Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Abortion Has Never Been Just About Abortion
By Thomas B. EdsallAs recently as 1984, abortion was not a deeply partisan issue. “The difference in support for the pro-choice position was a mere six percentage points,” Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, told me by email. “40 percent of Democratic identifiers were pro-life, while 39 percent were pro-choice. Among Republican identifiers, 33 percent were pro-choice, 45 percent were pro-life and 22 percent were in the middle.” By 2020, Abramowitz continued, 73 percent of Democratic identifiers took the pro-choice position, while only 17 percent took the pro-life position, with 10 percent in the middle. Among Republicans, 60 percent took the pro-life position while 25 percent took the pro-choice position and 15 percent were in the middle. The difference in support for the pro-choice position was 48 percentage points. This split was even wider, 59 points, among “strong partisans, the group most likely to vote in primary elections,” Abramowitz said. Crucially, Abramowitz pointed out, opinions on abortion are also closely connected with racial attitudes: Whites who score high on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance are far more likely to support strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on these measures. This is part of a larger picture in which racial attitudes are increasingly linked with opinions on a wide range of disparate issues including social welfare issues, gun control, immigration and even climate change. The fact that opinions on all of these issues are now closely interconnected and connected with racial attitudes is a key factor in the deep polarization within the electorate that contributes to high levels of straight ticket voting and a declining proportion of swing voters. Some of the scholars and journalists studying the evolving role of abortion in American politics make the case that key leaders of the conservative movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s — among them Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell Sr. — were seeking to expand their base beyond those opposed to the civil rights movement. According to this argument, conservative strategists settled on a concerted effort to politicize abortion in part because it dodged the race issue and offered the opportunity to unify conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.“The anti-abortion movement has been remarkably successful at convincing observers that the positions individuals take on the abortion issue always follow in a deductive way from their supposed moral principles. They don’t,” Katherine Stewart, the author of the 2019 book “The Power Worshipers,” wrote in an email. In 1978, the hostile reaction to an I.R.S. proposal to impose taxes on churches running segregated private schools (“seg academies” for the children of white Southerners seeking to avoid federally mandated school integration orders) provided the opportunity to mobilize born again and evangelical parishioners through the creation of the Moral Majority. As Stewart argues, Viguerie, Weyrich and others on the right were determined to find an issue that could bring together a much larger constituency: As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisioned. After long and contentious debate, conservative strategists came to a consensus, Stewart writes: “They landed upon the one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: ‘abortion.’” In an email, Stewart expanded on her argument. Abortion opponents: are more likely to be committed to a patriarchal worldview in which the control of reproduction, and female sexuality in particular, is thought to be central in maintaining a gender hierarchy that (as they see it) sustains the family, which they claim is under threat from secular, modern forces. Abortion is among the most intractable issues dividing the parties, with little or no room for compromise. On one side, opponents of the procedure argue that “at the moment of fusion of human sperm and egg, a new entity comes into existence which is distinctly human, alive, and an individual organism — a living, and fully human, being,” as the Center for Human Dignity puts it in the pamphlet “The Best Pro-Life Arguments for Secular Audiences.” On the other side, abortion rights proponents contend, in the words of the Center for Reproductive Rights: “Laws that restrict abortion have the effect and purpose of preventing a woman from exercising any of her human rights or fundamental freedoms on a basis of equality with men.” It wasn’t always this way. Fifty years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in St. Louis approved what by the standards of 1971 was a decisively liberal resolution on abortion: Be it further resolved, that we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother. This year, at a June meeting in Nashville, the convention demonstrated just how much has changed on the religious right when it comes to abortion. Members endorsed a resolution declaring, “We affirm that the murder of preborn children is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law,” pointedly repudiating past equivocation on the issue: We humbly confess and lament any complicity in recognizing exceptions that legitimize or regulate abortion, and of any apathy, in not laboring with the power and influence we have to abolish abortion. Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth and the author of a new book, “Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right,” looked at conservative strategizing in a recent op-ed in The Guardian. In his essay, Balmer recounted a 1990 meeting of conservatives in Washington at which Weyrich spoke: Remember, Weyrich said animatedly, that the religious right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got the movement going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies, including a ban on interracial dating that the university maintained until 2000. In an email, Balmer wrote, “Opposition to abortion became a convenient diversion — a godsend, really — to distract from what actually motivated their political activism: the defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.” The same is true, Ballmer continued, of many politicians who have become adamant foes of abortion: At a time when open racism was becoming unfashionable, these politicians needed a more high-minded issue, one that would not compel them to surrender their fundamental political orientation. And of course the beauty of defending a fetus is that the fetus demands nothing in return — housing, health care, education — so it’s a fairly