Asked at the Valdai Club Discussion, how Afghanistan can be helped to achieve political stability and economic development, President Putin emphasized that while the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Afghanistan’s neighbors will help the country economically, the Western nations who occupied the country for 20 years must take primary responsibility to stabilize the situation. “The first thing they must do,” Putin said, “is to release Afghan assets, and give Afghanistan an opportunity to resolve high priority socio-economic problems.”
The exchange, with Tsinghua University strategist Zhou Bo, follows:
Zhou Bo: “Mr. President, it is really my great honor to ask you this question. I will ask you something about Afghanistan. Afghanistan lies in the heart of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. So, if Afghanistan has a problem, then the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has a problem. Now the United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan. So how can the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is led by China and Russia, united with other countries, help Afghanistan to achieve political stability and economic development?”
Vladimir Putin: “The situation in Afghanistan is one of the most urgent issues today. You know, we have just had a meeting in the appropriate format, in part, with representatives of the Taliban. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is also active in Afghanistan. This is a very serious issue for all of us because for both China and Russia it is extremely important to have a calm, developing Afghanistan that is not a source of terrorism, or any form of radicalism, next to our national borders, if not on our borders.
“We are now seeing what is happening inside Afghanistan. Unfortunately, different groups, including ISIS are still there. There are already victims among the Taliban movement, which, as a whole, is still trying to get rid of these radical elements and we know of such examples. This is very important for us, for both Russia and China.
“In order to normalize the situation properly and at the right pace, it is necessary, of course, to help Afghanistan restore its economy because drugs are another huge problem. It is a known fact that 90 percent of opiates come to the world market from Afghanistan. And if there is no money, what will they do? From what sources and how will they fund their social programs?
“Therefore, for all the importance of our participation in these processes – both China and Russia and other SCO countries – the main responsibility for what is happening there is still borne by the countries that fought there for 20 years. I believe the first thing they must do is to release Afghan assets and give Afghanistan an opportunity to resolve high priority socio-economic problems.
“For our part, we can implement specific large projects and deal with domestic security issues. Our special services are in contact with their Afghan counterparts. For us, within the SCO, it is very important to get this work up and running because Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are right on the border with Afghanistan. We have a military facility in Tajikistan. It was based on the 201st division when it was still Soviet.
“Therefore, we will actively continue this work with China on a bilateral plane, develop dialogue with relevant structures and promote cooperation within the SCO as a whole. In the process, we will allocate the required resources and create all the conditions to let our citizens feel safe regardless of what is happening in Afghanistan.”
Brussels is blaming Putin for causing gas shortage in the EU. As ridiculous as this can be, the established media and politicians trumpet this lie around. But nobody mentions that the Netherlands, once a major provider of gas to Europe, is curbing its production right now.
The Dutch government had decided to shut down the Groningen gas field, because of fear of earthquakes, and began to wind it down last year. Earlier this month, Dutch Home Affairs Minister Kajsa and Economic Affairs Minister Stef Blok said that the government will not increase natural gas production from the Groningen fields to head off the impact of soaring gas prices. The gas taps will only be turned on again if there are very cold winters, not for price rises, the ministers said.
If reactivated fully in an emergency, Groningen could alleviate the scarcity. It delivered 88 billion cubic meters at its peak in 1976 and above 30 billion cubic meters just five years ago. Natural gas production in the Netherlands has been falling in recent years, and in 2020 totaled 20 billion cubic meters. This was the lowest production of natural gas in the Netherlands since the turn of the century.
Gas consumption in the EU amounted to 521 billion cubic meters in 2019, and it dropped to 380 cubic meters in 2020, due to lockdowns. As demand resumed this year, and Gazprom increased its supply, the Dutch could help fill the gap. But maybe the Dutch government wants to let “creative destruction” get its way…
Civilization Itself Is at Stake: Will We Rise to the Challenge?
Escalating tensions with Russia, driven by Ukrainian’s suicidal push for NATO membership, U.S. encouragement, and the U.S. military itself, threatens — despite President Biden’s reaching out to President Putin for an in-person summit — to explode into war, nuclear war. A provocative visit of former U.S. government officials to Taiwan adds more fuel to the fire of China’s cross-strait relations. Economic lending into the real economy by U.S. banks withers, even as they are showered with money. Inflation accelerates, and a blowout of the trans-Atlantic financial system is inevitable. Death by starvation stalks the impoverished inhabitants of war-zones Syria and Yemen.
