Critique of USAID

 1. Trump and the Closure of USAID: A Candid Conversation on "Independent Media" :

The impact of U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to halt foreign funding through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on Arab media platforms has largely gone undiscussed. Some of these platforms have consistently labelled themselves as "independent" despite being Western-funded.This article examines the reasons behind the failure of economic models for Western-funded institutions in the Arab world and explores the extent of their editorial independence.

Article: https://institute.aljazeera.net/en/ajr/article/3038. 

2. Africa Beyond Aid By Robtel Neajai Pailey

Rather than likening aid suspension to the apocalypse, we should instead embrace it as a catalyst for 21st century decolonization.  

For those of us who understand that structural barriers make achieving socio-economic transformation in the so-called ‘Global South’ difficult nigh impossible Washington’s exemption of military aid to Israel appeared rather self-serving and spiteful. But it also exposed the disingenuousness of an aid system that lacks transparency operates as a tool of neocolonial control and breeds dependency.  

Aid is clearly strategic rather than altruistic. For example the US agency for international development (USAID) was established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to fight the spread of communism with one American diplomat recently admitting in a live broadcast that “US aid is not charity. It is a tool for advancing the interests of the United States”.

Few aid industry zealots care to concede that the funding freeze disproportionately impacts American companies, contractors and NGOs which absorb 31% of financing after 12% overhead/admin is skimmed off. The lion’s share of USAID financing, 46%, is channelled through multilateral implementing partners such as the UN and World Bank, with only 11% going directly to foreign institutions, including governments, companies and NGOs.    

When Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara famously said, “he who feeds you, controls you”, he was demystifying a multi-billion-dollar industry whose modus operandi is to entrench geopolitical hierarchies of power and sustain global economic inequalities.  

Article: https://www.liberianobserver.com/opinion/commentaries/africa-beyond-aid/article_911e0978-fb19-11ef-be76-4b8ba3f1cb7f.html

3. Chihombori-Quao: USAID was ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ in Africa | The Bottom Line 

Al Jazeera 

It's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mFSRb5dUOM. 

4. Trump’s USAID freeze must serve as a wake-up call for Africa by Tafi Mhaka

13 Mar 2025, Al Jazeera Opinion 

From Zimbabwe to Uganda and Tanzania gaining independence from the so-called benevolence of the West must be seen as a crucial element of Africa’s postcolonial success.The painful and often humiliating contradiction of Western countries providing billions in aid to inefficient and sleazy African governments that preside over resource-rich countries should not remain the norm.

Article: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/3/13/trumps-usaid-freeze-must-serve-as-a-wake-up-call-for-africa?fbclid=IwY2xjawJSmRpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWgGxIb0GVJn8WoYxeGXH0gk42HKEM7WU_NwgBuSgUihf4v2YE4EhLtaWQ_aem_bOJfhMqbdQ4hmNRFyXDMQQ

5.  How the U.S. Uses ‘Aid’ as Soft Power to Dominate the World w/ Matt Kennard : 

15 Feb 2025 

Aid acts as a disguise for imperialism. It manufactures consent for the Empire. USAID. National Endowment for Democracy. These provide propaganda for American Empire. USAID was funding opposition against Eva Morales. Trump merely shows American Imperialism more clearly. Takes away the pretence. 9 out of 10 media outlets in Ukraine funded by USAID = propaganda control.

" For decades, U.S. imperialism has operated not just through military force but through a vast system of economic coercion, media manipulation, and covert operations. The World Bank, IMF, and USAID present themselves as tools of development, but in reality, they enforce American dominance under the guise of aid.  Now, with Trump and Musk cutting USAID, many see this as a shift, but in reality, it’s just a restructuring of the empire. What does this tell us about the evolving strategies of imperialism? How does economic warfare, soft power, and media complicity allow the U.S. and its allies to maintain control with minimal backlash?  Investigative journalist Matt Kennard, co-founder of Declassified UK and author of The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. The American Empire, joins Rania Khalek to expose how U.S. and British intelligence operations, including spy flights over Gaza, are deeply entangled with global imperial control. "

6. Why some in the Global South are not mourning the demise of USAID by Patrick Gathara 

3 Mar 2025

It is to say that the soul of “development” has always been much less humanistic than its proponents assert. In fact the entire enterprise of aid has been a tool for geopolitical control a means of preserving rather than eliminating global inequality and the resource extraction that feeds it.In recent days following the demise of USAID there has been growing openness about this reality – consciously or unconsciously.For example a statement issued by InterAction which “unites and amplifies the voices of America’s leading humanitarian and development organizations” made that quite clear. These organisations it said before a hasty rewrite “work tirelessly to save lives and advance US interests globally”. It added that the attack on USAID had suspended “programs that support America’s global leadership and creates dangerous vacuums that China and our adversaries will quickly fill”.

