The Fund for the Afghan People appointed a new executive secretary yesterday. 

Guillaume Braidi has replaced Andrea Dall'Olio, who left the organization some months ago.

Thread.

Braidi is a Swiss attorney with a background in finance and corporate law. Here's the biography page (in French) from his law firm in Geneva:

https://www.ptan.ch/team/guillaume-braidi/

He's now the Fund's 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘪𝘭, a position that confers certain legal duties.

In particular, he's required to approve the minutes of the Fund's board meetings.

(The notice posted by the Geneva Commercial Registry states that his signing authority is 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘶𝘹, meaning that either Alexandra Baumann or Jay Shambaugh has to co-sign.)

I don't think Andrea Dall'Olio was ever formally appointed to that position. The Fund's website described him as its "executive secretary" but the Commercial Registry never did.

That's fortunate, because the Fund appears to have falsified the minutes of its second board meeting.

That meeting took place on 16 February 2023, when the Fund's trustees tidied up their botched attempt to appoint Andy Baukol to the Board.

But as I wrote in this rather tedious thread from July 2023, the minutes didn't acknowledge what actually happened:

https://x.com/JeffRigsby2/status/1677284029236920321

The "secretary" at that meeting was identified as Caitlin Behles, a lawyer for the US Treasury Department.

But since she wasn't formally appointed 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘪𝘭, I don't think she can be held legally responsible for misrepresenting what took place.

And if there's anything wrong with the minutes of the meetings at which Dall'Olio was "secretary", he's probably not on the hook either. 

But Guillaume Braidi is.

Going forward I assume his signature will appear on the posted minutes, which have always been unsigned until now.

So we can expect (or at least hope) that the minutes of the Board's 28 June meeting will be posted soon, with Braidi taking responsibility for their contents.

That was the last meeting Dall'Olio attended. It's been more than four months now, and all we have is a press statement.

There must also have been a subsequent meeting at which Braidi's own appointment was confirmed, so we can look forward to hearing about that too.

It's been surprising to see this level of carelessness in managing an entity with nearly four billion dollars in Afghan state assets.

With Braidi now holding a formal role at the Fund, we can be a little more confident that we know what's going on.

The real problem, though, is that nothing seems to be going on.

The money is still just sitting there, and it seems unlikely that will change any time soon.

[end]

A New Appointment at The Afghan Fund

Melinda Gates's philanthropic fund, Pivotal Ventures, is offering $250 million to NGOs working on women's health issues.

I checked their website to see if they might fund action on lead poisoning here. But I learned something very disappointing.

Thread.

https://x.com/pivotalventures/status/1844037707544035770

The idea that Pivotal might support lead abatement was a long shot.

Lead exposure is harmful to both women and men, and if I read the announcement correctly that means the issue doesn't qualify for funding.

One could debate whether this is the best way to promote global health.

There are certainly countries where women's health needs are more acute than men's, and Afghanistan is one of them.

But as Samantha Power pointed out the other day, lead abatement is one of the most effective public health investments that governments and other donors can make.

It would be a mistake to overlook it just because it doesn't have an "equity" angle.

Perhaps Afghanistan should focus instead on finding donors to fund other health issues where gender is more relevant, like maternal mortality?

But if the donor is Pivotal Ventures, they can't:

The application guidelines (posted by Pivotal's partner, Lever for Change, at https://www.submittable.com/help/action-for-womens-health/rules/) rule out any funding for women's health care in Afghanistan.

Apparently this is because Afghanistan is considered a country on the OFAC "sanctions list"... whatever that means.

It seems that like many other people, the grantwriters at Pivotal Ventures don't understand how this works.

Afghanistan is certainly mentioned on OFAC's main sanctions page, as you can see here: https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-information

But they should have clicked through to the Afghan page.

If they'd read what Treasury actually wrote, they'd realize that anything Pivotal or its grantees do for Afghan women's health is going to be covered by General License 20, which allows almost all transactions with private and governmental entities here:

https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-information/afghanistan-related-sanctions

I haven't looked closely at the sanctions pages of other countries, but I'd be astonished if US sanctions against Ethiopia or Somalia were intended to prohibit this kind of humanitarian aid.

There are normally waivers available, though not often as broad as General License 20.

So if I were @US4AfghanPeace, I'd pick up the phone and call Melinda French Gates.

Now that Tom West is no longer a Special Representative, he's responsible for coordinating sanctions policy at the State Department.

If public communication isn't part of that job, it should be.

From lack of information or sheer laziness, Gates's staff at Pivotal Ventures are withholding support from women's health programming in every country under some form of US sanctions—even though sanctions are never supposed to interfere with humanitarian aid except inadvertently.

That's less excusable for Afghanistan than for any other country on Pivotal's blacklist.

The Treasury guidance here is unusually clear, because Washington wants to promote commerce and investment as well as aid.

(The US hasn't helped much with that in practice, but never mind.)

If Tom West can't resolve this, I assume Gates won't refuse a call from @SE_AfghanWGH or @USAmbKabul.

Any of them can tell her that Afghanistan isn't under OFAC sanctions, even though some individual Afghans are.

