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The Biden Administration Wants You to Forget Afghanistan 
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The CBO estimates Biden's $80 billion boost to the IRS will produce $200 billion in new revenue. When has any government agency projection been correct? The key to more equitable tax revenue is to go to a VAT tax and thus, capture the money owed and never paid.
Then we have Chief Justice Roberts on the short end of the stick as a result of his previous over reach to bring comity to The Court. Now he faces a solid block of conservative Justices who have sworn to bring sanity back to Court decisions. starting with Roe V Wade. Let the good times role.
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Texas’s Abortion Law Blunder
The Supreme Court was right not to interfere for now, but the statute won’t survive scrutiny on the merits.
By The Editorial Board
America is back fighting its endless legal war over abortion. A new front opened late Wednesday when five Justices issued an unsigned opinion declining to block a Texas law banning abortion after six weeks. Cue the hysterics about the end of abortion rights. But this law is a misfire even if you oppose abortion, and neither side should be confident the law will be upheld.
For starters, the Texas statute clearly violates the Court’s Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey (1992) precedents by making abortion illegal during the first trimester without exceptions for rape or incest—and it does so in a slippery way to duck federal judicial review.
Most laws delegate enforcement to public officials. This one delegates exclusive enforcement to private citizens, who are authorized to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks. Citizens who prevail in their civil lawsuits are entitled to at least $10,000 per abortion along with legal costs.
The law sets an awful precedent that conservatives should hate. Could California allow private citizens to sue individuals for hate speech? Or New York deputize private lawsuits against gun owners?
Texas argues that abortion providers don’t have standing to challenge the law because the state isn’t enforcing it and neither at this point is any private citizen. Thus there is no case or controversy, which is what courts are supposed to settle. This is technically correct and it is why the five Justices declined to enjoin the law.
“Federal courts enjoy the power to enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves,” says their unsigned opinion, citing the Court’s recent decision in California v. Texas (2021). In that case a 7-2 majority dismissed Texas’s ObamaCare challenge after finding the Court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case since the feds weren’t enforcing the individual mandate.
Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch wrote in a fierce dissent that the Court—read Chief Justice John Roberts —had applied standing principles selectively. They’re right. And some conservative Justices may now enjoy hoisting the Chief on his own standing petard. But their unsigned opinion suggests they also have doubts about the Texas law.
Abortion providers have “raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue. But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden,” the five Justices write. “We stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit” and the Court’s order “is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law.” Texas state courts may also have a say, the Justices add.
The Chief writes in a dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, that he would grant the providers “preliminary relief” to “preserve the status quo ante” so “the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.” But the dissenting Justices acknowledge that Texas may be correct that “existing doctrines preclude judicial intervention.”
What they want is to issue what is essentially an advisory opinion in the form of an injunction. This is not the role of the courts. In any case, a provider who gets sued under the Texas law will undoubtedly seek to dismiss the lawsuit under the Court’s abortion precedents. Then the law will be properly enjoined.
Meantime, Texas Republicans have handed Democrats a political grenade to hurt the anti-abortion cause. Pro-life groups have spent nearly 50 years arguing that abortion is a political question to be settled in the states by public debate. Yet now in Texas they want to use the courts via civil litigation to limit abortion.
Democrats are already having a field day with the Texas law. “This law is so extreme it does not even allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest,” President Biden said in a statement. Look for Democrats to raise the political pressure even higher on the Supreme Court this coming term when it hears a Mississippi case that bans abortion after 15 weeks. The Justices could uphold the Mississippi law by narrowing Casey’s “undue burden” standard. But the left will flog the Texas law and proclaim that upholding the Mississippi law is a fast track to overturning Roe.
Sometimes we wonder if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a progressive plant. His ill-conceived legal attack against ObamaCare backfired on Republicans in last year’s election and lost at the Supreme Court. Now he and his Texas mates are leading with their chins on abortion. How about thinking first?
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Finally, Manchin is making a big deal out of his reluctance to vote for the $3.5 trillion boondoggle but after he gets Democrats to knock a few dollars off.I suspect, he will claim victory and cave.
Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion
Amid inflation, debt and the inevitability of future crises, Congress needs to take a strategic pause.
By Joe Manchin
The nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges and will inevitably encounter additional crises in the future. Yet some in Congress have a strange belief there is an infinite supply of money to deal with any current or future crisis, and that spending trillions upon trillions will have no negative consequence for the future. I disagree.
An overheating economy has imposed a costly “inflation tax” on every middle- and working-class American. At $28.7 trillion and growing, the nation’s debt has reached record levels. Over the past 18 months, we’ve spent more than $5 trillion responding to the coronavirus pandemic. Now Democratic congressional leaders propose to pass the largest single spending bill in history with no regard to rising inflation, crippling debt or the inevitability of future crises. Ignoring the fiscal consequences of our policy choices will create a disastrous future for the next generation of Americans.
Those who believe such concerns are overstated should ask themselves: What do we do if the pandemic gets worse under the next viral mutation? What do we do if there is a financial crisis like the one that led to the Great Recession? What if we face a terrorist attack or major international conflict? How will America respond to such crises if we needlessly spend trillions of dollars today?
Instead of rushing to spend trillions on new government programs and additional stimulus funding, Congress should hit a strategic pause on the budget-reconciliation legislation. A pause is warranted because it will provide more clarity on the trajectory of the pandemic, and it will allow us to determine whether inflation is transitory or not. While some have suggested this reconciliation legislation must be passed now, I believe that making budgetary decisions under artificial political deadlines never leads to good policy or sound decisions. I have always said if I can’t explain it, I can’t vote for it, and I can’t explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion.
Another reason to pause: We must allow for a complete reporting and analysis of the implications a multitrillion-dollar bill will have for this generation and the next. Such a strategic pause will allow every member of Congress to use the transparent committee process to debate: What should we fund, and what can we simply not afford?
I, for one, won’t support a $3.5 trillion bill, or anywhere near that level of additional spending, without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs. This is even more important now as the Social Security and Medicare Trustees have sounded the alarm that these life-saving programs will be insolvent and benefits could start to be reduced as soon as 2026 for Medicare and 2033, a year earlier than previously projected, for Social Security.
Establishing an artificial $3.5 trillion spending number and then reverse-engineering the partisan social priorities that should be funded isn’t how you make good policy. Undoubtedly some will argue that bold social-policy action must be taken now. While I share the belief that we should help those who need it the most, we must also be honest about the present economic reality.
Inflation continues to rise and is bleeding the value of Americans’ wages and income. More than 10.1 million jobs remain open. Our economy, as the Biden administration has correctly pointed out, has reached record levels of quarterly growth. This positive economic reality makes clear that the purpose of the proposed $3.5 trillion in new spending isn’t to solve urgent problems, but to re-envision America’s social policies. While my fellow Democrats will disagree, I believe that spending trillions more dollars not only ignores present economic reality, but makes it certain that America will be fiscally weakened when it faces a future recession or national emergency.
In 2017, my Republican friends used the privileged legislative procedure of budget reconciliation to rush through a partisan tax bill that added more than $1 trillion to the national debt and put investors ahead of workers. Then, Democrats rightfully criticized this budgetary tactic. Now, my Democratic friends want to use this same budgetary tactic to push through sweeping legislation to make “historic investments.” Respectfully, it was wrong when the Republicans did it, and it is wrong now. If we want to invest in America, a goal I support, then let’s take the time to get it right and determine what is absolutely necessary.
Many in Washington have convinced themselves we can add trillions of dollars more to our nearly $29 trillion national debt with no repercussions. Regardless of political party, elected leaders are sent to Washington to make tough decisions and not simply go along to get along.
For those who will dismiss my unwillingness to support a $3.5 trillion bill as political posturing, I hope they heed the powerful words of Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who called debt the biggest threat to national security. His comments echoed the fear and concern I’ve heard from many economic experts I’ve personally met with.
At a time of intense political and policy divisions, it would serve us well to remember that members of Congress swear allegiance to this nation and fidelity to its Constitution, not to a political party. By placing a strategic pause on this budgetary proposal, by significantly reducing the size of any possible reconciliation bill to only what America can afford and needs to spend, we can and will build a better and stronger nation for all our families.
