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    Biden ‘privately defiant’ over chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, book says

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    Joe Biden is “privately defiant” that he made the right calls on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2021, a new book reportedly says, even as the chaos and carnage that unfolded continues to be investigated in Congress.“No one offered to resign” over the withdrawal, writes Alexander Ward, a Politico reporter, “in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy.”Ward’s book, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump, will be published next week. Axios reported extracts on Friday.Ward adds: “Biden told his top aides, [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan included, that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation.”Ward quotes an unnamed White House official as saying: “There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up.”The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Taliban, which had sheltered the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, was soon ousted but fighting never ceased.Figures for the total US death toll in the country since 2001 vary. The United States Institute of Peace, an independent body established by Congress, says that 2,324 US military personnel, 3,917 US contractors and 1,144 allied troops were killed during the conflict. More than 20,000 Americans were wounded.“For Afghans,” the institute goes on, “the statistics are nearly unimaginable: 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, 46,319 Afghan civilians (although that is likely a significant underestimation) and some 53,000 opposition fighters killed. Almost 67,000 other people were killed in Pakistan in relation to the Afghan war.”Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Furthermore, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “four times as many [US] service members have died by suicide than in combat in the post-9/11 wars [including Iraq and other campaigns], signaling a widespread mental health crisis”.Biden entered office determined to withdraw, and in late summer 2021 US forces pulled out, leaving the defense of the country to US-trained Afghan national forces.The Taliban swiftly overran that opposition, and soon scenes of chaos at Kabul airport dominated world news. Tens of thousands of Afghans who sought to leave, fearing Taliban reprisals after a 20-year US occupation, were unable to get out. More than 800 US citizens were left behind, notwithstanding Biden’s promise on 18 August that troops would stay until every US citizen who wanted to leave had done so.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWard, Axios said, quotes a senior White House official as saying: “There’s no one here who thinks we can meet that promise.”On 26 August, 13 US service members were killed in a suicide attack. Three days later, a US drone strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, seven of them children. No Americans faced disciplinary action over the strike, which a US air force inspector general called “an honest mistake”.According to Axios, Ward also details extensive infighting over the withdrawal between the Departments of State and Defense.Biden, Ward says, tended to favour the state department, having been chair of the Senate foreign affairs committee, and to be wary of the Pentagon, having been vice-president to Barack Obama through eight years of inconclusive war. More

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      Henry Kissinger’s role in Bengali massacre | Letter

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      Jonathan Steele’s obituary of Henry Kissinger (29 November) omits reference to his part in what the author Gary J Bass calls “one of the worst moments of moral blindness in US foreign policy”, when in 1971 he advised President Richard Nixon to side with Pakistan’s military dictator, Gen Yahya Khan, in his war with Bangladesh, then East Pakistan.In his Pulitzer prize-finalist book on this “forgotten genocide”, The Blood Telegram, Bass describes how Kissinger and Nixon repeatedly ignored the pleas from the US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, who was desperately cabling his superiors with reports of the massacre of thousands of civilians in the city. Pakistan was using US-made tanks, weapons and ammunition to crush the Bengalis.Senator Edward Kennedy declared this “one of the greatest nightmares of modern times”, but Kissinger used every power he (and Nixon) possessed to cover up their role. To this day, most Americans are oblivious to the appalling stain on their country’s history, in which as many as 3 million lives were lost.Robert EvansFormer MEP and chair of European parliament South Asia delegation More

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      Joe Biden calls for stable US-China relationship during south-east Asia tour

