World roundup: September 10 2024
World roundup: September 10 2024
Stories from Afghanistan, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere
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TODAY IN HISTORY
September 10, 1813: In one of the largest naval engagements in the War of 1812, a US fleet defeats a smaller British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie. This was a significant strategic victory, in that it gave the US control of the lake and enabled both the recapture of Detroit in late September and the US defeat of Tecumseh’s confederacy at the Battle of the Thames in early October. The victory also prompted US Commodore Oliver Perry’s famous message to General William Henry Harrison: “we have met the enemy and they are ours.”
September 10, 1942: In World War II, Allied forces undertake an amphibious landing at Mahajanga, in northern Madagascar, kicking off their final push to take that island from Vichy France. An initial Allied invasion of Madagascar in May had stalled, but over the ensuing months the British military was able to bring in reinforcements and to seize the nearby island of Mayotte for use as a base. The overwhelmed French forces resisted the renewed Allied push for several weeks but by early November Madagascar was in Allied hands. The victory was important for the Allied war effort as it prevented Madagascar from being used by the Japanese Navy to project power into the western Indian Ocean and threaten India as well as the “Persian corridor” used to funnel arms to the Soviet Union. The campaign also demonstrated the potential effectiveness of combined sea, land, and air operations.
INTERNATIONAL
There’s a new movement afoot to broaden the scope of international law to cover environmental crimes:
Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa have formally asked the International Criminal Court to consider ecocide — acts that destroy the world’s ecosystems — an international crime, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
If successful, their bid could allow for the prosecutions of company leaders, or even nations, that knowingly contribute to environmental degradation. Still, some of the world’s biggest polluters — China, Russia, India and the United States — are not ICC member states and could challenge any of the court’s rulings on jurisdictional grounds.
Proponents say labeling ecocide a crime under international law would create guard rails for the world’s policymakers. “The primary goal is ultimately protective: it’s deterrence,” Jojo Mehta, co-founder of the advocacy group Stop Ecocide International, said in a news release. “Criminal law creates powerful moral as well as legal boundaries, making it clear that extreme levels of harm are not just unlawful but totally unacceptable.”
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Gaza’s health ministry has revised down the number of people the Israeli military (IDF) killed in its Tuesday morning strike on the “protected” humanitarian zone in Gaza’s al-Mawasi area. Where early reporting put the death toll at 40 or more, the ministry now says it’s confirmed 19 deaths. At least 65 people were wounded. There may be additional bodies that haven’t yet been recovered so that death toll could rise.
The IDF has now acknowledged that one of its snipers most likely was responsible for killing Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the 26 year old Turkish-American activist who was shot in the head during an anti-settlement protest in the West Bank on Friday. To be sure there’s never been any question that an Israeli soldier killed her, but even so it’s somewhat surprising that the IDF copped to it this quickly. Israeli officials insist that, if an IDF sniper shot her, they did so “indirectly and unintentionally” while attempting to murder a different protester.
Eygi’s family issued a statement lambasting the IDF’s conclusions, but presumably they realize that this is where her story ends. Although US Secretary of State Antony Blinken attempted to approximate a human emotion in responding to Eygi’s death on Tuesday, calling it “unprovoked and unjustified” during a press conference in London and saying that “Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes in the way that they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement,” the fact that he said those things to a bunch of reporters in the UK and not to anyone in the Israeli government says all that needs to be said about whether the US government intends to pursue this matter any further.
Blinken’s boss, Decent Man Joe Biden, undercut that already milquetoast response further by telling reporters that Eygi’s killing was “apparently…an accident,” the bullet having “ricocheted off the ground” and into her head as bullets are wont to do. I don’t want to say that Biden’s reaction to this would have been different had the identity of the victim been other than what it was, or had her killers not been Israeli soldiers, but I think we all know that it would have been.