Will these crises culminate in what would become nuclear conflict, a devastation of the human race, or will a new paradigm overthrow the oligarchical structures that drive conflict? What flanks can you create to achieve that happier outcome?
In her weekly Schiller Institute webcast discussion, Helga Zepp-LaRouche responded to the urgent call to the world by Cardinal Mario Zenari in Syria for the world to come to the aid of the Syrian people. More than 90% of Syrians are below the level of extreme poverty, and many are in danger of losing their lives due to famine. (Zenari’s Time is Running Out.) The last decade of war, the unjust sanctions, and the Covid pandemic have created an absolutely intolerable condition of suffering for the Syrian people.
Similar horrors confront Yemen, where the agonizing reality of hunger is conveyed in the powerful documentary {Hunger Ward}, referred to by the head of the World Food Program, David Beasley, who saw children dying before his very eyes in the hospital, and he was unable to help.
In both Syria and Yemen, the results of supposedly “humanitarian interventionist” wars — and there is nothing humanitarian about them! — conducted under the guise of defending the people from murderous governments, are genocidal. Was U.S. military intervention in Syria driven by Assad’s chemical weapon murder of the people there? No, that was not the reason, and the claims about the attacks were not true. As Col. (ret.) Richard Black (USA) has explained, the plan for regime change in Syria was developed ten years before the 2011 destabilization, as part of a policy of regime change in the entire region, comprising Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya.
The narrative about the causes of the war is completely wrong.
But even leaving that aside, start from the current humanitarian situation: “When you have a people about to die, and the world does absolutely nothing, that means the people watching that are {morally unfit to survive.} And I’m crying out to you to help us make a mobilization to get rid of the “Caesar” sanctions and to have the immediate reconstruction of Syria.”
In contrast, the so-called donors’ conference in Brussels raised a few billion dollars, but it was an absolute charade. The funds will {not} go to the Syrian government, but rather to neighboring countries that have taken in refugees, to NGOs, and to opposition groups. But, as Cardinal Zenari says, without a {reconstruction}, there will be no end to the misery. Peace through development is the only way out of the crisis.
And we know how to do this! The Schiller Institute has worked for half a century on plans for the development of Southwest Asia, dating back to Lyndon LaRouche’s 1975 “Oasis Plan” proposal. Since then, the LaRouche movement has developed a plan for Syria (“Project Phoenix“), a plan for Yemen (“Operation Felix“), all in the context of bringing Southwest Asia into a development paradigm of the New Silk Road / Belt and Road Initiative.
Against this potential stands the Caesar sanctions, based on a lie. Photographs supposedly showing victims of torture carried out by the Assad government were used as evidence to push through these brutal sanctions policy. But these photographs were mainly of Syrian soldiers killed by al-Qaeda-linked groups! This is not the first time such fabrications have been presented. Saddam Hussein’s forces were accused of ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait. This was used to start the 1989 Iraq War. Then we had the “yellow cake” and other supposed evidence of Saddam Hussein’s program to create weapons of mass destruction — again, all lies. Then we had the lies from the White Helmets about the supposed use by Assad of chemical weapons.
Zepp-LaRouche demanded: “This must stop and the Caesar sanctions must be lifted. And all the members of Congress who do not lift these sanctions make themselves complicit in every death that occurs in the region…
“This has reached the point where either the world wakes up and we start to remedy this, or we will not survive, because of our own moral failure as a human species.
“I call on you: work with the Schiller Institute. Work with its Committee on the Coincidence of Opposites, which is working to get aid programs and reconstruction.
“I appeal to you: get in contact with the Schiller Institute and respond to the call by Cardinal Zenari, which has not been covered much at all by the Western press, which alone should show the one-sidedness of the media, which we must overcome.”
Will you answer the call? Become a member of the Schiller Institute and work to make its vision a reality.
