Posts – mustafamalik.com

Taliban an anti-hegemonic force

Mustafa Malik August 26, 2021

AS AMERICA FLEES Afghanistan under the Taliban gun, I am wondering how far west Asian Muslim societies are from ridding themselves of Western hegemony. At an intellectual level, the global Muslim struggle against Western hegemony began in Afghanistan in the 1860s with Jamaluddin al-Afghani prodding King Dost Muhammad to oppose the British colonial power. By Western hegemony, I mean invasion and occupation by Western powers and their domination through their vassals and subordinate regimes.

President Ashraf Ghani was a typical American vassal whose power structure began crumbling as the United States announced it was going to pull out its troops from Afghanistan by Aug. 31. America is the mightiest military and economic power the world has ever known. Yet its – and the West’s – stranglehold on Muslim societies is very fragile. That fragility was demonstrated spectacularly by the Biden administration’s quick compliance with the Taliban’s ultimatum to pull out all American forces from Afghanistan by the Aug. 31 deadline.

President Biden had been under intense domestic and international pressure to extend that deadline so the NATO countries had enough time to evacuate all their troops and collaborators from Afghanistan. In desperation, Biden rushed his CIA director, William Burns, to Kabul, obviously to ask the Taliban leadership to allow an extension of the deadline. But the guerrilla leaders said no, and Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen warned that the Aug. 31 deadline was their “red line,” and a U.S. failure to comply with it would have “consequences.” Without delay, Biden announced that his regime would indeed stick with the deadline. Which meant U.S. allies in Afghanistan would follow suit.

America’s humiliation at the hands of an impoverished and backward Muslim militia sent shivers of rage through America. Congressman Michael McCaul called it an “unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.” His fellow Texas Republican, Senator John Cornyn, exploded: “Letting the Taliban dictate our military strategy is an absolute disgrace.” And so on.

I have been writing all along that the Pashtun tribes, represented by the Taliban, would one day stamp out the American tutelage and that Americans were wasting their time trying to restructure Afghan society and politics in their image. Last week I told friends, however, the Taliban leaders would heed the CIA director’s pleas. They didn’t, and Medea Benjamin, the founder-president of the radically progressive Code Pink organization, explained why.

Taliban leaders wanted to “show that they have conquered Afghanistan” from the Americans, who had occupied it for 20 years, she tweeted. Well, “reconquered” would probably have been a more appropriate word.

All this reminded me of my October 1989 foray into a small gathering of Afghan Mujahedeen, freedom fighters, in Quetta, Pakistan. They were returning home after the Pushtun-led Mujahedeen had defeated the Soviet military juggernaut, the world’s largest conventional military force, and sent the cowering Communists running home into their mothers’ and wives’ arms. The Taliban group of about 20 I came across in Quetta was from Malaysia, India and three or four Arab countries.

“The Palestinians may have to wait until the Americans retreat from our region,” said a man, apparently in his early 30s, standing with his back against the wall of the lounge of the hotel in which I was staying. “The Jews would have been nice and humble without the American Crusaders behind them.”

The man apparently was answering a question, which I had not heard as I had just lumbered into the meeting spot with my friend Jamil Ahmed, a Pakistani businessman.

“Do you mean the Americans will retreat on their own?” asked a younger man, sitting on his hunches on the carpeted floor. “Won’t they have to be thrown out like those [Soviet] Communists?” The questioner, Ehtesham Wakil from the Indian city of Surat, told me later that he believed that the Americans would be “easier to defeat [than the Soviets] because they can only throw bombs from the sky” and weren’t good at fighting guerrillas with guns. Tajik and Uzbek tribal fighters, the Pashtun’s traditional rivals, had done most of the fighting for the American invasion, he added. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post would write later that CIA operatives bribed Tajik and Uzbek warlords with briefcases stuffed with $100 bills.

I was on a visit to Pakistan and several Arab countries to research the political fallout of the rout of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. I had a fellowship from the University of Chicago Middle East Center. The Soviet debacle had left many Pakistanis and other Muslims talking about the longevity of U.S. domination of Muslim lands.

Asrar Ahmed, my old journalist friend in Islamabad, said the United States was “pushing us around because most Muslims lack pollical consciousness.” Khurshid Ahmad, the deputy leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami party in Pakistan, said European colonial rule over non-Western countries did not last because “liberalism is incompatible with colonialism,” and that Americans “can’t make good warriors” and won’t be able to sustain their hegemony over Muslim societies because of that. In Amman, Jordan, Nihad al-Amr, a writer, told me that the Palestinians would be freed from Israeli suppression “when the American power weakens.” And ultimately, the American domination of Muslim countries would be ended “by our children or maybe grandchildren.”

The Taliban belong to Amr’s children’s generation. And their breathtaking victory over America will, I believe, help stir up other Muslim struggles against Western hegemony in the region. The most conspicuous ones of those struggles are being waged by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah against the Israeli colonization of Palestine, facilitated by America and Europe. The systematic repression of Arab Muslims by their monarchies and dictatorships is also being abetted or condoned by the West. In many ways, the regimes are America’s underlings.

In 1992 Earnest Gellner, one of my favorite anthropologists, wrote about a “revolution in the Muslim world … [brewing] for a century and a half.” In 2011 when Arab youths from Tunisia to Syria rose up to throw out their repressive autocracies, I thought that was the finale of that revolution. I was deeply disappointed when Arab tyrants quashed that liberation struggle. Obviously, Gellner’s Muslim revolutionary journey has some ways to go. I hope the Taliban triumph over America marks the beginning of the last 385 yards of the marathon.

~ Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator, living in Sylhet, Bangladesh. He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.‘

Arab Spring 2 gearing up

Mustafa Malik July 20, 2021

I WAS BUSY for two days getting ready to celebrate Eid al-Adha at my ancestral home in the Bangladeshi village of Mujahid Khani. And look what I missed.

“President Bashar al-Assad took the oath of office for a fourth term in war-ravaged Syria on Saturday, after officially winning 95.1% of the vote in an election,” the AFP put out the blurb the day before yesterday.

Don’t laugh.

The news agency mentioned that the governments in the United States, Britain, France, Italy and other countries had dismissed the election as a “farce,” which was “neither free nor fair.” I agree.

But look what the dictator said and why he said it.

