Afghan students in the UK urge government not to force them to return to Taliban

Home Office suggests scholars apply for another UK visa, such as the graduate route, or consider claiming asylum

A Taliban member at Ahmad Shah Massoud Square in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 10, 2023. 

AFP

Soraya Ebrahimi

Aug 13, 2023

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Afghan students at universities in the UK under a Foreign Office scheme say they are living in limbo and fear being forced back to Afghanistan governed by the Taliban.

The Afghan Chevening scholars currently face the possibility of having to return after their graduation in September or once their visas expire.

Scholars should follow the standard Chevening policy of returning home or to a third country, the Home Office initially said, adding the scholarship was not a pathway to resettlement.

However, the Home Office has now indicated that scholars can apply for another UK visa, such as the graduate route, or consider claiming asylum.

Three of the 17 Afghan students from the 2022-2023 year told reporters about their struggles with panic attacks and fear of persecution as a result of the government’s policy.

One said that even if they were granted a graduate visa, they would still be at risk of deportation after two years.

Afghan Chevening scholars in the UK in 2021 and 2022 were granted indefinite leave to remain.

The Chevening scholarship programme provides study at UK universities – mostly one-year master’s degrees – for students with potential to become leaders, decision makers and opinion formers.

The scholars agreed to speak to reporters on condition of anonymity, given their concerns for their safety and the wellbeing of their families still in Afghanistan.

One of them, who is specialising in international human rights law, said: “I am having panic attacks thinking about what exactly is going to happen.

“After September, I will have no accommodation. It is difficult to get a job without a visa. What should I do? Where should I go? Should I just become stateless and homeless at the same time after September?”

Another student, who is studying accounting and finance, said he was made aware that the scholarship was not an offer of resettlement but was “hopeful” things would return to normal in Afghanistan by the time he graduated.

“There is no possibility of going back to my country … I don’t want to put myself and my family in danger,” he said.

“We should be treated in the same way as the previous cohorts and be granted leave to remain indefinitely.”

A third scholar, who is studying management of information systems, said he was sent an email from the programme in June, telling him to book his flight back home.

He described it as a “hard moment”, adding: “Since then, I have not been able to concentrate on my studies.”

After having repeatedly asked for “clarity”, the scholars said Chevening had informed them at the end of June that they may be exempt from the requirement to return to Afghanistan because of the expiration of their visas in their countries of residence at the time of accepting the scholarship.

“We understand the situation in Afghanistan, and are therefore providing a letter of consent to current scholars whose visas in other countries have expired or will expire, allowing them to apply for another UK visa,” a government representative said.

“This will exempt them from the normal requirement to leave the UK on completion of study.”

The Home Office also made clear that if someone had come to the UK legally, and circumstances in their home country changed, such that it was no longer safe for them to return home, they could claim asylum.

After the Taliban seized power in 2021, the government programme only offered the scholarship opportunity to Afghans living outside their home country and this was the case for the three scholars, who fled to neighbouring nations after the takeover.

“The third country, which the Home Office says we should consider going back to … there are peculiarities in our situation,” a scholar said.

“Right now, India is not giving any type of visa for Afghans. And if I do get a temporary visa, I go there, I stay for one or two months and after that, I have to go back to Afghanistan,” she said.

“A girl who is single, who has done human rights law in the UK, under the UK government scheme, who has worked with international forces, I would be persecuted, I would be hanged in front of everybody.”

All three insisted that claiming asylum would be a bad option, with one noting that the average waiting time for an initial decision on an asylum case could be between one and three years, during which time they would not be able to work and could be placed in a hotel.

Moreover, according to the scholars, applying for a graduate visa, as the Home Office suggested, would bring financial challenges and may leave them with no option but to return to Afghanistan once it expired.

“The problem, for instance, with the graduate visa is that it has a very high fee, and I don’t think many of the Chevening scholars would be able to pursue that route,” a scholar said.

“But even if I manage to borrow some money, it is only for two years. I want to be assured that after this period, I wouldn’t be forced to leave.”

“If I get a visa and after two years, for some reason, I cannot get a sponsored job, I will definitely be deported or either I will be deported or I will have to apply for asylum or … I don’t know what happens in two years,” another student added.

Labour’s Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark), an MP representing one of the scholars, told reporters that Chevening scholars were “the best and brightest”, adding: “Ministers must end their debilitating quagmire and grant leave to remain in the UK, as the Home Office did for the students who completed their studies last year.”