Tulsi Gabbard Warns Ukraine Tensions Could Cause War
Apr. 14 (EIRNS)–Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Monday, former member of congress and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard warned the American people of the existential threat of conflict with Russia: “[The situation with Russia and Ukraine] is moving in a very dangerous direction. The question for the American people is, ‘are we willing to go to war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine’? And we need to understand that such a war would come at a cost beyond anything that we can really imagine. Because this is not a war that’s happening to someone else, somewhere else on the other side of the world. No, this is something that will directly impact me, and you, Tucker, every single one of your viewers, and all of our loved ones.
“And this is a war that is not a game. It’s a war in which there are no winners, because you’ve got thousands of nuclear weapons that the U.S. has aimed towards Russia; Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons that are aimed towards us, that could hit any town or city in the U.S. in less than thirty minutes, that could exact a cost on every one of us that would result in excruciating death and suffering beyond comprehension — hundreds of millions of people dying and suffering seeing their flesh burned from their bones. This is something that you can’t really even imagine. And it’s a cost that we will {all} pay.”
In response to Carlson’s question, “why in the world would we ever contemplate going to war with Russia, honestly?” Gabbard continued:
“It is one that we should not do, for those very reasons. You look at the impacts of what a nuclear brings. It brings about the end of the world as we know it. And our leaders should understand this consequence and take it seriously. This is why President Biden, instead of continuing to escalate tensions and escalate this new cold war between the United States and Russia, he needs to de-escalate these tensions, to take the heat out of it, and bring an end to this new cold war. Because if he doesn’t, it’s not a question of {if} we go to war with Russia, {if} this war goes to a nuclear holocaust: it really is then just a question of {when}. And if we continue down this path that we are on, it’s something that could happen a lot sooner than any of us think.”
Carlson concluded by referring to how he had opened the segment, by contrasting the importance of Gabbard’s warning to the war over pronouns: “I’m just amazed by the magnitude of the stories that all of us are missing, including those of us who are paid to follow this stuff, and especially this story. So, I appreciate how you so crisply and wisely addressed that. It’s terrifying.” Watch the interview here.
Apr. 14 (EIRNS)–On March 16, the Permanent Representative of India at the United Nations, Ambassador T.S. Tirumarti spoke out against the humanitarian disaster related to the U.S. imposition of sanctions against Syria, the so-called Caesar Sanctions. Tirumarti said the sanctions should be “relaxed,” calling on the international community to act “with a sense of urgency” to help the Syrian people. He said there is an “urgent need to increase humanitarian assistance to all Syrians throughout the country without discrimination, politicization, and any preconditions.”
The sanctions, which were a part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, went into effect on June 17, 2020, and have plunged more than 90% of all Syrians below the poverty level. With the full backing of Secretary of State Pompeo, the U.S, Special Envoy for Syria Engagement, James Jeffrey, exposed the hypocrisy of U.S. policy in his explanation of the actual intent of the Act. While insisting that “We’re not demanding total victory, we’re not saying that Assad has to go,” Jeffrey said that the goal of the Act is to “make it clear to anyone who wants to rebuild Assad’s Syria that that cannot happen without Caesar sanctions,” until there is a government in Damascus that carries out US demands with what Jeffrey described as “real eagerness.” He later clarified that anyone, or any nation which engages in economic activities in Syria is “a potential sanctions target.”
The sanctions were drafted in response to a collection of photos compiled by a defector of Syrians who were allegedly victims of the brutality of the Assad government. It was delivered to the opposition group, the “Syrian National Movement”, which passed it on to Human Rights Watch, (HRW) which released it in an 86-page report, “If the Dead Could Speak: Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria’s Detention Facilities.” Critics of the report point out that, of the 28,000+ photos included, only a “couple dozen” could be confirmed by HRW activists, who claimed to have “meticulously verified dozens of stories” of people who died in Syrian detention centers. Many of the others were Syrian soldiers murdered by terrorists, or victims of assassinations and bomb attacks done by terrorists.
In passing the bill, no significant voice in Congress was raised about victims of U.S. torture in Iraq or Afghanistan, or about the civilian toll of the “War on Terror,” or about the millions whose lives are endangered by the sanctions. Also of note is that the publisher of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who published classified U.S. documents reporting on torture and other atrocities carried out by U.S. military and security forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, was not hailed as a “hero” — as the defector and HRW activists have been — but is left to rot in a jail in London, awaiting extradition to stand trial in the U.S.