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      Joe Biden’s national security tour of south-east Asia reached Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, where the president called for stability in the US-China relationship against an increasingly complex diplomatic picture in the region for his country.“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden said. “I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about.”Biden also said that China’s recent economic downturn may limit any inclination to invade Taiwan.“I don’t think it’s going to cause China to invade Taiwan – matter of fact the opposite, probably doesn’t have the same capacity as it had before,” he said on Sunday during a press conference in Hanoi.He added that the country’s economic woes had left President Xi Jinping with “his hands full right now”.The president’s remarks came after a meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of Vietnam’s ruling Communist party, in the nation’s capital designed to secure global supply chains of semiconductors and critical minerals, which would offer a strategic alternative to China.“I think we have an enormous opportunity,” Biden said of the visit. “Vietnam and the United States are critical partners at what I would argue is a very critical time.”The meeting came during a multi-front diplomatic push to shore up international support for Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and enunciate a policy toward China that both encourages trade and reduces the potential for US-Chinese conflict.The complexities of the administration’s approach were illustrated on Saturday, a day before Biden landed in Hanoi, when the New York Times reported that Vietnam is in talks with Russia over a new arms supply deal that could trigger US sanctions.Reuters said it had seen – but could not authenticate – documents describing talks for a credit facility that Russia would extend to Vietnam to buy heavy weaponry, including anti-ship missiles, anti-submarine aircraft and helicopters, anti-aircraft missile systems and fighter jets.Earlier, at the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, western leaders failed to reiterate an explicit condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The summit declaration referred only to the “war in Ukraine” and lamented the “suffering” of the Ukrainian people – an equivocation that indicates a growing lack of international consensus.Less than a year ago, G20 leaders still issued a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion and called on Moscow to withdraw its forces.Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, attempted to smooth over the disparity, telling ABC’s This Week that world leaders meeting in New Delhi had “stood up very clearly, including in the statement, for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.Blinken said that virtually every meeting participant “is intent on making sure there is a just and durable end to this Russian aggression”.It was clear in the room, he said, that “countries are feeling the consequences and want the Russian aggression to stop”.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “The vast majority of G20 countries have supported multiple UN resolutions that call out Russia’s illegal aggression.”Jean-Pierre said the New Delhi communique “builds on that, to send an unprecedented, unified statement on the imperative that Russia refrain from using force for territorial acquisition, abide by its obligations in the UN charter, and cease attacks on civilians and infrastructure”.The comments came as a CBS News poll found only 1 in 4 Americans think Biden is improving the US’s global position. According to the survey, 24% thought Biden was making the US stronger, 50% said weaker and 26% that he was not having much effect.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust 29% said they were optimistic for the prospects of world peace and stability in the world, and 71% said they were increasingly pessimistic. Asked if the Biden administration was being “too easy” on China, 57% agreed.On CNN, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley slammed the Biden administration’s policy toward China, describing the country as an “enemy”.“China has practically been preparing for war with us for years,” Haley said. “Yes, I view China as an enemy.”Haley said China had bought 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) of US soil and the largest pork producer in the country, and continues to steal $600bn a year in intellectual property while spreading propaganda. She pointed to Chinese drones used by US law enforcement and to the crisis caused by Chinese-sourced fentanyl that “had killed more Americans than the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam war combined”.“How much more has to happen for Biden to realize you don’t send cabinet members over to China to appease them?” she said, referring to the recent visit of the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, to Beijing.The administration’s effort to present a coherent picture of US foreign policy toward its two most vexing issues – China and Russia – continued Sunday with vice-president Kamala Harris telling CBS News that a planned meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “would be a huge mistake”.“When you look at Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, and the idea that they would supply ammunition to Russia – well, it’s predictable where that ends up,” Harris said. “I also believe very strongly that for both Russia and North Korea, this will further isolate them.”Harris also spoke to an emerging concern that China’s president, Xi Jinping, who skipped the G20, may decline to attend the Asia-Pacific economic cooperation leaders’ meeting in San Francisco, California, in November.Last week, China’s security agency hinted that a meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in San Francisco will depend on the US “showing sufficient sincerity”.China’s ministry of state security said that the country “will never let its guard down”.The comments came after Raimondo said the US did not want to decouple from China but that American companies had complained to her that China had become “uninvestible”.Asked how important it is for Xi Jinping to come to America, Harris remarked that “it is important to the … stability of things that we keep open lines of communication”. More

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      Revealed: how world’s biggest fossil fuel firms ‘profited in Myanmar after coup’

