The Shia Revolt Shakes Iran to its Core by المجلة

How US Withdrawal from the Middle East Accidentally Helps Advance Iranâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Regional Playbook

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The Shia Revolt Shakes Iran to Its Core www.majalla.com

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The past few weeks have been rough for the Iranian regime. Not only have mass protests broken out in two of its regional proxy states, Iraq and Lebanon the people’s revolt has recently spilled over to Tehran itself. In a significant turn of events, the people of Iraq have been protesting against the Iran-aligned Abdul-Mahdi government and protestors have gone as far as to burn Iranian flags and deface portraits of Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile, the Lebanese have sought to topple the entire government, including Hezbollah and its allies, one of the chants heard in the streets is “All of them (government officials) means all of them, and Nasrallah is one of them.” Now that Tehran is facing a rebellion from within, it finds itself between a rock and a hard place. This week’s cover story by Hanin Ghaddar covers the protests in three states and how Tehran cannot resort to violence as it did so in the past. A recent article published in The Intercept has centered on intelligence cables from Iran, (sent from an anonymous source), that reveals the extent to which Tehran controls the affairs of Iraq. For instance, the cables showed that any prospective Prime Minister for Baghdad needs approval from the Iranian state. Furthermore, it revealed just how much the 2003 Iraq war was a blunder that led to greater Iranian influence in the region. Yasmine El Geressi writes on these revelations and reflects on whether or not the US’s hasty retreat from Northern Syria will yield similar results since the previously US-aligned Kurdish forces have now pledged allegiance to the Iran-allied Assad regime. During the 1980s, the Khalistani movement in Punjab was a force to be reckoned with. Radical Sikhs at the time conducted various terror attacks in India and abroad in order to forcefully create an independent Sikh state in Punjab. While the movement has died down in the 1990s, it has recently resurged and a myriad of terror attacks have been done in the name of the movement. Indian intelligence has reason to believe that Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus is supporting these radical groups as well as calls for an independence referendum. Ali El Shamy writes on this subject matter, as he analyzes ways in which Pakistan’s ISI has been infiltrating the Indian state and its goal of destabilizing India through these groups, be they radical Islamists in Kashmir or zealot Sikhs in Punjab. Since the age of Egyptomania, King Tut’s story has captured the imaginations of people around the world. Bryn Haworth writes on the current King Tut Treasures Gallery in Saatchi, London as he recounts the most popular stories and historical accounts surrounding King Tut and his direct family. We invite you to read these articles and more on our website eng.majalla.com. As always, we welcome and value our reader’s feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments on our website.

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The Shia Revolt Shakes Iran to Its Core The Popular Protests in Lebanon and Iraq Spillover to Iran by Hanin Ghaddar It is no coincidence that the people of the three countries controlled by the Iranian regime have taken to the streets together. Iran has been working for years to infiltrate both Lebanon and Iraq, and after years of strategizing and allocating major resources, they have declared victory and control of these two countries. However, soon afterwards, the economies of Lebanon and Iraq started to stagger, and Iranâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rhetoric of resistance failed to put food on the table. Iran failed

to rule and the Iranians, the Lebanese, and the Iraqi people now know it. Iran and its proxies are facing their most difficult domestic and regional challenge. They cannot blame these protests on the West, such as the US and Israel. But they also cannot portray them as ISIS or Al-Qaeda. The beauty about these protests is that they are genuine and real. They are leaderless and nobody was able to infiltrate them with a political or ideological agenda. That is exactly why the Iranian regime is sacred.

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It is no coincidence that the people of the three countries controlled by the Iranian regime have taken to the streets together. only they are losing their support base; Hezbollah sees the protests as a whole as a first stop of losing its first official state in Lebanon. In 2018, Hezbollah and its allies won the parliamentary elections and managed to form a majority parliament and government, in addition to their allied president. Through that influence within state institutions, Hezbollah crept into the state and had been able to control all of its key decisions. The party will not let go of al this without a fight. That’s why Hezbollah had to side with the authorities and the corrupt political class, against the Lebanese people. By doing so, Hezbollah declared itself the enemy of the people. Long gone their heroic rhetoric about resistance and fighting injustice. Today, Hezbollah is the injustice incarnate. Their main reaction is to use their thugs and influence within security institutions to suppress the protests. No a day passes in Lebanon without someone arrested or violated, mostly in Hezbollah’s core areas in the South and the Bekaa regions. This has worked in 2008 during the May 7 events, where use of force stopped the undesired change. However, this time is different. They are not fighting their political opponents. They are fighting the Lebanese people, who have nothing left to lose. After each use of force, beating or threat, people go back to the streets in bigger numbers. Iranian protesters gather around a fire during a demonstration against an increase in gasoline prices in the capital Tehran, on November 2019 ,16. (Getty)

Iran has been doing what it does best; that is using extreme force against protestors. Their violent methods have worked in the past. For example they have managed to quell the 2009 Green Revolution in Tehran. However; the regime hasn’t realized that this time around, these tools are no longer successful, because simply, the people have nothing left to lose.

SAME STORY IN IRAQ

HEZBOLLAH IN LEBANON

The Iraqi people – although they are fed up with the same economic grievances – have redirected their rhetoric against Iran. It has become obvious that Iran is the sole faction responsible for the Iraqi people’s ailments and pains. The corrupt political system put in place is not fooling the Iraqis, who took to streets despite all the threats.

For the first time since Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s, Lebanese Shiites are turning against it. Not

Iran’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was flying hysterically between Beirut and Baghdad trying to quell

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the protests. He decided to do what he does best: violence. He had a more violent plan for Iraq, where his forces and his proxies started shooting protestors in daylight, with no concerns about any accountability, knowing that no one will interfere. He was partially right: no one interfered. But that also played for the benefit of the protests, which managed to stay leaderless and un-tied to any western interference. Again, like in Beirut, violence proved to be an outdated method, and people – despite the hundreds of killings and thousands of injured – went back to the streets and their rhetoric against Iran strengthened.

THE IRANIAN PEOPLE JOIN THE STREETS It was not a surprise to see the Iranian people take to the streets. In a way, Iran has been exporting the revolution for decades. Finally, the people’s revolutions in Iraq and Lebanon are now transporting theirs to Iran. The street protests in Iran – although stated with complaints against gas prices – it was really much more than that. The rise in prices was just a peg that that sparked long and deep-rooted disillusionments and disappointment with the regime practices. Chants across all Iranian cities and towns are no longer about the gas prices or the deteriorating economy. They were about the regime’s corruption and disregards of its people’s needs. Criticism of Iran’s regional operations and support for its regional proxies were heard loud and clear. Of course, everyone realizes that the US sanctions worked in squeezing the regime’s financial resources, but the Iranian people criticism focused on the regime’s behavior rather than the US sanctions policies. It is significant that the Iranian people – like the Lebanese and the Iraqi people – realize that there enemy is within. Conspiracy theories no longer work. The rhetoric of resistance - and justifications for a resistance economy – is not successful anymore.

It has become obvious that Iran is the sole faction responsible for the Iraqi people’s ailments and pains.

Nor is violence. More than a hundred were killed in Iran since the protests started, and many more have been arrested. But that doesn’t seem to be a factor of scaring the Iranians back home. Again, they feel that they have nothing left to lose. Like in Iraq and Lebanon, fear doesn’t work when you have nothing left to lose: no job to go back to, no security, no dignity, and certainly no prospects for a better future.

SO WHAT CAN IRAN DO? It would be naïve to think that these demonstrations would topple the regime in Iran, or its proxies in Lebanon and Iraq. The absence of a unified international policy on Iran – and Lebanon and Iraq - means that the protestors will be left alone to deal with their domestic challenges. However, this is a rare moment that is shaking the core foundations of Iranian regime across the region. It is nota small detail that the Shia communities across these three countries are telling Iran that they aspire to a different identity. Without the Shia communities, Iran will lose a very

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Iraqi demonstrators keep up their waiting at Tahrir Square as anti-government protests continue in Baghdad, Iraq on November 2019 ,20. (Getty)

The absence of a unified international policy on Iran – and Lebanon and Iraq - means that the protestors will be left alone to deal with their domestic challenges. significant pillar of its power. Iran – even if it is not going to see a regime change soon – will be constrained. The Shia revolt across the region will make Iran think twice before starting a war. War will probably be its last resort, but also the beginning of its end. Iran will continue using the same methods of violence, hoping that eventually people will leave the streets. Whether they succeed or not, it doesn’t really matter. We all now know how vulnerable the Iranian regime and their proxies are. But most importantly, the Iranian regime is more aware of its vulnerability than ever, and its shaking. Hanin Ghaddar is the inaugural Friedmann Visiting Fellow at The Washington Institute's Geduld Program on Arab Politics.

Lebanese protesters scuffle with security forces near the parliament headquarters in the capital Beirut's downtown district on November ,19 2019. (Getty)

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Iraq’s New Republic of Fear

How Youthful Protests Provoked an Authoritarian Turn

by Renad Mansour On October 1, protesters flooded the streets of Baghdad, decrying high rates of unemployment and rampant corruption. In the ensuing weeks, the protests ballooned. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis marched in the capital and in other cities in the south of the country. As tensions mounted, government forces and paramilitary groups responded by killing over 300 people and wounding nearly 15,000 more. Baghdad has been in a near-constant state of upheaval for the past month. Government forces recently retook many plazas and bridges that had been occupied by the protesters, but the central Tahrir Square remains a hub for the popular uprising, replete with sound systems, medical tents, and even a free revolutionary newspaper. Over the last decade, Iraqi leaders have defused multiple bouts of popular protest by promising reforms and reshuffling cabinet portfolios. That approach has not worked this time. Despite pledges by Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi’s government to reform electoral laws and consider holding early elections, protesters remain in the streets, calling for the government to resign, for wider structural changes—including some demands for a new constitution—and for an end to political horse-trading, sectarian patronage, and endemic corruption. In a little more than six weeks, the popular uprising has swelled into the single greatest challenge to the Iraq’s political system since the U.S. invasion in 2003. In many respects, it poses a greater threat to

Iraq’s leadership than does the insurgent violence of ISIS. The young, leaderless, and revolutionary protest movement has rattled the ruling class, forcing Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish power brokers to form a united front behind the embattled prime minister. The coalescence of Iraq’s typically fragmented political elite, and their unified support for suppression of the protests, suggests a slide back toward authoritarianism—and the reemergence of a “republic of fear” similar to the one that the United States and Iraq’s new leaders swore would never return after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

MARCHING TO A DIFFERENT TUNE Previous Iraqi governments weathered waves of protests in ,2011 ,2009 2015, and 2016. In the most recent instance, supporters of the populist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed the Green Zone in Baghdad, but went home after the government reshuffled its cabinet ministers. This time the usual pledges of cosmetic reform have not caused the demonstrations to fizzle, and leading politicians backing Mahdi have begun to describe the protesters as something darker: mukharabeen, or “disrupters.” In truth, the current uprising differs from previous episodes of unrest in important ways. Whereas past protest movements were led by members of the intellectual and political elite, tended to seek incremental change, and drew participants from across age groups (almost a third

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A protester flashes the V for victory sign as a riot police vehicle burns behind him during clashes amidst demonstrations against state corruption, failing public services, and unemployment in the Iraqi capital Baghdad's central Tayeran Square on October ,3 2019. (Getty)

of protesters in Baghdad in 2015 were over 50 years old), the current demonstrations aren’t led by a particular party or intellectual movement. More importantly, they are powered by a much younger segment of society, which up until now has not been hugely involved in politics. Today’s movement isn’t just about better services or jobs; it reflects a more amorphous and powerful desire for radical change. It seeks to restore “dignity” to people who feel that the current political system treats them with indifference and cruelty. The fury of the Iraqi youth has finally reached a boiling point. Young people see the state’s immense oil wealth disappearing into the pockets of political and business elites, while little is left over to invest in education, infrastructure, and job creation. Youth unemployment has reached an estimated 30 percent. The younger generation also has no memory of life under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. All it knows is the political order formed with U.S. guidance in 2005, when a power-sharing pact between Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish political parties empowered elites from all three factions by guaranteeing their position atop a vast web of patronage. Under the current system, many young Iraqis feel that they have limited economic prospects while an implacable ruling elite continues to enrich itself. The October demonstrations began with familiar calls for jobs and better government services, but they quickly transformed into a sweeping rejection of the system. The typical political and intellectual elites were nowhere near the center of the mobilization. Sadr, for instance, has spent much of the last six weeks in Iran, altogether removed from the action. These demonstrations have no clear, centralized leadership, and as a result Iraqi leaders have struggled to isolate individuals who can speak on behalf of the protesters. In its inscrutability, its lack of clear political affiliation, and its uncompromising demands, the uprising represents a broad denunciation of the post-Saddam political order. The government’s harsh crackdown has only emboldened the protesters, who are now calling for ruling elites to be held accountable for the violence of recent weeks as well as for the years of corruption that preceded it.