So ostracizing the whole country is both pointless and perverse.

If there's one place where the lens of gender equity ought to be applied, this is it.

There's nothing to stop Pivotal Ventures from making grants in Afghanistan, and the few State Department officials still paying attention should make sure Melinda Gates understands that.

[end]

Melinda Gates Won't Help Afghan Women. Here's Why (11 October 2024)

I said I'd write something about SIGAR's new report on cash shipments to Afghanistan, which you can read here:

https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/evaluations/SIGAR-24-32-IP.pdf

But I've been hesitating, because people who should understand this subject better than me seem to be getting it wrong.

So here goes.

Thread.

What's especially odd is that SIGAR published another report on this topic in January, which at least showed a grasp of the basic concepts involved:

https://x.com/JeffRigsby2/status/1789664365664419859

But the new report is fundamentally confused. And the confusion seems to originate from the World Bank.

So you can see why I didn't want to tweet about this.

I have a BA in economics but it doesn't help much in this context. These are fairly technical issues.

But I'm now convinced that the World Bank's Afghanistan reports, on which SIGAR relies, are misrepresenting the situation.

This is how SIGAR describes its findings in a letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And the sentence I've highlighted here is just false.

Throughout the report, SIGAR consistently conflates the 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 of foreign aid with the 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 of its delivery.

Think of it this way.

Suppose someone—perhaps the US government, perhaps some other nation, perhaps a private individual—donates $1 million to UNICEF and earmarks it for programs supporting children in Afghanistan.

That money represents a claim on goods and services by UNICEF.

It starts off in an overseas bank account.

But it entitles UNICEF's Afghan operation to command $1 million worth of goods, labor, transport services, and various other things inside Afghanistan—without Afghans' having to pay for them.

It's a transfer of wealth into the country.

For UNICEF to obtain those things, it first has to convert the $1 million into local currency by selling dollars and buying afghanis. That strengthens the afghani's exchange rate.

And the process of buying goods and services creates employment, business opportunities, and so on.

So the effects that SIGAR is describing here (stimulus for the economy and support for the currency) are just the effects of foreign aid itself.

That's because aid is what economists call an "unrequited transfer". Unlike ordinary trade, it involves getting something for nothing.

That has nothing to do with the 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 by which aid moves across Afghanistan's borders.

In other developing countries, where the banking system functions normally, aid agencies receive their money via electronic transfer.

But it produces exactly the same supportive effects.

Here it works differently. 

When UNICEF receives $1 million for Afghanistan in its overseas account, its first action might be not to rent trucks or buy nutritional supplements, but to buy $100 bills from the New York Federal Reserve.

That's an exchange of dollars for dollars.

So it doesn't increase the value of the local currency.

That only happens after the $100 bills arrive at Kabul airport and are exchanged for the afghanis UNICEF needs for its operations.

And it doesn't stimulate the Afghan economy. That only happens when the afghanis are spent.

It's frustrating that people still discuss this subject with no understanding of what's going on.

The dollar shipments from New York to Kabul don't represent "aid" from the US government.

The Federal Reserve is selling physical cash in exchange for payments to its bank account.

That's not an unrequited transfer. It's a wash.

Electronic purchases of cash from the Fed are possible because UN agencies and NGOs are receiving money to spend in Afghanistan.

𝘛𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 are the unrequited transfers. Some of the money comes from the US government, but not all.

An NGO funded by Japan will order shrink-wrapped cash from New York in just the same way, if it doesn't have arrangements in place to receive funds by wire.

(Some agencies do have those, but they don't always work smoothly.)

The World Bank is contributing to this misconception.

If you look at the references in the new SIGAR report, it seems that the Bank's (infrequent) publications on Afghanistan have been a major source of the authors' confusion.

Here they cite the Bank's 𝘈𝘧𝘨𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯 𝘋𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘜𝘱𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘦 from October 2022.

Going back to what the Bank actually wrote, I won't claim it's strictly inaccurate. But it's bound to mislead people who don't understand the technicalities.

What propped up the afghani in 2022 was external financial support—not the particular method by which it was delivered.

(Full text here, since the Bank's Afghanistan webpage is hard to navigate: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d7d49962c0c44fd6bb9ba3bfe1b6de1f-0310062022/original/Afghanistan-Development-Update-October-2022.pdf?_gl=1*zuw58s*_gcl_au*MTkwMjQxMjc5Ny4xNzE4OTUzNTUz)

It should also be noted that what the Bank wrote about Afghanistan's economy in the autumn of 2022 is now well out of date.

At that time the afghani was around 88 to the dollar.

Today it's much stronger: around 71.

The continued appreciation over the past two years can't be explained by inflows of foreign aid, which are much lower than two years ago.

I can confidently say that no one, including the Bank, knows exactly why the currency has kept rising.

That's because I was once asked for my own opinion by someone on the Bank's Afghan team. And if that's not a sign of desperation, I don't know what is.

I do have a few ideas.

It may reflect exports of stockpiled opium, which of course won't show up in the official trade data.

But opium exports aren't new, so that's probably not it.

I think it's more likely to be remittances to households from relatives overseas: another kind of unrequited transfer.