Updated: August 13, 2023, 5:01 PM

Best of Friends, Canada and the United States Still Follow Different Paths

By Andrew Cohen

This article was initially published in The Ottawa Citizen on July 7, 2023

The beauty of the first week of July is that the birthdays of both Canada and United States fall within it. This is an accident of history, of course, but it gives us an opportunity to celebrate the most successful relationship in the world.

Neighbours, friends, allies, partners. Loyal, peaceful, prosperous, enduring. It isn’t American hyperbole to declare that no two countries on Earth have this kind of a friendship. It isn’t Canadian modesty to find something unique in two peoples living harmoniously in North America for two centuries while Europe was tearing itself apart.

Since 1812, we have never gone to war against each other. We have only gone to war alongside each other, in Europe, Korea and Afghanistan. We have maintained the longest border in the world, some 9,000 kilometres. It is no longer undefended, that hoary classroom cliché, but it is unmilitarized.

Who else can claim that? Russia and Kazakhstan, Argentina and Chile, China and Mongolia, Brazil and Bolivia, Pakistan and India all have long borders, but not as storied as ours.

We move goods and services across it every day. We share energy, embrace the free market, honour human rights, freedom, opportunity and dignity. We practise democracy — the United States as a republic, Canada as a constitutional monarchy.

We influence each other, imitate each other, in myriad ways: national parks, public broadcasting, immigration, trans-continental railways, organized labor, a social safety net.

There is a rhythm to political trends and social change in both countries. It is imprecise, as a comparison, but it is striking.

Roosevelt’s New Deal and Bennett’s New Deal. The New Frontier and the Quiet Revolution. The Great Society and the Just Society. Each was different but happened in the same decade. We had regulation and high taxes in the post-war era, for example, and then, under Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney in the 1980s, deregulation and lower taxes.

We quarrel endlessly but civilly over trade. On some things, though, we remain fundamentally different. Canada never had institutional slavery or racial segregation, though it did have residential schools, antisemitism and racism. Canada did not have Prohibition, and has legalized pot.

America fought in Vietnam and Iraq; Canada did not. Canada went to war in Europe in 1914 and 1939 and the U.S. did not until 1917 and 1941. It made Canadians feel superior.

Canada embraced peacekeeping as a vocation. Multilateralism, collective security, international law and free trade remain at the core of Canada’s internationalism, but not always America’s.

Ten or so year ago, it looked like we were becoming more alike. In the United States, abortion was widely available, access to health care was expanded, gay marriage was legally recognized. Like Canada. Now, south of the border, abortion is limited. Obamacare isn’t universal. Same-sex rights, and trans-gender rights, are in question. So are voting rights.

Things never seem settled in the United States. The Civil War did not fully free African Americans. It took the civil rights movement to integrate society and now voting rights are being eroded.

Canadians look at Americans today and wince. They see the ambition and ingenuity that has created the world’s wealthiest society. They also see mass shootings, book banning, income inequity, public vulgarity. They see a ghastly tolerance for death, which is why the United States had far more deaths, proportionately, from COVID-19 than Canada.

They see an insidious demagoguery, a belief in conspiracy, and a fear of immigrants.

Canada, for its part, is restricting guns and increasing immigration, sharply. Religion has not entered public life. It is not banning books, restricting abortion, or questioning gay marriage.

It’s fashionable among conservatives to decry life in Canada: forests burning, hospitals overflowing, housing dwindling, prices rising. We are not immune to cultural wars; see the National Gallery of Canada. We have real problems.

For all that though, Canada remains a progressive, stable, tolerant society, diverging from an angry, incendiary, feverish America.

We remain the best of friends, even as our cultural differences have never been as great as they are today.

CENTRE RIGHT COMMENTATOR IN CANADA

IN THE US HE WOULD BE A FLAMING LIBERAL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


ANDREW COHEN
Global Fellow;
Associate Professor of Journalism, Carleton University
Andrew Cohen is author of "Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History." He is a Global Fellow with the Canada Institute of the Wilson Center

CANADA INSTITUTE

 

From Shekinah To Sakinah: One Word With Two Holy Perspectives – OpEd

 August 14, 2023  

By Rabbi Allen S. Maller

Sakinah is an important word and a very important concept in both Islamic and Jewish thought. 

