PAKISTAN

Country’s first Media Impunity Index to track crimes against journalists

The Newspaper's Staff Reporter 

Published November 1, 2024 

DAWN

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s first-ever Media Impunity Index, which evaluates progress in combating impunity in crimes against journalists at the federal and provincial levels, was unveiled on Thursday as stakeholders expressed concern over multiple targeted killings of journalists and media practitioners in 2024.

Launched by Freedom Network at an event held in connection with International Day to End Impunity (IDEI), which falls on Nov 2, the index measures various aspects, such as policy initiatives, legislative actions and the establishment of protective mechanisms for journalists.

“While the federal and Sindh governments have made significant progress in passing safety laws for journalists, a critical shortcoming remains: the legislations have failed to establish the functioning safety commissions necessary to implement the laws,” a press release said.

The Index puts Sindh government on top with nine points out of 10 on progress while the federal government eight points. Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa score just two points each for managing to produce draft laws on journalists’ safety and basic consultations among stakeholders. Punjab scores just one point — the lowest ranking among the provinces.


Freedom Network reports six cases of targeted killings, 57 ‘violations’ in 2024

According to the report, there were several instances during 2024 when various courts — including district courts, high courts and the apex court — came to the rescue of journalists charged under various offences, often by state actors, serving as a silver lining over dark clouds that hand over journalists and other media practitioners.

Dangerous year

The year 2024 proved to no different for journalists, as it witnessed six casualties of media practitioners, including a YouTuber, and 57 violations recorded, with provinces doing little to end impunity for crimes against media and its practitioners, according to Freedom Network’s Impunity Report 2024.






The report notes that the federal and Sindh provincial laws have not been able to protect journalists and revealed alarming statistics — 11 assassination attempts, including five murders of journalists and a digital media practitioner, that occurred between November 2023 and August 2024.

At least 57 violations, including threats, assaults, and legal harassment, were also recorded during the reporting period.

“Despite the enactment of Sindh Protection of Journalists and Other Media Practitioners Bill, 2021, and the federal Protection of Journalist and Media Professional Act, 2021, both the federal and Sindh governments have failed to enforce these laws, leaving journalists vulnerable without any use of the legal framework protections,” Freedom Network Executive Director Iqbal Khattak said while launching the report.

“The lack of political will and resources to enforce special laws for protection of journalists is keeping the situation dangerous for journalists in Pakistan,” he said.

According to the report, in the year under review, Sindh was on top of the list where most violations were recorded (37pc or 21 out of 57 cases including three murders) followed by Punjab where 23pc violations (13 cases) were recorded.

Related

Pakistani journalists continue to pay high price for free speech as 2023 marks another tough year

Islamabad was the third most dangerous area for journalists in the year with 21pc violations (12 cases). Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was fourth with 12pc (seven cases including murders of two tribal journalists) while Balochistan recorded 3.5pc violations (two cases).

TV journalists faced the brunt of these cases — 30 in total which amount to 53pc followed by print media with 35pc cases while digital journalists 10pc and radio journalists 2pc faced different kinds of threats during the reporting period.

Women made up nine per cent of the journalists who faced such threats.

The report also identified threat actors allegedly involved in these cases. These included government authorities (47pc) followed by political parties (12pc) and miscellaneous identified actors (16pc). Unknown actors stood at 25pc.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2024

PAKISTAN

TikToker held for false claims in Lahore college ‘rape case’

The Newspaper's Staff Reporter 

Published November 1, 2024

 DAWN

LAHORE: The Organised Crime Unit (OCU) of Lahore police on Thursday arrested a woman TikToker who had claimed to be the mother of the alleged ‘rape victim’ of Punjab College.

She was arrested on charges of making a false claim and inciting public sentiment against the government authorities, urging the people to mobilise for street demonstrations.

The OCU Model Town police acted following a case lodged against her with the Gulberg police station after the woman, Sara Khan, recorded a TikTok video and uploaded it on the social media which went viral, creating another round of controversy over the alleged rape case as the matter was already in the limelight, provoking the students for violent agitation.

OCU DIG Imran Kishwar told Dawn that a special police team arrested the woman on Thursday when she went to Lahore High Court to get bail in another case lodged against her by the cyber crime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

He said the police teams were in search of the TikToker following a case registered against her on the complaint of Gulberg police sub-inspector Mohammad Imran under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (PECA) Act, 2016 and other charges. He said as Sara Khan was nominated in the FIR after the controversial video disseminated rapidly across social media platforms, showcasing the anonymous woman who posited an alarming assertion that the female student from the Punjab College, who allegedly fell victim to a heinous act of sexual assault, was her daughter.

During the investigation process, the DIG said, the woman was ascertained to be Sara Khan, a resident of Karachi with her permanent address in Multan.

Following the sensitivity of the matter, the Punjab government had formed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to conduct the probe.

Model Town OCU SP Aftab Phularwan was the convener of the JIT while other members included DSP Faisal Shareef, woman inspector Fiza and one each representative from Intelligence Bureau and FIA.

Mr Kishwar said the arrested TikToker has been handed over to the JIT for further investigation.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2024

TikTok bandits terrorise, transfix Katcha lands

Online gangs lay “honey-traps” to lure and kidnap victims, parade hostages in clips, exhibit weapon arsenals.




AFP Published November 1, 2024

With a showman’s flair and an outlaw’s moustache, the Pakistani gangster dials the hotline on his own most wanted notice — taunting the authorities who put a bounty on his head.

Staring down the lens in a social media clip, Shahid Lund Baloch challenges the official on the phone and his thousands of viewers: “Do you know my circumstances or my reasons for taking up arms?”

The 28-year-old is hiding out in riverine terrain in central Punjab which has long offered refuge to bandits — using the internet to enthral citizens even as he preys on them, police say.

On TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram he fascinates tens of thousands with messages delivered gun-in-hand, romanticising his rural lifestyle and cultivating a reputation as a champion of the people.

But he is wanted for 28 cases including murder, abduction and attacks on police — with a 10 million rupee ($36,000) price on his head.

“People who are sitting on the outside think he is a hero, but the people here know he is no hero,” said Javed Dhillon, a former lawmaker for Rahim Yar Khan district close to the hideouts of Baloch, and other bandits like him.

“They have been at the receiving end of his cruelty and violence.”

This photograph taken on October 9, 2024 shows elite police personnel patrolling on a sandy island along the Indus river, in the ‘Katcha lands’ at Rahim Yar Khan district. — Arif Ali / AFP


Backwater with bandwidth

Baloch is said to dwell on a sandy island in the “Katcha lands” — roughly translating as “backwaters” — on the Indus River which skewers from top to bottom.

High-standing crops provide cover for ambushes and the region is riven by shifting seasonal waterways that complicate pursuit over crimes ranging from kidnapping to highway robbery and smuggling.

At the intersection of three of the four provinces, gangs with hundreds of members have for decades capitalised on poor coordination between police forces by flitting across jurisdictions.

“The natural features of these lands support the criminals,” said senior police officer Naveed Wahla.

“They’ll hide out in a water turbine, move in boats, or through sugarcane crops.” Sweeping police operations and even an army incursion in 2016 failed to impose law and order. This August, a rocket attack on a police convoy killed 12 officers.

“In the current state of affairs here there is only fear and terror,” said Haq Nawaz, whose adult son was abducted late September for a five million rupee ransom he cannot afford.

“There is no one to look after our wellbeing,” he complains.

In this photograph taken on October 10, 2024, Haq Nawaz, whose adult son was abducted by bandits, speaks during an interview with AFP in Rahim Yar Khan district. — Ghulam Hassan Mahar / AFP


But the gangs are increasingly online.