Those are usually sent by hawala and I don't think the volume of inflows is known, even very roughly.

Another factor might be sales of real estate to diaspora Afghans: one of the few types of foreign investment the country receives.

That's just a guess, but it's based on the fact that people routinely collect huge sums of cash (tens of thousands of US dollars) at Saray Shahzada.

The World Bank has very little information about any of this, because its Afghanistan team has been cut to a skeleton staff.

So in late 2024, SIGAR shouldn't be citing the Bank (or the US Institute of Peace) to argue that the Afghan economy would collapse without cash airlifts.

What SIGAR seems not to understand is that there are two separate questions here.

Why is it so hard to move money in and out of Afghanistan, except by this peculiar mechanism?

And should western governments be providing foreign aid here, given the regime that's now in power?

The country would be better off if cross-border money transfer were easier. It would simplify not just aid delivery but (more importantly) normal commercial transactions.

The US government had that aim in mind when it set up the Fund for the Afghan People in Switzerland in 2022.

But for reasons that haven't been publicly disclosed, the Afghan Fund has been unable to function. And nobody has proposed a workable alternative to it.

On the question of foreign aid: there are useful ways it could be spent here, though it isn't being well spent at the moment.

But the country won't fall apart without it.

Aid inflows are down drastically from 2021-2022 levels. But the World Bank's survey data shows that rural poverty rates in 2023 were lower than in 2020, before the fall of the Republic.

So that experiment has already been performed.

Yet everything in SIGAR's muddled new report, starting with the title, asks readers to take sides in the same false binary we've been trapped in for the past three years.

It's either "Our aid keeps the IEA in power" or "Our aid is saving Afghans from mass starvation". (Or both.)

Follow me! Achieve enlightenment!

Neither of these things is true.

Once you recognize that, every aspect of the Afghanistan debate looks different.

[end]

What's The Deal With Those Cash Airlifts Into Kabul?

I went viral on Twitter for a thread with no original content. All I did was highlight other people's work.

So I'll try that now for @abbiearyan.

Landmine clearance is big business, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But it's basically a huge grift:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hollow-work-halo-trust-abbie-aryan-ccmse/

Thread.

I hadn't thought much about demining until Matt Yglesias mentioned it recently, arguing that it wasn't a good use of resources.

I can't find his comment now, so I don't know if he made it after seeing Abbie Aryan's LinkedIn essay.

But the problem is much worse than he implied.

Yglesias is an advocate for "Effective Altruism": the idea that charities should spend money where it's most beneficial.

(You wouldn't expect that to be controversial, but it's become controversial for reasons I won't get into.)

On that basis, mine clearance is hard to defend.

Landmines kill about 5000 people each year, mostly in developing countries.

That's a small fraction of the number killed by preventable diseases like malaria.

So when I saw Yglesias's offhand criticism, it made sense. Even a well-run demining NGO can't be doing that much good.

But Aryan shows that the major NGOs in this sector aren't exactly well-run. Some of them seem to be total scams.

Much of his essay—although not the most bizarre, comical and outrageous sections—examines the work of the HALO Trust, the world's oldest and largest demining charity.

The HALO Trust was founded in 1988 by Colin Mitchell and Guy Willoughby, two ex-British Army officers.

It gained prominence in 1997 when Princess Diana visited one of its projects in Angola.

(The International Campaign to Ban Landmines won the Nobel Peace Price that same year.)

Looking back, this may have been when the broader racket took off.

You might think that if banning the production and 𝘧𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 use of landmines is a worthy cause, locating and removing 𝘦𝘹𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 mines must also be worthwhile.

But it isn't, at least not necessarily.

It depends on how much you can accomplish, and on how much it costs to get it done.

In the 2022-2023 fiscal year the HALO Trust says it demined just over 8000 hectares of land, equal to 80 million square meters.

But it reports spending over 120 million pounds in the process.

(annual financials at https://www.halotrust.org/media/w2qdsoec/the-halo-trust-annual-report-31-march-2023.pdf)

That's £1.50 per square meter.

The numbers look just as absurd if you consider that the Trust employs almost 10,000 people, each of whom clears less than a hectare per year.

And they're addressing a problem they can never solve.

As Aryan points out, it would take nearly 2000 years for the HALO Trust to demine the world. 

He puts the cost at £176 billion, which can't conceivably be justified in the face of competing issues like global public health and climate change.

Yet the Trust keeps getting funded.

The sums involved make Shabana Basij-Rasikh look like a shoplifter.

Aryan says the UK government has donated £500 million to the Trust since its foundation.

And I see from ProPublica that HALO's tax-exempt US arm raised over $57 million in 2023 alone:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/522158152

A good deal of the Trust's success seems to have come from its excellent relationships in the UK, where it's hired a lot of former army officers.

Colin Mitchell died in 1996, and for the next 18 years the organization was effectively controlled by his co-founder Guy Willoughby.

Willoughby was forced out by the board of trustees in 2014 after complaints about spectacular self-dealing:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-28176916

(The Trust was paying his children's private school tuition and employing his wife as its official photographer. Aryan is very good on all this.)