In Islamic thought, it refers to the tranquility, serenity and peace of mind that results when an individual  believer becomes totally aware of God’s near by presence. Although Sakinah dwells in the heart of one who is already a sensitive and faithful believer; it now comes to him or her directly from God’s close presence and personal interest; to confirm and strengthen that believer’s faith. 

As the Qur’an says “It is God who sent down tranquillity into the hearts of the believers, that they would increase in faith along with their (present) faith.” (48:4) 

Thus, the experience of Sakinah is both God’s gift of enhanced, confirming faith; as well as the product of one’s own faithfulness. (Qur’an 9:26 & 40) This is clearly stated in the example given in the Qur’an about Prophet Samuel’s selection of Saul to be the first King of Israel, 

“Their prophet (Samuel) said to them (The People of Israel), “Indeed, a sign of his (Saul’s) kingship is that the chest (ark of the covenant) will come to you in which is Sakinah- assurance from your Lord, and a remnant of what the family of Moses and the family of Aaron had left (the broken ten commandments’ stone tablets in the wooden ark), carried by angels. Indeed, in that is a sign for you, if you are (already) believers.” (2:248)

The Biblical Hebrew word Shekinah is a noun from the verb ‘to dwell’. Thus God tells the Jewish People; “I will dwell among the children of Israel and will be their God; and they shall know that I am the LORD their God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, that I might dwell among them” (Exodus 29:45-46)

This concept, that God made a personal commitment to dwell among the People of Israel, is often repeated by the Hebrew Prophets. For example, Prophet Ezekiel (37:27) says: “My dwelling place also will be with them; and I will be their God, and they will be My people.” And Prophet Zechariah (2:10) says: ‘”Sing for joy and be glad, O daughter of Zion; for behold I am coming and I will dwell in your midst,’ declares the LORD.” 

Of course, this does not mean that God only dwells amidst one religious community: the Jewish community. That was true for over one thousand years when the Jewish community was the only on-going monotheistic community in the world. But with the advent of Prophet Jesus and Prophet Muhammad; another prophecy of Prophet Zechariah came true: 

“Many nations will join themselves to the LORD in that [distant] day and will [also] become My people. Then I will dwell in your midst, and you will know that the LORD of hosts has sent Me to you.” (Zechariah 2:11) 

Unlike ancient Christianity which claimed to have replaced the Jewish law of Moses with the Christian love of Jesus, Islam claimed it was the confirmation of all prior prophets and holy scriptures. 

Then, in the centuries between Prophet Jesus and Prophet Muhammad, the rabbis expanded the aspect of God’s dwelling presence from the nation to the individual, by following the guidance of Prophet Isaiah (57:15) “For thus says the high and exalted One Who lives forever, whose name is Holy, ‘I dwell on a high and holy place, and also [I dwell on earth] with the contrite and lowly of spirit in, order to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.'”

The rabbis asserted that Torah scholars may experience a Shekinah blessing during study: “Rabbi Chananiah ben Teradion said . . ‘when two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Shekinah dwells between them’ ” (Mishnah Avot 3.3)

And the rabbis also taught that community prayer is a place where one can experience the Shekinah as Talmud B’rachot 6a says: “Whenever ten (or more) are gathered for prayer, there the Shekinah dwells.” 

The Shekinah/Sakinah can also dwell in a sacred object like the ark of the covenant or in a lowly bush (Qur’an 2:248). Those who are  truly “Blessed by the Lord…with the best gifts of the earth and its fulness, and the favor of Him who dwells in the bush”. (Deuteronomy 33:16) 

The Sakinah can also dwell on or in a holy person; a saint, a sage. or a Prophet like Muhammad: “Allah sent down His Sakinah (tranquillity) upon His Messenger and upon the believers and imposed upon them the word of righteousness, and they were more deserving of it and worthy of it. (Qur’an 48: 26) 

Thus, the word/concept Shekinah in Jewish rabbinic thought became more a name for God that focuses mostly on an individual’s feeling of God’s presence that may manifest itself during several types of ordinary religious activities such as the prayer and Torah study already referred to; and also when visiting the sick (Shabbat 12b). practicing hospitality (Shabbat 127a & Sanhedrin 103b), giving charity (Baba Batra 10a), practicing chastity before marriage (Derek Ereẓ i.) and faithfulness within marriage (Soṭah 17a). 

It is true that doing all these things frequently will help produce greater faith, confidence, and peace of mind. But the Jewish focus is more on the opportunity to personally experience God’s presence in a daily activity, rather than on an individual’s personal spiritual growth. 