THE STATUS QUO RALLIES Faced with an existential threat, Iraq’s leading political parties are now closing ranks. Over the past few years, many observers of Iraqi politics have celebrated the country’s move away from overt sectarianism. The 2005 election—the first one after Saddam’s ouster—featured a single Shiite bloc, a single Kurdish bloc, and a smaller secular bloc with some Sunni leaders. By contrast, last year’s election included many different competing parties within each religious or ethnic group. But sectarian divisions aren’t the only ones being bridged. The most significant competition over the past few years has become intra-Shiite, namely between Sadr and a group of Iran-allied leaders that include former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Hadi al-Ameri, a leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces— parastatal armed groups that played an important role in defeating ISIS in northern Iraq. Elections in 2018 saw the emergence of

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The principal contest in Iraqi politics is no longer their factionalism, but rather the clash of rebellious youth and a panicked state. Sadr’s Islah parliamentary bloc and Ameri’s Binaa parliamentary bloc, both fronted by Shiite Islamist leaders and jockeying for Sunni and Kurdish allies. Normally opponents in the day-to-day jostling of Iraqi politics, Sadr and Ameri have put aside their infighting in the face of the popular uprising. Since the protests erupted, Ameri has backed Mahdi’s government and convened meetings with Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish groups to seek to expand his Binaa bloc in parliament into a clear majority. These meetings include discussions with a senior official from the Kurdistan Democratic Party, who told me that he was sent to Baghdad in early Novemberon “mission impossible” to ensure the survival of the current political system. To do so, he joined with former foes who had just a few years ago denied his party an independence referendum. The protests have largely silenced Sadr, a habitual rabble-rouser and agitator, and driven him closer to his political rivals. Over the past few years, Sadr has often criticized Iran’s outsized influence in Iraq, which leaked Iranian intelligence documents show is even greater that previously thought. At the end of this summer, he had begun to speak out against Mahdi’s government. But when protests flared in October, Sadr only made one appearance at a rally in Najaf. He told his followers that they were free to protest, but not to invoke his name. After his supporters chanted, “Iran, Out, Out! Iraq, Free, Free!” as they have done for years, Sadr urged them not to denounce “external actors,” meaning not to speak against Iran. As the grassroots movement consumed much of Shiite Iraq, a politically weakened Sadr stayed in Iran. He and Ameri may not be close allies, but the protests—along with the possible coercions of Tehran—have dulled their rivalry. The principal contest in Iraqi politics is no longer their factionalism, but rather the clash of rebellious youth and a panicked state.

STATE OF VIOLENCE Unable to defuse the growing revolution through other means, the government and its allies have turned increasingly to violence. Government forces and parastatal armed groups fire live ammunition and tear gas directly at protesters. The Ministry of Communication suspends the Internet to stop videos of state brutality from going viral. The courts have cited counterterrorism laws to justify the killing of protesters. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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How US Withdrawal from the Middle East Accidentally Helps Advance Iranâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Regional Playbook The Leaked Iran Cables Reveal How Tehran Expanded its Influence in Iraq on the back of CIA intelligence. Could the Same Happen in Syria? 16

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by Yasmine El-Geressi Protests in Iraq have exposed long-simmering resentment at Iran’s influence in the country, with protesters targeting Shia political parties and militias with close ties to Tehran. Iran's growing influence in Iraq is most visible in the allegiances of Iraq's prime minister, Adil Abdul Mahdi, and the frustrations of protesters flooding the streets of cities throughout Iraq and since October defacing photos of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, burning Iranian flags, and even firebombing the Iranian Consulate. While it is widely known that Iran plays a big role in Iraq’s domestic politics, the extent of its interference, and how it have developed over years at the expense of vital American intelligence has been made evident in black and white in the first ever leak of its magnitude from one of the most closed societies in the world. Over 700 pages of verified reports written by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security sent anonymously to The Intercept have revealed a detailed portrait of the massive scale of the Islamic Republic’s influence in neighbouring Iraq and how aggressively it has woven itself into every aspect of the country’s political, economic and religious life, particularly since the 2003 US invasion.

IRAN’S VAST INFLUENCE Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani attends Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's (not seen) meeting with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) in Tehran, Iran on September 2016 ,18. (Getty)

The cables detail how Iran has co-opted much if its government’s cabinet, infiltrating its military leadership, and even tapping into a network of sources once run by the CIA. The cables also reveal that spies who once worked for the United States defected and divulged information to Iran in exchange for safety, money and gifts. The documents read much like a spy novel: “Meetings are arranged in dark alleyways and shopping malls or under the cover of a hunting excursion or a birthday party. Informants lurk at the Baghdad airport, snapping pictures of American soldiers and keeping tabs on coalition military flights.” The report by The Intercept and The New York Times named former Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi as an official who was willing to have a “special relationship” with Iranian intelligence and detailed a January 2015 meeting with an operative. “No Iraqi politician can become prime minister without Iran’s blessing, and Abdul Mahdi, when he secured the premiership in 2018, was seen as a compromise candidate acceptable to both Iran and the United States,” reported The Intercept.

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The report said one source was willing to tell Iranian intelligence "everything" including "the locations of CIA safe houses; the names of hotels where CIA operatives met with agents; details of his weapons and surveillance training; the names of other Iraqis working as spies for the Americans." Former PM Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile, spent more than two decades in exile in Syria and Iran. He was a favorite of Tehran’s and served as premier between 2006 and 2014. His replacement, the Britisheducated Haidar al-Abadi, was seen as more friendly to the West and less sectarian. This did not worry the Iranians, because several ministers in Abadi’s government enjoyed close ties with Tehran. In one case detailed by both news agencies, cables revealed that one of the Iranian intelligence officials was a top political adviser to Salim al-Jabouri, the former speaker of the Iraqi parliament. That asset, referred to as "Source 134832," according to the documents, claimed to "carefully follow" Jabouri's contact with Americans. Jabouri held the role of Iraqi parliament speaker until 2018. The reports also show that representatives of Iran’s Quds Force and the Muslim Brotherhood considered forming an alliance against Saudi Arabia in 2014 and held a secret summit at a Turkish hotel in April 2014 to seek common ground. Representatives of the Brotherhood suggested the two should join forces against the Saudis and that the place to do that was in Yemen, where a war between the Iranianbacked Houthi rebels and the Saudi-back Yemeni government was about to escalate.

CONNECTIONS WITH FROMER CIA INFORMANTS The cables, which document a period mainly in 2015-2014 when Iran, Iraq and the United States

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were at the height of the war against ISIS in Iraq after it seized large swathes of Iraq and neighboUring Syria, show heavy interference by Tehran to keep Baghdad a pliant client state. But it shows that Iran’s aggressive interference started very quickly after the US troop withdrawal in 2011. After US forces pulled out, covert operators left hastily, abandoning their sources and leaving them vulnerable to Iranian pressure. These sources, as the joint report pointed out, were left poor, terrified, and desperate. According to the Intercept: "The CIA had tossed many of its long time secret agents out on the street, leaving them jobless and destitute in a country still shattered from the invasion ... Short of money, many began to offer their services to Tehran." Iranian intelligence officials reportedly made a concerted effort to recruit former CIA operatives following the US’s withdrawal in 2011, The Intercept and the New York Times reported. Iran immediately added CIA informants to its payroll. The report said one source was willing to tell Iranian intelligence "everything" including "the locations of CIA safe houses; the names of hotels where CIA operatives met with agents; details of his weapons and surveillance training; the names of other Iraqis working as spies for the Americans." The report also said that Iran started to recruit spies

The leaked cables have revealed a detailed portrait of the massive scale of the Islamic Republic’s influence in neighbouring Iraq and how aggressively it has woven itself into every aspect of the country’s political, economic and religious life, particularly since the 2003 US invasion.

from inside the US State Department. The State Department official is not named in the cable, but the person is described as someone who would be able to provide “intelligence insights into the US government’s plans in Iraq, whether it is for dealing with ISIS or any other covert operations.”

LESSONS NOT LEARNED? The hasty, chaotic pullout of US troops from northeastern Syria last month left allies, lawmakers and defence officials shocked. Fearing for its survival in the face of an invasion from Turkey, which considers it an enemy, the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led forces who spearheaded the fight against ISIS, quickly struck a deal with the Iranand Russia-backed Bashar al-Assad regime. During the war against ISIS, Special Operations forces, the

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An Iraqi protester holds up an Iranian flag as another sets it on fire for him, next to a portrait depicting Iran's former and current Supreme Leaders Ayatollah Khomeini and Khamenei, during demonstrations against the government and the lack of basic services in Basra on September 2018 ,7. (Getty)

Given the SDF’s exposure to the inner workings of the US Special Forces, the US withdrawal and the SDF’s subsequent deal with Assad has unnerved some experts who believe that US intelligence developed and shared with the SDF could be lost forever or fall America’s foremost adversaries, Iran and Russia. The Intercept’s Senior National Security Correspondent James Risen says that is a strong message in these documents for America’s Middle East policy. “The US invasion of Iraq is a historic mistake, a strategic blunder of massive proportions. We invaded and Iran won the war. That is a lesson to be learned today in how we operate in the Middle East and what we do in the Middle East. It is a warning against further aggression in the region,” he said.

U.S. military’s most elite units, among the 1,000 American personnel in the country worked closely with Kurdish counterterrorism units while regular Kurdish fighters carried out most of the ground operations against ISIS. Given the SDF’s exposure to the inner workings of the US Special Forces, the US withdrawal and the SDF’s subsequent deal with Assad has unnerved some experts who believe that it has paved the way for several dangerous scenarios for the US, including concerns that US intelligence developed and shared with the SDF could be lost forever or fall America’s foremost adversaries, Iran and Russia. And now that what we now know about Iran's steady and aggressive penetration into Iraq on the back of CIA intelligence, the question arises of whether the same thing could happen with US intelligence assets in Syria.

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Eric L. Robinson, a former intelligence official with the National Counterterrorism Center who focused on counter-ISIS measures, tweeted last month that the drawdown was a counterintelligence "nightmare," as the SDF would be forced to give up tactics, techniques, procedures, names, and locations. "What a coup for the Russian intelligence services — 5 years of history regarding the elite forces of NATO etc," he said. “It’s going to turn out that, all of a sudden, the ways that elite American counterterrorism forces operate are known to the opposition,” Robinson told The Atlantic. Brian Katz, a former CIA official who recently took a post as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Atlantic that “Understanding how the U.S. military, Special Operations, and intelligence community operates is going to be very valuable for Russia and Iran—if not in Syria now, then wherever we’ll be competing and fighting in the coming years. They’ll have a playbook for how we operate.”

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Re-Emergence of Sikh Separatism Islamabad and Its Not So Secret Support For the Khalistan Movement by Ali El Shamy The 1947 partition of India made it evident that sectarianism was going to plague the subcontinent for the foreseeable future. Fast forward 70 years later and the emergence of Hindu nationalism in India and militant Islamism in Pakistan, has made the divide among religious and ethnic groups deeper. Recent developments such as New Delhiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s decision to remove the semi-autonomous status of largely Muslim Jammu and Kashmir and integrate it into the Indian state have made matters worse for sectarianism in India.

Sikhs only comprise less than 2 per cent of the Indian population, despite their small population they have also been the subject of sectarian issues and violence. Moreover there has been a recent resurgence of the Khalistan movement which calls for the establishment of a separate Sikh state in Punjab. Nevertheless, the movement witnessed its peak in the 1980s, when the Indian army conducted Operation Blue Star to remove militant Sikh separatist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale from the Golden Temple complex in Punjab. The operation subsequently damaged the Akal Takht one of the holiest sites for Sikhs. Shortly following the incident, two of then Prime Minister Indira Ghandiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sikh guards murdered her, which resulted in mass anti-Sikh riots leading to the deaths

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of thousands of Sikhs in India. While the Khalistan movement started to wane by the 1990s, it experienced a slight resurgence in recent years as prominent members of the movement have called for a referendum to take place next year in Punjab, where Sikhs will be asked to vote on whether or not a separate Sikh state should be established there. While it is not yet clear how much voter turnout the referendum will yield, there is evidence to suggest that Pakistan’s rogue intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is supporting the calls for referendum as well as supporting radical Sikh activists residing in India and foreign countries, particularly Canada and the United Kingdom. What’s more pressing is the ISI’s training and funding of radical Sikh terrorists seeking to carry out attacks on Indian state agencies in Punjab.