Some use the web to lay “honey-traps” luring kidnap victims by impersonating romantic suitors, business partners and advertising cheap sales of tractors or cars.

Some parade hostages in clips for ransom or exhibit arsenals of heavy weapons in musical TikToks.

Baloch has by far the largest online profile — irking police with a combined 200,000 followers.

Rizwan Gondal, the head police officer of Rahim Yar Khan district, says that his detectives have a dossier proving his “heinous criminal activities”.

“Police have made multiple efforts to capture him however he escapes,” he added.

“He’s a very media savvy guy. Let him say, ‘I am going to surrender before the state to prove that I am innocent’ and let the media cover it.”
‘Beloved brother bandit’

In his clips Baloch protests his innocence whilst casting himself as a vigilante in a lawless land, claiming he chose to fight only after family members were slain in tribal clashes.

“We couldn’t get justice from the courts so I decided to pick up arms and started fighting with my enemies,” Baloch told AFP.

“They killed our people, we killed theirs.” But he also plays off the cycle of state neglect which breeds banditry and in turn relegates the destitute farming communities further to society’s fringes.

“The villagers here are not viewed as human but as animals,” Baloch told AFP.

“If they gave us schools, electricity, government hospitals and justice, why would anyone even think of taking up arms?” In comments sections his viewers call him “beloved brother bandit” and a “real hero”.

“You have won my heart,” claims another.

“He is popular in the mainstream because he is giving the police authorities a tough time,” said former lawmaker Dhillon.

“People like that he says the things they can’t say out loud against people they can’t speak out against.”

This photograph taken on October 9, 2024 shows an elite police personnel monitoring security at a post on a sandy island along the Indus river, in the ‘Katcha lands’ at Rahim Yar Khan district. — Arif Ali / AFP


Robbed of followers

Police have proposed countering bandits by downgrading mobile phone towers to 2G in the Katcha lands, preventing social media apps from loading.

That has not yet happened and would risk cutting communities off further still. But more low tech solutions have had some success.

An anti-honey trap police cell cautions citizens against the gangs with the help of billboards and loudspeakers at checkpoints entering the area, preventing 531 people from falling prey since last August, according to their data.

Baloch scoffs at police. But one problem plaguing his bid for online stardom has his attention.

Copycat social media accounts pretend to be him and share duplicates of his videos — earning thousands more followers and views than his legitimate accounts.

He feels robbed. “I don’t know what they are trying to achieve,” he complains. But for police, his internet hero status is at odds with the toll of his crimes.

“People will idealise Shahid Lund Baloch but when they ultimately get kidnapped by him, then they will realise who Shahid Lund Baloch really is,” said senior officer Wahla.

Header image: This photograph taken on October 9, 2024 shows elite police personnel patrolling on a sandy island along the Indus river, in the ‘Katcha lands’ at Rahim Yar Khan district. — Arif Ali / AFP

Saving Karachi’s Oxygen Islands

Planting mangroves has become a popular CSR activity. But in our rush to tick the right box, are we actually regenerating any mangrove growth? Tariq Alexander Qaiser poses the question.

Tariq Alexander Qaiser

DAWN/AURORA

NOVEMBER 1, 2024



If a tree falls in a forest and no one is near to hear it fall, did it make a sound?

This is an old philosophical thought experiment that is still pertinent. However, in the context of mangroves and Karachi’s islands, these words do demand clarification and restructuring: If some trees in a forest are removed before they are seen by us, did those trees ever exist? Or without mincing words: If a forest is cut and the land cleared for development before it is documented, photographed, filmed, brought to the forefront on social media, or argued on national TV, was the forest ever there?

I would like to state two verifiable truths.

1 The mangroves of the Eastern Delta of the Indus River Basin, far from urban centres, are being replanted. These efforts are commendable.

2 The mangroves of the Western Delta of the Indus River Basin are being ignored. These are the mangroves near coastal cities, especially Karachi. They are being cut, removed and sold at throwaway prices. Mangrove lands are being allocated for development. Some small-scale plantation is being done sporadically and then often broadcasted with fanfare.

A tree intact on Bundal Island, October 2019

Which conversation is a fact, and which part of the fact is the critical truth? Which words were spoken in the broadcasts and which were not used or voiced?

To provide context, let me illustrate through these perplexing comparative statements: Mangroves were planted by us, versus mangroves were planted by us on land in a garden away from salt water, above the level of tides, away from their natural habitat.

The first question and these statements are not rhetorical or hypothetical. They are based upon current verifiable happenings and illustrate the schism between perception and reality.

Understanding the nexus between the perceived and the real is important in the understanding of our own life, personal existence, presence and future on this Earth.

Accepting any stimuli or information received without questioning and analytical thought leads to misperception and a belief in a reality that may not be correct. Today’s assault of fake, moulded or selected news is on an epidemic scale. Additionally, our addiction to the rush of dopamine through social media is changing the way we accept information and is reflected in the way facts are presented. The format of images shown, the words that are written and spoken, and the auditory tones and sounds broadcast are all designed to move us.

The philosophy of perceptions has been discussed since humans have had sentient abilities, and the skills learnt have been used to influence human thought. The tools available today are training us to receive vast volumes of information, see it fast, and perceive it on an epidermal-sensationalist level. But, unfortunately, without any requirement of deep understanding. That incredible resource, the Internet, has profound information; we just need to selectively seek it from multiple, responsible sites and think about it. We know about the need to replant our mangroves. We witness them being planted. We are rightfully happy when we see wonderful, valid statements in the media claiming that mangroves are being planted, the carbon credit business is successful, and the environment is benefiting. These facts are correct. But questions need to be asked, and information needs to be analysed and thought about.

I would like to elaborate on the previous statement. Mangroves for carbon credits are being planted substantially and successfully in what I call the Eastern Delta. This is in the estuaries east of the Port Qasim channel.

The carbon credit business is in full momentum around Keti Bandar and Shah Bandar, and it is generating profit. If these mangrove plantations are monitored, nurtured and protected and if the dying saplings are not replanted, only approximately 30% will grow into a community of trees – into mangrove forests. This will take a few decades. The environment will benefit substantially, but only when these forests grow and mature. Funds will be required to pay for manpower, technical skills, fuel for boats, and the costs of independent monitoring organisations to oversee this critical activity. These funds and organisations are as yet to be identified and allocated. They are not part of a long-term financial plan. The success of mangrove replantation depends on the growth of these saplings into a forest, and not just on the plantation drive and the ledger of accounts recording the number of seedlings put into the ground.

We see posts about the effort and push towards planting mangroves. This has become a popular and valuable CSR activity. This is a good thing. The taglines of photographs of happy faces of known good people proclaim with pride their role played in helping to mitigate climate change. The smiling faces are sometimes looking at planted seedlings within circular planting beds, surrounded by lush green lawns. Terrestrial sweet water gardens are planted with intertidal plant life that needs salt water.

Cut trees being transported, Bundal Island in 2019

There are other photographs of colourfully dressed local women smiling and squatting on a non-saline riverine clay surface that is parched and cracked due to a lack of water. The image shows them placing plastic-covered tubes of soil with mangrove seedlings, with the plastic wrapper still intact around it, and planting in the ground. These images are intended as a reference to project delivery – a give-back to the environment and responsibility towards the community. The intent may be laudable. However, we are all witnesses to the evidence of a lack of inquiry into what the reality of environmental needs is for the task at hand versus the desired perceptions of what the act of planting has achieved.

I would like to think this is a misinformed act, and it is most certainly misperceived by many as positive. The resources for information are available. The right questions just need to be asked. Curiosity, research, learning, skill and training need to be valued and sought.