He was replaced by James Cowan, another ex-soldier who's served as CEO since then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cowan_(British_Army_officer)

Aryan doesn't mention Cowan in his article. But he does write about a strange incident that took place in British politics last year.

So I shall boldly connect the dots.

In July 2023 Tobias Ellwood, then a Conservative MP, came back from a trip to Afghanistan and released a video full of praise for the new regime. 

He told the British public that engagement with the Taliban was essential.

Piers Morgan was unimpressed: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aKlW3YbiJQ

And even those of us who agreed with Ellwood about engagement saw he wasn't well informed.

(In his video he celebrated the installation of solar water pumps by farmers in southern Afghanistan. He seems not to have known that those were put in during the Republic—to grow opium.)

It didn't go well for Ellwood, who had to delete the video and then resigned from the Defence Select Committee just before a scheduled vote to remove him.

Ellwood himself is a former officer, although he never served in Afghanistan. What possessed him to make such naive remarks?

What's been overlooked in the debate over Ellwood's video is that his trip was sponsored by the HALO Trust.

The organization must have given him some kind of briefing, especially since James Cowan runs it.

Cowan commanded British forces in Helmand during the 2009-2010 campaign.

So unlike Ellwood, he's had plenty of personal experience in country. 

I wouldn't dream of suggesting that Cowan gave Ellwood a set of talking points in support of the IEA.

But you can't help noticing that Cowan is saying much the same things now that Ellwood said last summer.

Ten days ago, on the anniversary of the takeover, the HALO Trust quoted him in a press release ("Engage With Kabul Or Risk Worsening Crisis") calling for "more diplomatic engagement from western countries":

https://www.halotrust.org/latest/halo-updates/news/engage-with-kabul-or-risk-worsening-crisis/

Not surprisingly, he also called for more aid.

I support engagement and aid!

But money spent on the HALO Trust benefits the Trust more than it benefits Afghans. It's a poor use of development funds.

And it seems the Trust isn't even the worst actor in the demining business. This is where Aryan's article gets really wild.

There's the Mine Advisory Group (MAG), also founded by ex-British soldiers.

They don't work in Afghanistan, and seem to specialize in African countries with very few landmines.

Like the HALO Trust, they report costs of over £1 per square meter.

And on a per-mine basis... wow.

Here in Afghanistan there was the Mine Detection Dog Center (MDC), founded by "Professor" Mohammad Shohab Hakimi.

Aryan says Hakimi took in over $70 million per year from the US Embassy and other donors, as he searched for landmines with his specially trained Afghan hounds.

There's an interesting comment on Aryan's article, reporting that Hakimi's mine-sniffing superdogs cost $12,000 each.

It's unclear what distinguished them from other dogs.

But Hakimi claims, mysteriously, that with their help MDC removed 80 percent of the mines in Afghanistan.

A Belgium-based group, APOPO, says it's developed an even better method.

They train giant African rats to sniff for mines. Since 1997 they've received over $200 million.

(The rats also diagnose people with tuberculosis. I'm sorry, there's more material here than I can use.)

Aryan ends with an inspirational story.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Ukrainian farmer named Oleksandr Kryvtsov built a remote-controlled, armor-plated tractor to roll over minefields and detonate the mines.

Reuters wrote him up last year:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-farmer-comes-up-with-novel-way-demine-his-fields-2023-05-02/

But what Aryan has to say is worth reprinting at length.

A comparison between Kryvtsov's tractor and the HALO Trust does not look good at all for the Trust, or for its even more ridiculous competitors.

Gl0ry to Ukr@ine, indeed.

Everyone who's worked in the aid business knows that a lot of money isn't well spent.

But I hadn't realized there was an entire category of "assistance" that's uncomfortably close to pure fraud.

I wonder: how many of these NGOs would even exist if Diana hadn't crashed her car?

I'll shut up now and ask everyone reading this to click over to Abbie Aryan's eye-popping essay, "The Hollow Work of the HALO Trust":

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hollow-work-halo-trust-abbie-aryan-ccmse/

This piece shouldn't be allowed to languish on LinkedIn.

Some version of it belongs in a newspaper, or on television.

I still have no idea why I was touched by the magic wand last weekend.

But now that my account is getting attention, the least I can do is direct some of it towards an impressive piece of muckraking.

[end]

Removing Landmines Is Bad. (Yes, really.)

Donald Trump claimed in 2019 that the US had killed Osama bin Laden's son, Hamza bin Laden. But there have been persistent rumors that he's hiding out in Afghanistan.

Those rumors went mainstream over the weekend. And I think I know what caused them to break through.

Thread.

There's been social media chatter on this topic for a few months, mostly among people who didn't seem too credible.

But you can't miss it now if you're on Afghan Twitter—or following the mainstream media in India, where it's turned into a major story.

So where did it come from?

It started on Thursday with a report in a British tabloid, the 𝘋𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳. (Links are bad for views, so google it yourself.)

According to Chris Hughes, the paper's defense editor, Hamza is not only alive but is now in control of al-Qaeda.

As they say: big if true!

Hughes makes detailed claims, even listing the provinces which host al-Qaeda's training camps.