The elections “have proven the strength of popular legitimacy” of his regime, Assad proclaimed in his inaugural speech.

The Syrian dictator has mercilessly put down a popular uprising that began to rattle his regime 10 years ago. Why the heck does he now need to put on a fake election? Because he knows that he lives in a new world that is roiling from a tsunami of ideas of freedom and human rights in the midst of which governments that aren’t based on “the consent of the governed” look like ugly pariahs. All tyrannical monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East know this in their bones, and the Arab Spring of 2011-2013 was a thunderous reminder of it.

Well, that Arab revolutionary upheaval was – except in Tunisia – savagely crushed in Syria, Egypt and Bahrain. It unraveled some states such as Libya and Yemen. And the convulsion has spared – for now, it seems – the Arab Gulf, except Bahrain. But that was, I believe, the revolution’s dry run. No revolution worth its name has matured in one go. The Russian Revolution was brought off in October 1917 after the Duma put down its first outburst in February. The American Revolution began with slavery, raw racism and disenfranchisement of women, and it took two centuries of turmoil, including a civil war, to get near maturity.

The French Revolution of 1789 took a full decade of skirmishes, upheavals and the Reign of Terror to stabilize with the November 1799 Coup of 18 Brumaire, installing Napoleon Bonaparte in power. Abbe Sieyes, who was a principal protagonist of the healing process, was asked how he could help usher in an era of stability in France.

“I survived,” he replied.

Many survivors of the 2011-2013 Arab uprisings are spearheading a new wave of protests against Arab monarchies and dictatorships. And they are using their experience from the earlier, botched upheavals to guide them. Many of them have led new protests in the streets and squares of Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, demanding an end to corruption, repression and suppression of human rights. Against the more oppressive regimes such as in Egypt and Bahrain, they are using graffiti, anonymous flyers, social media and small protests to put the regimes on notice that the caldrons of their grievances have begun to simmer and could boil over one day.

In Algeria, in 2019, smoldering public outcry against the two-decades-old suffocating autocracy of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika toppled the autocrat. In Sudan protests against the repressive dictator Omar al-Bashir began in 2018 and got him bundled out in a military putsch a year later. The protesters would, of course, have liked it done in a better way. In Iraq public fury against Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi for widespread corruption, unemployment and Iran’s influence on Iraqi security and political matters began in October 2019 and ended with Mahdi’s resignation at the end of November. Other despotic Arab governments will require more sustained struggles to give in.

Steven Heydemann, an insightful researcher of Arab uprisings, warns that before the forces of tyranny in the Arab world tumble, they would become “darker, more repressive, more sectarian, and even more deeply resistant to democratization than in the past.”

Some of them indeed have. Egyptian tyrant Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has dumped tens of thousands of actual and suspected political dissidents into prisons to languish in horrendous conditions. Gruesome torture is routinely used against political activists, male and female. In Syria, apart from the bombing and indiscriminate shooting of protesters and innocent Sunni and other on-Alawite people, security agencies and the mukhabarat spy outfit arrested and tortured people with complete impunity. Many of those picked up by them have disappeared without a trace.

Today’s Arab revolutionaries are using tools they reshaped in light of the lessons from the botched Arab Spring. Their protests now are mostly peaceful. The activists are using social media more widely and effectively than street demonstrations. They are adapting their methods to the West’s renewed human rights consciousness of the post-Trump era. In March the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) joined Amnesty International and other international human rights groups to write an impassioned letter to U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, detailing the “violent suppression” and persecution of dissidents by their monarchy, one of the Arab world’s most remorseless. They reminded Blinken of “President Biden’s recent commitment to bring human rights to the heart of the new administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East” and urged the administration to intercede in the monarchy’s blatant suppression of dissent. Persecuted dissidents in other Arab countries, too, are using the same kind of appeals to Western democracies against abuses by their regimes.

Because of their new and more sophisticated strategies, the 2018-2021 Arab struggles, albeit still in a relatively low gear, have been called by scholars “Arab Spring 2.0.” I am hoping they will have a better outcome.

In the fall of 1991, on a research trip to several Arab countries, I had an illuminating interview with Rami Khuri, the former editor of the Jordan Times newspaper, in Beirut, Lebanon. I asked him why he thought “Arabs have such thick skin against tyranny.”

A Palestinian native, Khuri said patience had been regarded as a “virtue in our culture” for centuries, but that the newer generations were getting excited about Western values of “freedom and the rule of law” and other liberating ideas. “Give them some time,” he added. “The West took centuries to cultivate and absorb” democracy and its institutions.

Thirty years later the new Arab generations look gifted with a much thinner skin for the despotic rule. I expect Arab Spring 2.0 to mark the beginning of the end of authoritarian rule in Arab societies. I just hope that the process would be much shorter than it was for the Americans and more benign than what the French had to endure.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs analyst, living in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Ehtiopia’s nationalist journey

Mustafa Malik July 12, 2021

Ethiopia’s liberal Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been assured a second term in office as his ruling Prosperity Party has won the federal parliamentary election by a landslide, capturing 410 of 436 seats.

Elections to about a fifth of the seats have been delayed because of Covid-19, logistical problems and, in the case of Tigray province, a secessionist movement.

Ethiopia has become a political laboratory in which Abiy is testing a high-stakes hypothesis. It’s that several dozen ethnic communities – a half-dozen of whom deeply estranged from one another – can be molded into a unified democratic nation. The Tigrayans under the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) have posed the most potent of the challenges to his mission.

The TPLF had dominated the federal government for 27 years even though Tigrayans make up only 6 percent of the Ethiopian population. Traditionally militarist, they dominated the Ethiopian federal bureaucracy since an uprising overthrew the Communist Dreg regime in 1991. The TPLF then led the formation of a coalition of ethno-nationalist parties named Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Through the EPRDF, the Tigrayan party institutionalized its principle of ethnic communities’ rights to self-determination and even secession. The 1994 federal constitution underpinned that centrifugal framework.

But despite Ethiopia’s loosely federal constitutional structure, the TPLF maintained an iron grip on the federal government and unleashed a reign of terror, muzzling and persecuting critical voices. Human Rights Watch termed their wanton persecution as “crimes against humanity on unimaginable scale.” During 2016-2018 the long-festering protests against the TPLF repression under the cover of EPRDF, exacerbated. Led initially by the activists from Omoria, the largest enhno-nationalist region in the coalition, and Amhara, the second-largest, the protests overwhelmed the government. In February 2018 Hailemariam Desalegn, Ethiopia’s beleaguered prime minister, resigned hoping to facilitate an end to the “unrest and political crisis.”