This methodology is much needed. Especially for governmental and nongovernmental institutions, large corporations, and businesses. Planting mangroves is important. But without a willingness to understand the requirements of an obligate halophyte – the mangrove – and the ecosystem it will grow in, this effort can only be seen as greenwashing and the ticking of boxes on corporate forms. Mangroves are intertidal plants; they need the twice-daily ebb and flow of saltwater tides to live, grow and thrive.

Mangroves should not be planted in gardens on terrestrial land or in sweet water riverine flood plains that see water only in gaps of months or years.

Unfortunately, photographic evidence shows otherwise. Well-intentioned actions undertaken without knowledge, or the acceptance of advice without question or thought, or for the sake of convenience, or simply to keep the shoes of donor-observers unsoiled, can lead to misrepresentation. Let me be clear: If mangroves are planted where they cannot survive, it is a falsehood to claim benefit from the climate crisis. At the end of the day, the seeds we plant need to be able to grow and thrive for our future and our children’s future, not to mention our own zamir (conscience).

Reality and the perceived real can be very different. Perceptions are rooted in one’s personal point of view and in the sensory abilities that each distinct species has. Yes, rhetoric allows for the ambiguities of the perspective of the absolute. However, there do exist some truths that are not dictated by perceptions.

Global warming and its fallout, climate change, is not just a perceptual reality. It is empirical, quantifiable and present. The resulting changes are being felt globally, and especially in Pakistan. Glacial melt and the changing patterns of rainfall storms are resulting in the flooding and devastation of communities. Runoff of fertile soil, waterlogging, and rising terrestrial salinity are impacting our ability to provide food for ourselves, let alone for other countries. Rising sea levels and the warming of the ocean’s surface have already started and coastal communities and cities will see climate migration. Species change is already present; we are in the sixth mass extinction of life on this Earth. Our untreated pollution is flowing unabated into our seas. The organic and chemical toxins are changing the biology and botany of our waters. Solid plastic waste is not only a danger to our marine life but is also a catalyst for increasing the temperature of the water surface. This has escalated within my lifespan. I am pained to be witnessing it. These are empirical facts.

We are at risk. However, efforts in localised areas can still help mitigate some of the extreme effects of global warming. Attempts to change the microclimates of localities need to be undertaken urgently. Our mountains need to be reforested, the riverbeds and flood plains of our Indus River and its tributaries need to be replanted, and our cities need parks and avenues of trees, with the rooftops covered in plants. Our saline farmlands require halophytes planted on them; our vast delta needs to be revived. Nature-based solutions by locals in localised areas are required on an ongoing basis if our communities and culture are to survive.

Bundal Island in 2022

The first imperative step for the delta in southern Pakistan is the plantation of halophytes to revive biodiversity. Halophytes are plants that grow in the presence of saltwater or brackish water. Mangroves are a species called obligate halophytes, and they require salt to survive. Their roots need to be exposed to both air and salt-infused water. They are intertidal and grow on the coast, in the zone between the low and high tide levels. They are not terrestrial (land-based) plants.

The Sindh Forest Department, especially the office of the Conservator of Forests, Mangroves, is doing seminal work in the reforestation and biodiversity revival of our delta. The carbon credit market has given their work a boost. One has to appreciate it when business enterprise facilitates the regeneration of nature. However, if the protection, monitoring, and nurturing of the new plantations as previously mentioned is not implemented, this revival is at risk.

The Indus River Delta spans about 6,000 square kilometres across, and about 93% of this is in the Eastern Delta, and parts of this vast area are slated for replantation. Commendable.

However, this section of the delta has very little river water flowing into it, due to barrages and dams built upstream. Consequently, the pH of the water here is less than ideal, except when upstream flooding happens. This results in slow growth of saplings into trees and about two-thirds of the newly planted atrophy. They need to be replaced, and all need to be protected.

The remaining seven percent is the Western Delta. These are the islands of Karachi. The growth of mangroves here is faster and more profuse. This is because of the outflow of wastewater from our coastal cities. I have personally photographed and am witness to Avicenna Marina Mangrove forests with canopy heights above 50 feet. The trees on these islands are being cut. The tall canopies I photographed in 2012 are gone, and the current height of the mangroves on Bundal Island is now only in the range of 20 to 25 feet. In 2021, due to the disturbance and sound of chainsaws, the flamingos migrated to other areas, and Brahmini kites had to leave for a lack of tall trees to nest on.

These low-lying alluvial deltic islands made of shifting sands were slated for industrial and residential high-rise development. These islands, where almost 60% of the sandbanks are flooded by the ocean twice a day, would have required a retaining seawall of about 13 feet above low tide sea level. Imported or dredged infill for the 24-kilometre square of Bundal Island alone would have been needed. The longshore drift currents along our coast erode and reshape these islands constantly, and the seawalls require constant rebuilding. The unaffordable high initial capital investment and continuous expenditure to reconstruct the shores would literally be carried away by the sea. I can only be thankful that these plans do not seem to be progressing.

Karachi has been blessed with this natural resource, our island’s mangrove forests. Even if we just protect them from being cut and allow the seeds to propagate naturally, without being trampled, within a 15-year period we will have vast forests of oxygen-producing mangroves upwind to Karachi. This is the time to push for and implement marine protected areas, and protected nature reserves on our islands. Especially Bundal Island and Khiprianwala Island. Our city needs these forests to be here for ourselves and our children’s future.

Tariq Alexander Qaiser is an architect and environmentalist. His YouTube channel is Edge of Delta. edgeofdelta@gmail.com

Join DawnMedia’s Breathe Pakistan initiative to combat climate change.

New Delhi chokes in smog after firework ban flouted
AFP Published November 1, 2024

A security personnel rides past the India gate amid smoggy conditions after Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, in New Delhi on Nov 1, 2024. — Arun Sankar/AFP

India’s capital New Delhi was wreathed in poisonous smog Friday, with air pollution worsening after a fireworks ban was widely flouted for raucous celebrations for the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali.

New Delhi’s traffic-clogged streets are home to more than 30 million people, and the city is regularly ranked as one of the most polluted urban areas on the planet.

The city is blanketed in cancer-causing acrid smog each year, primarily blamed on stubble burning by farmers in neighbouring regions to clear their fields for ploughing, as well as factories and traffic fumes.

But air worsened Friday after a thunderous night of firecrackers lit as part of Diwali celebrations, despite city authorities last month banning their sale and use.

‘Stilted response’

City police had seized nearly two tonnes of fireworks before Diwali, but the crackers remained readily available for sale in neighbouring states.

Many residents celebrated at home, holding a family meal and lighting small candles in praise of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi and symbolising the victory of light over darkness.

Others launched firework rockets and booming crackers, rocking the densely packed city throughout the night.

Revellers light fireworks during the celebrations to mark Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, in New Delhi on Oct 31, 2024. — Sajjad Hussain/AFP

Police are often reluctant to act against violators, given the strong religious sentiments attached to the crackers by Hindu devotees.

Critics say arguments between rival politicians heading neighbouring states — as well as between central and state-level authorities — have compounded the problem.

India’s Supreme Court last month ruled that clean air was a fundamental human right, ordering both the central government and state-level authorities to take action.

“Delhi’s toxic air is killing us softly with its smog,” the Times of India wrote in an editorial last week, as the winter pollution returned.

“It is nothing new, but what doesn’t cease to amaze, year after year, is the state’s stilted response.”

‘Lack of resolve’

Levels of fine particulate matter — dangerous microparticles known as PM2.5 pollutants that enter the bloodstream through the lungs — surged to more than 23 times the World Health Organisation recommended daily maximum.

