SACW - 25 Aug 2017 | Afghanistan: military contractor / Bangladesh: 16th amendment / Sri Lanka: China deal / India: Triple Talaq unconstitutional ; Luithui's 22-year ordeal / Hindutva reshaping India / Brazil scraps Amazon reserve / Burma minorities / Historical Monuments, From Charlottesville to Moscow / The chill of air conditioning

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at gmail.com
Thu Aug 24 17:07:41 EDT 2017


South Asia Citizens Wire - 25 August 2017 - No. 2948 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: The Supreme Court scraps the 16th amendment - questions & implications
2. India: The Supreme Court Judgement On Triple Talaq statements from women's groups and commentary 
3. Learning Chinese chequers | Latha Jishnu
4. India: Reign of Hindutva undermining democracy / religious displays in police stations in UP / Malegaon blast accused Col. Purohit granted bail / Mughals Nearly Removed from Maharashtra State Textbooks
5. India - Human Rights: Luithui's 22-year ordeal for justice / Police crackdown on Sanjay Sahni / harassment of Prof Nivedita Menon by Jawaharlal Nehru University
8. Recent on Communalism Watch:
Press Release by Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy Applauds SC verdict on Triple Talaq
India: Time for UCC [uniform civil code] says the Times of India Editorial (August 24, 2017)
Anti-Hindutva protest in London demands end to lynching of Indian minorities
India: Notice to Govt On Plea Against Rule Denying Reservation Benefits To Dalit Christians [Read Petition to Supreme Court]
India: Dabholkar, Pansare killings well-planned, linked - Bombay High Court
India: RSS fumes over historian Romila Thapar’s new book on nationalism
Cartoon by Nala Ponnappa after the Tripple Talaq Ruling by the Supreme Court of India
India: Hindutva camp prepares for weapon worship in Bengal on Bijoya Dasami
India: Why is Punjab increasingly turning to new gurus for comfort?
India's Supreme Cout Strikes Down Triple Talaq, But Does Little for Gender Justice | Indira Jaising
India - Punjab: Gurmeet Ram Rahim rape trial - 50,000 Dera Sacha Sauda sect followers gather, stockpile weapons
India: Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal (MSM) welcomes Supreme court ruling against Triple Talaq and seeks Uniform Civil Code

::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
7. Trump’s changing view of Afghanistan: are private armies part of the plan? | Ulrich Petersohn
8. The Bidding War: How a young Afghan military contractor became spectacularly rich | Matthieu Aikins
9. Sri Lankan justice minister fired for criticizing China deal | Bharatha Mallawarachi / AP
10. Bangladesh university drops dress code after backlash | AFP
11. India: SC verdict leaves no escape route for the govt: Usha Ramanathan on privacy right | Bhasha Singh
12. India: Supreme Court avenges a misogynist clergy | Saif Mahmood
13. India: Oppressive personal laws aren’t the only thing standing between Muslim women and happy lives | Farah Naqvi
14. India: Ramjas College - censorship continues - Dilip Simeon / DSE cites security concerns to cancel event on Ramjas violence - The Times of India
15. Brazil scraps Amazon reserve to allow mining | AFP
16. Thailand: International Statement in support of Dr. Chayan Vaddhanaphuti and colleagues
17. Burma covers up its systematic abuse of a minority group - Editorial, The Washington Post
18. Joys of the occasional detour | Jawed Naqvi
19. Political Conflict Over Historical Monuments, From Charlottesville to Moscow | Stephen F. Cohen
20. The chill of air conditioning goes global - Summertime, and the living is easier | Benoît Bréville

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1. BANGLADESH: THE SUPREME COURT SCRAPS THE 16TH AMENDMENT - QUESTIONS & IMPLICATIONS
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The Supreme Court of Bangladesh scrapped the 16th amendment on the ground that it undermined the independence of the judiciary . . . bangladesh 16hth amendment judgment, where the cj has made very clear pronouncements on how this govt rehabilitated military rulers legacy of making islam the state religion
http://www.sacw.net/article13435.html

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2. INDIA: THE SUPREME COURT JUDGEMENT ON TRIPLE TALAQ STATEMENTS FROM WOMEN'S GROUPS AND COMMENTARY
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* INDIA: STATEMENT OF WOMEN’S GROUPS & CONCERNED INDIVIDUALS ON THE SUPREME COURT JUDGEMENT ON TRIPLE TALAQ
We wholeheartedly welcome the judgment of the Hon’ble Supreme Court in the matter of Triple Talaq brought before it by a number of Muslim women and Muslim women’s rights groups. In arguing that the practice of Triple Talaq is both, un-Quranic and Un-Constitutional, it is an important departure from earlier judgments on all women’s rights, because it is based on the tenets of equality, dignity and secularism as enshrined in the Constitution.
http://www.sacw.net/article13440.html

* INDIA: SECULAR CIVIL CODE - WITH TRIPLE TALAQ STRUCK DOWN, IT’S TIME TO REFORM OTHER UNJUST FAITH-BASED LAWS | Girish Shahane
The Supreme Court’s divided judgement on instant divorce is a tiny step in the right direction
http://www.sacw.net/article13441.html

* ALL PERSONAL LAWS IN INDIA ARE DISCRIMINATORY
by Vibhuti Patel
The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down triple talaq should be the trigger to generate a candid debate on religion-based personal laws in the country.
http://www.sacw.net/article13442.html

* INDIA: SUPREME COURT RENDERS TRIPLE TALAQ UNCONSTITUTIONAL - FULL TEXT OF COURT RULING OF 22 AUGUST 2017
https://tinyurl.com/ybwbgek7

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3. LEARNING CHINESE CHEQUERS
by Latha Jishnu
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Middle India is clearly chuffed. The prolonged confrontation with China on the Doklam plateau, which is into its third month, has provided the comforting illusion that India can stand up to its large neighbour unlike in 1962 when the Chinese inflicted a humiliating defeat on the country. . . Facts are almost irrelevant in this elevation of the national mood over the current stand-off.
http://www.sacw.net/article13444.html

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4. REIGN OF HINDUTVA UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY / RELIGIOUS DISPLAYS IN POLICE STATIONS IN UP / MALEGAON BLAST ACCUSED COL. PUROHIT GRANTED BAIL / MUGHALS NEARLY REMOVED FROM MAHARASHTRA STATE TEXTBOOKS
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INDIA: DISTORTION OF TRUTH AND THE UNDERMINING OF DEMOCRACY UNDER REIGN OF HINDUTVA
by Ananya Vajpeyi
It is important to recognise that the manipulation of language, the deployment of silence, the disparagement of individuals, the erasure of historical memories, the marginalisation of minorities and women, the crushing of institutions — these are all strategies on a continuum, designed to effect the tectonic shift of a plural and diverse India into a Hindu Rashtra.
http://www.sacw.net/article13436.html

INDIA: UTTAR PRADESH CHIEF MINISTER YOGI ADITYANATH’S ENCOURAGEMENT OF RELIGIOUS DISPLAYS IN POLICE STATIONS IS TROUBLING | Aakash Joshi
The least problematic aspect of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s statement implying that Muslim residents offering namaz in public are comparable to police stations in the state becoming associated with the majority religion is that it is a simple logical fallacy. The "false equivalence" between ordinary citizens exercising their freedom of religion and the co-opting of police stations for janmashthami celebrations is, however, symptomatic of a deeper malaise
http://www.sacw.net/article13431.html

INDIA: COL. PUROHIT - ARYAVARTA’S SOLDIER, NOT A MERE MOLE | Press release by JTSA
The Malegaon accused Col. Purohit has been granted bail by the Supreme Court. We know that bail in terror cases, especially those involving bomb blasts, is rare, if not altogether impossible to secure. Take fore example, the following cases. Mohd. Aamir Khan’s bail application was repeatedly turned down even when his lawyer furnished medical certificates vouching that his old mother has suffered a paralytic stroke.
http://www.sacw.net/article13439.html

INDIA: MUGHALS NEARLY REMOVED FROM MAHARASHTRA STATE TEXTBOOKS
History textbooks for Std VII and IX revised, Akbar’s reign reduced to three lines as focus is on Shivaji’s Maratha Empire
http://www.sacw.net/article13416.html

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5. INDIA - HUMAN RIGHTS: LUITHUI'S 22-YEAR ORDEAL FOR JUSTICE / POLICE CRACKDOWN ON SANJAY SAHNI / HARASSMENT OF PROF NIVEDITA MENON BY JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY
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* INDIAN CITIZENSHIP REGAINED: THE 22-YEAR ORDEAL OF LUINGAM LUITHUI FOR JUSTICE | Bharat Bhushan
India failed Luingam Luithui, a Naga human rights advocate, by illegally revoking his citizenship 22 years ago. He fought back and won.
http://www.sacw.net/article13437.html

* INDIA: NREGA SANGHARSH MORCHA CONDEMNS THE POLICE CRACKDOWN ON SANJAY SAHNI AND OTHER MEMBERS OF SPSS IN MUZAFFARPUR
NREGA Sangharsh Morcha strongly condemns the arrest of Sanjay Sahni in Muzaffarpur, Bihar on 21 August and the police lathi charge on other members on Samaj Parivartan Shakti Sanghathan (SPSS) who were protesting outside the office of the district’s Deputy Development Commissioner (DDC). Sudha Devi of the Sangathan was badly injured on the head. Other Sangathan members who were hit include Indu Devi, Yoshoda Devi, Gulab Devi and Girija Devi.
http://www.sacw.net/article13438.html

INDIA: STATEMENT BY ACADEMICS AND ACTIVISTS AGAINST HARASSMENT OF PROF NIVEDITA MENON BY JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION
We, the undersigned women’s rights groups, activists and academics, are shocked to learn that the JNU administration has adopted a biased and mala fide procedure to institute an enquiry against Professor Nivedita Menon, eminent academic and well-known feminist who is Chairperson of the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Thought at the School of International Studies, JNU.
http://www.sacw.net/article13443.html

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6. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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India: Triple Talaq Verdict, Gender Justice and RSS Combine | LS Herdenia
India: Unity mounts at Kuber Teela
Press Release by Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy Applauds SC verdict on Triple Talaq
India: Time for UCC [uniform civil code] says the Times of India Editorial (August 24, 2017)
Anti-Hindutva protest in London demands end to lynching of Indian minorities
India: Notice to Govt On Plea Against Rule Denying Reservation Benefits To Dalit Christians [Read Petition to Supreme Court]
India: Dabholkar, Pansare killings well-planned, linked - Bombay High Court
India: RSS fumes over historian Romila Thapar’s new book on nationalism
Cartoon by Nala Ponnappa after the Tripple Talaq Ruling by the Supreme Court of India
India: Hindutva camp prepares for weapon worship in Bengal on Bijoya Dasami
India: Why is Punjab increasingly turning to new gurus for comfort?
India's Supreme Cout Strikes Down Triple Talaq, But Does Little for Gender Justice | Indira Jaising
India - Punjab: Gurmeet Ram Rahim rape trial - 50,000 Dera Sacha Sauda sect followers gather, stockpile weapons
India: Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal (MSM) welcomes Supreme court ruling against Triple Talaq and seeks Uniform Civil Code
India: Supreme Court Renders Triple Talaq Unconstitutional - Full text of Court Ruling of 22 August 2017

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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7. TRUMP’S CHANGING VIEW OF AFGHANISTAN: ARE PRIVATE ARMIES PART OF THE PLAN?
by Ulrich Petersohn*
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(The Conversation, August 22, 2017)

Donald Trump has defied expectation by pledging to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan. In an address from Arlington, Virginia, the president announced that, following a review of the US strategy in Afghanistan, he had concluded that hasty withdrawal would be a mistake and that “our nation must seek an honourable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made”.