But he doesn't say how he knows these things.

His language ("experts say", "analysis suggests", "it is claimed", "a report seen by the 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳") hides the sourcing at every turn.

So readers of the 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 are fortunate that a few hours later it published 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 piece about Hamza bin Laden by Col. Richard Kemp, a former infantry commander in the British Army—and now a prominent political commentator, as we shall see.

It's quite a coincidence.

What makes the coincidence even more striking is that Hughes and Kemp once co-authored a book about the deployment to Sangin of the Royal Anglian Regiment, which Kemp previously commanded (although he retired in 2006, before the regiment went to Helmand):

https://www.amazon.com/Attack-State-Red-Richard-Kemp/dp/0141041633

So it's pretty clear that they're relying on the same source material for the Hamza bin Laden claims. And Kemp is more forthcoming than Hughes about what the source is.

Not 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 forthcoming, though. He says it's a "leaked intelligence report", but doesn't say who leaked it.

The phrase does at least imply that it was produced by a national secret service, which I wouldn't have inferred from reading the Hughes article alone.

I've seen one person on Twitter jump to the conclusion that since Kemp is British, the leak must be from British intelligence.

But that's hasty in two respects.

It looks as if Kemp gave Hughes what he said was classified information. (The Hughes article seems to refer to three separate reports.)

But the documents may not have been what Kemp said they were. And he may not have said the UK compiled them.

If Kemp's materials were spurious, in fact, he probably wouldn't have said that.

Chris Hughes has covered UK security issues for over a decade. There's a good chance he knows what documents leaked from MI6 should look like.

So I suspect something very different may be going on.

Let's jump back in time, because the articles in the 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 weren't the first reports that Hamza bin Laden is living under IEA protection.

Some guests on the Shawn Ryan podcast said the same thing this summer, although the guests were too shady to take them very seriously.

But on 11 September, one day before the first 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 story appeared, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) made a very similar claim.

They said Hamza and his brother Abdullah bin Laden were both hiding out in Panjshir, guarded by hundreds of foreign fighters:

(link: https://www.memri.org/jttm/afghan-resistance-media-reports-terror-hideouts-afghanistan-abdullah-bin-laden-son-osama-bin)

MEMRI was founded in 1997 by two Israeli political activists in Washington. 

It specializes in translating media reports about Islamic extremism. And although the content is selected to make Israel's enemies look bad, it's usually been accurate.

But MEMRI's report last week about the bin Laden sons is impossible to verify, since it doesn't offer a link to the original source.

MEMRI says its information comes from an anti-Taliban resistance group called the "National Mobilization Front" (NMF), which I had never heard of.

This organization seems to be referenced on the internet mostly by MEMRI itself (which reproduced this statement from it as part of an earlier article in June), and by something called the RASC News Agency at www.rudabe.org.

Whoever these guys are, they aren't the NRF.

And since the NRF should know what's going on in Panjshir, it's hard to see why MEMRI didn't get the information from them.

(Dara Parandeh in Bazarak district, where Abdullah bin Laden supposedly lives, isn't far from Kabul. I went there last year to visit a hydropower project.)

It's odd that a pro-Israel NGO published obscurely sourced claims about Hamza bin Laden just one day before the 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 did. 

The 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 is clearly relying on Richard Kemp, so one would like to learn more about him.

This is his Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kemp

Colonel Kemp is a trustee of a charity called UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers (UK-AWIS).

Here's the website of that charity's Israeli parent organization, AWIS, soliciting donations for IDF units operating in Gaza:

https://www.ufis.org.il/en/

It turns out Kemp has longstanding ties to Israel. 

In 2020, he told the UK's 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦 that he first visited the country in 2002 on secondment to the Cabinet Office, when he "provided intelligence assessments on international terrorism" just after 9/11.

And since the Hamas attacks of 7 October, Kemp's profile in Israel has been higher than ever. He apparently relocated there shortly after the war started. 

Here's the 𝘑𝘦𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘮 𝘗𝘰𝘴𝘵, describing the rock-star reception he received at an event in Tel Aviv in December:

And although he's not Jewish himself, Kemp contributed this op-ed to the 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦 in April, in which he praises "Israel's spectacular military success" in Gaza and invokes his Afghan expertise to confirm that the IDF's approach has been completely correct:

So if Kemp wanted to persuade an experienced defense journalist that he was a conduit for leaked intelligence about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan—and if the material he had wasn't authentic—I think there's one country to which he could have attributed it more plausibly than to the UK.

It doesn't sound as if Kemp is the kind of person who would leak classified Israeli documents without getting the approval of the Israeli authorities.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the documents are real. The events of the past week in Britain suggest they probably aren't.

The 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦 is the world's oldest Jewish publication, founded in 1841. But it's now facing the worst crisis in its history.

On 5 September, the paper published an article by a freelancer named "Elon Perry", allegedly based on Israeli intelligence reports.

The article claimed that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was planning to escape to Iran and take the surviving Israeli hostages with him.

That sounds rather farfetched—which is why many Israelis didn't believe Benjamin Netanyahu when he made the same claim one day earlier.