Soon after dawn, pollutant levels topped 345 micrograms per cubic metre, according to monitoring firm IQAir, which listed air in the sprawling megacity as “hazardous”.

It rated New Delhi as worst in the world, just above smoke-choked Lahore, 400 kilometres (250 miles) to the northwest.

A cyclist wearing a mask gestures near the India gate amid smoggy conditions after Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, in New Delhi on Nov 1, 2024. — Arun Sankar/AFP

The New Delhi government has previously sought to cut pollution by restricting vehicle traffic, including a scheme that only allowed cars with odd or even number licence plates to travel on alternate days.

Authorities have also imposed seasonal bans on construction work and on diesel-powered vehicles from entering the city.

“The gravity of the problem is such that incremental changes are insufficient,” The Indian Express wrote, criticising “an unfortunate lack of resolve from both the centre and state governments. “

Shared crisis

DAWN
Editorial 

Published November 1, 2024 


WITH Lahore experiencing unprecedented levels of smog, the Punjab government has announced a series of “green lockdowns” in the city’s identified smog hotspots. These measures include limiting construction, banning open-air barbecues, restricting high-emission vehicles, and mandating early closures for marriage halls. While such actions reflect commendable intent, air quality experts argue they fall short, especially given Lahore’s recent AQI readings, which peaked at 708. The WHO recommended maximum for healthy air is 50. The situation poses grave respiratory and cardiovascular risks to vulnerable populations, besides causing reduced productivity. The chief minister’s appeal for cross-border cooperation with Indian Punjab offers a pragmatic approach. Pollutant-carrying winds know no borders and collaboration is essential to address this shared crisis. Both sides must implement stricter emission controls and engage in joint monitoring efforts to better manage smog.

Crop stubble burning exacerbates this challenge. Despite fines and arrests of farmers on both sides of the border, limited field-clearing alternatives force many to continue this practice. Efforts by India to subsidise residue management machinery like super-seeders are a step forward, yet the outreach and affordability of these options are inadequate. Real, sustainable support for farmers is necessary, encompassing access to affordable equipment, training, and incentives. Moreover, the government should focus on building a robust network of air quality monitoring stations, especially given the inconsistencies in current AQI reporting. Expanding Lahore’s green cover through more urban forests would also play a significant role in combating air pollution long-term. Additionally, accelerating the transition to clean energy, subsidising EVs, and enhancing public transport could make substantial differences. At the same time, an extensive public awareness campaign on reducing individual contributions to smog — such as minimising the use of private vehicles and avoiding open-air fires — can bolster efforts in tackling the threat. Only unified action can lift the smog choking our future.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2024

In America’s gripping political chess game, what is really at stake?

As Harris and Trump go head to head in November, the fate of Empire hangs in the balance.

Faiq Zafar 

DAWN

Published November 1, 2024 

Said Lord Byron famously, “While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls — the world.”

As America’s high-octane presidential race makes inroads into its final stretch, it invokes many of Byron’s apocalyptic overtones.

“In this election, your freedom, your democracy, and America itself is at stake,” Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris said at an event in Greensboro, North Carolina. “This is the one. The most existential, consequential, and important election of our lifetime.”

As they brace for the great November showdown, Democrats have garnished their political rhetoric with similar allusions to the apocalypse should Trump take the White House in November. Of course, these clichéd talking-points don’t really explain some of the truly damning developments in their own camp. And there have been quite a few.

One such moment came gunning for Harris as she interacted with voters at a supermarket in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she was asked to comment on an endorsement she had recently received.

In a move that had flabbergasted political pundits, journalists, and voters alike, former vice-president Dick Cheney, once vilified by Democrats, backed Harris for the top job, putting his weight behind a campaign he initially seemed to share little common ground with. Surprising still was a visibly excited Harris celebrating Cheney’s endorsement as if he was Santa Claus:

“I am honoured to have their endorsement. I think that leaders who are well-respected are making an important statement. (That) it’s okay to put country above party.”

The “well-respected” leader in question is the decorated and unapologetic architect of the illegal Iraq War, a self-described ‘Darth Vader’ who notoriously signed off on the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ [read torture] programme, is liable for prosecution under every anti-torture and war crime statute known to man, and who, during his tenure under the Bush administration, crossed off murderous atrocities against the Global South like items off a grocery list. For Harris, however, there’s more to a person than the war crimes they commit.

At the time of writing, Harris is currently touring the country with his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, in a bid to tap into the conservative GoP base.

Democrat VP Kamala Harris campaigns alongside former Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) in Ripon, Wisconsin. Source: NPR

Arriving on the heels of more than 200 Republican endorsements, the Cheneys’ patronage of the Harris/ Walz ticket signals the latest development in a wider pattern of explicit bipartisan reshuffling, the likes of which Washington has seldom seen before. Legacy conservatives like the Bush family, Mike Pence, Stephanie Grisham, Olivia Troy, Geoff Duncan, and Jeff Flake, to name a few, have disavowed a second Trump presidency as a ‘unique threat to democracy’, thereby accentuating a burgeoning chasm within the GoP camp.

In a country where bipartisan consensus on any given issue is generally inconceivable, Republicans and Democrats have banded together amidst hollow slogans of ‘Country Above Party’ in unprecedented fashion, hoping to insulate the Oval Office from Donald Trump by any means necessary. To this end, nothing is off-limits. Goalposts will shift, ideologies and dogmas, hitherto uncompromisable, will be forsaken, bitter adversaries shall embrace like star crossed lovers, and once impregnable party lines shall be permeated with relative ease.

People who view the labyrinth that is American politics through a partisan lens don’t know how to make sense of these glaring contradictions. They tend to perceive these shifts as occasional glitches in a political simulation underpinned largely by a two-party system.

Thus, they are confused when more than 700 current and former national security officials from either side of the political aisle flock to endorse Harris as someone with the “temperament and values needed to serve as commander-in-chief”. They are bewildered at how politicians who profess to stand for global peace and prosperity, human rights, and individual liberty, bring themselves to ally with imperial hawks like the Cheneys, the Clintons, and the Bushs.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

For political theorist and professor at the University of Chicago, Dr John Mearsheimer, such people miss the forest for the trees. Per Mearsheimer, the segmentation of American politics into a Republican and Democratic orientation is a game of smoke and mirrors — a remnant of a bygone era in American political life.

“I like to refer to the Republicans and the Democrats as Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” he said in a panel discussion with economist and Columbia professor, Dr Jeffery Sachs. “There is hardly any difference between the two parties.”

For many, this taps into a kind of Jungian dream — it reinforces something about America most people have known to be true for the longest time, but just didn’t quite know they knew it yet. Take for instance, the presidency of Democratic sweetheart Barack Obama. Voted into power amidst slogans of hope and change, Obama’s campaign had vowed to do away with many of the ills that had plagued the Bush years. However, incessant GoP filibustering ensured much of Obama’s domestic agenda never saw the light of day. Not only was the President unable to get many of his innocuous appointees into office, Republicans relentlessly impeded progress on issues like immigration reform, minimum wage increases, gun reform, climate change, and any domestic issue that would have aided in the real life amelioration of the American working class.

The GoP obstruction, however, did not seem to stop Obama from picking up the threads on many of his predecessor’s more controversial policies, all of which he had spent an entire campaign run deriding.

The Obama years saw citizens liquidated without due process, prisoners detained without charge, dragnet surveillance on the American people, and unprecedented witch-hunts against federal employees through the Insider Threat Programme.

