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      Trump's Afghanistan withdrawal announcement takes US officials by surprise

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      Donald Trump has announced on Twitter that he wants to bring all US troops home from Afghanistan by Christmas – a plan that came as a surprise to administration officials and which puts complicated peace negotiations in jeopardy.Multiple officials told the Associated Press they had not been informed of any such deadline and military experts said it would be impossible to withdraw all 5,000 US troops in Afghanistan and dismantle the US military headquarters by the end of the year.They suggested the president’s claim was aimed at shifting the news cycle away from coronavirus coverage and that the Pentagon would not act on the order before the 3 November US election.The announcement was, however, greeted enthusiastically by the Taliban on Thursday. If Trump follows through, the militant group would almost certainly claim it as a victory, after decades of couching their fight as a war against foreign aggression.“It’s no surprise that the Taliban have welcomed Trump’s announcement that he’d have the troops home by Christmas. They spent 19 years fighting for this,” said Ashley Jackson, the director of the ODI’s Centre for the Study of Armed Groups.“This is the last leverage the US had left in talks with the Taliban, and Trump is proposing to give it away for free.”Without the prospect of US military pressure, the Taliban would have little incentive to stay at the negotiating table with representatives of the Kabul government.From a practical point of view, disentangling a 19-year military presence would take considerably longer than two months.“It’s October, so no – it’s ridiculous. It’s simply can’t happen,” said Jason Dempsey, a former infantry officer who served in Afghanistan. “We could make some superficial show of pulling out uniformed troops, but obviously we still have a very massive contractor presence, and we would need a uniformed headquarters to oversee the shutdown and withdrawal of everything we have in country.”Trump has made impulsive policy announcements about Afghanistan on Twitter before, including calling off a US-Taliban summit last year, shortly before a withdrawal agreement was first expected to be signed.He also has a record of ordering abrupt and total troop withdrawals from foreign deployments. In most cases the Pentagon has sought to mitigate and slow the speed of the pullout but in some case the president has prevailed in bringing soldiers back home.The Afghan government and Taliban negotiators are currently attempting to hammer out a new political settlement for the country in the Qatari capital. The peace talks were set up under a withdrawal agreement signed earlier this year between the Taliban and Trump’s administration.The US-Taliban deal laid out a full departure of American forces by May 2021 but only if conditions on counter-terrorism were met, including severing ties with al-Qaida. Some critics of the Doha talks argue that the militants are merely marking time until the departure of US troops.Trump’s plans were announced in a tweet late on Wednesday night. The White House doubled down on the message on Thursday morning: “our troops in Afghanistan are coming home by the end of the year”, the official Twitter account for the administration said.It was the latest in a long line of ad hoc policy announcements from Trump that have caught his own advisers and military by surprise. His national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, had said shortly before Trump tweeted that troop numbers would be brought down to 2,500 early next year.About 4,500 troops are currently on the ground in Afghanistan, reduced from over 12,000 when the deal was signed in February.The Pentagon referred all requests for comment on Afghanistan drawdown plans to the White House.The Taliban welcomed Trump’s remarks as “a positive step towards the implementation of [the] Doha agreement”, a spokesman for the Islamist group, Mohammad Naeem, said in a statement, referring to the US withdrawal deal.Peace talks have been progressing slowly, with negotiators still trying to lay out the ground rules for their discussion. They are currently stalled on which school of Islam should be used when settling disputes.Trump has made a promise to “end” America’s wars overseas part of his bid for re-election this year, promising to bring troops home from a constellation of conflict zones including Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.But past pledges to bring back troops have often been abandoned, reversed or only partially completed.After ordering a total withdrawal of US troops from Syria in October 2019, Trump was persuaded to let some stay on the grounds that they would protect oil installations there. A US military presence has remained, but it is about half the size of the thousand-strong force that was supporting Kurdish forces in northern Syria.In July, the Pentagon announced it was pulling nearly 12,000 troops out of Germany, after Trump called for a total withdrawal to punish the Berlin government over policy disagreements.Senior military officials made clear it would take years to redeploy that number of troops, and Congress is scrutinising the order. The drawdown of foreign deployed forces was dwarfed by the dispatch of 10,000 US troops to the Gulf following the killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in January. Dempsey, now adjunct senior fellow of the military, veterans and society program at the Center for a New American Security, said the Pentagon would wait to see the outcome of the presidential election before carrying out major troop movements. “I think the lesson we all should have learned after four years is the president’s conception of his powers doesn’t go anywhere beyond his enjoyment of having an expanded Twitter presence,” he said. “We’ve become so inured to these kind of kneejerk attempts to win the news cycle that nobody will be talking about this 48 hours from now.” More