Mr. Manchin, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from West Virginia.
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All this mass media talk about treating Afghanistan's who helped us as a humanitarian issue is garbage. It is the same as why Democrats are flooding our nation's borders. The sole purpose is to stack the deck as Obama did with Somalians and to make it possible for Democrats to be re-elected forever. Democrats are seedy folk because they are interested only in seeding society so they are re-elected.
EXCLUSIVE: Biden Admin Sending Afghans to Swing States Where They Will Be Housed
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The worst is yet to come:
Biden’s Policies Will Hurt America’s Laborers in the Long Run
Maybe paying people not to work and punishing employers isn’t so great for the job market.
By Eugene Scalia
Presidential transitions are gradual. It takes a president time to staff an administration, develop and articulate policies, and decide which of his predecessor’s actions to unwind and which to leave undisturbed. This Labor Day weekend, nearly eight months into his tenure, President Biden is starting to leave his mark on the job market and the employment landscape. What decisions and trends stand out?
The president’s first important employment policy decision was in March, when he extended the $300 weekly federal supplemental unemployment benefit another six months. In the last recession, when Mr. Biden was vice president, the federal unemployment weekly supplement was $25 and ended with the unemployment rate at 9.3%. When President Biden extended the $300 benefit in March, the national unemployment rate was 6%—lower than for nearly six years of the Obama presidency. Almost a million jobs were added that month alone, and the vaccination program was in high gear. A federal unemployment supplement was warranted initially in the pandemic, but by this March it was clear the $300 figure had no basis in reason. Combined with state unemployment benefits, it paid more on average than the $15-an-hour minimum wage championed by progressives.
The consequences have been predictable. The U.S. now has a record 10 million unfilled jobs. That isn’t attributable entirely to paying approximately 40% of recipients more on unemployment than they earned while working. But the supersized benefit has kept many workers on the sidelines, contributing to a labor shortage that has pushed up wages. From July 2020 to July 2021, the average hourly wage for nonsupervisory employees in leisure and hospitality rose nearly $1.90—a 13% pay raise in one year.
The long-term impact of Mr. Biden’s $300 unemployment plus-up, which ends this weekend, may be to achieve by other means the wage hike that progressives couldn’t enact legislatively. Wage growth is good, but not when caused by competition with government largesse. The president may regret intervening in this way if inflation lingers and job growth slows in the months ahead.
A second hallmark of Mr. Biden’s employment policy is his repudiation of the Trump administration’s tax cuts and deregulation. A rational goal when Mr. Biden took office would have been to bring back the vibrant pre-pandemic economy of less than a year earlier. In February 2020, the national unemployment rate was at a 50-year low and unemployment for African-Americans and other minorities had recently hit all-time recorded lows. Wages were rising steadily, especially for lower-wage workers.
But Mr. Biden’s commitments to progressives and labor leaders required a sharp departure from his predecessor’s policies. When I headed the Labor Department under President Trump, we vigorously enforced worker protection laws—in 2019 and 2020 the department achieved record and near-record recoveries for pension plans, minimum wage and overtime violations, and in discrimination cases. But we also supported workers by removing unwarranted regulatory burdens and promoting clarity in the law, which fosters investment, innovation and job creation within the bounds laid down by Congress. So for example we issued regulations clarifying when it’s appropriate for companies to classify workers as independent contractors, and when a franchiser is not the “joint employer” of—and therefore jointly liable for—its franchisees’ employees.
Both those regulations have now been repealed, and uncertainty is widespread. Even corporate leaders who supported Mr. Biden are bracing for federal enforcement and regulatory actions intended to implement—to the extent the courts will allow—the dim view of independent contractors embodied in California’s A.B.5 legislation, which outlawed a wide swath of independent contractor relationships.
A third notable trend this Labor Day weekend is how much the employment picture varies state to state. Nationally, the unemployment rate is 5.4%. Unemployment is significantly lower in nearly half the states, but there are two where unemployment is much higher: California and New York. Both have struggled to put people back to work throughout the pandemic. In July—the last month for which we have data—California and New York were tied with New Mexico for the second highest unemployment rate in the country, at 7.6%.
