World roundup: February 13 2024

Stories from Pakistan, Senegal, Ukraine, and elsewhere

This is the web version of Foreign Exchanges, but did you know you can get it delivered right to your inbox? Sign up today:

---

TODAY IN HISTORY

February 13, 1945: The World War II Siege of Budapest ends with the Axis (German and Hungarian) defenders surrendering the city to the Soviet Red Army and allied Romanian forces. Casualties were high on both sides, but at this point in the war they were casualties the Soviets could withstand while the Nazis could not. Some 38,000 civilians are estimated to have died from combat and starvation during the nearly two month siege. On the same day, Allied forces in the west began their extended firebombing of the German city of Dresden, which lasted for three days and killed at least 25,000 people.

INTERNATIONAL

Humanity spent a whopping $2.2 trillion on our various militaries last year, a 9 percent increase over 2022 and a new annual record. At least you can’t say our priorities are out of whack. The United States alone accounted for a bit over 40 percent of that total and the rest of NATO accounted for a bit over 17 percent, putting the alliance as a whole at around 58 percent of the planet’s total military expenditure while only accounting for around 12.5 percent of its population. We might not be able to feed or house our people or make sure they can see a doctor when needed but we sure can win wars—or, at least, lose them very expensively.

Unsurprisingly, the big driver of the increase in military spending is war, though frankly I’m not sure which direction that causal relationship goes. But I digress. European nations in particular have been ramping up their defense budgets since Russia—which has been doing likewise—invaded Ukraine roughly two years ago.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

As usual there are a number of items to cover here so I will try to be brief:

• Another round of probably-doomed ceasefire talks in Cairo ended “inconclusively” (as Reuters put it) on Tuesday. The Biden administration once again dispatched CIA Director/unofficial co-Secretary of State William Burns to the negotiating session, which also included Egyptian, Israeli, and Qatari representatives. Things seem to be back to square one in this process, with little reason to think The Gang can find common ground between the positions of Hamas, which is insisting that any ceasefire be effectively permanent, and Israel, which is insisting that any ceasefire be temporary. Neither party seems willing to budge on those mutually incompatible demands. Joe Biden hosted Jordanian King Abdullah II at the White House on Monday and told reporters that “the key elements of the deal are on the table” for a six-week ceasefire with some possibility of renewal, but Abdullah spoke of the need for that ceasefire to be “lasting” and that’s clearly not something the Israeli government wants.

The king and the president clearly enjoying themselves at the White House on Monday (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

• The urgency to reach some sort of ceasefire is growing the closer we get to the Israeli military’s (IDF) promised ground assault on Rafah. The American Prospect’s Jonathan Guyer outlines the stakes of such an attack, which would threaten a population of around 1.5 million people who are presently crammed into a city that normally houses around 270,000. The Biden administration, ever steadfast in its commitment to preserving Palestinian lives, has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it will not support an Israel assault on Rafah…unless Netanyahu promises to do his absolute best not to kill a bunch of civilians. I’m sure he’ll take that to heart. Netanyahu may make at least a token effort at evacuating civilians, which would delay the ground assault.

• The AP reported on Sunday that the Egyptian government is threatening to suspend its peace treaty with Israel, which has been in place since the late 1970s, if the Rafah attack proceeds. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry threw cold water on that report on Monday and I have to say it’s hard to imagine Cairo taking such a drastic step.

• For a while during Sunday’s Super Bowl it seemed like the attack on Rafah had already begun, with reports of heavy Israeli bombardment of the city. But this turned out to have been a hostage rescue operation rather than a full incursion. Israeli forces reportedly rescued two hostages, while the bombardment killed somewhere on the order of 100 people. It’s unclear how many were combatants, but according to Hamas three of them were hostages themselves.

• With its case about United Nations Relief and Works Agency employees participating in the October 7 attacks fraying a bit, the Israeli government has upped the ante by allegedly discovering a dreaded Hamas death tunnel under UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters. The notion that there’s a tunnel under the UNRWA building isn’t all that farfetched, inasmuch as there are tunnels under much of Gaza. But the argument here is apparently that this particular tunnel—Hamas’s main headquarters according to the IDF, in what’s only the fifth or sixth time they’ve made that claim since their operation began—proves that UNRWA is in cahoots with Hamas. This seems like a stretch, but if it furthers the Israeli government’s long-term project to shut UNRWA down I guess it will have accomplished its mission.