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      Revealed: how world’s biggest fossil fuel firms ‘profited in Myanmar after coup’Leaked tax records suggest subsidiaries of international gas field contractors continued to make millions after the coup In the two years since a murderous junta launched a coup in Myanmar, some of the world’s biggest oil and gas service companies continued to make millions of dollars from operations that have helped prop up the military regime, tax documents seen by the Guardian suggest.The Myanmar military seized power in February 2021 and according to the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, it is “committing war crimes and crimes against humanity daily”. More than 2,940 people, including children, pro-democracy activists and other civilians have been killed, according to Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.Amid this violence, leaked Myanmar tax records and other reports appear to show that US, UK and Irish oil and gas field contractors – which provide essential drilling and other services to Myanamar’s gas field operators – have continued to make millions in profit in the country after the coup.The documents were obtained by transparency non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets and analysed by Myanmar activist group Justice For Myanmar, investigative journalism organisation Finance Uncovered and the Guardian.The documents suggest that in some cases the subsidiaries of major US gas field service firms continued working in Myanmar – even after the US state department warned in January last year there were significant risks in doing business in the country – including with state-owned entities that financially benefit the junta, such as the national oil and gas company Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE).On Tuesday the US, UK, Australia and Canada announced more Myanmar sanctions, including on the managing director and deputy managing director of MOGE. But they stopped short of sanctioning MOGE itself.Last February the European Union became the first jurisdiction to announce sanctions against MOGE itself in light of the “intensifying human rights violations in Myanmar” and the “substantive resources” MOGE provides the junta.The EU sanctions prohibit European companies from working on Myanmar’s oil and gas field projects. But the US and UK have not yet introduced similar measures and such work – which may involve direct or indirect dealings with MOGE – is not prohibited.Among the findings, the leaked tax documents show that:
      US oil services giant Halliburton’s Singapore-based subsidiary Myanmar Energy Services reported pre-tax profits of $6.3m in Myanmar in the year to September 2021, which includes eight months while the junta was in power.

      Houston-headquartered oil services company Baker Hughes branch in Yangon reported pre-tax profits of $2.64m in the country in the six months to March 2022.

      US firm Diamond Offshore Drilling reported $37m in fees to the Myanmar tax authority during the year to September 2021 and another $24.2m from then until March 2022.

