Politics – Page 17 – a sibilant intake of breath

The CIA didn’t fund al Qaeda during the Soviet Afghan war

It’s worth mentioning here that there is simply no evidence for the common myth that bin Laden and his Afghan Arabs were supported by the CIA financially. Nor is there any evidence that CIA officials at any level met with bin Laden or anyone in his circle. Yet the notion that bin Laden was a creation of the CIA is widespread. For instance, the American film-maker Michael Moore has written, “WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!” The real problem is not that the CIA helped bin Laden during the 1980s, but that the U.S. government had no idea about his possible significance until 1993, when he first started to appear in internal U.S. intelligence analyses describing him as a financier of Islamic extremist groups.

The notion that the CIA aided the rise of the Afghan Arabs is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the agency supported the Afghan war effort. First, it was overseen by a tiny group of CIA officers in Pakistan. Vincent Cannistraro, who helped coordinate CIA support to the Afghans during the mid-1980s, explained there were only six CIA officials in Pakistan at any given time, and they were simply “administrators.” Secondly, CIA officers in Pakistan seldom left the embassy in Islamabad, and rarely even met with the leaders of the Afghan resistance, let alone Arab militants. That’s because the CIA officers provided American funding to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which, in turn, decided which among the Afghan mujahadeen groups would receive this funding.

Bridadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran the ISI’s Afghan operations, explained that it was “a cardinal rule of Pakistan’s policy that no Americans ever became involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahadeen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.” Mark Sageman, a CIA officer who worked on the Afghan “account” in Pakistan during the mid-1980s, recalls “we were totally banned” from going into Afghanistan, for fear it would hand the Soviets a great propaganda victory if a CIA officer was captured there.[“] The CIA’s Milt Bearden says the agency “never recruited, trained or otherwise used Arab volunteers. The Afghans were more than happy to do their own fighting—we saw no reason not to satisfy them on this point.” No independent evidence of the CIA supporting al-Qaeda has emerged in the four decades since the end of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.

In short, the CIA had very limited dealings with the Afghans, let alone the Afghan Arabs. There was simply no point for the CIA and the Afghan Arabs to be in contact with each other, since the agency worked through Pakistan’s military intelligence agency during the Afghan War, while the Afghan Arabs had their own sources of funding. The CIA did not need the Afghan Arabs and the Afghan Arabs did not need the CIA.

Bergen, Peter. The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. Simon & Schuster, 2021. p. 42-3

Texas’ bounty-based heartbeat law

America’s unravelling continues, with the Supreme Court declining 5-4 to hear an emergency appeal of Texas’ bizarre and cruel fetal heartbeat anti-abortion law.

Laurence Tribe has written about what the law’s bounty system will do:

It wasn’t just Roe that died at midnight on 1 September with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. It was the principle that nobody’s constitutional rights should be put on sale for purchase by anyone who can find an informant or helper to turn in whoever might be trying to exercise those rights.

That, after all, is how the new Texas law works. Its perverse structure, which delegates to private individuals anywhere a power the state of Texas is forbidden to exercise itself until Roe is overruled, punishes even the slightest form of assistance to desperate pregnant women. Doctors, family members, insurance companies, even Uber drivers, are all at risk if they help a woman in need. And the risk is magnified by the offer of a big fat financial reward for whoever successfully nabs a person guilty of facilitating an abortion once a heartbeat can be detected, typically six weeks after a woman’s last period, well before most women even know they are pregnant. There is not even an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. No law remotely like this has ever been allowed to go into effect.

The prospect of hefty bounties will breed a system of profit-seeking, Soviet-style informing on friends and neighbors. These vigilantes will sue medical distributors of IUDs and morning-after pills, as well as insurance companies. These companies, in turn, will stop offering reproductive healthcare in Texas. As of a minute before midnight on 31 August, clinics in Texas were already turning patients away out of fear. Even if the law is eventually struck down, many will probably close anyway.