Several parties in the EPRDF coalition – especially the Omoro Democratic Party and Amhara Democratic Party – succeeded in picking the young, visionary Abiy Ahmed from Omoria as Hailemariam’s successor. Once in prime minister’s office, the reformist Abiy released thousands of political prisoners; lifted restrictions on the independent media; scrapped the anti-terrorism law, which was being used as a tool of oppression; ended the state of emergency, under which the TPLF was carrying on the witch-hunt of opposition activists; and invited the country’s once-banned opposition groups back into the country from exile. Among the leading political activists against whom Abiy dropped charges of anti-state activities were Jawar Mohammed, who has since turned into his fierce political rival; and Andargachew Tsege, who had been on the death row 24 hours before the prime minister met him in his office. Abiy stunned his country and the world by ending the decades-long war with Eritrea, which earned him the 2019 Nobel Prize for Peace.

Ethiopia is made up of 10 semi-autonomous federal states, organized along ethnic lines, and ethnic violence has soared in recent years. To pursue his liberal, nationalist agenda, Abiy led the formation of a new party, the Prosperity Party. Four of the EPRDF’s five political parties joined the Prosperity Party. The fifth, the TPLF, grumbling over its loss of three decades of domination of the Ethiopian government and politics, refused to join and began to organize Tigrayan activists into violence and rebellion.

The TPLF insurgency came to a head in November 2020 when armed Tigrayans attacked a federal military base in Tigray. The Abiy government dispatched a federal military force to subdue the rebellion, which was defeated by TPLF rebels. Apart from the Tigrayans, other ethnic groups are also carrying on violence and repression against rival ethnic groups. Amhara authorities annexed a vast part of western Tigray, forcing hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to seek refuge elsewhere in the country and in nearly Sudan. Clashes between the Afar and Somali ethnic groups have cost many innocent lives. Benishagul-Gumuz is home to a host of ethnic groups including the Gumuz, Berta, Shinasha, Mao, Kimo, and Fadashi. Conflicts among them have caused continual blood-letting. And so on and on.

Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest nations, replete with a proud history and many cultures. In early youth I was fascinated by the legend of the Ethiopia’s Queen of Sheva. Narrated differently in the Quran and the Old and New Testaments, the saga of the queen is highlighted by her visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem and returning home after conceiving his son. The Ethiopian dynasty of Menilek I, who Ethiopian believe was Solomon’s son by Sheba, lasted until 1974 when the last monarch of the Solomonic dynasty, Emperor Haile Selassie, was overthrown in a pro-Communist military putsch.

Apart from my intellectual interest in Ethiopian affairs, I have been intensely curious about the Nobel-laureate Abiy’s mission to remold the interminably feuding Ethiopian ethnic groups into a unified, democratic nation “where every Ethiopian,” he said, “moves around relaxed, works and prospers.” Abiy’s vision of Ethiopia reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding fathers, respectably, of independent India and Pakistan. Oxford-educated barristers. They set up their multi-ethnic, multinational states as Westminster-style liberal democracies. Pakistan fell apart when Bengalee ethno-nationalists seceded from the old Pakistan, complaining of relentless political and economic repression by Punjabi ethnic elites. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism in India has eclipsed Gandhi’s secularist political model. Hindus, however, make up 82 percent of the Indian population, and Hinduization has overlapped ethnic fissiparousness in the Hindu heartland of the Indian plains. Secessionist movements fester in several outlying non-Hindu regions, especially in the Muslim-majority Kashmir.

My question about Ethiopia: Can Abiy really tame Ethnic fissures and recast the country into a nation whose “sovereignty is respected and feared, and whose territorial integrity is preserved,” as he has promised?

I see the idealist Ethiopian prime minister pursuing at best a long-term project. Today’s stable Western democracies such as Britain, the United States, France and Germany evolved through ethnic and religious conflicts and mayhem over centuries. Many post-colonial states were haphazardly created overnight as “nation-states” by cobbling together disparate ethnic and religious communities and are expected to function as unified nations. Examples include Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Democracy and elections often challenge their state structures, instead of integration them.

In 1970 Pakistan gave its feuding ethnic communities their first national elections, which allowed long-estranged ethnic Bengalees in the eastern province the opportunity to vote for secession and create independent Bangladesh. In multi-ethnic Iraq, America’s pie-in-the-sky neoconservatives prescribed elections, hoping to set up a Western-style secular democracy. The Iraqi Kurds used their votes to create all but independent Kurdistan. Shiite and Sunni Arab Iraqis are being governed, under the democratic system, by their religious (Shari’a) laws. In Lebanon, 78 years of democracy and elections have failed to integrate its half-dozen confessional communities into an integrated nation. Abiy thinks his electoral mandate would enable him to remake the multi-ethnic Ethiopian chimera into an integrated, liberal democratic nation.

Abiy’s mission is noble, but I think the best course for him to pursue it would be to open painstaking dialogue and negotiations among Ethiopia’s feuding ethnic groups for a unique brand of nationhood and type of national integration that would best fit the country’s unique communal history and behavior patterns. Today Ethiopia seems unprepared to achieve the national cohesion of contemporary America or Britain. The patriotic and visionary prime minister and Ethiopian political elites should, I think, settle for the level of national integration that is feasible today. And they may, if they want, to work toward ushering in the like of the British or American model in the future, if that is possible, hopefully without civil wars.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator, lives in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Liberal democracy derails

Mustafa Malik June 24, 2021

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ISN’T serving Americans very well, not, at any rate, in their well-being. Nicholas Kristoff is making the point poignantly. America’s “greatest threat,” writes the Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, isn’t Communist China or authoritarian Russia “but our underperformance at home.”

Kristoff cites data from several surveys to support his argument. Fifteen-year-old American kids can’t do as well in math as do their peers in many in less developed countries such as Latvia, Poland and Russia. One in five of these children can’t read as well as 10-year-olds do in many other countries. Even more depressing, America is “one of only three countries, out of 163, that went backward in well-being over the last decade.”