ISI’S OPERATIONS TO DESTABILIZE INDIA

Indian Sikh activists from various radical Sikh organisations shout slogans in support of Sikh leader Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and Khalistan -- the name for an envisioned independent Sikh state -- after prayers on the 33rd anniversary of Operation Blue Star at the Golden temple in Amritsar on June ,6 2017. (Getty)

One of the ISI’s pillars since its establishment in 1948 is destabilizing the Indian state. The ISI’s activities in India range from state sponsored terror attacks, training and recruiting militias bent on undermining the Indian state apparatus and training and supporting radical separatists in Kashmir and Jammu and Punjab. Among the major terror attacks that are widely believed to be sponsored by the ISI are the 1993 Mumbai Blasts and the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The latter attack was done by the Lashkar-eTaiba militant, Zabiuddin Ansari, and Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the Kashmir based terror organizations which the ISI and the Pakistani army recruits and trains its insurgents. Jammu and Kashmir has been the one region that the ISI has worked extensively on, and as a result it became a breeding ground for both home grown and foreign sponsored terror groups. For decades, the Pakistani government’s support for Kashmiri jihadist groups posed a great threat to India’s sovereignty, the fact that a lot of the training and recruitment took place in Pakistan-administered Kashmir made the prospect on an attack even greater. In 2002, shortly after the 11/9 attacks then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf sought to ban all militant groups operating in his country, and for a brief time his battle against terrorist groups seemed to be working. He even sought to reduce Pakistan’s support for militant groups attacking Indian Kashmir. According to a BBC report, his efforts were briefly successful as by 2005, Kashmiri militancy had almost completely stopped. However, the late 2000s saw a resurgence of Kashmiri insurgency and Pakistani support for jihadist groups. As previously stated, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is one of the major terror groups in the region and one of its main objectives is to integrate Indian Kashmir into Pakistan. The Pakistani’s support for the terrorist group is extensive, back in 2011 David Headley, a Pakistani-American member of the group was captured by Indian authorities. After his capture he revealed a number of ways the ISI has been aiding the group, he stated that each vital member of the LeT (leaders, spies…etc) gets one ISI agent to sponsor them. As a surveillance agent for the LeT, he had an ISI partner who provided 25,000 US dollars in funds to carryout

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The ISI’s activities in India range from state sponsored terror attacks, training and recruiting militias bent on undermining the Indian state apparatus and training and supporting radical separatists in Kashmir and Jammu and Punjab. spying operations in India. Shortly after India’s decision to revoke Article 370, the ISI’s operations in Jammu and Kashmir only intensified. A recent 45 minute investigative report by India Today revealed that the ISI has expanded its recruitment network by recruiting operatives from a myriad of countries such as Canada and Nepal in order to infiltrate Jammu and Kashmir. The report conducted a secret interview with an ISI recruiter, who stated that some of the recruitment also happens within India, especially within a New Delhi inn popular among Pakistani diplomats.

ISI’S SUPPORT FOR KHALISTANI RADICALS The ISI’s support for Kashmiri jihadist groups is well documented, however its support for Khalistani groups is much less known. According to an article in the Fair Observer, the ISI’s support for the Khalistan movement dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, the period in which the movement was at its peak strength and posed a major threat to the unity of India. Furthermore, it was during this time period in which insurgency in Punjab was frequent, according to the same article in the Fair Observer, violence in Punjab between 1980 and 2000 cost the lives of 11,694 Indians. While it is not clear why the ISI started supporting the movement some believe it is revenge for India’s support for Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in its 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. Despite the fact that the war had ended almost 50 years ago, Khalistani leaders are still using it to propagate Pakistani support for its movement. Last year, the USbased Sikhs For Justice organization wrote to Pakistan’s leader Imran Khan asking for his government’s support for the planned 2020 Khalistan referendum, and the letter allegedly stated that Punjab’s liberation would be Islamabad’s way of avenging “the fall of Dhaka”. Thus far, it is still not clear whether or not the current Pakistani government supports the movement; however its intelligence apparatus, which has undermined the Pakistani government on a number of occasions, certainly does. One thing is for certain though; Pakistani government’s support for the movement is in compliance with the ISI’s wider goal of destabilizing the Indian state.

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THE ISI AND THE SIKH DIASPORA While calls for Sikh seperatism died down in Punjab since the 1990s, Sikh extremist groups are still operating in a number of Western countries, particulalry the UK, Canada and the US. Babbar Khalasa International (BKI) is one of said groups that operate in the West despite the fact that it is classified as a terrorist organization in most Western states and India. BKIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s objective is to create a separate Sikh state in Punjab through the use of violence, and its most famous terrorist attack was its 1985 bombing of the an Air India Boeing 747 en route to India, the attack would the lives of 329 people and remained the most deadly aviation terrorist attack until 11/9. Many of these extremists groups have more leeway to operate in Western countries with more permissive political climates. Indian intelligence has reason to believe that the ISI has been and is still aiding and abetting such groups abroad. In a 2018 interview with Outlook India, Pujab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh explained that the ISI is exploiting the Sikh diaspora living in the West to revive Khalistani sentiment and that most foreign based Khalastani movements are either working closely with the ISI or working independently. Moreover, the ISI has played a role in most of the recent terror attacks in Punjab.

REVIVAL OF PUNJABI INSURGENCY This decade is coming to a close, and people of the Indian subcontinent will remember it for a number of reasons, such as the rise of Narendara Modi and the BJP, the border skirmishes between India and Pakistan and the resurgence of Khalistani militancy both within India and outside India. One of the first major incidents happened in 2012, when a group of extremist Sikhs stabbed Lt-Gen Kuldeep Singh Brar, the general who led Operation Blue Star in 1984, in Oxford Circus in London. Brar survived the attack, and the assailants were found and arrested a year later. The following years saw more unrest in Punjab, as 2016 saw six terrorist incidents, many of which were targeting Hindu nationalist leaders. Last year, extremist Sikhs threw

The ISIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s support for the Khalistan movement dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, the period in which the movement was at its peak strength and posed a major threat to the unity of India.

grenades at the Nirankari temple in Ameristar; the reason for this is because some fanatical Sikhs views Nirankari followers as heretics. The attack resulted in the deaths of three people and the injury of 20. Immediately after the incident, ISI-based Khalistani/ Kashmiri terror groups were suspected to be the perpetrators. Just this year, the Indian police in Punjab foiled a terror attack that Khalistan Liberation Force had planned for the eve of the 35th anniversary of Operation Blue Star. According to India Today, one of the ways in which Pakistani intelligence has been attracting Punjabis to the Khalistani movement is through destabilizing the Punjabi state. For instance Pakistani intelligence routinely smuggles drugs into Punjab thereby ensuring that more young people become addicts and therefore become disenfranchised. As such, more members of the youth will be susceptible to radicalization efforts from the Khalistani movement. That same report indicated that crime syndicates in Punjab that express loyalty to the movement are more likely to receive armaments from the ISI.

WILL THE KHALISTANI MOVEMENT GAIN MORE SUPPORT? While terror attacks from Khalistani groups have become more frequent, there is little evidence to suggest that they

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Soldiers can be seen firing at suspects during the operation in Golden Temple in 1984 in Amritsar, India. (Getty)

While calls for Sikh seperatism died down in Punjab since the 1990s, Sikh extremist groups are still operating in a number of Western countries, particulalry the UK, Canada and the US.

will sweep mass support from Punjabis and Sikhs, even when the movement was at it highest peak 30 years ago, it couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t gain enough backing to move beyond insurgency. Pakistan and India have recently decided to open up the

Foundation stone monument of the Kartarpur corridor project at Gurudwara Darbar Sahib, on November 2019 ,9 in Kartarpur, Pakistan. (Getty)

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Kartarpur corridor to allow Indian Sikhs access to a holy Sikh Gurdwara in Pakistan. While this marked a rare occasion of coordination between the states, some have suggested that such a decision might make India more susceptible to terror attacks. Indeed, former Pakistani army chief, Mirza Aslam, recently issued a threat to India stating that Pakistan will use the Khalistani corridor for Khalistani terror, he also said that such attacks would serve as a lesson for Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s decision to revoke Article 370. While the Indian state does recognize this threat, it still went through with the decision out of respect for the Sikh community. Moreover, while speaking to The Wire, Gurpreet Singh, president of the Kendri Singh Sabha, expressed doubts that the wider Sikh population would be swayed by Khalistani propaganda. According to him only 5 percent of Sikhs in India supported the movement in its heyday, while today that number has fallen to 1 percent. He, along with Professor Balkar Singh director of the World Punjabi Centre in Punjabi University do not believe that Indian Sikhs would head calls for a referendum next year, calls which mainly hail from expatriate radical Sikhs and the Pakistani intelligence apparatus.

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Great Power Competition Is Washington’s Top Priority - But Not the Public’s China and Russia Don’t Keep Most Americans Awake at Night by Richard Fontaine For all the acrimony in Washington today, the city’s foreign policy establishment is settling on a rare bipartisan consensus: that the world has entered a new era of great-power competition. The struggle between the United States and other

great powers, the emerging consensus holds, will fundamentally shape geopolitics going forward, for good or ill. And more than terrorism, climate change, or nuclear weapons in Iran or North Korea, the threats posed by these other great powers—namely, China and Russia—will consume U.S. foreign-policy makers in the

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decades ahead. President Donald Trump’s administration has been a prime mover in setting this new agenda. Its National Security Strategy, published in December 2017, portrayed China and Russia as seeking “to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests,” with Beijing displacing the United States in the Indo-Pacific and Russia establishing spheres of influence near its borders. When he presented the new National Defense Strategy in January 2018, then Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced that “Great Power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said much the same in April, when he told NATO foreign ministers that the world had entered “a new era of great-power competition,” adding separately that “China wants to be the dominant economic and military power of the world, spreading its authoritarian vision for society and its corrupt practices worldwide.” GPC has become the Pentagon’s newest acronym.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) seen during their bilateral meeting on November 2019 ,13 in Brasilia, Brazil. (Getty)

But the consensus extends well beyond the current administration, to foreign policy experts, current and former national security officials— and much of the Democratic presidential primary field. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren warned last year that both Russia and China “are working flat out to remake the global order to suit their own priorities,” while Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders decried the rise of a new authoritarian axis that includes Moscow and Beijing and has ignited “a global struggle of enormous consequence.” There is a striking disconnect, however, between the consensus in Washington and the views of most Americans. Survey after survey shows that while concerns about China are gradually rising, the vast majority of Americans are relatively unconcerned with great-power competition and much more focused on other threats. That could pose a problem for the United States’ new competitive strategy. A generation-long greatpower competition demands national-level focus and new economic and military approaches, all of which will be difficult to achieve without popular support.

