Many Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, are protesting angrily about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the peaceniks-come-lately were nowhere to be found over the last two decades as the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, waged a brutal proxy war in Yemen and Syria, destroyed Libya and terrorized much of the world with assassination drone planes. When the US is the guilty party, citizens of the US are silently complicit. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Scott points us to an excellent example of journalistic malpractice, this time by the New York Times about COVID-19 and different outcomes in Democratic versus Republican states. Ted and Scott dig deep into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ted talks about why he draws cartoons for Sputnik News.
The people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and many other countries destroyed by US military forces never enjoyed the sympathetic media coverage, much less the humanization, that Ukrainians are getting during the Russian invasion. To the contrary, Afghan patriots who shot at American forces were portrayed as terrorists and enemy combatants. Why the difference?
Maybe it’s time to change the flag on your social-media avatar.
To the extent that objective guideposts exist in international relations, the United States has no legal obligation to defend Ukraine. Ukraine, a U.S. strategic partner, is neither an ally nor a member of NATO. Nor is it in our neighborhood. Much as the Monroe Doctrine declares the entire Western hemisphere under American sway, Russia has long declared all the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, to belong to its “sphere of privileged interest.”
Despite our newfound obsession with a nation two out of three Americans couldn’t find on a map last month, American journalists and ordinary citizens have been so moved by scenes of death and destruction that members of both major parties have quickly come together to declare that they #StandWithUkraine, want to welcome Ukrainian war refugees, favor sending advanced weapons to aid Ukraine in its defense and support an array of harsh sanctions against Russia so wide-reaching that they ban Russian opera singers, paralympians and cats.
Headlines aside, Ukraine is not the most miserable place on earth right now. And the cruelest inflictor of human pain isn’t Russia.
It’s the United States.
“Afghanistan has become the world’s largest humanitarian crisis,” Jane Ferguson reported in The New Yorker in January. “More than 20 million people are on the brink of famine.”
“Afghanistan,” says the U.N. World Food Program, “teeters on the brink of universal poverty. As much as 97% of the population is at risk of sinking below the poverty line.”
The afghani, the national currency, has lost 30% of value since the American withdrawal last August—a collapse so precipitous that the U.N. worries that a liquidity crisis is imminent. Money exchanges in major Afghan cities have ceased operations, portending a return to the cashless subsistence economy, based on barter, that prevailed before the 2001 U.S. invasion, when Afghanistan was officially designated a failed state. Imports, which make up a high percentage of consumer goods, have been soaring in price as unemployment has shot up following the cessation of international aid that accounted for more than 40% of GDP. UNICEF warns that up to one million children under age five may die from malnutrition and lack of essential services by the end of 2022.
Schoolchildren are taught outside in the snow because schools can’t afford electricity for lights. Desperate Afghans are selling daughters and their own kidneys (going rate $1500) to survive.
“U.S. politicians and media frequently treat Afghanistan these days like a TV series that had its finale in 2021,” observes James Downie of The Washington Post. “But Afghans’ suffering is very much ongoing, and American decisions continue to make it worse.” With all eyes on Ukraine, no one is paying attention to the graver situation in Afghanistan—even though (or because?) the spiralizing disaster there is largely our fault.
1.4 million Ukrainian refugees have fled; 200,000 are internally displaced. Compare that to Afghanistan: 2.2 million Afghans have gone to neighboring countries in the last six months and 3.5 million are internally displaced.
Even if we don’t exactly care about the people of Afghanistan, what about self-interest? It’s curious strange that we’ve already forgotten that an unstable, impoverished Afghanistan can pose a danger to the region and the world.
Downie notes: “That famine is a direct consequence of the United States’ failure to create a self-sustaining economy there over two decades.” During the occupation we created a kleptocracy by dumping billions of dollars on pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills into the hands of corrupt government officials, connected oligarchs and warlords while small entrepreneurs were shaken down for protection money. “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” an American official told The New York Times, “was the United States.”
Coverage of the Afghans’ plight, such as it is, focuses on the $7 billion to $9.5 billion held by the former Afghanistan government in U.S. banks, now frozen by the Biden Administration, which stubbornly refuses to recognize the reality of Taliban rule.
Biden wants to siphon off $3.5 billion of the Afghan funds to settle legal claims by the families of 9/11 victims, a bizarre stance given the fact that no Afghan national had anything to do with the terrorist attacks. The remaining monies, says the president, will only be released to the Taliban after they allow girls to attend school, guarantee universal human rights, form an inclusive government and promise to sever all ties with terrorist groups.
The Taliban say they’re open to negotiations, but none have been scheduled.