Worse still, if women try to escape the state to access abortion services, their families will be on the hook for offering even the smallest aid. If friends or family of a woman hoping to terminate her pregnancy drive her across state lines, or help her organize money for a plane or bus ticket, they could be liable for “aiding and abetting” a now-banned abortion, even if the procedure itself takes place outside Texas.

Adding insult to injury, if a young woman asks for money for a bus ticket, or a ride to the airport, friends and parents fearful of liability might vigorously interrogate her about her intentions. This nightmarish state of affairs burdens yet another fundamental constitutional privilege: the right to interstate travel, recognized by the supreme court in 1999 as a core privilege of federal citizenship.

It’s a heartless and unfeeling religious morality that sees this kind of harassment as desirable. The Supreme Court’s conduct will also further erode its own position as a unifying public institution and legitimate arbiter of constitutional grievances. When people lose faith in unifying institutions — and in the perception that there are legitimate avenues for pursuing their interests — it threatens complete breakdown in the country’s self-understanding as one polity, and further progression into settling questions of policy and law by force rather than through reason and democratic debate.

Knowing how to look something up isn’t comparable to knowing it

There’s a voguish argument that in an era of easy information availability there is less cause to have any substantial body of knowledge memorized. I have seen articles arguing that the crucial cognitive skills for young people today are the ability to find what they are looking for, given access to the internet.

I think there is a huge and obvious shortcoming with this perspective. Knowing that I can look up the Wikipedia article on the Lutheran Revolution, for example, is just a one way mental link that stops there. If you know nothing about the history of Catholicism, or of religious conflict in Europe, or of the precepts of Christianity then knowing where to find someone else’s writing about the Reformation doesn’t give you any meaningful understanding of what it was or why it mattered. Someone asked a narrow question about the event will be able to find it through an online search, but without internalized knowledge they won’t be able to see the implications and connections to other phenomena. Knowing that you can look up thermodynamics or Carnot efficiency doesn’t give you the ability to apply those concepts when thinking about an application like heating or cooling or the efficiency of an engine.

The ongoing COVID pandemic is demonstrating the extent of scientific and medical ignorance even within rich industrialized societies. That manifests in people falsely believing that they can make health choices for themselves with no consideration of others, and of course in the enormous amount of nonsense that is circulating about vaccines. It’s strange to observe how society has become technological to an unprecedented degree — with technology literally making life as humanity is experiencing it possible — and yet culturally an interest in and knowledge about science is treated as an optional personal curiosity, like fly fishing or following a soccer team. Broadly speaking, I hold the view that to understand anything well requires knowing at least the basics about many other issues (nobody can sensibly evaluate public health policy without knowing the rudiments of medicine, statistics, and epidemiology for example). That concept of knowledge as an interconnected web demonstrates how the ability to pluck out a narrow fact with the help of technology may not translate into much real understanding.

It’s oversimplistic to apply a ‘deficit model’ to what people know about an issue like COVID or climate change, assuming that there is an empty void where knowledge ought to be and that filling it is the solution. For issues tied up in politics, and thus in questions about what people will be free to do, the desire to undertake particular behaviours can create the motivation to believe what’s necessary to keep doing them. Just as someone operating under motivated reasoning can never be swayed by facts or arguments, more education alone won’t combat the problem of people choosing to believe factually what supports their behaviours or ideological positions.

100 years ago, someone could have been appropriately laughed at for saying they know about Pitt the Elder or the Peloponnesian War because they know they can go to a library and find books about them. The instant availability of information online doesn’t really change that.

Canada’s two kinds of environment ministers

Based on my experience of Canadian environment ministers (whatever the department is called at a given time), there are essentially two types. The rarer type is the genuine environmentalist who thinks they can get things done through the compromises of government. They’re true believers on climate change but rarely have much support from cabinet or the prime minister because what they want to do is not actually popular. Set in the abstract, people want to keep the climate stable and protect the planet. Give them the choice between that and something concrete, however, and you have the recipe for delay and misdirection which has been ongoing in Canada for 30+ years. I would say Stéphane Dion and Catherine McKenna are the clearest example of the genuine environmentalist set, and demonstrate how people with those priorities get sidelined. When you have no natural allies in cabinet because most of the other departments are pro-fossil (industry, transport, finance, natural resources, etc) the constraints of cabinet solidarity put ministers of this type in the position of unsuccessfully demanding the bare minimum behind closed doors, before defending inadequate plans to the public.