It was convenient that "Elon Perry" was able to find evidence to back up the prime minister's story.

But Israel is a small country, where most of the important people know each other. Many Israeli journalists have very good sources in the military and the intelligence community.

So the allegations in the 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦 were challenged almost immediately inside Israel. And questions then began to be asked about "Elon Perry" himself.

He'd contributed several recent articles to the 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦, some of which made incredible claims.

But there's no record of his publishing anything else, although he says he's been a journalist for 25 years. And the rest of his biography has been largely fabricated as well. 

Ben Reiff of +972 𝘔𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘦 has an excellent English survey of what's being reported in Israel:

To make a long story short: 

The IDF and Israel's intelligence agencies say they didn't provide any material for the stories in the 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦—or in the pro-Israeli German tabloid 𝘉𝘪𝘭𝘥, which published a lurid "leaked" report about Hamas on 6 September.

There's now an internal IDF investigation to determine the source of the "leaks". But I can't see why they expect to find anything.

There's no particular reason to think that either the military or the security services produced the fake documents.

(They're fake, after all.)

Many Israelis take it for granted that they were manufactured by the prime minister's office, to convince the public in both Europe and Israel that he's right to hold out against a hostage deal with Hamas.

The Hebrew reporting I've auto-translated is taking this very seriously.

It's being described as a "blue" disinformation op aimed at misleading Israeli citizens—not a legitimate "red" operation to mislead Israel's adversaries.

So it appears that Netanyahu has been very busy in recent weeks getting phony "Israeli intel" published in the Western press.

Is there any proof that this is how the 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 stories originated?

There isn't yet. But there could be.

Right now there's only motive (Kemp's political sympathies), means (his relationship with Hughes) and opportunity (the plausibility of his access to Israeli sources).

One loose end is Netanyahu's own motivation.

But that's not hard to work out. It's no secret that like most Israeli Jews, he hopes Donald Trump will be reelected in November.

If Hamza bin Laden is alive, it means Trump was mistaken (or something) when he announced he was dead.

But it would reflect worse on President Biden, and to some extent Vice-President Harris, than it would on Trump. 

The Afghanistan withdrawal is a political liability for the Democrats, and anything that raises its salience can only hurt them.

(Republicans in Congress know this.

That's why the House Foreign Affairs Committee has been working since August to generate as much media coverage of the topic as possible, even though it also exposes Trump to criticism for signing the Doha Agreement.

They think that's a worthwhile trade-off, and it probably is.)

I could be barking up the wrong tree here. But there's one way to find out.

Israeli intelligence has denied sharing classified information about Hamas with "Elon Perry".

So if they didn't share classified information about al-Qaeda with Richard Kemp, they should deny that too.

That won't prove the stories in the 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 are wrong, because the 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳 hasn't claimed that its evidence came from Israel.

But if Kemp told Chris Hughes that's where it came from, then Hughes will know they're wrong. And he might want his editors to retract them.

(British newspapers never seem to retract anything, of course. But we live in hope.)

The repudiation of the 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦 stories didn't come through official channels, obviously. No country's intelligence agencies would say anything like that on the record.

But off the record it came very quickly, thanks to the work of Israeli and diaspora Jewish journalists like @ronenbergman of 𝘠𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘈𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩 and @bentreyf of +972.

Those guys can find out what's going on.

[end]

(links to media coverage to be tweeted separately)

Who's Behind the Hamza bin Laden Rumors? (16 September 2024)

Afghanistan has one of the world's highest rates of childhood lead exposure, which causes permanent brain damage.

Nearly all children here have significant lead poisoning.

Researchers in the US have found the source of the lead. But nobody has told the Afghan public.

Thread.

A worldwide survey in 2020 found that one in three children had blood lead above 5 micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL). That's considered the threshold for lead poisoning.

Children in Afghanistan have an 𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘦 blood lead level of 14.2 μg/dL, nearly three times the cutoff.

(Wikipedia: "Lead poisoning")

And the vast majority of Afghan kids have blood lead above the 5 μg/dL level.

Compare that to the worst recent case of lead poisoning in the United States, which happened a few years ago in the city of Flint, Michigan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

Roughly 100,000 people in Flint were exposed to elevated lead levels from the municipal water supply.

The affected families won hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, and public officials were prosecuted.

There are different estimates of exactly how much harm was done.

But according to some studies the share of young children in Flint with blood lead levels above 5 μg/dL may have been around 5 percent.

That was still considered a public health emergency—and for good reason.

Lead exposure in children causes irreversible losses in intelligence.

It also predicts violent behavior in adulthood. 

Some people think the fall in US crime rates in the 1990s was partly caused by the ban on lead paint and the phaseout of leaded gasoline, which both began two decades earlier.

Lead has damaging effects on other organ systems too.

According to the WHO, some of its hazards include "increased risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems and kidney damage":

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lead-poisoning-and-health

So if Afghanistan has one of the world's worst lead exposure problems, people should know where the lead is coming from.

There are a few possible suspects.

South Asia as a whole has the world's highest burden of lead poisoning.

And in Bangladesh the problem turned out to be turmeric (زردچوبه).