This somewhat different emphasis between Sakinah and Shekinah are not opposites. They are simply two different perspectives: like seeing a lion from the front, or from the side. Sakinah and Shekinah thus compliment each other; and proclaim the interactive reciprocities between humans love of God and God’s love of humans. 

From another perspective, Shekinah, a rabbinic name for God, shifts the view from the community to the individual’s experience, just as Sakinah shifts the focus from Jihad to calmness, serenity and effortless peace of mind. Both of these shifts are complementary; not contradictory, 

The connection between our faithfulness and God’s Shekinah is described in Exodus 25; when God directs the People of Israel to build a sanctuary. But first God says, each person should make a voluntary offering: “The Lord said to Moses “Tell the Israelites to bring me an offering. You are to receive an offering for me, from everyone whose heart prompts them to give.” (Exodus 25:1-2) 

Six verses later God says,”Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell (Shekanti) among them.” (25:8)  First humans choose to make a heart felt offering to God; then God chooses to dwell among, and within, faithful humans and their religious communities. 

When God is well pleased by faithful people, God’s gift of inner peace and reassurance is sent down to them. As it is written: “Certainly Allah was pleased with the believers when they pledged allegiance to you, (Muhammad), under the tree, and He knew what was in their hearts, so He sent down Sakinah (tranquillity) upon them and rewarded them with an imminent conquest”. (Qur’an 48:18) 

And as Prophet Zechariah proclaimed: “Many nations will join themselves to the LORD in that day and will become My people Then I will dwell in your midst, and you will know that the LORD of hosts has sent Me to you.” (2:11)

Perhaps now is a good time to expand the concept of Shekinah/Sakinah even wider to include all human’s responsibility [vice-regency] to not defile the whole natural world’ in accord with God’s command (Torah Numbers 35:34) ‘You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell…'”

Muslim prayer beads. Photo by Muhammad Rehan, Wikipedia Commons.

Rabbi Allen S. Maller

Allen Maller retired in 2006 after 39 years as Rabbi of Temple Akiba in Culver City, Calif. He is the author of an introduction to Jewish mysticism. God. Sex and Kabbalah and editor of the Tikun series of High Holy Day prayerbooks.

Essay

Stormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the West

We have turned the Ukraine War into a fairy tale

BY JOHN MICHAEL GREER

“Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise...” (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

August 14, 2023

Do you remember the Imperial Stormtroopers from the Star Wars movies, lurching around in their white plastic armour? When Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original movie said that no one else was as precise as Imperial Stormtroopers, he was clearly making a joke that Luke Skywalker was too wet behind the ears to catch. The one thing those movies make plain about Imperial Stormtroopers is that they couldn’t hit the broad side of a Death Star even if they were standing the length of one womp-rat away from it. Their job is to fill the air with blaster fire and miss. They do that job very effectively.

Anyone who knows anything about actual firefights involving professional soldiers will know that this isn’t what happens. (First-timers in combat, sure, but Stormtroopers are supposed to be competent.) In other words, Stormtroopers aren’t there to do anything useful. They’re there to provide the illusion of deadly peril so that the fake heroics of the protagonists look a little less unconvincing to movie audiences.

There’s a reason for this kind of absurdity, of course. Popular entertainment in Western industrial nations today is as thickly larded with moral posturing of this sort as anything Victorian parents inflicted on their children. In most popular genres, the basic premise is that the Good People always win, and the Bad People always lose

That colossus of the modern imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, has some responsibility for all this. In his programmatic essay “On Fairy-Stories”, he discussed one of the central plot schemes of fairy tales, which he called “eucatastrophe”: in plainer English, a sudden improbable turn for the better that saves the day when all is lost. As you’d expect from a devout conservative Christian like Tolkien, this theme is ultimately religious in nature — he described the resurrection of Jesus as the ultimate eucatastrophe — and it provided the frame for his two gargantuan fairy tales, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

To give him due credit, Tolkien went out of his way to make his eucatastrophes as plausible as he could. Most of the ninth-rate Tolkien imitators whose fetid output bathes the brains of today’s mass-media consumers stopped worrying about such petty concerns a long time ago. It doesn’t matter how much stronger and smarter and better armed the Bad People are; they have to lose because they’re the Bad People. Nor does it matter how idiotic the plan the Good People decide on, the Bad People are required to make the mistakes that will enable it to succeed. When the chips are down, you know that Harry Potter will always manage to drop the One Ring from his X-wing into the cooling port of Mount Doom.