7.  The real history of USAID as an imperial cutout by The GrayZone 

11 Feb 2025 

Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on ugly truth behind the United States Agency for International Development which is now on the Trump administration's DOGE chopping block.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ND5xZ802X0

Brexit was a signal...

Brexit was a signal, the fracture of a once mighty colonial power. Germany , which is now thrashing Holocaust survivors for protesting Israel's Genocide, is undergoing Far Right, Nazi striped resurgence. Trumpism is the same destructive internal shit show like Brexit which reveals contradictions but effect of American imperialism is unchanged or even worse.

“The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism”

 This interview “The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism” really spoke to me: 

"the primary impulse behind the book was really to put an end to this horrible loneliness that I felt, along with many other people, a kind of desolation induced by the fact that, you know, powerful people, powerful politicians in democracies, journalists, intellectuals were either silent about the ongoing genocide in Gaza or, even worse, vehemently supporting it. So, I think, you know, it forced many of us to reexamining not just sort of narratives of Middle Eastern history or Israeli history or Palestinian history, but a kind of broader history of Western supremacism, of decolonization."

One feels a loneliness and desolation at the silence of Western white friends who have not uttered a peep against the Genocide. It exposes the hollowness of an international life with international careers, international education, international colleagues and friends with whom one doesn't share any soul, any solidarity, any politics, any common consciousness.

This sense of betrayal, this sense of desolation has to be acknowledged but also resisted, I suppose. We have to continue to bear witness to the atrocities and this world order.

Some more quotes:

So, I think, for many people in the West, who have been absorbed with a very different narrative — first of all, the narrative of the Cold War, the narrative of the end of history, the narrative of American unipolar dominance — decolonization still comes as a kind of news, or they confuse it with people asking for decolonizing knowledge in the United States or decolonizing educational syllabuses. So, I think there’s a very broad confusion about this world.

But what it really signifies is greater political, intellectual assertiveness and a very fierce desire to not live in a world where racial privilege, most specifically white privilege, orders and forces a global hierarchy. You know, you can see this very clearly in sort of South African president a few days ago making a speech and saying, “We will not be bullied.”

And you can read the whole transcript here: “The World After Gaza”: Author Pankaj Mishra on Gaza & the Return of 19th-C. “Rapacious Imperialism”: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/13/pankaj_mishra_world_after_gaza .

By the way, I was lucky enough to see a conversation between Pankaj Mishra and Mohsin Hamid in Lahore at the Lahore Lit Fest a couple years ago.

On International Women’s Day

 

On International Women’s Day, we honor Vietnamese revolutionary Võ Thị Thắng. Here, she smiles after receiving a 20-year labor camp sentence from the US-backed South Vietnamese government. She told the judge: “20 years? Your government won’t last that long.”

You can read about her: Reflections on a Joyous Revolutionary: Vo Thi Thang: https://www.eksentrika.com/revolutionary-vo-thi-thang-vietnam/: 

Oh, that’s Ms. Vo. Oh yes, she was quite famous. She used to be the Minister of Tourism for Vietnam for a while. She died a few years ago.

One March 8, Thomas Sankara declared a day of rest for women. Men were asked to go to the market to buy vegetables and do the household chores. The best speech by an African political leader on women's freedom came from Sankara in March 8, 1987, a few months before Sankara was assassinated. In the speech, Sankara said: "The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph. Women hold up the other half of the sky."

This is flooding my Facebook , it's raining on Facebook for the Proxy War in Ukraine

 

Lucky Irani Circus is in Islamabad

Encourage everyone to support these amazing performers who risk everything to entertain the public. Encourage children to see this and, be amazed at the acrobats , especially the young ones! These are working class people and there are as many women performers as men! PS. There are performers from Ukraine and Africa (couldn't catch which country in the pronunciation) too.

I made many many videos of course. See one: 50 Years of Lucky Irani Circus. 

Dancing Girl of Moenjodaro

 I was really really excited to see the Dancing Girl of Moenjodaro. 

My first reaction was that she's so tiny! She is 10.8cm. This was in the Harappan Gallery, which has has 3,500 artifacts from the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation. 