The spice was being adulterated with lead chromate, a pigment that makes it a brighter shade of yellow.

What happened in Bangladesh was ultimately a success story:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/20/23881981/bangladesh-tumeric-lead-poisoning-contamination-public-health

It showed that when a major source of lead contamination can be located, the problem is sometimes easy to fix.

I think that may be true in Afghanistan too, but the evidence has been overlooked.

The cosmetic use of kohl (سرمه) is another risk factor for lead exposure in this part of the world.

Kohl is supposed to be powdered stibnite (antimony sulfide).

But stibnite looks very similar to galena (lead sulfide), and the two minerals are often found in the same locations.

So kohl sold in India tends to have very high levels of lead. Kohl is banned in the United States for just that reason:

https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetic-products/kohl-kajal-al-kahal-surma-tiro-tozali-or-kwalli-any-name-beware-lead-poisoning

Nobody knows whether turmeric, kohl, or any of the other spices and cosmetics sold in Afghanistan contain dangerous amounts of lead.

That's because they've never been tested. But it would be a good idea if someone tried.

In Bangladesh, the adulteration of turmeric with lead pigment mostly stopped after government inspectors began spot checks at the country's spice markets, using handheld XRF spectrometers.

But that isn't the most urgent priority for Afghanistan, where the major source of lead exposure is probably already known. 

It just isn't known here.

Since 2019, health officials in Seattle have been finding elevated blood lead levels in Afghan immigrant and refugee children.

And in 2022, four local researchers published a paper in the 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘌𝘹𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 & 𝘌𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘌𝘱𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 which solved the mystery.

The lead is coming from cooking pots the families brought with them from Afghanistan.

(full text at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41370-022-00431-y)

The most hazardous pots tested were a type of aluminum pressure cooker called a 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯 (کازان).

These are a standard item in many Afghan kitchens, and it's been hard to convince some immigrant families in Seattle to stop using them.

But the authors' "simulated cooking and storage" tests released very high levels of dissolved lead.

(Amusingly, they didn't pressurize the 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯𝘴 for the tests because they were afraid they might explode. So the lead levels produced by actual cooking might be even higher.)

Chris Ingalls, of Seattle's KING 5 television channel, has been following this story since the article appeared. 

It was newsworthy for non-Afghans because at the time, some online retailers were selling imported 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯𝘴. 

Eventually the press coverage forced them to stop.

The US Food and Drug Administration has now issued an "import alert" against Rashko Baba, the dominant manufacturer of 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯𝘴.

And the state of Washington has passed legislation to tighten controls on lead in cookware.

Ingalls deserves a great deal of credit for all this.

So does Afghan Health Initiative (https://afghanhealth.org/), a Seattle-area nonprofit supporting the immigrant community. 

And so do the researchers who originally identified the 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯𝘴 as the source of lead poisoning in local Afghan children.

But why does no one else know?

I don't think Afghans in California or Virginia have heard about this threat. 

Much more importantly: Afghans in Afghanistan weren't told anything either.

Children here are less intelligent than children in most countries, because of something their mothers cook with every day.

And the most incredible aspect of the story is that it could have been told years ago, before the Seattle researchers even completed their study.

In January 2020 Radio Azadi, the Pashto service of RFE/RL, filmed a short video inside Rashko Baba's 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯 factory in Nangarhar.

Tens of thousands of people have seen workmen melting down car engines and radiators to cast into Afghanistan's leading brand of pressure cooker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ManknFL2BIw&t=57s

But nobody seems to have pointed out that anything cooked in those pots will be unfit for human consumption.

The IEA should close the Rashko Baba plant tomorrow. Arresting the company's owners wouldn't be a bad idea either.

But any aluminum 𝘬𝘢𝘻𝘢𝘯 made in Afghanistan or Pakistan is probably recycled scrap metal.

According to the Seattle researchers, this is how it works in Africa:

"Investigations in Cameroon and other West African countries found that the smelting process often used drinking cans, car and motorbike engine parts, vehicle radiators, transmissions, airplane fuselages, lead batteries, computer and electronic components, and other materials."

So if you own one of these things, destroy it. 

You can buy pressure cookers made from stainless steel, and they won't poison your children's brains.

[end]

NOTES:

Some articles by Chris Ingalls of KING 5:

https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/dangerous-cookware-for-sale-warnings-health-experts/281-48cb6121-9b12-44d2-9648-8aed67ad541a

https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/amazon-removes-afghan-pressure-cookers/281-b41a9a3f-dcdf-4bd8-b7f7-520254c8beeb

https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigators/cookware-dangerous-amounts-lead-still-sold-online-expert-warnings/281-b05e3870-046b-4cb0-bd1b-2fc812229d61

https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigators/lead-imported-cookware-remains-for-sale-before-washington-state-law/281-84d5882b-122f-4255-91d3-b27dc8343a05

And a global map of average blood lead levels:

https://leadpollution.org/

Afghanistan's Silent Lead Poisoning Crisis

House Republicans have asked SIGAR to examine ways in which the Taliban might gain access to US aid money spent in Afghanistan.

They've also asked it to look at the Fund for the Afghan People—something SIGAR has already said it intends to do.

