Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan

According to an article by Ambassador, Mark Green, President, Director and CEO, Wilson Center, at a time when the majority of Afghan population struggles to afford food under the collapsed economy and severe drought, the “poppy pledge” threatens to devastate the livelihoods of entire communities. 

According to Green, Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of poppy. Its production grew during the years when United States and coalition forces were present, despite the US spending more than US$8 billion to eradicate the crop.

Production grew during Taliban’s years of insurgency, despite its public opposition to poppy  production because narcotics are contrary to Islam, and perhaps because the militant group reportedly imposed “taxes” on poppy farmers and others involved in the trade as a way of funding its operations.

As Taliban representatives negotiated over the drawdown of Western forces with, first, the Trump Administration and then, later, Biden representatives, they promised to end poppy production in Afghanistan once they regained power.

Even though observers say Taliban have broken many of its other pledges—on matters like the role of women in society and tolerance for diversity of opinion— the “poppy pledge” may be one they’re serious about trying to keep.

In April, Taliban issued a decree that banned poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, and government spokespersons said that offenders would be tried according to Shariah laws and courts.

A representative of the interior ministry told the Associated Press, “We are committed to bringing poppy cultivation to zero.” 

Farmers in Helmand, the center of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, recently reported that armed Taliban officials have begun seizing farms and tearing up fields of poppies with tractors.

Taliban campaign to eradicate poppy cultivation poses significant challenges for millions of impoverished farmers and day laborers that rely on their earnings from the profitable crop.

In 2021, the value of Afghanistan's poppy production was 14% of the country’s GDP at US$1.8 billion to US$2.7 billion, and day laborers can make more than US$300 a month harvesting poppy.

 

Pakistan: Remittances continue to be the biggest source of foreign exchange

Remittances have remained high in June 2022. Eid festivity impact was restricted to the month, the inflow of US$2.5 billion depict a higher rate of remittance. Even though remittances were down 9%MoM, analysts expect growth during the year to remain tepid backed by increase in Pakistani worker registration in GCC countries.

As per Board of Emigration and Overseas Employment (BEOE), around 458,000 Pakistanis have expatriated during 7MFY22TD as against 288,000 and 225,000 during FY21 and FY20, respectively. Most of the expatriations have occurred towards Middle East countries which continue to enjoy better macros in a high oil price environment. 

Notwithstanding a better current account deficit (CAD) in July 2022, the overall Balance of Payment (BoP) position was reported at a negative US$1.8 billion. This is largely owing to the absence of financial flows from any country during the month. 

During June 2022, Pakistan received US$2.3 billion deposit from China while in July 2022 external debt repayments of US$748 million eroded foreign exchange reserves.

Pakistan’s monthly CAD nearly halved during the month under review to US$1.2 billion (3.7% of GDP), despite hefty oil payments as the free-fall in Pak Rupee (fall of 17%) continued to act as a key shock absorber, supported by administrative measures that reduced trade deficit to US$3 billion (21%MoM decline). 

Notwithstanding the fizzling out of Eid festivity impact, rate of remittance flows remained steady at US$2.5 billion for July 2022. 

Trend reversal in PBS-SBP import differential was witnessed owing to oil payments where most shipments, at high crack spreads and as under PBS data, were made during July 2022. Adherence to the renewed IMF program is imperative besides administrative measures to conserve energy in order to keep CAD within the targeted level of US$10 billion (3.0% of GDP).

Pakistan is poised to receive US$4 billion under friendly assistance from GCC countries, which will effectively put its external account at an over-financed status.

SBP has already indicated a pause in tightening with a few downside risks from exogenous factors and deviation from the path of fiscal consolidation. While the end of overheating of economy is in sight (June 2023), Pakistan needs stay adequately congruent to the Fund’s stipulations and implement energy conservation drives to reduce oil import bill.

Trade deficit has come off from its fresh peak of US$3.9 billion to US$3.1 billion, largely owing to demand moderation as well as administrative measures on restricting non-essential items, more specifically the CKD imports.

The biggest decline was seen in machinery and transport group. Infrequent trend reversal in the PBS-SBP import difference was also witnessed during the month, which was primarily on account of higher crack spreads booked in prior month and cash transactions being settled in July 2022. This also kept Pakistan’s average cost of oil import higher than oil prices.