The pandemic accelerated several pre-existing workplace trends. The evidence is mounting of potentially long-term job loss in two states where taxes are highest, regulation most onerous, and pandemic restrictions have been most severe. There is a lesson for Mr. Biden in the experience of the home states of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer —although it is unlikely the lesson will be learned.
Last year, in a friendly exchange with a top labor leader, I urged him to admit it: The pre-pandemic economy had been terrific for his union’s members—soaring job growth, record-low unemployment and rising wages. He bristled, denounced the Trump administration as the worst for workers he’d ever seen, and as proof gave a litany of rulings by the Labor Board and actions I had taken, or not taken, as labor secretary.
This leader was measuring workers’ progress by the number of progressive employment policies emanating from Washington—he’d lost sight of how a hospitable business environment drives job and wage growth for working men and women. This Labor Day, that appears to be the view from the White House, too.
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Mr. Scalia, who served as U.S. labor secretary (2019-21), is a Washington lawyer.
Since immigration is no longer about humanity but votes the answer to the attached is obvious - Hell No:
Will the plight of Afghanis recast the debate about refugees?
Liberal groups have twisted the meaning of the word to include illegal immigrants who weren’t fleeing for their lives. The current crisis puts that false claim in perspective.
JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(September 2, 2021 / JNS) In recent years, many Jewish groups have redoubled their advocacy for more liberal immigration laws. This was rooted in remembrance of the immigrant forebears of the Jewish community, as well as a belief that America is a nation that should also have the “welcome” sign up to any who wish to avail themselves of a land of opportunity, no matter where they come from.
That spirit explains why so many Jews have stepped forward in recent days to donate or advocate for the absorption of refugees from Afghanistan fleeing from the Taliban, who took over that country in the wake of the Biden administration’s precipitate abandonment of its allies. The emerging debate about the fate of tens of thousands of people who aided the American war effort who may have been left behind and those who now seek new homes in the United States is not only a measure of the nation’s compassion and decency. It should also involve a reassessment of the way many Jewish groups have essentially undermined the case for refugee resettlement by wrongly applying the term to people who should have never been called refugees.
The debate about immigration has led much of the organized Jewish world to take what has increasingly become a hardline stance that regards virtually any restrictions on entry to the country as xenophobic, as well as to label efforts to enforce existing laws as immoral.
Yet this debate is not merely a matter of support for immigrants, whether they have legal permission to enter America or not. Integral to the work of Jewish groups like HIAS has been an effort to effectively redefine what it means to be a refugee. In the past, those who formally sought asylum as refugees did so because they were directly fleeing persecution and/or threats to their lives. Those Jews who attempted, largely in vain, to enter the United States and other Western countries during the Holocaust are classic examples of genuine refugees. The same applies to those who fled countries that oppressed whole classes and groups of people, such as the millions of Jews seeking to leave the former Soviet Union.
In recent years, however, part of the effort to mobilize support for those seeking to enter the United States without waiting in line and going through the process of gaining legal permission was a push to call many of them refugees, rather than—though almost all actually were—economic migrants. In effect, the refugee label was placed on the large number of people from Central America flooding the southern border of the United States. Some of them may qualify as refugees because they are labeled for death by political foes or organized crime. Yet the overwhelming majority are leaving their homes for the same reason people have always come to the United States throughout its history; they want a new life in a prosperous country where political and economic freedom is taken for granted.
One may argue, as some Jews effectively do, that America’s gates should be open to all those who wish to enter, regardless of the economic consequences. Since the political consensus to change the laws to that effect is clearly lacking, liberal groups have instead become supporters of those who enter the country illegally. They’ve also insisted that these largely bogus claims for refugee asylum should be accepted.
Pro-immigration groups have no qualms about this because they believe that compassion for those wanting to enter the country outweighs any other consideration. Jewish organizations pepper their advocacy with frequent allusions to Judaism’s admonitions to welcome the stranger and religious texts that can be read as justifying their positions.