Obama also spearheaded an increasingly deceptive recovery of the stock market after the 2008 financial crash, during which individual stock ownership plummeted to record lows, while cash-rich corporations lined their pockets via stock-buybacks. National economic inequality skyrocketed, GDP growth outran wage growth, and Wall Street remained unreformed, creating highly leveraged markets which were increasingly susceptible to breakdowns.

On the foreign policy front, Obama, who had run on the promise of putting an end to Bush’s forever wars, orchestrated regime change operations in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, without so much as a peep from the adversarial Republicans that packed both Houses of Congress. When it came to capitulating to the status quo, Obama’s answer was always, “Yes We Can!”

A relatively unknown Obama embraces superstardom at the 2004 DNC keynote address. Source: Politico.com

To the uninitiated, this bipartisan convergence on issues of international governance, economics, and war but never on domestic issues like healthcare, infrastructure, gun reform, and education would appear to be somewhat of a random coincidence. But Mearsheimer’s thesis points to a larger pattern at play — a deeper collusion than what meets the eye.

If this hypothesis does hold true, and the Republican/ Democrat divide is just mere political theatre, what is it about Trump specifically that disrupts this script? What remarkable threat does he pose that makes him such an anathema to the American political class?
Pied Piper

Trump first burst onto the political scene in 2015 as little more than a second-generation plutocrat with a discernable last name, a flamboyant flair for showmanship, and no political experience save for an ill-advised interest in Obama’s birth certificate. His initial bid for the presidency commanded little, if any respect, least of all from his eventual rival, Hillary Clinton.

In a leaked memo published by Wikileaks, it was in fact Clinton who intentionally orchestrated the elevation and propulsion of Donald Trump to the party nomination as part of what she termed the “Pied Piper” strategy — a concerted effort by the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to deliberately encourage media coverage of far-right Republican candidates, such as Donald Trump, in the Republican primary. The prevailing theory was that these candidates — seen as extreme or unelectable — would be easier for Clinton to defeat in a general election.


Leaked memo by the Clinton campaign calling for the implementation of the ‘Pied Piper’ strategy in 2015. Source: WikiLeaks



Few things in history have backfired with such ferocity. Not only had the Clinton campaign grossly miscalculated just how despised Hillary was to an enormous chunk of the American population, the timing of the strategy did not do the campaign any favours. 2016 was a turbulent time in American history. The forever wars, the 2008 financial crash, and the advent of the culture wars had pushed America to the brink of political exhaustion. In a climate sullied by such volatility, the ‘Pied Piper’ strategy essentially sought to put out fire by drenching it in gasoline, and up until this point, Trump was actually the DNC’s accelerant of choice.

Fast forward to 2024 and the same DNC now assails him as a parousia of Hitler, a “threat to our democracy in a way we have not seen,” as per Harris’ running mate Tim Walz during the vice-presidential debate on October 1. Of course, Walz’s derision of Trump would demand a lot more credibility had he not been running on the same ticket as Kamala Harris, who secured the party nomination in what can only be described as a blatant disregard for democratic procedure at best, and a palace coup orchestrated within the party’s elite ranks, at worst.

Widely regarded as one of the most unpopular vice-presidents in American history with a dismal favourability rating of 16 per cent as of June 2024, Kamala was nobody’s first choice to lead the Democratic presidential bid. When President Joe Biden was forced to withdraw from the race in July following an embarrassing night on the debate stage, he merely passed the baton to Harris, snubbing the conventional primary process wholesale. Harris then relied on the elite cadre in the Democratic Party to garnish her nomination with the requisite legitimacy. A candidate whose unpopularity rendered her unable to secure a single delegate in the 2020 primaries now leads the Democratic party ticket in 2024, bypassing any primary polling whatsoever.

Eight years on from the Pied Piper strategy, what danger does a political outsider like Trump pose to the Democratic establishment for them to feel compelled into such extremities?

When Trump took the national stage against Clinton in 2016, his populist, ultra-nationalist rhetoric against immigrants, Muslims, women, minorities, and people of colour was not only expected, it was welcomed by a DNC which saw his far-right slants as easy conquest for a relatively moderate Clinton.

However, often the most dangerous lies are those interspersed with the truth. In a political masterstroke that eventually killed Hillary’s presidential aspirations, Trump punctuated his radical outbursts and far-right jingoism with something far more potent. Americans were angry. And Trump showed them exactly who to blame. His cries of ‘Drain the Swamp’ (“swamp” being a metaphor for entrenched political interests) instantly appealed to an enraged conservative mob that had found itself relegated to the peripheries of globalisation for far too long.

His characterisation of Washington as a corrupt cesspool of self-serving careerists carved him more than 304 electoral votes amidst a political storm no one predicted. In a bid for political relevance, Trump’s populism inadvertently tapped into something astoundingly powerful. Was he merely throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks? Or did he inadvertently stumble upon some kind of fourth wall?

Democrats have branded Trump’s rhetoric as the unhinged chauvinism of a power-hungry populist bent on destroying America’s democratic infrastructure. Such terms of endearment, however, are hardly surprising. In American political lore, the deep state has largely occupied a kind of mythological status, an enigma akin to that of the Loch Ness monster. Questions about its existence rarely evoke a serious answer, whistleblower accounts are laughed off as heresy, and any analysis with respect to its existence rarely breaks into the news cycle. Beneath the deflections and the distractions, the veneers and the illusions, the pertinent question remains: is the deep state real?
The Loch Ness monster of Washington

October 16, 1962 — a day that has lived on in America’s public consciousness in infamy. At 8:45am on a chilly autumn morning, a pajama-clad John F Kennedy breezed through a copy of the Washington Post when he was interrupted by a flustered McGeorge Bundy. The national security adviser apprised the 45-year-old president of an ominous escalation in the Cold War: photographic evidence from U2 flight missions over Cuba had unearthed Soviet nuclear-tipped missile installations in secret launch sites across the island, setting into motion a geopolitical chess game that would later claim notoriety as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In frenzied cabinet Room deliberations, panic-stricken members of Kennedy’s inner circle locked horns on what the best response to Khurshchev’s betrayal might look like. All diplomatic gloves had come off, and the iron fist dictated the order of the day. Secretary of State Dean Rusk sought the president’s green light for a ground invasion into Cuba, an escalation that would most certainly bring the country into direct military confrontation with a nuclear-armed foe, one which could very well wipe the US off the face of the Earth. The cabinet was deadlocked, leaving Kennedy with a political dilemma of potentially world-ending implications. The sheer gravity of the moment was not lost on attorney-general Robert Kennedy, who passed a note to his brother, reading: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbour.”

As the cabinet ran the arduous calculations of a potentially apocalyptic fallout, an indecisive Kennedy took leave, effectively breaking the meeting. Instead of staying with his aides in the West Wing to calibrate a policy response, the president found himself at a cocktail party on the other side of DC, at the Georgetown residence of famed columnist Joseph Alsop. On the eve of a possible nuclear war, when the fate of the world rested in his hands, the American president was photographed amongst friends, eating, drinking, laughing.

President Kennedy at the residence of Joseph Alsop on October 16, 1962. Source: Politico Magazine

It was a move that perplexes Cold War historians to this day. When America stood one misstep away from nuclear Armageddon, why did its commander-in-chief forego his war room for a dinner date in Georgetown?

Conventionalists attribute this seeming erraticism to the president wanting to maintain a guise of normalcy, for fears of prematurely revealing his hand to White House watchers in the press. For the careful observer, however, the night provides one of those unique momentary glimpses behind the veil of political pageantry, when power, in its most unabashed and unadulterated, stripped of all theatrics and veneers, effervesces to the surface of history long enough to be palpable.