low-risk advocacy. The reality in the 1970s was that the surging rights movements — rights for African Americans, women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, rights for criminal defendants and for the mentally ill — had set the stage for what would become an explosive conservative reaction, a reaction that by the 1980 elections put Ronald Reagan in the White House for eight years, wrested control of the Senate from Democrats and elected a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats that wielded tremendous power in the House. “There is a persistent association between abortion views and ethnoracial exclusion,” Bart Bonikowski, a professor of sociology at N.Y.U., wrote in an email: What has happened is that both issue positions have become increasingly sorted by party, so that being anti-choice or holding exclusionary beliefs is a clear marker of Republican affiliation, whereas being pro-choice or defining the nation in inclusive terms signals Democratic identity. The same has happened to a wide range of other issues, from health care and voting rights to mask-wearing and vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic — across all of these domains, policy views increasingly demarcate partisan identity. David Leege, emeritus professor of political science at Notre Dame, has an additional explanation for the process linking racial animosity and abortion. In an email, he wrote: For the target populations — evangelical Protestants — whom Viguerie, Weyrich, and Falwell sought to mobilize, racial animosity and abortion attitudes are related but mainly in an indirect way, through aversion toward intellectual elites. The people perceived to be pushing government’s role in equal opportunity and racial integration were now the same as those pushing permissive abortion laws, namely, the highly educated from New England, banking, universities, the Northern cities, and elsewhere. In short, Leege wrote, “although the policy domain may differ, the hated people are the same.” Michele Margolis, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, in her 2018 book “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity,” argues that “instead of religiosity driving political attitudes, the shifting political landscape — in which Republicans have become associated with religious values and cultural conservatism to a greater extent than Democrats — could have instead changed partisans’ involvement with their religious communities.” If, Margolis continues: Republicans and Democrats select into or out of religious communities in part based on their political outlooks, they will find themselves in more politically homogeneous social networks where they encounter less diverse political information. Rather than churches being places where people with different political viewpoints come together, religious communities may become more like echo chambers populated by like-minded partisans. The power of partisanship to influence stands on abortion can be seen on the Democratic side by the “host of Democrats who have liberalized their views as they eyed the presidency — Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, and Dennis Kucinich among them” — as John Murdock wrote in “The Future of the Pro-Life Democrat” in the journal National Affairs. Rachel Rebouché, a law professor at Temple, adds nuance to the argument that abortion serves as a roundabout vehicle to appeal to racial conservatives. Instead, she contends that anti-abortion and segregation are “explicit co-travelers, to be sure. But I think they also have different chronological origins and somewhat different original audiences.” Abortion, she wrote by email, and “sex control, gender identities and patriarchy” are a set of “very strong themes that developed alongside private schools, with their ability to shape views of religion, sex, culture and race, and alongside welfare reform and criminal law enforcement, which always have had race at the center of those systems.” In addition, Rebouché wrote, “Where I see synergies are conservative politics aligning with ideas about sex, sexuality, religion, family.” Jefferson Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt, argued in an email that “there are three dimensions to the question of abortion.” The first, he notes: is an obvious and genuine concern for fundamentalist Christian morality among the Southern polity. Some are clearly motivated by the obvious: they think abortion is wrong. Such views are a minority in this country, but they are highly concentrated in the South. The second, he continued, is: the politicization of the issue to rile up the electorate. This is less about policy and more about pure and simple voting harvesting. Obviously, there is very little support for neonatal care or curbing the death penalty, so “pro-life” is a ridiculous misnomer. They are less pro-life than they are pro-political power — their own. The third, in Cowie’s view, is: The overlooked part: the deep resonance of state and regional sovereignty. Regional politics is still defined by a resistance to federal authority. If the federal government can run any aspect of regional culture or politics, the logic goes, then they can run it all. This has been a concern on just about everything since Reconstruction, including lynch law, fair employment practices, the Brown decision, busing, prayer in schools, and abortion. This issue runs deep — consider the career of George Wallace who liked to say the federal government has put the courts in schools and taken God out. This is the remnants of the Lost Cause still blowing in the political winds. Darren Dochuk, a professor of history at Notre Dame and the author of “From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism,” argued in an email that the strength of the opposition to abortion in the South grows out of the unique tensions in the region between notions of manhood and evangelical attempts to control the sins of men: There has always been a tension in Southern life between the ideals of rugged masculinity and expectations of evangelical propriety. In the early 20th century, preachers and earnest parishioners did their part to rein in the worst excesses of Southern manhood, be they related to drink or sex or violence; waging war on sin was their calling, protecting home and hearth and securing Christian male headship of them, their main concern. This tension was also a dynamic one in that excessive sin also led to heightened evangelistic fervor; the greater the sin, the greater the salvation, meaning masculine indiscretions were in subtle ways allowed, even celebrated, among the churchly crowd as justification for an equally aggressive response.