Many Americans would, of course, still argue that they are blessed with “the world’s greatest democracy,” which is “a beckon of freedom” for the rest of the world. I travel a lot and one of my favorite haunts is Kolkata (Calcutta), India, the hub of my native Bengali culture. Two years ago, my friend Susnata Sen, who teaches history at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, asked me, in jest, if Trump had “lost his way to a lunatic asylum” and ended up at the White House! In 2008, in Doha, Qatar, a stringer for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun inquired of me “how in the world did you succeed in getting W” as our president?

I told them both that democracy is “a gift of the Enlightenment,” which had derailed through the “corruption of another gift of the Enlightenment,” liberalism.

Liberalism was originally conceived as the ideology of freedom of the individual from the tyranny of monarchy and religious bigotry and prejudices. The idea was that the human mind, disabused of these strictures and prejudices, would be free to inquire rationally about the world around it, develop the sciences and technology and pursue pleasure and happiness. It sounded as a momentous idea – the greatest message to mankind since Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon (in which the Islamic prophet abolished blood revenge, forbade usury, reminded men of their rights and responsibilities toward women and women’s rights over them, warned men against evil conduct, and so forth).

The one thing that was missing in the Enlightenment missive was, however, moral duty. John Locke, Voltaire or John Stuart Mill didn’t talk about men’s and women’s responsibilities to their kin and community. And that is reflected in the ideology of capitalism and free enterprise, whose corruption has been all but completed by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, the latest twist to capitalism, calls for the elimination of price controls, deregulation of capital markets, lowering of trade barriers, etc., unleashing the forces of wanton plunder and pillage on society, regardless of the poverty, privation and hardships they visit upon the masses. It’s all about making money and pursuing individual pleasure, caring little about kin, community, humanity or its fulfillment.

In 1991 I was researching U.S. foreign policy options in Arab societies with a fellowship from the University of Chicago Middle East Center and hired a research assistant from Washington suburbs. Abdul Matin (not his real name) was a hardworking immigrant from my native India. He took a second job and got his wife to work for another family to make ends meet. They had three children, born in India and Kuwait. One of them was a toddler, and the two others helped their parents around the house besides toiling over their hard schoolwork.

At my Washington office, an American friend used to drop by for coffee and chitchat and sometimes complained about his son not doing well in school because of an under-funded school with inadequately qualified teachers in a rather depressed area in the nation’s capital.

One morning Matin showed up for work with a smile stretching from one ear to the other. He showed me his young son’s school grade released the previous day. The boy got all A’s and just one B.

I congratulated Matin. “You have a brilliant boy!” I said.

“Well,” he replied, “most of the credit goes to my daughter,” he said. Matin had told the children that education was “the most important thing” for them to do in life. Every day his daughter made sure her younger brother did his homework diligently and checked out each of his report cards. Matin’s wife wasn’t educated enough to check up on the boy’s progress in school. And the girl “reports any problem” the boy had to the parents, Natin said.

I saved a copy of the boy’s grade report and showed it to my American friend on his next visit. I told him how the family helped the Hindi-speaking boy do so well in an English-medium school.

“I just have to get serious about my kid’s school work,” he said, pensively. “He has to cut back on his Nintendo games.”

Mustafa Malik worked three decades as a journalist for American newspapers and researcher of U.S. think tanks. He now lives in Bangladesh.

Joe Biden’s valued ‘autocrat’

Mustafa Malik June 18, 2021

SEVERAL NEWS OUTLETS have lauded President Biden’s meeting on Monday with Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “upbeat.”

Have you been following Biden’s comments about Turkey and its president? In April he riled up the entire Turkish nation by labeling the 1915 Armenian tragedy Turkish “genocide.” Earlier he called the Turkish president an “autocrat,” proposed to support Erdogan’s opponents during the next elections, and so on.

Yet after he met Erdogan for barely an hour, Biden declared the meeting “very good” and “positive and productive.” His Turkish counterpart called it “fruitful, sincere.”

What prompted the two to kiss and make up?

It reminds me of Erdogan’s first visit to the White House on December 10, 2002. Weeks before, his Justice and Development Party (AKP), rooted in Islam, had won a thumping majority at the Turkish parliamentary elections, routing the long-established, staunchly secularist ruling party. But the head of the victorious party, Erdogan, was still barred from coming into office as prime minister because of his earlier conviction in an ultra-secularist court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting in 1997. (A piece of legislation would soon waive that prohibition.)

Erdogan needed to get Bush to push the European Union to advance Ankara’s membership issue at the bloc’s crucial summit at Copenhagen two days later. Before heading for the White House, the Turkish leader gave a previously scheduled talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, which I attended from the second row of the audience. As Erdogan was walking up to the podium to give his speech, the entire audience applauded him except three people on the front row. One was Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish neoconservative who was then deputy defense secretary masterminding the Iraq war, and two people who had accompanied him to the meeting.

The meeting over, I buttonholed Erdogan for about 10 minutes to ask him a couple of questions about his impending meeting with Bush. I had known him from several visits to Turkey. He said it was “important” that Bush put in a good word for Turkey to EU leaders before their Copenhagen meeting.

As Erdogan was getting up to leave me, I said, “Bush is a prisoner at the hands of Islam-bashing neocons who hate you. They call you an Islamist. Do you think you can get his support?”

“They need Turkey, not me,” Erdogan said, releasing my hand from his.

Now last Monday’s meeting. Erdogan was asked to explain what had made his meeting with Biden productive, the Turkish leader said, without elaborating, that he and the U.S. president had agreed on the need for “cooperation to promote regional security.” In other words, despite his tirade against Erdogan and the Turks, Biden realized that Turkey had a vital role to play for “regional security.” One such role had been announced just after the meeting. After American and allied troops would be pulling out of Afghanistan before September 11, Muslim Turks would be guarding and maintaining the Kabul airport, about the only venue through which America and the West would carry on their diplomatic, security and business affairs in Afghanistan. Troops from any Western countries would be easy targets from the Taliban and other Afghan forces, fuming over 20 years of American occupation of their country.

Secondly, Biden’s avowed mission on this trip was to recommit America to NATO and other alliances, which President Donald Trump had denigrated and alienated. To promote NATO, you need the alliance’s second-largest army, which is Turkey’s.

Thirdly, since the end of the Cold War America and NATO have continually been invading Muslim countries and otherwise attacking Muslim forces. Brown Muslim Turks are about NATO’s only shield, however tenuous, against Muslim accusations of it being a white Christian force refighting the Crusades.