The other type of Canadian environment minister is the public relations spinmaster whose behaviour does not demonstrate any sincere concern about climate change, but simply the need to manage it as a PR issue. This is a much easier approach to the job since you can always just say nice things, avoid hard decisions, and cut dirty deals in the background. I feel like John Baird, Jim Prentice, Peter Kent, and Jonathan Wilkinson fall in this category. My father recently collected a set of letters on climate change for Minister Wilkinson (mine is here) and the experience illustrates how Wilkinson is a PR man for a government which in practice largely serves the same interests as the Harper Conservatives, but who work to maintain a false public and media narrative that they are bold environmental champions.

Part of the problem, surely, is that politicians have a hopelessly distorted understanding of the scale against which they should be judged. They give themselves kudos for being better than some of their electoral competitors, rather than comparing the scale of the efforts they propose against the scale of what needs to be done. The consequences are that the future becomes more dire for everyone, and that Canada will have an infrastructure and economic base poorly matched to what success in a post-fossil world will require.

Forgone fossil fuels

Back in 2012, Justin Trudeau said that “there’s not a country in the world that would find 170 billion barrels of oil under the ground and leave them there.”

At an event in June organized by Bank of America, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman supposedly said: “We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”

Since avoiding catastrophic climate change is chiefly a problem of prompt global fossil fuel abolition, such sentiments are positively frightening. Trudeau’s cynicism may not be entirely justified, however, as there are examples of government choosing not to develop fossil energy, either out of innate concern about climate change or because they expect such industries to be in decline as the world decarbonizes.

For example, Greenland has banned oil exploration and Quebec’s government rejected a $14 billion LNG export project.

A few examples don’t make a trend, and enormous investments in fossil fuels continue to be made. At the same time, every noble example provides a case that can be raised with politicians who say action is impossible or that nobody will do it. If countries like Canada which have become rich on a high-carbon trajectory and which maintain excessively high per capita emissions continue to refuse to decarbonize we perpetuate a global suicide pact in which we all end up with ruin because each jurisdiction scrambled to pull in as much fossil cash as possible beforehand.

Will Trudeau gamble on a 2021 election?

For weeks, the press has been full of reports about a potential election, with the Trudeau Liberals potentially hoping to replace the 147 seat minority which he won in the 2019 election with another majority like in 2015.

Speculation has reached the point that a prominent potential Liberal candidate has told the media that he won’t be running this time because of other commitments.

There is a common view that the ongoing implosion of the Green Party may be part of the rationale for going to the polls.

Presumably, Trudeau’s team at the Prime Minister’s Office has encouraging interal voter models, since they have allowed widespread speculation on an election and encouraged it with the traditional statements that the current Parliament isn’t working. Nonetheless, it may be a risky prospect. A Nanos poll found that only 26% of Canadians want an election. Furthermore, there is good cause to worry about another big new wave of COVID cases as protective restrictions are scaled back, people change their behaviour, and variants continue to spread within populations around the world where far too many people have refused vaccinations in the places where they are available. That could leave the government punished on both sides, first from those who support strong public health policies and feel let down by the government’s willingness to contain the pandemic, and also from the mega-libertarian crowd who have hated the precautions which have been taken and will rage if they are reimposed.