      Schlumberger Logelco (Yangon Branch), the Panama-based subsidiary of the US-listed world’s largest offshore drilling company, earned revenues of $51.7m in the year to September 2021 in Myanmar and as late as September 2022 was owed $200,000 in service fees from the junta’s energy ministry.
      The services provided to Myanmar’s Asia-owned gas field operators by these companies gave vital support to MOGE, which is a major shareholder in all of the country’s most important oil and gas projects.MOGE collects taxes and royalties for the state on gas field projects, ensuring that the junta gets lucrative tax and royalty payments, as well as a vast share of profits. According to the junta’s own figures the oil and gas industry is its biggest source of foreign-currency revenue, bringing in $1.72bn in the six months to 31 March 2022 alone.Yadanar Maung, Justice For Myanmar spokesperson, called the situation “deplorable”.“Oilfield service companies in Myanmar have blood on their hands for operating in an industry that bankrolls the illegal Myanmar military junta, as it wages a campaign of terror against the people,” Maung said.“These companies have breached their international human rights responsibilities and may be complicit in the junta’s war crimes and crimes against humanity by servicing oil and gas projects that fund the junta’s atrocities.”Maung welcomed the latest sanctions but said “far more needs to be done.“So far, only the EU has sanctioned MOGE, which bankrolls the junta. We call on the US, UK, Canada and Australia to follow the EU and also sanction MOGE,” Maung said.Myanmar is one of the poorest countries in Asia but is also rich in oil and gas deposits. The country’s major projects export gas to China and Thailand, with around 20% of the gas retained for domestic use.The major gas projects in which MOGE has significant shareholdings are run by the South Korean corporation Posco International, Thailand’s PTTEP and Gulf Petroleum Myanmar, also from Thailand. Gulf Myanmar Petroleum, PTTEP and Posco were contacted for comment.Map of major oil and gas fields in MyanmarActivists argue that any role played by western gas field contractors in Myanmar’s gas and oil industry after the coup makes them complicit in the junta’s war of aggression. Some legal experts argue the contractors could face future legal issues from their activities in the country.Baker Hughes told the Guardian its contracts were signed before the coup and completed in early 2022. The company said it had not signed new contracts since the coup and had “a very limited number of personnel in the country to support critical safety and operations needs”.Halliburton, Schlumberger and Diamond Offshore Drilling did not respond to repeated requests for comment.Last January, France’s Total and US’s Chevron – which have long been criticised for their roles as gas project operators in the country – announced plans to exit Myanmar.Chevron told the Guardian that it had now sold its 41.1% interest in the Yadana Project to Et Martem Holdings, a wholly owned subsidiary of MTI Energy, a Canadian company.The situation is complicated by the US’s ambiguous stance on MOGE. Myanmar’s state-owned gems, pearl and timber industries have been sanctioned by the US but Washington has not yet tackled MOGE, the linchpin in the junta’s largest single source of foreign revenue.In 2021 the New York Times reported that the oil giant Chevron had led an intense lobbying effort against sanctions that would disrupt oil operations in the country. That report came after the UN’s special rapporteur on Myanmar, Tom Andrews, had told Congress that MOGE was “now effectively controlled by a murderous criminal enterprise” and called on it and other state entities to be sanctioned in order to “meaningfully degrade the junta’s sources of revenue”.Last January, the state department did specifically warn of the dangers of doing business in the country and cited MOGE as particularly problematic. MOGE and other state-owned enterprises “not only generate revenue for a military regime that is responsible for lethal attacks against the people of Burma, but many of them also are subject to allegations of corruption, child and forced labor, surveillance, and other human and labor rights abuses”, it warned.But while the US has put sanctions on the State Administration Council – the junta’s ruling body which controls MOGE through the ministry of energy – it has stopped short of imposing tougher sanctions on MOGE itself. And the US commerce department’s country commercial guide for Myanmar, last updated in July 2022, describes the “dynamic” oil and gas sector as a “best prospect industry” with “significant opportunities for US investors”.The Biden administration is understood to be struggling with a desire to implement stronger sanctions while maintaining good relations with Thailand, a strategic partner, and also a major buyer of Myanmar’s natural gas.Justice for Myanmr’s Maung said the Biden administration’s contradictory approach to Myanmar “has allowed US oil and gas corporations to continue business as usual in Myanmar, enabling the junta’s international crimes”.“While the Department of State has warned that dealing with MOGE risks money laundering, furthering corruption and contributing to serious human rights violations, the US Department of Commerce is advising US companies to seek profits in the oil and gas sectors in Myanmar and to compete for MOGE tenders,” Maung said. “We call on the US to stand with the people of Myanmar by imposing sanctions on MOGE and helping to cut the flow of funds to the junta.”Pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to act. Last year, the Democratic senators Jeff Merkley, Cory Booker, Dianne Feinstein, Edward Markey and Gary Peters wrote to the US treasury urging the Biden administration to impose sanctions to help stem the junta’s brutality, especially by cutting off revenues from MOGE. “MOGE sanctions are one of the most significant actions the United States could take to degrade the junta’s ability to operate,” they wrote.In December, the US House passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which included a section outlining action on Myanmar that raised the possibility of Joe Biden imposing sanctions on MOGE but stopped short of issuing a stronger ruling.“At the end of last year, Congress made great progress in authorizing sanctions on Burma’s energy sector, which represents nearly half of the junta’s foreign currency income. The administration must use these authorities and work with regional partners to cut off the junta’s ability to fuel its brutal campaign against civilians,” Merkley told the Guardian.The European Union toughened its stance on MOGE in February 2022, expanding its sanctions against the junta, becoming the first jurisdiction to sanction MOGE itself and prohibiting the provision of technical assistance that directly or indirectly benefits the state-owned entity, with a narrow exemption for decommissioning a project.One European company, Dublin-based Gavin & Doherty Geosolutions, a specialist geotechnical engineering consultancy, secured a contract to work on Thai-owned PTTEP International’s Zawtika development project off the coast of Myanmar, according to August 2021 reports. The contract was announced before EU sanctions were imposed on MOGE but seven months after the coup. Gavin & Doherty declined repeated inquiries about the nature of the contract or whether it was still working in the country.MOGE owns a 20% of Zawtika and profits from the project flow directly to the junta.The tax documents suggest Intermoor, a subsidiary of UK-based Acteon, a subsea services company, also continued to profit from work in Myanmar until at least February 2022. The UK has issued sanctions against some individuals and entities in Myanmar. But like the US, it has so far stopped short of sanctioning MOGE and no UK sanctions prohibit working directly or indirectly with the junta-controlled entity.Filings to Myanmar’s tax authority by Diamond Offshore Drilling indicate it made repeated payments to Intermoor between October 2021 and February 2022 for work done on behalf of Posco International. Posco runs the Shwe gas project, which in 2020 Intermoor had publicly announced it was working on. MOGE has a 15% stake in Shwe, in addition to the revenue it gets from taxes and royalties.A Justice For Myanmar source, verified by the Guardian, has confirmed the presence of InterMoor personnel in Myanmar in 2021 and 2022.Neither Intermoor nor its parent company, Acteon Group responded to repeated requests to comment on this story.Despite US and UK reluctance to target MOGE, environmental lawyers claimed companies working on gas projects in Myanmar still faced legal risks from their activities.Ben Hardman, Myanmar policy and legal adviser at Earthrights, a Washington-based human rights and environmental non-profit, said: “Oil field service companies are not just working with international oil majors, they are supporting joint ventures with MOGE, a government agency that has effectively been taken hostage by the junta. When the companies submit an invoice, the junta ultimately pays a share of them and the support of these companies ensures that the junta can keep seizing revenues that flow through MOGE.“If these companies have an EU presence, they are at severe risk of breaching EU sanctions on MOGE. Companies in the US and the UK also face risks because both governments have sanctioned the junta’s State Administration Council, which controls MOGE’s management and revenues.”TopicsMyanmarMyanmar coupOil and gas companiesSouth and central AsiaUS politicsIrelandThailandnewsReuse this content More