The Schiller Institute is demanding that the sanctions be lifted immediately.
UN Secretary-General Maintains, ‘So Far, We Have Failed’
April 13, 2021 (EIRNS)—United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres yesterday delivered a grim review of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the related hunger, poverty, and unemployment crises, telling a gathering of the UN Economic and Social Council’s Forum on Financing for Development that “no element of our multilateral response has gone as it should.”
Speaking as the current head of the post-war international institution par excellence, the United Nations, Guterres’s speech almost reads like a funeral oration for the demise of the entire Old Paradigm. This is what a systemic breakdown looks like, from the inside.
Guterres said that during the last year more than 3 million have died from the virus. Around 120 million have fallen into extreme poverty, and the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs have been lost. “The crisis is far from over,” he stated. The crisis is “putting multilateralism to the test, and so far, we have failed.” He went on to say that a “paradigm shift” was needed.
The President of the UN General Assembly Volkan Bozkır echoed Guterres’s grim report, stating that the COVID-19 pandemic has “precipitated the single largest economic contraction in 90 years, devastating lives and livelihoods in the process.”
Guterres ripped into the suicidal immorality of hoarding vaccines, in which a mere 10 countries globally account for around 75% of COVID-19 vaccinations given. He said that the estimated cost of this is more than $9 trillion—without explaining where that figure came from. “To end the pandemic for good, we need equitable access to vaccines for everyone, everywhere.” Guterres then focused on the debt crisis, saying that “we need to go beyond debt relief,” and strengthen the “international debt architecture to end the deadly cycles of debt waves, global debt crises and lost decades.” But that is as close as he came to actually proposing a solution to the crisis. The best he could muster was to protest that “there has been a $5 trillion surge in the wealth of the world’s richest in the past year” of the pandemic, and that governments should therefore “consider a solidarity or wealth tax on those who have profited during the pandemic, to reduce extreme inequalities.”
Drumbeat Grows for Release of Afghan Funds As Economy Falters—
As Afghanistan’s Chamber of Commerce and Investment warned on September 13 that the country would plunge into an economic crisis unless frozen international reserves were released by the U.S. Treasury, there is a growing cascade of voices calling on the U.S. to do just that. These private sector representatives charged that the U.S. Treasury’s freezing of reserves is a violation of humanitarian law and reported that since the reserves were frozen, all transactions between Afghan and international banks have been halted.
Unless this situation is reversed, the country won’t avoid a deep recession, the representatives warned, according to TOLO News. “We call on the United States and the world to solve the issue with the frozen assets, because that money belongs to the people of Afghanistan. If you have political issues with the government or some people, you should not take people’s money hostage,” ACCI acting director Yunus Mohmand said. A fellow member of the ACCI, Khan Jan Alokozay, said that most of the factories are facing serious financial shortages and raw materials because they are unable to withdraw money, adding that in the last month over one million laborers have not been paid.
In addition, Afghanistan’s Health Minister, Wahid Majrooh, who had stayed on from the previous government, said that the Afghan health system is teetering on the edge of collapse, “We are losing personnel, we are losing lives, and the morale and momentum we had,” Majrooh said. “The crisis is very, very extensive.”
Pressure is growing on the U.S. to release the funds. On September 15th, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhao Lijjan said that the U.S. should release those Afghan Government assets which they have been holding in abeyance as the new Afghan government was in the process of formation. Zhao was replying to a question regarding the Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen’s call for release of the funds. “Shaheen is right,” Zhao said. “The assets belong to Afghanistan and should be spent for the Afghan people. The U.S. should not freeze them without justification. The U.S. should face up to the legitimate demand of Afghanistan, abandon pressures and sanctions, and stop creating obstacles to the economy, livelihood and peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan.”
One can also expect a clear statement from the upcoming SCO meeting as both Russia and China have indicated that the U.S. which is responsible for the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan have got to take the primary responsibility for resolving the crisis. A first step in that direction would be releasing the funds to the present interim government before it is too late.