From a climate change perspective, it’s hard to know what to hope for. The Liberal government’s climate change policies have been deeply inadequate and sometimes counterproductive (insisting that fossil fuel development can continue, building long-lived infrastructure to that effect, refusing to set targets that are within the time period where the government will be accountable and which are compatible with a 1.5–2.0 ˚C limit and Canada’s fair share). The Conservatives would clearly be worse, as a central part of their pitch is dismantling the carbon pricing system which has been the Liberals’ main contribution with some notion of wooly support for technological development, The NDP and Greens might theoretically be better but (a) they can’t win given first-past-the-post and the preferences of Canadians and (b) it’s not clear their climate change policies would be better. The NDP has been perhaps the most inconsistent party, torn both by anti-environmentalist union sentiment and the party’s hope of replacing the Liberals on the centre-left, making them chiefly critics of that party. The Greens have far too little support to plausibly form a government, and tend to be riven anyway by campaigns to posture for moral purity. Ironically — at a time when people are opening up to the idea that climate change is the defining challenge of our time — the focus of the Greens is elsewhere.

Perhaps the best outcome would be an election that produces little change: a similar seat count, another Liberal minority, and a continued need to cooperate with other parties to stay in power. There is a case that a majority would let them act more boldly on climate, but I would say there is a stronger case that having to maintain support from other parties pushes them to do more than their status quo backers in the finance and resource industries would prefer.

Wet bulb temperatures and human death

The many human impacts of climate change are complex and often indirect, like how warmer winters in the mountains affect downstream agriculture. The most direct possible effects — however — have been on display in the brutal heat waves on the west coast, as well as elsewhere in the world.

CNN recently published an editorial by Ban Ki-moon and Patrick Verkooijen on the most direct imaginable way in which increased global temperatures can bring harm upon people:

Sweltering temperatures have become the norm in Jacobabad, a town of around 200,000 inhabitants in Pakistan’s Indus Valley that has become one of the hottest places on earth. Temperatures can top 126 degrees Fahrenheit and air conditioning is scarce, leaving the streets deserted and forcing farmers to till their fields at night.

The city, along with Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates, has temporarily crossed the threshold beyond which the human body cannot sweat enough to cool itself down. A “wet bulb” temperature of 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) — which factors both heat and relative humidity — can be fatal after a few hours, even assuming ideal conditions such as unlimited drinking water, inactivity or shade. In practice, the bar for this wet bulb temperature, which is measured by covering a thermometer with a wet cloth, is much lower — as shown by the deadly heat waves in Europe in 2003 that are estimated to have claimed 70,000 lives.

Our most basic biological function and a prerequisite and definition of life is the ability to maintain stable conditions inside the body compatible with the needs of our physiology and biochemistry; homeostasis is the term for maintaining internal conditions, and if you don’t have it you’re literally dead.

We’re already artificially coping with places which are literally unliveable without air conditioning, from scorching cities around the Persian Gulf to Phoenix and Las Vegas, which are also profoundly threatened by the loss of winter snowpack and lost river volume and reliability.

Canada submits new 2030 climate target

Canada is now promising the UN that it will cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2030.

The government says emissions are already set to fall from 729 million tonnes (MT) in 2018 (the last year with final figures) to 468 MT by 2030.

Canada’s choice of a 2005 baseline sets it apart from the global standard of setting targets compared to 1990 emissions as required by the UNFCCC reporting guidelines, effectively forgiving 15 years in which bitumen sands output and Canadian GHG pollution rose substantially. Canada’s emissions rose from 600 MT to 747 MT between 1990 and 2005.

Linkages between the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and contention elsewhere

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Rashid Khalidi argues:

Israel’s apologists in Washington, London, and Berlin naturally trotted out the standard clichés about Israel’s right to self-defense, but they could not mask the changing tone both in the political arena and in the large demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. For perhaps the first time, public discourse in all four of those countries (which share legacies of dispossessing indigenous peoples) featured discussion of the settler colonialist nature of generations of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Activists reinforced parallels to the oppression highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement, and many young Americans now connect the injustice they have seen in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, to what they saw in Sheikh Jarrah and other locales where security forces use the same U.S.-manufactured tear gas and the same militarized policing tactics.