 

United States takes help of poll to continue war in Ukraine

It is not new by a regular practice of the US administration to take help of pool to justify its acts. This time it has taken help of world’s leading news agency, Reuters, to continue arms supply to Ukraine. 

Before the readers go further I request them to first read one of my blogs titled Dying Ukrainians Thriving US Military Complexes dated August 20, 2022.

After half a year of war in Ukraine, a slim majority of Americans agree that the United States should continue to support Kyiv until Russia withdraws all its forces, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Wednesday.

The polling suggests continued support for President Joe Biden's policy of backing Ukraine, despite economic worries and domestic political developments grabbing Americans' attention in recent months.

The Biden administration has provided weapons and ammunition for Ukraine's bid to repel Russian forces and is expected to announce a new security assistance package of about US$3 billion, a US official said, as Ukraine's marks its Independence Day on Wednesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has vowed to recapture territory seized after the February 24 invasion and in earlier incursions beginning in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.

Out of 1,005 people in the United States who took part in an online poll last week, 53% expressed support for backing Ukraine "until all Russian forces are withdrawn from territory claimed by Ukraine." Only 18% said they opposed.

That support came from both sides of the political divide, although Democratic voters were more likely to back the position, with 66% of Democrats in support compared to 51% of Republicans.

A slim majority, 51%, also supported providing arms such as guns and anti-tank weapons to Ukraine's military, compared with 22% who opposed.

In previous polls, higher numbers of Americans have backed providing arms to Ukraine but directly comparable polling was not available.

In line with past polling, there was little support among Americans from across the political spectrum for sending US troops to Ukraine.

Only 26% said they supported such an intervention, but 43% agreed with sending US troops to NATO allies neighboring Ukraine who are not at war with Russia.

 

Why fuss against Mahmoud Abbas?

At a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Mahmoud Abbas, President, Palestinian Authority (PA) said Israel has caused 50 Holocausts against Palestinians. His remarks triggered outrage among certain world leaders, including Scholz.

"From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and cities," Abbas said in Arabic, according to CNN. Until today and every day there are killings by the Israeli military.

Abbas made the comments when asked if he would apologize for the 1972 Olympics incident in Munich, when members of the Israeli team were taken hostage by Palestinians linked to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

Chancellor Scholz tweeted, "I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud #Abbas. For Germans in particular, any relativization of the singularity of the Holocaust is intolerable and unacceptable. I condemn any attempt to deny the crimes of the Holocaust."

It is true that the Holocaust has singular dimensions but the German leader and others who were outraged by the Palestinian Authority president’s remarks cannot deny nearly eight decades of occupation, land robbery, destruction of homes, burning of olive trees, imprisonment, injustice, genocide, displacement of families, etc.  Just in 1948, 700,000 Palestinians were forced to leave their homes.

Moreover, Abbas did not deny Holocaust that Scholz says condemns denial of it.

Also, deep down, Scholz and other current and former Western leaders are well aware that Israel’s behaviors are by no means excusable, otherwise they are bigoted.

Why the term Holocaust used by Abbas was taken literally. He was just trying to express incessant cruelty against Palestinians.

The interim Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid tried to abuse the situation and talked about morality of the remarks by the Palestinian Authority leader, something which is quite alien to Israeli officials.

"Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including one and a half million Jewish children. History will never forgive him (Abbas)," Lapid tweeted.

Lapid is better to be reminded that history will never forgive or forget the stealing of another nation’s land. Between August 5 and 7, Lapid killed 16 children in Gaza. 

Holocaust happened during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. But the Palestinians have been suffering since 1947 and there is no prospect for an end to their agonies.

Israelis are stealing the remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank and don’t allow them to establish their own country. They have also imprisoned about two million people in Gaza.

Even Palestinians who were protesting inside the besieged Gaza were murdered in cold blood as they were holding symbolic “Great March of Return” demonstrations. 

Also, UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which oblige Israel to return to the 1967 borders, carry no weight for the West.

In the Tuesday press conference Scholz also unexpectedly refuted the statement by Abbas that Palestinians are living under the apartheid practiced by the Israeli regime, saying he did "not think that is correct, to use the term to describe the situation. 

Manay groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have concluded that Israel's treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid.