This, he said, involves using “all instruments of American power – diplomatic, economic, and military – toward a successful outcome”.

Ahead of Trump’s statement, it was widely reported that the White House was considering turning to the private sector to draw up a plan to deploy troops there.

Trump did not openly discuss such plans in his speech, but he did not rule them out either. His address was noticeably light on detail.

One of the private consultants tasked with the planning is well known in private security circles – Erik Prince, CEO of the private military firm Academi, previously called Blackwater. His organisation ran one of the largest and most heavily armed private military operations in post-invasion Iraq.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, Prince set out his vision for a private military solution to resolve the “expensive disaster” in early 2017. He draws on several historical cases for inspiration, such as the East India Company, which effectively ruled large parts of India with its private army during British rule, and General MacArthur, who administered post-war Japan.

Prince proposed to put an “American viceroy” in charge in Afghanistan to consolidate authority. This person would have significant decision making powers “so no time is wasted waiting for Washington to send instructions”. His proposal implies that the viceroy is meant to have authority over all coalition efforts and the ability to allot property rights.

Trump didn’t speak directly to this in his Virginia address, but he did rail against the current approach to making decisions, arguing:

    Micromanagement from Washington DC does not win battles. They are won in the field drawing upon the judgement and expertise of wartime commanders and frontline soldiers acting in real time, with real authority, and with a clear mission to defeat the enemy.

To address the current effectiveness problems of the Afghan army, Prince has, in other media appearances, talked of bringing in private military and security companies to live, train, advise and lead their local counterparts.

If this is what he has in mind as he puts together his plan for the Trump administration, there is significant reason for concern and it is unlikely to succeed.

Powerful local actors

There are powerful actors who have a vested interest in the status quo and little incentive to change the current order. Afghan warlords have their own lucrative private security operations, so Prince’s plan would directly threaten their business model. They are dependent on a certain degree of insecurity, which they often spread themselves, while selling security services at the same time. They would almost certainly oppose a foreign competitor entering the market. The result would be various private security outfits using force to promote their business interests and eliminate others from the market.

Many of these warlords are well-connected in the Afghan government. Some are even high-ranking officials themselves. Foreign private actors taking control of territory, cutting off access to resources and taking over political power would alienate the local elites in power. A massive redistribution of power of this kind would certainly exacerbate the conflict.

Market forces

Private forces can indeed be a highly effective option for increasing combat power. But their performance depends on the competitive pressures of the market. They only perform at their peak when there is financial incentive to do so. Several private military or security firms need to be contracted to perform similar tasks to keep up competitive pressure. This, in turn, induces a source of friction into the military operation. Various companies – potentially from different countries - need to be co-ordinated, and that’s even before you factor in how they engage with the Afghan army.

The early days of the Iraq operation demonstrated the problems in such an undertaking. Coordinating the different players was difficult and commanders often didn’t know who operated in their area of responsibility. Friendly fire incidents occurred, and private companies collided with military procedures. It took several years to build a robust co-ordination system and improve the situation.

News of Trump’s inauguration reaches Afghanistan. EPA

Prince’s proposal suggests a single corporate provider, or a prime contractor, handing out subcontracts and running the operation. In both cases, once the contract is awarded, competition would be non-existent. The client would be dependent on a single private company. Replacing that company would be almost impossible due to the enormous size of the contract.

The absence of competition eliminates any incentive for efficiency and opens the client up to all kinds of vulnerabilities. The private military or security company could increase prices, overcharge or compromise on quality. That makes this kind of operation unlikely to deliver on the kind of efficiency and effectiveness that Prince seems to envisage.

Making it worse?

The proposal does not solve, and probably even aggravates, the major conundrum of counterinsurgency operations with foreign intervention such as Afghanistan. According to Prince, Taliban groups want to “destroy the American way of life”. Taliban groups certainly do not care for the American way of life but they fought the coalition forces for different reasons. Many of the insurgents were “accidental guerillas”, motivated to fight because a foreign force invaded their land.

Against this backdrop, the imposition of a corporate actor, modelled after a former colonial entity, seeking to secure access the economic crucial areas by using private soldiers, in combination with a foreign viceroy being able to assign property rights, would be a propaganda win for the insurgency. Moreover, it’s certainly the recipe for an even larger mobilisation of opposition.

Whether the Trump administration will take up the proposal is uncertain. Several high-ranking security experts in Washington are not keen on privatised missions, but influence in Washington is a wavering commodity. One can say a lot of things about Prince, but not that he doesn’t know how to take advantage of an opportunity.

(*Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Liverpool)

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8. THE BIDDING WAR: HOW A YOUNG AFGHAN MILITARY CONTRACTOR BECAME SPECTACULARLY RICH
by Matthieu Aikins
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(The New Yorker - March 7, 2016 Issue

Within the U.S. government, there is growing recognition that our expenditures in Afghanistan have been self-defeating.

America ’s war in Afghanistan, which is now in its fifteenth year, presents a mystery: how could so much money, power, and good will have achieved so little? Congress has appropriated almost eight hundred billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan; a hundred and thirteen billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent on the Marshall Plan, in postwar Europe. General David Petraeus, a principal architect of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, encouraged the practice of pumping money into the economy of Afghanistan, where the per-capita G.D.P. at the time of the invasion was around a hundred and twenty dollars. He believed that money had helped buy peace during his command of American forces in Iraq. “Employ money as a weapons system,” Petraeus wrote in 2008. “Money can be ‘ammunition.’ ”

The result was a war waged as much by for-profit companies as by the military. Political debate in Washington has focussed on the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan and the losses that they have sustained. To minimize casualties, the military outsourced any task that it could: maintenance, cooking and laundry, overland logistics, even security. Since 2007, there have regularly been more contractors than U.S. forces in Afghanistan; today, they outnumber them three to one.

One result has been forms of corruption so extreme that the military has, in some cases, funded its own enemy. When a House committee investigated the trucking system that supplied American forces, it found that the system had “fueled a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.” Its report concluded that “protection payments for safe passage are a significant potential source of funding for the Taliban.” The system risked “undermining the U.S. strategy for achieving its goals in Afghanistan.”

The system has also made a few individuals very rich. Hikmatullah Shadman, an Afghan trucking-company owner, earned more than a hundred and sixty million dollars while contracting for the United States military; for the past three years, he has been battling to save much of his fortune in a federal court in Washington, D.C. In United States of America v. Sum of $70,990,605, et al., the Justice Department has accused Hikmat, as he’s known, of bribing contractors and soldiers to award him contracts. Hikmat has maintained his innocence, even as eight soldiers have pleaded guilty in related criminal cases. Several members of the Special Forces who have not been accused of wrongdoing have defended him. In a deposition, Major Jerry (Rusty) Bradley, a veteran Special Forces officer, said, “The only way to right a wrong of this magnitude is to be willing to draw your sword and defend everything that you believe in.”

I first met Hikmat in June, 2014, at his office in downtown Kabul, on a main road crowded with taxis and venders hawking stewed chickpeas. The compound once belonged to Ahmad Zahir, a famous pop singer of the nineteen-seventies. We sat in a living room that, with its low ceiling, floral wall print, and paper lanterns, resembled a California den from that period.

Hikmat, who is in his late twenties, looks disarmingly young and gentle. Slim, with a high brow that he often furrows, he countered the charges against him in grave, deliberate English. “The people who did this investigation were sitting in air-conditioned rooms,” he told me. “They don’t know what was happening in the field.” He offered to explain how he had made his fortune. “I was part of the Special Forces family,” he said. “I was trained by them.”

Before the Americans came, Hikmat lived with his father, a schoolteacher; his mother; and five siblings in a four-room mud-walled house in one of the oldest parts of Kandahar City, in southern Afghanistan. In the summer of 2001, Hikmat was fourteen years old, and he and his friends chafed at the narrowness of life under the Taliban. No one had a telephone, televisions were banned, and there was rarely any electricity. Sometimes, Hikmat recalled, the Taliban would round up the schoolboys and take them to see executions at the city’s soccer stadium. “There was a black umbrella on top of us,” he said. “We were not connected to the world.”

Eager for a glimpse of life outside Afghanistan, Hikmat would watch movies at the house of a Hindu friend, on a tiny, illicit television with the volume turned low and the blinds pulled down. They liked Bollywood dramas and Hollywood action films, and would try out the foreign-sounding names: Van Damme, Bruce Lee, Rambo. At home, in the evenings, Hikmat’s father listened to the BBC’s Pashto service while taking notes on world events in a diary. “My father was always studying at night,” Hikmat said. “He was always working.”

On September 11, 2001, Hikmat came home to find his parents sitting by the radio, stunned by the news from New York. Like many Afghans, they didn’t understand why their country was said to be responsible, but it soon became clear that the Americans would attack. Hikmat imagined that, like the action heroes in his films, they would come on foot, in a spray of bullets. He was so excited, he said, that he sneaked out and wrote in chalk on the wall of a mosque, “Long live Bush.”
“See—all the thrills of outdoor activity with none of the risks!”

The Americans came in B-52s instead, raining bombs on the Taliban and the Arab foreign fighters who had become their allies. Hikmat and his family fled across the border to Karachi, in Pakistan. Kabul fell in November, but Kandahar held out until December 7th, when a convoy of Afghan militiamen, led by the warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, entered the city, accompanied by C.I.A. advisers and U.S. Special Forces. Hikmat’s family rushed back to Kandahar. The next day, residents celebrated and played music in the streets. For the first time in years, videocassettes were sold openly. When a convoy of Special Forces drove through town, with soldiers as muscled and heavily armed as Rambo, Hikmat joined the crowd that was walking alongside them, waving and smiling. On the radio, the country’s new leader, forty-three-year-old Hamid Karzai, a former diplomat, promised a bright future of peace and development; after decades of war and isolation, the economy was reviving in Kandahar.

But, that winter, Hikmat’s father fell ill with stomach cancer, and died soon afterward. To support his mother and sisters, Hikmat tended a French-fry and juice stand. In June, 2002, he found work cleaning and making repairs at a Special Forces base that the Americans had set up at Kandahar’s airport.

Sami Ghairatmal, a childhood friend, told me that Hikmat was always driven to improve himself. “He studied more than us,” he said. “He learned good and fluent English.” After the project at the base ended, a friend of Hikmat’s who was working as a security guard for the U.S. military asked Hikmat to see him about another job. Borrowing his brother’s motorcycle, Hikmat drove out to the former compound of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, in the hills north of the city. Both the C.I.A. and the Special Forces had set up at the compound, which they called Camp Gecko, after the noisy lizards that lived there. The roof was destroyed, but workers were putting up new buildings. Eventually, the complex had a cafeteria with a fireplace, a fountain with catfish, and a swimming pool.

Hikmat’s friend took him to meet Bryan Myers, a twenty-two-year-old engineering sergeant who had just arrived for his first tour in Afghanistan with the Desert Eagles, a battalion of the 3rd Special Forces Group, which deployed frequently to Kandahar in the course of the war. Myers was a barrel-chested man who, like most Green Berets, as the Special Forces are known, had a beard that distinguished him from the clean-shaven regular troops. He later wrote an account of his meeting with Hikmat, which Hikmat’s lawyers submitted in court:

    “How old are you, kid?”
    “I am 16, about, sir.”
    “Yeah no, that’s not going to happen. Sorry but there is no way. Tony, I am sorry but we can’t hire a kid, it’s too dangerous and he doesn’t bring anything to the table.”
As Hikmat turned to go, Myers mentioned that a rucksack and some gun covers needed repairing; Hikmat offered to do it. His mother sewed up the rucksack, and when he declined payment Myers and the team, impressed by his honesty, decided to take him on:
    “Hik, your English is pretty good. You know what we do here right?”
    “Of course, you are the bearded ones, everybody knows what you do. That is why I want to work with you.”
    Laughing, I just put my hand on his shoulder and respond “Welcome aboard.”