Oct. 18 (EIRNS)—Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced this morning that the Russian Mission to NATO would be shutting down within two weeks, and that the NATO Information Office in Moscow would, as a consequence, be closed. “As a result of purposeful steps by NATO, we do not have the right conditions for elementary diplomatic activities,” he told TASS news agency, RT reported. “In response to NATO’s actions, we are suspending the work of our permanent mission, including the work of our chief military representative.”
The NATO International Secretariat has already been notified,” Lavrov added. “If NATO members have any urgent matters, they can contact our ambassador in Belgium, who ensures bilateral relations between Russia and the Kingdom of Belgium.”
Sept. 14, 2021 (EIRNS)—The Sept. 13, United Nations conference in Geneva on aid to Afghanistan succeeded in raising $1.1 billion, beyond the original target of $606 million. But given the dramatic reports by speakers on the dire humanitarian crisis and the urgent need for food and medicine to avert imminent starvation of tens of millions of people, the $1.1 billion won’t suffice. The situation is so fragile that 1 million children are at immediate risk of starvation if their immediate needs are not met, the New York Times reported Sept. 13. “At least 10 million children depend on humanitarian aid just to survive,” UNICEF’s executive director Henrietta H. Fore told the Times*. The World Food Program (WFP) estimates that 40% of Afghanistan’s crop has been lost this year, and the prices of basic food items are soaring. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is taking steps to help farmers so that they don’t miss the upcoming winter wheat planting season, and to keep life-sustaining farm animals alive, but the situation has been complicated by a severe drought. Over half of an average Afghan’s daily caloric intake comes from wheat, most of which is domestically grown, FAO director general Qu Dongyu, told the meeting.
World Food Program director David Beasley starkly warned that “14 million people—1 in 3—are marching to the brink of starvation…. On top of that, you have 14 million people in IPC2”—a category of acute food insecurity—“that are knocking on the same door, so if we’re not very careful, we could truly enter the abyss and see catastrophic conditions, worse than what we see now.” WFP estimates that 40% of Afghanistan’s crops have been lost for this year; the price of wheat rose by 25%, and the price of flour has doubled at local markets. Beasley stressed that a major concern is that 4 million people live in hard-to-reach areas, for whom, if food isn’t prepositioned before winter, “we will face a catastrophe. The time is now. We can’t wait six months. We need the funds immediately so we can move the supplies.”
Like other speakers, Beasley also warned, “if we’re not careful, and we’re not strategic, we could face mass migration, destabilization in the region, and for certain starvation for millions of Afghan people.” Beasley’s full remarks can be found here.
Making the same point, Gennady Gatilov, Russia’s permanent representative to the Geneva UN office, stressed that “Kabul’s traditional Western sponsors must provide active help to the country’s population to reduce or stop migration flows,” according to TASS.
April 29, 2021 (EIRNS)–In an article in the inaugural issue of a new British journal called Environmental Affairs, former UK foreign minister William Hague proposes that British armed forces could be deployed, not to secure supplies of raw materials for the British Isles, as happened in the past, but rather to prevent them from being used by anybody. “In the past, the UK has been willing to use all of our firepower, both military and diplomatic, to secure and extract fossil fuels,” Hague wrote. “But in the future, the UK will need to use all of its diplomatic capacity to ensure that these resources are not used and that natural environments are protected.”
“This could result in uncomfortable situations where the need to coordinate international action on climate change runs against our other foreign policy priorities.”
Hague’s comments on resources made headlines in publications such as the Daily Mail, and it actually constitutes a blueprint for a global fascist system to enforce the shutdown of productive economic activities through such measures as sanctioning deforestation in other countries, international taxation of “specific high carbon products,” and mandatory labelling schemes for products “with risks of high environmental damage, such as food and clothing…”
Hague frankly admits that the shift to a “net zero” carbon emissions economy will result in greater global instability, not less. Aside from the obvious hardships that will be visited on many countries–he names Nigeria and Libya as two obvious examples–the transition will also sharpen “strategic competition” among the major blocs, particularly in the Arctic. But instead of Russia being the major strategic competitor in his context, it is China that worries Hague the most. The UK must cooperate with China on climate change even if it strongly disagrees with China on other matters. At the same time, the UK must wean itself from dependence on China for green technologies and the raw materials they require, such as cobalt. At the same time, the UK must remain aligned with the US on its geopolitical policies.
