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      in US Politics

      Michigan and Washington impose new restrictions as US Covid cases pass 11m

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      Michigan and Washington state have joined a growing number of US cities and states in imposing new restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus, amid a nationwide surge which saw the national caseload grow by 1m in less than a week, passing 11m.
      Johns Hopkins University in Maryland reported 133,045 new Covid-19 cases on Sunday, down from a record high of more than 184,000 on Friday but a 13th day over 100,000 in a row.
      The growth in cases is especially concerning ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, when Americans typically gather indoors to celebrate with friends and family.
      “The situation has never been more dire,” said Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. “We are at the precipice and we need to take some action.”
      Whitmer, a Democrat, ordered high schools and colleges to stop in-person classes, closed restaurants to indoor dining and suspended organised sports. Her order also restricted indoor and outdoor residential gatherings, closed some entertainment facilities, and banned gyms from hosting group exercise classes.
      The new restrictions are set to last three weeks, as part of a more surgical approach to dealing with the pandemic than general lockdown orders last spring. Whitmer’s previous stay-at-home orders made her the target of criticism from a Republican-led legislature, rightwing protests and later a kidnapping plot.
      Whitmer’s new, more limited orders drew condemnation from Trump adviser Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist without specific infectious disease credentials. Atlas tweeted that Michigan residents should “rise up” against Whitmer’s orders.
      Fourteen men have been charged in connection with the plot to kidnap Whitmer.
      On Monday, she told reporters Atlas’s comment was “just incredibly reckless considering everything that has happened, everything that is going on. We really all need to be focused on the public health crisis that is ravaging our country and that poses a very real threat to every one of us.”
      Atlas tweeted that he would “NEVER” endorse or incite violence.
      More than 246,000 people have died in the US from Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins, which recorded 616 deaths on Sunday. More Americans have died per capita than in other developed nations, studies have shown, even compared to “high mortality” countries.
      Deaths statistics are predicted to worsen in the next few weeks. Current projections from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show as many as 282,000 deaths from Covid-19 by 5 December.
      Spread of Covid-19 appears to be accelerating. It took 300 days for 11m Americans to test positive, after the first case was found in Washington state on 20 January. But it took just six days to move from 10m to 11m.
      Economists and epidemiologists have broadly maintained the same position throughout the pandemic: that the economy and public health are inextricably linked.
      Whether new surgical-style restrictions will effectively contain the virus remains to be seen. Some prominent experts such as Dr Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s school of public health, said similar restrictions “appear to be working in France”.
      Others are more cautious. Andew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins, told NPR the level of spread is “a very daunting problem to control the numbers of cases that we’re seeing right now with these kinds of minor efforts”.
      US covid graphic
      Michigan’s orders came the same day Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, announced his state would enforce new restrictions on businesses and social gatherings for the next month.
      Starting on Tuesday, gyms and some entertainment centers will be required to close indoor services. Retail stores, including grocery stores, will be ordered to limit indoor capacity and multiple-household, indoor social gatherings will be prohibited unless attendees have quarantined for 14 days or tested negative and quarantined for a week. By Wednesday, restaurants and bars will again be limited to outdoor dining and to-go service.
      Even the previously resistant North Dakota governor, Republican Doug Burgum, ordered a statewide mask mandate and imposed several business restrictions on Friday. The Republican heeded the advice of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to require face coverings. Bars, restaurants and other venues were ordered to reduce capacity.
      North Dakota has nearly the worst per capita spread of Covid-19 in the nation, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
      The US appears to be entering the worst phase of the pandemic in terms of new cases. Texas and California last week each marked more than 1m confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic.

      In Texas, sporting events were canceled and at least one city added mobile morgues in anticipation of Covid deaths overwhelming hospital storage. Meanwhile, in California, the nation’s most populous state and the first to issue a statewide stay-at-home order, officials urged residents to keep holiday gatherings to small, outdoor visits less than two hours long.
      Health experts and officials across the nation are now cautioning people to forego or revise gatherings and holiday travel plans as Thanksgiving and other celebrations approach.
      There are notes of optimism on the horizon – makers of two leading vaccine candidates announced their drugs are far more effective than initially predicted. Wide distribution of a vaccine is months away, and will face complex logistical challenges. More