…

Terms that were never employed in the past about Israel, such as “systemic racism,” “Jewish supremacy,” “settler colonialism,” and “apartheid,” are being debated and becoming part of U.S. and left-wing Israeli public conversations.

While it is far from my area of expertise and specialization, I do watch the media coverage on Israel’s ongoing inability to resolve a conflict between being Zionist, being democratic, and holding all the land they have.

It also crops up in intersectional climate change activism, which is based around the idea that each injustice should be understood alongside each other, and that strategies for resolving them all simultaneously should be pursued. Campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) campaigns have often experienced internal conflicts about whether it is strategic or ethically obligatory for them to express solidarity with Palestinians and condemnation for Israeli conduct. Oftentimes, this involves a discussion of whether Israel’s critics are antisemitic — one argument used to condemn and reject the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement intent on applying external pressure to Israel. This has been at the heart of recent ructions in Canada’s federal Green Party.

On the other side, those who are critical about linking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with issues like environmental protection see the debate as absorbing a lot of time and energy for little purpose. There’s little or no prospect that any statement by environmentalists will affect Israeli government conduct. Some would say the effort to link these conflicts stems from a desire for a feeling of personal moral purity among activists, rather than an assessment of what impact their actions could really have. As the catastrophic momentum and severity of climate change continue to worsen, there is a fair case to be made that we need to focus on the issue and not be diverted down unproductive tracks. Indeed, if some nefarious pro-fossil outfit wanted a strategy for distracting progressives from a focused and effective call for fossil fuel abolition, stirring up arguments about notional but passionately held disagreements in which those arguing have little or no actual influence would seem to be a sound strategy.

The insurance industry as a leverage point for fighting climate change

One of the revelations about fighting climate change that seems to have echoed broadly since 350.org started the fossil fuel divestment movement is the degree to which the industry can be suppressed by denying it access to financial services.

That includes denying it the ability to borrow from banks and institutional investors, who are increasingly concerned both about the reputational risk of supporting a world-wrecking industry and the financial risk of contributing to new fossil fuel projects which will need to be shut down to avoid worst-case climate change scenarios.

It also includes the insurance industry. To begin with, they face enormous financial risks from climate change impacts as diverse as rising sea levels, extreme storms, and wildfires. The concept of insurance is that the premiums are reasonable because things won’t go wrong for everyone at the same time; you can get affordable fire insurance, for instance, because in most cases the insurer can be confident that only a small fraction of insured properties will burn each year. That calculation changes when climate change coordinates risks for billions around the world, whether that’s coastal property at risk to rising seas and hurricanes or towns in wildfire zones that now face an existential risk every time there is a bad fire season. With those kinds of risks now evident, it’s unsurprising that the insurance industry is expressing concern and calling for action.

In addition to those insured against climate change risks, insurance is also necessary for fossil fuel project proponents. That leverage point is being made use of by anti-pipeline activists in B.C. who are pushing for insurers to refuse to cover the Trans Mountain pipeline:

Over the course of the week, Indigenous rights and climate activists from Vancouver to Kiribati to Sierra Leone called on Liberty Mutual, Chubb, AIG, W.R. Berkley, Lloyd’s of London, Starr, Stewart Specialty Risk Underwriting, and Marsh to publicly pledge to refrain from doing any future business with the project.

…

Argo, one of the companies that currently insures Trans Mountain, recently confirmed it will not cover the pipeline or its expansion project, which would carry an extra 590,000 barrels of oil a day from the Alberta oilsands to British Columbia. Since then, two other insurance companies that had previously insured Trans Mountain but are not current insurers, Scor and Lancashire, have cut ties too.

No doubt this will lead to howls from pro-fossil entities, but in the long run blocking these projects has the promise of avoiding massive further investment in unusable energy.

The fossil fuel industry has been able to impose as much harm on the world as it has because there haven’t been mechanisms to make it care about the losses being suffered by others. If that freeloading dynamic changes, the world will have a better chance of avoiding climate catastrophe. Insurers can play an important role in driving the shift.