Unfortunately, the effort to stretch the meaning of refugee to include those who are not by any reasonable definition of the term actual refugees has come with a cost. It has fueled skepticism about the cause of refugee absorption at a time when support for immigration has become controversial because many Americans see it as interchangeable in some contexts with advocacy for open borders.
Moreover, those Jewish groups who made this cause their own have done so in a manner that not only places them in opposition to the rule of law. By making false analogies between those seeking to evade the laws of a democracy to Jews hiding from or fleeing the Nazis, they have also cheapened the memory of the Holocaust.
By contrast, a desire to welcome the Afghan refugees ought to be universal. It’s not just that those wanting out of the nightmare of life under the Islamist tyrants of the Taliban deserve our sympathy. Many of them are also people who have risked their lives by assisting American and NATO forces during the 20 years of war in that country since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or who took on roles in their country that were possible only as long as American allies ruled. Sadly, the inept U.S. withdrawal that triggered the collapse of the Afghan government happened in such a manner as to leave behind tens of thousands of people who have a legitimate right to American help.
Nevertheless, there are voices raised in opposition even to this undeniably sympathetic group. Some on the right, including people like Fox News host Tucker Carlson have embraced a position that is so hostile to immigration in general that even these betrayed Afghan allies are seen as unwelcome, despite the fact that among the prominent advocates of welcoming the Afghans is former President Donald Trump. It is reasonable to ask that anyone coming from Afghanistan or any country with so many Islamic extremists and terrorists be properly vetted before being allowed to enter the United States. But denying those who are vetted (as most of those who have helped America, in fact, are) a chance for a new life in America isn’t merely churlish, it’s also dishonorable.
Those Jews who are rightly championing the cause of getting Afghan refugees to safety and then admitting them to the United States need to understand that their plight undermines their previous attempts to brand Central American migrants with the same label. Just as the comparisons between those understandably wanting out of countries like Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador to Jews fleeing the Holocaust were absurd, the same can be said about analogizing those migrants with the Afghans.
While the disastrous end of their country’s involvement in Afghanistan is something about which Americans should feel ashamed, the attention given to refugees who do manage to get out should help us refocus discussions about immigration, and especially, what it means to apply for refugee status. Those liberal groups like HIAS that continue to pretend there is no difference between genuine refugees and those who merely want to cut the line for legal entry into the United States are only making it harder to ensure that the Afghans are able to escape an Islamist hell.
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Biden’s Second Surrender
The Democrats push for a hike in corporate taxes that would be a gift to the Chinese.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Joe Biden this week completed the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, in a humiliating military surrender to the Taliban. The president is more interested in working on a second capitulation—a wholesale economic surrender to China and other rivals.
Members of the House Ways and Means Committee were notified that markup will begin as early as next Thursday on Democratic plans for the largest tax increase in at least 50 years. House leaders have yet to provide any text for the committee work, since they continue to negotiate the details. But the White House and Democratic lawmakers have made clear the broad contours, which are best read as an exercise in U.S. self-sabotage—a gift to foreign companies and foreign workers everywhere.
Washington excels at spin, but few lines may prove more economically destructive than the continued Democratic claim that the 2017 tax law was about cuts for the “rich.” Even critics at the time acknowledged the law’s real highlight—its central focus—was its overdue and comprehensive reform of the corporate tax system. As this page’s editorial columns noted, the cuts on the individual side weren’t nearly “as ambitious,” making only marginal trims to top rates.
The corporate changes were specifically designed to restore America’s global competitiveness, which had eroded over decades. It cut the top corporate rate, which at 35% was the highest in the developed world. It got rid of a backward “world-wide” tax system, in which U.S. companies paid taxes in countries where they earned income and again if they returned money here. This was fundamentally a “pro-America” reform.
And it worked. An estimated $1.6 trillion flowed back into the U.S. from 2018 to 2020, which businesses poured into American factories, American jobs, American wages. Remember that giant sucking sound of the Obama years, as corporations fled to foreign shores? There hasn’t been a major corporate inversion announced since the tax reform passed. Prior to the Covid interruption, the U.S. economy was firing on every cylinder. At least 10 countries have reduced their own corporate tax rates since, an acknowledgment the U.S. is cleaning their clocks.