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The struggle between the United States and other great powers, the emerging consensus holds, will fundamentally shape geopolitics going forward, for good or ill. MIND THE GAP Given the hardening consensus among foreign policy elites, it is remarkable that the American public expresses far different sentiments. In a recent survey released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, for instance, respondents ranked Russia as the ninth most pressing threat to U.S. interests (tied with immigrants and refugees) and China as the 11th most pressing threat (tied with the rise of authoritarianism). Two-thirds of respondents preferred to deal with the rise of China through friendly cooperation and engagement, and just 30 percent preferred to limit its power. Among both Republicans and Democrats, more saw Chinese power as a threat in 1998 and 2002 than see it as such today. That survey is no outlier. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked Americans to rate seven threats, ranging from Iran and North Korea to climate change and t ISIS. China came in fourth and Russia last. For the past decade, Americans have consistently ranked terrorism and cyberattacks as the two most pressing national security threats, as they did in the Chicago Council survey. Climate change increasingly finishes near the top, and while regional threats wax and wane in public consciousness, Americans still tend to rate North Korea as a bigger threat than the great powers. These views correspond to specific policy preferences among the general public. A November 2018 Reagan Institute poll asked where the United States should focus its military might. Possibly to the surprise of those seeking to extricate the United States from Middle Eastern distractions, it was not Europe or Asia that topped the list but the Middle East

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itself. Another poll by the Center for American Progress asked respondents to list their top foreign policy priorities. Stopping Russian interference in U.S. politics ranked behind guarding against terrorism, protecting American jobs, reducing illegal immigration, combating climate change, and dealing with Iran and North Korea. Taking on Chinese economic and military aggression ranked lower still, beneath all the same priorities as well as ending involvement in Middle East wars, fighting global poverty, and promoting trade. And whereas 95 percent of foreign policy elites would seek retaliation in the case of a Russian attack on a NATO ally, according to a recent Eurasia Group Foundation survey, only 54 percent of the public would do the same. Together, these surveys paint a picture of an American public much less concerned with great-power competition than with threats— such as terrorism, Iran, and North Korea—that policymakers have relegated to secondary status. It is possible that the gap between elite and popular opinion will narrow over time as politicians adjust their focus to the concerns that most animate the public. Politicians and policymakers might begin to talk the terrorism-and-regional-threat talk while walking the great-power walk. Indeed, in his first State of the Union address, immediately following publication of the National Security Strategy, Trump emphasized the challenges not

Survey after survey shows that while concerns about China are gradually rising, the vast majority of Americans are relatively unconcerned with greatpower competition and much more focused on other threats.

of great-power competition but of terrorism, North Korea, and illegal immigration. But another, perhaps more likely, possibility is that the gap will simply persist. For decades, elites have been more supportive of globalization, trade, foreign aid, and alliances than the American public. The problem is that gaps that persist invite backlash—a phenomenon the United States is arguably witnessing today with the backlash against globalization, trade, and alliances. And to the extent that long-term competition with Russia and China demands “whole of society” responses rather than just a set of new policies, as many in Washington now argue, a lack of public support courts danger. Washington’s favored response seems to revolve around educating the American people about great-power threats. With China, the gap is already beginning to narrow: a February survey from the Chicago Council showed that the percentage of respondents labeling the United States and China “mostly rivals” rose from 50 percent in March 2018 to 63 percent a year later. It is certainly tempting to borrow a page from Dean Acheson and make the Russia and China threats “clearer than the truth”—that is, painting them as critical and imminent—thereby stirring the country to action. The worry is that in doing so, elites will court overreaction and heighten anxiety among the public. The better course is to continually explain the nature of longterm great-power competition and connect it to specific actions Americans need to undertake to strengthen their position.

BALANCING THREATS Great-power competition is a fact of life in our current age, and it is likely to endure well into the future. Russia represents an acute nearterm threat to the United States, largely but not exclusively because of its interference in American democracy. At the same time, China and the United States are locked in a long-

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Abigail Disney and Jane Fonda demonstrate outside the Russell US Senate office building during «Fire Drill Friday» climate change protest on November 2019 ,15 in Washington, DC. (Getty)

term competition across military, economic, technological, and ideological spheres.

It has become an axiom of American foreign policy that the United States can no longer do it all, everywhere—if ever it could. The But great-power competition cannot be the threats are too manifold, the resources too United States’ only focus, if for no other scarce. Surely it’s true that difficult choices reason than the American people have other about priorities must be made. But it is also priorities. Left unattended, other threats—such true that the United States cannot compete as a mass-casualty terrorist attack on U.S. soil with China and Russia while at the same or a North Korean missile that falls close to the time minimizing or dismissing other critical United States—could easily upend a carefully threats, especially those that animate the constructed set of policies aimed at countering public more than worries about great-power Russia and China. In such a case, the temptation trajectories. How to balance these worthy to embrace counterterrorism or rogue-state priorities in a manageable and sustainable containment as the chief national security priority way will be the overarching challenge for would become potentially irresistible—leaving U.S. foreign policy. the United States even more vulnerable to threats This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com. from Russia and China.

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How to Win the Battle Over Data The United States Dithers While Authoritarians Seize the Day by Eric Rosenbach and Katherine Mansted In recent years, a number of authoritarian governments have begun taking data very seriously. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping believe that the twentyfirst century belongs to nations that control communications platforms, suppress independent

media, and dominate the development of datadriven technologies such as artificial intelligence. These regimes cordon off their domestic Internet space and shut off their citizens from global information flows, while undermining rival countries through disinformation campaigns and hacking. Authoritarian governments try to steal the intellectual property and databases of foreign organizations, but lock foreign firms out of their

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own data-rich sectors. The United States has yet to show up to this information fight. U.S. cyberstrategists prioritize defending physical infrastructure—routers, servers, and endpoint devices such as laptops and smartphones—but consistently underestimate the economic and political significance of the information carried on that infrastructure. The U.S. private sector, which rarely acts in the American national interest, is primarily responsible for protecting data and information platforms. It can be tough to craft regulations and national security policies for data and technology that do not fall afoul of democratic and capitalist values. A national information strategy can sound, or indeed become, Orwellian without the right political leadership. But to thrive in the twenty-first century, democracies must now put information at the center of domestic, security, and foreign policy.

MARSHALLING DATA

Aerial view of a data center of China›s e-commerce giant Alibaba is seen on June 2019 ,28 in Zhangbei County, Hebei Province of China. Alibaba established two data centers in Hebei province to serve the cloud computing industries in northern China. (Getty)

In 2014, Chinese hackers stole the personal information of more than 22 million people connected to U.S. security clearance processes. That breach not only demonstrated the vulnerability of U.S. government systems to hostile actors but also provided China with a tremendous resource. China could use the stolen data to profile and target U.S. officials and their families. It could also use the “clean” and highly structured data to train the algorithms that power military-related artificial intelligence projects, sharpening the weapons in its cyberwar arsenal. For similar reasons, China sponsors the theft of commercial data. Security officials believe that the data breach that rocked credit reporting giant Equifax in 2017—in which hackers stole the financial and personal information of approximately 147 million Americans— originated in China. That stolen U.S. information can make up for gaps in China’s own datasets. Although consumers provide plenty of data to Chinese e-commerce giants, China’s financial and health-care industries are threadbare compared to their U.S. counterparts. The Equifax operation provided the Chinese with detailed, organized information on nearly half the American

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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping believe that the twenty-first century belongs to nations that control communications platforms, suppress independent media, and dominate the development of data-driven technologies such as artificial intelligence. population. Neat, easily searchable data, however acquired, is vital for companies to train artificial intelligence applications for both military and commercial use. No advanced economy boasts a national artificial intelligence strategy more mercantilist than China’s. Beijing seeks to lead the world in this area by 2030. Xi’s doctrine of civil-military fusion yokes together the research efforts of private corporations, China’s military industrial base, and the intelligence agencies of the People’s Liberation Army. China subscribes to the zerosum ethos of data competition; states want to acquire data from others, while limiting access to their own data. To that end, China, India, Russia, and other countries have introduced tough data localization laws to prevent companies from taking certain types of information across national borders. In the private sector, access to data tends to create a virtuous cycle: more data lets companies build better applications, which makes them more profitable and allows them to harvest and monetize even more data. The dynamic explains why information giants, like Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Tencent are monopolies. But this commercial logic also prompts states to think in zero-sum terms. The United States should prepare for the prospect of authoritarian regimes ramping up cyberattacks against the databases of its major companies. If China, for instance, wanted to boost its own national champion as the dominant player in a particular market, even a minor cyberattack

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against a rival firm could be very damaging. Stealthily disrupting or “poisoning” inputs through a data-integrity attack or by manipulating the quality-control algorithms that govern industrial processes and the delivery of products could result in inferior, potentially harmful outcomes. Before an affected company even detects this kind of attack, it could face numerous economic, legal, and reputational problems, losing consumers and becoming dislodged from supply chains. Data-driven machine learning systems now assist decision-making in many areas of the private and public sectors. A data integrity attack does not even need to be successful to be catastrophic. The perception that an organization’s data is poisoned and its decision-making processes corrupted could reduce public trust in a company, in a government agency, and even in democratic process. Since the Internet was introduced in China in the 1990s, China has developed the world’s most sophisticated system of network control, censorship, and propaganda, and has maintained heavy restrictions on market access for foreign media and technology companies. Russia is following China’s lead. During recent protests in Moscow, authorities jammed mobile Internet access in the city to keep protestors from communicating with one another. In a more ambitious gambit, Russia plans to test a procedure that would altogether disconnect Russian Internet users from the global internet. Even the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense has warned

No advanced economy boasts a national artificial intelligence strategy more mercantilist than China’s. Beijing seeks to lead the world in this area by 2030.

that democracies may need to step back from a commitment to the open Internet and consider “national or regional cyber borders.” Such moves would unwind decades of economic liberalism, fragment the relative openness of current information flows, and give rise to suspicion and animosity. Unless the United States can chart a different course, the world might stumble down this path.

A REAL PLAN The United States must adopt a national information strategy that places data at its center. The network-centric approach to national security is failing. There is only a low probability of a catastrophic attack on infrastructure networks, but that possibility has distracted leaders from defending the nation’s most precious resource: information. U.S. policymakers need to identify and protect national information assets, including companies and infrastructure, from attacks and foreign takeovers. Over the past decade, China has systematically invested in U.S. firms that develop data-driven technologies. Recent steps to tighten foreign investment rules are encouraging. This

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Sberbank CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board German Gref (L) and Russia›s President Vladimir Putin talking during the Artificial Intelligence Journey forum at Moscow›s Expocentre Exhibition Complex. Alexei Nikolsky/Russian Presidential Press and Information Office/TASS (Getty)

year, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States forced Chinese investors to withdraw from a data-rich health-care startup and a prominent dating app. New regulations will soon toughen the vetting of foreign investments in high-tech firms that possess troves of sensitive data. Still, Congress should supplement the heightened scrutiny of foreign investment with more funding to support companies and research institutions that are developing artificial intelligence. In particular, the government should help boost tech companies whose innovations do not have immediate commercial applications but could support American national security or economic interests over the longer-term. Those measures would be further bolstered by a national data protection regime. Many democracies, and the United States in particular, muddle along with a complex web of statebased and industry-specific requirements for data protection and privacy. A U.S. company could contend with more than 50 different overlapping and sometimes contradictory data laws, which together are still insufficient to ensure basic data governance and protection standards. Policymakers and lawmakers should streamline and clarify this inefficient and highly ineffective

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system. Government agencies must strengthen coordination with the private sector, which is on the frontlines of twenty-first-century competition and conflict. The intelligence community should share threat assessments with high-tech companies, social media platforms, and entities that keep large holdings of sensitive data. At the same time, Congress must pass pending legislation, such as the bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Elizabeth Warner, Lindsey Graham, and Amy Klobuchar, that will hold tech firms accountable for their role in protecting national security interests. After reinforcing its defenses, the United States should expose the malign tactics and shadowy networks of its adversaries. Evidence of bribery, state sponsorship of organized crime, the employment of cyber-mercenaries, and attempts to interfere in Western democratic processes must see daylight outside the memos of intelligence services. Such exposure should form a core plank of public information campaigns that reveal China and Russiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s corrupting and coercive behaviors. Authoritarian governments like those of China and Russia are ultimately brittle. Their legitimacy does not rest on freedoms and elections, but rather on the control and manipulation of information. They are therefore highly susceptible to cyberattacks that would crack open their tightly controlled information environments. U.S. leaders should explicitly signal that information attacks against the United States will spark serious retaliation. To effectively meet authoritarian countries on the field of information competition, democracies will have to perform a balancing act. They must boost their economiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; capacity to produce, refine, and protect data, while avoiding the temptations of protectionism and monopolism. They must defend their information environments from subversion but redouble efforts to protect individual rights and democratic institutions. The difficulty of these tasks must not prevent policymakers from grappling with them. For national security leaders, there can be no more important task than crafting a data security strategy fit for purpose in the information age. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The Progressive Case Against Protectionism How Trade and Immigration Help American Workers by Kimberly Clausing It has almost become the new Washington consensus: decades of growing economic openness have hurt American workers, increased inequality, and gutted the middle class, and new restrictions on trade and immigration can work to reverse the damage. This view is a near reversal of the bipartisan consensus in favor of openness to the world that defined U.S. economic policy for decades. From the end of World War II on, under both

Democratic and Republican control, Congress and the White House consistently favored free trade and relatively unrestrictive immigration policies. Candidates would make protectionist noises to appease various constituencies from time to time, but by and large, such rhetoric was confined to the margins. Almost never did it translate into actual policy. Then came the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump found a wide audience when he identified the chief enemy of the American worker as foreigners: trading partners that had struck

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A crowd of shoppers estimated in the thousands attend the opening of a new Wegmans supermarket despite heavy rain in a renovated section of the Brooklyn Navy Yard on October ,27 2019 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Getty)

disastrous trade agreements with Washington and immigrants who were taking jobs from native-born Americans. Everyday workers, Trump alleged, had been let down by a political class beholden to globalist economic ideas. In office, he has followed through on his nationalist agenda, withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and routinely levying higher tariffs on trading partners. On immigration, he has implemented draconian policies against asylum seekers at the border and undocumented immigrants within the United States, as well as reducing quotas for legal immigrants and slowing down the processing of their applications. But Trump has not been alone in his battle against economic openness. During the 2016 campaign, he was joined in his calls for protectionism by the Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders, who also blamed bad trade agreements for the plight of the American worker. Even the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state had championed the TPP, was forced by political necessity to abandon her earlier support for the agreement. Democrats have not, fortunately, mimicked Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, but when it comes to free trade, their support has often been lukewarm at best. While some Democrats have criticized Trump’s counterproductive tariffs and disruptive trade wars, many of them hesitate when asked if they would repudiate the administration’s trade policies, especially with respect to China. The political winds have shifted; now, it seems as if those who purport to sympathize with workers and stand up for the middle class must also question the merits of economic openness. American workers have indeed been left behind, but open economic policies remain in their best interest: by reducing prices for consumers and companies, free trade helps workers more than it hurts them, and by creating jobs, offering complementary skills, and paying taxes, so do immigrants. Instead of hawking discredited nationalist economic ideas, politicians seeking to improve Americans’ economic lot—especially progressives focused on reducing inequality and rebuilding the middle class—should be looking to domestic policy to address workers’ needs, while also improving trade agreements and increasing immigration. That, not tariffs and walls, is what it will take to improve the plight of regular Americans.

