The Reeducation Camps of Xinjiang

The dispatches on the Rohingya have dried up as the repatriation deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh, set to begin last month, stalled out.

Filling the void have been stories of Uighur Muslim internment camps in the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang. Chris Buckley got things rolling in early September with "China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’" The story's bombshell two-sentence paragraph was

The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.

All qualification was quickly lost and the number of Uighurs detained for reeducation became 1 million. I was walking home from work one night right after the midterm elections and I ran into a guy, an Amazon worker, coming from an anti-Trump rally. We got to talking, and it turned out he was Iranian. I said most people in the United States have not a clue how devastating the Iran-Iraq War was. He said one of Saddam's Scud missiles blew up down the street from his house. While we agreed on a lot, he said he was more frightened of China than an errant U.S. hyper power. He mentioned the 1 million in internment camps in Xinjiang.

Chris Buckley, along with co-author Austin Ramzy, was back at it yesterday with "China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor." The Xinjiang reeducation camps, come to find out, have a forced labor component. Residents graduate from indoctrination to jobs in textile mills, sometimes housed right there at the internment camp.

China is a nation run by the central planning of the Communist Party. The Communist Party has a problem with poverty and underdevelopment in Xinjiang. Xinjiang is also the focus of foreign powers attempting to create separatist problems for China by means of Islam. It is an established pattern for Western intelligence services: Afghanistan, the First and Second Chechen Wars, Libya, Syria, etc. So the Chinese are being proactive. Training and jobs. The refugees fleeing Guatemala and Honduras might very well favor such internment camps in Arizona, California and Texas if it meant permanent residency and stable employment. And what about the opioid killing fields of West Virginia and Ohio?

These stories about the Uighur internment camps of Xinjiang are a good illustration of how the news works a la the Integrity Initiative. Intelligence agencies fronting as NGOs develop and work with "clusters" to spread misinformation.

It is Hard to Imagine What Peace with the Taliban would Look Like

Afghanistan is getting a new defense minister. Gen. John Campbell is being replaced by Lt. Gen. John "Mick" Nicholson, who will likely preside over whatever ignominious demise is in store for the Ghani-Abdullah government. Here is the blurb that appears in this morning's Foreign Policy "Situation Report":

Fourteen years of war, and a new General steps up. One place in particular where American special operators have been making headlines is Afghanistan. And the 9,800 U.S. troops there are about to get a new boss. If confirmed by the Senate, Army Lt. Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson will pin on a fourth star and head to Kabul in coming months to replace Gen. John Campbell, who is expected to retire. Nicholson, a veteran of multiple deployments to Afghanistan, is currently commander of NATO’s Allied Land Command in Izmir, Turkey. He’ll also appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday morning at 9:30 a.m. for a hearing on his nomination. Watch it live here.

Campbell took over the war in the summer of 2014, and was expected to be the general to close up shop on the U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan. But after shuttering hundreds of combat outposts across the country and ending the NATO combat mission on Jan. 1, 2015, Afghan security forces have faltered in the face of a consistent Taliban offensive. Despite Washington’s $60 billion investment in the Afghan army and police, Campbell has argued that they need several more years of training and support before they’re ready to stand alone. And now the next general steps up to take over the fight.

To get a sense of the contours of the Taliban offensive, there is David Jolly's "Taliban Sabotage Cuts Major Power Source for Afghanistan Capital." The Taliban blew up a transmission tower in Baghlan, the province next to Kunduz. The Taliban took control of Kunduz City for two weeks in October. Now they are engaged in an offensive in Baghlan.

One of the passages in Jolly's piece that really jumps out at the reader is his description of the Afghan power grid:

Afghanistan suffers from a chronic power shortage, with less than 40 percent of the population even connected to the grid, according to World Bank data. Three-quarters of the country’s electricity is imported from the neighboring countries of Uzbekistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. The long transmission lines leave Kabul vulnerable to outages from sabotage. As a result, backup generators are de rigueur among those who can afford them.

After 14 years of U.S. occupation and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, two-thirds of the country is not connected to the power grid, and 75 percent of its electricity is imported. This tells you more about the failure of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan than the chronically dysfunctional Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.