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      in US Politics

      Obama scolds 'petulant' Trump but reveals conservative sympathies

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      In an interview with the Atlantic to mark publication of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama ponders Joe Biden’s chances of working with Republicans in Congress, comes close to admitting to being a never-Trump conservative himself – and compares America under Trump to Central Asia under Genghis Khan.
      “If we were going to have a rightwing populist in this country,” Obama says, “I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”
      Trump is refusing to admit defeat by Biden, despite a 5.5m deficit in the popular vote and an electoral college loss by 306-232, the margin by which he beat Hillary Clinton.
      “For all the differences between myself and George W Bush,” Obama said, “he and his administration could not have been more gracious and intentional about ensuring a smooth handoff. One of the really distressing things about the current situation is the amount of time that is being lost because of Donald Trump’s petulance and the unwillingness of other Republicans to call him on it.”
      On Sunday night, Trump tweeted: “I WON THE ELECTION!” Twitter gave the message a label: “Official sources called this election differently.”
      The president’s current petulance might be increased by how Obama compares him to “the classic male hero in American culture” – and finds him distinctly wanting. Trump is, after all, a president who plays the song Macho Man at his rallies.
      “I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up,” Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic. “The John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the 30s and 40s and before that.
      “There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully – in fact, he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich – the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”
      Most give Trump no chance of success in his lawsuits in battleground states, based on groundless claims of election fraud. But depending on the results of two runoffs in Georgia, the Senate looks set to stay in Republican hands. Biden may have to try to work with Mitch McConnell, the hardline Republican senate majority leader who has propped up Trump in office.
      Obama said: “Mitch McConnell is not buddy-buddy with anyone. I’m enjoying reading now about how Joe Biden and Mitch have been friends for a long time. They’ve known each other for a long time. I have quotes from Biden about his interactions with Mitch McConnell.
      “The issue with Republicans is not that I didn’t court them enough. We would invite them to everything: movie nights, state dinners, Camp David, you name it. The issue was not a lack of schmoozing. The issue was that they found it politically advantageous to demonize me and the Democratic party.”

      How friendly Democrats should be to the Never Trumpers, conservatives from the Lincoln Project to the Bulwark and beyond, is another key issue. Told by Goldberg that “a colleague of mine says that in some ways you’re a never-Trump conservative”, Obama said the characterization was “not quite right”, but reached again for mid-20th-century male archetypes Republicans revere.
      “I understand that,” he said. “There’s this sense of probity, honesty, responsibility, of homespun values, that I admire. That’s the Kansas side of me. My grandmother’s a stand-in for that.
      “The folks we celebrate at Normandy, including my Uncle Charlie, who was a member of one of the units that liberated parts of Buchenwald, those were men who, whatever their limits, whatever their constraints in terms of their emotions because of what they were told they could and couldn’t feel and be as men, however their relationship with women was skewed by all this – they sacrificed for others.
      “And they never bragged, and certainly they would never make cheating others or taking advantage of them a calling card.”
      “… You mentioned earlier that I’m in some ways a never-Trump conservative. That’s not quite right, but what is true is that temperamentally I am sympathetic to a certain strain of conservatism in the sense that I’m not just a materialist. I’m not an economic determinist. I think it’s important, but I think there are things other than stuff and money and income – the religious critique of modern society, that we’ve lost that sense of community.”
      The depth of Obama’s answer reflected the many differences between him and Trump – and the sheer size of his book. A Promised Land runs to 751 pages, many filled with rumination on historical progress, centrally Martin Luther King Jr’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.
      Genghis Khan came up in response to a questions about a visit to the Pyramids. The Mongol warlord would “slowly boil you in oil and peel off your skin”, Obama said. But “compare the degree of brutality and venality and corruption and just sheer folly that you see across human history with how things are now. It’s not even close.”
      “This was not meant to be commentary on the Trump presidency – not directly, at least,” Goldberg wrote. “In any case, Obama has more respect for Genghis Khan than he has for Donald Trump.” More

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      in World Politics

      In Asia, a New Kid on the Trade Bloc

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      History undergoes serious change thanks in particular to slow events that fly below the media’s radar. Focusing on dramatic, immediate events, the media tends to neglect the major shifts that unfold over time. Paradoxically, slowly developing events that often go unreported tell the true story of history. Most often, the exciting, explosive events that dominate the news merely serve to accelerate longer-term trends.

      There is a simple scientific reason for this. Systems react immediately to dramatic events that occur quickly and unexpectedly. They typically mobilize their defenses to improvise a rapid reply. Rather than signaling change, such actions serve to protect and reinforce the status quo.