LEBANON
An IDF airstrike in eastern Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley on Tuesday killed a “field commander” in the Radwan Force, Hezbollah’s special operations unit, according to AFP. Hezbollah and the Israelis have confirmed the killing of Mohammad Qassem al-Shaer, but Hezbollah hasn’t publicly acknowledged Shaer’s role in the organization. Hezbollah launched another barrage of rockets into northern Israel in response.
JORDAN
The Jordanian government partially reopened the King Hussein Bridge (AKA the Allenby Bridge) checkpoint into the West Bank on Tuesday, two days after closing it due to an attack from the Jordanian side that killed three Israeli security guards. Right now the checkpoint is only open to passenger traffic and remains closed to freight.
Meanwhile, Jordanian voters (or a subset of them at least) went to the polls on Tuesday for a parliamentary election. This vote is noteworthy in that it’s the first since a package of reforms instituted in 2022 reserved a slightly higher number of legislative seats for women and introduced a partially proportional system that should have the effect of strengthening the cohesion of Jordanian political parties. Nevertheless turnout was expected to be low and apparently was—32 percent, according to electoral officials, which is in line with Jordan’s last two parliamentary elections.
IRAN
At his London press conference with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Blinken confirmed the Biden administration’s conclusion that Iran has begun providing the Russian military with ballistic missiles for use in Ukraine. The administration subsequently announced a raft of related sanctions designations, involving ten individuals and nine entities in Russia and Iran, including Iran Air, as well as nine Russian-flagged cargo vessels. The French, German, and UK governments also announced new sanctions in coordination with the US.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
The Afghan embassy in Oslo is shutting down, joining its London counterpart as the second Afghan diplomatic mission in Europe to announce its closure this week, after the Taliban-led government in Kabul announced in late July that it would no longer support missions staffed by the previous Afghan government. As with the UK situation, it is extremely unlikely that the host government—in this case Norway—is going to recognize a new diplomatic mission appointed by the Taliban, so the facility is likely to remain closed for the foreseeable future.
Elsewhere, the Afghan and Chinese governments are finally making progress on their long-standing goal of exploiting Afghanistan’s mineral resources, specifically its large copper deposit at Mes Aynak. But Foreign Policy’s Christina Lu reports that it may be slow going moving forward:
The Taliban are “all in” on this project, said Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center and the author of FP’s South Asia Brief newsletter. “The Taliban would see this project as very much a part of this broader vision that the Taliban have for making Afghanistan a bigger part of connectivity projects spanning South and Central Asia.”
The Taliban’s interest in copper is nothing new; Afghanistan’s rulers have long sought to exploit the country’s mineral riches. The effort to transform Mes Aynak dates back to at least 2008, when the Chinese state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. secured a $3 billion, 30-year mining concession for the project. After 16 years of delays, the Taliban and Beijing appeared to turn back to the project this summer with a July ribbon-cutting ceremony for the construction of a road to the mine, which Chinese officials said marked a “significant step” forward.
Yet even with this apparent momentum, analysts warn that a raft of security, regulatory, legal, financial, and infrastructure challenges stand in the way of the project’s success, alongside concerns of how mining could damage historic ruins. Advancing a mining project in any country is a risky endeavor that requires years, if not decades, of investment and commitment.
“This is not easy, and investing in a mine like this requires not just a lot of money but a lot of stability,” said Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, the founding director of the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. “China is not stupid. They do not want to waste a lot of money and scarce resources on an investment that will yield very little if [Afghanistan] blows up in civil conflict again.”
INDIA
Authorities in the Indian state of Manipur have imposed an internet shutdown and curfew in response to the recent renewal of violence between the Meitei and Kuki communities. That violence has claimed at least nine lives over the past ten days and has apparently escalated to include rudimentary drone and rocket strikes. It’s also taken on a new dimension, as student groups have begun organizing protests against the state government for its failure to resolve a crisis that’s killed more than 250 people since May 2023.