“Since the late 1970s, however,” Dochuk wrote: Southern evangelicalism as a whole has become more welcoming of the type of rugged masculinity that the Southern sinners of yesteryear often displayed. For theological as well as cultural and political reasons, the Southern evangelical majority, whose prescripts and sentiments now pervade all corners of Southern rural culture, has increasingly embraced a muscular Christianity that deems protection of home and hearth and all facets of family values and notions of life and liberty associated with them a cause worth waging with all the force and abandon required. This accommodation is driven, according to Dochuk, by the fact that the enemy is now, in Southern evangelicals’ view, “an effeminate liberalism and its ‘secular humanism,’” which, in turn, means that: even those leaders who might not display Christ-like temperaments or norms are welcome in the fold. In a sense, Southern evangelicals have jettisoned the New Testament for the Old Testament — revival for societal reconstruction — and carved out plenty of room for the rampaging politician who can impose his will (see Trump as well as lesser lights) in order to remake the nation in their image. In this milieu, Dochuk observed: The swashbuckling southern rural politician enjoys more freedom than ever to play hard even as he decries the sins of abortion and feminism; as saint and sinner, he’s been granted the right and freedom to lead the family values charge against Washington and its soft liberal elite. In milder terms, Rebecca Kreitzer, a professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and two colleagues argue in “The Evolution of Morality Policy Debate: Moralization and Demoralization” that as an issue becomes both polarized and “moralized,” it become more difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. In contrast, when an issue become “demoralized,” as has been the case with gay marriage over the past two decades, it becomes increasingly likely to reach bipartisan consensus. For 20 years, Gallup has asked, “Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general gay and lesbian relations are morally acceptable or morally wrong.” In 2001, 53 percent said morally wrong and 40 percent said morally acceptable. By 2021, however, 69 percent said gay and lesbian relations were morally acceptable compared with 30 percent who described such relations as morally unacceptable. The issue has been “demoralized” and has effectively disappeared from the national debate. No such luck in the case of abortion. Over the same 20 years, Gallup asked whether abortion is morally acceptable or unacceptable. In 2001, 42 percent said the procedure is morally acceptable and 45 percent said morally unacceptable. Over those two decades, the numbers varied modestly year to year but effectively changed very little: In 2021, 47 percent said acceptable, 46 percent said unacceptable. The bottom line: For at least the medium term, the abortion issue is here to stay. If anything, the Supreme Court 5-4 decision on Sept. 1 to refuse to block a Texas law prohibiting most abortions demonstrated that the issue will remain on center stage with no resolution in sight.
Biden says he has ‘great confidence’ in Milley after book reveals top general, fearing Trump, conferred with China to avert war
By John Wagner and Karoun Demirjian
President Biden said Wednesday that he has “great confidence” in Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after a new book revealed that the country’s top military officer privately conferred with his Chinese military counterpart to avert armed conflict with the United States late in the Trump administration. “I have great confidence in General Milley,” Biden told reporters at a White House event focusing on the response of business leaders to the coronavirus. His brief comments echoed those of White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who said during an earlier briefing that Biden had come to know Milley well during his presidency. “They’ve worked side by side through a range of international events,” Psaki said. “And the president has complete confidence in his leadership, his patriotism and his fidelity to our Constitution.”Secret calls from Milley to Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army in October and January are detailed in a book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for Milley, said Wednesday that Milley had acted constitutionally and within his established responsibilities. In a statement, Butler said Milley “continues to act and advise within his authority in the lawful tradition of civilian control of the military and his oath to the Constitution.”
Butler’s statement largely confirmed the reporting in the book.The defense of Milley’s conduct came a day after former president Donald Trump, speaking on the conservative television network Newsmax, labeled the chairman’s reported actions “treason” and said, “I did not ever think of attacking China.”