      The 9/11 attacks, clearly the most dramatic event of the past two decades, provoked a massive response from the US government. The effort to oppose the emergence of the new shape of terrorism appeared to mark a decisive shift in contemporary political history. The response consisted of a global military alliance intent on defending the prevailing “rule of law” and the elaboration of a powerful security state.

      Will Laos Become a Model for China’s Economic Colonialism?

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      The effort piloted by George W. Bush and Tony Blair ended up simply reinforcing the focus of Western nuclear powers on the idea that sophisticated military technology provided the key for governing the world. It confirmed and consolidated the long-term trend of building the entire Western economy and culture around the American military-industrial complex.

      Distracted by a relatively meaningless transfer of power in the US following Joe Biden’s election and other colorful events such as the comic melodrama of relations within British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chaotic Brexit team, today’s media have paid scant attention to one event of monumental importance that took place on Sunday. The event itself was unremarkable, but it is a powerful indicator of historical change. The signing on Sunday of the act that brought Asia’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) into existence marked a crucial moment in a slowly evolving shift that began nearly a decade ago and will have a profound impact on history in the coming years.

      In its article on the event, Al Jazeera quotes one American expert, Jeffrey Wilson, who sees RCEP as “a much-needed platform for the Indo-Pacific’s post-COVID recovery.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Post-COVID recovery:

      The idea which some people consider to be phantasy that the global economy may some day return to normal once COVID-19 is eradicated.

      Contextual Note

      The New York Times notes that RCEP has been in the plans for eight years and describes it as “designed by Beijing partly as a counterweight to American influence in the region.” In other words, this is a chapter of a story that lives within the context of a massive and continual decades-long shift of momentum in the global economy. The center of gravity of the global economy has been silently but steadily migrating from the North Atlantic following World War II on a south-eastward course toward Asia.

      Back in 2015, Reuters market analyst John Kemp pointed to the West’s failure to sense this movement, stating that “Most western policymakers and journalists view the world economy through a framework that is 10-15 years out of date.” He further points out that “India’s economy has also started to become a major source of global growth, which will ensure the centre of gravity continues to move more deeply into Asia over the next 50 years.” Analysts who have even attempted to assess the speed of the shift appear to agree on a “rate of about 100 kilometres or more per year.” It may have accelerated since 2015, and even intensified as a consequence of the implicit isolationism of Trump’s “America First” philosophy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Fearful of the threat to US hegemony posed by the RCEP, the Obama administration launched the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), designed to eclipse the RCEP and protect some of the key historical advantages that underpinned US economic hegemony. Once Trump decided to leave the TPP, the US could no longer take advantage of its provisions to protect industrial property rights or oblige other nations to respect unified labor standards.

      The US has literally been left behind in the race to define and enforce the rules that will govern commerce and economic development throughout the Asia zone over the next 50 years. Most commentators suspect that once president-elect Joe Biden is in office, he will not in the short term make an effort to catch up. In the midst of a complex health and economic crisis, there are other priorities. But Jeffrey Wilson’s comment about “Indo-Pacific’s post-COVID recovery” reveals that Asia, under China’s leadership, today has a clear head start and can set the tone for what a post-coronavirus world will look like. This is a question every nation is grappling with. There are no obvious answers. But there can be little doubt that the world that emerges once COVID-19 is completely under control or eradicated will be very different from what preceded the pandemic.

      The Times signals the fact that “to some trade experts, the signing of the R.C.E.P. shows that the rest of the world will not wait around for the United States.” Many commentators have noted that four years of Donald Trump have convinced European leaders that depending on the ideological and geopolitical framework provided by the US is too risky an engagement. It may even transpire that, despite the intensified military cooperation between India and the US directed against the Chinese threat, as reported in this column by Vikram Sood, Atul Singh and Manu Sharma, India could eventually be attracted to the RCEP. Security is one thing. A humming economy is another.

      India could, for example, be positioned to profit from a key feature of RCEP. The Times quotes Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, who notes that “R.C.E.P. gives foreign companies enhanced flexibility in navigating between the two giants. Lower tariffs within the region increase the value of operating within the Asian region, while the uniform rules of origin make it easier to pull production away from the Chinese mainland while retaining that access.” Narendra Modi’s India has not yet managed to fulfill its promises to expand manufacturing in India. Could RCEP be the key to providing conditions favorable to that evolution?