• Speaking of UNRWA, Axios is reporting that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is the person responsible for blocking a US-organized food aid shipment at the Israeli port of Ashdod, because UNRWA is responsible for distributing it. Coincidentally, the Biden administration recently issued an internal memo suggesting that military aid ought to be cut off for any country that interferes with US humanitarian aid deliveries. Just throwing that out there in case anybody in the Biden administration has been paying attention to their own bullshit.

• The French and UK governments have followed Washington’s lead and are now sanctioning especially violent Israeli settlers, with London blacklisting four on Monday and Paris a whole 28 of them on Tuesday. As I said a couple of weeks ago these sanctions are the definition of an empty gesture, though there is some possibility they could lead to a more serious effort to counter settler violence.

SYRIA

Islamic State fighters killed at least nine soldiers on Tuesday in a desert region of Syria’s Hama province, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. IS continues to carry out hit and run attacks within and on the edges of the Syrian desert. On Saturday, the SOHR reported that at least three people were killed in an apparent Israeli missile strike near Damascus. Their identities appear to be unknown.

LEBANON

An Israeli drone strike killed at least two people and wounded two others in the Lebanese town of Jadra on Saturday. This attack, which took place well north of the area where the IDF and Hezbollah have been trading pot shots since October 7, appears to have targeted a Hamas “recruiter” who survived the strike. Israeli airstrikes on Monday killed at least four Hezbollah fighters and wounded one of the group’s “officials” in southern Lebanon.

The French government has reportedly presented the Lebanese government with a proposal for standing down tensions along the Israeli-Lebanese border. It calls primarily for pulling Hezbollah and other militant groups back to a minimum distance of ten kilometers from the current “Blue Line” boundary and positioning thousands of Lebanese soldiers on the border effectively as peacekeepers. The ensuing ceasefire would lead into negotiations on formally delineating the border, parts of which have been in dispute for decades. The Israeli government has been demanding that Hezbollah withdraw north of the Litani River, some 30 kilometers north of the Blue Line, which the group refuses to do. This French proposal is supposed to represent a compromise.

YEMEN

Houthi fighters in northern Yemen carried out their first attempted attack on a commercial vessel in the Red Sea in several day on Monday, but it seems they may have targeted a ship carrying grain to Iran. If we assume that’s true we can probably also assume that it was done in error. The ship only suffered minor damage.

Multiple US and UK airstrikes on northern Yemen late last week reportedly killed 17 Houthi fighters. The Houthi movement held public funerals for the deceased in Sanaa on Saturday.

IRAN

The Biden administration has impounded a Boeing 747 aircraft that Iran’s Mahan Air carrier had previously sold to a Venezuelan cargo firm. Both Mahan and the Venezuelan firm’s state-owned parent company are under US sanctions. The Argentine government seized the plane in 2022 and finally decided over the weekend to turn it over to US authorities. The Venezuelan government has demanded its return.

The Wall Street Journal published a profile earlier this month on the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, and comparing him to his much higher profile predecessor, Qasem Soleimani. The upshot is that, at a time when Iranian-aligned groups from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen are engaged in low-level conflicts that threaten to escalate into a regional war that would definitely not be in Iran’s national interest, Qaani’s ability to convince them to stand down is substantially inferior to the influence Soleimani once wielded. It turns out that when the US assassinated Soleimani in 2020 it didn’t diminish the threat posed by those groups so much as it just made them a lot harder to control. Mission…accomplished?

ASIA

ARMENIA

Some sort of border skirmish left at least four Armenian soldiers dead in Armenia’s Syunik region on Tuesday. Armenian and Azerbaijani officials are each blaming the other side for sparking the clash. According to the Armenian government, Azerbaijani forces began firing across the border unprovoked, while according to the Azerbaijani government they were retaliating for Armenian shelling.