This sort of silliness makes for dreary storytelling, but I’m convinced that it can also cause serious cognitive disabilities. Children who are raised on a steady diet of this kind of schlock are apt to end up thinking that this is how the world works. If they get out into the real world and bloody their noses a few times, they generally learn better, but if they live in a society that doesn’t let them fail, they may well reach adulthood without ever encountering that salutary lesson. Instead, they are seduced by Stormtrooper Syndrome: the conviction that no matter what, you’ll inevitably win because you think you’re morally superior to your enemies.

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There’s no shortage of examples of Stormtrooper Syndrome these days, but I’m going to focus on the most important of the lot, the one that bids fair to transform the world’s political and economic landscape in the years immediately ahead. Yes, we need to talk about Ukraine. Now, this emphatically does not mean that we need to talk about who gets to claim the roles of Good People and Bad People. The unwelcome truth is that the outcome of this war does not depend on which side is morally better than the other. In the real world, in terms of military victory and defeat, who’s right and who’s wrong don’t matter once the cannon start to roar.

The roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war go back a very long time, but for present purposes we can begin in 2014 — when a coup overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian government and replaced it with a pro-Nato one. With the new regime in place, and following the Russian military incursion into eastern Ukraine, the US and its allies began funding a build-up that gave Ukraine the second-largest army in Europe. That army was armed and trained with an eye toward a massive shift in military affairs that was then underway.

In 2006, the Israelis launched one of their periodic incursions into Lebanon. To the surprise of many, the Hezbollah militia dealt the Israelis a bloody nose and forced them to withdraw with their main goals unachieved. The Israelis, like every other modern army at that time, used the tactics that had been pioneered by the Wehrmacht in 1939 and 1940, and perfected by Soviet and US militaries in the years immediately following: massive assaults by tanks and mobile infantry supported by air superiority, driving deep into enemy territory to get behind the defenders’ lines.

What Hezbollah demonstrated is that those tactics had passed their sell-by date. Having built a network of underground shelters and urban strongholds, they lay low while the Israeli vanguard moved past, then popped up and started clobbering Israeli units with sudden ambushes using state-of-the-art weapons. A decade later, the Ukrainian military imitated these tactics, building a massive network of defensive works just west of the Russian-held areas of the Donbas.

These defences were useful when the full-scale invasion came, denying Russia a swift victory and tying them into a gruelling stalemate. As strategies go, this was fairly good, but it had two serious weak points. The first was that it needed to be twinned with an economic sanctions package from the West that would succeed in breaking Russia’s domestic economy and forcing them to withdraw. The second was that it assumed the Russians would stick to pre-2006 military doctrine no matter how badly things went. That’s where Stormtrooper Syndrome first showed up. The decision-makers in Washington, Brussels, and Kyiv had convinced themselves that those weak points didn’t matter because the Ukrainians were the Good People and the Russians were the Bad People.

Then, last February, war broke out. At first, events seemed to play into the West’s hands. The Russians launched a classic Blitzkrieg operation, driving deep into Ukrainian territory, only to find that the Ukrainians fell back on prepared defences and urban strongholds. Some Russian units suffered embarrassing defeats; others found themselves overextended in hostile territory and retreated. Meanwhile, the US and the EU slapped sanctions on the Russian economy.

But that’s when the plan ran straight off the rails. The first difficulty was that most of the world’s nations didn’t cooperate with the sanctions. Some, such as Iran and China, that are hostile to the US saw the situation as an opportunity to extend a middle finger to their enemies. Others, such as India and Brazil that are non-aligned powers, saw the situation as a chance to demonstrate their independence. Still other nations wanted Russian oil and grain and weren’t willing to forgo them, so they acted in accordance with their interests rather than ours.

Yet there was another difficulty with the sanctions’ efficacy. Do you remember all those big corporations that loudly announced that they were leaving the Russian market? They couldn’t take their outlets and infrastructure with them, and so the Russians simply rebranded those and kept going. A soft-drink bottling company partially owned by Coca-Cola, for example, now produces something called Dobry-Cola in Russia. It tastes very similar to Coca-Cola, and it’s in a very slightly different red can. The crucial point is that the profits from sales of Dobry-Cola and similar products and services aren’t flowing out to stockholders in the US, they’re staying in Russia, where they’ve given a timely boost to the Russian economy. This presumably wasn’t what US and Nato elites had in mind.

