Aug 19, 2021 | World
From the WSJ, The Return of ‘America Held Hostage’:
“As Taliban forces consolidate their control of Kabul, the nature of the new regime remains somewhat veiled. On the positive side, the jihadist group issued a general pardon to all government workers, some female broadcasters have returned to the air, and prominent ex-officials like former President Hamid Karzai appear to have elected to remain in the country. On the other side of the ledger, Taliban spokesmen would say only that Afghan women will enjoy their full rights under Shariah; girls’ schools have been shut down in parts of the country; teenage girls have been forced into marriage with Taliban fighters; and residents report that armed soldiers are searching apartments and taking names. A widely circulated video purports to show the jihadist group’s soldiers executing 22 unarmed Afghan army commandos after their surrender.
“One thing, however, is clear: The Taliban hold the lives of thousands of U.S. citizens—and the future of the Biden administration—in their hands. The collapse of the Ghani government left as many as 15,000 Americans and permanent residents along with an unknown number of other Westerners and foreigners trapped behind Taliban lines. Tens of thousands of Afghans employed by the old government, allied military commands and Western-oriented nonprofits are, with their family members, also desperate to leave. While U.S. forces control the Kabul airport, American citizens—and Afghans with U.S. visas—must run a gantlet of Taliban roadblocks and checkpoints to reach the American perimeter.
“As for the thousands of Americans, citizens of allied nations and endangered Afghan nationals stranded in other parts of the country, at press time U.S. officials had no plan in place to bring them to safety. Congressional offices report being deluged with pleas for help from Americans behind enemy lines and from veterans seeking help for Afghan contacts and friends.”
The White House did release this tweet:
Shouldn’t this discussion have occurred before the U.S. military pulled out?
High school students could have planned this better:
“Shouldn’t we get our friends before we bail?”
(Well at least the ones not hyper-focused on “structural racism” and the forthcoming “environmental apocalypse.”)
There seems to be more strategic planning in the dreadful Kathleen Kennedy/JJ Abrahms/non-George Lucas Star Wars sequels (and there was apparently “no plan”) than in the Biden Administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal.
Aug 16, 2021 | World
George Packer at The Atlantic in remarking on how “Veterans, with their code of leaving no one behind on the battlefield, have been among the most passionate advocates for Afghan interpreters,” tells the heart-wrenching story of the fate of interpreters who worked with the U.S. and were trapped in Afghanistan and how the “chaos produced by the Biden administration’s delays has given an outsize role to sheer randomness, as twists of fate save one Afghan and doom another.”
Writes Packer:
“[O]ur abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy.”
[…]
“Today, the U.S. government is more focused on saving our own than on saving the Afghans who counted on us. For many of them, time is running out. For some, it already has.”
“All of this was foreseeable—all of it was foreseen. For months, members of Congress and advocates in refugee, veteran, and human-rights organizations have been urging the Biden administration to evacuate America’s Afghan allies on an emergency basis. For months, dire warnings have appeared in the press. The administration’s answers were never adequate: We’re waiting for Congress to streamline the application process. Half the interpreters we’ve given visas don’t want to leave. We don’t want to panic the Afghan people and cause the government in Kabul to collapse. Evacuation to a U.S. territory like Guam could lead to legal problems, so we’re looking for third-country hosts in the region. Most of the interpreters are in Kabul, and Kabul won’t fall for at least six months.”
Read the rest of Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy.
Jul 28, 2021 | World
R W Johnson has an informative article on “Why Violence and Looting Have Exploded Across South Africa” published in the Quilette. Some of the low-lights:
“Shopping without money”
“[O]nce the rioting and looting of shops and hijacking of trucks on the highway began, with the police clearly scared and ineffective, word rapidly spread that you could go “shopping without money,” creating huge excitement among the ranks of the millions of poor and unemployed Zulus who inhabit the townships and squatter camps around Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and from there spreading into every small town of the province. Most of the looters and miscreants were unconcerned about Zuma’s fate. They simply heard along the grapevine that trouble was going on and realised that opportunity was staring them in the face.”