PAKISTAN

The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, one of two parties that has claimed victory following last week’s Pakistani parliamentary election, announced on Tuesday that it has reached a coalition agreement with the Pakistan People’s Party. Technically the PPP finished in second place behind the PMLN last week, and I say “technically” because in reality former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party defeated both of them, but its members were forced to run as “independents” when Pakistani authorities banned PTI from the ballot. The fact that they technically aren’t in a party means they’re ineligible for a share of the reserved seats that the Pakistani system allocates to established parties post-election, while the PMLN-PPP alliance should, with their additional seats, wind up close to a joint 169 seat parliamentary majority. Former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, younger brother of PMLN leader Nawaz Sharif, now appears to be the compromise coalition candidate for PM.

In an attempt to qualify for a share of reserved seats and maybe challenge the PMLN-led alliance, PTI leaders announced on Tuesday that their members would be joining (or taking over, essentially) the small religious Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen party. The party is also forming similar alliances with MWM in the Punjab provincial assembly and with the Jamaat-e-Islami party in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial assembly in an attempt to secure control of those regional governments. PTI is also alleging that dozens of its candidates were cheated in their races. Given PTI’s poor relationship with Pakistan’s military establishment it’s unlikely any of these attempts at capitalizing on the party’s surprising electoral success will actually work. PTI supporters have already taken to the streets across Pakistan to protest the election result and that will likely continue if PTI is shut out of power.

MYANMAR

Myanmar’s ruling junta has instituted mandatory military service for all men aged 18-35 and all women aged 18-27 in what is presumably an attempt to halt and/or reverse months of setbacks against multiple rebel factions across the country. The service period is a minimum of two years but the government can extend that to five years in time of “emergency.” Military conscription has been on the books since 2010 but has apparently not been well enforced until (maybe) now.

INDONESIA

As I write this, Indonesian voters are probably already heading to the polls to participate in Wednesday’s general election. Polling has made Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto the favorite to become Indonesia’s next president, running on a ticket with incumbent Joko Widodo’s son Gibran Rakabuming. He’ll need to win more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff, which recent polls have suggested he will though only by a relatively small margin. The Intercept’s Allan Nairn has written a profile of Prabowo and his “fascist” tendencies (no, really), his past coup attempts, and his involvement in crimes against humanity in East Timor. He seems nice.

AFRICA

SENEGAL

Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Senegalese security forces of killing at least three people during protests last week against President Macky Sall’s decision to postpone this month’s presidential election until at least December. Three people died during demonstrations in the cities of Dakar, Saint-Louis, and Ziguinchor on Friday and Saturday, and while there’s no confirmation that Senegalese forces were responsible it seems like a pretty reasonable theory. Another major protest was scheduled for Dakar on Tuesday but I have not seen any indication whether it actually took place, possibly because the Senegalese government decided to cut national internet service ahead of the event.

NIGERIA

Armed attackers killed at least four people and abducted some 40 others in an attack in the Kaura Namoda region of northwestern Nigeria’s Zamfara state early Tuesday morning. Zamfara is regularly plagued by violence that authorities attribute to “bandits,” who frequently use kidnapping for ransom as a means to bring in lucre.

CAMEROON

A bombing in the city of Nkambe in Cameroon’s Northwest region left at least one person dead on Sunday. The explosive was planted near the site of a Youth Day parade but detonated well after the event was over, probably reducing casualties significantly. Anglophone separatist militants are the prime suspect.

ETHIOPIA

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on Tuesday said that it had confirmed that “at least 45 civilians…were extrajudicially killed by government security forces” in the town of Merawi in late January. You may recall that the EHRC last week said that over 80 civilians were killed in that town in a massacre on January 29, prompting US Ambassador Ervin Massinga to call for an investigation. The 45 civilians announced on Tuesday are apparently those the EHRC has been able to conclusively identify, and the commission said that “it can be assumed that the [full] number of victims is even higher.” Merawi is located in Ethiopia’s Amhara region and according to the commission these civilians were killed for allegedly supporting the regional Fano militia, which has been engaged in a conflict with federal security forces for months.

SOMALIA

Al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for an attack on a military base in Mogadishu on Saturday that killed at least four UAE soldiers and one Bahraini soldier. All were reportedly in Somalia on a “training mission.”

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

An apparent M23 militia attack on a displaced persons camp on the outskirts of the town of Sake left at least three people dead and eight more wounded on Monday. The Congolese military and M23 are continuing to battle over Sake, which is located some 20 kilometers outside the capital of the eastern DRC’s North Kivu province, Goma. The rebels appear to have seized a foothold in the town but Congolese officials are insisting that their forces are still in overall control.

