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afghanistan
Trump Picks 'Lobbyist for War Criminals' to Lead Pentagon
Pete Hegseth helped secure pardons for three former U.S. soldiers accused or convicted of horrific war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nov 13, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump's choice to head the Pentagon privately lobbied Trump during his first White House term to pardon former members of the U.S. armed forces accused or convicted of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL chief who allegedly gunned down a young girl and elderly man in Iraq.
Pete Hegseth is an Army veteran who has used his role as a "Fox & Friends" co-host to praise Trump, make the case for a preemptive strike against North Korea, peddle anti-Muslim bigotry, express support for Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza, and divulge bizarre details about his lack of personal hygiene.
Hegseth also had the ear of the former president during his first four years in the White House, acting as an informal adviser. In that capacity, Hegseth reportedly played a key role in securing pardons for three court-martialed U.S. military officers who were accused or convicted of horrific crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As Politiconoted Tuesday, "Hegseth helped capture Trump's attention on a military case that led, in 2019, to full pardons for former Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, both convicted of war crimes."
Lorance was serving a 19-year prison sentence for second-degree murder when Trump pardoned him. Golsteyn was charged with murder in 2018 for killing an Afghan man.
Trump also pardoned Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, "who had been stripped of military honors during his prosecution for murder charges," Politico added.
The New York Timesreported in 2019 that a member of Gallagher's platoon called him "freaking evil" and said that "you could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving." According to the Times, Gallagher was accused by fellow soldiers of "stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death," "picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper's roost," and "indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine-gun fire."
Media Matters for America has documented some of what it described as Hegseth's "eyebrow-raising comments about war crimes."
"In August [2019], he referred to the 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square by private security contractors working for Blackwater (now rebranded as Academi) as 'another day on the job in Iraq,' later hosting Blackwater founder Erik Prince to complain about the unfair prosecutions of his former employees who murdered 17 people," the watchdog organization noted. "Hegseth has also said the possibility of pardons is 'very heartening for guys like me,' that it 'could've been me' on trial for war crimes, and that if Golsteyn's actions counted as a war crime, then 'put us all in jail.'"
The incoming Defense Secretary is literally a lobbyist for war criminals https://t.co/S27FoJOkV7 pic.twitter.com/jLe9wAJa9J
— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) November 13, 2024
If confirmed by the Senate or rammed through in a recess appointment, Hegseth—who served in served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantánamo Bay prison—will be tasked with leading a waste-and-fraud-ridden department whose budget accounts for roughly half of all federal discretionary spending.
Paul Eaton, a retired U.S. Army officer who chairs the advocacy group VoteVets, said in a statement Tuesday that Hegseth is "wholly unqualified to head the Department of Defense and hold the lives of our troops in his hands."
"Nothing more need be said," Eaton added.
As likely chief of the Pentagon, Hegseth will also have to contend with a reported Trump plan to purge the military's top ranks of insufficiently loyal generals.
The Wall Street Journalreported Tuesday that Trump—who threatened on the campaign trail to deploy the U.S. military against his political opponents—is "considering a draft executive order that establishes a 'warrior board' of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership."
"If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be 'lacking in requisite leadership qualities,'" the Journal reported, citing a draft of the order. "But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect's past vow to fire 'woke generals,' referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness."
Hegseth, who has said that "we should not have women in combat roles," has signaled support for such a purge, telling an interviewer last week that any general involved in "woke shit" should be fired.
Eaton of VoteVets said Tuesday that the removal of generals seen as disloyal to Trump would "give him what he said he wanted—generals like Hitler had, who do not challenge him, do not tell him what he doesn't want to hear, and do not stand in the way of using the military to crush his political opposition."
If not stopped, Eaton warned, the president-elect's plan would spawn "a MAGA military, pledging fealty to Donald Trump."
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Extreme Flooding Kills Hundreds in Climate-Vulnerable Afghanistan
"This is a subsistence agriculture community and society. So, they're bearing the brunt of it, without having necessarily contributed to the issue very much," one aid worker said.
May 14, 2024
Severe flooding in Afghanistan over the weekend has killed more than 300 people and destroyed thousands of homes in rural villages.