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But the worst news for Nato came from the battlefields. What happened there has an odd personal dimension for me. Some years ago I wrote an essay, “Asymmetric tactical shock: a first reconnaissance”, about what happens when an army becomes too dependent on complex technologies and its enemies figure out how to monkey-wrench those. The example I used came from the end of the Bronze Age, but the lesson applies more broadly: the monkey-wrenched army faces total disaster unless it does something most people these days can’t even conceive of doing. My essay circulated quietly among people interested in such things, and I have no reason to think that anybody in the Russian General Staff pays the least attention to obscure American fringe intellectuals like me. Yet the fact remains that when the Ukrainians monkey-wrenched the Russian version of Blitzkrieg, the Russians did exactly what I suggested an army in that situation should do: they fell back on an older form of warfare that wasn’t vulnerable to the monkey-wrenching tactics.

This is why the Russians abandoned their deep thrusts into Ukrainian territory, retreated from vulnerable areas around Kharkiv and Kherson, launched a mass-mobilisation of troops and a major expansion of their already large munitions industry, and got to work building entrenched defensive lines to guard the territory they had seized. Meanwhile, the Russian government strengthened ties with Iran and North Korea — two nations that have large munitions industries autonomous from Western technology and capital.

That is to say, since the new Ukrainian tactics made it impossible for the Russians to refight the Second World War, the Russians switched to First World War tactics. The defensive lines and urban strongholds on which the Ukrainians relied to defeat Russian tank columns didn’t provide anything like the same defence against massed Russian artillery bombardment. While the Russian Army was retooling for the new (or rather old) mode of war, mercenary units — Wagner PMC most famously, but there were others — took over the brunt of the fighting, tested out First World War tactics against entrenched Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, and won.

This put Ukraine and its Nato backers into a very difficult position. In First World War-style combat, the winner is the side with the largest munitions industry and the biggest pool of recruits to draw on. Russia has a huge advantage on both counts. First, Nato countries no longer have a political consensus supporting mass military conscription, while Russia does. Second, while the US and its allies dismantled most of their munitions factories at the end of the Cold War, Russia did not, and it also has those good friends in Tehran and Pyongyang. All these give the Russians an edge the Nato nations can’t match in the near term.

Why Ukraine's offensive has stalled   BY EDWARD LUTTWAK

This wasn’t a message that Nato was willing to hear. To a very real extent, it was a message they weren’t capable of hearing. It’s been 70 years — since the end of the Korean War — since the United States and its allies last fought a land war against a major power. The entire Nato officer corps got its training and experience in an era when they had overwhelming superiority over their enemies, and they have no idea how to fight without it. (Even then — Afghanistan comes to mind — they aren’t too good at winning.) That’s when Stormtrooper Syndrome really came into play, because it never occurred to Nato that Ukraine could lose — defined as they were as the war’s Good People.

And so the elites in Washington, Brussels, and Kyiv convinced themselves that the Russians couldn’t possibly ramp up their munitions industry to a pitch that would permit them to carry on trench warfare for years at a time. (Remember all those confident reports that insisted the Russians were about to run out of shells and rockets?) They told themselves that the Russians were using mercenaries because their army was too demoralised and brittle to stand up to the rigours of combat. They drew up plans for a grand Ukrainian offensive to turn the tide of the war, and funnelled more arms to Ukraine..

The counteroffensive began on 4 June. Two months on, it is clear that it has failed. A successful assault against fortified positions in modern war requires a three-to-one advantage in soldiers on that region of the battlefield, a large advantage in artillery, and air superiority. Ukraine has none of these things, and somehow or other no eucatastrophe showed up to save the day.

The Russo-Ukraine war isn’t over yet, and the fortunes of war may yet favour the Ukrainian side — though this looks very improbable just now. Meanwhile, history is not waiting around for the details to be settled. Towards the end of last month, the heads of state of 40 African nations gathered in St. Petersburg to sign agreements giving Russia a leading position in the economic and military affairs of the world’s second largest continent, while Russia’s defence minister was in North Korea negotiating further arms deals. It seems the Russians know better than to wait for miracles to save them from the consequences of their own actions.