Finally, spanning the Middle East and Europe, Turkey is the West’s only physical link to the Muslim world. The country is, as former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu once told me, “the bridge between Islam and the West.” Moreover, Gallup and other polls have found that Tayyip Erdogan is the most popular leader in the Muslim world. Biden can use him and his country productively to promote America’s much-needed outreach to Muslim societies.

Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator, now living in Bangladesh.

Can Palestinians bypass Biden’s blind spot?

Mustafa Malik May 18, 2021

PRESIDENT BIDEN’S UNSWERVING defense of Israel’s relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip reminds me of my last meeting with a friend and colleague at the Hartford Courant newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut.

On a spring day in 1985 my op-ed on the killing of several Palestinians by Israeli troops had appeared in our newspaper. Robin Frank pinched me on my left arm as I was editing a story.

“Dinner at Gianni?” she asked, as I turned around and looked at her.

“Sure,” I said.

“At 7.”

Frank was a leftist Jew and a staunch Zionist. At our meetings at the Courant café and other places, we used to trash then-President Ronald Reagan’s latest dig at welfare programs, extol socialist leader Michael Harrington’s portrayal of poverty in America, Karl Marx’s pitch for ultimate freedom in his German Ideology, and so forth.

That evening, as we sat across a table at the Gianni restaurant, I was taken aback.

Frank’s eyes were burning with rage.

“I didn’t know that you hate Jews,” she said.

In the article I had criticized Israel’s “colonial occupation” of Palestinian territories and “brutal” treatment of Palestinians, etc.

Did I know, my friend asked, that Palestine had been “the land of the Jews for ages” but had been occupied by “nomads and yahoos” before the establishment of Israel?

I realized that Frank’s knowledge of Jewish and Palestinian history was based more on Jewish propaganda than facts. I told her that both Jews and Palestinians inhabited the same land since ancient times and lived peaceably together in the hills around Jerusalem. “I don’t hate Jews, Robin,” I said. Both Jews and Palestinians, I continued, were nomads before they settled down as peasants and artisans. “But your calling Palestinians yahoos seems to me to reflect your racial bias toward them.”

Robin stood up. “You called me a racist!” She exploded. She picked up her purse and stamped away, paying the bill at the cashier’s counter.

I wondered if Frank had invited me to the meal for a dressing down and wanted it to be our parting dinner. Later, I tried twice to have a conversation with her, but she didn’t have the time.

In any case, I still think that staunchly progressive on many issues as she was, Frank’s attitude toward Palestinians was tinged with racial prejudice. I bet I have prejudices of my own, which I am not aware of.

Joe Biden, a centrist-turned-progressive Democrat, has been known for his blind support for Israel, which I have been following since the 1970s, when he was a senator from Delaware. During the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, he has been the only world leader to offer a blanket defense of Israel’s bloody and devastating bombing of Gaza. In the 15-member U.N. Security Council the United States, under his orders, was alone in blocking two attempts at issuing a statement calling for an immediate end to the Israeli-Hamas hostility. He obviously wanted Israel to continue its slaughter and destruction in Gaza. Biden’s first public comment on the Israeli bombing of civilian targets in Gaza was, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” He did not answer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) question if “the Palestinians have a right to survive.”

After the Netanyahu government had slaughtered more than a hundred Palestinians, including children and women, the American president proclaimed that Israel had not “significantly overreacted” to Hamas rockets, which had killed eight Israelis. In all this, Biden did not mention, even once, the Israeli raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque and its worshipers in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Neither did he comment on the Israeli initiative to expel Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make room for Jewish settlers. The two events had prompted Hamas to start firing rockets and missiles into Israel. When Biden was compelled by domestic and international pressure to try to stop the bloody Israeli aggression, he said he “support(ed) a ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas. He did not call for, let alone demand, a cessation of hostilities.

Biden’s utterly callous attitude toward the havoc Israel is wreaking in the abysmally impoverished enclave blockaded by Israel and Egypt flies in the face of his widely publicized human rights rhetoric and otherwise admirably progressive agenda. Biden plans to lower the eligibility age for Medicare; forgive federal loan debt for those making less than $125,000; raise $2 to $4 trillion in taxes to pay for progressive plans and programs; levy a 95 percent excise tax on pharmaceuticals if the industry doesn’t accept price controls, and so forth. His $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief law is probably the most progressive piece of legislation enacted by Congress since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In fact Bien’s strong support for black civil rights and other issues promoting black interests have made him quite popular in that community, which was pivotal to his winning the Democratic presidential primary against Bernie Sanders. But racial tolerance and empathy is selective in America. Many Americans, disabused of prejudice toward blacks, can be, and have been, hostile toward Arabs, Muslims and Asians. A brown-skinned Muslim, born in India, I have encountered racial gibes and taunts from progressive colleagues and acquaintances. (Where did I park my “camel”? Did I have a second wife tucked away in my “old country”? It was a reference to polygamy practiced by some Muslim men. How could I learn to write English so well? And so on.)

The Democratic Party, until the early 1970s, was honeycombed with anti-black racists. (Republicans by and large are racists.) The Democratic Party used to be the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, and segregationists. And many Democratic presidents, including the otherwise progressive ones, were diehard racists. Woodrow Wilson, who promoted freedom and the right of self-determination for peoples abroad, was an anti-black racist pig at home. He mandated racial segregation of the federal workforce, reversing the gains the blacks had made following Reconstruction. His segregation order hurt blacks most at the Post Office, in which 60 percent of workers were black; and the Treasury Department, which employed the second-largest number of blacks.

Monroe Trotter, the black editor and publisher of the Guardian newspaper, published from Boston, had campaigned for Wilson’s election. A brilliant Harvard scholar and civil rights leader, Trotter led a black delegation to the president to complain about his segregation order. Wilson argued that racial segregation would “prevent any kind of friction between the white employees and the Negro employees.” Trotter protested the president’s argument, citing “the established fact … that for 50 years white and colored clerks have been working together in peace and harmony and friendliness.” The 28th president replied that he had been “offended” by the civil rights leader’s insolence and ordered him out of the White House.