Much like Kennedy, many of Alsop’s guests that night were people who dominated the Georgetown scene and similar high-end neighbourhoods in DC in the 60s. According to Gregg Herkins’ groundbreaking book, ‘The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington’, at this party were people Kennedy could not afford to ignore, people who commandeered true power in the Beltway during that time.

Men of importance like the far-east chief and future director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) William Bolby, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Chip Bohlen, the CIA’s longest-serving director Allan Dulles, one of the CIA’s founding fathers Frank Wisner, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among others, joined Kennedy at the Alsops’ on the night of October 16. It was here, at a small domicile two-and-a-half miles from the Capitol, that the policy response to the missile crisis was brokered.

The idea of faceless, conspiratorial cabals maneuvering the political and economic trajectory of a polity from the cold, dark corners of government can probably be traced back to the dawn of the nation-state itself. Indeed, it was this rudimentary conceptualisation that fuelled political rhetoric during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, when the concept of the deep state was first operationalised. In the case of America, however, the deep state is anything but.

In his book, ‘The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government’, former Republican Congressional aide Mike Lofgren draws on decades of political experience to recount first-hand run-ins with the American deep state. Born, not out of some clandestine conspiracy but a natural evolutionary process of Empire, the American deep state is not so much sinister (although it possesses menacing aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

Unlike its Ottoman counterpart, agents of America’s deep state operate in broad daylight, playing by a set of neo-conservative dogmas rooted in the triumphalism of the Cold War. For these operatives, America is the indispensable nation, the city upon a hill whose vast military aptitude affords it the moral imperative to establish its footprint across the globe. It is an incredibly robust consensus incentivised by an intimately connected network of money, a collective ideological subscription to global American primacy, and cutthroat careerism to specific and powerful elements of corporate America.

Over the years, it’s come to be known by many names. Some have called it the “military-industrial complex”. Others have called it names like “the Establishment” or the “the Blob”. Neither do justice to the elaborate, sophisticated, oft-times impressive machinery that is the deep state.

As per Lofgren’s detailed account, the deep state is underpinned by the Department of Defence, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, and the Justice Department. It also envelops critical areas of the judiciary, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are an enigma even to most members of Congress, and certain federal trial courts like the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The metaphorical fort is held together by a rump Congress, consisting of the congressional leadership and some members of the defence and intelligence committees.

One of the principal actors greasing the wheels of this elaborate machinery is the department of the treasury, owing to its unilateral jurisdiction over financial flows, its extensive bureaucracy devoted to enforcing international economic sanctions, and its natural symbiosis with Wall Street. Over the years, the treasury has quietly become the mecca of a new kind of national security operation, with some of its day-to-day execution outsourced to American financial institutions, including but not limited to major banks, investment firms, and payment processors, in almost the same way that the Pentagon has outsourced military logistics in war zones to private contractors.

Under regulations like the Bank Secrecy Act and partnerships with agencies like the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), these institutions are on the frontlines of financial surveillance, and help monitor, enforce, and comply with government directives of sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) measures.

In a special series in the Washington Post called ‘Top Secret America’, Dana Priest and William Arkin described, in addition to its public sector arm, the staggering scope of the privatised deep state. As of 2024, there are more than one million contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number far greater than that of cleared civilian employees of the government. This is supplemented by the capital and grandeur of Wall Street, which injects the cash needed to keep the political arm of the deep state quiescent as an illusory puppet show. Should an over-zealous politician forget his place and threaten the status-quo, Wall Street floods the streets of Washington with cash to help hired hands remember exactly who runs their town.

This inverted relationship is also true of the visible government and Silicon Valley, defined by Lofgren to include not only quintessential hardware and software companies, but the telecommunications infrastructure that enable these devices to work. Following the dotcom revolution of the late 1990s and the industry’s explosive boom during the 21st century, the Valley has largely outgunned traditional smokestack industries as a credible generator of unimaginable wealth. Its research-and-development capabilities are essential to the clandestine operations of the deep state — from globe-spanning surveillance technology to the avionics, sensors, and guidance systems in every military plane, ship, tank, missile, and drone, the Valley has proven to be the deep state’s crown jewel.

In terms of its scope, financial resources, and sheer global reach, the American deep state is a truly anomalous phenomenon. That said, it is hardly an optimal design. Its predisposition to expensive, futile wars, its sheer incapacity to forecast and respond to the 2008 stock market crash, and its manifest blindness to the blowback of its own policies are, in fact, rather routine. The lofty castle of the deep state has long stood upon pillars of salt and sand; were it not for a perverse incentive structure that rewards failure and redresses it as success, it would have collapsed long ago.
A ‘benevolent’ world empire

It would be pertinent to note that the deep state was not always a staple in American politics but has mutated over the years as an unintended consequence of a specific kind of political dogma. In fact, the isolationist years before 1941 saw the US maintain only the 17th largest military force in the world — impressive nonetheless, but nowhere near the nuclear-powered merchant of death it is today.

A product of the gruesome realities of the Second World War, the attainment of workable nuclear weapons was almost certainly the deep state’s moment of conception. The Manhattan Project and the Office of Strategic Services were the most expansive government projects in recorded history, shrouded in cabbalistic secrecy. Entire sequestered cities ranging from Oak Ridge in Tennessee to Los Alamos in New Mexico sprung up in a matter of months. As Lofgren put it ever so eloquently, “If the deep state is an evolved structure, nuclear weapons were the genetic mutation that gave it the key characteristics it possesses today: a penchant for secrecy, extravagant cost, and a lack of democratic accountability.”

The deep state is born — the ‘Trinity’ bomb at Los Alamos. Source: National Park Service



By 1945, what Time magazine publisher Henry Luce heralded as the ‘American Century’ was at hand. With the power of the Gods in the palm of their hand, Washington was entranced by an overwhelming sense of destiny to uplift the world from the ruination of war. In the decades following the War, the administrative state quietly waded through the waters of the Cold War, augmenting its influence on American political life, one silent victory at a time. With the National Security Act of 1947 and the establishment of the Department of Defence, the CIA, and the president’s National Security Council, there was an institutionalization of a permanent national security apparatus for the first time in American history. Ideological support for this apparatus soon followed with NSC-68, a 1950 White House policy document sketching out a grand strategy for containing communism by means of a permanent peacetime military buildup. As America locked horns with the Soviets, the deep state festered beneath the murky waters of Pennsylvania Avenue, slowly infecting and intellectually corrupting the American political class.

A copy of Henry Luce’s infamous article ‘The American Century’ in Time Magazine. Source: Time Magazine

Kennedy was as good an exemplar of this intellectual corruption as any. In one of the most conveniently misremembered ironies in American history, it was Kennedy, the darling of American liberalism, who campaigned on an imaginary “missile gap” with the Soviet Union. He accused the incumbent Dwight Eisenhower — chief organiser of American victory in Europe during the War — of being weak on defence, taking baby steps towards the Missile Crisis in Cuba which would later go on to define his legacy.

In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower, cognisant of the dangers of a permanent war mentality, famously warned about the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” embodied by a new “military-industrial complex.” By that time, however, America had long crossed the Rubicon, and there was no turning back. The war machine’s new sweet tooth for the glacé of conflict gave rise to the Domino Theory — an idea that the spread of communism in one country would trigger a chain reaction in others. As history would have it, American troops laid waste to Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Grenada, and Panama, among countless others, lest the first domino fall.

When the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve itself in ‘91 in a death knell to the USSR, America, left without a worthy adversary on the global stage, was caught completely off-guard. For decades, the Cold War had provided balance to international relations, with the United States and the Soviet Union representing a clear global dichotomy: capitalism, democracy, and free markets versus communism, state control, and authoritarianism. With the death of the Leninist dream, communism as a credible global ideology, a hedge against America’s vulture capitalism, essentially died as well.