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      Leon Panetta on the Afghanistan withdrawal, a year on: Politics Weekly America podcast

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      A year ago, American troops withdrew from Afghanistan after a 20-year war. The Taliban quickly returned to power and the country has since experienced famine, economic collapse and a widespread erosion of women’s rights.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the former US defense secretary Leon Panetta, who was at the heart of the Obama administration’s Afghanistan policy, about what he thinks of the Afghan withdrawal and what the future holds for Joe Biden and the Democrats

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Archives: MSNBC, CNN, the Guardian Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

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      How Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ‘pattern of life’ allowed the US to kill al-Qaida leader

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      How Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ‘pattern of life’ allowed the US to kill al-Qaida leader After a decades-long hunt the simple habit of sitting out on the balcony gave the CIA an opportunity to launch ‘tailored strike’ In the end it was one of the oldest mistakes in the fugitive’s handbook that apparently did for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top al-Qaida leader killed, according to US intelligence, by a drone strike on Sunday morning: he developed a habit.The co-planner of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 had acquired a taste for sitting out on the balcony of his safe house in Sherpur, a well-to-do diplomatic enclave of Kabul. He grew especially fond of stepping out on to the balcony after morning prayers, so that he could watch the sun rise over the Afghan capital.According to a US official who briefed reporters on Monday, it was such regular behavior that allowed intelligence agents, presumably CIA, to piece together what they called “a pattern of life” of the target. That in turn allowed them to launch what the White House called a “tailored airstrike” involving two Hellfire missiles fired from a Reaper drone that are claimed to have struck the balcony, with Zawahiri on it, at 6.18am on Sunday.It was the culmination of a decades-long hunt for the Egyptian surgeon who by the time he was killed had a $25m bounty on his head. Zawahiri, 71, was held accountable not only for his part as Bin Laden’s second in command for 9/11, with its death toll of almost 3,000 people, but also for several other of al-Qaida’s most deadly attacks, including the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, which killed 17 US sailors.The mission to go after the al-Qaida leader was triggered, US officials said, in early April when intelligence sources picked up signals that Zawahiri and his family had moved off their mountainside hideaways and relocated to Kabul. Following the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan last August, and with the support of the Haqqani Taliban network, Zawahiri and his wife, together with their daughter and grandchildren, had moved into the Sherpur house.MapIn their telling of events, US officials were at pains to stress that under Joe Biden’s instructions the mission was carried out carefully and with precision to avoid civilian casualties and US officials said no one else was killed or wounded in the attack.Social media images of the strike suggested the use of a modified Hellfire called the R9X with six blades to damage targets, sources familiar with the weapon told Reuters. They caused surprisingly little damage beyond the target, suggesting they may be a version of the missile shrouded in secrecy and used by the US to avoid non-combatant casualties.The US president was first apprised of Zawahiri’s whereabouts in April, and for the next two months a tightly knit group of officials delved into the intelligence and devised a plan. A scale model of the Sherpur house was built, showing the balcony where the al-Qaida leader liked to sit. As discussions about a possible strike grew more intense, the model was brought into the situation room of the White House on 1 July so that Biden could see it for himself.The president “examined closely the model of al-Zawahiri’s house that the intelligence community had built and brought into the White House situation room for briefings on this issue”, a senior administration official told reporters.The White House made further claims to bolster its argument that the attack was lawful, flawless and with a loss of life limited to Zawahiri alone. Officials said that engineers were brought in to analyse the safe house and assess what would happen to it structurally in the wake of a drone strike.Lawyers were similarly consulted on whether the attack was legal. They advised that it was, given the target’s prominent role as leader of a terrorist group.Biden, by now quarantined with Covid, received a final briefing on 25 July and gave the go-ahead. It was a decision in stark contrast to the advice he gave Barack Obama in May 2011 not to proceed with the special forces mission that killed Bin Laden in a raid on his safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.On Monday evening, Biden stood on his own balcony – this one in the White House with the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial as his backdrop – to address the nation.“I authorized the precision strike that would remove him from the battlefield once and for all,” Biden said. “This measure was carefully planned, rigorously, to minimize the risk of harm to other civilians.”Biden’s insistence that no one other than the al-Qaida leader was killed in the attack was amplified repeatedly by US officials. The narrative given by the White House was that Zawahiri was taken out cleanly through the application of modern technological warfare.Skepticism remains, despite the protestations. Over the years drone strikes have frequently proved to be anything but precise.In August last year one such US drone strike in Kabul was initially hailed by the Pentagon as a successful mission to take out a would-be terrorist bomber planning an attack on the city’s airport. It was only after the New York Times had published an exhaustive investigation showing that the strike had in fact killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children, that the US military admitted the mission had gone tragically wrong.Perhaps mindful of the doubts that are certain to swirl around the Zawahiri killing for days to come, the White House said that the Sherpur safe house where the drone strike happened had been kept under observation for 36 hours after the attack and before Biden spoke to the nation. Officials said that Zawahiri’s relatives were seen leaving the house under Haqqani Taliban escort, establishing that they had survived the strike.TopicsAyman al-ZawahiriAfghanistanTalibanSouth and central AsiaJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      'Justice has been delivered': al-Qaida leader killed in US drone strike, Biden says – video