Hikmat spent the next three years as an interpreter, living and fighting alongside Myers and other Green Berets. He earned up to fifteen hundred dollars a month, twenty times the salary of an Afghan police officer. “In the eyes of Hikmatullah, the bearded ones were sent upon him as an answer to many of [his] prayers,” Myers wrote.

The Special Forces, who are known as “quiet professionals,” focus less on commando raids—the hallmark of other élite units, such as the Delta Force and the Navy SEALs—than on training and fighting with allied local forces. During the invasion, they had embedded with Afghan warlords and their militias, and afterward they were left behind to hunt the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda across Afghanistan’s remote mountains and deserts.

“We were inherently different,” Rusty Bradley, who served as an officer with the Desert Eagles, wrote in “Lions of Kandahar,” a 2011 memoir. “We ate, slept, lived, and breathed with the Afghan people as if we had done so all our lives, immersing ourselves in their language and culture.” Bradley deployed to Kandahar eight times, eventually learning rudimentary Pashto. After Myers rotated back to the U.S., Hikmat worked for Bradley’s team, and the two grew close. He compared Bradley, who weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, to Sylvester Stallone; Bradley has credited Hikmat with saving his life by putting himself between Bradley and an armed insurgent. “I wasn’t just an interpreter,” Hikmat told me.

By 2006, the American military was focussed mostly on Iraq, and the Taliban had retaken much of the countryside in southern Afghanistan. That summer, Bradley and Myers redeployed with the Desert Eagles to Kandahar. In Operation Medusa, one of the largest battles of the war, U.S. and Canadian troops attacked Taliban fighters west of the city with tanks, artillery, and airpower. “It looked like a monster had stomped through the valley, leaving skeletons of compounds smoldering and tops of trees jagged and twisted,” Bradley wrote.

Hikmat’s mother, fearing for his safety, pleaded with him to stop working as an interpreter. Three interpreters in Kandahar had recently been captured and beheaded by the Taliban. “I lied to my mom,” he said, telling her that he had stayed on the base during the operation. He had started a side business selling fruit and soft drinks to the base, and that winter he quit his job as an interpreter in order to work on the business full time. Hikmat told me that a sergeant major at the Special Forces headquarters helped him register it at the main U.S. base, known as Kandahar Airfield, or KAF. On February 25, 2007, Hikmat signed a “blanket purchase agreement” with the U.S. military, an open-ended contract for trucking services. He started with a single rented truck.

Hikmat’s entry into the trucking business brought him into competition with some of Kandahar’s most powerful men. Gul Agha Sherzai, the warlord who had retaken the province with the help of the C.I.A. and Special Forces, had been the governor; his brother Abdul Raziq was a general in the Afghan Army, in charge of the airport. The Sherzais also controlled lucrative contracts to supply gravel to the American base, and Raziq’s company, Sherzai Construction and Supply, provided trucks to the Americans. “We’ve had a friendship since 2001,” Raziq told me in his office on KAF. He had a framed photograph on his desk of himself with General John Campbell, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “From that time, I’m their partner.”
“Wait! Anybody that amazing with balloons deserves to live.”

To many Afghans, warlords like the Sherzais were scarcely more legitimate than the Taliban. After the Communist government fell, in 1992, Gul Agha and his men had taken part in the civil war that pillaged Kandahar. Now, “with U.S. dollars,” Governor Sherzai “had constituted his own private militia,” Sarah Chayes, a journalist turned aid worker, writes, in “The Punishment of Virtue,” her 2006 account of life in Kandahar. But the Americans saw the political landscape in Afghanistan through the dichotomies of the war on terror, and in Kandahar they relied on the Sherzais to help identify the enemy. “Before long, the U.S. forces were helplessly wrapped inside the [Sherzais’] friendly bear hug,” Chayes continues. Bradley, who referred to the Taliban as “savages,” wrote, “Every day was like September 12, 2001.” Raids by U.S. Special Operations Forces, in conjunction with the Sherzais, compelled former Taliban leaders to move to Pakistan, where they began to revive the insurgency.

As an interpreter, Hikmat had often been in meetings with the Sherzais, though they hardly noticed him in those days. “We wouldn’t even greet him, I remember,” Khalid Pashtoon, a member of the Afghan parliament who was then an aide to Gul Agha Sherzai, said. Hikmat told me that he understood why the Americans aligned themselves with people like the Sherzais against the Taliban. “There is bad and worse,” he said. “You would choose bad.”

Now he was their rival in a more and more lucrative business. Unlike the Iraq war, in which international companies brought in supplies, in Afghanistan the military outsourced its overland-logistics chain to local contractors, whose jingle trucks, so called because of their colorful, tinkling metal decorations, hauled cargo to bases across the country’s remote and increasingly dangerous terrain. In the beginning, contractors like Hikmat were paid in cash by the U.S. military after missions were completed. Glad to have an alternative to the Sherzais, the Special Forces welcomed him. “I was never saying no to any job,” Hikmat said. “They want anything, anytime, and you have to be ready.”

Hikmat had chosen the right time to start. Between 2007 and 2010, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan increased from fourteen thousand to nearly a hundred thousand. And they were outnumbered by a second, private army: by June, 2010, more than a hundred and seven thousand contractors were working for the Department of Defense. The jobs were dangerous—more contractors had been killed so far that year than U.S. soldiers—but the payoff was substantial. Between 2007 and 2014, the U.S. spent eighty-nine billion dollars on contracting in Afghanistan.

“There were so many contracts out there that you could win anything you wanted,” Simon Hilliard, a former British soldier who worked on KAF as the managing director of Watan Risk Management, an Afghan-owned security company, told me. “The margins were insane.” He said that, in eighteen months, Watan’s revenues increased from five hundred thousand dollars to fifty-eight million.

Built as a spartan military encampment, KAF became a city of tens of thousands, with paved roads and a state-of-the-art trauma hospital, as well as a Burger King and a T.G.I. Friday’s, all coated with fine desert dust and permeated by the smell of the “poo pond.” The U.S. and its allies eventually built more than five hundred military bases in Afghanistan. Many of them had hot showers and Internet cafés. Soldiers who patrolled mud-walled villages without plumbing or electricity, in temperatures that rose to a hundred and thirty degrees, slept in air-conditioned tents so cold that they needed blankets. It all consumed enormous amounts of fuel: in 2010, Bagram Airfield, which was comparable in size to KAF, used nearly 1.6 million gallons per week.

Most of the fuel was transported by trucks like Hikmat’s, and what had originally been an ad-hoc system grew into a countrywide network that handled billions of dollars in freight. Even its management was outsourced. In October, 2007, not long after Hikmat rented his first truck, the contract to set up a Jingle Truck Coordination Office, a job originally handled by the U.S. military, was signed by TOIFOR, a German company that was founded in the nineteen-nineties to supply portable toilets to NATO forces preparing to go into Bosnia. “It was an absolutely minor, small, small, little thing,” Karl Friedrich Krause, one of the company’s founders, told me. “A small job done by one guy.”

That guy was Roren Stowell, a Denver native with a snowboarder’s drawl. “We were about two weeks away from taking over,” Stowell told me. “They didn’t have a pencil.” As troop levels surged, Stowell said, “where before they were doing maybe twenty trucks a week, in a short amount of time we were going upward of four or five hundred trucks on any given day.”

Stowell went on, “There were million-dollar truck runs, paying upward of forty-five thousand dollars per truck.” The military didn’t seem to mind the expense, as long as U.S. soldiers didn’t have to risk their lives on the road. The attitude, he said, was “Fuck it. There’s an endless amount of money—just get the trucks there and keep the customers happy.”

The money created a local ecosystem, with KAF at its apex. Stowell and his team awarded supply requests from military units to a group of Afghan trucking companies, based on price, availability, and dependability. He soon realized that, while his subcontractors—who included both Hikmat and Sherzai—had their own fleets, they also acted as brokers for the rest of Kandahar’s truckers, hiring them and adding a hefty percentage to the cost. The subcontractors’ advantage was their access to the base and what were known locally as awwal las, or “first-hand,” contracts.

Millions of dollars were being paid by the U.S. government to private companies, but the intermediary was typically a low-level military officer, contractor, or civil servant. The temptation to take part in the profiteering was substantial. According to a study published in May, 2015, by the Center for Public Integrity, at least a hundred and fifteen U.S. service members who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been convicted of bribery, theft, and contract-rigging charges since 2005.

“It was obvious that there was an opportunity to make money by giving a specific company more missions,” Stowell said. He told me that once, when he was sent to Dubai to collect sewer-cleaning equipment, one of TOIFOR’s subcontractors, Tawazuh, offered to have someone guide him around the city. “I’m picturing this guy who will take me to HomePro,” Stowell said. Instead, several men picked him up in a Mercedes-Benz. They offered him a Rolex watch as a gift, which he refused. “I’m like, dude, I’m looking for a Roto-Rooter, I don’t need a fucking entourage,” Stowell told me. Undeterred, the men drove him around Dubai and, that evening, tried to introduce him to some Russian women at a night club. Stowell said he told them, “I can’t take any Rolexes, I can’t take any hos, and I don’t want to go to any more dinners.” (Sadeeq Mohmand, Tawazuh’s owner, has denied offering gifts or bribes.)

While Stowell decided which Afghan companies would supply conventional units, the Special Forces were allowed to choose the companies they preferred, on the ground that they had unique requirements. “They’d come in and be like, No way, the only company that’s going to do it is this company,” Stowell said. “And I’m like, Yeah, man, but they’re three times the price of the other guys.”

Hikmat had just begun his business when Stowell arrived on KAF. By the time he left, in late 2008, Hikmat was making his first millions. “He kind of came in as an underdog,” Stowell said. “He was so young. I was just sitting there thinking, How’s this guy doing it?”

In January, 2008, Tonya Long, a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant, arrived on KAF, where she spent six months working with the Jingle Truck Office and its contractors to coördinate her unit’s resupply missions. In late 2010, federal agents confronted her over her lavish spending on furniture, a trucking business, and a vacation to Disney World. She pleaded guilty to smuggling back to the U.S. approximately a million dollars in cash, stuffed inside VCRs, money that she said had come from Afghan contractors.

Long, who is serving a five-year prison sentence, told me in an e-mail that the bribery scheme was already in place when she arrived on KAF. She was involved in an affair with an Army captain who worked in logistics for the Bush Hogs, a sister battalion of the Desert Eagles in the 3rd Special Forces Group. The captain, she wrote, had been taking bribes from Tawazuh in return for steering contracts to the company and for creating fake missions, which the U.S. government was billed for. (Mohmand has denied this.) When the Bush Hogs were replaced by another Special Forces battalion, in early 2008, the captain’s successor, Captain Franklin Rivera-Medina, took over the scheme, but he favored another company: Hikmat’s.

To justify the choice of contractors, the first captain “said that ONLY Tawazuh was reliable and Rivera said that ONLY Hikmat was reliable,” Long, who also had an affair with Rivera, wrote.