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      Donald Trump says he will not participate in virtual debate with Joe Biden – video

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      The US president made his announcement in a Fox Business interview, moments after the commission that oversees the presidential election debates said the next event would be conducted from remote locations after Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis. The White House has refused to say when the president’s last negative test for the virus was and, as a result, it is unclear how long he has been positive. The next debate is scheduled for 15 October
      Trump says he won’t participate in virtual presidential debate with Biden – live
      Donald Trump says he will not join proposed virtual debate – full story

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      A Year On, the Clean India Mission Falls Short

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      Research amidst the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the virus is transmitted through wastewater. This makes it crucial to revisit the goals of India’s ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission, or SBM) that came to a close almost exactly a year ago. While there were substantial improvements made in toilet coverage, a lack of data clarity muddies an understanding of exactly how large these improvements were across the country. According to government estimates, national sanitation coverage was 51% in 2014 when SBM began and reached 78% in 2018, less than a year prior to the end of the program. While this certainly shows progress — the national average was just under 26% in 1999 — no one would think to take these numbers and simply round up to 100%.  

      But at the close of the SBM last fall, this is exactly what Prime Minister Narendra Modi did. Speaking to a crowd, Modi proclaimed that India was now completely open defecation free (ODF), with sanitation coverage reported by the SBM portal as 100% in rural areas and, inexplicably, 105% in urban areas. From the start of the 2014 campaign, the central government maintained that in just five short years, India would be ODF. Despite the gains made, a singular focus on meeting steep targets in a very short amount of time seems to have put Modi in a tight spot by the time October 2019 rolled around. 

      Caste Politics Overshadow Sanitation Issues in India

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      The gaps have been, at times, glaring. News reports from established outlets all over the country reported open defecation in areas that were already recorded as ODF. A 2018 study by the Rice Institute estimated an open defecation rate of 44%, meaning nearly half of the sampled population was still engaging in the practice hardly a year before SBM ended. In urban areas the picture looks a bit better: 95% of urban households access an improved toilet. But this includes community toilets, which may be used by hundreds of other families and are often plagued with maintenance, hygiene and safety issues. Furthermore, one survey from 18 states identified over 48,000 manual scavengers still cleaning “dry” toilets which do not discharge into sewer lines.

      Social Pressure-Cooker

      What explains these inconsistencies? The use of shame-based tactics to stop open defecation, alongside a rush to meet ODF goals, have built up a pressure-cooker environment. The SBM has continued prior national efforts that deemphasized technical solutions and focused heavily on strategies to encourage behavior change at the local level. One such strategy is Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), which hinges on “triggering” disgust and extreme emotions among community members to spur the abandonment of open defecation. Despite some concerns about shame-based approaches, the SBM continued with the CLTS Foundation and others as implementation partners.

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      But open defecation is an issue that needs more than short-term emotional reactions. The longstanding practice is mired in cultural tradition, casteist taboos and environmental factors, among others. Some reasons people give for it is that they do not wish to empty a pit themselves, that it is considered more hygienic to defecate further away from the home — certainly reasonable considering how few poor Indian homes have running water — or that community toilets are dirty and unsafe, so squatting in a quiet area nearby is actually preferable.

      In the SBM environment, people who have not built a toilet, for whatever reason, are highly likely to experience retaliation for continuing to defecate in the open. Because Indian culture is quite collective — the actions of one person are seen to have radiating effects on the family and community — sometimes social pressure can play a role in nudging behavior change. However, this is a slippery slope. In India’s highly unequal society, characterized by stark gender and caste-based hierarchies amidst a wide array of languages and ethnicities, such strategies have the potential to be misused, with large social costs.

      There is ample evidence to show this. In June 2017, Zafar Hussein, a local community leader agitating against the eviction of his settlement in Rajasthan, was allegedly beaten to death by local officials for trying to stop officials from taking photographs of women defecating in the open. His death was reported by multiple outlets. In other areas of Maharashtra, people have been followed by a loud band, jailed or fined for defecating in the open.

      Walls of shame have been instituted by local village councils onto which the names and photographs of people defecating openly are be pasted. These individuals were often removed from eligibility for local government programs. The previously mentioned Rice Institute study also recorded coercion and threats of the loss of government rations as a way to bring down open defecation rates. Notably, the study found that Dalits and Adivasis were the most likely to face such behaviors. India’s Health Ministry has publicly denounced the results of the Rice survey. But in September last year, weeks before Modi’s ODF declaration, two young Dalit children were beaten to death in their village in Madhya Pradesh for defecating in the open.