THE TRADE BOOGEYMAN Forty years of widening inequality and slow wage growth have left many Americans searching for answers. It may be tempting, then, to blame the United States’ trading partners, many of which have experienced remarkable jumps in GDP and wages. China, perhaps the most spectacular example, saw its GDP per capita expand more than -22fold from 1980 to 2018—in terms of 2010 U.S. dollars, from 350$ to 7,750$. Yet during the same period, U.S. GDP per capita grew from 28,600$ to 54,500$. That’s less in relative terms—advanced economies usually grow more slowly than poor ones—but far more in absolute terms, and enough to significantly boost standards of living. The problem, however, is that the gains have not been evenly

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From the end of World War II on, under both Democratic and Republican control, Congress and the White House consistently favored free trade and relatively unrestrictive immigration policies. shared. Adjusted for inflation, the average income of the bottom 50 percent of earners stayed nearly flat between 1980 and 2014. For those in the 50th to 90th percentiles, it grew by about 40 percent, lagging far behind expectations based on the experience of prior generations. Among the top one percent, meanwhile, average income has skyrocketed, ballooning by 205 percent over the same period. No wonder so many Americans are disappointed. The U.S. economy has failed to achieve its most basic aim: generating inclusive growth. Trade does deserve some of the blame. When the United States buys goods from labor-abundant countries such as China and India, the demand for domestic labor falls. This appears to be what happened after the big surge in Chinese imports to the United States in the early years of this century. In a series of oftcited research papers about “the China shock,” the economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson estimated that trade with China may have displaced the jobs of one million to two million Americans during this period. But it’s important to keep those numbers in perspective. The U.S. economy is a dynamic place, with more than six million jobs lost and created every single quarter. Moreover, the share of Americans working in manufacturing has been declining steadily since 1950, even as growth in trade has waxed and waned—suggesting that factors other than trade are also at play. Indeed, the U.S. economy has experienced other huge changes. Workers have lost bargaining power as unionization has declined (from 30 percent of the labor force in 1960 to less than 11 percent today) and large companies have steadily increased their market power (corporate profits as a share of GDP are 50 percent higher than they were in prior decades). Perhaps most important, technology has disrupted countless industries and lowered the demand for less educated labor. Most economists believe that technological change is a far more important factor than international trade in explaining the disappointing outcomes in American labor markets. Across all industries, the returns to education have increased, as less educated workers are disproportionately displaced by automation and computerization. And although manufacturing output continues to rise, manufacturing employment has fallen, as capital takes the place of labor and workers steadily move into the service industry. Yet in spite of all this evidence about the effects of technological change, politicians still point fingers at foreigners.

conomy

THE MYTH OF BAD DEALS Critics of trade on both the left and the right contend that much of the problem has to do with bad trade deals that Washington has struck. On the left, the concern is that trade agreements have prioritized the interests of corporations over those of workers. On the right, it is that trade agreements have focused on the goal of international cooperation at the expense of U.S. interests. Trump has argued that U.S. trade deals have been tilted against the United States, contributing to the large trade deficit (meaning that the country imports more than it exports) and hollowing out the manufacturing sector. Sanders has echoed these concerns in the past, for example, claiming that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) cost 43,000 jobs in Michigan and is behind Detroit’s urban decline. But just as trade in general is not to blame for the woes of the American worker, neither are the specifics of individual trade deals. In fact, the terms of trade agreements are typically highly favorable to the United States. That’s because such deals usually require U.S. trading partners to lower their trade barriers far more than the United States must, since Washington tends to start off with much lower trade barriers. Such was certainly the case with Mexico, which, prior to NAFTA, had tariffs that averaged ten percent, compared with U.S. tariffs that averaged two percent. This is not to say that trade agreements cannot be improved; useful tweaks could counter the excessive prioritization of intellectual property and reduce the reach of the mechanism by which investors and states resolve disputes, which critics allege gives companies too much power to fight health and environmental regulations. The TPP attempted to modernize NAFTA by placing a greater emphasis on the rights of workers and protecting the environment, and future agreements could go even further. That said, it is easy to overstate the stakes here. Even ideal trade agreements would do little to address economic inequality and wage stagnation, because trade agreements themselves have little to do with those problems. Compared with other factors—the growth of trade in general, technological change, the decline of unionization, and so on—the details of trade agreements are nearly inconsequential. In fact, in the late 1990s, just after the adoption of NAFTA, the United States saw some of the strongest wage growth in four decades. As studies by researchers at the Congressional Research Service and the Peterson Institute for International Economics have shown, any disruption to the labor market caused by NAFTA was dwarfed by other considerations, especially technological change. And even when trade has cost jobs, as with the China shock, the effect did not depend on the particulars of any trade deal. There was and is no U.S. trade agreement with China, just the “most favored nation” status the country was granted when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001—a status that it would have been hard to deny China, given the country’s massive and growing economy. What really

mattered was the mere fact of China’s emergence as an economic powerhouse. Critics of trade are also dead wrong when they argue that U.S. agreements have expanded the trade deficit. In fact, it’s the result of borrowing. As economists have long understood, trade deficits emerge whenever a country spends more than it earns, and trade surpluses arise whenever a country earns more than it spends. Trade deficits and surpluses are simply the flip side of international borrowing and lending. Some countries, such as the United States, are borrowers. They consume more of others’ goods than they send abroad, and they pay the difference in IOUs (which take the form of foreign investment in U.S. stocks, bonds, and real estate). Other countries, such as Germany, are lenders. They loan money abroad, accruing foreign assets, but receive less in imports than they send in exports. Which country is getting the better end of the deal? It is hard to say. U.S. households enjoy consuming more now, but they will eventually have to repay the debt; German households get returns on their investments abroad, but they forgo consumption in the present. What this means is that if policymakers wish to reduce the U.S. trade deficit—and for now, it is not alarmingly large— they should reduce borrowing, which they can accomplish by shrinking the budget deficit. Instead, policymakers are moving in the opposite direction: the budget deficit has swelled in recent years, especially after the 2017 tax cuts. The new U.S. tariffs, meanwhile, have done nothing to improve the trade deficit. That came as no surprise to economists.

THE PRICE OF PROTECTIONISM As easily debunked as these myths about trade are, they clearly

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Printing business run by Hispanic family. (Getty)

Most economists believe that technological change is a far more important factor than international trade in explaining the disappointing outcomes in American labor markets.

have a powerful hold on policymakers. That is troubling not merely for what it reflects about the state of public discourse; it also has profound real-world implications. As they lambast trade, politicians are increasingly reaching for protectionist policies. Yet for American workers, such measures only add insult to injury, making their lives even more precarious. They do so in four distinct ways. First and foremost, tariffs act as regressive taxes on consumption. Although the Trump administration likes to claim that foreigners pay the price of tariffs, in truth, the costs are passed along to consumers, who must pay more for the imports they buy. (By this past spring, the cost of the trade war that began in 2018 exceeded 400$ per year for the average U.S. household.) Beyond that, tariffs fall disproportionately on the poor, both because the poor consume more of their income and because a higher share of their spending goes to heavily tariffed products, such as food and clothing. That is one reason why progressives in the early twentieth century, outraged by the inequality of the Gilded Age, pushed for moving away from tariffs and toward a federal income tax: it was widely recognized that tariffs largely spared the rich at the expense of the poor. Now, the reverse is happening. After having championed tax cuts that disproportionately benefited well-off Americans, the administration has tried to collect more revenue from regressive taxes on trade. Second, tariffs and trade wars wreak havoc in U.S. labor markets by raising costs for American companies. Many large U.S. manufacturers are heavily dependent on imports. Boeing is a top U.S. exporter, but it is also a major importer, relying on crucial parts from around the world. General Motors now pays over 1$ billion in annual tariffs, no doubt one factor behind the company’s recent decision to shutter a plant in Ohio. When tariffs

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interrupt global supply chains, they disadvantage U.S. companies relative to foreign ones. If the goal is to make the United States a more internationally competitive place to locate jobs and direct investment, protectionism is a completely backward approach. Third, trading partners do not sit on their hands when Washington raises tariffs on their products. Already, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Europeans have slapped serious retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods. The victims of these measures include soybean farmers in Iowa and Minnesota (who have lost market share to Canada as Chinese buyers look elsewhere) and whiskey distillers in Kentucky and Tennessee (who have seen their exports to Europe and elsewhere plummet). Finally, trade wars harm the global economy and U.S. trading partners, weakening Washington’s network of alliances and jeopardizing the cooperation required to deal with pressing international problems. Recent meetings of the G7- and the G20have been dominated by discussions aimed at diffusing trade conflicts, distracting precious diplomatic attention from climate change and nuclear nonproliferation. It is easy to take peace and international cooperation for granted, but they are prerequisites for the success of the U.S. economy in the decades ahead. The world is witnessing another rise in economic nationalism, which makes it easy for politicians and publics to embrace nationalist tendencies in other spheres. It is worth remembering that after the last era of globalization came to a halt, what followed was the Great Depression and World War II.

PEOPLE POWER Protectionism is harmful for most American workers, but even more destructive are policies that make the United States less welcoming to immigrants. Setting aside the Trump administration’s actions against refugees and the undocumented—a serious moral stain on the country—its efforts to limit immigration are also economically harmful. Immigration has long been an enormous boon for the U.S. economy. Study after study has shown that it is good for economic growth, innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation and that almost all economic classes within the United States benefit from it. Even though only 14 percent of the current U.S. population is foreign-born, immigrants create a disproportionate number of businesses. Fifty-five percent of the United States’

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1$ billion startups were founded or co-founded by immigrants, and more than 40 percent of the Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants or their children. In recent decades, immigrants have accounted for more than 50 percent of the U.S.-affiliated academics who have won Nobel Prizes in scientific fields. Immigrants also provide countless skills that complement those of native-born American workers. Highly educated foreigners with technological skills (such as computer programmers) make up for persistent shortages in the U.S. high-tech sector, and they complement native-born workers who have more cultural fluency or communication skills. Less skilled immigrants also fill labor shortages in areas such as agriculture and eldercare, where it is often difficult to find native-born workers willing to take jobs. There is little evidence that immigration lowers the wages of most native-born workers, although there is some limited evidence that it may cut into the wages or hours of two groups: high school dropouts and prior waves of immigrants. In the case of high school dropouts, however, there are far better ways to help them (such as strengthening the educational system) than restricting immigration. As for prior waves of immigrants, given how substantial their economic gains from migration are—often, they earn large multiples of what they would have made back home—it’s hard to justify their subsequent slower wage growth as a policy concern. Immigrants have another economic benefit: they relieve demographic pressures on public budgets. In many rich countries, population growth has slowed to such an extent that the government’s fiscal burden of caring for the elderly is enormous. In Japan, there are eight retired people for every ten workers; in Italy, there are five retirees for every ten workers. In the United States and Canada, although the budget pressures of an aging population remain, higher immigration levels contribute to a

Immigration has long been an enormous boon for the U.S. economy. Study after study has shown that it is good for economic growth, innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation and that almost all economic classes within the United States benefit from it.

healthier ratio of three retirees for every ten workers. It also helps that recent immigrants have above-average fertility rates. Many objections to immigration are cultural in nature, and these, too, have little grounding in reality. There is no evidence that immigrants, even undocumented ones, increase crime rates. Nor is there evidence that they refuse to integrate; in fact, they are assimilating faster than previous generations of immigrants did. Given the many benefits from immigration, greater restrictions on it pose several threats to American workers. Already, the United States is beginning to lose foreign talent, which will hurt economic growth. For two years straight, the number of foreign students studying in U.S. universities has fallen, which is a particular shame since these students disproportionately study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—areas in which the country faces large skills shortages. Encouraging such students to stay in the country after graduation would help the United States maintain its edge in innovation and promote economic growth. Instead, the Trump administration is discouraging foreign students with visa delays and a constant stream of nationalist rhetoric. Restricting immigration also harms the economy in other ways. It keeps out job creators and people whose skills complement those of native-born workers. And it increases the pressure on the budget, since restrictions will lead to a higher ratio of retirees to workers. A more sensible immigration policy would make it easier for foreign students to stay in the United States after graduation, admit more immigrants through lotteries, accept more refugees, and provide a compassionate path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. Promoting U.S.