Jolly goes on to mention the Taliban offensive in Helmand Province in the country's south. Remember, it is winter, the season when fighting is supposed to wind down:

The unrest in the north is arguably not the worst of the government’s problems at the moment. Helmand Province, in the south, has been under siege for months, and officials say that only the timely dispatch of Afghan and American special forces kept it from completely falling under Taliban control toward the end of 2015.

On Wednesday morning, insurgents attacked a demining team in Nawabad village in the Greshk district of Helmand Province, killing at least three people, said Mohammad Ismail, the district police chief. He said the police quickly scattered the insurgents after a 30-minute gun battle. Had the police not arrived, he said, the insurgents would very likely have killed or kidnapped all of the deminers, employees of the Demining Agency for Afghanistan.

The Chinese are reportedly getting antsy ("China Urging Afghanistan to Restart Peace Talks With Taliban" by Ed Wong; "China Considers Larger Role in Afghanistan Peace Process" by Ed Wong and David Jolly), worried that a collapsed Afghanistan ruled by various Salafist groups would serve as a transmission belt for jihadi Uighurs to destabilize western China's Xinjiang region. Also, as long as Afghanistan remains an oozing ulcer, Xi Jinping's "One Belt, One Road" development plan for Central Asia will be unable to achieve its full potential. One Belt, One Road is vital to China because it is the Dragon's counter to Obama's militarized Asia pivot. Hence, the Chinese are putting pressure on Pakistan to reboot peace talks between the Taliban and the Ghani government.

But what would peace with the Taliban look like? Is such a thing even possible? Would the Taliban agree to serve within a U.S.-created Afghan government? Is partition of the country on the table? It all seems like nonsense, a sentiment basically echoed by U.S. Army Officer Lemar Farhad in "Why Peace with the Taliban Is a Bad Idea: What Needs to Happen Instead":

Pakistan’s view of peace with the Taliban entails the placement of actual, dyed-in-the-wool Taliban ideologues in the ranks of the Afghan civilian and military establishments. This would result in infiltration of Afghan military and civilian cadres, by pro-Wahhabi partisans from Hekmatyar’s Hezbi-Islami and the Haqqani network.

Unfortunately Farhad's solution is pure fantasy:

Establishing sustainable peace in Afghanistan, and the region at large, requires the total and unequivocal neutralization of the Taliban as a viable fighting force. This is because the Taliban and peace are antithetical to each other. Defeat of the Taliban requires a broad based international effort to dissuade the Pakistani government from supporting Taliban action in Afghanistan. The U.S. policy in particular should be geared at rendering Islamabad either incapable of aiding the Taliban or unwilling to do so. Declaring the Taliban as a foreign terrorist organization is the first step. After all, an insurgent force without protected safe-havens, financial institutions, resources, materiel, logistics capabilities, and a host-state will be unable to survive for long.

For this to happen, the United States would have to confront Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Absent a revolution in the homeland, that is not going to happen.

Maybe the best that can be hoped for is a "frozen conflict" a la countries of the former Soviet Union. A set of ceasefires with international monitors.

Dragon Rising

Despite the saturation coverage of the Charlie Hebdo massacre the Gray Lady managed yesterday to sneak in a story on the frontpage (right beneath a large color photo of a machine-gun toting French soldier beneath an iconic arch of the Eiffel Tower) about the amazing array of gargantuan civil engineering projects currently underway in China.

"In China, Projects to Make Great Wall Feel Small," by David Barboza, a reporter who specializes in a constant stream of criticism of Chinese society and the state (he is similar to William Neuman, whose portfolio is South America -- both might as well be employees of USG), the build-for-growth philosophy of the People's Republic of China is faulted for 1) being government driven, 2) fueled by debt, 3) adding capacity that is underutilized in a slowing economy and 4) damaging to the natural environment. But then at the end of the piece (a strong "tell" that one is consuming prestige-press propaganda) the undeniable benefits of an economy oriented around infrastructure construction are enumerated: efficiencies of scale, increased competitiveness, new scientific skills and engineering expertise acquired which can then be exported to other countries.

Reading Baroza's story and its description of enormous wind farms, offshore airports, an underwater tunnel twice the length of the one beneath the English Channel, a 26.4-mile sea-spanning bridge, canals, pipelines, high-speed rail, a freight rail line that runs from China to Spain in 20 days, new ports and commercial architecture provides proof of a nation ascending. Here is the positive part of Barboza's article, the paragraphs at the end:

Proponents say the giant projects can bring greater efficiencies. Big dams and wind farms can cut carbon emissions, while mass transit can help reduce oil consumption, thus delivering greener solutions.