      Numbers, Strategies and Health Equity

      These debates over sanitation data are not merely academic exercises. They have real, material impacts on people. In some ways, the above tragedies are not surprising. If a hasty approach is taken toward declaring areas ODF, it follows that any activity hinting that this claim is not matched by reality will be quashed. Despite this, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation bestowed the Global Goalkeeper Award upon Modi last year. It is surprising that one of the largest, most influential health organizations in the world, committed to facts and data, accepted without question the Indian prime minister’s claims, failing to consider all the evidence to the contrary.

      So what is the solution? Certainly, the answer is not to give up on sanitation programming as the need remains great. There are several organizations on the ground that have successfully integrated mobilization with communities, technical expertise and a sustained presence through which people are not merely pressured to stop a practice but meaningfully guided toward an alternative and given the facts and tools to integrate that alternative into their lives.

      However, this takes a more long-term presence, a less single-minded focus on quick targets, a commitment toward waste management infrastructure besides just toilets, and a willingness to meet people where they are. Further, the same people who have fallen through the gaps in the SBM are those with a lot to lose during the current pandemic: the rural poor, slum-dwellers, sanitation workers, manual laborers and migrants. Brutal crackdowns against those who kept working amidst India’s COVID-19 lockdown illustrate that retaliation cannot continue to be a solution when reality does not match the official word. Amidst the pandemic, sanitation infrastructure and the transparency of data surrounding it are necessities that cannot afford to wait.

      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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      Donald Trump, COVID-19 and America’s Love of Conspiracy

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      US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania tested positive for COVID-19 on the evening of Thursday, October 1. In retrospect, the diagnosis should not have become as a complete surprise. For months, Trump and most of his entourage ignored the advice of public health specialists, in his own administration, to wear masks in public settings and maintain social distance between the president, his key advisers and other White House personnel.

      QAnon: A Conspiracy for Our Time

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      Despite warnings from infectious disease specialists inside and outside the administration, Trump persisted to hold public rallies, often in confined indoor settings, as part of his reelection campaign. These events appeared to gratify the president’s need for attention and unqualified adoration, irrespective of their partisan political benefits. Based on this behavior, extended over the course of the pandemic, it was almost inevitable that the infection caught up with Trump.

      Alternative Facts

      This interpretation seems perfectly reasonable. But it is unlikely to satisfy voices on the far right of the American political spectrum despite the House of Representatives’ bipartisan vote on October 2 to condemn the QAnon conspiracy. It requires some speculation, but not all that much, to expect QAnon believers and such deranged media figures as Alex Jones to produce a set of “alternative facts.” 

      These “facts” are likely to involve the discovery of still another “deep state” conspiracy within the federal government. According to such a conspiratorial view, Trump’s attempts to achieve his “pro-American” white nationalist objective are being sabotaged by a secret conspiracy formed among federal bureaucrats to thwart his policy goals. “Deep state” conspirators will stop at nothing to bring down Trump and his “conservative” administration. We should not be surprised if, over the remaining weeks leading to the November 3 presidential election, various versions of such a “deep state” conspiracy appear across the internet. It remains to be seen how much will be taken up by Fox News and other outlets.

      Multiple “deep state” conspiracy assertions and interpretations have surfaced in American political life over the decades. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the journalist John T. Flynn and other right-wing isolationists, including “Colonel” Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, claimed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had deliberately goaded the Japanese into attacking the United States to make gullible Americans abandon their “America First” ideals and support the country’s entry into the war against the Axis powers.

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      Flynn and others believed that Roosevelt knew of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor but deliberately did not alert US commanders in Hawaii, Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, so that the attack could proceed with maximum effect. According to this scenario, the blood of the sailors on the USS Arizona was on Roosevelt’s hands.

      During President Dwight Eisenhower’s second term, when fears of communism became a national obsession, Robert Welch, a retired Massachusetts candy manufacturer, formed the John Birch Society. (Birch was an American missionary in China who had been killed by Mao’s Communists in 1946.)  Welch went on to publish a widely publicized “Blue Book,” which, among other things, included a list of domestic “communists” and communist sympathizers who were scheming to bring down America. The president’s brother, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, then the chancellor of the University of Minnesota, was allegedly his superior in the communist conspiracy. The president himself was simply a dupe instrumentalized by powers that be inside the communist movement.

      The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 yielded a bonanza of conspiracy theories. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had defected to the Soviet Union, returned to the US and became a member of the “Fair Play for Cuba” committee while living in New Orleans. Those who espoused this conspiratorial interpretation claimed either the USSR — the assassination occurred after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — or Fidel Castro, who had been targeted for assassination by the CIA, were behind the murder.

