed in the history of warfare and intelligence. The CIA’s covert operation was called ‘Operation Cyclone’, in which they recruited, armed and trained fighters on a massive scale—according to some estimates, the mujahideen casualties were in the range of 150,000 to 180,000. It cost the US about $20 billion in that era. Since the US was extremely particular about ‘plausible deniability’ for the entire operation, they had no option but to involve the ISI in recruiting, arming and training the mujahideen. Since the training had to be imparted secretly, the invented the device of the madrasa. The CIA and ISI opened a large number of such ‘Islamic schools’ in the remote, border areas. Instead of religious education, they were given military training there. Arms for the mujahideen were arranged from the illicit arms bazaar across the world. Weapons were shipped to Pakistan and from there they were sent over land to the fighters in Afghanistan. Brig. Mohammad Yousaf has described the operation in detail in his books, Afghanistan: The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower and Silent soldier: The man behind the Afghan jehad General Akhtar Abdur Rahman Shaheed. The whole operation was brilliant in theory. There was but a small undesirable side-effect. And the world is paying the price of that side-effect even now. ISI, being closely involved in the whole process, pilfered a great quantity of arms. Citing arms-trades specialist James Adams in his book, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, John K. Cooley writes that between the delivery point at Karachi to the border checkpoints of the Pakistani army from where they were meant to be distributed to the Mujahideen, the ISI pilfered about 50% of the arms, which ended up either in their warehouses or sold off in international black market. During the Battle of Kandahar (2011) as a part of 2011 Taliban Spring Offensive, foreign-aid officials leaving the city at the time or shortly before fighting broke out, reported seeing grease paper everywhere as the Taliban removed the wrappings from the packed weapons. It is understood that the weapons had come directly from ISI warehouses. An idea of the scale on which Pakistan siphoned off money can be had from a revelation by Andrew Elva of the Federation for American Afghan Action, who had claimed before the US Senate that between 1980 and 1981 itself, the ISI had siphoned off $700 million out of $1.09 billion in aid earmarked by the Congress for the rebels. The still unexplained 1988 Ojhri arms depot explosion in Rawalpindi may also have been part of this process. ISI’s crowning glory In the 20 years from 2001 to 2021, the ISI pulled the wool over the American eyes with such panache that, despite a constant uncomfortable feeling all along about what they had been doing, the Americans could never pin any clear blame on Pakistan. Having earned their spurs in the Mujahideen War, the ISI, while pretending to be an ally of the US in their two-decade long war in Afghanistan, pulled the rug from under their feet. They duped the only superpower in the world. They made them believe that they were undertaking counterterrorism operations against the militants hiding in FATA in 2003, whereas they cleverly avoided putting all their might behind it. They continued to equip the Taliban with weapons from the Mujahideen War. The smallarmssurvey.org publication ‘Surveying the Battlefield: Illicit Arms in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia’ infers from an analysis of the seized caches that most Taliban weapons were of older models. It also says that in 2005, the Afghan Defence Ministry had reported 475 seizures of weapons, including more than 2,000 rockets, 4,000 land mines, and 5 million cartridges on the border with Pakistan. Similarly, in January 2007, Afghan forces found 40 truckloads of machine guns, explosives, and rockets belonging to the Taliban that were hidden in mountain caves near the border with Pakistan. Obviously, the ISI had ‘made’ them ‘survive’ the 2003 military operations! As Stephen Tankel discloses in his US Institute of Peace study, they established a pattern of military incursions into FATA followed by peace deals that empowered the pro-Taliban Pashtun militants. These included a February 2005 peace agreement with Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan and the September 2006 Waziristan Accord in North Waziristan. From a purely professional angle, what Pakistan has achieved in Afghanistan today has to be regarded as one of the greatest feats of covert intelligence. If anyone deserves to celebrate the Taliban victory, it is surely the ISI.
N.C. Asthana
https://thewire.in/south-asia/pakistans-support-to-the-taliban-is-one-of-the-greatest-feats-of-covert-intelligence
Several soldiers killed in southwestern #Pakistan suicide bombing
At least three soldiers killed and 15 others wounded near Quetta in Balochistan province, police said.A suicide bomber has detonated his explosives near a security checkpoint in restive southwestern Pakistan, killing at least three paramilitary personnel and wounding 15 others.The attacker walked towards the checkpoint manned by the paramilitary Frontier Corps on Quetta-Mastung Road, 25km (15 miles) south of Quetta, capital of Balochistan province, senior police officer Azhar Akram said on Sunday. A suicide bomber on a motorcycle packed with 6kg of explosives rammed one of the vehicles in a convoy, Akram said. He said some of the wounded were in critical condition and the death toll could rise, adding body parts were found at a distance from the security post after the bombing. Banned armed group Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, claimed responsibility for the attack. It was the first time TTP claimed an attack on Pakistani security forces since the Taliban – a separate organisation – took control of neighbouring Afghanistan.TTP, which renewed its allegiance to the Afghan Taliban after the fall of Kabul, has recently stepped up its campaign against the Pakistani army.“Condemn the TTP suicide attack on FC checkpost in Mastung Road, Quetta,” Prime Minister Imran Khan said in a tweet. Attacks continue Balochistan has also seen a low-level armed uprising by Baloch separatist groups for nearly 20 years, calling for independence for the gas and mineral-rich province. Most attacks on security forces in Balochistan in the recent past have been claimed by Baloch separatist groups Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front.Balochistan, bordering Iran and Afghanistan, is a key province in southwest Pakistan, where China has been working on projects related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The projects, including road construction, power plants and agricultural development, have cost billions of dollars. China has in recent years also played a key role in developing the deep-water port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. But there have been attacks on Pakistanis and Chinese working on the economic corridor projects. A suicide bomber last month detonated his explosives near a vehicle carrying Chinese workers, killing two Pakistani children playing by the roadside and wounding a Chinese national and two other Pakistanis in the port city of Gwadar. Suspected separatists also last month hurled a hand grenade at a store selling national flags in Quetta, killing one man and wounding four others who were buying flags to celebrate Pakistan’s independence day.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/5/several-troops-killed-in-southwestern-pakistan-suicide-bombing