FDR is widely considered the most progressive among American presidents, and yet he was among the most racist of them. His internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II is widely known. Less known is his staunchly anti-Semitic attitude and policy. He persistently refused to allow Jews from Nazi Germany to immigrate to the United States. He suggested that they be resettled in Venezuela, Ethiopia or West Africa. He even opposed plans to resettle fleeing German Jews in the Dominican Republic or U.S. Virgin Islands because of those countries’ proximity to the United States, which, he feared, could enable them to infiltrate into America. When the passenger ship St. Louis with nearly 1,000 German Jews fleeing Hitler’s persecution headed toward the United States, Roosevelt did not respond to telegrams requesting that it be docked on the U.S. shore. The State Department forced it to return to Antwerp from where many of them were herded into concentration camps. In the end, wide circulation of the news of the Holocaust forced Roosevelt to admit some Jewish refugees. Historian Rafael Medoff wrote that Roosevelt’s anti-Semitism stemmed from his belief “that America was by nature, and should remain, an overwhelmingly white, Protestant country; and that Jews, on the whole, possessed certain innate and distasteful characteristics.”

Harry S. Truman was another innately racist Democratic president. He recognized Israel because Jews were among his ardent campaign activists. But he brushed aside reports of the harrowing ethnic cleansing of the new state of Israel of its Palestinian inhabitants. Jews, mostly from Europe, expelled 700,000 Palestinians (some of them were displaced by war) from their ancestral homes and lands. Truman also opposed interracial marriage. He often used racial slurs and told racist jokes. He accused civil rights activists of being masterminded Communists and called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a troublemaker.

The Democratic Party has shed much of its anti-black racism, thanks to the struggle and sacrifices of many blacks and whites in the Civil Rights Movement. Anti-black and anti-Semitic comments today are unacceptable in America. But anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Asian racism remains alive and well in American society. And in the halls of Congress, which strikes you when you listen to the comments of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), or Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) on the floors of the House and Senate.

But the tide is turning. Last week, for the first time in American history, the floor of the House of Representatives vibrated with biting criticism of an American president’s defense of Israeli aggression against Palestinians. Many critics of Biden’s and America’s callousness toward Palestinian dispossession, subjugation and persecution under Israeli occupation saw it as anti-Arab racism and likened it to racism against blacks.

“The Black and Palestinian struggles for liberation are interconnected,” tweeted Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), “and we will not let up until all of us are free.”

Mustafa Malik, editor and publisher of this blog, lives in Bangladesh.

Must skin tone replace values?

Mustafa Malik March 24, 2021

I AM AN Asian American and a life-long Democrat, who has been rudely hurt by the recent racist attacks on Americans of Asian descent. I am disappointed, however, by Asian American Senators Tammy Duckworth’s and Mazie Hirono’s cynical use of the tragic incidents to advance their own careers. They have announced that they would boycott the Senate confirmation of any White House nominee for Cabinet positions unless he or she is an Asian American! Mediocre lawmakers as they are, they obviously are playing their Asian American card to secure plum jobs in the administration.

I am already put off by President Biden’s overuse of the skin tone and gender criteria to fill positions in his administration. I had hoped that progressive credentials and vision would be his main hiring criteria, while not, of course, making his administration a white monochrome.

I credit the administration for its 1.9 trillion measure that would attend to the needs of folks in the middle and lower-middle classes. But I am disappointed to see the White House being honeycombed with run-of-the bureaucrats with status quo and Cold War mentality.

I remember that a reporter had asked retired Justice Thurgood Marshall what his advice would be to President George H.W. Bush in appointing his replacement on the Supreme Court bench.

“Don’t hire the wrong nigger!” the black jurist admonished Bush.

It looked like Papa Bush was thumping his nose at Marshall, a progressive icon, when he nominated the black Clarence Thomas, one of the court’s most right-wing member ever, to the gifted and visionary black jurist!

It’s strange that the United States is the only democracy that is still hung up on skin color, gender and sexual orientation in politics and government, discounting competence, ideas and insights.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, is the host of this blog.

Biden’s war on racism nets UK war hero

Mustafa Malik January 22, 2021

ONE OF THE TOP items on President Biden’s agenda is fighting racism. So upon entering the White House on Wednesday he removed – again – the bust of the racist British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. President Barack Obama had put away the bust from the room but Donald trump, his successor, brought it back.

Told about Biden’s action, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he had no quarrel with the new American president decorating his “private office … as he wishes.”

But when Obama had removed the bust from the Oval Office, Johnson, then mayor of London, was furious. He fumed that the black Obama’s action had shown “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire.”

Johnson’s conciliatory gesture toward the 46th American president may reflect, in part, the Britts’ desperate need for good trade relations with the United States after their foolish breakup with the European Union. The Conservative British prime minister was wrong, however, to assume that Obama disliked Churchill because of Churchill’s or Britain’s legacy of imperialism, which doubtless was brutal and dehumanizing. Many people in the East – and now in the West – despise Churchill mainly for his rabidly racist views of non-white people and societies. He called them “barbaric nations” and “savages” whom he considered “a menace to civilized nations” in the West.

Churchill ardently believed in Social Darwinism, superiority of white races, and argued over and over that they have the inherent right to subjugate, dispossess and persecute non-whites. Intriguingly, Churchill considered Jews a white people and as British colonial secretary in the 1920s, he defended, strongly, the expulsion of Palestinians from the lands belonging to them for centuries by Jewish refugees from Europe. Churchill thought of brown-skinned Palestinians as some kind of beasts who had no right to challenge their dispossession by fairer-skinned European Jews.

“I do not admit,” he explained, “that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time.”

The British leader who led his nation to victory in World War II held the same view about Anglo-Saxons uprooting dark-skinned people from the United States and Australia and occupying their land. “I do not admit,” he said. “that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

Churchill’s view of non-whites being subhuman made him disregard the usefulness of their lives. A glaring example it was his role during the 1943 famine in the Indian region of Bengal, where I grew up and made my debut as a journalist. In other times when a food shortage had occurred in Bengal or any other part of British India, rice, and sometimes wheat, was rushed in from elsewhere to feed people. But in 1943 Britain was fighting a bitter war with Germany and, ignoring the Indian administration’s warnings about the approaching famine in Bengal, Prime Minister Churchill decided to divert food supplies for Bengal to British and other troops in Europe. The result was mass starvation of Bengalees, millions of whom perished from it. William F. Buckley Jr. called it a slaughter of “genocidal proportions.”