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A farmer holds soybean from the 2018 harvest, on May ,5 2019, at her farm in Scribber, Nebraska. Earlier last year China imposed temporary tariffs on pork and soy coming from the US. (Getty)

interests means more immigration, not less.

WHAT WORKS While reducing trade and immigration damages the prospects of American workers, free trade and increased immigration are not enough to ensure their prosperity. Indeed, despite decades of relative openness to trade and immigration, wages remain stagnant and inequality high. This has dire implications. As the economist Heather Boushey has argued, inequality undermines the U.S. economy by inhibiting competition and stifling the supply of talent and ideas. Unmet economic expectations also fuel voter discontent and political polarization, making it easy to blame outsiders and embrace counterproductive policies. For the sake of both the country’s economy and its politics, economic growth needs to be much more inclusive. To achieve that, the United States needs, above all, a tax system that ensures that economic prosperity lifts all boats. The Earned Income Tax Credit is a powerful tool in that regard. A credit targeted at lower-income workers that grows as those workers earn more, the EITC subsidizes their work, making each hour of it more lucrative. This credit should be expanded in size, it should reach further up the income distribution, and it should be made more generous for childless workers—changes that would particularly benefit those lower- and middle-class Americans who have seen their wages stagnate in recent decades. This policy would work well alongside an increase in the federal minimum wage, which would help combat the increased market power of

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employers relative to employees. Beyond these steps, the federal government should set up a wage insurance program, which could make up some of the difference in lower wages for workers who have been displaced by foreign competition, technological change, domestic competition, natural disasters, or other forces. The federal government should also make greater investments in infrastructure, education, and research, all of which would benefit workers by increasing their productivity and thus their incomes. And it should strengthen the safety net, making improved health-care access and affordability a top priority. None of this will be cheap, of course. To raise revenue, the U.S. tax system needs to be modernized. For corporations, Congress should curb international tax avoidance, closing loopholes and reforming minimum taxes so as to raise government revenues without chasing profits offshore. Congress should also strengthen individual and estate taxation, and it can do so without resorting to extreme rates. For the income tax, it can cap or end various deductions and preferences; for the estate tax, it can raise rates and reduce exceptions. And it can beef up enforcement of both. Congress should also enact a long-overdue carbon tax. Coupled with the other policies, a carbon tax could raise substantial revenue without harming poor and middle-class Americans, and it would fight climate change. Finally, policymakers need to reckon with corporations’ growing market power. They should modernize antitrust laws to put more emphasis on labor and modernize labor laws to suit the nature of work today, making sure that they adequately protect those in the service sector and those in the gig economy. Although large companies are often good for consumers, their market power narrows the share of the economy that ends up in the hands of workers. So the balance of power between companies and their workers needs to be recalibrated from both ends: policies should empower labor movements and combat companies’ abuses of market power. In the end, global markets have many wonderful benefits, but they need to be accompanied by strong domestic policies to ensure that the benefits of international trade (as well as technological change and other forces) are felt by all. Otherwise, economic discontent festers, empowering nationalist politicians who offer easy answers and peddle wrong-headed policies. American workers have every reason to expect more from the economy, but restrictions on trade and immigration ultimately damage their interests. What those who care about reducing inequality and helping workers must realize, then, is that protectionism and nativism set back their cause. Not only do these policies have direct negative effects; they also distract from more effective policies that go straight to the problem at hand. On both sides of the aisle, it’s time for politicians to stop vilifying outsiders and focus instead on policies that actually solve the very real problems afflicting so many Americans. This article was originally published in the November/ December 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine and on ForeignAffairs.com.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1775- November- 22/11/2019

Ancient Egypt comes to the Kingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Road www.majalla.com

Jeremy Corbyn: From ‘Unelectable’ to ‘Corbynmania, and Back Again? Majalla - London A fixture of British politics for four decades, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was born in Wiltshire in 1949. His father David, an electrical engineer and mother Naomi, a maths teacher, were both peacecampaigners and Labour Party members, who met at a London rally supporting the cause of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. After attending a grammar school in Shropshire - where he was one of only two Labour-supporting students and left with two E-grade A Levels - and briefly a technical college in North London, he volunteered abroad in Jamaica and Latin America. Corbyn had a middle-class childhood, spending much of his youth in a sprawling manor home in a Conservative-voting village in the West Midlands. He learned of his politics at the family dinner table where left-wing causes and social justice were frequent topics of debate. Despite his comfortable upbringing, Corbyn himself joined the Labour party at the tender age of 16 and he was an active member of the Young Socialists and the League Against Cruel Sports as a teenager while still at school. He was elected to Parliament in the 1983 general election for the safe Labour seat of Islington North, a working-class area close to central London. From there, he backed every significant left-wing cause and championed human rights and pacifist causes. He was also a serial rebel against his party’s leadership in more than 500 votes in the House of Commons over the last three decades - serving as a thorn in the side of centrist Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, notably over the Iraq war - which he voted against and chaired the Stop the War Coalition. He was active in campaigns for the UK

to give up its nuclear weapons and was a consistent opponent of the Middle East policies supported by successive U.S. and Israeli governments. He experienced the wrath of the Labour party early in his 32 year career on the back benches, when he invited two former IRA prisoners to speak at Westminster, two weeks after the IRA had bombed Brighton’s Grand Hotel during the Conservative conference - coming close to killing Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. Later on, it would be his willingness to share platforms with representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah, who he famously described the groups as his “friends” (a statement he later said he regretted), that would put him at the centre of controversy. When challenged, he insists he does not share their views but that peace will never be achieved without talking to all sides. Corbyn never sought—and was never offered—any kind of ministerial office during Labour’s 13 years in power (2010–1997) under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But despite being sidelined by his party and the House of Commons, a lifetime building up protest credentials endeared him to waves of young voters disillusioned with mainstream politics. Labour's poor performance at the 2015 general election prompted Ed Miliband to resign as party leader, triggering a contest to find a successor. The party’s rules required wouldbe candidates to be nominated by 35 MPs (out of Labour’s postelection total of 232), and Corbyn could muster the support of only 20. However, in the hours before the close of nominations on June 15, at least 14 additional MPs who did not endorse Corbyn’s policies or actually want him to win agreed to nominate him in an effort to ensure a wider debate in the leadership contest. He was

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an outsider candidate in the race but his campaign suddenly took off as his uncompromising political outlook inspired many of the party’s members and supporters who were disillusioned by New Labour and attracted thousands of new ones who spread his message of social media, using the hashtag #Jezwecan. In a remarkable revival in a brand of left-wing Labour politics which looked to have been consigned to history, he went from relative obscurity, to an unlikely political star and won the leadership with ease, securing 59.5 percent support, three times that of any other candidate. Corbyn’s journey as leader of the opposition has been a bumpy ride. He has faced sharp criticism over accusations of anti-Semitism within the Labour party. Although he has condemned antisemitism, he has been criticised for some of his past associations and his weak response to the allegations. Endless infighting eventually lead to a leadership crisis in the summer of 2016 following the EU referendum, but they failed to unseat him. Corbyn then went on to lead the party to a much better than expected result in the 2017 snap general election. He made the case for a different kind of government in line with principles he has held since he first entered politics more than 40 years ago, drawing large enthusiastic crowds on the campaign trail and attracting waves of new supporters, especially among the young, which further cemented his authority. Corbyn has been a Euroscepctic for most of his political life. He opposed membership of the thenEEC at the 1975 referendum and happily stood on the 1983 Labour manifesto calling for withdrawal. He has been suspicious of an organisation where he believes unelected Brussels bureaucrats have huge influence - including initiating legislation. But

his views seem to have evolved - accommodating, the aspirations of some of the newer, younger proEU members. He supported remain in the 2016 referendum but has been criticised by some inside and outside the party for what they considered his “lukewarm” campaigning and for changing his stance on the EU many times since the referendum. As it stands, the Labour party are pledging to hold

Labour still pledge to hold a second referendum if they win in the elections next month, but will try to negotiate a withdrawal agreement with the EU first and will implement whatever option the public vote for. Ahead of next month's general election, a new poll by Ipsos MORI suggested that Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition party leader of the past

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45 years. Corbyn’s troubles are most visible in Labour’s northern heartlands according to recent YouGov polling. In the north-west, the party scored 30 per cent, down 25 from its 2017 general election result. Boris Johnson’s Tories are polling at 33 per cent. Even in London there was a sizeable drop for Labour, which is down from 55 per cent in 2017 to 39.

ulture

Why You Don’t Need to be a ‘Star Wars’ Fan to Enjoy ‘The Mandalorian’ Latest Star Wars Instalment has Wide Appeal

by Tracy Brown “The Mandalorian” follows the story of a gunslinging bounty hunter clad in sleek armor, taking jobs on the outskirts of the galaxy. But don’t worry if you haven’t the faintest idea what a Mandalorian is: Showrunner Jon Favreau assures us that the first ever live-action “Star Wars” series, premiering Nov. 12 with the launch of Disney’s standalone streaming service, Disney+, requires no prior knowledge in order to dive in. “It’s an invitation into (‘Star Wars’) in a very pure way,” said Favreau, whose Disney credentials include directing “The Lion King” and “Iron Man.” “It’s the first time since ‘Episode IV’” — the 1977 original — “where it’s inviting people into a whole new cast of characters that doesn’t require any prerequisite understanding of the world.” Starring “Game of Thrones” alum Pedro Pascal as the titular bounty hunter, “The Mandalorian” takes place a few years after the events of “Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi,” the final film of George Lucas’ original trilogy. That film saw the Rebel Alliance bring down the Galactic Empire, decades before the adventures

of the next generation of heroes picks up in “The Force Awakens.” Like any good bounty hunter, the Mandalorian, or Mando, is just trying to do his job without drawing unnecessary attention to himself. The cast also includes Gina Carano as an exRebel soldier named Cara Dune and Carl Weathers as the leader of the bounty hunter guild who helps put Mando in contact with a high-paying client (played by Werner Herzog). Favreau specifically wanted to explore the period after the defeat of an oppressive regime that ruled through fear and military might, when the galaxy is done celebrating its newfound freedom. “What would really happen with a strong, tyrannical central government disappearing? At first it’s wonderful, because it’s freedom. But then sometimes freedom gets sloppy,” said Favreau. “Like after the fall of the Roman Empire, a lot of the world descended into darker times. So it was interesting to explore what the ‘Star Wars’ version of that would be.” Also part of the show’s brain trust is Dave Filoni, a “Star Wars” veteran known for his work on animated entries in the franchise. The writer and executive producer explained that his

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Pedro Pascal arrives for the Premiere Of Disney+›s «The Mandalorian» held at El Capitan Theatre on November 2019 ,13 in Los Angeles, California. (Getty)

Set in the «Star Wars» universe, «The Mandalorian» will be one of the original series available at the launch of Disney›s new streaming service, Disney+. (Lucasfilm Ltd.)

contributions to the series included assessing when to incorporate elements that already existed in the “Star Wars” canon, and when it made more sense to create something new. Like the original “Star Wars,” “The Mandalorian” is inspired by westerns and samurai films and will see Mando travel from town to town, or planet to planet, in the more “lawless” outskirts of the galaxy in search of his mark. The line between good and evil will be much less clear than in the films. Favreau and Filoni agree that part of the original “Star Wars’” appeal was how its sci-fi and fantasy elements were rooted in real history and experiences. “George (Lucas) taught me first and foremost that you have to have a good story with characters you believe in,” said Filoni.