The first captain, who retired from the military, was never charged, and refused to comment. The Justice Department also declined to comment. (At Long’s sentencing hearing, the prosecution stated, “We know that the prior captain did the false-claim scheme as well.”)

Rivera, when questioned by the F.B.I., admitted to receiving eighty thousand dollars from Hikmat. He pleaded guilty to charges of cash smuggling and taking gratuities, but he died in 2014, before he could be sentenced. According to a prosecution document, Hikmat admitted to paying Rivera a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash, but he said that the money was compensation to the military for missing shipments.

Bank statements submitted in court by Hikmat’s lawyers show that fluctuations in his earnings appear to correlate with the presence of different Special Forces battalions in Kandahar. His first six months of invoices to TOIFOR averaged a hundred thousand dollars a month; after April, 2008, when Rivera arrived on KAF, they rose sharply, totalling almost thirteen million dollars for the rest of the year. Then, in early 2009, Bradley and the Desert Eagles were back in Kandahar. Hikmat’s invoices kept climbing, reaching $7.7 million in May; by the end of the year, he had billed TOIFOR more than forty-five million dollars. Captain Edward Woodall, a supply officer with the Desert Eagles, later wrote that the Special Forces “required a level of trust and dependability that only Mr. Shadman could provide.”

But in the winter of 2010 a new Special Forces battalion arrived, and it seemed to prefer Tawazuh. That month, Hikmat billed for less than half a million dollars. In Kandahar, Mohmand, Tawazuh’s owner, showed me a certificate of appreciation signed by the battalion’s commander. “I worked with the Americans very honestly and sincerely,” he said. “My rates are also less than other contractors’.”

When the Desert Eagles returned later that year, Hikmat’s business recovered. Woodall, who was in charge of the service detachment, obtained a “sole source” memo, which the Desert Eagles used to bypass TOIFOR’s selection process and to work with Hikmat when they wanted. Hikmat set his own prices, and, according to his lawyers, they were reviewed by both TOIFOR and the military. “I think I remember hearing that it was more expensive to use Hikmat than the other companies, but that was all right with my chain of command because the mission was more dangerous and he was the only one who could and would do it,” Caleb Hardin, one of Woodall’s subordinates, wrote in a declaration submitted by Hikmat’s lawyers.

Hikmat’s invoices to TOIFOR reached new heights. Bradley and Myers were back in Kandahar during the Bush Hogs’ next rotation, which replaced Woodall’s in early 2011. In September alone, Hikmat’s invoices to TOIFOR amounted to $17.4 million. One form from the Bush Hogs requesting a trucking mission contains a handwritten justification for Hikmat’s higher prices: “Always on time, never any issues, and understands how [Special Forces] operates.” Hikmat’s bid was five thousand dollars; those of three other Afghan subcontractors were $2,500, $2,124, and $1,000.

Hikmat told me that his higher prices were the result of the extra flexibility he gave the Special Forces. Often, he said, they would change the mission at the last minute, for security reasons. “I told them, don’t tell me the date, don’t tell me the time, and don’t tell me the destination,” he said.
“I promise to love, honor, and stay the hell off Facebook.”

Hikmat’s earnings from TOIFOR made up the lion’s share of a highly lucrative business. According to his bank statements, his logistics companies took in a hundred and sixty-seven million dollars between late 2007 and the end of 2012. During that period, he withdrew eighty-eight million. Even assuming that the withdrawals were all for business expenses, rather than investments or personal spending (Hikmat also owned a gas station and an energy-drink company, and employed a mostly Filipino office staff, led by Western expatriates), that left him with almost eighty million dollars—a profit margin of nearly fifty per cent. (According to Hikmat’s lawyer, Hikmat has millions of dollars in unpaid debts, and is owed between fifty and sixty million dollars by the U.S. government.)

By the time he was in his early twenties, Hikmat was one of the wealthiest men in Kandahar. He got married, made the hajj, and travelled through Europe, visiting the Eiffel Tower and the stadium where Real Madrid, his favorite soccer team, plays. Every Ramadan, he showered money on those in his neighborhood he judged to be poor and deserving. Rumors spread that Hikmat would drive around in an old car, a scarf half obscuring his face, handing out hundred-dollar bills to laborers. One cash giveaway at his gas station led to a near-riot that had to be dispersed with live ammunition. It was around this time that people started calling him Shadman, which means “happy.”

The vast sums that he was handling also impressed the foreigners on KAF. Once, Hikmat told me, a Canadian soldier who searched him at the entrance found ten thousand dollars. He marvelled at the thick bundle of bills. “He said, ‘Oh, wow, just hit me with it on my face. I like it, I’ve never seen such money,’ ” Hikmat said, smiling at the memory.

Hikmat outfitted his living quarters on KAF with flat-screen TVs and opulent furniture, including an oversized bed. “Nothing fits together, because it’s the most expensive stuff that’s picked out of every magazine,” one of Hikmat’s managers said. “Everything’s gold and shiny, and it’s got crystal in it.” Yet Hikmat never used his ornate bed, preferring, like most Afghans, to sleep on a mat on the floor. “He sat cross-legged with the locals, with baba and the guy that makes the food,” the manager said.

The Special Forces were frequent visitors. In 2011, Hikmat hosted a Christmas party, and Myers attended. In a photograph, Myers is wearing a checked shirt, and appears conspicuously massive next to Hikmat’s diminutive Filipino employees. There was a plastic Christmas tree on a stand draped in an American flag. The guests ate pizza and drank Red Bull, and Hikmat, beaming and rosy-cheeked, handed out gifts from a secret-Santa exchange. Myers took part in a three-legged race, pulling one of the Filipino staff people along with him. “It was one of the most bizarre evenings of my life,” Franco Swart, a South African who managed one of Hikmat’s trucking companies, said.

But Hikmat was under pressure in Kandahar. He said that the Taliban had attempted to kidnap his brother, and had also threatened him at his family’s house. “After a few days, they stuck a letter on the door, that in three days if you don’t leave the job we will kill even the kids,” he said. In February, 2011, he had applied to a State Department program that allowed interpreters and other Afghan employees of the U.S. to emigrate to America. “I am requesting a Visa to the US in the case of an emergency,” he wrote, citing the Taliban’s threat to his life. Bradley and three other Special Forces soldiers provided supporting letters. The Bush Hogs’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Carty, wrote, “The loyalty and commitment Hikmatullah displays in supporting [the special-operations task force] and its mission goes unmatched.”

In November, 2009, Scott Lindsay, a staffer on the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, was flying back from Pakistan when George Miller, a Democratic representative from California, handed him an article from The Nation. “How the US Funds the Taliban,” by Aram Roston, claimed that Afghan trucking companies working for the American military were paying off insurgents. “Scott, do you know anything about this?” Miller asked.

Over the next eight months, Lindsay and a team from the subcommittee interviewed U.S. military officials and contractors and reviewed thousands of documents. “It was immediately glaring that, oh, my God, this could be as bad as alleged,” Lindsay told me.

The U.S. military had decided to make trucking companies responsible for hiring their own security. As the country descended into violence, the companies were forced to pay off the men who controlled the roads, whether they were crooked officials, warlords, or Taliban. “The whole thing became this inadvertently but inherently corrupt enterprise that, to me, symbolized the failure of the entire adventure,” Lindsay said. “If you have to pay your enemy for the right to be there, something’s gone wrong.”

In June, 2010, the subcommittee released a report, titled “Warlord, Inc.,” which concluded that U.S. government funds were likely going to the same people who were killing American soldiers. According to the subcommittee, the military had known about the problem for at least a year, but, Lindsay told me, “absolutely nothing was done.”

The perception among many of the trucking companies on KAF was that the U.S. military was turning a blind eye to where its money was ending up. “We all knew what was happening,” Rodney Castleman, an American employee of an Afghan trucking company, told me. “You could be hardcore about stuff and say, We’re not going to pay nobody, but, I’m telling you, you were going to get hit on the road.”

The report landed amid a growing realization in Washington that corruption in Afghanistan was jeopardizing President Obama’s plan to stabilize the country before withdrawing American troops. That fall, Afghanistan’s financial system nearly collapsed after it was revealed that a group of well-connected businessmen and officials—including the brothers of President Karzai and his first Vice-President—had fraudulently acquired nearly a billion dollars in loans from Kabul Bank. Far from being a source of stability, American money was part of the problem, and U.S. officials had little idea where it was going.

“I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters,” John Sopko, the head of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), later wrote in a quarterly report to Congress, “but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract.”
“Damn it—I think I just butt-donated to a charity.”

“You know, Taliban soldiers are a hundred times cheaper than American soldiers,” Pashtoon, the member of parliament from Kandahar, said. “So for a lot less money the Taliban can fight for a long time.”

The military had long been reluctant to address corruption. But now General Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, conceded that the flood of U.S. money into Afghanistan was “both an opportunity and a danger.” He added that, uncontrolled, it could “unintentionally fuel corruption, finance insurgent networks, strengthen criminal patronage networks, and undermine our efforts in Afghanistan.” Money, it seemed, was a double-edged weapons system.

The military created Task Force 2010, a team of forensic accountants, law-enforcement agents, intelligence analysts, lawyers, and auditors, to scrutinize Afghan contractors. The team reported that, of the thirty-one billion dollars in contracts that it inspected, an estimated three hundred and sixty million dollars had reached corrupt officials, criminals, or the Taliban. Thomas Creal, the lead forensic accountant on the task force, told me that U.S. taxpayer dollars reached the insurgents through a layer of intermediaries that began with the contractors. “I always viewed them as an aider and abettor of terrorist acts,” he said.

In 2010, as investigators descended on KAF, contractors there began to come under scrutiny. “The military came in and did their audits,” Castleman said. “We got audited.” In October, the U.S. military detained Mohmand, Tawazuh’s owner, on suspicion of making payments to the Taliban. Though he was quickly released, his company was barred from receiving further contracts.

In May, 2011, Hikmat, too, was banned from receiving contracts from the military, because of allegations that he had “direct association with individuals who have been involved in significant criminal activity or insurgent operations,” according to a declassified report presented in court. Creal said that his team had initially flagged Hikmat because his invoices were so high. “It wasn’t hard to come to the conclusion that Shadman was getting way more money than he should have,” Creal told me.

But Hikmat’s allies in the Special Forces believed that his rivals, including General Raziq Sherzai, were jealous of his success, and that the accusations were based on false information that they gave to military investigators. “Some of Hik’s competitors were always trying to make his life difficult,” Bradley wrote. (Raziq Sherzai denied this.)

Myers told the court that he “began digging deep into both sides of the allegations.” After Hikmat took a polygraph test, Myers got the Bush Hogs’ commander to lead a successful effort to remove the ban on him. In the next six months, Hikmat’s companies billed TOIFOR for more than fifty million dollars.

But the military investigators had come to believe that Hikmat may have been paying off the Taliban. According to Creal, they discovered transfers from his account to an alleged Taliban “money mover,” who, it was rumored, was connected to a suicide bombing on KAF. Twice that year, attackers had detonated cars packed with explosives at the base’s main gate, killing dozens of Afghan civilians. Around 4 A.M. on October 1, 2012, a U.S. military team raided Hikmat’s compound.

Hikmat’s first thought, when armed men kicked in his bedroom door, was that the Taliban had come for him. The men cursed him in Pashto, but when they dragged him outside he saw, to his relief, that there were American soldiers with them. He was blindfolded, shackled, and flown across the country to the main U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan, at Bagram Airfield. “The way they treated me and the place they put me in the jail,” Hikmat told me, his voice trailing off. “It was a toilet.”