Other huge projects could bolster China’s position as a manufacturing and trading powerhouse. In November, the government said its freight rail link between eastern China and Spain had opened, allowing factory goods to reach Spain in just over 20 days. It is now the world’s longest rail journey, far surpassing the route of the famed Trans-Siberian Railway.

China also sees hidden benefits in such projects, including the ability to gain new scientific and technical expertise.

As a result, bridge-building in China has become something akin to an Olympic event. In 2007, after China completed the longest sea-crossing bridge, in Hangzhou, the nation has regularly broken records. China now claims the longest bridge of any kind, the highest bridge and, in 2011, a new successor to the longest sea-crossing bridge, 26.4 miles long, in the eastern city of Qingdao.

“For China, a lot of this is about building a national identity. Mega-projects are suited for that,” said Bent Flyvbjerg, an authority on mega-projects who teaches at Oxford University. “It’s a lighthouse for all to see what the Chinese nation can do.”

It is the type of engineering expertise the government wants its state-owned enterprises to export — and that is already happening. Boston is buying subway cars from China. Argentina, Pakistan and Russia have asked China to upgrade their infrastructure. Last month, Chinese construction teams began work on an ambitious $50 billion canal across Nicaragua that could some day rival the Panama Canal.

“They have the idea that they’re going to be doing infrastructure for the rest of the world,” said Mr. Huang at the Carnegie Institute.

In doing so, China is pushing the boundaries of infrastructure-building, with ever bolder proposals. The Dalian tunnel looks small compared with the latest idea to build an “international railway” that would link China to the United States by burrowing under the Bering Strait and creating a tunnel between Russia and Alaska.

“The technology is already there,” said Wang Mengshu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an adviser on the Dalian tunnel proposal. “Think about it. If we can build a railway to the North Pole, it would be convenient for us to go to the North Pole.”

The United States, bearer of the global currency, could be doing the same thing, building infrastructure for future growth. But the nation's political class is dominated by the rich who are interested only in plunder not development.

No better example of China's rise and U.S. decline is Ed Wong's story this morning, "Exploring a New Role: Peacemaker in Afghanistan." The PRC is talking to the Afghan Taliban. Realizing Uighur unrest is steered by the usual suspects out of Pakistan, China is trying to talk and cut a deal rather going the military-first route the U.S. favors:

BEIJING — No stranger to engaging in power politics with its Asian neighbors, China’s diplomatic corps has in recent months been trying on a new role: talking with the Afghan Taliban in an effort to play peacemaker.

Late last year, two Afghan Taliban officials traveled with Pakistani officials to Beijing to discuss a potential peace process among Afghanistan’s warring parties, according to three current and former Afghan officials. And that may not have been the first such meeting. Though his account could not be independently confirmed, one Pakistani journalist said that China’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Sun Yuxi, had traveled to Peshawar, Pakistan, to meet with Afghan Taliban representatives weeks earlier.

Despite years of war and turmoil in Afghanistan, China had long seemed reluctant to become directly involved. So what has changed to move it to try to mediate with Islamist militants now? According to Chinese and foreign analysts, the answer lies in three factors: China’s growing worries about a Uighur uprising on its own frontier; concern about more instability on its western border after the main American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan; and urgency to secure access to Afghan mineral and oil deposits where Chinese companies have already made large investments.

“Under the new situation, China is more willing to take on greater responsibility and more willing to proactively promote conciliation,” said Zhao Huasheng, a professor and director of the Center for Russian and Central Asian Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

He added that China was in a good position to help shepherd a peace process, now only in the proposal stage, “because China is not involved in Afghanistan’s domestic fights and, comparatively speaking, is pretty broadly accepted.”

***

There are signs that Uighur militants have been making use of training bases in the Pakistani tribal belt. In November, Afghan and Western officials said in interviews that the Afghan intelligence agency had shown China evidence that dozens of militant Uighurs caught inside Afghanistan in the past year had been trained in camps in Pakistan. 

Last March, Reuters did a telephone interview with Abdullah Mansour, who said he was the leader of the Turkistan Islamic Party, which seeks to free Xinjiang from Chinese rule. Abdullah Mansour said Uighurs were training in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan and planning “many attacks” on China.