CHINA
The commanders of the US military’s Indo-Pacific Command and the People’s Liberation Army’s Southern Theater Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo and General Wu Yanan respectively, held a video conference on Tuesday. This would be relatively unremarkable except for the fact that it’s the first theater commander interaction between the two militaries since the Chinese government effectively cut off military-to-military interaction with the US back in 2022. Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to restore those interactions when they met in San Francisco last November. The two commanders reportedly discussed tensions in the South China Sea among other topics, but as is the case with most US-China contacts these days the substance of the conversation is less important than the fact that the conversation happened at all.
AFRICA
LIBYA
The United Nations mission in Libya will hold another round of negotiations to resolve tensions over the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli on Wednesday. The last round ended with an agreement in principle between the country’s rival legislative bodies, the eastern House of Representatives and the western High State Council to work together to appoint a replacement for fired bank governor Sadiq al-Kabir as well as a new board of directors. Unfortunately they were supposed to have wrapped up consultations on those appointments on Monday and it would appear they have not been able to reach an agreement. The bank crisis has caused the eastern-based “Libyan National Army” to shut down most of the country’s oil facilities, depriving the bank of what is easily its largest source of revenue.
ALGERIA
The two losers in Saturday’s Algerian presidential election, Abdelaali Hassani Cherif and Youcef Aouchiche, appealed the official results to the Algerian Constitutional Court on Tuesday, getting in well under the ten day deadline for filing such a challenge. It’s sad but I guess they just don’t believe that incumbent Abdelmadjid Tebboune really won 95 percent of the vote, even though it’s totally believable. There is no real possibility that this appeal will wind up invalidating Tebboune’s win, but it could prompt election officials to “recount” the votes (assuming they ever bothered counting them in the first place) and giving Tebboune a slightly less inflated total. Interestingly even Tebboune’s campaign has questioned the results, which could suggest second thoughts about arranging such a lopsided outcome or even some deeper discord within Algeria’s ruling elite.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
Joe Biden suggested on Tuesday that he’s about to give the Ukrainian military blanket permission to use long-range US-made armaments to strike targets inside Russia, telling reporters that his administration is “working that out now.” Biden previously gave the Ukrainians limited permission to use US arms to strike targets in Russia if those sites were involved in attacks against Ukraine, but Ukrainian officials have complained that this is too restrictive for their purposes. Tuesday’s comment comes a couple of weeks after Biden said he was “open” to supplying Ukraine with long-range, air-launched cruise missiles and a week after Reuters reported that the US was “close” to a firm agreement on that front. It would likely take months before the Ukrainian military could realistically put such weapons in the field but this would still offer a substantial increase in its strike capabilities.
UKRAINE
Meanwhile, the Russian military announced the seizure of a town and three villages in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast on Tuesday. The most significant of these is the town, Krasnohorivka, which is located around 30 kilometers west of Donetsk city.
AMERICAS
MEXICO
Hundreds of protesters stormed into the Mexican Senate building on Tuesday to block a planned vote on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s judicial overhaul. Prior to the festivities speculation was high that AMLO’s Morena party had secured the support of one opposition senator, giving it the two-thirds majority required to pass the plan. Debate over the bill resumed Tuesday evening in another location and is expected to continue into Wednesday morning.
UNITED STATES
Finally, with the Big Debate tonight I thought it might be appropriate to conclude with a bit of election-related material, in this case a plea from Foreign Policy’s Joseph Nye for the next president to focus on restoring US “soft power”:
Dear Madam or Mr. President,
As president, you will need to invest in U.S. soft power, the ability to get what we want through attraction rather than coercion or payment. When I first published an article on soft power in Foreign Policy in 1990, the concept was new, but the behavior is as old as human history. While the hard power of coercion usually prevails in the short run, soft power is essential for the long-term success of foreign policy. As Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister, is alleged to have said, “You can do everything with bayonets, except sit on them.”
A country’s soft power comes primarily from three sources: its culture; its political values, such as democracy and human rights; and its policies when they are seen as legitimate, because they are framed with awareness of others’ interests. How a government behaves at home in its practice of democracy, in international institutions and alliances where it consults others, and in setting foreign-policy goals such as promoting human rights and responding to global public problems such as climate change determines whether other countries find us attractive or not.