In intake, he was subjected to the same fate as those he had once hunted alongside the Special Forces. His head was shaved, and he was forced to strip and wash under the guards’ supervision, an ordeal that Hikmat, having grown up in conservative Kandahar, found particularly humiliating. “This is why President Karzai says that this is the factory of the Taliban,” he said. “How they treat people!”

Hikmat denied any connection with the Taliban, and passed a polygraph test. “In Pashto, we have a proverb that you cannot hold two watermelons in one hand,” Hikmat told me. “When I was fifteen, I started working with you guys. I am one of the family members of the Special Forces, and I worked against the Taliban.”

According to a declaration submitted in court by Hikmat’s lawyers, the civilian interrogator who questioned him for two months at Bagram came to believe that he was innocent. The evidence against him was flimsy and, the interrogator suspected, provided by “disgruntled former employees or business competitors who were known to be jealous and resentful of Hikmatullah’s success.”

At the time, Afghans detained by the U.S. military were entitled to a hearing within sixty days, at which three officers determined whether they were still a threat to U.S. and allied forces and, if not, whether they should be released. A group of Hikmat’s Afghan supporters approached Gul Agha Sherzai, the former governor of Kandahar, and asked for his help. Sherzai remained close to the U.S. military leadership and often intervened in support of detainees; he had already helped secure the release of Mohmand, Tuwazuh’s owner.

On December 9, 2012, the day of the hearing, Sherzai arrived at Bagram, along with a group of tribal elders from Kandahar. He, too, was unimpressed by the evidence presented by the military investigators. “They had no documents,” Sherzai told me. Even so, he found it plausible that both Mohmand and Hikmat were paying off the Taliban, since it was a widespread practice in the trucking business. “They weren’t powerful enough to face the Taliban,” he said. “Why would it be that easy for them to pass with their convoys?”

With Sherzai and the Special Forces vouching for Hikmat, the three officers voted to clear him. After he was released, he flew back to Kandahar. “I think it broke his spirit for a bit,” Hikmat’s employee Franco Swart told me. In Hikmat’s absence, the business had largely shut down. On January 23, 2013, Hikmat flew to Dubai, and started shopping for a piece of very expensive real estate.
“I like his earlier work better, particularly the ones I said I didn’t like at the time.”

Since the beginning of the war, Dubai has been a magnet for Afghans seeking to move their fortunes out of the country. Hikmat told me that, since he could no longer operate on KAF, he had decided to invest in property. He settled on Ahli House Tower, a residential apartment block of approximately two hundred units. On February 23rd, he signed a contract to buy it for forty-three million dollars. But when he called his bank in Kabul he was told that his accounts had been frozen.

While Hikmat was detained at Bagram, the Justice Department, working with SIGAR, had filed a civil-forfeiture suit, claiming that Hikmat had paid bribes in order to obtain contracts. “The civil route made sense,” a former Justice Department official who worked on Hikmat’s case said. “There’s no extradition agreement, no way that he’d be arrested in Afghanistan.” Since Hikmat’s bank accounts were in Kabul, the Justice Department section at the U.S. Embassy had to persuade the Afghan attorney general’s office to recognize the warrant, something that had never been done before. The attorney general, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, a Karzai protégé, was out of the country undergoing medical treatment; in his absence, his deputy acquiesced.

When Hikmat returned from Dubai, on February 28th, he went straight to the attorney general’s office, where he was told that he was under investigation. Later, prosecutors called him back and arrested him. He was thrown into prison for several hours, until a call came from the Presidential palace, ordering his release.

“Shadman’s case was a very fishy case,” a former senior official in the Afghan attorney general’s office said. “Karzai was calling us saying, ‘What happened with this case? The money was supposed to be released.’ ”

Aimal Faizi, a spokesperson for Karzai, denied that Karzai had any personal interest in the case. “For President Karzai, it was just another case of illegal detention of an Afghan citizen by the U.S. forces in Afghanistan,” he said.

Hikmat’s accounts were unfrozen, and he transferred seventy-four million dollars to bank accounts in Dubai. When the Justice Department officials at the Embassy learned that the Afghan government had unblocked the accounts, they were furious. “One of our people went over and confronted the attorney general about it,” the former official said, telling him that he had “lost a great opportunity to demonstrate to the international community the integrity of your legal system.”

But Hikmat was still vulnerable. When funds targeted by a civil-forfeiture suit are held outside the reach of the U.S. government, it has the authority to seize equivalent funds held by those foreign banks in the U.S. In May, 2013, the U.S. restrained funds in the correspondent accounts of Hikmat’s banks in New York, forcing the banks to freeze fifty-seven million dollars of his money in Dubai and Kabul.

The civil-forfeiture suit has not yet gone to trial, and both the Justice Department and SIGAR declined to speak with me about it. Hikmat’s lawyers have filed reams of documents in court—including bank statements, depositions, and business records—but the government has barely outlined its case, which alleges that Hikmat paid bribes to both U.S. soldiers and TOIFOR contractors, including some of Stowell’s successors at the Jingle Truck Office.

Yet the Justice Department has prosecuted a series of related criminal cases in North Carolina, where Fort Bragg, the home of the Special Forces, is situated. On September 29th, five current and former Army sergeants were sentenced for taking illegal payments. Several of them wept as they spoke of their betrayal of the military and their families. If “you did something that impaired the Army’s fighting ability,” Judge Terrence Boyle said, referring to earlier wars, “they would court-martial and shoot you.” He then handed down sentences that ranged from ten months to ten years. “I mean, how do you explain it to somebody whose child or spouse or loved one, you know, died in one of these theatres?”

Four of the soldiers had worked in the Bush Hogs logistics section in Kandahar from February, 2011, to January, 2012, Hikmat’s most lucrative period. According to court documents, the soldiers created fake trucking missions—some signed with names like Bongo Truck and Touchi Meh—and allowed Hikmat’s drivers to steal fuel in return for cash payments.

These criminal cases suggest long-running fraud within the Special Forces’ service detachment on KAF. The lawyer for the soldiers’ leader, Sergeant First Class Jeffrey Edmondson, said that Edmondson learned about the scheme from his predecessor on KAF, a staff sergeant who worked for Woodall and the Desert Eagles. The prosecution stated that it was in the process of investigating that unit. (“My military career is over, and I’m done with that portion of my life. And that’s that,” the staff sergeant told me when I reached him by phone, before declining to speak further. He has not been charged.) Another soldier, Sergeant First Class Robert Green, admitted to receiving at least forty-five thousand dollars from Hikmat in 2008, and said that fraudulent practices had existed before his arrival. In exchange for a reduced sentence, he coöperated with the government against his former superior, an Army captain, who recently pleaded guilty to similar charges.

“This is a cycle that goes through every year,” Judge Boyle said at the sentencing hearing. “When the new guy shows up, they say, Well, you can get a good meal over here and you can get, you know, a beer over here, and, by the way, you can pick up a quarter of a million dollars if you feel like it—we just run this operation.”

Similar cases involving fuel theft and Afghan contractors have been unearthed at other military bases in Afghanistan. “We’ve interviewed a lot of the people we’ve caught,” a law-enforcement official at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul told me. “One of the things they say is that the system is so loose, and it’s so obvious that you can get away with it.”
“Hang on, I think they’re just aiming for our hats.”

The Army’s Special Operations Command, when asked whether it was aware of systemic corruption within its logistics section on KAF, declined to comment. Its commander at the time, Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland, offered this statement to the court on the impact of the cases: “The majority of the Afghan population views the United States as one more in a long line of occupiers. When people they regularly do business with, in this case the Soldiers listed above, are exposed as thieves and conspirators, the established trust and respect is destroyed.”

In late December, the Justice Department filed criminal-conspiracy and bribery charges against Hikmat. A warrant was issued, though it’s unlikely that he’ll be arrested, since he spends his time in Dubai and Kabul. He and his lawyers have denied that he paid bribes or committed any illegal activities. In court hearings, Hikmat’s lead counsel, Bryant Banes, has said that Hikmat was paid out of logistics funds for intelligence work for the Special Forces, and that classified evidence will exonerate him. Bradley has stated that he recruited Hikmat to be part of classified “compartmented programs.”

Bradley, Myers, and Woodall have not been accused of any wrongdoing or criminal acts, and they remain loyal to Hikmat. Woodall, who is now a major, wrote to me, “Hikmat is a friend to not only myself but to the American servicemen who operated in Afghanistan. To say differently is a disgrace.”

“I don’t want nothing else to do with Afghanistan,” Bradley told me, before refusing to comment. “Everything about it gets twisted into something wrong.” Myers also declined to speak. Both he and Bradley have retired from the Army. Myers has started a nonprofit, The World Is My Country Foundation. His Web campaigns have solicited funds for earthquake relief efforts in Nepal, and for him and his best friend to drive around the world, “helping people in every country we drive through.” According to his social-media posts, he plans to work on charitable campaigns with Hikmat in Afghanistan. The World Is My Country Foundation is registered as a nonprofit in Texas by Banes, Hikmat’s lawyer.

Last March, I visited Kandahar City. The fiery heat of summer was still a way off, and the air was mellow and dry. There were only ten thousand U.S. soldiers left in Afghanistan, and, compared to the mad years of the surge, Kandahar felt quiet. The long lines of trucks waiting to enter KAF had vanished, and the economy was languishing without them.

Security conditions have continued to deteriorate. In September, Taliban fighters overran Kunduz, the country’s fifth-largest city, when the government forces collapsed in a day. After two weeks of fighting, Afghan special-operations troops, backed by American airpower, retook the city. A few days later, President Obama announced that he would extend the American troop deployment, into its fifteenth year, in order to shore up the Afghan government.

Within the U.S. government, there is growing recognition that America’s vast expenditures in Afghanistan have been self-defeating, and that the conflict is more complex than simply fighting the Taliban or terrorism. “The existential threat to the long-term viability of modern Afghanistan is corruption,” General John Allen, the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told Congress in 2014.

But, in a war waged by private contracting, the line between profit and profiteering can be hard to define. In Kandahar, I was told by many Afghans that the small thieves are caught so that the big thieves may go free. They believed that Hikmat had been singled out by the Americans because he lacked the political connections of rivals like the Sherzais. “It’s not only Hikmatullah Shadman—there were so many contractors that did the exact same thing that Shadman did,” Khalid Pashtoon, the member of parliament, said. “The only problem was that Shadman was captured.” He added, “Hikmat was like a milking cow: everybody tried to suck his milk.”

A Kandahari businessman used a different metaphor. “Hikmat was like a knight in chess,” he told me. “There were many people before and after Hikmat, far richer than him.” He said that he owned about a hundred trucks and had subcontracted for Hikmat and the other awwal las contractors on KAF. He also claimed that he had helped to sell stolen fuel on the black market, and had delivered the cash to soldiers working with the Special Forces unit at the airport. “The bottom line is the Americans were corrupt themselves.”

“The American money was benefitting everybody—the government and the Taliban,” Gul Agha Sherzai told me. There was, he said, an apt Pashto proverb about unintended consequences: “A rifle strikes from its barrel and its butt.” ♦

    Matthieu Aikins is a Schell Fellow at the Nation Institute. He has been reporting from Afghanistan since 2008, and won a 2013 George Polk Award for magazine reporting for his piece about war crimes in that country.

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9. SRI LANKAN JUSTICE MINISTER FIRED FOR CRITICIZING CHINA DEAL
by Bharatha Mallawarachi | AP
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(The Wachington Post - August 23, 2017)

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s president fired the justice minister on Wednesday for criticizing government policies, including a decision to sell a majority of shares in a seaport to China.