While the White House dithers, babies are starving to death in Afghan hospitals without medicine.
Biden’s statements border on fantasy. “[The money] is not going to the Taliban; it is going to be used for the benefit of the Afghan people,” an anonymous White House official told the Post. The U.S. government couldn’t control the fate of aid money to Afghanistan while occupying with tens of thousands of soldiers. Now we’re gone, without a single embassy or consulate in the whole country.
Like it or not, the Taliban is the government of Afghanistan. They will rule the country for the foreseeable future. There is no realistic way to help the Afghan people without recognizing their government, lifting sanctions and restoring the flow of aid money.
Now, in the middle of an especially harsh winter in a mountainous country whose meager agricultural operations are disproportionately impacted by climate change, there is no time to lose. The U.S. should offer a helping hand immediately, without preconditions.
Give Afghanistan its money back.
We can set deadlines for the Taliban to meet U.S. benchmarks on women’s rights and other issues, stating that non-compliance will mean there will be no resumption of aid.
Even if the Taliban spend its billions carefully, it won’t last long in a country of 40 million people. Over the coming years, the U.S. has a moral obligation as well as a vested interest to help Taliban-ruled Afghanistan transition from a bloated welfare state dependent upon foreign aid to a modern, developing, independent economy.
Whether or not we relate more easily to blonde European Christians than darker-skinned Central Asian Muslims, back-burnering the U.S.-made catastrophe in Afghanistan in favor of the more telegenic mayhem in Ukraine is unconscionable.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
American media outlets characterize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as, variously and concurrently, the bloodthirsty act of a Hitlerian madman, part of an attempt to reconstitute the former Soviet Union and, predictably continuing the silently-debunked Russiagate narrative of the last six years, an assault on the concept of democracy motivated by President Vladimir Putin’s supposed fear that his own people might get jealous of the freedom next door. Senator Marco Rubio even implied that U.S. intelligence officials believe two years of COVID lockdown drove Putin nuts.
Any, some or none of these explanations born of pure speculation may be accurate. None of them is as likely as something simpler. The fall of the Soviet Union was followed by three decades of nearly constant provocation and encirclement by the United States and its Western allies. Putin decided enough is enough; here’s where we draw a line on the steppe.
Frenemies fighting the common threat of Nazi Germany, World War II concluded with Europe divided along the lines where the Allies and the Red Army met in 1945, with Germany divided between the two.
Proxy conflicts in which the Soviets took sides in Turkey, Greece and Czechoslovakia prompted Western European nations to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a U.S.-run collective-security arrangement formed in 1949 under President Harry Truman. Famously, an attack against one member is considered as an attack against all. Weirdly, no one was bothered by the fact that World War I began in large part because of a similar set of entangled alliances.
The USSR retaliated by grouping the Eastern European countries under its domination under the Warsaw Pact. This 1955 alliance was structured as a direct response to NATO and organized the same way except that all major decisions were controlled directly by Moscow, whereas NATO theoretically required unanimous consent by its members.
The Soviet Union was disbanded in 1991. Russia, economically devastated, politically demoralized and militarily emasculated under the incompetent and corrupt presidency of alcoholic pro-Western President Boris Yeltsin, became merely the largest of 15 now-independent former Soviet republics. Russia has three-quarters the land mass and half the population of the old USSR.
The Warsaw Pact went away. Yet NATO lived on.
NATO’s website explains: “NATO endured because while the Soviet Union was no more, the Alliance’s two other original if unspoken mandates still held: to deter the rise of militant nationalism and to provide the foundation of collective security that would encourage democratization and political integration in Europe. The definition of ‘Europe’ had merely expanded eastward.” Toward Russia.
Russia focused inward, transitioning into capitalism. Yet the West and NATO acted as though the Cold War had never ended.
In 1991 NATO was far away from Russia. The post-communist Russian Federation was separated from NATO territory by Eastern Europe plus the former Soviet republics of Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, also former republics of the USSR. That soon changed.
Over the next 20 years all of the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe joined NATO, shrinking an 800-mile buffer zone by half. The Baltics signed up in 2004.
Moldova’s constitution guarantees neutrality so it will never join NATO, but its geopolitical status as a buffer state is relatively inconsequential. Belarus remains a staunch Kremlin ally. Which brings us to Ukraine.
If Ukraine were admitted to NATO, Russia’s buffer zone would vanish. In its place would appear a vast open corridor between Russia and Europe. Ukraine, the same route Nazi Germany used to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, resulting in the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens — the same place where many Ukrainian locals greeted advancing German forces as liberators — would fall under the control of the NATO alliance. Russia’s enemy would be at its border.