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Showrunner Jon Favreau assures us that the first ever live-action “Star Wars” series, premiering Nov. 12 with the launch of Disney’s standalone streaming service, Disney+, requires no prior knowledge in order to dive in. “There were no ‘Star Wars’ fans when ‘Star Wars’ first came out. That wasn’t even a thing.” Originally published in the LA Times

ealth

Is it Safe to Go Vegan in Older Age?

The Diet takes Vegetarianism to the Extreme and Poses a Risk for Nutrient Deficiency by Harvard Health Letter

VEGETARIAN DIET BENEFITS

If tofu turkey and meatless meatloaf are on your holiday menu this year, you may have made the switch to a vegetarian diet, eliminating at least some animal protein. But how much animal protein can you safely cut out of your diet?

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Among the many types of vegetarian diets, three are particularly common: a pescatarian diet allows seafood; a lacto-ovo diet allows dairy products and eggs; finally, a vegan diet allows no seafood, dairy, or other animal products. • lots of fiber, which helps prevent constipation, lowers LDL (bad) cholesterol, and controls blood sugar and weight • low saturated fat compared with a non-vegetarian diet. Compared with meat-containing diets, the health benefits of all vegetarian diets are well documented: lower rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. The picture isn›t completely straightforward: a study published Sept. 2019 ,4, by The BMJ found that along with lower rates of heart attacks, vegetarians had higher rates of hemorrhagic (bleeding) stroke, compared with meat eaters. The increase equaled about three more cases of hemorrhagic stroke per 1,000 people over 10 years. Most other studies have not identified such a risk.

VEGAN DIET BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES

All of these approaches typically include lots of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and healthy oils. These plant-based foods contain several healthy components: • a wide variety of antioxidants, which have antiinflammatory properties that are linked to better health

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If plant-based foods are generally healthier than animal-based foods, should you consider a vegan diet, banishing all animal products? It seems like something to consider, with the increasing amount of vegan foods now sold in grocery stores and restaurants. Whether a vegan diet has even greater benefits than a less restrictive vegetarian diet is unclear. «Because the vegan diet is restrictive, it can be a challenge to maintain over the long term,» says Kathy McManus, director of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women›s Hospital. A study published in April 2019 in The Journal

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of Nutrition found that a vegan diet slightly outperformed a pescatarian diet and a lacto-ovo diet when it came to the amount of antioxidants and omega3- fatty acids in the blood, and that a vegan diet significantly outperformed diets with meat. However, this is just one study. «Most studies don›t separate vegan and vegetarian diets, so we don›t have a lot of evidence comparing one vegetarian diet to the other,» says McManus. A vegan diet also comes with health risks, especially for older adults, although you can take action to counteract those risks. In particular, McManus notes, when you cut out animal products, you may come up short on certain nutrients: Calcium. Calcium is important to many functions, especially bone, dental, heart, nerve, and blood health. Protein. We need protein to build strong muscles, bones, and skin -- particularly as we age and lose muscle and bone mass and have a harder time healing from wounds. Vitamin B12. This vitamin comes only from animal-based foods. B12 is crucial to our DNA, red blood cell formation, new cell growth, glucose metabolism, and maintaining our nervous system and thinking skills. In addition, you may have trouble getting enough calories on a highly restricted diet. If you don›t give your body enough fuel, you may become tired or malnourished.

AVOIDING DEFICIENCIES «You have to be selective when choosing a plantbased diet to ensure that you get enough calories

A vegan diet also comes with health risks, especially for older adults.

and nutrients,» McManus says. Here›s how to avoid the potential pitfalls of a vegan diet -- or, for that matter, any other type of vegetarian diet: Avoid calcium deficiency. Eat plant-based foods that are rich in calcium: almonds, dark leafy greens (kale, spinach), figs, tofu, and oranges. A medium-sized orange has about 50 milligrams (mg) of calcium; a cup of cooked collard greens has 268 mg of calcium. Aim for 1,000 to 1,200 mg of calcium per day. Get enough protein. Eat protein-rich plant foods: soy products (tofu, tempeh, and edamame), legumes (beans, lentils), nuts (walnuts, almonds), chia seeds, and spirulina (blue or green algae). For example, a cup of canned navy beans has 20 grams of protein. Chia seeds have about 4.5 grams of protein per ounce, and sunflower seeds have about 6 grams per ounce. You need about 7 grams of protein daily for every 20 pounds of body weight. Avoid vitamin B12 deficiency. Try B-12enriched vegan foods such as fortified plant milks (like almond or soy milk) or fortified cereals. McManus

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By all means, take it slowly. «Get rid of red meat, and then poultry, and then dairy products and fish,» McManus says, «But don›t feel that you have to eliminate all of them at once.» it slowly. «Get rid of red meat, and then poultry, and then dairy products and fish,» McManus says, «But don›t feel that you have to eliminate all of them at once.»

says you may need to take a B12 supplement while on a vegan diet. We also advise that your doctor check your blood level of vitamin B12 regularly.

HOW SHOULD YOU START? Get the okay from your doctor before starting a vegan diet, and then seek advice from a registered dietitian, who can tailor an eating plan to your nutritional needs. Combine plant food sources for the maximum amount of vitamins and nutrients. Soups, salads, and smoothies with lots of different kinds of foods will help you maximize calories and nutrients. And by all means, take

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Ancient Egypt comes to the King’s Road It’s been a Long Wait, but the King of Egyptian Chic has Finally Arrived in London by Bryn Haworth WHAT’S IN A NAME? AN ENTIRE SOAP OPERA, APPARENTLY. I have always had a problem with the way popular culture has treated the reputation of the most famous of all the pharaohs. It simply lacks decorum, in my view, to refer to the boy king as Tut. Why the familiarity? The Americans seem to have come up with the idea, no doubt to avoid the nightmare of spelling his name in full, but also because, well, they’re a republic – bowing and scraping to monarchs ought to be something they grew out of long ago. And yet, I can’t help feeling there’s something more than mere disdain for monarchy going on here. Could it be that the finery and makeup are considered effeminate, and that therefore Tut cannot be taken seriously? If this had been Alexander the Great, I doubt they would have referred to him as King Alex, although he did have that tranny phase in Persia. When Tut took the fashion industry by storm in the Twenties, it fell to the flappers to wear the mascara and beaded headpieces. You rarely saw men of the era sporting eyeliner unless they were Rudolph Valentino.

Aside from the lack of proper respect, I have never been sure how to pronounce Tut. On the face of it, one tends to opt for the ‘tut, tut’ of mild admonishment, of a kind the boy king would have been used to hearing every time he knocked over another vase of lotus flowers with his flail. One can rush to judgement here, but you try walking sideways and avoiding breakages. However, if we treat Tut as a literal abbreviation, it actually gives us King Toot, which is even more infantilising than Tut. You can’t help picturing Toot, as a tot, annoying the otherwise serene Nefertiti (not his real mum, by the way, just one of his dad’s wives) by fooling around with the ceremonial trumpets. Life in the palace must have been wearing for everyone concerned. The pharaoh, it has to be said, would not have been particularly fazed

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Everything before me now was for the eyes of the gods only. None of the treasures here were intended to be touched by the light of day again, and the curators had almost stayed true to this intention.

Christian Dior liked the beard

by discussions over his name. Even in his short lifetime, there was some confusion about it, and his father had been just as bad, starting out as Amenhotep IV, meaning ‘Amun is satisfied’. He had to change this when, five years into his reign, he well and truly dissatisfied Amun by declaring that the Aten (the disk of the sun) was the only god worthy of reverence. Some polite people called this monolatristic. Others, more forthright, called it henotheistic, and there were those who didn’t mince their words and accused him of outright monotheism. In truth, he probably wasn’t that interested in the theological niceties; he just wanted to annoy the priests in Thebes, who had become too rich and powerful. Whatever his motives, Amenhotep duly changed his name to Akhenaten, which was no less of a mouthful, but had the advantage of meaning ‘effective for Aten’. In this way, he could force the priests to address him by what amounted to a short sentence and

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really rub their noses in it. After changing his moniker in this tyrannical fashion, Akhenaten, the ‘pharaoh-formerlyknown-as’, decided to name a son he’d just sired by ‘the younger lady’ (not Nefertiti), Tutankhaten. This meant ‘living image of Aten’. Now, given that Akhenaten saw himself as the image of Aten, if not Aten in the flesh, the name basically confirmed that the child had his father’s eyes, and it was another one in the eye for those pampered priests. Then the pharaoh shifted operations from Thebes and founded his own capital named, you guessed it, Akhetaten, ‘the horizon of Aten’, though people now prefer to call it Amarna. What had perhaps begun as a trivial spat, just a bit of a turf war with the priests, turned into a comprehensive triumph for Akhenaten that led to an overhaul of the entire state religion and imperilled the peaceful functioning of the Egyptian state. There’s a lesson in there for leave voters. Later, when his son failed to provide an heir to extend the eighteenth dynasty, the revenge of the nineteenth dynasty would be swift. Akhenaten was denounced as an enemy and ‘that criminal’. His statues were destroyed. For obvious reasons, he wasn’t even referred to by name unless absolutely necessary, and the scribes had their work cut out omitting to mention his reign in the court records. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. What, I hear you ask, about the son by the ‘younger lady’, this Tutankhaten we’ve never heard of? Once the heretical pharaoh had met whoever his maker turned out to be, there was a brief reign by someone called Smenkhkare. This, some Egyptologists speculate, may actually have been Nefertiti. The ancients were not keen on allowing women to become pharaoh, and if you think what they did, eventually, to Akhenaten was bad, you should see how they treated the memory of

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Hatshepsut, who had even gone to the lengths of wearing a beard and, some say, dressing as a man, simply to pass as regal. Anyway, we shall probably never know if Smenkhkare was male or female. What we do know is that he/she was succeeded by the apple of Akhenaten’s eye, one Tutankhaten, though his throne name was Nebkheperure, obviously. Presumably, they only called him that when he was sitting. This, however, he was unable to do comfortably, as there was great unrest in the kingdom: the gods were not happy after their relegation by his father to a league below that of the sun. We cannot be sure whether it was the result of advice he received or on his own initiative, but Tutankhaten, otherwise occasionally known as Nebkheperure, decided enough was enough. He changed his name to Tutankhamun, and lo, there was rejoicing in the land. Now, since the whole point of kinghood was to make sure one’s name lived forever, something his father had demonstrably failed to do, it was prudent to say the least for Tutankhamun to get this little matter of what he was called sorted out. It’s true that he went around restoring some of the damage done to the temples by his petulant father, but surely his big idea, and the crowning glory of his reign, was to arrange by the ancient equivalent of deed poll (a royal proclamation) to dissociate himself from his dad’s appalling public image and to butter up the priests. He moved back to Thebes and to Memphis, abandoning his father’s city, and everyone said what a good, pious boy he was. As for his father and whoever had taken over in the meantime, the least said about them the better. Order was restored, the republicans could still call him Tut if

It is as if the boy king will triumph over death – this is not just a tomb, after all, but a magical time machine – through sheer arrogant contempt for his enemies.

they insisted, and everyone was happy. Which all goes to prove that, despite the irreverent newspaper headlines and the popular songs – even President Hoover’s German shepherd dog was called King Tut – the pharaoh’s name was a deadly serious matter. According to the Book of the Dead, the manual for the afterlife that has come down to us from the ancient Egyptians, it could mean the untimely interruption of a deceased pharaoh’s paradisal existence if their name wasn’t uttered any more, let alone erased from the records: ‘To have a name (Ren) was to have an identity. If your name was lost, you were no longer a distinct person and would cease to exist. As a result, tomb owners inscribed their names all over their tombs and texts begged visitors to say their name and so help them to flourish in the afterlife. The name of the pharaoh was magically protected by the cartouche. One Egyptian myth tells that Isis gained power over Ra himself by learning his secret name. It was possible to attack a person in the afterlife by destroying their name’ (Ancient Egypt Online). The misfortune that befell Tutankhamun in his life, leading to his premature death, has been a matter for feverish speculation. Was it a fall from his chariot? A cranial injury to his mummy seemed to suggest this, until they concluded that it was the botched handiwork of his embalmers. He is thought to have been a weakling, possibly forced

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Large granite sphinx bearing likeness of pharaoh Hatshepsut