      In short, the world is faced with a formidable number of variables that combine in a variety of different ways. As Brexit demonstrated, today’s political alignments can be nullified in a trice as the perception of economic opportunities and the pressure of uncontrollable crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic lead to new geopolitical configurations. Those trends are far more powerful than bilateral agreements.

      Historical Note

      Asia’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership will only begin to produce practical effects two or three years down the line. But it already opens channels of communication and coordination between fifteen countries. This will not only confirm the shift of the global economy’s center of gravity but also accelerate the shift toward a new power relationship between the US and China. As the recent presidential campaign highlighted, Americans tend to see this as a binary relationship. Yet all the indicators point toward a multipolar reordering.

      The Times article reminds readers of the historical situation when RCEP was first proposed: “The prospect of China’s forging closer economic ties with its neighbors has prompted concern in Washington. President Barack Obama’s response was the T.P.P.” Trump’s action upon taking office of killing the TPP before it could be signed opened the door to the eventual 15 nation agreement, with the roles of the US and China inverted. Obama designed the TPP to allow China in through the back door. RCEP is designed to allow the US in through the back door.

      The world awaits the evolution and hoped-for denouement of a series of crises nested each within the other. However painful and disruptive, these crises have the merit of signaling the existence of a common interest for all of humanity in stark contrast with the traditional model of geopolitical reasoning based on national rivalries. It is in everyone’s interest to keep our eyes fixed on the slow but deep movements of history as well as the superficial ones that the media throw in our faces every day.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden: Black Lives Matter activists helped you win Wisconsin. Don't forget us | Justin Blake

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      Three months ago, a Kenosha police officer shot my nephew, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back in front of his children. Jacob was rushed to the hospital, where for days he was shackled to his bed, only to find he’d been paralyzed from the waist down. The officer who shot him, Rusten Sheskey, has yet to be charged with a crime and is currently on paid administrative leave.Days after the shooting, Donald Trump came and went, showing little empathy for our family, and calling for a violent crackdown on protests for racial justice. The press, too, came and went, as the drama of uprising transitioned into the long, slow work of healing and change. But even after the cameras left, after the president ignored our pain and took off in his motorcade, Kenoshans kept organizing.In close concert with the Blake family, grassroots organizations in Kenosha began turning protest power into electoral power in one of the most competitive swing states in the country. From the start, our goal was to counteract voter suppression and make sure everyone in our community had their voice heard at the ballot box.On 20 October, our family joined hundreds of activists and community members in a peaceful march from Kenosha to Milwaukee, receiving support along the way from luminaries like the former Ohio state senator Nina Turner and the Rev Jesse Jackson. The march took over 14 hours, ending in Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park, where Dontre Hamilton was killed by a police officer in 2014. The message of the marchers was simple: south-eastern Wisconsin has seen too much violence at the hands of the police. It’s time for Wisconsinites to vote out the politicians who have allowed, and often encouraged, this violence in our communities.Make no mistake: now that Biden’s won the election, he owes this country real racial justice reformFor many of the activists in Kenosha, including Jacob’s family, this meant voting Trump out of office. In the last two weeks before the election, we took this message door to door in a canvassing sprint across Kenosha, a city where the Joe Biden campaign itself had very little presence on the ground. But for the thousands of low-propensity voters we spoke to one-on-one in the city of Kenosha, Biden’s 20,000 statewide vote margin might have looked a lot smaller.Mainstream Democrats often invoke “loyalty” as the quality they hope to inspire in their voters. But “loyalty” is a two-way street: party leaders shouldn’t expect it if they can’t deliver for the voters who put them in office. And on this front, particularly with Black voters, Biden is far from perfect. He spearheaded the 1994 crime bill, for instance, which expanded mass incarceration and hurt Black communities across the country.Kenosha’s community leaders are taking a chance on Biden, believing that this turning point will push him to learn from past mistakes and take a moral stance in this moment of national division. And we are tired of Trump’s hateful racism and the increasingly explicit imprimatur he’s given to violent white supremacists. But make no mistake: now that Biden’s won the election, he owes this country real racial justice reform.He must start with the most obvious steps: executive orders that address the immediate need for federal remedies to protect Black and Brown citizens from police brutality; appointing a special prosecutor to investigate both criminal and civil rights violations in the Floyd, Taylor, Blake, Cole and Anderson cases. More broadly, Biden must recognize that poverty and racism are pandemics in their own right, each of which has been exacerbated by Covid-19. Beginning to remedy them will require not just an emergency economic stabilization package, but a national moratorium on foreclosures and evictions for the next 12 months, and a prioritization of funding for the communities of color hit hardest by the virus.These demands are not coming from Kenosha alone, but from all across the country, where the Black Lives Matter movement – the largest social uprising in our nation’s history – has inspired a new generation of voters and activists. So while racial justice leaders may have helped Biden take back the White House, come January 2021, we’ll be reminding him exactly who got him there. More