Wong has another story this morning, "10 Turks Said to Be Under Arrest for Aiding Terrorist Suspects in China," that ties Turkey to terrorism in Xinjiang. It reminds one of the role Turkey played in the rise of the jihadis in Syria:

BEIJING — The police in Shanghai have arrested 10 Turkish citizens and two Chinese citizens and accused them of providing altered Turkish passports to terrorist suspects from the western region of Xinjiang, a state-run newspaper reported on Wednesday. 

The people trying to use the passports — nine ethnic Uighurs trying to leave China illegally through a Shanghai airport — are also under arrest, according to the newspaper, Global Times. 

All the suspects were detained in November and formally charged recently, the report said. It added that the nine Uighurs were planning to go to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria after leaving China. Audio and video materials with content related to terrorism were found on those trying to leave, the report said. 

Those involved in providing the forged passports have been charged with smuggling terrorists and altering legal documents, Global Times reported. On Wednesday afternoon, calls made to the Shanghai police seeking comment were not immediately answered.

Hopefully Chinese talks with the Afghan Taliban will bear fruit. But I am skeptical. The U.S. and its principal allies among the Gulf monarchies are entirely committed to the spread of destabilizing jihadi violence. It keeps them control.

Gray Lady Reporter Finally Asks the Obvious, "Why No Action Against ISIS?"

As the Islamic State offensive wreaks havoc in Christian communities west of Mosul, sending refugees fleeing to the Kurdistan border and proving once again that the pesh merga have fallen short of their well-crafted reputation for martial prowess, the story to turn to is Somini Sengupta's,
"Islamic Militants in Iraq Are Widely Loathed, Yet Action to Curb Them Is Elusive."

Sengupta is the Gray Lady's United Nations reporter. She is a reliable parrot of whatever the company line is at the moment. But recently she has written some interesting stories, like last week's piece devoted to Israel's war on the UN. Today Sengupta takes on the question, albeit obliquely, that has been demanding an answer since ISIS rose to prominence last year: Why is there no coordinated action, no coalition of the willing, to roll back a terror group more fearsome than Al Qaeda ever was? Good question.

Never mind the decapitations, the crucifixions, the shrine demolitions, the vicious attacks on religious minorities, the oil and gas field seizures, the international recruitment of jihadis from seemingly every nation on the globe. What about the Global War on Terror (GWOT) according to which the West has reconfigured itself in the last 15 years? Aren't the trillions spent on national defense meant to prevent a movement like that represented by Islamic State from doing exactly what it is doing?

The answer that Sengupta comes up with? Basically, it is a version of, "It's complicated":

“With Iran and Saudi Arabia locked in a proxy war in Syria, Saudi Arabia competing with Qatar and Turkey for influence throughout the region, and Kurds — themselves hardly united — leaning ever further toward independence, it is not realistic to expect a coherent strategy for confronting ISIS to emerge from the region,” said Noah Bonsey, the Syria expert at the International Crisis Group. “The U.S. has the clout and capacity to build partnerships capable of reversing ISIS gains, but seems to lack the necessary vision and will.” [Note how the U.S. doesn't lack the "necessary vision and will" to foster a coup in the Ukraine, effectively paving the way for a new Cold War. Yet the U.S. cannot seem to find a way to confront its latest existential enemy, "Islamofascism."]

ISIS threatens not just Iraq and Syria. It has drawn fighters from countries as far-flung as India and China, Belgium and Britain. United Nations experts said fighters from rival jihadist groups, including the Nusra Front, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, have steadily defected to ISIS, because it has more money and guns. Military analysts say that it is exceedingly difficult to neutralize a group that now finances itself — it controls several oil fields in Iraq and Syria— and is heavily armed with weapons seized from both Iraqi and Syrian military bases.

***

The United States has plenty of reason to worry, said Julia McQuaid, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Va., and not just because Western recruits to ISIS can come home and wreak havoc. 

ISIS propounds the idea of a Sunni “caliphate,” which by definition threatens the borders of nation-states. “While there should be little concern for any current jihadist movement successfully establishing a global caliphate under its banner,” Ms. McQuaid wrote in a blog post, the Islamic State’s model “may have profound implications on the security environment in other countries.”