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      US President Joe Biden  has announced  the top al-Qaida leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been killed in a US drone strike in Afghanistan. The US president described the death of al-Zawahiri, who was Osama Bin Laden’s deputy and successor, as a major blow to the terrorist network behind the September 11, 2001 attacks.
      The CIA strike will be seen as a proof of the US’s ability to conduct ‘over-the-horizon’ operations despite last year’s military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. But it also raised questions over al-Qaida’s continued presence in the country since the Taliban regained power

      Who was Ayman al-Zawahiri? The al-Qaida leader who helped plot their deadliest attacks
      Al-Qaida enjoying a haven in Afghanistan under Taliban, UN warns More

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      The Guardian view on the death penalty: a long way to go | Editorial

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      The Guardian view on the death penalty: a long way to goEditorialThough capital punishment is in global decline, there are horrifying exceptions to the general trend Next month, Oklahoma will embark on a grim schedule: an execution nearly every month until the end of 2024. In September, it is due to execute Richard Glossip, whom many believe to be the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. A five-year moratorium has come to an end with the failure of a lawsuit arguing that the use of lethal injections was unconstitutional.Oklahoma is not the only place that is enthusiastically resuming state-sanctioned killing after a pause. Myanmar’s rulers announced on Monday that they had executed four prisoners, including Phyo Zeya Thaw, a rapper and former MP, drawing international condemnation. This was the first time the death penalty had been used there for more than 30 years, said the UN. And on Tuesday it emerged that Tomohiro Kato has been executed in Japan for stabbing seven people to death in 2008.Recorded executions fell sharply in 2020 across the world due to the pandemic, but are now rebounding. Amnesty International says that it saw a 20% increase in 2021, including a sharp rise in Iran to 314 deaths. This year, Saudi Arabia executed 81 men on a single day in March, two of them for participation in violent anti-government protests. Singapore executed four people for drug offences after a two-year pause – including, despite an international outcry, Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam, a young man with an IQ of 69 who said that he was coerced into carrying a small amount of heroin. His case has helped to stir debate about capital punishment. In Myanmar, more than 100 other people have been handed death sentences since last year’s seizure of power by the army. The broad trend is towards the decline of capital punishment. Almost 160 years after Venezuela became the first country to abolish it, well over a hundred more have followed suit (including Papua New Guinea this January), and about 30 more have effectively abolished it, for example through formal moratoria. Despite the increase in 2021, the total number of deaths – 579 – was the second lowest that Amnesty International has recorded since 2010.But a huge black hole remains: the organisation believes that China executes thousands of prisoners a year, but the figure is a state secret, as in Vietnam and North Korea. And the overall fall in the documented use of the death penalty is accompanied by extreme and shocking cases in places that cling to it. The US is also a glaring example of the way that progress can be turned back: 50 years ago this summer, the supreme court struck down the death penalty. Four years later it restored it. More recently, the last administration dramatically resumed federal executions; more were carried out under Donald Trump than any other president in the past century. Though the current attorney general, Merrick Garland, imposed a moratorium, that could be undone by the next administration.There are many reasons to be disturbed by capital punishment. These include agonising deaths witnessed in the US, wrongful convictions, the blatant discrimination of criminal justice systems that results in the disproportionate killing of ethnic minority offenders, and the use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes and political offences. In Myanmar, relatives of the executed men were reportedly denied access to their bodies. But underlying all of this is the broader understanding that continues to spread through the world: that states have no right to take the lives of citizens.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.comTopicsCapital punishmentOpinionLaw (US)US politicsMyanmarSouth and central AsiaSingaporeAsia PacificeditorialsReuse this content More