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      in World Politics

      No Clear Vision to End Violence in Afghanistan

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      Afghanistan has been engulfed in bloodshed and confusion for decades. The deal between the United States and the Taliban signed on February 29 in Doha, Qatar, has added more tension to the conflict by creating competition among anti-government militants. Groups such as the Islamic State Khorasan (ISK) compete with the Taliban for political success and influence by perpetrating more violence. At the same time, they look to each other’s success as a source of inspiration and cooperation.

      No Place for Naivety in Afghan Peace Talks

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      On November 2, Afghanistan was shocked by an attack on Kabul University that killed 35 students and wounded 50; officially, the death toll stands at 22, with 27 wounded. It was the latest of the many attacks on the country’s educational institutions. On October 24, a suicide bomber targeted the Kawsar-e Danish education center in western Kabul, killing at least 43 and wounding a further 57. In August 2018, another suicide attack in western Kabul on the Mawud tutoring center, which, like Kawsar-e Danish, was located in a Shai-dominated area, killed at least 48 and wounded 60. The victims at both schools were under the age of 20, some of them were as young as 14.

      Who Killed the Students?

      Due to the highly complex environment, survival for the people of Afghanistan is just a matter of chance. Sajjad Nijati was wounded in the attack on Kabul University. He is also one of the survivors of the attack on the Mawud education center. He has lost three of his family members in the attack on Kawsar-e Danish.

      ISK claimed responsibility for all three attacks, while the Taliban denied any connection. However, the Taliban attack on the American University of Afghanistan in August 2016 killed 14 and wounded 35, again mostly students. The attacks on Kawsar-e Danish and Mawud were mainly against the Shia Hazaras, a historically persecuted group that has invested in education as a strategy to break the cycle of its precarious position inside Afghanistan. Shamsea Alizada, a survivor of the attack on Mawud, topped the country’s national university tables by achieving the highest score out of nearly 200,000 students this year. When the attack happened, she was 15 and could have lost her life like many of her friends.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The day after the university attack, students protested and carried slogans against the Islamic State and the Taliban that read “Don’t kill us.” All in all, 13 people have been detained for their failure to prevent the attack, including the security commander of Kabul University and the district chief of police. However, Vice President Ambrulah Saleh reversed the decision arguing that the problem is systematic and needs broader attention. It is still unclear whether those arrested have been released.

      The question remains unanswered as to how the three gunmen entered the university campus. Kabul University has three main gates that are blocked by police checkpoints. The terrorists entered from the north gate, which is usually overseen by a large number of police officers who check all visitors’ IDs. With no sign of an explosion at the gate, Saleh, hours after the attack, called it an “intelligence failure.”

      Research shows that Afghan universities have been exposed to extremism in recent years and have become fertile ground for recruitment for groups like ISK and the Taliban; in July 2019, Afghan security agencies arrested three ISK recruiters at Kabul University. On November 14, Vice President Saleh announced that security forces have arrested the mastermind behind the attack on Kabul University. According to Saleh, Adel Mohammad was recruited by the Haqqani Network, a branch of the Taliban based in Miramshah, Pakistan, and had gone missing three years ago after completing his third year at Kabul University’s faculty of sharia law.

      Proxy War, Terrorism, Confusion

      In their peace deal with the US, the Taliban agreed to stop bombing urban centers and cut ties with other terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. However, according to the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, attacks by the Taliban have increased by 50% in the past three months, to at least 55 attacks per day around the country. Since the official inauguration of the intra-Afghan talks in Qatar on September 12, the has been no reduction in civilian casualties. The Taliban use military operations as a bargaining chip in the talks, which has increased concerns about the group establishing a totalitarian and discriminatory regime in the country if it comes to power as a result of the negotiations.