Finest Hour is a quarterly publication put out by the International Churchill Society. In an editorial (Nov. 18, 2008) entitled “Media lying over Churchill’s crimes,” an editor of the journal, Gideon Poyla, wrote: “Churchill is our hero because of his leadership in World War 2, but his immense crimes, notably the WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the 1943-45 Bengal Famine in which Churchill murdered 6-7 million Indians, have been deleted from history by an extraordinary Anglo-American denial.”

Reliable estimates have put the death toll from the famine at about 3 million.

In India, Churchill was the most hated British prime minister in history. He earned that infamy with his racist contempt for Indians (He called Mahatma Gandhi “a half-naked fekir,” or beggar), which he gushed out off and on and which was reflected in his disdainful rejection of Indians’ repeated pleadings and demands for autonomy or independence. As World War II began, many Indian, realizing that they won’t get their independence from the Churchill government, prayed for Hitler’s victory, which they hoped would dissolve the British empire and liberate them from British colonial rule and racist domination.

The Allied victory over Nazi Germany was a pyrrhic one for Britain. The war wrecked the British economy and military power so much so that within two years the Britts – who were never impressed by Gandhi’s non-violent mantra or tactic – were forced to concede the independence of India and Pakistan, which was followed in quick succession by the independence of other British colonies around the world.

Today even many Britts see Churchill as among the most notoriously racist leaders in their history. Last June protests over the killing of African-American George Floyd by a white American police officer spread to Britain. Soon the Churchill statue at London’s Parliament Square was found spray-painted with the words: “Was a Racist.” Sadiq Khan, then London mayor, got the statue boarded up to protect it from protesters’ rage. Undaunted, some of them wrote in big black letters on one of the walls around it: “Watch out! Racist Inside!”

America is going through a revolution to stamp out racism from its social fabric and has done away with statues, busts and pictures of most of its confederate heroes who used to defend racism. It’s crazy to try to have an arch-racist from abroad enshrined in the American political pantheon. Well, Trump was craziest of American presidents.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of this blog, is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

A crusader for the oppressed

Mustafa Malik December 4, 2020

By Mustafa Malik

THE 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF Mahmud Ali’s passing fills my mind with memories of the man I had come to know as a human incarnation of Pakistan. Among those memories was his forecast that Bangladesh would establish good relations with Pakistan “sooner than you think.” The last time he repeated this prognosis to me was in June 2000, when he was visiting with me and my family in Washington. I remembered his prediction just yesterday as I ran into the headline “Hasina calls for strengthening ties with Pakistan” in the online edition of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. Sheikh Hasina Wajed is the prime minister of Bangladesh.

Mr. Ali was the first of my two political mentors, the other being Nurul Amin, once chief minister of East Pakistan who became Pakistan’s last Bengalee prime minister. In 1970-71 both statesmen opposed the breakup of old Pakistan, which they had struggled onerously to help create, and they lived the rest of their lives in self-imposed exile in what was left of Pakistan after Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, had become independent. Years of repression and economic discrimination by West Pakistan-based military and political elites, culminating in a brutal military crackdown, led to Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan. The two countries have since been estranged politically, diplomatically and economically.

Mr. Ali (like me) was born in the British Indian province of Assam. In 1946, as the general secretary of the All-India Muslim League in Assam, the young leader helped split the old Hindu-majority Assam province through a referendum so our native Muslim-majority part of it could join the Muslim homeland of Pakistan.

Born into an aristocratic family, he cut his political teeth in the Pakistan movement and breathed his last during a speech in Lahore, having barely finished a sentence calling for the realization of one of Pakistan’s unfulfilled causes: the liberation of Indian-occupied part of the Jammu and Kashmir state.

Besides being one of Pakistan’s architects, Mr. Ali will be remembered as a top leader in its struggle to wrest democracy back from the clutches of military dictatorships. He was one of nine leading Pakistani statesmen who in 1962 issued the first clarion call to then military dictator General Mohammad Ayub Khan to restore democracy, which Ayub and a group of other army generals had usurped through a coup d’état.

It was Mr. Ali’s battle for “the emancipation of the peasants and workers,” as he termed it, which lured me to him at age 17. The 38-year-old revenue minister of East Pakistan was presiding over a public meeting in his native Sunamganj district, in a field covered with the stubble of a newly harvested rice crop. The crowd of peasants, fishermen and a smattering of students greeted other speeches with mild applause. But when Mr. Ali began denouncing, passionately, the “exploitation” of impoverished people by zeminders (owners of large landed estates), money lenders and industrialists, they went wild with the slogans: “Mahmud Ali Zindabad” (long live Mahmud Ali), “Pakistan Zindabad,” and “Krishok-Mazdur ek ho” (Peasants and workers, unite).

I had just finished my matriculation (high school graduation) exam and was attending the meeting as a campaign activist for a progressive candidate for election to the East Pakistan legislature, supported by Mr. Ali, and was deeply impressed by his speech. The meeting over, I met him at a nearby dak bungalow and embarked on my lifelong association with him.

I had opportunities to come in contact with most of Pakistan’s major politicians and interview many of them for my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital. Except for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, Mahmud Ali was the most politically courageous and ideologically committed statesman I have known in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Mr. Ali’s relationship with Sheikh Mujib alternated between close friendship and bitter ideological and political rivalry.

Bangladesh-Pakistan ties

Among the last of Mr. Ali’s political projects was the one to promote solidarity among Muslim communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir and other parts of the Indian subcontinent through his movement Tehreek-i-Takmil-i-Pakistan. He remained optimistic about this goal to the last days of his life.

During our discursive discussions, he recalled that “the enthusiasm that Muslims in Bengal and Assam” had demonstrated for the creation of Pakistan, they had never before shown for “any other movement of causes.” That was mostly because, he said, they saw Pakistan as a “promise of liberation from Hindu zeminders and money lenders. And from caste-Hindu oppression.” Lower-caste Hindus, he went on, also shared with Muslims that aspirations for “freedom from the oppression and suppression” and in the 1937 and 1946 elections in Bengal, many of them voted for Muslim candidates. Eventually, he predicted, Muslim communities in the subcontinent would revive some kind of “solidarity as they showed during the Pakistan movement.” Bangladesh and Pakistan would, he added, establish “good relations sooner than you think.”