Thread.

https://twitter.com/HouseForeignGOP/status/1636780129513881601

As @RepMcCaul notes, SIGAR's latest quarterly report found that "neither the State Department nor SIGAR have visibility on how much revenue the Taliban-controlled ministries may be collecting from fees and other payments from UN agencies or NGOs".

That's a legitimate concern.

The World Food Program is a particularly important case, partly because of its humanitarian role and partly for another reason.

The United Nations has its own airline, the UN Humanitarian Air Service:

https://www.wfp.org/unhas

And in a slightly odd arrangement, it's run by WFP.

So when UNAMA talks about flying bundles of cash into the airport here, they're referring to those UNHAS planes with the "WFP" tail logo:

https://unama.unmissions.org/cash-shipments-un-afghanistan-%E2%80%93-info-sheet

In other words, the WFP isn't just a major beneficiary of the incoming funds. They handle the logistics as well.

I said in January that I was puzzled Congress made it illegal to send cash to the Taliban on planes owned by the Defense Department, but not on other planes:

https://twitter.com/JeffRigsby2/status/1612962602837233664

The UNHAS cash shipments may be entirely legitimate, but in any case those planes belong to WFP.

But now I see why the law (the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2023) was written the way it was.

If it hadn't been carefully worded to cover only US military flights—which no longer land here, of course—it might have ended up banning cash deliveries on WFP flights.

That's because even if the money is spent in an appropriate way by NGOs and UN agencies, some of it is bound to go "to the Taliban" in the form of taxes, fees, and so on.

(Like it or not, the Afghan government is the Taliban.)

General License 20 authorizes most such payments.

Granted, there's room for the Taliban to skim off money by applying unreasonable taxes or fees to aid agencies. Lack of transparency makes that easier, so the Republicans have good reason to ask for more detail.

But an outright ban on cash shipments would have been catastrophic.

What I still don't understand, though, is 𝘸𝘩𝘺 it would have been catastrophic. Why can't aid to Afghanistan be sent in the normal way, electronically?

(Contrary to popular belief, there are no "sanctions" on foreign banks operating here. General License 20 makes that clear.)

People I've asked about this say the major Western banks are just being overcautious, perhaps because of the burden of counterterrorism and anti-money laundering rules.

Is that it, really? In a year and a half, is there nothing the US could have done to make the banks cooperate?

After all: if there's anything for which the banks can expect not to be blamed, it's handling 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘢𝘪𝘥 supplied by the United States and its allies.

Why does it still have to be pallets of cash?

The White House must know that looks shady, even if it really isn't.

I don't know the answer to this question, despite my best efforts. Maybe the House Foreign Affairs Committee can figure it out.

I have a guess, though. I think the banks may be worried about certain US laws that allow private litigation against entities that finance "terrorism".

The Biden administration may not be able to give assurances that frivolous lawsuits like 𝘏𝘢𝘷𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘷. 𝘉𝘪𝘯-𝘓𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘯 won't be filed against them if they handle wire transfers to Afghanistan.

As I say, that's just a guess. It would be helpful for SIGAR to look into this.

Chairman McCaul also urged SIGAR to investigate the Fund for the Afghan People in Switzerland.

SIGAR is, in fact, independent (that's the "I") and doesn't take direction from Congress. But they've already said they believe the Fund is subject to their supervisory authority.

Based on my reading of the law, I think they're right:

https://twitter.com/JeffRigsby2/status/1621200349989339136

And it's good to see that in recent months, the Biden administration has dropped its policy of almost total stonewalling of SIGAR.

Hopefully they'll now offer the cooperation federal law requires.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several things SIGAR might want to ask the Fund's trustees.

Since three of the four trustees are based in the US—and one is a senior Treasury official—it's not unlikely that the House Foreign Affairs Committee may also ask them to testify.

Both SIGAR and members of Congress will want to know, for example, if the Fund has been lawfully established.

There's a process set out in the Federal Reserve Act for situations like this, and there should be written documentation showing that the State Department followed it.

When I asked for that documentation, though, I didn't get it. Others may have better luck.

They may also want to discuss the fact that Andrew Baukol participated in the Fund's first board meeting, even though his appointment as a trustee was invalid:

https://twitter.com/JeffRigsby2/status/1629186221875384321

That didn't matter much in itself, but it makes you wonder if other legal errors are waiting to be found.

One area that needs more research is the relevance of Swiss law: namely Article 82 of the Civil Code, which governs the establishment of nonprofit foundations like the Fund.

TL/DR: if you lock up your money in a Swiss foundation, people you owe money to can go after the foundation itself, on the grounds that you're hiding assets.

That may mean the Fund can be challenged by creditors of Da Afghanistan Bank—or possibly by any creditor of the Republic.

I hope the State Department's lawyers thought of that, and that they checked with qualified attorneys in Switzerland.

(Swiss law is very different from Anglo-American law, although I think Article 82 covers much the same thing that Anglo-Americans call "fraudulent conveyance".)

In any case, these are the kinds of issues SIGAR will want to discuss with the Fund's US-based trustees.

And I wouldn't be surprised if Congress wants to discuss them too.

[end]