President Maithripala Sirisena approved a request by his United National Party to dismiss Wijeyadasa Rajapakse, the president’s office said.

The party accused Rajapakse of breaching the collective responsibility of Cabinet ministers by criticizing the port deal and other government policies as well as some of his colleagues.

The party said it asked Rajapakse last week to correct his statements by Aug. 21, but he failed to so and continued to criticize ministers and policies over the weekend.

Some party members also accused Rajapakse of using his position to delay filing corruption charges against former President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family, a key pledge of the Sirisena government that was elected in January 2015.

The dismissed minister, who is not related to the former president, has denied the allegation.

Sri Lanka’s government last month signed a long-delayed agreement to sell a 70 percent stake in a $1.5 billion port to China for 99 years in a bid to recover from the heavy burden of repaying a Chinese loan obtained to build the facility. The agreement has drawn public criticism and protests, with opposition parties and farmers saying it was akin to a sellout of the country.

Rajapakse also called the lease a sellout and said he would ensure that the port is taken back for the benefit of Sri Lankans.

The port is part of Beijing’s so-called string-of-pearls plan for a line of ports stretching from its waters to the Persian Gulf.

China’s influence in Sri Lanka makes neighboring India anxious because it considers the Indian Ocean region to be its strategic backyard. Sirisena has been trying to balance both Asian giants.

Sri Lankan officials have reiterated that the port’s security will be handled by the government in an attempt to allay fears that the port could be used by China as a military hub.

__
This story has been corrected to fix spelling of minister’s name in 5th paragraph to Rajapakse instead of Rajapaksa.

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10. BANGLADESH UNIVERSITY DROPS DRESS CODE AFTER BACKLASH | AFP
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(Hindustan Times - August 24, 2017)

A notice posted at Dhaka University’s Kobi Sufiya Kamal Hall had barred its 2,300 residents from wearing such clothes including t-shirts, threatening disciplinary action against anyone who disobeyed.

Agence France-Presse, Dhaka

A women’s dormitory at Bangladesh’s most prestigious university said on Thursday it has dropped a ban on students wearing what it called “indecent” clothing after an uproar.

A notice posted at Dhaka University’s Kabi Sufiya Kamal Hall barred its 2,300 residents from wearing such clothes including t-shirts, threatening disciplinary action against anyone who disobeyed.

A photo of the order went viral on social media, with many accusing authorities of “Talibanising” the dormitory.

“Do we have to change our clothing every time we go to the dining room for lunch or dinner?” said one student at the dormitory, who asked not to be named. “I am not sure whether I should study or keep changing clothes three times a day.”

Dhaka University is Muslim-majority Bangladesh’s largest secular bastion. The head of the dormitory said she had not issued the order, which did not reflect its policies.

“We are very embarrassed seeing the distorted notice,” Sabita Rezwana Rahman told AFP.

She said a new notice had been put up saying only that students should wear appropriate dress to enter the dormitory office.

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11. INDIA: SC VERDICT LEAVES NO ESCAPE ROUTE FOR THE GOVT: USHA RAMANATHAN ON PRIVACY RIGHT | BHASHA SINGH
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(National Herald - August 24th 2017)

Usha Ramanathan, an independent law researcher studying Aadhaar since 2009, tells NH that it is going to boost the legal fight against Aadhaar besides protecting the rights of LGBTI community

During the marathon hearing of the case in the Apex Court over the past three years, the BJP-led NDA government had argued that right to privacy was not a fundamental right guaranteed in Indian Constitution as an inalienable fundamental right. Against this backdrop, Usha believes that the court’s verdict becomes even more significant.

How significant is today’s SC judgment?

This verdict signifies three important things. One, the judgments made in 1954 and 1963 won’t come in the way of our fundamental rights. Secondly, the SC has categorically endorsed the privacy rights after the long-standing struggle of the past 40 years. However, the government tried to destroy this right very systematically.

Thirdly, the SC has recognised that right to privacy is protected by Article 21 and by the whole chapter on fundamental rights.

Why in the Aadhaar case, has the government taken the plea of fundamental rights?

That is an interesting aspect to look into. It is not as if the government has denied the existence of right to privacy in every situation. For example, when people moved court asking that defamation should not be a part of criminal law, as the powerful use this clause to suppress the weaker section—the then government refused citing its respect for individual privacy. But on UID/Aadhar it took a different stand.

In your opinion, why did the government oppose privacy in the Aadhar case?

They did this to do red herring, to mislead and to buy time. You see, when they said that privacy can’t be treated as fundamental right, the Aadhaar case was at its final hearing stage. They raised this on March 16, 2015, when the bench was going to fix final hearing. Why didn’t they bring it up at the beginning? Why at this crucial stage? Meanwhile, they kept on expanding the scope and reach of Aadhaar. All this was very calculated.

The SC judgment says that right to privacy is valid even in the context of Section 377. How do you view it?

If you read the judgment, it is very open and clear. It says that fundamental rights are not linked with majoritarianism. If LGBTI is in a minority, no one can take away their fundamental rights. They have right to life, right to privacy, etc. This nine-judge bench has almost overruled the core of the Suresh Kaushal judgment. It will have a long-lasting impact.

This judgment has come down heavily on the controversial ADM Jabalpur judgment too…

Yes, it openly says that the judgment was “seriously flawed.” It has been made clear that fundamental rights can’t be suspended or taken back.

Do you think this judgment shall boost the legal fight against Aadhaar too?

It’s good that the Supreme Court has made it clear that privacy is a fundamental right. With this judgment, it becomes amply clear that the UID project shall have to meet the challenge of privacy as a fundamental right.

Privacy has been deeply compromised in this project and ample evidence has been submitted to the court in this regard. It possibly pushed the government to argue that privacy can’t be a fundamental right.

They (government) have been giving citizens’ private data to foreign companies. This thing can’t be done now. We see hope.

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12. INDIA: SUPREME COURT AVENGES A MISOGYNIST CLERGY
by Saif Mahmood
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(The Indian Express - August 23, 2017)

Right-wing Muslim bashers rejoicing over the apex court having come down on the Shariat with a heavy hand need to hold their horses. Far from doing this, the apex court has actually fallen back on and relied upon the Shariat itself to accord justice to Muslim women by declaring the practice of Triple Talaq as illegal.

By a majority of 3 : 2, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court has “set aside” the practice of Triple Talaq prevalent among Indian Muslims. As political parties of various hues and views rush to welcome the judgment, let us first understand what the issue was before the Court and what the Court has actually done. Unlike the Hindu Law or even the so-called progressive Special Marriage law, Islamic Law recognizes the irretrievable breakdown of marriage as a ground for divorce. Both the husband and wife have a right to dissolve their marriage without providing reason.

However, it prescribes an exhaustive procedure for the exercise of such a right. In the case of dissolution at the behest of the husband (called talaq), the procedure prescribed is this :

1. If a Muslim man wants to dissolve his marriage by way of talaq, the dissolution must be preceded by attempts at reconciliation by arbiters from both sides.

2. If reconciliation attempts fail, he may pronounce talaq.

3. Talaq must be pronounced in the presence of the wife and witnesses. In the event the wife refuses to be physically present, the husband must pronounce it in writing and must communicate the writing to his wife.

4. However, there will be a ‘cooling period’ of 3 months during which, if parties reconcile, the talaq so pronounced may be revoked. For these 3 months, this talaq shall remain in abeyance.

5. If during the aforesaid 3-month period, the talaq is not revoked, it will be effective on the expiry of 3 months.

6. If the husband pronounces talaq in accordance with the aforesaid procedure and revokes it within the 3-month cooling period, the marriage stays intact. However, he can do this (pronouncing talaq and revoking it) only twice. If he pronounces talaq for the third time, he cannot revoke it and the marriage shall stand dissolved.

7. The husband must make reasonable provision for maintenance and alimony for the wife.

In India, for decades now, Muslim husbands have been told by ill-informed (and often mischievous) clergy that talaq will not be effective except when pronounced thrice in one sitting. That a Muslim husband must necessarily utter the word talaq three times at one go to dissolve his marriage. They have also been told that such an utterance will lead to an ‘irrevocable’ dissolution of marriage after which parties can neither revoke the divorce nor remarry even if both of them so desire, unless the divorced wife first marries another man, consummates that marriage and gets divorced by that man.

This absolutely un-Islamic practice called halaala was nothing but reprehensible mischief devised by a misogynist clergy to persecute innocent couples (especially the wife) who wanted to rethink their divorce. This practice – pronouncing talaq three times in one go to make it irrevocable and forcing the woman to go through the inhuman practice of halaala — which was challenged before the Supreme Court and which is commonly called Triple Talaq.

The Constitution Bench on August 22 pronounced three different judgments – one each authored by Chief Justice J S Khehar (Justice Abdul Nazeer concurring with him), Justice Kurien Joseph and Justice R F Nariman (Justice UU Lalit concurring with him). While the Chief Justice has upheld the practice of Triple Talaq in a curious and rather oxymoronic fashion, the judges who have authored the other two judgments have set it aside. In this manner, a majority of three judges (Joseph, Nariman and Lalit) have set aside the practice of Triple Talaq and a minority of two judges (the Chief Justice and Justice Nazeer) have upheld it. Needless to explain that the majority judgment is the one that is the law of the land.

What have these judges said ? The Chief Justice has, in his 272-page judgment, held that Triple Talaq is an essential religious practice of Islam and, therefore, protected by Article 25 of the Constitution which guarantees the right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion. Rights guaranteed by Article 25 cannot be abrogated except on grounds of public order, morality or health, and since Triple Talaq does not affect any of these, it must be upheld as part of the right of Muslims to profess and practice their religion.

On the basis of this finding, he has refused to touch the practice of Triple Talaq or declare it as unlawful. He has, however, noted that all parties before the Court have been unanimous in maintaining that, whether or not it is un-Islamic, it is a bad practice and has been abolished by statutory reforms in many Islamic countries.

He has, therefore, exercised jurisdiction under Article 142 of the Constitution and directed the Central government to consider appropriate legislation on the subject keeping in mind the progressive developments that have taken place in this regard in the Muslim world. He has further injuncted Muslim husbands from pronouncing Triple Talaq till such time as “legislation in the matter is considered”. His injunction shall, in the first instance, operate for 6 months and its further continuation will depend on what legislative process is brought into action.

Apart from being predicated on a completely absurd foundation, viz., that Triple Talaq is an essential religious practice of Islam, the Chief Justice’s opinion is also ridden with inherent contradictions. On the one hand, he holds that Muslims have a fundamental right to practise Triple Talaq since it is an essential religious practice and therefore constitutionally protected, but on the other hand he not only directs the State to consider legislation to curb Triple Talaq, but also injuncts Muslim husbands from pronouncing Triple Talaq for an uncertain period.

If Triple Talaq is Constitutionally protected, how can its practice be injuncted or how can the State pass a law to curb it? The minority judgment is not only confusing and inconsistent but also falls foul of elementary canons of judicial interpretation. Thankfully, it is a minority judgment and, consequently, does not require to be treated as the law laid down by the apex court. Both the majority opinions demonstrate a great degree of judicial scholarship. Justice Joseph quotes verse after verse from the Holy Quran and finds that Triple Talaq is absolutely impermissible under the Quran. He maintains, and rightly so, that when the Quran – which is the primary source of Islamic law — itself is unambiguous about the impermissibility of Triple Talaq, there is no need to look at secondary sources of Islamic law.