This left America crippled with a national identity crisis. With no grand villian to justify its foreign policy, military posture, and global strategy against, the US and its allies were left without a clear narrative for global engagement. For the first time ever in recorded history, the world was, in the truest sense of the word, truly unipolar.

The Malta Summit 1989 — President George W. Bush and President Gorbachev shake hands, signaling the end of the Cold War. Source: The Malta Independent

Realising the gaping ideological vacuum created by what Charles Krauthammer famously called ‘the unipolar moment’, a budding group of neo-conservative thinkers saw gold in the streets. Rooted in a nationalist history of American exceptionalism that advocated for aggressive military and political assertions of democracy and liberalism, the neo-conservative revolution chalked out a new approach for international engagement.

The founding group for this new policy approach was the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a think-tank formed in 1992 on the “fundamental propositions that assert the belief that American leadership is good for both America and for the world”. In full cognisance of the unimaginable military might that lay at their feet, William Kristol, who acted as Project Chairman for PNAC, and Robert Kagen, co-founder of the PNAC, authored a critical policy document which was to later become the ideological foundation for the American Empire.

The document, titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” called on the United States to realise the moral imperative of its military prowess and assume its role as a “benevolent global hegemon”, a world empire which would use its military might to promote, and if need be, impose, liberal ideals of democracy and freedom. For the neo-cons, the unipolar moment was a stabilising force in international relations, a moment truly unique in human history and one wherein America needed to strike whilst the iron was hot. As authors of the Empire’s origin story, the neo-cons advocated maximum military and diplomatic engagement to ensure US values and influence dominate the international system.

In the decades that followed, the neo-conservative revolution slowly infiltrated the highest levels of government. In the Clinton administration especially, necons like secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright espoused a kind of hubris many have since come to know all too well: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

Sure enough, wherever there was danger, the wrath of Empire, ruthless and swift as it is, made sure to follow. Where danger didn’t exist, it was simply manufactured all the same.

The phenomenon of cooked intelligence is best embodied by the summer of 1996 when American neo-conservative thinkers Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others authored a policy document for the new Israeli Prime Minister at the time — a young hardliner who went by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu. The document, titled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ reflected a broader neo-conservative vision for Israeli dominance in the Middle East, with Israel functioning as the Empire’s guard dog in the region. The Clean Break papers advocated brute military engagement, regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and strong deterrence capabilities for Israel. During the Bush Jr years, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser, along with other neo-cons like Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and US Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, occupied key strategic positions in the administration.

The 9/11 attacks presented the neo-conservatives with a unique opportunity to realise their foreign policy agenda and impose American ideals of democracy and freedom in the Middle East. At a time when American sentiment was at its most vulnerable, Netanyahu was called in to testify before Congress in 2002 as a “regional expert”. Realising his one shot at securing the realm, Netanyahu’s testimony was perfectly in conjunction with the Clean Break papers. Addressing Congress, Netanyahu laid the groundwork for a regime change operation against Saddam Hussein, claiming that doing so would rid the region of Islamic fanaticism and usher in a new era of peace and stability.

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Suspiciously enough, intelligence reports citing the existence of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq popped up in the media soon after, with the United States putting boots on the ground in Iraq less than a year later. The Clean Break was finally underway, and the neo-cons’ insatiable thirst for war quenched at last — until the next one, of course. For more than three decades, the “benevolent hegemon” stoked war and violence across the world, leaving destruction, instability and despair in its wake. Little did it know that its day of reckoning was not too far off.


Benjamin Netanyahu testifies before Congress in 2002. Source: Vox.com


Red Caesar

Over two millennia ago, Rome stood somewhat of a similar inflection point. At the time, the Empire had already become an imperial force and was overstretched militarily across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. As a result, domestic resources flailed thin. Economic inequality ran amuck, with Roman senators, bureaucrats, and patrician families hoarding exorbitant amounts of wealth as the plebeians and slaves were left fighting for scraps.

From within this cesspool of ideological corruption, political rot, and economic inequality rose a charismatic populist who vowed to return the dying empire to its former glory. His explosive rhetoric found an audience amongst an increasingly discontented polity. He galvaniSed the public against an entrenched aristocracy that commanded real power behind the toga-wearing mules of the Senate, and threatened to tear the very fabrics of the state apart. His ascendency was challenged at every step by the oligarchic structure that ruled Rome. When this populist finally grabbed hold of the reins of power, he never let go. And Rome chose to follow him every step of the way. So goes the story of Julius Caesar.

More than 2,000 years later, America finds itself at a crossroads similar to that of the great Republic it has modeled itself after. The neo-con revolution of the 90s and its subsequent infiltration into the Bush Jr and Obama administrations empowered the deep state, tossing America into the throws of the forever wars, overstretching its military and economic resources to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Presently, the US maintains more than 750 military bases across 80 different countries, increasingly at the cost of domestic infrastructure, social programmes, and other pressing needs. The repulsion of the Glass-Steagall Act through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which allowed commercial banks to engage in investment banking, coupled with the overall deregulation of Wall Street, upped the risk prevalent in the financial system; this culminated in 2008 with the worst financial crisis in the US since the Great Depression. As working-class Americans lined up to cash unemployment checks, Obama, in lockstep with his hawkish secretary-of-state, spent trillions in wars of choice in the Middle East, all the while lining the pockets of cash-rich corporations and the military-industrial complex back home.

With Americans seething with frustration, something had to give. In September 2011, protesters chanting “We are the 99pc” flooded the streets of New York City in what is now known as the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. A protest against the wealthiest 1pc, it derided the rampant economic inequality, corporate greed, neoliberal economics, and large financial institutions for causing the 2008 financial crisis.

On the opposing side of the political aisle, festering discontent amongst the public culminated in the Tea Party movement. A grassroots conservative response to the federal government’s actions post the 2008 financial crash, the movement called for limited government, fiscal conservatism, lower taxes, and a reduction in the federal deficit.

A grassroots consensus against the cistern of corruption and greed in Wall Street on both sides of the political aisle spooked the dark agents of the deep state, sending its extensive machinery into overdrive. With liberals and conservatives coalescing around the shadow state’s cash cow, danger to the status-quo was palpable. There was a need to break this overwhelmingly powerful consensus at the roots with something relatively superficial, but rooted in just enough reality to fragment society back into their ideological camps. Enter the culture wars.

Around the same time as the Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements, the media dramatically ramped up coverage of racism, embracing novel theories of racial consciousness hitherto unheard of in American political discourse. Brilliant reporting by Zach Goldberg in Tablet magazine uncovers what appears to be a clear trend in liberal newspapers around the consequential 2011 mark, when the OWS and the Tea Party movements were galvanising the youth in droves. Around 2011, there was a notable surge in terms like “racism”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, and “racial inequality” among others, reported in some of the most widely read newspapers in the country. Take for instance the following graph, which displays the usage of terms “racist(s)” and “racism” as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from 1970 through 2019.






Around 2011, instances of the word “racist/racism” shot up considerably. Similar trends are apparent for other culture war mainstays, suspiciously around the same 2011 mark.






To be clear, racism undoubtedly permeates American society as an incredibly serious problem. However, did American society coincidentally grow more racist in the aftermath of the OWS and Tea Party movements than it was in the 1990s, when Bill and Hillary Clinton labelled young people of colour “superpredators” from behind the Seal of the President of the United States? This apparent shift in liberal reporting in 2011, amidst inflammatory rhetoric by American politicians and pundits, fractured American society in ways it still hasn’t quite healed from. Post 2011, the fracture was graphically evident.