The current Ukrainian government wants to join NATO. It came to power as the result of a U.S.-backed coup d’état. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, democratically-elected and pro-Russian, was deposed in a 2014 covert operation carefully orchestrated by the Obama Administration. “The United States had no right to try to orchestrate political outcomes in another country—especially one on the border of another great power,” Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute commented in 2017.
Adding to Russian anxiety, right-wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, played an outsized role in the 2014 Maidan uprising.
Now notorious anti-Semitic paramilitary groups like the swastika-wearing Azov Battalion have become an important component of the official Ukrainian military. As the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting notes, however, American media consumers are not being told about this. FAIR reports that a “crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces. If the corporate media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of U.S. foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater question.”
The BBC reported back in 2014 that “ultra-nationalists, and their extreme right fringe, are a small part of the overall campaign — a subgroup of a minority.” But the leaders of the new government “have at various points seemed unable, unwilling or even afraid to rein in the radical right, who are mostly concentrated in an umbrella organization called Right Sector.”
Azov has grown since 2014. It has now become a movement with its own politicians, newspaper, even children’s camps.
Another far-right extremist group, C14, now controls Ukraine’s police and National Guard, according to Reuters. The Trump Administration considered declaring Azov and the Ukrainian National Guard a terrorist organization. Now, The New York Times reports, alt-right militants from France, Finland and other European nations are flocking to fight Russia alongside the Azov Battalion, whose ranks include soldiers wearing Nazi insignia.
Though Jewish himself, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has turned a blind eye to the neo-Nazis within his own government. So have his American allies. Sam Biddle of the Intercept reported last week that “Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy.”
For Americans, an enemy of an enemy is always a friend. Unlike Russia, Americans don’t live next door to a country that welcomes Nazis into its military.
NATO repeatedly provoked Russia over the past few decades, most notably planning to place ballistic missiles in the former Warsaw Pact nation of Poland. “From what we have seen in recent years—the creation of a missile defense system, the encirclement of Russia with military bases, the relentless expansion of NATO—we have gotten the clear impression that they are testing our strength,” then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev observed in 2008.
Until last August, NATO and the U.S. had fully occupied Afghanistan—which borders the former USSR—for 20 years.
The United States portrays itself as a critic of aggressive militarism carried out by Russia. At this writing, however, Russia has one military base outside the former Soviet Union, in Syria. The United States has over 800 around the world. After the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the Bush Administration rented military airbases from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia along Russia’s southern border, which it claimed it needed in order to wage airstrikes and deliver materiel inside U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.
The U.S. took over the Khanabad base in three former Soviet republics bordering and near Russia: Uzbekistan, Bishkek airport in Kyrgyzstan, and the airfield in Kulob, Tajikistan. NATO forces set up a base at Termiz, Uzbekistan, and outside the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.
The U.S. troop presence in former-Soviet Central Asia ended in 2014. But maintaining American military forces within striking distance of southern Russia is clearly still on American officials’ minds. In April 2021 the new Biden Administration reached out to the governments of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan about using bases there.
None of this is to justify all of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Still, it is impossible to accurately assess the current crisis in the far reaches of Eastern Europe without considering Russia’s motivations. After years of encirclement in a one-sided Cold War directed at Russia, a Ukraine that is anything less than at least neutral (or ideally an ally) is simply too close for Moscow’s comfort.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
In this episode, Scott and Ted debate what the United States response ought to be should Putin’s Russia invade Ukraine. Ted goes deep into the weeds to explain how anti-SLAPP laws in America have been used by the powerful to screw over the weak and damaged, and destroy defamation law. (You know it’s bad when the likes of Ted feel sorry for Sarah Palin.) The third segment has Ted and Scott discussing what they are going to create, and how, as they are teamed up to draw on the same day on CounterPoint.
First the United States and its allies pressure Russia by placing missiles in Poland, near its border. Then the West tries to expand NATO right up to the Russian border, by inviting Ukraine to join. When the Russians respond by massing troops along their own border, we have the unmitigated nerve to say that they are provoking us.
You have heard the rest, now here are the best political analysts in America! Cartoonist-hosts Ted Rall and Scott Stantis unravel the mystery of why Joe Biden’s poll approval numbers continue to tank despite the economy not really being that bad, grizzly prospects for the Democrats in the midterms and 2024, Russian saber-rattling along the border with Ukraine and whether we should get involved, as well as feeling seriously bummed about Christmas time and holidays in general. Plus: flamethrower drones!
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