In a commentary on August 18, Marwan Bishara, a senior political analyst at Al Jazeera, said, “Aggrieved and angry, the Palestinians have long believed that it was they who paid the price for the horrors inflicted upon Jews in Europe since it is they who were robbed of their homeland by the newly established Jewish state in 1948.”

Bishara adds “… the early Zionists chose to settle and build a homeland for Jews in Palestine nearly half a century before the Holocaust, knowing all too well that it is the homeland of another people. They wished it cleansed of its non-Jewish inhabitants. Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion believed Zionism was not driven by victimhood but rather by the necessary emancipation of the Jewish people as a new nation in Palestine.”

The analyst goes on to say, “The Gaza Strip may not be the Buchenwald concentration camp, but for decades, this tortured and tormented open-air prison of two million Palestinians has had more than its share of sadistic Israeli aggression under the pretext of security.”

In a show of hypocrisy, over the past decades Western statesmen have not reacted to comparing certain Arab leaders to Adolf Hitler by Israeli leaders.

“Israeli leaders have called any Palestinian or Arab leader they disliked a ‘new Hitler’, to justify aggression and war against Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and others. Before their trilateral attack on Egypt in 1956, Israel and its two co-conspirators, France and Britain, portrayed its pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, as ‘Hitler on the Nile’,” Bishara says.

Moreover, Zionists have used the term “anti-Semitism” to attack the opponents of Tel Aviv’s behaviors toward Palestinians. They are using this term to justify their illegal acts.

“…, any journalist, scholar or peace activist who dares criticize Israeli policy is routinely denounced as an anti-Semite, Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi,” the Al Jazeera analyst writes.

He also says, “Such Zionist and Israeli abuse of the Holocaust’s memory and even its survivors was exposed by Israeli historian Tom Segev in his revelatory book The Seventh Million, The Israelis and The Holocaust, as well as by American Jewish scholar, Norman Finkelstein, in his daring book, The Holocaust Industry, Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.

“The latter is highly critical of the cynical calculus behind the persistent invocation of the Holocaust by American Zionist organizations, in order to portray Israel as a victim, despite its 1967 war and occupation of Palestine in its entirety.”

Courtesy: The Tehran Times

Colossal impact of Ukraine war on Germany

The adverse impact of Russia-Ukraine conflict leading to war is anticipated to last for years. One of the leading economists, Marcel Fratzscher of the German Institute for Economic Research told Reuters. He expressed fears that the turmoil could cost 3 percentage points of growth this year.

Fratzscher, whose institute advises the government of Europe's largest economy on macroeconomic policy, said the impact could last until 2025 when Germany expects to have freed itself from all exposure to Russian gas.

Germany, which for decades prospered from reliable flows of cheap Russian gas, is rushing to reorient itself after the outbreak of war in February.

"The war in Ukraine has done massive damage to the German economy," Fratzscher said, adding that perhaps only 1.5% would remain of the 4.5% economic growth he had expected at the start of the year.

The impact on inflation, through high energy prices, would also be sustained for a similar period, though he rejected suggestions that there was cause for wage restraint.

"Unions aren't as strong as they were in the 1970s," he said, noting that this year's forecast wage growth of 4.5% was well short of inflation at some 8%. "Even in coming years I see no sign of us falling into a wage spiral."

  

Crude oil prices slip on receding fears of output cut by OPEC Plus

Crude oil prices fell on Wednesday, taking a breather from a near 4% surge the previous day, on receding fears of an imminent output cut by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies, a group known as OPEC Plus.

Global benchmark Brent crude futures fell to US$99.82 a barrel by 0337 GMT, after rising 3.9% and WTI futures declined to US$93.47 a barrel, having jumped 3.7% on Tuesday.

Both contracts soared on Tuesday after Energy Minister of Saudi Arabia flagged the possibility of supply cuts to balance a market it described as "schizophrenic", with the paper and physical markets becoming increasingly disconnected.

"While Abdulaziz bin Salman's comment may have achieved more than putting a floor under crude prices, we expect it to follow the law of diminishing returns, unless it is followed up by more signals or action from OPEC Plus to restrain output," said Vandana Hari, founder of oil market analysis provider Vanda Insights.