In December 2006, 45pc of white Democrats and 41pc of white Republicans reported knowing someone they considered racist. By June 2015, this figure surged to 64pc for white Democrats but stayed at 41pc for white Republicans. Surprisingly enough, among Black and Hispanic Democrats, the trend was in the opposite direction. By inflating a very real social issue and manufacturing a culture war, the media created a political playing field ripe for a populist demagogue.

In 2016, with political frustration at fever pitch, the threads of Empire finally gave way at the seams. On the Republican side of the political aisle, a culturally disenfranchised conservative mob nominated a populist in Donald Trump to the GoP ticket. In the Democrat camp, it took a socialist like Bernie Sanders to energise a young progressive base increasingly disillusioned by Obama’s capitulation to the establishment. The 2016 moment was truly unique, with two anti-deep state candidates across the political aisle galvanising an incredibly angry base.

The Democratic party establishment successfully quashed the Sanders threat by stacking the deck in favour of dedicated neo-con and deep state darling, Hillary Clinton. In July 2016, WikiLeaks published a trove of DNC emails, revealing that party officials had discussed ways to undermine Sanders’ campaign in favour of Clinton.

Additionally, in a deliberate effort to minimise Sanders’ exposure, the DNC scheduled a limited number of debates on weekends or holidays, at times fewer viewers would tune in. This played right to Clinton’s advantage, who had a higher name recognition at the time. Superdelegates — party officials who can vote for whomever they choose at the convention — cast their vote for Clinton uncharacteristically early in the primary process, curating an impression of inevitability around her candidacy and thereby discouraging potential Sanders supporters.

The Republican camp was far less successful in dealing with Trump, who was already a known commodity and had a flair for waddling through media attacks unscathed. There was something about a non-traditional renegade lambasting legacy neo-cons in the Republican primaries that was like a breath of fresh air for an incredibly frustrated conservative base.

“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction; there were none. And they knew there were none … obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We all make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.”

Such outbursts were virtually unheard of in Washington. The fact that the barbs were clearly aimed at Jeb Bush, brother of former-president George W Bush Jr, who stood a couple of feet away from Trump on the debate stage, was cathartic for a conservative base that had grown increasingly disillusioned with the war-crazed neo-cons that dominated the GoP at the time. Like a Red Ceasar rising from the ashes, Trump’s brash insults and radical jingoism, supplemented with Hillary’s Pied Piper strategy, radically reconfigured the boundaries of acceptability in modern US politics, threatened to “demolish the deep state”, and usher in a new era in American politics.

Trump had a radically different foreign policy agenda than many of the neo-cons he railed against. Though not strictly an isolationist, Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda hinted at a voluntary disbandment of Empire. Corporate America’s dealmaker extraordinaire, he hoped to foster better relations with the deep state’s cardinal foe Vladmir Putin, renegotiate the establishment’s prized NAFTA, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific partnerships, reevaluate US engagement with NATO, and pivot US foreign policy away from the neo-conservative thinking of yesteryears toward a more non-interventionist approach.

During his first presidency, however, Trump’s efforts to renegotiate the terms of political power with the administrative state were mitigated by the ‘adults in the room’, a trope popularised by an anonymous 2018 submission to The New York Times by a former White House staffer. In an op-ed titled “I am the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, the staffer reassured readers that the president did indeed face substantial internal resistance within the West Wing.

“The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.”

This time around, the Trump threat is far more dangerous. With deep state stalwart Joe Biden out of the running, his protege Kamala Harris has been forced to take off the training wheels and enter the race with the backing of the entire deep state machinery behind her.

From assassination attempts to a cascade of civil and felony indictments, all efforts to prevent another Trump run have yet failed. What the establishment has celebrated as deserved prosecution against a rogue former president has been decried as ‘lawfare’ by bipartisan legal experts — selective justice, lacking any sound legal foundation or precedent.

The hush-money case in New York City, for instance, is almost laughable, especially when predators like Bill Clinton strut across Democratic National Conventions to rapturous applause, and are paraded as one of its greatest Democratic exports to the White House. The Georgia ‘election interference’ case calls into question the First Amendment rights of a former president to voice concerns regarding the integrity of an election — a right the Democrats seemed to have no qualms with when Hillary Clinton attributed Trump’s 2016 victory to “Russian interference” without any evidence or proof.

With respect to Trump’s prosecution in the ‘classified documents’ case, the Democrats seem to forget that Joe Biden was exonerated by a special counsel for virtually the same transgressions. From gag orders limiting Trump’s ability to comment on his own prosecution to the imposition of absurd fines to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in what can only be perceived as an open effort to enforce personal bankruptcy, the legal machinery of the state seems to have been deployed in a nakedly partisan fashion. However, it only seems to have pushed Trump toward a harder line of attack.

Courtroom sketch of Donald Trump during the Georgia election interference proceedings. Source: Reuters

At a rally in Waco, Texas, Trump framed his onslaught against the shadow government in apocalyptic terms.

“Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state”

However, much like Caesar, Trump’s defiance of the old Gods stems, not from an ideological commitment to democracy, but from a misplaced belief in his own divinity. He has successfully tapped into the rampant disillusionment with the status quo to rack up currency for his own political ambitions.

This time, Trump carries a blueprint for amassing unprecedented power, developed by a constellation of ‘America First’ conservative organisations. Under Project 2025, a policy document developed by the Heritage Foundation, Trump is expected to install loyalists into key appointment positions, staving off any more “adults in the room”. In fact, the former-president has noticeably recruited a more radical inner-circle. Unlike his previous stint, the Republican party now constitutes a much deeper bench of Make America Great Again (MAGA) loyalists as compared to 2016, with deep state sceptics like JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Pompeo, and Stephen Miller expected to take critical cabinet positions.

Trump is also expected to reimpose the Schedule F order, which would be one of the most profound changes to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Under the order, presidents may increase political appointment positions from 4,000 to more than 50,000, making almost every major federal programme subservient to the Oval Office, effectively disintegrating the deep state.

However, Trump’s animosity towards the administrative state has attracted unlikely and dangerous allies. This time, the GoP campaign is backed by one of the richest men on the planet — Elon Musk, who up until March 2024 publicly disavowed any affiliation with Trump, has grown to become a valuable arrow in the former president’s quiver. From dedicating near unilateral algorithmic support for the Republican hopeful on his platform X to promising a $1 million giveaway for registered voters in key swing states, rarely has someone of Musk’s stature thrown themselves so explicitly behind a political candidate.

Though he may hide behind the kind of inflammatory rhetoric and far-right conspiracy theories typical of MAGA rednecks, Musk is no ideologue. In fact, his patronage of Trump is as close to a marriage of convenience as it gets. Trump’s bid to harness over-expansion of the administrative state provides Musk with a golden opportunity to realise his own political designs. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly earmarked the tech boy-wonder as his “efficiency” czar, a potential head of a new ‘government efficiency commission’. If this pans out, Musk shall have tremendous sway over the very government institutions that regulate his companies, institutions Musk has an adversarial history with.

Musk joins Trump at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Source: The Atlantic

Therefore, as Harris and Trump lock horns in November, the fate of Empire hangs in the balance. The election confronts Americans with two radically different paths. One, of a deep state candidate representing a decades-long entrenchment of global American primacy, and the other of a populist demagogue who threatens to tear the Empire down to its last shreds and build it anew in his image. November 5 is truly a contest between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

Exactly who will win this high-stakes game of thrones is not known. What is known is that the losers will be the American people.


The author is a student at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, and is interested in political, historical and social affairs.