      Left-Wing Conspiracies

      At the time, competing left-wing conspiracy theories flourished as well, according to which Kennedy had been the victim of right-wing generals and businessmen who wanted the United States to abandon plans for a peaceful end to the Cold War. Film director and Vietnam War veteran Oliver Stone made a movie depicting the dynamics of this conspiracy, featuring an imaginary New Orleans district attorney uncovering the “truth.”

      The New World Order (NWO) conspiracy arose at the end of the Cold War. Following the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 by an international coalition led by the United States, President George H. W. Bush referred to the emergence of a new world order dominated by America as the world’s only “hyper-power.” His celebration of American dominance was understood by members of various active well-armed “patriot” groups around the country as the government’s attempt to compromise American sovereignty.

      Bush’s aim, according to this conspiracy, was to turn the United States over to the United Nations and other dark international evil-doers. In parts of the West and Midwest, NWO believers spotted black helicopters hovering above farms and ranches. Others detected the movement of black trains carrying Chinese communist troops to obscure destinations. Suspicions were aroused in the Northwest that detachments of China’s People’s Liberation Army were massing on the Canadian border, preparing to invade the US. Reverend Pat Robertson, a prominent televangelist, even wrote a book entitled “The New World Order,” warning  of the NWO threat and encouraging  followers to be prepared.

      If Donald Trump’s COVID-19 infection is blamed on the “deep state,” it will surely become part of a line of right-wing conspiracies involving American presidents, either as victims or, in the case of Roosevelt, perpetrators.  

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      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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      At least 27 in Trump’s circle have tested positive for coronavirus

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      Covid-19 has created a dramatic situation in the Trump administration best summed up as “all the president’s men and women”.At least 27 people across Donald Trump’s White House, election campaign and military leaders have now tested positive for coronavirus.On Tuesday, Stephen Miller, the controversial policy adviser to the US president, became the latest to confirm that he has Covid-19 and will enter quarantine. Miller has become the latest in a lengthy list of people connected to the White House to contract the virus in recent days.This group is headed by Trump himself, who left the Walter Reed hospital on Monday after receiving state-of-the-art medical treatment for the virus.Trump, who has routinely downplayed the virus and disparaged the wearing of masks, posed for cameras without a mask after returning to the White House and tweeted: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”Public health experts have criticized Trump’s comments, noting that people with the virus can still spread it to others for around 10 days after becoming infected.More than 210,000 people in the US have died from the coronavirus pandemic, by far the worst death toll in the world.After seemingly months of largely avoiding becoming infected, Covid-19 reached into the heart of the Trump administration last week.A swathe of Trump’s inner circle of family and allies has recently tested positive for the virus, including Melania Trump, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, assistant press staffers Chad Gilmartin, Karoline Leavitt and Jalen Drummond, aide Nick Luna, adviser Hope Hicks and former White House counsel Kellyanne Conway, as well as Miller. A military valet and another assistant press staffer, both unnamed so far, have also been infected.Meanwhile, a number of prominent Republicans have also contracted the virus, including Republican National Committee chief Ronna McDaniel, former New Jersey governor and unofficial Trump adviser Chris Christie, Utah senator Mike Lee, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson and Bill Stepien, head of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.At least nine of these people, including Trump, attended a White House event on 26 September for Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s nominee for the US supreme court. Assembled guests, most of them not wearing masks, were seated close together for the event, with some then mingling inside the White House, again without masks, afterwards.An outbreak of Covid-19 has also swept through senior US military leaders, including Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Gen John Hyten, vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.Gen Gary Thomas, a senior marine corps leader; Gen Daniel Hokanson, the chief of the national guard; Gen James McConville, the army chief of staff; Adm Michael Gilday, naval operations chief; Gen Charles Brown, air force chief of staff; Gen Paul Nakasone, the cyber command chief; and Gen Jay Raymond, the space force chief, have also been infected.White House staff have reportedly expressed fears that their workplace has been allowed to become an unsafe environment, with mask wearing discouraged and even mocked.The day after the event for Barrett, the White House held a gathering for Gold Star military mothers, the name given to families who have lost military members to combat, with pictures again showing the president and other officials not socially distancing or wearing masks while indoors. Those working in the White House are regularly tested for the virus, but officials have been opaque on when the president had his last negative test, before testing positive late last Thursday.The senior military leaders are believed to have been infected during a Friday meeting in the “tank”, a secure Pentagon room for top military brass. Contact tracing and further precautions are being taken to “to protect the force and the mission”, according to a Pentagon spokesman.The infections have occurred within a broader context where the pandemic is still barely under control across much of the US. Half of all states are reporting an increasing trend in recent Covid-19 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University. In total, more than 7.5 million people in the US have tested positive for the virus. More