According to the book, one of Milley’s calls took place on Oct. 30, four days before the election that unseated Trump, and the other on Jan. 8, two days after the U.S. Capitol siege carried out by Trump supporters in a quest to overturn the vote.The first call was prompted by Milley’s review of intelligence suggesting the Chinese believed the United States was preparing to attack. That belief, the authors write, was based on tensions over military exercises in the South China Sea, and deepened by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric toward China. In the second call, placed to address Chinese fears about the events of Jan. 6, Li wasn’t as easily assuaged, even after Milley promised him, “We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes,” the authors write. In his statement Wednesday, Butler said Milley “regularly communicates with Chiefs of Defense across the world, including with China and Russia.” “These conversations remain vital to improving mutual understanding of U.S. national security interests, reducing tensions, providing clarity and avoiding unintended consequences or conflict,” Butler said. “His calls with the Chinese and others in October and January were in keeping with these duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.” News of Milley’s conversations prompted harsh criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill and prominent military observers, many of whom called for his resignation. “You must immediately dismiss General Milley,” Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Foreign Relations panel, wrote in a letter to Biden on Tuesday. “America’s national security and ability to lead in the world are at stake. Rubio said Milley “worked to actively undermine the sitting Commander in Chief” — then Trump — “and contemplated a treasonous leak of classified information to the Chinese Communist Party.” His alleged breach of the chain of command — as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley’s role is advisory — also rankled at least one high-profile Trump critic. Former Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a star witness in the first impeachment proceedings against Trump, went on Twitter on Tuesday to declare that if the allegations in the book were true, “Milley must resign.” “He usurped civilian authority, broke Chain of Command, and violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military,” Vindman wrote. “It’s an extremely dangerous precedent. You can’t simply walk away from that.” While Republicans on Capitol Hill have echoed Rubio’s contention that Milley’s reported actions constitute a fireable offense, Democrats have maintained that his statements and actions were justified. “It is breathtaking to think of the lengths that Milley and others went to to avert the disasters Trump was creating at the end of his presidency,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters, adding that he was “not at all” concerned if Milley had overstepped his authority. “It is a shame we reached that point in America’s history that’s necessary, and I think he did the responsible thing to keep America out of war,” Durbin said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/milley-defended-china-call/2021/09/15/3393fa18-1645-11ec-b976-f4a43b740aeb_story.html
George W. Bush, Mark Milley and Violent Extremists - What are America’s domestic threats?
By James Freeman
Pundits have widely interpreted former President George W. Bush’s Saturday remarks to be a condemnation of participants in last January’s Capitol Riot. But recent news brings other possibilities. Last weekend Mr. Bush said at a 9/11 memorial service for the heroes of Flight 93:
And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.Monday’s column noted that Byron York is among those interpreting the remarks as an endorsement of the idea “that an equivalence exists between the plane-hijacking, murderous terrorists of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Capitol rioters of Jan. 6, 2021 — a comparison that has no basis in fact but has done much to sour the national debate.”
Reader Paul Goldbeck responds:
It struck me that those Bush noted as destroying things in his speech could have included Antifa and others as well as the Capitol rioters. What did I miss?
This column asked Bush spokesman Freddy Ford to whom President Bush was referring when he talked about “violent extremists at home” on Saturday. Mr. Ford responds via email:
He refers to anyone who would take up violence against fellow Americans to advance a belief — inclusive of, but not exclusive to, those who would attack synagogues, nightclubs, churches, people of color, national symbols, institutions, the government, etc.
Two days before Mr. Bush delivered his Saturday address, the Associated Press reported from Seattle:
A second defendant has been convicted of sabotaging railroad tracks near the U.S.-Canada border in Washington state just before a train carrying crude oil was due to pass through — apparently part of a campaign to protest construction of a pipeline across British Columbia.
Following a two-day trial and three hours of deliberation, a federal jury in Seattle on Thursday convicted Ellen Brennan Reiche, 28, of Bellingham, of violence against a railroad carrier. Her co-defendant, Samantha Frances Brooks, 24, pleaded guilty in July.
A press release from the U.S. Department of Justice states:
According to records in the case and testimony at trial, on the night of November 28, 2020, Reiche and co-defendant Samantha Frances Brooks, 24, were observed on video surveillance walking on the tracks near a crossing in Bellingham. Whatcom County Sheriff’s deputies responded to the scene. The defendants were detained for trespassing, and a shunt was found on the tracks near where the deputies had first encountered them. Reiche was carrying a paper bag containing wire, a drill with a brush head, a magnetic adhesive and gloves... The shunt that was placed on the tracks could have interfered with the railroad crossing guard at Cliffside Drive in Bellingham. A train carrying crude oil, among other cargo, was scheduled to come through that area soon after this incident.