He then holds that since Triple Talaq is un-Quranic, it cannot be deemed to be Islamic, much less an essential practice of Islam even if it has been practised for a long period of time. On the ground of being un-Islamic, he sets it aside holding that : “what is held to be bad in the Holy Quran cannot be good in Shariat and, in that sense, what is bad in theology is bad in law as well”.

Since he sets aside this practice, he finds it imperative to explain the correct procedure to be followed by Muslim men to dissolve their marriage. In doing so, he relies upon and reaffirms the 2002 judgment of the Supreme Court in Shamin Ara Vs Union of India where the Court has affirmed the procedure explained in (1) to (4) above as the correct procedure of talaq prescribed by Islamic law. Justice Joseph believes that when religion is pitted against other Constitutional rights, a reconciliation between the same is necessary and such reconciliation can be done only by the legislature.

Justice Nariman begins his judgment with disagreeing with the Chief Justice. Like Justice Joseph, Justice Nariman also finds that Triple Talaq is not an essential religious practice of Islam ; in fact, it is deprecated. But he adds an ingenious argument in his judgment. The Muslim Personal Law Board, while supporting Triple Talaq, had argued that Muslim Personal Law is de hors (outside) the definition of “law” as found in Article 13 of the Constitution and, therefore, its Constitutionality cannot be tested by the Supreme Court. Justice Nariman maintains that since Triple Talaq is a form of Talaq and Talaq has been recognized as a mode of dissolution of marriage in the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat)

Application Act 1937, the practice of Triple Talaq has now been incorporated in a statute and has, consequently, become part of “law” for the purpose of Article 13. It can therefore be tested on the touchstone of Constitutionality. As a result, the apex court can review the practice of Triple Talaq. Having reached this conclusion, he tests the practice on the cornerstone of the Right to Equality guaranteed by Article 14 of the Constitution and finds that it violates the said right and, consequently, sets it aside as un-Constitutional.

At the end of the day, the practice of Triple Talaq has been set aside by the Supreme Court for different reasons. It is interesting that the majority judgment which has set it aside has not held that the Islamic law of divorce is unconstitutional or unfair. What has been held is that the practice of Triple Talaq is illegal, and to reach this conclusion, the Bench has not repelled the Islamic law of divorce but has, in fact, relied upon it.

It has found that the practice of Triple Talaq is un-Islamic and violates Islamic law itself. In that sense, the Court has actually recognised that true Islamic law is progressive and does not violate women’s rights ; only the un-Islamic practice of Triple Talaq does. Right-wing Muslim bashers who are rejoicing over the apex court having come down on the Shariat with a heavy hand need to hold their horses. Far from doing this, the apex court has actually fallen back on and relied upon the Shariat itself to accord justice to Muslim women by declaring the practice of Triple Talaq as illegal.

Though, in our peculiar social milieu, women’s rights cannot be ensured by judicial pronouncements alone, this judgment will surely go a long way in making a much-needed beginning. One only hopes that this judgment is not politicized by vested interests to defile and deface Islam and similar judgments are pronounced by the apex courts on other issues facing women and disadvantaged groups across religions.

Said Mahmood is an advocate in the Supreme Court and author of the book, ‘Muslim law in India and abroad’ cited in this Supreme Court judgement. He can be reached at saif at amicusjuris.in

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13. INDIA: OPPRESSIVE PERSONAL LAWS AREN’T THE ONLY THING STANDING BETWEEN MUSLIM WOMEN AND HAPPY LIVES | Farah Naqvi
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(scroll.in - August 23, 2017)
The nation cannot swoop in to save the Muslim woman while Muslim communities are simultaneously being brought to their knees
https://scroll.in/article/848238/oppressive-personal-laws-arent-the-only-thing-standing-between-muslim-women-and-happy-lives

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14. INDIA: RAMJAS COLLEGE - CENSORSHIP CONTINUES - DILIP SIMEON / DSE CITES SECURITY CONCERNS TO CANCEL EVENT ON RAMJAS VIOLENCE - THE TIMES OF INDIA
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Dear friends, we have just undergone the latest act of censorship in a long series of attempts to crush thoughtful minds. A meeting called today, (24th August 2017; at the campus of the Delhi School of Economics) to recall and discuss the violent events in Ramjas College in February this year has been called off under pressure from the very same people who indulged in the violence. Since they are affiliated with the ruling party, they can bend the police and administration to their will. Police are only too happy to say 'there is a threat of disturbance, cancel the event' - when in fact it is their duty to prevent disturbance. Delhi Police may kindly refer to Article 19 of the Constitution of India, which protects our Right to Freedom, including freedom of speech. In shameless violation of their oath of office, the North District police is rendering state protection to hooligans; and allowing ruling politicians to trample over our constitutional rights.
https://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2017/08/ramjas-college-censorship-continues.html

o o o

DSE cites security concerns to cancel event on Ramjas violence
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/dse-cites-security-concerns-to-cancel-event-on-ramjas-violence/articleshow/60199554.cms

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15. BRAZIL SCRAPS AMAZON RESERVE TO ALLOW MINING | AFP
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(news24.com - 2017-08-24)

Rio de Janeiro - Brazil stripped a vast Amazon nature reserve of its protected status in a move that could expand mining in the region, in a decree published on Wednesday.

The four million-hectare reserve is home to indigenous people but also rich in gold and manganese.

Established in 1984 under the then military dictatorship, the reserve's protected status restricted mining activities to state companies.

Wednesday's decree stressed that it does not override other existing environmental protection laws.

But campaign groups such as the World Wildlife Fund have expressed concern about the environmental threat to the reserve from potential mining projects.

A report by the mining ministry in April said that lifting the protected status could provide "access to minerals potentially existing in the region" by letting private companies operate there.

The mining department in Amapa, one of the state’s home to the reserve, said environmental institutions were supervising the plans.

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16. THAILAND: INTERNATIONAL STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF DR. CHAYAN VADDHANAPHUTI AND COLLEAGUES
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As representatives or heads of international academic organizations or academic programs, we view with deep concern the recent news that the Royal Thai Police may be about to charge Dr. Chayan Vaddhanaphuti from Chiang Mai University along with four others - Chaipong Samnieng, Ph.D. Candidate and Lecturer, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Chiang Mai University; Teeramon Buangam, M.A Candidate, Faculty of Mass Communication, Chiang Mai University (and Editor, Prachaham News); Nontawat Machai, undergraduate student, Faculty of Mass Communication, Chiang Mai University; and Pakavadi Veerapaspong, independent writer and translator - with illegale political assembly.

The recent 13th International Thai Studies Conference (ICTS) and the 10th International Convention of Asia Scholars were major international academic events each attended by around 1300 participants, from 37 countries (ICTS) and over 50 countries (ICAS) respectively, that brought a global presence of scholars to Thailand. These conferences enjoy high international prestige and produce work of impressive and lasting significance. Dr. Chayan was entrusted by his university to facilitate the organization of these two major events, both of which received official support from the Governor of the Province of Chiang Mai. Dr. Chayan’s organizational skills and intellectual leadership are celebrated worldwide, and were certainly in evidence on these occasions. 

The presence of military officers at the ICAS conference apparently prompted some individuals to affirm that the conference was an academic forum and not a military barracks, a statement made in defense of the academic nature of the conference. 

We are sure you will agree that Chiang Mai Convention and Exhibition Center is indeed not a military barracks. We believe that making this factual statement was a 
legitimate expression of their rights and liberties, as permitted under Article 4 of the 2017 Constitution; and one that in no way threatened Thailand’s peace and order. 

We would therefore urge that all charges be dropped against Dr. Chayan and the other individuals named above, who clearly had no intention of violating any laws on political assemblage. Chiang Mai University and other universities in Thailand have hosted many international academic conferences, each important not only for the opportunities for scholars to share current research, but also for generating economic revenue for Chiang Mai and other hosting provinces. Holding such international conferences is a vital component if Thailand is to reach the stated goal in its “Thailand 4.0” plans of ensuring that at least 5 Thai universities are ranked among the world’s top 100 higher education institutions within the next 20 years. We hope, too, that Thailand will continue to welcome serious scholars of all disciplinary inclinations and to benefit from the global contributions of Thailand’s own most important academics – of whom, without question, Dr. Chayan is an outstanding representative.

Issued on behalf of the following:

    International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, The Netherlands. Dr. Nira Wickramasinghe, Chair of the Board. Dr. Philippe Peycam, Director
    International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS). Dr Philippe Peycam, International Council Charles. Dr. Paul van der Velde, Secretary
    Association for Asian Studies (AAS). Dr. Katherine A. Bowie, President (AAS is an international academic association with more than 7000 members)
    Committee of the Thai Studies Program, Asia Center, Harvard University. Dr. Michael Herzfeld, Director
    New York Southeast Asia Network (NYSEAN). Dr. Duncan McCargo, Co-Founder
    Humanities Across Borders, Asia and Africa in the World (HaB) program. Dr. Aarti Kawlra, Academic Director (HaB is a consortium of 22 universities and institutes in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America)
    Southeast Asian Neighborhood Network (SEANNET). Dr. Rita Padawangi, Co-Director. Dr. Paul Rabé, Co-Director
    The Board of the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS). Dr. Silvia Vignato, President
    The Board of the Association of Southeast Asian Studies (ASEAS) (United Kingdom). Dr. Deirdre McKay, Chair

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17. BURMA COVERS UP ITS SYSTEMATIC ABUSE OF A MINORITY GROUP - EDITORIAL, THE WASHINGTON POST
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(The Washington Post - August 17, 2017)

By Editorial Board 

IN FEBRUARY, the United Nations released a report detailing the Burmese government’s human rights abuses against the long-suffering Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state — abuses that likely amounted to crimes against humanity. Burma should have responded by allowing U.N. investigators into the country and creating accountability mechanisms to prevent further violations. Instead, a government inquiry has concluded that there is “no evidence of crimes” and that “people from abroad have fabricated news claiming genocide had occurred.”

On the contrary, there is considerable evidence to suggest that systematic human rights violations have occurred in Rakhine. The Rohingya have long been denied citizenship and pushed into ghetto-like conditions. This persecution escalated last year, when Burmese security forces conducted a scorched-earth campaign in the state amid widespread reports of mass rape, torture, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings. The government has also restricted the movements of Rohingya people, imposing curfews and contributing to extreme food shortages. Nearly 90 people have died since the violence erupted last year, while an estimated 65,000 have fled Rakhine.

Burma’s response was to establish an investigative commission that lacked credibility from the outset. The 13-member committee was headed by former military leader and current Vice President Myint Swe and included no Rohingya representatives. According to reports from civil society, its investigators used sloppy research methods, browbeat villagers and ignored complaints. 

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18. JOYS OF THE OCCASIONAL DETOUR | Jawed Naqvi
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(Dawn, August 22, 2017)

AS a journalist, one has travelled to remote places across India that have intractable pot-holed roads or have no roads at all to connect them to the rest of the country. Given the challenge, there was always the option of hitching a ride with the odd politician on a helicopter, a memorable one being with Lalu Yadav to Vaishali, once a thriving cultural hub of ancient India now confined to the backwaters of Bihar. There is, though, nothing to beat the trove of experience and stories that slower journeys throw up on routes that often meander through punishing terrains.

Recently, I had to travel to Chicago from Delhi, and the only option was to fly. Since there was no journalistically stimulating route on offer, say, via Pyongyang, and there is no airport yet on the Doklam Plateau where India and China are flexing their military muscles in an ominously fraught battle of nerves, I chose to fly via Doha. The politically loaded route map displayed on the Qatar Airways monitors compensated amply for the money and time lost in cancelling the non-stop option with Air India.