See this interesting history about the division of artefacts between India and Pakistan: 

When one of the major sites of the Harappan civilization, Mohenjo Daro, was excavated in the 1920s, archaeologists deposited its important finds first in the Lahore Museum, and then these were moved to Delhi by Mortimer Wheeler in anticipation of the construction of a Central Imperial Museum there. At the time of the Partition, the issue of ownership of these objects arose and eventually the two countries agreed to share all the collections equally, although this was sometimes interpreted in literal sense, with several necklaces and girdles taken apart with half the beads sent to Pakistan and half retained in India. In the words of Nayanjot Lahiri, ‘the integrity of these objects were compromised in the name of equitable division’.  Of the two most celebrated sculpted figures found in Mohenjo Daro, Pakistan asked for and received the steatite figure of a bearded male, dubbed the 'Priest King', while the National Museum of India retained the bronze statuette of the 'Dancing Girl', a nude bejeweled female.  Considering that the major sites like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa belonged to Pakistan post-Partition, the collections in this gallery also grew out of the discoveries of the excavations made after the Indian independence in 1947 such as Daimabad, Rakhigarhi, and Dholavira.

National Museum of India 

The secular conversations in Pakistan that ask us to reject a narrow and weird Islamic Arabic national narrative ask us to remember Gandhara, Indus Valley Civilisation , Buddhism, Hinduism and so on. The Dancing Girl often pops up as a metaphor for what was here long before any Empire , modern religion or Pakistan came along. 

Interestingly, Pakistan has asked for the the Dancing Girl to be returned: Sindh seeks return of Moenjodaro’s Dancing Girl from India. Why? Do we have any good museums? Do we have thriving Archaelogical , Cultural or Historical societies? Are our ancient monuments preserved? Do we appropriately educate children of the history of this land ? All I see is evidence of anti Hindu, anti Indian brainwashing at a very young age to justify Communalism, Partition and the ethnic cleansing that ensued. 

India too is having its moment of right wing Hindu nationalism but that does not justify hyper nationalism on either side. 

I just remembered reading this idiotic column by Rafia Zakaria which ENRAGED me when I read it. She suggests that Tipu Sultan's Tiger should be given to Pakistan because " it is time that the tiger came to Pakistan, which, being the Muslim successor state after colonial India, should have a right to it." She can't invoke the UNESCO Convention here but invokes Pakistan's identity as a Muslim state. You can read it here: The fate of Tipu’s Tiger. 

But what about Lal Qila the mightiest symbol of Islamic India? How about the Taj? How about Tipu Sultan's seat of government? Why don't we bring everything back to Pakistan brick by brick, Ms. Zakaria? 

This modern obsession with claiming, owning, distorting and mutilating history is sick. 

Back to the Dancing Girl, another reason I was excited to see her was recalling some recent articles I read that suggest the Indus Valley Civilisation was egalitarian. There's a hopeful idealistic glow to knowing that human society isn't programmed to be unjust and unequal. 

And the Dancing Girl of Moenjardo will forever be dancing in our collective imaginations. 

I made a video too: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WcT1WO26hzM. 

Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia

Visiting or rather paying respects to Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia Dargah was spellbinding. This is where Amir Khusrau is also buried. Ghalib is also buried close by. This visit and subsequent visit to Humayun's Tomb (and the adjoining world class museum) helped me to understand the spiritual and artistic North Hindustani /Classical culture. That all Indian rulers chose to be buried in this area that was founded by Nizammuddin Aulia , close to the Yamuna River. The legacy of Nizammuddin Aulia , a 14th century Sufi saint, carries on to this day. I was also personally very very happy to have paid respects to Amir Khusrau, the poet scholar artist musician who apparently invented the sitar, the tabla and the qawali. 

"Agar firdaus bar ruh zameen ast, hameen ast o hameen ast o hameen ast!"

The Red Fort, also known as Lal Qila is a historic Mughal fort in Delhi, India, that served as the primary residence of the Mughal emperors. Emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the construction of the Red Fort on 12 May 1639, following his decision to relocate the Mughal capital from Agra to Delhi. Originally adorned in red and white, the fort's design is attributed to Ustad Ahmad Lahori, the architect behind the Taj Mahal. The Red Fort represents the pinnacle of Mughal architecture during Shah Jahan's reign, blending Persian palace influences with indigenous Indian architectural traditions. (Wikipedia)

We entered the Fort through the Lahori Gate which faces Lahore, as told to us by our guide. And, of course, there is a Delhi Gate in Lahore. 