Why destroy this success? Because all the billionaire dollars in the world won’t foot Mr. Biden’s entitlement bill. So Democrats want to plunder the corporate side—even though it means debilitating U.S. firms globally, and advancing those in China, Europe and the Middle East. The president proposes rocketing the corporate rate back to 28%, an increase of one-third. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation notes this would create a federal-state combined tax rate of 32.34%, “highest in the OECD and among Group of Seven (G7) countries, harming U.S. economic competitiveness and increasing the cost of investment in America.”
The White House rejoinder is to brag about the deal it cut in June in which G-7 countries will impose a “15% global minimum tax” on their own companies’ foreign profits. Democrats insist this will keep U.S. companies from fleeing their higher tax rates. But what they aren’t noting is that the Biden plan would impose a 75% higher minimum tax on American companies, with an effective rate of 26.25%. It’s yet another windfall to foreign competitors.
Then there’s the Biden war on American energy, with proposals to inflict soaring new taxes on the lifeblood of the American economy—U.S. oil and gas producers, pipelines and refiners. The tax plan would strip small and large companies of critical deductions that inspire cleaner investment, produce jobs and generate royalties. This is a stunning handout to foreign energy competitors—including Iran, Venezuela and Russia—on whose oil Americans will again grow dependent.
Mr. Biden spent the past weeks describing an Afghan situation completely at odds with reality, and he’s done much the same for months with regard to corporate tax hikes. He explained in April that he’ll insist on a 28% corporate tax rate because he’s “sick and tired of ordinary people being fleeced” by companies that don’t pay their “fair share.”
If there’s one idea that unites economists, it’s that corporations don’t pay the corporate tax—they pass it on to workers, consumers and stockholders. The Joint Committee on Taxation last month produced an analysis of how the corporate tax hike would be distributed among taxpayers. With a rate hike to even 25%, within 10 years some 172 million taxpayers would be paying the bill—98.4% of them with incomes below $500,000.
So not only would the corporate tax hikes destroy American competitiveness; they’d sock it to average Americans. And that’s before you take into consideration Mr. Biden’s plans to raise individual rates, to slam Main Street with tax hikes and the end of the small-business deduction, and to cripple family farms with a supercharged death tax.
All this explains why Democrats are intent on finalizing details in the quiet August recess, the better to steamroll it through Congress in September. Before Americans can understand that this isn’t about tax fairness at all. It’s the Biden White House waving the white flag of economic surrender.
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The Taliban will gain adherents and we will hear from radical Islamist terrorism many times down the road. Evil attracts activists, decency does not attract because of passivity.
The Taliban Gain Ground in Islam’s Battle of Ideas
Their anti-West ideals can be traced to an Indian madrassa and a rift that erupted over 150 years ago.
By Sadanand Dhume
The image of the last U.S. soldier leaving Kabul might have marked the end of America’s 20-year presence in Afghanistan. But it also begins a new chapter in an older story: the contest between Muslims who believe they must embrace Western ideas, at least in part, to succeed, and those who seek Islamic renewal by shunning the West in favor of what they view as a pure form of their faith.
The chaos in Afghanistan presents this contrast starkly. The U.S.-educated President Ashraf Ghani fled in panic as Taliban zealots closed in on Kabul. But the effects of the Taliban’s triumph on the battle of ideas within Islam will be felt far beyond Afghanistan’s borders. “This will energize Islamists all around the world,” says Mustafa Akyol, an expert on Islam at the Cato Institute, referring to Muslims who seek to order the state and society by Shariah, or Islamic law. “I already see it happening.”
In South Asia, where the austere brand of Islam the Taliban espouses was born more than 150 years ago, the aftershocks are likely to be especially powerful. In Pakistan the Taliban triumph could inspire a fresh wave of violence by their cousins in the Tehreek-e-Taliban, also called the Pakistani Taliban, and by violent anti-Shiite groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba. More broadly, working women, Westernized elites, and Shiite and Sufi Muslims in Pakistan should brace for a fundamentalist Sunni resurgence.