In her closing argument, Assistant United States Attorney Sok Jiang told the jury, Reiche “disrupted the signal system designed to stop trains from crashing into each other or crashing into cars…. A car driving through the intersection (near the shunt) would not have warning that a train was coming.”
There are of course different types of domestic threats. Today the Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker writes about his Post colleagues’ allegation that in the final months of the Trump administration, America’s senior military officer delivered a remarkable message to China:
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa...
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Strategists can debate whether assuring Gen. Li should ever be a U.S. strategic priority, but if this story is true it’s hard to see how Gen. Milley could have been effective. Promising to provide warning of an attack right after one has just promised that such an attack won’t occur isn’t a good way to assure anybody.
Not reassuring at all to Americans who treasure our Constitution and the role of the duly-elected President as commander-in-chief is the following passage in which The Post claims:
Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order — but, crucially, that he, Milley, also had to be involved. Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood, the authors write, in what he considered an “oath.”
Alexander Vindman, one of the country’s foremost experts in the field of undermining presidential authority, responds on Twitter to the Post claims about communications with China:
If this is true GEN Milley must resign. He usurped civilian authority, broke Chain of Command, and violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent. You can’t simply walk away from that.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-w-bush-mark-milley-and-violent-extremists-11631667584?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s
Initial Taliban Moves Fail To Convince Afghanistan’s Neighbors – Analysis
By James M. Dorsey
The Taliban’s record in recent weeks on making good on promises to respect human and women’s rights as well as uphold freedom of the press is mixed at best. Afghanistan’s neighbours and near-neighbours are not holding their breath even if some are willing to give the Central Asian country’s new rulers the benefit of the doubt.
A litmus test of Taliban willingness to compromise may come sooner than later.
It’s most likely only a matter of time before China knocks on newly appointed Afghan acting interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani’s door demanding the extradition of Uighur fighters.The Chinese demand would be challenging not only because of the Taliban’s consistent rejection, no matter the cost, of requests for the expulsion of militants who have helped them in their battles.
The Taliban already made that clear two decades ago when they accepted the risk of a US invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 by refusing for the umpteenth time to hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. There is little in Taliban 2.0 that suggests that this has changed.
If Haneef Atamar, the foreign minister in the US-backed Afghan government of former president Ashraf Ghani, is to be believed, Uighurs, including one-time fighters in Syria, contributed significantly to the Taliban’s most recent battlefield successes in northern Afghanistan.
A demand to extradite Uighurs to China would also be challenging because Mr Haqqani himself, the Afghan official in charge of internal security, is a wanted man with a $5 million US bounty on his head. Moreover, the United Nations has sanctioned Mr Haqqani’s prime minister, Mullah Hasan Akhund, and several other members of the caretaker government.
“It’s hard to see a wanted man turning over someone who is wanted for similar reasons,” said a Western diplomat.
Moreover, honouring extradition requests could threaten unity within the Taliban’s ranks. “Taliban actions against foreign jihadist groups to appease neighbouring countries would be especially controversial, because there is quite a widespread sense of solidarity and comradeship with those who fought alongside the Taliban for so long,” said Afghanistan scholar Antonio Giustozzi.
Unanswered is the question of whether China would go along with what seems to be an unspoken international consensus that it may be best not to seek extraditions if the Taliban keep their word and prevent militants from striking at targets beyond Afghanistan.
Counterterrorism experts and diplomats argue that if forced, the Taliban would quietly let foreign militants leave their country rather than hand them over. That would make it difficult to monitor these individuals.
China has in recent years successfully demanded the extradition of its Turkish Muslim citizens from countries like Egypt, Malaysia, and Thailand and has pressured many more to do so even though they were not suspected of being foreign fighters and/or members of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP). The United Nations Security Council has designated TIP’s predecessor, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organisation.
There is little reason to assume that China would make Afghanistan, a refuge from Syria for Uighur fighters, the exception.
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi made that clear when he hinted at possible extradition requests during talks in July in China with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban and the new government’s first deputy prime minister. Mr Wang demanded that the Taliban break relations with all militant groups and take resolute action against the TIP.
Moreover, the Taliban may have destroyed any chance of Chinese reliance on them by demonstrating early on that they and the international community may be speaking different languages even if they use the same words.