No kidding.

The obvious answer as to why there has been no response from the greatest military power on the planet as the ISIS juggernaut gobbles up vital territory is that ISIS is a creation of U.S.-ally Saudi Arabia, and Washington and the House of Saud are using Islamic State to achieve strategic goals that could not otherwise be conventionally achieved, namely, partitioning Iraq, fracturing Syria, and pressuring Iran and Hezbollah. Where it will end we do not know. ISIS's clashing with Kurdistan represents a shift in the script since back in June when Mosul fell to the jihadi blitz, the Kurds, in what had to be a coordinated move, took Kirkuk. The pesh merga and Salafis assiduously avoided one another. Now they are fighting one another. And what provides proof that the U.S., so far at least, is firmly in the Saudi/ISIS camp is that Washington has not done much of anything to aid Erbil.

Yes, where the caliphate will stop nobody knows. We know that Afghanistan will soon return to the Taliban, and that the Taliban have same sponsor, the Saudis, as ISIS. We know that China is dealing with a shadowy Islamic insurrection in its western province of Xinjiang, not to mention pirate hijackings of tankers in the South China Sea that may have an origin in ISIS recruiting efforts in Malaysia. Then there is the case of the middle-class Indian Muslim men who disappeared to go fight with ISIS in Iraq. Islamic State apparently already has a toehold in the second-most-populated Muslim nation on the planet; the potential for mayhem -- think 2008 Mumbai Thanksgiving massacre -- is immense.

No, the main warfare state, the United States, is aligned here with Saudi Arabia, and its proxy, Islamic State, to make sure the planet has a "rosy future of war."

**CORRECTED**Conflicting Reports on Beheading of Franciscan Father. The Gray Lady Mum.

Catholic Online has a piece about the Al Nusra Front beheading Franciscan Father Francois Murad. This is being denied. No word as of yet in the prestige press.

No Syria news appeared in this morning's New York Times. Reuters is reporting that Chinese Communist leadership blames unrest in the western region of Xinjiang on the Syrian opposition. This wasn't mentioned in the story by Christopher Buckley that appeared in the New York Times.

Yesterday Mark Mazzetti, C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt reported on Qatari shipments of shoulder-fired Chinese FN-6 missiles to the rebels in Syria. Add this to reports of the Saudis supplying antitank guns to the rebels in Aleppo, and already it's plain to see that the heart of the Middle East is going the way of Afghanistan in the 1980s. This means constant warfare and the suffering that results -- death, dislocation, poverty.

It was a big disappointment to read Steve Coll's take on Syria in The New Yorker. It's pure sophistry. He basically comes out and calls for a no-fly zone. Coll makes his pitch based on appeals to our humanitarian better angels. Al-Assad is targeting civilians lining up to buy bread. Proof? No proof needed. And he's using poison gas on his own people. Proof? Well, our spot-on intelligence apparatus, of course. After reading Coll's "spooky" piece, from now on I'll be skeptical about anything he writes.

The best reporting -- the most consistent and trustworthy -- comes from The Independent's Patrick Cockburn. He had an excellent piece on Homs that appeared on Counterpunch's web site over the weekend; in it he directly addresses humanitarian warriors like Coll and the canard that the body count -- 90,000 to 100,000 -- constantly headlined in the Western press is entirely attributable to al-Assad:

The Syrian conflict is a civil war with all the horrors traditionally inflicted in such struggles wherever they are fought, be it Syria today or Russia, Spain, Greece, Lebanon or Iraq in the past. For the newly appointed American National Security Adviser Susan Rice, David Cameron or William Hague to pretend that this is a simple battle between a dictatorial government and an oppressed people is to misrepresent or misunderstand what is happening on the ground.

Evidence that both sides have committed supporters prepared to fight to the death is borne out by the estimate of some 100,000 dead published this week by the pro-rebel Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It concludes that fatal casualties come almost equally from the two sides in the civil war: broadly 25,000 of them government soldiers, 17,000 pro-government militia, 36,000 civilians and 14,000 rebel fighters, though the last two figures in particular are probably understated.

The massive anti-Morsi protests yesterday in Egypt are heartening. The Saudis and Qataris actively seeking to Talibanize the entire Middle East no doubt took note. There is a huge majority that wants peace, employment and tolerance. Not sharia. Not perpetual war.