The flash floods—prompted by heavy rainfall—came on the heels of an extreme drought in one of the nations that is most vulnerable to the climate emergency, yet has done little to contribute to it.
"They're not net emitters of carbon," Timothy Anderson, head of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in Afghanistan, toldCNN. "This is a subsistence agriculture community and society. So, they're bearing the brunt of it, without having necessarily contributed to the issue very much."
"How many more tragedies must happen for the world to prioritize climate action?"
The rain and flooding inundated 21 districts in the northeastern provinces of Badakhshan, Baghlan, Takhar on Friday and Saturday, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The extent of the flooding caught many villagers by surprise.
In Folo in Bulka district of Baghlan province, the rain began during Friday prayers, softly at first, and then quickly building in intensity.
Resident Barakatullah told CNN that it does not often rain so high up in the mountains and that villagers had to scramble as the situation "turned dire."
"People fled to higher ground, seeking refuge in mountains and hills," he said. "Unfortunately, some individuals who were unable to leave their homes fell victim to the floodwaters."
The WFP toldThe Associated Press that more than 300 were killed, and the U.N. Children's Fund reported that at least 51 of them were children. The government said Sunday that the storms killed 315 and injured more than 1,600.
The survivors were left to bury the dead and tally their losses. All told, the disaster destroyed or damaged 8,975 homes, according to OCHA. In Baghlan province alone, the floods washed away at least six public schools, 10,200 acres of orchards, and 2,260 livestock and damaged 50 bridges and 30 hydroelectric dams.
"Lives and livelihoods have been washed away," Arshad Malik, the Afghanistan director for Save the Children, told Reuters. "The flash floods tore through villages, sweeping away homes, and killing livestock."
Farmer Abdul Ghani told the AP that he was visiting family in another province when he learned of the floods. Rushing home to the Nahrin district in Baghlan province, he found the road he usually took to his village erased, his wife and three of his children dead, and another child missing.
"My life has turned into a disaster," he said.
Muhammad Yahqoob, who lives in the same district and lost 13 family members, told Reuters, "We have no food, no drinking water, no shelter, no blankets, nothing at all, floods have destroyed everything."
He added that out of 42 houses that used to stand in his village, only two or three were left.
"It has destroyed the entire valley," Yahqoob said.
Anderson of the WFP told CNN that losing livestock for many villagers meant losing all or part of their livelihoods. Further, the flooding disrupted the lives of people who were already struggling due to drought and destroyed measures they had taken to adapt, such as dams for rainwater and irrigation canals.
"It was already pretty grim. And now it's catastrophic," he told CNN.
The current disaster also follows rains and flooding in April that killed 70 and destroyed around 2,000 homes in southern and western provinces, according to AP.
The U.N. lists Afghanistan as one of the countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis, and it also lost a signficant amount of foreign aid when the Taliban took control in 2021. The aid has only decreased in the years since.
While decades of war means that Afghanistan faces unique challenges, it's not the only country that has been inundated with severe rain since the start of 2024. Extreme flooding this spring has displaced nearly a quarter million people in East Africa and half a million in southern Brazil.
"The climate crisis continues to rear its ugly head," Teresa Anderson, the global climate justice lead at ActionAid International, said in a statement. "With the latest incident, Afghanistan joins a long list of Global South countries grappling with floods this year. And this is as the world continues funding the climate crisis by expanding fossil fuels and industrial agriculture."
"How many more tragedies must happen for the world to prioritize climate action?" Anderson asked. "It's time to back climate action with the necessary climate funding. Communities, like those in Afghanistan, need this money to build resilience to climate impacts and pay for the losses and damages already caused by the climate crisis."
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Beyond Bullets: Bringing Climate Justice to the Asylum Process
There is a growing movement of displaced people who are sharing our stories of climate and displacement and calling for recognition of climate change in asylum and refugee policies.
Apr 22, 2024
I was born in a small village in the heart of Afghanistan, but most of my childhood was spent as a refugee in Quetta, Pakistan. My family returned to Afghanistan in the early 2000s after the American invasion. Both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I grew up amid the chaos of conflict, and the sounds of bullets and bomb blasts were a part of my daily life.