The Taliban made clear that their definition of inclusivity, a term the group and the international community, including China, Russia and India, appeared to agree on, was very different. The Taliban formed an overwhelming ethnic, all-male government that was anything but inclusive by the universally agreed meaning of the word.Similarly, Mr Haqqani and his colleagues, including Qari Fasihuddin Badakhshani, the Afghan military’s new Taliban chief of staff, a Tajik and one of only three non-Pashtuns in the new 33-member government structure, is believed to have close ties to Uighur, Pakistani and other militants. As a result, they are likely to be equally reticent about entertaining Chinese-backed Pakistan requests for the transfer of members of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), more commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban.
The TTP is a coalition of Pashtun Islamist groups with close ties to the Afghan Taliban that last year joined forces with several other militant Pakistani groups, including Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a violently anti-Shiite Sunni Muslim supremacist organization.
Hazara Shiites, who account for 20 per cent of the Afghan population were not included in the newly appointed Afghan government even though the Taliban made a point of last month protecting Shiite religious celebrations. Nonetheless, the Taliban’s notion of inclusivity has already troubled relations with Iran and could persuade the Islamic republic to covertly support resistance to the group’s rule.
China fears that the fallout of the Taliban’s sweep across Afghanistan could affect China beyond Afghanistan’s borders, perhaps no more so than in Pakistan, a major focus of the People’s Republic’s single largest Belt-and Road (BRI)-related investment.
The killing in July of nine Chinese nationals in an attack on a bus transporting Chinese workers to the construction site of a dam in the northern mountains of Pakistan raised the spectre of Afghanistan-based religious militants jihadists targeting China. Until now, it was mainly Baloch nationalists who targeted the Chinese in Pakistan.
The attack occurred amid fears that the Taliban victory would bolster ultra-conservative religious sentiment in Pakistan where many celebrated the group’s success in the hope that it would boost chances for austere religious rule in the world’s second-most populous Muslim-majority state.
“Our jihadis will be emboldened. They will say that ‘if America can be beaten, what is the Pakistan army to stand in our way?’” said a senior Pakistani official.
Indicating concern in Beijing, China has delayed the signing of a framework agreement on industrial cooperation that would have accelerated the implementation of projects that are part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a crown jewel of the People’s Republic’s transportation, telecommunications and energy-driven BRI.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid recently kept the Taliban’s relationship with the TTP ambiguous.
“The issue of the TTP is one that Pakistan will have to deal with, not Afghanistan. It is up to Pakistan, and Pakistani Islamic scholars and religious figures, not the Taliban, to decide on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their war and to formulate a strategy in response,” Mr Mujahid said during an interview on a Pakistani television program. The spokesman stopped short of saying the Taliban would abide by a decision of the scholars.
Afghan sources suggest that the Taliban advised the TTP to restrict their fight to Pakistani soil and have offered to negotiate with the Pakistan government an amnesty and the return of the Pakistani militants to the South Asian nation.
Uncertainty about where the Taliban may be taking Afghanistan has also cast a shadow over Indian hopes that the Iranian port of Chabahar would facilitate trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia and counterbalance the Chinese-supported Pakistani port of Gwadar.
Eager to maintain leverage in its relations with Pakistan as well as China, Taliban official Sher Mohammed Abbas Stanekzai chose his words carefully by stressing that economics should be at the centre of Afghan-Indian relations. “We give due importance to our political, economic and trade ties with India and we want these ties to continue. We are looking forward to working with India in this regard,” Mr Stanekzai said.
Mr. Stanekzai’s business-focused approach coupled with the pressure on Taliban to police militants on Afghan soil, some of whom have attacked India in the past, dovetails with Islamic scholars in the Deobandi alma mater in the Uttar Pradesh town of Deoband stressing the divide between themselves and their Afghan and Pakistani brethren.
The Indian Deobandi posture created an opportunity that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has yet to grasp to involve them in India’s backchannel and direct contacts with the Taliban. India invested US$3 billion over the last 20 years in building Afghan roads, girls’ schools and health clinics. Mr. Stanekzai’s remarks indicate that the Taliban would like India to continue its investments in the country.
The Taliban as well as a significant number of Pakistani ultra-conservatives root their worldview in Deobandism, a strand of Islam that emerged in India in the mid-19th century to oppose British colonial rule by propagating an austere interpretation of the faith. Deobandism became prevalent among Pashtuns even if Deobandis in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India went their separate ways after the 1947 partition of the subcontinent.
Arshad Madani, the principal of the Darul Uloom Deoband, the original Deobandi madrassa established in 1886, recently welcomed a decision by India’s Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) to set up a training centre in Deoband.