Quartzite statue of Tut, then Ay, then Horemheb

to carry a stick. Was he brought low by an infection in his foot? Or by an assassin? What we can say for sure is that the succeeding dynasts did everything they could to obliterate his memory, owing to his filial guilt by association, and that in so doing they must have known they were attacking his immortal soul. Like Elvis, so long as he was spoken about, the king was in danger of being spotted, and not just in Memphis. He hadn’t yet entirely left the building. He was still on the loose. So, quite ruthlessly, they removed Tutankhamun from the records. Like ancient Stalinists, they airbrushed him from history without a thought for his afterlife. Believe me, you don’t ever want to cross an Egyptian priest. Job done, they (and more importantly, the grave robbers) were free to forget him. They even repurposed the statues, by changing the names on the plinths. When a new tomb was being constructed nearby, for Ramesses VI, the rubble ended up covering the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb. Already, the whole sorry business had been forgotten. Aha, I thought, so that was how the bling managed to survive the usual attention of the thieves. A kind of collective amnesia. Obscurity was the key to Tutankhamun’s fame. He would have remained nameless without it. THE KING’S ROAD On an autumn evening in London, some three thousand three hundred and thirty years (give or take a year) after the boy king was consigned to oblivion, some very posh-looking courtiers lined up for an audience. It had been a very cold, wet autumn so far, but on this particular night, as the

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queue formed outside the Saatchi Gallery, a little bit of Egyptian warmth seemed to be escaping from the interior, out through the tall columns of the portico, to greet the chattering throng. There was a low buzz of anticipation. A woman in a gold sequined dress glittered in the subdued light. Otherwise, everyone was rather sombre, the men in lounge suits and the women in long black dresses. The glow of gold sequins against this background of black was calculated to make Tutankhamun feel right at home. It was the King’s Road after all. The acme of fashion. It’s what he would have wanted. Besides, there was something funereal about the black suits, serving to frame the promise of eternity scintillating in the gold dress. Like everyone else, I’d been drawn there by the irresistible fame of the man they tried to snuff out, whose refulgent allure had already seen them queueing round the block in Paris only a week before, and whose effortlessly glitzy Ba (or soul) has fetched up here, in dreary London, in the shape of the gorgeous artefacts from his private collection. Some of them have never left Egypt before, and – after touring the world one last time – none of them will ever leave it again. So, a sharp intake of breath, darling. The camera loves you. Prepare to become drunk on beauty, and take notes, because no one, but no one, does aesthetic intoxication quite like the ancient Egyptians. Once I got inside, it was hard to believe that the beauty and splendour of the boy king’s stuff was supposed to remain hidden in a dark tomb, for ever. They must have had complete faith in the Book of the Dead and the entire project of immortalising their kings; anything less, and it would all have felt like an appalling waste of effort. There is a story that Donatello took obsessive care over the backside of a statue of David, I think it was, that was destined to adorn the exterior wall of a building. “Why bother,” he was asked, “since no one will be able to see the back of the statue?” A lesser man might have been rattled by this question, particularly if, like Donatello, they were accustomed to fending off accusations that the backside was the only part of the anatomy they cared about. Unruffled, the sculptor smiled indulgently at his interrogator. “God can see it,” he replied. Everything before me now was for the eyes of the

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gods only. None of the treasures here were intended to be touched by the light of day again, and the curators had almost stayed true to this intention. The gallery’s rooms were shrouded in darkness. Only through gloom, as our eyes adjusted, were we able to see the objects, thanks to a bare minimum of illumination. For the makers of these objects, there must have been a kind of sanctity in darkness itself. The man who uncovered it all broke into that sanctity. His immediate transgression, even before he removed the contents of the pharaoh’s tomb, was to let the first ray of sunlight in on the mystery. The effect of the semi-darkness was to make me feel slightly transgressive too. Judging by the hushed voices, I was not alone. Incredible to think that we were only able to see this because the first ‘robber’ to reach it had been a British archaeologist working on a hunch. Not even a very good archaeologist, if one believes the opinion of Flinders Petrie, an excellent archaeologist, who employed him on an excavation of Akhenaten’s old city. Petrie liked the boy: Carter was roughly the same age as Tutankhamun had been when he died. It was the first time the callow young Englishman had heard about the pharaoh. Petrie considered him “a good-natured lad, whose interest is entirely in painting and natural history,” adding: “It is of no use to me to work him up as an excavator.” Oh, the irony of it. If the priests were right

According to the Book of the Dead, the manual for the afterlife that has come down to us from the ancient Egyptians, it could mean the untimely interruption of a deceased pharaoh’s paradisal existence if their name wasn’t uttered any more, let alone erased from the records.

about names having to be repeated to ensure immortality, then poor old Flinders will just have to make do with the fond recollections of fellow Egyptologists. Howard Carter was destined for greater things. When his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, asked if he could see anything beyond the sealed door, Carter replied “Yes, wonderful things!” They are still just as wonderful today and, like Carter, one can barely see them at first, let alone photograph them: many of the finest pieces are in gilded wood that seems to glow with its own light, yet in photographs the rich lustre of the gold is replaced by an over-lit glare of yellow, and all the detail is lost. Unable to capture the sight with a camera, one is forced to savour the moment, or else store it in the memory. Tutankhamun’s features and svelte body, striding or standing sentinel, are everywhere, glowing gold. At one point we see him hunting hippos, in another guise he guards the entrance to his own tomb, tall and black as the fertile silt of the Nile. The smaller figurines have the ambiguous gender we associate with the pharaohs. One representation in particular looks exactly like a young woman, with the hips and breasts of an hour glass figure. In other instances, we sense the machismo of an ancient monarch, enacted (like monarchs throughout the centuries) in the hunt. This is the warrior who turns on the local fauna and destroys them for his pleasure. But it was not just hippos that needed to fear him. Nubians are trampled underfoot. Captives are depicted on objects that have nothing to do with warfare or hunting. It is as if the boy king will triumph over death – this is not

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Twiggy, looking very understated, in the King’s Road, 1966

Letting the light in on a mystery

just a tomb, after all, but a magical time machine – through sheer arrogant contempt for his enemies. And yet this machismo has to coexist with the pampered effeteness of a boy reared in unimaginable luxury. Toy skiffs idle on invisible rivers, small enough for a boy to sail on the pond in his local park. When needed, they will transform into fullsized boats for the pharaoh’s spirit to make its way to paradise. Elsewhere, he is depicted as a winged sphinx. In the introductory film, the closing image is of Tutankhamun taking flight. But not yet. Snug, like a swaddled babe, deep inside his multi-layered Russian doll of sarcophagi, which are carved in his likeness, the boy king who died around 1,326BC is still dreaming of becoming a butterfly, and in strange, eerie sympathy, the sphinx-butterfly is dreaming of becoming him. There are many gorgeous treasures, such as the inlaid cabinet on slender legs or the alabaster vessels faintly translucent in the gloom, but one object lured me back, again and again, and it’s a fan. Not the entire fan, but the wooden pole and golden lotus of the part where the ostrich feathers would have been mounted. The carving is too exquisite for a smartphone camera to pick up. You really have to linger over the carvings and look at them. Here we see remarkable animation, as if the ancient Egyptians had never specialised in stylised, rather stiff figures walking among hieroglyphs. Tutankhamun is dashing along in a chariot, firing arrows as he

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does so, and in front of his vehicle a hound tears along at full pelt, legs stretched before and behind, almost visibly salivating. To the right, the quarry of the king, are two confused looking ostriches who will die for the sake of the fan industry. One of them has a bolt right though its back and turns in agony towards its tormentor, the other seems to be mortally wounded and is already on the ground. They are not very accurately pictured, but you can just make out their stumpy, useless wings and the tail feathers the pharaoh is after. His chariot is pulled, rather alarmingly, by two rearing horses. The air is thick with hieroglyphs, but if we look closely at the hieroglyph that seems to be striding along behind the chariot, we see that it is humanoid and carrying its own fan, crested with ostrich plumes. The scene is a perfect example of the strangely effete machismo that I was describing: even in the heat and haste of the chase, the pharaoh must be cooled by a fan borne by one of his minions, a fan that no doubt depicts another chase, and in that chase another fan, so that we have a fan with a kind of infinite self-reference, as eternal as the chase itself. According to some lurid theories for the king’s death at so early an age, it was a man with a fan who did for him. Tutankhamun’s successor, by the name of Ay, was the ‘Fan-bearer on the Right Side of the King’. This was a very important position, signifying that the bearer of the title had the ear of the ruler. Ay was old by ancient standards, in his sixties by the time Tutankhamun died. He had already been influential over one, perhaps two of the king’s predecessors, a survivor, and the novelists have succumbed to an irresistible temptation to portray him as the villain of the piece. The younger man’s tomb contains a mural depicting Ay, in a leopard’s skin, performing the mysterious Opening of the Mouth ceremony on a statue of Tutankhamun. Or was he just making sure the young king was dead? For such an old man, he looks suspiciously lissom in that leopard skin. Prettier, arguably, than Nefertiti looked in some of her representations. Ay remains, however, a shadowy presence. It is always Nefertiti, with all her charisma, one comes back to, but having marvelled at her bust in Berlin, I was a little disappointed to discover that ‘the beautiful woman has come’ (as her name translates) could

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actually look so frightful, you wouldn’t touch her with a Nilotic barge pole. Ugh, give me Amanda Barrie in a bath filled with asses’ milk any day – yes, I know, that was Cleopatra, not Nefertiti. This rather stern and not so beautiful image may well belong to a later date than the famous bust. Back in the days of her marriage to Akhenaten, when the family moved to Akhetaten and adopted a different religion, she and her spouse were the only true receivers of the Aten’s life-giving rays, which they then dispensed to the people. They must have felt like they had the costa del sol all to themselves, beaches (well, sand) stretching as far as the eye could see, and for a woman of the elite class, lying around on a sun lounger was a way of displaying piety. Even the temples in Akhetaten were exposed to the sky. After laying off the priests and sculptors in their thousands, now that there was no demand for offerings or idolatrous statues, the royal couple could spend the entire day in peace, catching rays from the disc and, even better, feeling righteous about it. But it couldn’t last. With the death of her husband, the sun worshipper in chief, Nefertiti suddenly had her work cut out. Having done nothing more strenuous than smite the occasional fly with a swatter, she now had to smite the country’s multitudinous enemies. Before long she would become a full-time male impersonator, and thus she would complete the narrative arc from celebrated glamour-puss to hackneyed circus act, a cross between the lion tamer and the bearded lady. By the time she’d smitten her way into an early grave, it was Tutankhamun’s time to take over smiting duties, and when he was worn out by the sheer strain of it all, in stepped the villainous Ay. It’s a good story, but probably not one I could ever verify, since Ay’s short reign was followed by that of Horemheb, and his main contribution to world history was to expunge the part of it containing his immediate predecessors. In the absence of facts, one must resort to scarcely plausible fiction. They say the Aten had male and female characteristics and so, apparently, did its worshippers. Personally, I reckon the Nile contained high levels of oestrogen

(you heard it here first), which was dumped as effluent by the priests to undermine the monarchy – how else to explain that oddly epicene look the royals had? One poignant fact remains undeniable: that a boy king who had been reared in the ways of sun worship, ended up disregarded in a pitch-black cubbyhole, surrounded by objects of bewitching beauty that no one was ever supposed to see. It makes you think, but only for a while. We mortals have our needs. Having supped long on so much forbidden beauty, I began to hunger for actual sustenance. Rumours were abroad that canapés, the food of the twentieth-century gods, were being

The king’s ostrich hunt, which took place near Heliopolis

Nefertiti on a bad day

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be as if Carter had turned to see the entrance of the tomb slowly re-seal itself behind him, and as the crack of African sunlight dwindled, the last rays of the Aten would be accompanied by an ominous voice reciting the words of the Great Hymn: You are in my heart, There is no other who knows you, Only your son, Neferkheprure, Sole-one-of-Re [Akhenaten], Whom you have taught your ways and your might. [Those on] earth come from your hand as you made them. When you have dawned, they live. When you set, they die. Very occult goings-on

served on an upper floor, so I squeezed into a tiny lift to be carried skywards. At least, that was my intention. Instead, along with nine or ten other overdressed guests, including Philip Hammond who had recently quit the Treasury, I descended to the basement. There was a momentary thrill of panic, a sense that things were getting out of control. As we approached the bottom floor, it occurred to me how fitting it would be to get trapped together, held by an invisible force that prevented us from ever leaving the bowels of the building. It would

Did someone mention treasure?

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Then, eternal darkness. Disappointingly, the confusion over the direction of the lift got resolved as soon as the Chancellor of the Exchequer found the buttons and worked out how to operate them. The mummy’s curse failed to materialise and, in a few minutes, I would discover that canapés are indeed the food of the gods, and not as pointless as I’d always imagined. Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh is at the Saatchi Gallery in London till 3 May 2020.