Protesters demonstrated near the US and Belgian embassies in Kinshasa on Monday, claiming that both governments are supporting M23 via the Rwandan government. These protests followed similar incidents at the US and French embassies and at the headquarters for the UN’s Congo mission over the weekend. The Congolese government has long accused Rwanda of enabling M23’s operations and the UN and several Western governments have concurred with that assessment. Congolese police used tear gas to break up the embassy demonstrations.

EUROPE

ESTONIA

The Russian Interior Ministry on Tuesday placed Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas on a registry of people wanted in connection with unspecified criminal charges. She’s apparently the first foreign leader to earn this distinction. It’s unclear what offense Kallas has allegedly committed, though her government has strongly supported Ukraine and has tried to remove monuments to Soviet soldiers in World War II. The latter is probably what landed her on the naughty list, as in theory that could violate Russian law regarding the desecration of war memorials. Kallas is presumably unlikely to face arrest unless she decides to vacation in St. Petersburg or something.

UKRAINE

According to Reuters, Russian President Vladimir Putin made private overtures to the US government late last year regarding a potential ceasefire in Ukraine, but US officials rebuffed them. Toward the end of the year Putin also started dropping hints about a ceasefire in public but to my knowledge this is the first reporting on these private messages. US officials reportedly told their Russian interlocutors last month that they would not negotiate without Ukrainian involvement and the initiative withered as a result. They also may not have believed that Putin’s offer was sincere, though according to Reuters’ “Russian sources” it was. It seems like diplomatic malpractice not to continue pursuing this, but I suppose we should trust that the Biden administration knows what it’s doing, right? Hello? Anybody?

FINLAND

Conservative former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb won Sunday’s runoff to become the country’s next president, defeating former Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto 51.6 percent to 48.4 percent. Stubb also narrowly beat Haavisto in the first round last month, so this result was expected. Finnish presidents primarily oversee military and foreign policy and although Haavisto is on the political center-left there doesn’t seem to have been much difference between the two candidates in those areas as both campaigned on strongly pro-NATO, anti-Russia platforms. Stubb is a bit more open to deepening Finland’s position in NATO on issues like basing foreign soldiers in Finland and allowing the transit of nuclear weapons through Finnish territory.

HUNGARY

Hungarian President Katalin Novák resigned on Saturday amid public outcry over the revelation that last April she pardoned a man convicted of involvement in a child sex abuse case. A second member of the ruling Fidesz Party, Judit Varga, also resigned from parliament for her role in the case—she was serving as justice minister at the time and apparently recommended the pardon. Both Novák and Varga are closely affiliated with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, though it remains to be seen whether this scandal is going to affect him as well.

AMERICAS

VENEZUELA

The Venezuelan government finally spoke about its recent military buildup along the Guyanese border on Sunday, accusing the Guyanese government of issuing “illegal oil concessions” for companies to explore in the Essequibo region. Venezuela has a claim on Essequibo dating back to colonial days and has reignited that dispute since holding a referendum in early December in which Venezuelan voters (a few of them, anyway) overwhelmingly supported the annexation of the region. Venezuelan officials say the concessions undermine an agreement between the two governments to deescalate tension over the land dispute. Despite the buildup there’s no indication Caracas is planning any military action at this time.

HAITI

A new report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime says that Haitian gangs have parlayed their growing territorial control into a lucrative and self-sustaining protection racket, forcing businesses to pay them regular taxes plus percentages of their revenue. The report also highlights kidnapping for ransom and organ trafficking (!) as major economic engines that are strengthening the gangs and could make a proposed international intervention extremely challenging.

UNITED STATES

Finally, since this newsletter is already almost over the email limit I’ll close by simply noting that the US Senate on Tuesday passed a long-debated $95.34 billion spending package that would provide billions in military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, along with around $9 billion in humanitarian aid and a few billion in assorted odds and ends. Around $60 billion is earmarked for Ukraine, which has been making do without substantial US support since late last year. This is basically the Biden administration’s supplemental military request, which has been stuck in Congress for months, minus a contentious border security piece. The measure now waits on movement in the House of Representatives, where Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested it is dead on arrival. That’s not necessarily true, though, and Democrats are planning to explore legislative options for forcing a vote over Johnson’s opposition.