“There is nothing wrong with what we teach, and we welcome the ATS staff to be a part of our classes whenever they like,” Mr. Madani said. A spokesman for the madrassa added that “we are a religious school, but we are also Indians. To doubt our integrity every time the Taliban spread terror is shameful.”
Mr. Madani’s posture should serve as an incentive for the Modi government to work with Indian Deobandis in the hope that the Taliban may be more willing to listen to religious figures with whom they share a history.
Mr. Madani has never had contact with the Taliban nor has he ever visited Afghanistan. “I’m weak and old,” says the 80-year-old cleric. “But if given the chance, I would go to Afghanistan.”
https://www.eurasiareview.com/15092021-initial-taliban-moves-fail-to-convince-afghanistans-neighbors-analysis/
China, Afghanistan, and the Belt and Road Initiative: Diplomacy and Reality
By Magnus Marsden
China will face a number of difficulties in implementing the BRI in Afghanistan.A series of diplomatic statements by China has indicated a “cautious alliance” between the country and the Taliban. On their part, the Taliban have declared China to be Afghanistan’s “main partner.” In the wake of the violent return to power of the Taliban, international leaders have made much of China’s potential role in Afghanistan. Most statements emphasize the possible dividends of growing levels of Chinese investment in Afghanistan in the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – China’s central foreign policy scheme that seeks to create land and sea infrastructural links designed to facilitate economic activity within and beyond Asia. Serious questions remain, however, about Afghanistan’s incorporation within the Belt and Road project. Most obviously, the security situation in Afghanistan will hamper China’s ability to invest in it. The Taliban have publicly stated they will not interfere in China’s affairs, yet there remains an important question mark over the ability and willingness of their new and internally divided administration to reign in Islamist movements hostile to neighboring states — including China. At the same time, opposition to Taliban rule — both in the form of street protests and in the military activities of the National Resistance Front led by Ahmad Masood — will be a source of further caution in China. Various groups have targeted Chinese personnel in Pakistan in recent months; comparable incidents in Afghanistan would bring the country’s cautious alliance with the Taliban under yet more scrutiny in China itself. It is also important to go beyond the sphere of bilateral relations and formal diplomacy to understand the difficulties that China will face in implementing the BRI in Afghanistan. An understanding of Afghanistan’s relationships with its neighbors, especially those with expansive geopolitical ambitions, requires recognition also of the role played by informal forms of diplomacy. Afghan populations who reside beyond the country’s territorial borders play an especially key role in informally contributing to Afghanistan’s relationships with its neighbors. Afghan communities in the wider region are a complex and layered mixture of exiles, traders, and labor migrants. Millions of Afghans have lived in Iran and Pakistan, for example, over the course of several generations. In these countries, Afghan communities have established sustainable businesses, and long-standing social, political, and cultural relationships, even if many do not have access to citizenship or even stable residency rights. Afghans living in the former Soviet states, including the Muslim majority republics of Central Asia, as well as Russia and Ukraine, constitute sizeable communities, too. Afghans across these settings are especially active in trade, yet they have also established vibrant cultural and political associations through which they organize events as well as interact with local and national authorities. These social institutions play an important role in informing the nature of debate in Eurasia about Afghanistan, enabling the countries of the region to keep pace with the changing dynamics of Afghanistan beyond. Similar processes are available elsewhere, most notably in the Gulf States (especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia) and in Turkey. Countries in Afghanistan’s neighborhood exert a range of forms of power on the spectrum between “soft” and “hard” in Afghanistan by way of their interactions with Afghan communities. China’s position is different in important respects from that of other countries in Afghanistan’s neighborhood. Historically, China has not accepted refugees from Afghanistan. Afghans living in the country are either students or individuals active in the trade in Chinese commodities, both in Afghanistan and also with other countries in which Afghans reside and are engaged in the commodity trade. The vast majority of the few thousand Afghans living in China reside in the country by way of short-term visas; authorities in China usually issue such visas for one year and, exceptionally, a maximum of five years. Affordable schooling is hard to access for foreigners in China: The majority of Afghans living in the country reside, then, in communities predominantly made of men. The families of Afghan traders based in China mostly live in Afghanistan or in other countries in the region (especially Turkey) where visas and residency permits are (for wealthier businesspeople) relatively easier to come by. Chinese government officials are highly sensitive to migrant communities that seek to establish cultural and political associations in the country. Even to hold community-oriented events, migrants