Amir Khusrau's lines, "Agar firdaus bar ruh zameen ast, hameen ast o hameen ast o hameen ast!" (If there be a paradise on earth, this is it, this is it, this is it!), are inscribed on the walls of the Diwan-i-Khas within the Red Fort. 

Lal Qila is massive. (The Red Fort in Delhi covers an area of approximately 255 acres (103 hectares), enclosed by 2.41 kilometers (1.50 miles) of defensive walls. ) The Yamuna River is at the back of the Fort. The Yamuna also flows through the Nizamuddin area. 

We didn't get there until 3 pm but a full tour requires at least a full day. There are so many Mahal, gardens and monuments inside the Fort, not to mention the 5 different museum buildings. We were only able to see the first one and that too only half of it. 

7 October changed everything like 9-11 did

7 October 2023 seems to be as significant a day now as 9-11 has become in our lives. Again, it has impacted everything.  

I had just completed my undergraduate studies and was back in Islamabad. I was shocked by the attacks , fresh from the grief of losing my friend. I could only see the attacks in terms of death and destruction of individual lives, so called innocent citizens. International media also bombarded us with their deaths, as it does. I did rage and rage and rage at the carpet bombing of Afghanistan. I was raging at the idea of our sisters and brothers dying next door. I remember thinking of Afghans as our neighbours, so close to us.  I couldn't take the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. 

I vowed to never set foot on American soil. 

The rest is history. 

This time around for 7 October we have a live streamed genocide. What has changed this time? 

For me, besides the rage, grief and mountains of injustice, everything is so much clearer. The West has completely exposed itself as a barbaric collective, bathed in blood. The blood of every Indigenous peoples ethnically cleansed by the West started to haunt us as Israelis destroyed hospital after hospital, journalist after journalist, school after school, family after family, baby after baby. This carnage immediately conjured up history of North America, the Trail of Tears, the broken treaties, the murder of millions of bison, the stealing of children and the final act: reservations. 

I can't stand a single Western leader: walking corpse Biden embracing Zionist Bastard Netanyahu,  Fuckboy Rishi Sunak, Shitty Macron, Fuckboy Trudeau, Nazi Witch Ursula von der Leyen, Vapidly Giggling Kamala, Corpse lady Pelosi, Jeering and filthily Greedy Hillary. 

Against this we have the hypocrisy of the West's proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. 

Putin's speech on Victory Day triggered me to take an amateur deep dive into World War 2 and, the staggering awe inspiring sacrifices Soviets made to defeat Hitler, the same Hitler who was inspired by American genocide and  institutional racism  in North America. See: What America Taught the Nazis:

Whitman’s “smoking gun” is the transcript of a June 5, 1934, conference of leading German lawyers gathered to exchange ideas about how best to operationalize a racist regime. The record reflects how the most extreme among them, who relied on Krieger’s synoptic scholarship, were especially drawn to American legal codes based on white supremacy. The main conceptual idea was Freisler’s. Race, he argued, is a political construction. In both America and Germany, the importance and meaning of race for the most part had been determined less by scientific realities or social conventions than by political decisions enshrined in law.

See  U.S. Treatment of Indians Inspired Hitler’s Hunger Policies: 

The article is entitled “Hunger as a weapon: Hitler’s Hunger Plan Native American resettlement and starvation in Yemen”.It recalls how Hitler was impressed by U.S. resettlement programs that opened the “West” as it was called to white European settlement and agricultural development. Key among them was the Indian Removal Act of 1830.The Southeast tribes of Cherokee Creek Choctaw Chickasaw and Seminole were the first to be dispossessed they noted although the Cherokee tribe is best remembered for its “Trail of Tears” forced relocation.

Everything happening today in Palestine is a re enactment of Western greed and appetite for genocide which was invented by them as they colonised and pillaged the world. 

Legal and political terminology for genocide had to re-gurgitated for the world when South Africa took Israel to court.  Nothing came of it. We all know it is ethnic cleansing. Nothing came of it. We know this is how Europeans massacred Indigenous populations and took the Americas and Australia and so on. Nothing came of that. No one took the Europeans to court as a moral case. Because this terminology, definitions and laws are based on the European world order.  

Almost a year afterwards, I don't have much left in me to watch minute by minute. It's too much to bear. Also, for me to see this, bear witness to it, I will say Struggle Against Zionism instead of genocide. We know the Palestinians are fighting. It's not merely genocide. It's ongoing ethnic cleansing since 1948. But it's also a moral, political and armed struggle.  