With OPEC Plus already delivering about 2.8 million barrels per day less than its monthly target, cutting production is going to be more complicated than usual, Hari added.

Potential OPEC Plus production cuts may not be imminent and are likely to coincide with the return of Iran to oil markets should it clinch a nuclear deal with the West, nine OPEC sources told Reuters on Tuesday.

A senior US official told Reuters on Monday that Iran had dropped some of its main demands on resurrecting a deal. 

"Tuesday's rally was overdone as many investors knew it would take several months for Iranian oil to flow into the international market even if an agreement to revive Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal was made, meaning OPEC Plus would not trim output so quickly," said Kazuhiko Saito, Chief Analyst at Fujitomi Securities.

"Still, there is not much room for the market's downside due to robust heating fuel demand for the winter," he said, citing that the recent rally in the US heating oil market and surging natural gas prices boosted expectations for stronger heating oil demand and tighter crude supply.

US gas prices shot above US$10 for the first time in about 14 years due to a surge in prices in Europe, where tight supplies persist.

Underlining tight supply, US crude stockpiles fell by about 5.6 million barrels for the week ended August 19, according to market sources citing American Petroleum Institute figures on Tuesday, against analysts' estimate of a drop by 900,000 barrels.

But gasoline inventories rose by about 268,000 barrels, while distillate stocks increased by about 1.1 million barrels.

Jerusalem belongs to all, not Jews alone

Jerusalem is the united capital of Israel, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said Monday morning as he pushed back at former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who attacked him on social media over his previously announced stance.

“Jerusalem is the united capital of the State of Israel – so it has been, and so it will be,” Gantz told Radio 103 FM.

Netanyahu on Sunday tweeted the headline of an interview Gantz gave to a Saudi paper in 2020 in which he said there was room for a Palestinian capital in a united Jerusalem.

 “The answer is no,” Netanyahu tweeted. The issue of a united Jerusalem is one he often campaigns on and has in the past warned that his opposition would give it away to the Palestinians. He famously did so when he campaigned against former Labor Party leader Shimon Peres.

Gantz clarified in his radio interview that he had made those comments around the time former US President Donald Trump had unveiled his peace plan, which called for a Palestinian capital in Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem that were on the opposite side of the security barrier. Netanyahu also supported that plan.

Trump’s plan also called for a two-state resolution to the conflict. Gantz in his public comments since then has spoken of a resolution that involves two entities.

Gantz told the radio station he did not believe it was possible “to get to a permanent agreement with the Palestinians in the coming years.”

What needs to happen instead is to reduce the points of conflict and strengthen Palestinian self-governance over their own affairs, particularly their internal security, Gantz said.

It’s important to prevent the creation of a bi-national state, “which no one wants,” he said.

With respect to a Palestinian foothold in Jerusalem, Gantz said there are people who say there are “civilian villages that Palestinians call Jerusalem, which is not in the metropolitan envelope of Jerusalem, and they can be defined as their capital.”

Gantz also clarified that he would not sit in a government in which Netanyahu was a Prime Minister or a Minister.

 

Benjamin Gantz was born in Kfar Ahim, Israel, in 1959. His mother Malka was a Holocaust survivor, originally from Hungary. His father Nahum came from Romania, and was arrested by the British authorities for trying to enter Palestine illegally, before reaching Israel. His parents were among the founders of Moshav Kfar Ahim, a cooperative agricultural community in south-central Israel. In his youth, he attended the Shafir High School in Merkaz Shapira and boarding school at the HaKfar HaYarok youth village in Ramat HaSharon.

Gantz is a graduate of the IDF Command and Staff College and the National Security College. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Tel Aviv University, a master's degree in political science from the University of Haifa, and an additional master's degree in National Resources Management from the National Defense University in the United States. Gantz is married to Revital, with whom he has four children. He lives in Rosh HaAyin

In February 2011, following the government decision to promote Gantz to Chief of the General Staff, Attorney Avi'ad Vissuli of the Forum for the Land of Israel unsuccessfully petitioned to revoke the appointment.

In February 2019, an Israeli-American woman accused Gantz of exposing himself to her 40 years earlier, causing her traumatic disorders. Gantz denied all allegations, claiming that such an incident never took place, and that the allegations were politically motivated. Gantz has since sued the woman for defamation.