must contend with various levels of bureaucracy. Afghan communities across Asia emphasize the inherently perilous circumstances of their lives and their working activities. A combination of uncertainty about their future legal status in China, and the difficulties they face in establishing meaningful social institutions in the country, means that the scope for Afghans in China to play informal diplomatic roles is considerably narrower than is the case elsewhere in the region. Elsewhere in the region the BRI has empowered large transnational companies and marginalized smaller-scale trading communities. The fragility of the Taliban-led Afghan state, and the ongoing significance of informal institutions to the country’s economy, mean that successful Chinese investment in the country will depend to a significant degree on the mediating role played by Afghan traders and businesspeople. Beyond the diplomatic portrayal of the smooth flow of Chinese investment in Afghanistan via the BRI lies a far more rocky and uncertain reality. Political instability, the ongoing presence of militant Islamist organizations pursuing transnational objectives, and the comparative weakness of pre-existing social ties and bonds of trust between the two countries are just some of the issues that policymakers will face in the days, months, and years to come. https://thediplomat.com/2021/09/china-afghanistan-and-the-belt-and-road-initiative-diplomacy-and-reality/
#Pakistan: How 'blood money' laws allow murderers to be pardoned
Medical student Asma Rani was shot and killed in 2018. But Pakistan's forgiveness laws might allow the convicted murderer to walk away from his sentence.In January 2018, Asma Rani, a medical student in her third year, was on a semester break in her hometown of Kohat in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Asma and her sister-in-law were on their way back to their house when two men opened fire. Three bullets hit Asma. Before her death, she identified her attacker as Mujahidullah Afridi, a man from the same city whose marriage proposal she had refused. A manhunt was launched against Afridi, who had fled the country shortly after the attack. He was arrested in the United Arab Emirates, extradited and tried in Pakistan. The case ran for three years. In June 2021, a court in Peshawar in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa handed him the death sentence. But it now looks like Afridi can avoid serving his sentence. Spiraling violence and impunity Recently, local news media reported that Asma Rani's family had "pardoned" him in an event held in Lakki Marwat in the district of Kohat. The pardon was overseen by a "jirga" — a council of village or town elders that acts as an unofficial justice system and mediates settlement in conflicts. Asma's family's lawyer Syed Abdul Fayyaz, advocate of Pakistan's Supreme Court, confirmed to DW that the pardon has been recorded and submitted by Asma's parents to the court. When the court accepts the plea he can be acquitted, the lawyer explained.
"I find that there's a lot of impunity as far as violence against women is concerned, people can — as we say — get away with murder," said Khawar Mumtaz, women's rights activist and former Chairperson of the National Commission of the Status of Women, part of the Human Rights Ministry of Pakistan.She also told DW that Pakistani society has become very violent, and the easy availability of guns has contributed to this escalation.But the country's forgiveness laws also play a key role. They are rooted in the Islamic concept of "Qisas" or retributive justice, which means "an eye for an eye." According to this principle, a murderer can be punished with a death sentence. However, there is an option: "Diyat" is compensation or blood money that can be paid to the victim's family for the damage and suffering caused. The pardon received in exchange for compensation can be as effective as the law if the courts accept it, and is part of Pakistan's legal justice system. The amount for the compensation can be determined by law or by the parties themselves. A decision made under duress? Pakistan's legal and penal system is directly influenced by Shariah law. The criminal code has provisions that allow pardons for the accused without compensation as well. Often families pardon and forgive in the name of Allah. The final choice rests with the family of the victim. But, as in the case of Asma Rani, there is often suspicion that families grant pardons under duress. "We've seen that often the pardon or compromise comes from pressure, coercion, blackmail and threats," Mumtaz told DW. "And even when there's an actual conviction, that doesn't mean it's the end of the case, the culprit or his family can still threaten or blackmail to get a pardon." Many have been freed this way, she explained. "It is an escape route for them being able to pay your way out of it." In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Asma Rani lived, a pardon is granted in most cases when a death sentence is given for murder, said advocate Fayyaz. The provision is only used in cases where intent is personal. It is not possible to apply it to cases of terrorism or honor killing, as per Pakistan's anti-honor killing bill of 2016. Yet the provision for compensation is often misused, Mumtaz told DW. Long tradition of pardons Still, since this law is part of Shariah law, it will remain part of Pakistan's legal system, and jirgas encourage people to use the principle to settle cases privately. But recent years have seen a number of controversial high-profile cases hit the headlines.
https://www.dw.com/en/pakistan-how-blood-money-laws-allow-murderers-to-be-pardoned/a-59173115