It's a struggle against Western Imperialism and the face that Imperialism exposed by arresting students on college campuses, blocking protests, harassing and firing pro Palestinian voices in their own workplaces, arming Israel, gaslighting victims, defunding UNRWA, blocking anti Israel commentary/analysis on tech platforms, etc. List is too long.  

Political discussions in Class 6

I love hearing about the daily happenings in Kavita's school. 

There is a girl who used to go to the top of the class and mimic the class teacher whenever she isn't around. One time the teacher caught her and started arguing over the inaccuracy of the mimicry. 

I thought this girl has a cool personality but she also said she would throw a person on a wheelchair down the stairs and started laughing! Other girls started laughing too. 

So much for comedy - this kid is merely an attention-seeker with little to no sensitivity. 

Another kid asked Kavita if she is on Israel or Palestine's side. 

The thow-the-wheelchair-down-the-stairs girl spurts "Imran Khan" all the time! As if it's an exclamation! 

Stay tuned for more anecdotes. 

What do I really want to write about?

What do I really want to write about? 

I've been dreaming, fantasising, even obsessing about writing for some time. I want to write political and social commentary, as I observe lived experiences, politics and social interactions. My professional experiences in the Development world have really informed my politics too and propelled me obtaining a Master's Degree at SOAS. The master's degree was already a prerogative in 2008 to further one's career and get a decent contract. Is the Master's degree required for this line of work? I was trained to take a critical look at Development and, unless one obtained a Master's to learn how to better write, a Master's degree is absolutely not required for the desk work, field visits, and meetings. The pretence of technical expertise can be obtained from a course and experience. 

Real expertise is of course necessary for agriculture, nutrition, and health experts in specialised agencies but bulk of the job is bureaucratic with a corporate agenda and style. 

There's much to write about and, link it to the Global order. The most telling are, of course, personal anecdotes. 

Here's one: 

A French guy at the sushi bar: "We should have never left Africa."

Here are more: 

A Canadian woman in response to a critical article in American press about expatriate perks: "We deserve a sushi restaurant. We work hard!" 

A Canadian woman sharing an apparent epiphany: "I look at our way of life in Canada and know that people in the world want different ways of organising their societies." 

An American woman in a USD $12 million proposal development brainstorming session during the Ebola Epidemic: "Wouldn't it be amazing if we taught everyone to wash their hands?" 

A Kenyan woman: "I want to take Liberia and dump it in the Ocean." 

I've always found the attitudes of Westerners enlightening. How do they see their roles, their place in the world and how they carry the legacy of imperialism in them. 

There's been almost complete silence by my Development colleagues on the Genocide in Gaza, regardless of whether they are from the Global North or Global South. 

Feminism and interest in Leftist thinking has also informed how I think and express myself. I think I've always been critical , questioning religion , questioning the Development Industry

I was thinking about extrapolating my life experiences and analysing them with a feminist lens, a material / structural lens. Becoming a mother was one of the most significant moments of my life and, my life is now only about that role as Kavita is suffering with lupus. 

Kavita may see me as a strict mother full of rules but she may take for granted how much I love her, display that affection, and teach her all I know. I could never take anything granted with my mother. I've often wondered how feminists make peace with their patriarchal mothers. 

My father is in an interesting character. I've seen him as a progressive man who has ensured his daughters are educated and was not interested in marriage as a duty. However, family conflicts made me question his patriarchal nature.  

It's only recently my father told me about his membership in the Communist Party and how he came on a train from India to Pakistan.  (He also told me about his charsi days) My mother's stories are of privilege and are much more clanish as she comes from a big family. 

My father would have made a great committed atheist but he's a believer despite his politics and love of the arts. 

Who makes you who is of great interest to me. One thing I share with Aboo is my love of pseudo philosophising and I subject Kavita to grand lectures. She will inherit the skill to think at different levels. 

Lastly, I have been thinking about culture and ethnic/national identity. The culture identity has totally burst for me. I don't know which romantic rock I was living under. What culture do I really have? Or any urbanised folks long since removed from kinship to the land? My father and family left their roots in India during Partition. He has has told me his father was removed from his village because he wouldn't bow down to the landowners. My mother's side also left their ancestral village Bhera and are now scattered all over as they left Pakistan being Ahamdis. Neither my parents spoke Punjabi with us. Living abroad as Pakistanis , we followed the Pakistani State narrative. We do not have a culture but strong Ahamdi identity. And, as members of capitalist societies how are we really different from Americans? 

What are the values and ideas I will pass to Kavita? My actions will always speak more loudly than any conversations and lectures.  

Fifty shades of red