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      US withdrawal triggered catastrophic defeat of Afghan forces, damning watchdog report finds

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      US withdrawal triggered catastrophic defeat of Afghan forces, damning watchdog report findsReport by special inspector general blames Trump and Biden administrations, as well as the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani Afghan armed forces collapsed last year because they had been made dependent on US support that was abruptly withdrawn in the face of a Taliban offensive, according to a scathing assessment by a US government watchdog.A report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) on the catastrophic defeat that led to the fall of Kabul on 15 August, blamed the administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden as well as the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani.“Sigar found that the single most important factor in the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in August 2021 was the decision by two US presidents to withdraw US military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves,” said the congressionally mandated report, which was released on Wednesday.Afghanistan stunned by scale and speed of security forces’ collapseRead moreThe Sigar account focused on the impact of two critical events that it said doomed the Afghan forces: the February 2020 Doha agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban, and then Biden’s April 2021 decision to pull out all US troops by September, without leaving a residual force.“Due to the ANDSF’s dependency on US military forces, these events destroyed ANDSF morale,” the inspector general said. “The ANDSF had long relied on the US military’s presence to protect against large-scale ANDSF losses, and Afghan troops saw the United States as a means of holding their government accountable for paying their salaries. The US-Taliban agreement made it clear that this was no longer the case, resulting in a sense of abandonment within the ANDSF and the Afghan population.”The ANDSF were dependent on US troops and contractors because that was how the forces were developed, the report argued, noting “the United States designed the ANDSF as a mirror image of US forces”.“The United States created a combined arms military structure that required a high degree of professional military sophistication and leadership,” it said. “The United States also created a non-commissioned officer corps which had no foundation in Afghanistan military history.”It would have taken decades to build a modern, cohesive and self-reliant force, the Sigar document argued. The Afghan air force, the main military advantage the government had over the Taliban, had not been projected to be self-sufficient until 2030 at the earliest.Within weeks of Biden’s withdrawal announcement, the contractors who maintained planes and helicopters left. As a result, there were not enough functioning aircraft to get weapons and supplies to Afghan forces around the country, leaving them without ammunition, food and water in the face of renewed Taliban attacks.The US had begun cutting off air support to the Afghan army after the Doha agreement was signed. Exacerbating its impact on morale was the fact that the deal had secret annexes, widely believed to stipulate the Taliban’s counter-terrorism commitments and restrictions on fighting for both the US and Taliban. They remain secret, apparently, even from an official enquiry.“Sigar was not able to obtain copies of these annexes, despite official requests made to the US Department of Defence and the US Department of State,” the report observes.The secrecy led to unintended consequences, the report said.“Taliban propaganda weaponised that vacuum against local commanders and elders by claiming the Taliban had a secret deal with the United States for certain districts or provinces to be surrendered to them,” it said.The Sigar report also blames the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, who changed ANDSF commanders during the Taliban offensive, appointing aged loyalists from the communist era, while marginalising well-trained ANDSF officers aligned with the US.It quotes one unnamed former Afghan government official as saying that after the Doha agreement, “President Ghani began to suspect that the United States wanted to remove him from power.”According to the former official and a former Afghan government Ghani was afraid of a military coup. He became a “paranoid president … afraid of his own countrymen” and particularly of US-trained Afghan officers.Ghani fled Afghanistan on the day Kabul fell.TopicsAfghanistanAshraf GhaniUS foreign policyTrump administrationBiden administrationSouth and central AsiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More