The last time he shared this optimism with me was, as I mentioned, in our very last meetings during June 22-24, 2000. A federal minister in the Pakistan government, Mr. Ali was on an official visit to Washington. He was staying in Omni Sheraton Hotel in Washington but was kind enough to visit with me and my family for dinner on two of those evenings.

All his life, my mentor was a staunchly secular, progressive man, whose struggle for workers and peasants earned him the “Communist” label from his conservative political opponents. Among them was one of my uncles who warned me against associating with him because “Communists don’t believe in Allah or Islam.” In reality, Mr. Ali had plunged into the Pakistan movement because he saw it as a struggle to alleviate the suffering of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, who happened to be mostly repressed and impoverished, from exploitation of the landed and moneyed class, which happened to be mostly upper-caste Hindus.

In the course of his long political career Mr. Ali changed political parties and some of his political views. But he stuck with his two things that defined him. One was his trademark costume in social and political life, a sherwani and tight pajamas. The other was his advocacy of and deep empathy for the poor and oppressed.

Mustafa Malik is a writer in Washington. He hosts the blog Community.

Biden’s pursuit of LBJ legacy

Mustafa Malik November 8, 2020

“Our long national nightmare is over!”

So declared Gerald R. Ford on August 9, 1974, from the East Room of the White House. He was making his maiden speech to the nation as the 38th president of the United States. By ending the “national nightmare” the new president meant that his pardoning of his predecessor, the disgraced President Richard M. Nixon, was going to help heal the deep wounds that Nixon’s Watergate scandal had inflicted on America.

Two days ago I remembered watching Ford’s comment live from Frederick, Maryland, as I was reading Joe Biden’s victory speech on the Internet. A bit more modestly than had Ford, the president-elect said his victory over President Trump had ushered in a “time to heal” America’s wounds, caused by Trump’s disastrous presidency.

A mediocre politician without ingenuity or a vision, Ford did not accomplish much as president before he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 elections. Biden, too, is not known for political insights or vision, and his long career as a lawmaker and vice president has not left much of a footprint on America’s political landscape.

Can he do better as president?

He can and I am hopeful that he will, mainly because of the need of the hour and the progressive political and social climate he has inherited. Trump has vandalized America’s economy, fractured its race relations and brutalized its relations with most of America’s allies, except the murderous crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman; and the colonialist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has turned the Palestinian territory into an open-air prison and Israel into an apartheid state. America will be grateful to its 46th president if he can just start mending the economic and racial injustices at home and the alarming fissures in foreign relations that Trump has brought about.

I am a card-carrying “Berniecrat” who worked his tails off campaigning for Bernie Sanders’ unsuccessful presidential candidacy in 2016 and this year. (I still flaunt two “Bernie for President” stickers from 2016 on my car bumper.) I am still not a fan of Biden’s. I used to call him a standard-bearer of “the Republican wing of the Democratic Party” and a flunky of Wall Street, which has contributed lavishly to his presidential campaign.

Biden opposed school desegregation in the 1970s; befriended Strom Thurmond and other arch-racists; voted to trim welfare programs; overturn the Glass-Steagall law, deregulating banking and making many Wall Street banks too big to fail; pass the 1994 “tough on crime” bill, dumping many, mostly black, innocent and small-time offenders into prisons; launch the catastrophic Iraq war; and so on. In fact Biden did not face a war he did not support.

Yet I voted gladly for Biden on Tuesday, hoping that he would be able to do much of the mending I have just mentioned. Besides, Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s ultra-progressive presidential campaigns and a progressive surge in the Democratic Party and the country have moved much of America to the left, which was reflected in the platform on which the former vice president has been elected president. The platform’s embrace of Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal, police reforms, and high tax on wealth accumulation, etc., prompted Trump to call Biden a “socialist.” Waheed Shahid of Justice Democrats has called the Democratic platform “the most progressive any Democratic nominee in the modern history” had campaigned on. On the stump Biden has also promised to quadruple federal spending on low-income housing subsidies; triple K-12 school aid in poorer areas; double Pell Grants for students and make community colleges free. Additionally, he has proposed to invest $100 billion in an affordable housing trust fund, $10 billion of which would be reserved for transit projects in high-poverty areas. It all is breathtaking, echoing, to some extent, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. It remains to be seen how much of this highly ambitious progressive agenda Biden can translate into reality.

In 1970 I was covering a public meeting of the would-be Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for the Pakistan Observer newspaper at Liaqat Bagh park in Rawalpindi. The populist, theatrical politician promised to make pullers of rickshaws – tricycles carrying passengers – owners of their vehicles. Most rickshaw pullers rented their rickshaws. Bhutto also promised to impose heavy taxes on corporations piling up “unconscionable” wealth; have a law passed increasing the minimum wage for factory workers; “try my utmost” to see that “no Pakistanis go to bed hungry”; and so forth. In a fit of excitement, he threw away his jacket, which landed on a child’s head, making him cry. The crowd was ecstatic and chanted deliriously: “Bhutto Zindabad!” Long live Bhutto.

The meeting over, I hired a rickshaw to return to my nearby hotel. “Bhutto Zindabad,” the man pedaling the rickshaw yelled, punching the air with his fist. I asked the shabbily dressed middle-aged man if he owned his rickshaw, and he replied that he had rented it.

“Do you think Bhutto will make you owner this rickshaw?’’ I asked.

He replied in Urdu, “Nahin, sahib, yeh kabhi nahin ho ga,” no, sir, that will never happen.

“Why are you then so excited by his speech?”

“Sahib,” he said, “woh to mera dil khush kar dia,” sir, he has made my heart happy.

The lanky, middle-aged man added that most other politicians did not talk about bread-and-butter issues with the passion that Bhutto exuded.

I have to see how many of his campaign promises Biden will be able to fulfill. For now, though, his progressive agenda has “made my heart happy.”

Prime Minister Bhutto turned out to be the most progressive statesman in Pakistan’s history who adopted a plethora of anti-poverty, pro-worker and other progressive programs that no other Pakistani prime minister, let alone military dictator, has dared to attempt to this day.

If Biden can deliver on half the promises he has made to America, he will turn out to the most progressive American president since Lyndon B. Johnson, also known as LBJ.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog Community, is a political commentator in Washington.

Mustafa Malik

Stop, and look around you.

— Tolstoy

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