      The frequently reported links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda remain another concern. Last month, Afghan security forces killed a senior al-Qaeda leader in Ghazni province in areas controlled by the Taliban. Another al-Qaeda member was killed in a Taliban-influenced area in Farah province, in the west. Research also shows that there has been cooperation — as well as clashes — between the Taliban and ISK in the past.

      Many in Afghanistan view the Taliban as responsible for hosting and cooperating with various terrorist groups. The continued war by the Taliban has severely undermined Afghanistan’s political stability, economic development and security. This has weakened the government’s functionality and territorial control, opening the door for other militant groups such as ISK. Both ISK and the Taliban have similar ideological positions toward secular education, and the situation on the ground today makes it clear that the war has turned into a deliberate strategy of indiscriminate violence against education centers and youth in the country.

      There are three theories about recent urban attacks in Afghanistan. The first is that the Taliban organize the attacks but deny responsibility to benefit from the chaos and backlash against the government, which allows ISK to claim responsibility. Vice President Saleh claimed that the ISK claiming the attack on Kabul University was fake. Saleh pointed to a Taliban flag apparently found at the scene as evidence of Taliban involvement. According to the vice president, the weapons found at the scene do not match those in photos released by ISK. The Taliban, however, rejects these claims.

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      The second theory is that the Haqqani Network, a branch of the Taliban close to Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), is carrying out attacks in urban areas. Some experts argue there is a disagreement between the Quetta Shura and the Haqqani Network branches. Therefore, without Quetta Shura’s approval, the Haqqani Network attack on urban areas but under the ISK name; since the appearance of ISK, the Haqqani Network did not claim most of the bigger urban attacks, with ISK taking responsibility instead. According to this theory, the main actor behind terrorist activity in Afghanistan is the Haqqani Network rather than ISK. It has been argued that the Haqqani Network has strong links and levels of cooperation not just with the ISI, but also al-Qaeda and ISK. Those who believe in this theory argue that there is a close relationship between the Haqqani Network and ISK.

      The third theory is that the ISK organizes urban attacks independently, such as the one on Kabul University. According to this analysis, ISK today has more influence in urban areas. At the moment, however, this argument does not have many supporters among experts and Afghan security officials. From the Afghan government’s point of view, ISK is a platform for Pakistan’s clandestine activities, where ISK is an umbrella for many actors including the Haqqani Network and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) for attacking targets in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani, believes that ISK is supported by the same forces in Pakistan that back the Haqqani Network.

      Death by a Thousand Cuts

      The conflict in Afghanistan doesn’t have a single dimension. It is a combination of proxy wars and terrorism. The proxy dimension of the war since the 1980s produced countless intended and unintended consequences such as state fragility, terrorism, sectarianism, war crimes, social fragmentation and radicalization. Kabul University has found itself at the center of this strife over the four decades of war. In late 1983, a bomb was placed under a dining room table at the university, killing many. Later on, Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who was leading the Afghan Bureau of ISI at the time, revealed in his memoir that the attack was part of Pakistan’s strategy of “death by thousand cuts.”

      This specter of history is fresh in Afghanistan’s collective memory. Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan enabled the group to intensify the conflict. The complicated links and cooperation between the Taliban, ISK and al-Qaeda make it difficult to believe that they did not join forces to target educational institutions and carry out assassinations. At the same time, contextualizing the war in Afghanistan by considering the long history of cooperation between militant groups and the intelligence services in the region make the proxy dynamic of the war more apparent.

      With mistakes made on all sides, especially by the Trump administration in Washington, created both inspiration and hope for many extremist groups in the region. Particularly, the US-Taliban deal turned the country into a playground for various extremist groups and their supporters trying to either outdo each other or build tactical collaboration to defeat the Afghan government. Even Pakistani extremist groups have called upon the Afghan government to surrender to the Taliban.

      These groups are trying to build leverage through violence and claiming the honor of resisting the US and its partners. They are fighting to create frustration and chaos in order to expand their operational reach and lethality, thereby creating transnational inspiration for the movement. Unless there is a policy change to effectively deal with this threat, there is no clear vision for ending all this violence.

      *[Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the attack on Kawsar-e Danish killed 24 people. This piece was updated at 17:50 GMT.]