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None of this is to say that the mess in Ukraine is the only way that Stormtrooper Syndrome has shaped recent history; it’s just the most obvious example right now. It was because of Stormtrooper Syndrome, for instance, that so many people suffered nervous breakdowns when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, their reaction amounting to: “He’s a Bad Person, he’s not supposed to win!”. Afterwards, the same factor also kept them from wondering why so many disillusioned voters were willing to settle for Trump, of all people, as an alternative. Nor, to be fair, is Stormtrooper Syndrome in short supply on the Right, where shrill moral dualism is far more common than thoughtful discussion about how to deal constructively with the cascading crises overwhelming America today.

Really, it’s hard to name anything in contemporary Western life that hasn’t been twisted bizarrely out of shape by the efforts of our privileged classes to pretend to be the heroes of their own Star Wars sequels. Yet the lesson being whispered by the winds from Ukraine is that nobody and nothing else is required to play along. That lesson may end up costing a great many people bitterly in the not too distant future.

John Michael Greer is the author of over thirty books. He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.

 

Death on K2: Inside the world of elite mountaineering, where normal rules don’t apply

Daily Telegraph UK

By Tarquin Cooper

13 Aug, 2023 

OPINION

Here we go again, a roll of the eyes, but sadly no surprise. Like many mountaineers, I suspect there will be a grim resignation to hear that once again, climbers hell-bent on the summit are accused of walking past someone dying in order to get to the top.

Video footage has emerged this week of climbers on K2 apparently walking past porter Mohammed Hassan, who had fallen at 8200 metres, and not going to his aid. Particular anger has been aimed at Norwegian Kristin Harila, who was in the middle of a record-breaking climb and was seen to celebrate when she reached the summit.

But we’ve been here before. In 2006, the New Zealand double-amputee Mark Inglis conceded that on his way to the summit of Mt Everest, he and his party had passed the dying English climber David Sharp. The furore that erupted caught him by surprise, and shone a light on the unsavoury side of elite mountaineering.

Inglis was even castigated by none other than legendary mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, who expressed dismay, saying his world-first climb of Everest in 1953 would have been abandoned if a man’s life had been at stake. “It was wrong, if there was a man suffering altitude problems and huddled under a rock, just to lift your hat, say ‘good morning’ and pass on by,” Hillary said at the time.

Mohammad Hassan died on K2 after falling off a sheer edge at the top of the area known as the "bottleneck", some 8200 metres high. Norway’s Kristin Harila has been criticised for ignoring the dying climber. Photo / Adventure Alpine Guides

“I think it was the responsibility of every human being. Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain. My expedition would never for a moment have left one of the members or a group of members to just lie there and die while they plugged on towards the summit.”

Everest does, of course, tend to be the focus of these kinds of stories. It was in 1996 that a huge storm ripped through the mountain, killing eight climbers who’d signed up on commercial expeditions. The disaster story was turned into a best-selling book, Into Thin Air, by one of the survivors, Jon Krakauer. Another, Beck Weathers, wrote his own account, Left for Dead, after he was forced to fight his own way off the mountain.

Every May, during summit season, stories emerge of overcrowding, of huge lines of climbers following fixed lines of ropes. There are tales of commercial clients who don’t even have a basic grasp of mountaineering setting off for the summit, who don’t know how to put on crampons or hold an ice axe correctly.

But until now, these kinds of stories were confined to Everest. Not anymore. Today, these incidents are happening on all 14 of the 8000m mountains (“the 8000ers”), including K2, once considered the preserve of only the most elite and hardy climbers on account of its risk and difficulty.

Known as the Savage Mountain, it’s lower than Everest at 8611m, but it’s a technical climb from the start - at least it used to be, before the commercial guiding operators moved in. They now rig the mountain with lines of fixed rope.

K2 is the second-highest mountain in the world.

“As far as I’m concerned, mountaineering has ended on the 8000ers,” says Stephen Venables, the first Briton to summit Mt Everest without oxygen. “It’s become a monopoly of slick-operated cartels escorting people to their trophies, which to my mind has nothing to do with mountaineering.”

It’s changed even in the past few years, says the British climber Kenton Cool, who guided a client to K2′s summit in 2021. “If you look at the likes of Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 8000ers, it was more of a spiritual journey. Now we see more and more people are attempting these things with large amounts of logistical support, Sherpa support, fixed lines, oxygen, and it becomes, to an extent, a box tick - something they can put on the ‘Gram, and [a way to] associate themselves with the practitioners of the past.”