Indians have reason to fear an uptick of violence in the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, where soldiers have battled an insurgency for three decades. The Taliban victory may also strengthen the appeal of both homegrown Islamic fundamentalists, as well as Hindu nationalists who view India’s 200 million Muslims with suspicion. In recent years, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have sustained terrorist attacks linked to Islamic State. A fundamentalist surge in the region is bad news for them, too.
To contrast Muslim approaches to the West, scholars sometimes cite two towns in northern India as examples: Deoband and Aligarh. In 1857-58, the British cemented their pre-eminence in the subcontinent by brutally suppressing a native revolt and extinguishing the remnants of the Mughal Empire. Ten years later, traditionalist clerics established a humble madrassa under a pomegranate tree in Deoband, in today’s Uttar Pradesh. In the words of the historian Barbara Metcalf, it represented an effort “to preserve the religious heritage” of the clerics’ forebears and “to disseminate instruction in authentic religious practice and belief.”
In 1877, a contrasting Muslim response to political defeat arose in the town of Aligarh, about 125 miles south of Deoband. There the British Viceroy Lord Lytton laid the foundation stone of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, brainchild of the Muslim reformer and Empire loyalist Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Khan tailored his faith to Victorian sensibilities. He hoped, according to Ms. Metcalf, that the new college’s “accommodation to British social and political institutions would . . . go hand-in-hand with a true understanding of Islam.” The Aligarh thesis: “The Muslims of British India had been rulers [and] could, through English education and Islam, once again be great.”
Both Deoband and Aligarh sought a revival of Muslim fortunes against the backdrop of Western military and cultural pre-eminence. Both adopted modern methods of education such as fixed curriculums, formal exams and permanent teaching staff. But the similarities ended there.
What’s 50 Times More Dangerous Than Afghanistan? August 19, 2021
Have No Illusions About the U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan August 5, 2021
India, Like the U.S., Has Grown Impatient With China July 22, 2021
Southern India Leads the Way to Tolerance July 8, 2021
India’s Covid Curve Could Raise the World’s June 24, 2021
Deoband was inward-looking and focused on Sunni religious scholarship, emphasizing lessons from the life of the prophet Muhammad. Aligarh engaged deeply with colonial authorities, educated Sunni and Shiite alike, and sought to equip high-born Muslim men with a mastery of European arts, sciences and manners. Aligarh wasn’t irreligious—quite the contrary—but it sought, unlike Deoband, to reconcile Islamic religiosity with modernity.
Why does all this matter today? First the caveats: Most Deobandis have nothing to do with the Taliban, and South Asia’s fundamentalism problem cannot be attributed purely to Deobandism. Nor is it the only strictly scriptural form of Sunni Islam in the subcontinent associated with violence. The Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami has spawned the terrorist group Hizbul Mujahideen. Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, sprang from the Ahl-e-Hadith movement, closely related to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism.
The Barelvis, a rival school of Sunni Islam, are at the forefront of protests in Pakistan demanding the death penalty for blasphemy. State support, whether with Saudi petrodollars for jihad or from the Pakistan army’s Inter-Services Intelligence, has also turbocharged the problem.
The Taliban nonetheless represent an extreme version of Deobandism, spawned in large part in radical madrassas that sprang up in Pakistan following the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and received an injection of Saudi funds during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. Deobandi Islam evolved differently across the region, points out Javad Hashmi, a scholar of Islam at Harvard. In India, the Deobandis have no hope of claiming power and remain quietist. In Pakistan, where they face few restrictions, they have spawned several radical groups, including the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the Kashmir-focused Jaish-e-Mohammed, and the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. In Afghanistan, they now hold power.
The jury is still out on how rough Taliban 2.0 will be with working women, Shiite Muslims and pro-West Afghans. The portents for the world aren’t good. “It’s like giving Islamism steroids,” says Mr. Hashmi of the Taliban’s triumph. “This shows them that perseverance in the way of Allah, jihad in the way of Allah, bears fruit. The route to success is not by aping the West.”
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