The Doha route had its purpose, not the least being to breach the dubious sanctions placed on Qatar all because it has an outspoken TV channel. We all have our differences with Al Jazeera, not the least over its support for the destruction of the secular state of Syria. One senses in Al Jazeera’s reports a bias for regressive religious ideologues. That being the case, however, the remedy is to crosscheck its coverage on alternate channels like Russia Today or CNN, preferably both, and not to call for the channel’s closure.

What if Muslim extremists win elections, on the other hand, as they have done in the past in different locations? Should a military coup void the results, as the generals did against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt? Al Jazeera has been punished for opposing the coup, its reporters jailed. The Gulf states are wary of the Muslim Brotherhood because of its support for political change, and so is Israel because of the Brotherhood’s admiration for Hamas.

    The Doha route had its purpose, not the least being to breach the dubious sanctions placed on Qatar all because it has an outspoken TV channel.

Al Jazeera likens Hamas to a resistance group against occupation, not as a terrorist outfit. It riles Israel. Al Jazeera correspondents have annoyed the US too whose warplanes have bombed its offices in strife-torn Iraq and Afghanistan, erroneously, we are told.

The Modi government briefly suspended its uplinking over charges that the channel showed ‘the wrong map’ of Kashmir. Twitter suspended its account briefly. If shutting down channels is the route to consider, which should never happen, then Fox News in America and many channels in India have to be taken down first for inciting violence and fomenting hatred. And Marine Le Pen should never frighten any democrat since a general will always be around to upend her victory! Such a course should neither be an acceptable option nor is it a politically valid remedy.

Given the circumstances, the Qatar Airways itinerary helped me partake of a diplomatically fraught flight plan that willy-nilly included Iran. Above all, it involved a careening approach on the descent and a gentle landing through a narrow air corridor that David Beckham would be proud of. Qatar’s former Gulf allies have mindlessly shut their air spaces to the harmless peninsula.

The bizarre move reminds us of a South Asian row some 16 years ago when India had closed its air corridor to Pakistani planes in response to a terror attack on the British-built Parliament House in late December 2001. It then — tactlessly, in my view — offered a concession to president Musharraf. He could fly to a Saarc summit in Kathmandu through the Indian air space, which would stay off limits to Pakistani commercial flights.

Musharraf ignored the joke and opted to take the passage to Nepal via China, just what the Vajpayee government in Delhi had not anticipated. The joint boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Egypt and, laughably, Yemen, produced a similarly Houdini-like response from the rulers of Qatar. Doha moved even closer to Iran, a shift that should leave its sullen former allies regretting their folly.

On the Delhi-Doha sector, the plane hugged the Pakistani coastline all the way to Bandar Abbas before sharply turning south towards the Qatari peninsula. The onward flight to Chicago cleared any lingering political doubts. The plane’s monitors as it cruised over Iran, showed up names of cities and places that would not exactly bring comfort to Qatar’s detractors. Flying northwards towards the Caspian, flanked by the fabled cities of Isfahan, Qom, Tehran and Tabriz, the US-bound pilots of the besieged airline would have much to thank the clerics of Iran for. And that would be just the opposite of what the Saudi-led measures had desired.

As a political observer, it should ideally be one’s preferred choice to remain non-judgemental in a stand-off between Qatar and its former Gulf allies. Both sides have colluded to destroy not one but three secular Arab states, namely Iraq, Libya and Syria. As such they bear a great responsibility for the menacing cult of car bombs and suicide belts adopted as a badge of honour by Muslim terrorists. If the Saudi-led coalition, partnered occasionally by Turkey and others and blessed in no subtle terms by Israel, was fighting for democracy to supplant the destroyed Arab states, they might begin by ushering secular and representative governments in their own countries, which they probably won’t.

My detour on the private journey would not be rewarded without the joy of meeting the heart-warming men and women from different South Asian countries. The Pakistani chief stewardess, the Sri Lankan and Indian pursers and their humming of Surangini, a love song in Sinhala, became the right antidote to the inevitable jet lag that followed the detour.

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19. POLITICAL CONFLICT OVER HISTORICAL MONUMENTS, FROM CHARLOTTESVILLE TO MOSCOW
by Stephen F. Cohen
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(The Nation - 18 August 2017)

Today’s conflicts over American slavery and Stalin’s Great Terror reveal similar controversies as well as an unknown Putin.

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussion of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fourth year, are at TheNation.com.)

Cohen and Batchelor have a spirited discussion of Cohen’s thesis that the political legacies of American slavery and of Stalin’s Great Terror, which engulfed the Soviet Union from the mid 1930s until the despot’s death in 1953, have had, and continue to have, similar consequences. Having grown up in the Jim Crow South and later become a historian of the Soviet Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras, Cohen acknowledges that his perceptions may have been influenced by his autobiography. He also acknowledges important differences between the black victims of American slavery and the more diverse victims of the Stalinist Terror. But, he argues, the historical and political consequences have been similar. Most notably:

§ Both events victimized many millions of people and were formative chapters in the histories of the two political systems and societies.

§ For decades, in both countries, subsequent generations were not taught the stark truth about these monstrous events in their national histories. For example, neither Cohen nor Batchelor learned in school that many founding fathers of American democracy were slave owners. And the beginning of partial truth-telling about Stalin’s Terror began in the Soviet Union only in the mid-1950s and early ’60s, under Nikita Khrushchev, and then was stopped officially for another 20 years until Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, when it was more fully exposed as part of his reformation policy known as glasnost.

§ Both traumas produced citizens with very different life experiences and equally conflicting narratives of their own lives and their national histories. The result was constant political, social, and economic conflicts over many years, some of them dramatic and even violent. At the forefront were often descendants of both the victims and the victimizers. (Cohen’s book The Victims Return focuses on this dimension of the Stalinist Terror and its aftermath.)

§ One aspect of the controversy in both countries has been ongoing conflict over existing monuments and other memorials erected decades ago honoring leading victimizers in the American slave and Soviet Stalinist eras, and what to do about them in light of what is now known about these historical figures. The recent events in Charlottesville are only one example, as are Russian controversies about sites that still honor Stalin and his henchmen.

§ A profound, even traumatic historical-political question underlies these conflicts in both countries. How to separate the “crimes” committed by the historical figures still honored from the glorious national events with which their names are associated—in the American case, with the founding of American democracy; in the Russian case, with the great Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, led by Stalin? And if the “crimes” are paramount, who else, and what else, should be deleted from their place of honor in the respective national histories? No consensus regarding this ramifying question has been achieved in either society. Both have their consensus-seekers and their “alts,” and with no resolution in sight. (On this issue, Cohen explains his own opposition to destroying such historical monuments.)

Cohen ends by pointing out that Putin, since coming to power in 2000, has played an essential but little-understood role in trying to cope with this decades-long controversy in Russia. Having inherited a political system whose state had collapsed twice in the 20th century, in 1917 and again in 1991, his first mission was to create a state that would never again disintegrate, with all the attendant social and other miseries that had entailed. For this, he needed an effective degree of historical consensus about the conflicting Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet pasts. Unlike most previous Kremlin rulers, Putin has not sought to impose a new historical orthodoxy through censorship and the educational system but to let society—through the agency of historians, journalists, broadcast and movie producers and others—sort out history by presenting their rival perspectives. The widespread view in the US media that Putin has been a neo-Stalinist in these matters is factually incorrect. There is virtually no historical censorship in Russia today, and the revealing Stalin-era archives generally remain as accessible as they were under his purportedly more democratic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in some cases even more so.

Indeed, Putin has played what can only be understood as an anti-Stalinist role, sometimes behind the scenes. In the United States, there is, for example, no national museum dedicated solely to the history of slavery. In 2015, there opened in Moscow, with Putin’s essential political and financial backing, a large, modern-day Museum of the History of the Gulag, the penal labor camps in which millions of Stalin’s victims languished virtually as slaves and often died. Though opposed by the Ministry of Education, Putin has indicated that he agrees with the museum’s leadership that schoolchildren should visit the museum as part of their historical education. This struggle also continues.

The year 2017—which marks both the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and the 80th anniversary of the onset of Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937—has enhanced the controversy and framed it in a new way. With Putin’s agreement, the large and important Russian Communist Party will organize the celebration of the 1917 Revolution with major public events in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities, most of them in October. These Communist commemorations will feature prominently Stalin’s image. But on October 30, the first-ever national monument memorializing the victims of Stalin’s Terror will be unveiled in central Moscow. The October 30 event, as Cohen also learned during a recent visit to Moscow, will feature Putin, who will personally unveil the anti-Stalinist monument, even though a large number of Russians will certainly disapprove. (A recent survey of Russian opinion found Stalin to be “the most admired figure in history,” followed by Putin and Alexander Pushkin.)

For political perspective, consider that such a national monument was first proposed by Khrushchev in 1961. It remained unbuilt under every subsequent Kremlin leader, including Yeltsin and Gorbachev, until Putin made it possible. But this will not end (perhaps only exacerbate) Russia’s long struggle over its past any more than what a US president does or does not do regarding America’s history of slavery will end its lingering political consequences. As William Faulkner reminded us, and many historians have long understood, such past traumas and their politics are never really past. In the Russian case, consider also that worsening Cold War with the West, as we are now witnessing, always further embellishes Stalin’s popular and official reputation. This is another reason why Putin did not instigate the new Cold War, also contrary to US political-media opinion.

Historical Amnesia About Slavery Is a Tool of White Supremacy


Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation.

========================================
20. THE CHILL OF AIR CONDITIONING GOES GLOBAL - SUMMERTIME, AND THE LIVING IS EASIER
by Benoît Bréville
========================================
(Le Monde Diplomatique - August 2017)

In 1960 only one US home in eight had air-con. Now American life is inconceivable without it, and the rest of the world wants to be cool too.
 

The temperature in Hamilton, Canada (population 500,000), is below zero 129 days a year and above 30°C on just 18 days. Yet 82% of its homes have air conditioning and the city council plans to provide it free to poor residents with health problems. In doing so, Hamilton will be following a trend from the US, where state aid is already given to those who cannot afford air-con.

Subsidising air-con is not entirely crazy. In many US states, including Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, Florida, Texas and Nevada, daytime temperatures in summer can exceed 40°C and barely drop overnight. Living without air-con brings a risk of high blood pressure, respiratory failure, insomnia and headaches, so in the southern US, 97% of homes are air-conditioned. Some states, such as Arizona, treat it like electricity and running water, and require landlords to provide tenants with a functioning air-con system.

But the US appetite for artificially cooled air goes beyond the arid Southwest and subtropical South; it affects even Vermont and Montana, more prone to snowfall than heatwaves. Across the US, air-con maintains a constant year-round temperature of just over 20°C in homes, cars, restaurants, shops, government buildings, stadiums, elevators, schools, public transport, sports centres and places of worship. Troops who went to fight in Afghanistan had air-conditioned tents. As David Owen has written, ‘to someone who works in an air-conditioned office, an un-air-conditioned house quickly becomes intolerable, and vice versa’.

This all comes at considerable environmental cost in greenhouse gas emissions (from the use of coolant gases) and energy consumption. Air-con consumes 6% of the US’s annual electricity output, which is 65% coal, oil- or gas-generated, and accounts for 20% of a household’s energy bills. Two years ago, US energy use just for air-conditioning buildings equalled Africa’s entire energy consumption. And this does not include the energy for cooling US (...)

FULL TEST AT: https://mondediplo.com/2017/08/04airconditioning

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South Asia Citizens Wire
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matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
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