The climber Nick Hollis, who summited Everest in 2019, has also observed the adverse influence of Instagram. “During my time, the appeal for a significant proportion of mountaineers is the Instagram photo - and the fame. They’re in it for the glory as opposed to the experience of being there.”

The result, says Greg Moseley, mountain commission president at the international mountaineering federation, the UIAA, is people who shouldn’t be there - and people who wouldn’t know how to respond to a situation if one occurred.

“These adventure tourists that go up 8000m peaks,” says Moseley, “and most notably the big ones like Everest and K2, know nothing of the history and ethics of mountaineering.”

This is the background to the recent events on K2. Not surprisingly, Kristin Harila has been a lightning rod for criticism. Her July 27 summit marked the culmination of a remarkable - and controversial - record attempt to climb all 14 mountains over 8000m within three months - supported by helicopters, oxygen, slick logistics and funding. She succeeded in completing the feat in just over three months, beating the previous record set by the former Gurkha, Nims Purja.

But helping others in the mountains is one of the unwritten codes of mountaineering, says Moseley.

“If someone’s in trouble, it doesn’t matter what the problem is. If someone is lying there in the snow, you cannot leave him there. The chances of getting him down in a rescue may be effectively nil. But the least you can do is stay with him, hold his hand, talk to him. It’s basic humanity.”

Hollis says when he came across a body after climbing Everest, he instinctively shook the dead man’s shoulder. “It was frozen solid. I later discovered he died that morning. If I’d been able to assist, I would not have gone on - not a chance. I would not have been able to live with myself.”

Part of the problem, says Andy Syme, president of the British Mountaineering Council, is that clients on commercial expeditions are not bonded by camaraderie. “When people used to climb Everest, they were teams of friends. Consequently, they were very invested in trying to save their friends, whereas now they’re just brought together for a particular purpose, and they’re not very invested in each other.”

Harila has fiercely rejected the claims: “It is simply not true to say that we did nothing to help him,” she told the Daily Telegraph. “We tried to lift him back up for an hour and a half, and my cameraman stayed on for another hour to look after him. At no point was he left alone.”

Other seasoned high-altitude climbers are inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. “Did they know he was dying when they were looking through their fogged-up goggles in a high-altitude miasmic confusion?” asks Venables. “Above 8000m, your mind is not functioning at your tip-top best, that’s for sure. On the one hand, everything seems bright and beautiful, but you’re viewing the world through a hypoxic fog which dulls rational decision-making. It’s easy to understand people not making clear moral decisions.”

British climber Alan Hinkes, the first Briton to summit all 8000ers - a feat he completed in 2005 - is also prepared to cut Harila some slack. “I think it’s a bit much to blame Harila and Tenjen. There were scores of other expeditions, and I think people did what they could. If you’re not walking wounded, your chances are slim. It’s not really possible to stretcher a person down. In Britain, you need eight people to carry a stretcher and eight to rotate.”

He added that it seemed the porter was ill-equipped and not very experienced. “Obviously he wasn’t sent there at gunpoint, but there’s still a duty of care for whichever expedition had let him go up.”

Perhaps the real question in all this is K2′s continued appeal to climbers. Although he’s climbed Everest 17 times, Cool says K2 is one of the most special expeditions he’s done. “The line is beautiful. The history is incredible. Yes, there is a level of fear and anxiety when you’re underneath the bottleneck, knowing that it really is Russian roulette, but the vista looking out across the Karakoram... It even makes the view from Everest look a little benign. And don’t forget the Pakistani people. They’re some of the most generous-hearted, fun-loving and hard-working people I’ve met.”

K2 gets its reputation from its fierce fatality rate, which once stood at 25 per cent, and from being more prone to bad weather and avalanches than Everest. It famously claimed the life of the British climber Alison Hargreaves and five others in a brutal storm in 1995. But in recent years, the rate has dropped significantly as the mountain has become more tame. In 2022, only three climbers died on the mountain, 1.6 per cent of successful summits.

In fact, the talk among seasoned high altitude climbers is not Mohammed Hassan’s death, but the fact that at present, it seems his is the only one this season on the mountain.

The real fear is what happens if a huge glacial wall of ice that teeters above a zone called the “bottleneck” breaks. “That’s a tragedy waiting to happen,” warns Hinkes. “Or if there’s a storm like there was in ‘86 or ‘95 - there’s the potential for a vast amount of deaths.”