South East Asia

n Christmas Eve in 2002, I was suddenly dispatched from my base in Tokyo, where I was the New York Times bureau chief at the time, to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, to cover reports that North Korea was about to reactivate a nuclear reactor that had previously been taken out of service as a result of painstaking negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.

The country feels safer, less violent than it has in decades, but the once aid-fueled economy is barreling toward collapse. Tens of thousands of Afghans have fled or have been evacuated, including large numbers of educated elites. They either fear for their economic future or lack of freedom under a group that ascribes to a strict interpretation of Islam. During its previous rule in the late 1990s, the Taliban barred girls from school and women from work.

For years, the world tried to soften the Taliban’s extremist ideology by exposing them to modernity. As an insurgency they learned diplomacy and negotiation tactics, but their medieval thinking remained just as rigid. Now that the Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the international community continues to appease them, assuming it can convince them to form an inclusive government and ease their regressive policies while alleviating the country’s worsening humanitarian disaster. That is a naïve assumption that overlooks the root causes of the current crisis. Not only will the international community not get what it wants, but it also risks creating a much greater crisis: a Taliban theocracy that institutionalizes its repressive rule at a steep human and economic cost.

Marvin G. Weinbaum
Director, Afghanistan and Pakistan Studies

After two years of failed diplomatic efforts, for a time it seemed there might be an agreement with the Taliban reached by the Ghani regime and its international backers, albeit one very different than a long-sought power-sharing arrangement. With Taliban forces bearing down on Kabul, discussions involving the entry of Taliban forces into the capital and the formation of an interim government were being conducted in Doha.

The Taliban, which have controlled the country since US troops evacuated at the end of August, said Monday in a statement that they will have to “reconsider its policy” toward the United States if the asset seizure ordered last week by US President Joe Biden is allowed to stand.

In an action that combines brazen theft, imperialist brutality and unlimited hypocrisy, the Biden administration announced Friday that it will seize control of $7 billion in Afghanistan financial assets, held largely at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, rather than return them to the Afghanistan central bank.

Hate crimes against Asian Americans mushroomed over the past two years. According to the Guardian, they jumped 567 percent in San Francisco since 2021, and you don’t have to look far to find out why. The main reason is, quite simply, incessant China-bashing in the mainstream media. This propaganda campaign was kicked off by Trump in his last year in office with absurd, dangerous and bombastic claims that China, perhaps deliberately, caused covid. The anti-China hysteria spread like measles. Now the American right-wing deploys Nazi tropes against the Chinese – a repulsive example was a January 25 Washington Times article headlined “Chinese Communist Party Termites Are Everywhere in the U.S.” With Nazi poison like this circulating through red-blooded American veins, can war fever be far behind?