However, the conflict that loomed the largest for my family was between people and nature. Like many from our village, leaving became inevitable for my family as our homeland was transformed by drought into a barren wasteland again and again. As resources dwindled, we were forced to chase water, which became increasingly scarce and expensive. Like so many others, my family became nomadic, changing homes, cities, provinces, and countries in search of water to survive. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable places to climate change, and as I write this, the country is undergoing the worst drought in decades.
A decade later, in 2017, I applied for asylum in the United States. When I attempted to include this narrative of my community’s plight from drought and natural disasters in my application, my lawyer strongly advised against it. Instead, I was encouraged to focus solely on the impacts of war and my triple minority identity as a Hazara-Shia-Afghan woman. It didn’t make sense to try to separate the religious and political persecution I faced from the reality that my ancestral village, once verdant and flourishing, had been reduced to dust by decades of unyielding drought. My attorney seemed fixated on presenting me as a “Western-educated Hazara-Shia-Afghan woman” fleeing persecution and ignoring any mention of the environmental devastation that compelled my family to flee our homeland numerous times.
Amid these struggles with armed conflict, corruption, and dictatorship, there lurks another adversary: global warming, the silent killer.
Unfortunately, my attorney’s stance proved valid. There are currently no systems or protections in place for individuals displaced by climate impacts under U.S. or international law. My asylum application was approved with a selective narrative devoid of the true underlying causes of my displacement.
As I became an immigrant rights advocate, first at the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition and now as the director of We Are All America, I connected with fellow asylum seekers with the same thread of environmental injustice woven throughout their stories. I met people who, like me, saw their vulnerabilities multiplied by the climate crisis and faced much more intricate, intersectional challenges than our current asylum pathways recognize.
Paul, an asylum seeker from Congo, is one such example. He and his family of farmers initially fled due to war, but when floods and heavy rain destroyed their new home in Kenya, they were forced to seek refuge elsewhere. After experiencing this double displacement, Paul sought resettlement in Canada because he knew the U.S. didn’t have a protected asylum pathway that aligned with his experience.
Amid these struggles with armed conflict, corruption, and dictatorship, there lurks another adversary: global warming, the silent killer. Despite its profound impact, our stories about it are often left untold, overshadowed by tales of violence and persecution. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, climate is now the leading cause of global displacement, surpassing conflict. Our limited asylum policies shape the very stories of our displacement, masking the extent to which climate change is interwoven with other root causes and warping climate-displaced people’s perceptions of what makes a valid reason to move to safety
However, there is a growing movement of displaced people, like Paul and myself, who are sharing our stories of climate and displacement and calling for recognition of climate change in asylum and refugee policies. Some asylum seekers and their lawyers are beginning to include climate impacts as a central part of their cases, and attempting to set precedents that would require immigration judges to consider them. In the past few years, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies started tracking asylum cases with prominent climate impacts and already has an extensive number in their database, including some promising successes.
There’s a lot the Biden administration could do to support these efforts. In one of his first executive orders, President Joe Biden created an inter-agency task force on climate and migration. However, three years on, the task force has produced little tangible action. Meanwhile, advocates have offered a number of immediate actions for the administration to take, from prioritizing the resettlement of climate-impacted refugees to training USCIS officials to consider climate impacts as a supporting factor in asylum claims.
Of course, the need to update the United States’ outdated refugee and asylum policies is at the heart of this issue. Last year We Are All America’s sister project, the Climate Justice Collaborative, led a broad coalition of immigrant, refugee, and climate justice organizations that supported the reintroduction of Sen. Edward Markey’s (D-Mass.) Climate Displaced Persons Act (CDPA). The CDPA would create a new visa program parallel to refugee resettlement, specifically for people facing forced displacement due to climate impacts. It would also create a global climate resilience strategy to help vulnerable countries, like mine, adapt to climate change. This is the kind of bold policy change we need to bring our country into the modern age and build a life-sustaining future in the face of the climate crisis and its intersectional impacts on our society.
Climate displacement is not a far-off problem for future generations. It is happening now and has been happening for decades. Our voices have just been silenced, and our experiences have been buried by those deemed valid by our antiquated asylum policies. We deserve the same empathy and support as those fleeing bullets. It’s time for policy to reflect that.
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