      *[The author is one of the investigators on the Carnegie Corporation of New York-funded project “Assessing the impact of external actors in the Syria and Afghan proxy wars” (Grant number: G-18-55949) at Deakin University, Australia.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump campaign abandons part of legal challenge to Pennsylvania election results

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      President Donald Trump’s campaign has withdrawn a central part of its lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump to capture the state and help win the White House.
      Ahead of a Tuesday hearing in the case, Trump’s campaign on Sunday dropped the allegation that 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots were illegally processed without its representatives watching.
      The campaign’s slimmed-down lawsuit, filed in federal court on Sunday, maintains the aim of blocking Pennsylvania from certifying a victory for Biden in the state, and it maintains its claim that Democratic voters were treated more favorably than Republican voters.
      The Associated Press on 7 November called the presidential contest for former vice president Joe Biden, after determining that the remaining ballots left to be counted in Pennsylvania would not allow Trump to catch up. Trump has refused to concede.
      The remaining claim in the lawsuit centres on disqualifying ballots cast by voters who were given an opportunity to fix mail-in ballots that were going to be disqualified on a technicality.
      The lawsuit charges that “Democratic-heavy counties” violated the law by identifying mail-in ballots before election day that had defects – such as lacking an inner “secrecy envelope” or lacking a voter’s signature on the outside envelope – so that the voter could fix it and ensure their vote would count, a moved called “curing”.
      Republican-heavy counties “followed the law and did not provide a notice and cure process, disenfranchising many”, the lawsuit said.
      Cliff Levine, a lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee, which is seeking to intervene, said it was not clear how many voters were given the chance to fix their ballot. But, he said, the number was minimal and certainly fewer than the margin – almost 70,000 – that separates Biden and Trump. “The numbers aren’t even close to the margin between the two candidates, not even close,” Levine said.
      In any case, there is no provision in state law preventing counties from helping voters to fix a ballot that contains a technical deficiency. Levine said the lawsuit did not contain any allegation that somebody voted illegally.
      “They really should be suing the counties that didn’t allow [voters] to make corrections,” Levine said. “The goal should be making sure every vote counts.”
      Pennsylvania’s top election official, secretary of state Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, responded in court on Sunday, asking the judge to dismiss the case. State courts are the proper jurisdiction for the subject, and the lawsuit contains no “plausible claim for relief on any legal theory”, the state’s lawyers wrote.
      More than 2.6m mail-in ballots were reported received by counties, and no report of fraud or accuracy problems has been made by state or county election officials or prosecutors.
      A key theme of Trump and his supporters has been their claim that Philadelphia – a Democratic bastion where Trump lost badly – had not allowed Trump’s campaign representatives to watch mail-in and absentee ballots processed and tabulated.
      However, Republican lawyers have acknowledged in a separate federal court proceeding that they had certified observers watching mail-in ballots being processed in Philadelphia. Governor Tom Wolf’s administration has said that ballot watchers from all parties had observers throughout the process and that “any insinuation otherwise is a lie”. More

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      in US Politics

      Tracking the US election results: 'We needed to be clear, fast, and accurate'

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      On Wednesday 4 November, the Guardian recorded its highest-ever digital traffic, reaching more than 190 million page views and 52.9m unique browsers worldwide in 24 hours – exceeding all previous traffic records by an enormous margin. Our live results tracker – a collaborative project from the Guardian’s newsroom, visual journalism, designers and engineering teams – has received over 94 million page views so far since launch, and continues to draw in readers. Here, the team behind it explain why visual journalism is so critical to what we do. How did the results tracker come about?We started talking to the US office about this in October 2019, before the primaries. We aim to provide live results for most major elections and we knew the whole world would be watching this one. The live results page for the 2016 US election had been a phenomenal success.We followed a six-month project plan while continuing to cover other major visual stories, most importantly the Covid-19 crisis. Towards the end of the summer, we gradually dedicated more resources exclusively to the election, staying in close contact with US editors throughout.Why was it such an important part of our election coverage?Any serious news organisation needs to be able to keep its readers up to date with election results – especially for a huge event like the US election. However, we also wanted the page to have a narrative, and to provide context for our readers about the election.We included information on the page about the key states to watch and the history of how each had voted in the past. As we launched it several hours before any results came through, we were pleased to see it received more than 3m page views in that time. Attention time on the page showed that people appreciated the extra context.We updated the key states section as the results came in, and also added extra components to reflect the news. For example, when Trump claimed victory the next day we added a clear warning that the election was not over, and a table to show where votes were still being counted.All of these editorial decisions added value to the page for our readers, making it an important page to return to as the count continued. More