Poverty increases under ANC rule
“When the ANC was first elected in 1994 its posters promised “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” but paid little heed to that once they were elected. In 1995 the average number of unemployed, according to official figures, was 1,698,000 or, if one took the expanded definition of unemployment, including those who had given up looking for a job, the figure was 3,321,000. With only a few exceptional periods to the contrary, that figure has grown steadily and hugely to surpass 11.4 million today. Since the unemployed have little or no income, this has also meant a huge growth in both poverty and inequality. The ANC has routinely deplored poverty and inequality but it has generally tried to pretend that this is part of the “apartheid inheritance.” As the figures show, this is the opposite of the truth.“
Political cronyism under the banner of “equality”
The article also points to one of the key causes of South Africa’s decline: a political class of government workers, trade union officials, and BEE “capitalists” politically connected to government officials:
“In practice the plight of the unemployed and poor has been ignored. The government is far more concerned with the “haves” within its coalition—the BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) capitalists, the public sector workers and the trade union bosses. The government’s offer of an extra R18 billion ($1.25 billion) for already well-paid public service workers came only days before the unrest and was, effectively, an insult and a provocation for the unemployed. Similarly, Ramaphosa attempted to garner public sympathy for the “plight” of MPs—who are among the one percent best paid people in the country.”
“Most striking of all, however, is the BEE legislation which has, not surprisingly, been nominated by foreign investors as the biggest single drawback to investing in South Africa. It is, after all, effectively a tax on investment—if you want to invest in South Africa you have to more or less give away a large chunk of your equity to BEE partners who have nothing to offer by way of skills or capital other than an ability to get government ministers to take their calls. This is straightforward crony capitalism. The effect of such legislation is to push foreign investment away—at the cost of many jobs—simply in order to line the pockets of a handful of ANC-connected cronies.”
Such cronyism is not capitalism, but political cronyism.
Capitalism is a political-economic system based on the principle of individual rights, which means the separation of state and economics (just like the separation of church and state).
Under capitalism, the government’s sole purpose is to protect each individual’s rights equally. It is a system of justice. Cronyism is the practice of giving rewards based on considerations other than merit: it is a form of injustice.
A “partner” who has “nothing to offer by way of skills or capital other than an ability to get government ministers to take their calls” would not exist under capitalism, as under a free-market (the chief trait of a capitalist economy) one does not require the permission of government officials to start a business. One-acts by inalienable right.
Given the two concepts — the political cronyism of statism vs. the political freedom of capitalism — are incommensurable, what does the invalid lumping of the two as “crony capitalism” seek to accomplish? It seeks to blame capitalism for the sins of politicians and their cronies who would not survive in a free market.
Capitalism creates; statism destroys:
The result has been the destruction of large segments of South Africa’s infrastructure:
“[A]mong the mass of looters are more sinister elements. Criminals naturally flourish in such an environment, either organizing massive heists of goods or using the mayhem as cover for other crimes. But there are also clearly political elements trying to make the country ungovernable by attacking key pieces of infrastructure—there have been attacks on reservoirs, over 120 attacks on electricity sub-stations, and the road leading to the Sapref refinery in Durban (which produces one third of all South Africa’s petrol) has become so dangerous due to continuous attacks on vehicles that the refinery has had to close down completely. Already there are huge queues at garages and a major fuel crisis is building. Moreover, as soon as a shop, warehouse, or factory has been looted it is set on fire. None of these crimes produce money and the destruction of such buildings is bound to cost jobs and lead to many more people going hungry in future.”
Such infrastructure has taken decades upon decades to build, has been destroyed in a matter of days.
Why Violence and Looting Have Exploded Across South Africa is an important read.
Jul 17, 2021 | World
Writes Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald on “When it comes to Cuba, there’s a lot of hypocrisy from the right and from the left” (2021.07.17):
[I]nstead of defending the Cuban people’s right to express themselves peacefully, these and other members of the region’s Jurassic left joined the dictators of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua in blaming the U.S. “blockade” for the protests in Cuba.
In fact, there is no “blockade.” According to Cuba’s own official figures, the island conducts trade with 70 countries around the world, including the United States. There is an embargo on U.S. trade with Cuba, which Washington imposed in 1962 after the island’s regime expropriated U.S. companies there.
And the U.S. embargo has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese. The United States is one of Cuba’ s 15 largest trading partners and the biggest exporter of food and agricultural goods to Cuba, according to U.S. government figures.
The United States ships about $276 million a year in food and medicines to Cuba. In addition, U.S. residents send $3.5 billion a year in family remittances to the island, and more than 500,000 U.S. tourists visited Cuba in 2019, at the height of Trump’s sanctions. In other words, the United States is one of Cuba’s main sources of income.
According to Reuters it was the Cuban government that blocked the import of food and medicine into Cuba:
“Cuba announced on Wednesday it was temporarily lifting restrictions on the amount of food and medicine travelers could bring into the country in an apparent small concession to demands by protesters who took to the street last weekend.”
[…]
“Still, one of the campaign’s demands was for the government to lift customs restrictions on food, medicine and hygiene products that are lacking in the country amid its worst economic crisis since the fall of former ally the Soviet Union.”
For further reading:
