Features

Human rights and US double standards

Published

3 years ago

2023/05/8

Thilina Walpola

By Daya Gamage

Foreign Service National Political Specialist (ret) U.S. Department of State

In November 2019, President Donald Trump granted clemency to three controversial US military figures charged with war crimes, arguing that such moves would give American troops “the confidence to fight” without worrying about potential legal repercussions. Two army officers were granted full pardons for the murder of Afghans. Trump also restored the rank of a special warfare operator who had been tried for a string of alleged war crimes. It was claimed that the criminal charges were an overreaction to actions taken in the chaos and confusion of battle. Such actions validate the widely-held view that the US does not hold itself to the same standards it tries to impose on them.

If Sri Lanka has an iota of dignity – I am not suggesting a free-for-all with Washington – it should make ‘some’ diplomatic moves on the basis of the following:

The American Service-Members Protection Act (ASPA) was an amendment to the 2002 Supplemental Appropriations Act (House Resolution 4775) passed in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the launch of the so-called Global War on Terror. The ASPA aims to “protect U.S. military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the Government against prosecution by an international criminal court to which the U.S. is not a party.” Among other defencive provisions the Act prohibits federal, state and local governments and agencies (including courts and law enforcement agencies) from assisting the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It even prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are parties to the Court. In 2002, during the administration of Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, Sri Lanka signed with the U.S. an “Article 98 Agreement,” agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the Court. This was done under pressure during the 2002-2004 ‘Peace Talks’ in which Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powel and his Deputy Richard Armitage were directly involved in lifting the terrorist/separatist LTTE on par with the legitimate government of Sri Lanka.

This shows the hypocrisy and double standards of Washington policymakers who, with no substantial data and evidence, relied on information furnished by an NGO to blacklist former Navy Commander, Admiral of the Fleet Wasantha Karannagoda.

In September 2009, four months after the conclusion of the Eelam War IV, the US Senate Appropriations Committee had mandated that the State Department prepare a report on possible war crimes committed during the final phase of the conflict during 2008-2009 in Sri Lanka. (It should be mentioned that when the ICC decided to send officials during the Trump administration to Washington to interview USG personnel on US atrocities in Afghanistan, USG suspended their visas and declared that the US was a sovereign nation for such interference). The report was completed in October despite acknowledged evidentiary limitations, but the allegations it uncovered of abuses by government officials defined thereafter the policy of the US and some EU countries toward the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL). The report’s findings, based largely on hearsay, also created an atmosphere of credibility about human rights violations that was exploited for anti-Colombo propaganda by activist sections of the Tamil Diaspora. The US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues articulated a double standard that was common in the US foreign policy establishment at that time. He acknowledged “that honestly in a conflict like that against the LTTE it was necessary to use very strong force to defeat a group that was committing horrendous crimes against the civilian population. But on the other hand, that action had to comply with the laws of war.” A democratic government, in other words, was held responsible to rules of warfare that autocratic insurgents were not, even though that would mean that the democratic government could be handicapped in defending its sovereignty, system of government, and domestic rule of law. Such accountability, of course, did not apply to the US.

These disgraceful double standards of Washington policymakers and lawmakers in dealing with Sri Lanka’s ‘national issues’ since the advent of the separatist war in the north in the 1980s are now very broadly dealt with by two personnel who worked within the U.S. Department of State for thirty years in the area of foreign affairs: One is this writer who is a retired Foreign Service National Political Specialist once accredited to the Political Section of the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, and the other, Dr. Robert K. Boggs, a retired Senior Foreign Service (FS) and Intelligence Officer who served as Political Counselor at the Colombo Diplomatic Mission and in many senior positions in the State Department in Washington. Their investigative work is still in progress. Their manuscript ‘Defending Democracy: Lessons in Strategic Diplomacy from U.S.-Sri Lankan Relations” is nearing completion with alarming disclosures, provocative analyses and interpretations based on their up-close and personal knowledge and understanding of Washington’s foreign policy trajectory in Sri Lanka – then and now – and how it used ‘double standards’ in handling its foreign relations with Sri Lanka reducing Sri Lanka to some level of a client state. Sri Lanka’s own infantile behaviour, ignorance of its own strengths and inarticulate manner in which it was handling foreign relations since the 1980s contributed too to become a subservient state allowing ‘national issues’ to become ‘global’ ones.

‘Moral Arbiter’

How can the US be a moral arbiter in the war against terrorism if it has never tried or prosecuted most of the Americans responsible for kidnappings, secret detentions and torture of suspects abroad after 9/11? Why has it so uncritically accepted the civilian casualty figures of international NGOs, however righteously motivated, regarding hostilities in Sri Lanka but consistently rejected them regarding its own collateral killings? And does the U.S. really believe that, because it tries sincerely to minimise harm to civilians, it is morally justified in pursuing tactics that inevitably will cause casualties among non-combatants? If so, do the compulsions of military tactics not similarly exonerate other governments fighting other groups recognised by the international community as terrorists? Are no allowances granted to military forces that do not have the U.S.’ access to precise overhead targeting intelligence and so-called precision weapons? If the U.S. can excuse itself from culpability for civilian deaths it causes in counterinsurgency operations in poor countries far from North America, are foreign governments not also excused for using their full offensive capabilities to defeat domestic terrorists posing immediate threats to their national integrity and democracy? Abuses by the United States do not excuse abuses by Sri Lanka, but U.S. abuses tarnish the U.S.’ moral authority, weaken U.S. claims to international leadership, provoke deep resentment of the U.S., and provoke even more anti-U.S. terrorism.

Contradictory position

Compounding its hypocrisy in Sri Lanka is the long US record of self-righteously shielding its own military from investigation by international human rights tribunals. Since 1986 the USG has adopted the contradictory position of supporting the rule of law in the international system by participating in litigation before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but at the same time refusing to submit itself to the authority of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the grounds that this would violate U.S. sovereignty. While Sri Lankan forces were fighting the LTTE, the US was unleashing massive amounts of firepower in Iraq that killed thousands of civilians. In Afghanistan the U.S. allied itself with, and thus strengthened, war lords and provincial officials with strong records as counterinsurgency fighters, but has ignored credible reports of these allies’ corruption and human rights abuses. At the same time, the U.S. has become increasingly reliant in its international campaign against extremism on air power, including armed drones that routinely injures and kills civilians. Yet in September 2018 the US National Security Advisor, John Bolton, threatened sanctions against the “illegitimate” ICC if it investigated credible allegations of war crimes by U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Afghanistan. In earlier diatribes against the ICC, Bolton reportedly acknowledged that the U.S. needed immunity because its use of torture, harsh imprisonment and some counterterrorist tactics constituted crimes under international law, which he dismissed.

At the time that the United States was pressuring Colombo to accept “national, international, and hybrid mechanisms to clarify the fate and whereabouts of the disappeared,” the USG had not itself ratified the UN convention of 2006 requiring state party to criminalise enforced disappearances and take steps to hold those responsible to account. Sri Lanka need not have ‘confronted’ the US, but it had no guts to question it. The US jointly with Sri Lanka during the Wickremesinghe-Sirisena regime presented the 30/1 Resolution in UNHRC in October 2015 for ‘hybrid’ commission.

Despite a resolution passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on November 19, 2020 calling on the USG to ratify the international convention, this still has not happened. The U.S.’ long history of rejecting accountability is strongly rooted in legislation.

Washington has used different standards for the legitimate administration in Sri Lanka which was combating a separatist-terrorist movement, and its overseas advocates, fundraisers and advisors. It needs to be stressed here that Washington ignored the atrocities committed by the Tamil Tigers. A democratic government was made to abide by the rules of warfare, but the terrorists were not required to do so. Such accountability, of course, did not apply to the US.

This point of view may have been based on a legal interpretation common in the past that if a state actor in an internal conflict is a party to international covenants of humanitarian law, the state actor needs to abide by the provisions ratified by the United Nations and is responsible for any violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). In contrast, if the opponent of the legally constituted government is an armed non-state actor (ANSA) and therefore not a signatory to international covenants, the general opinion was that it has no obligation to uphold the provisions. However, due to the growing number of internal armed conflicts that emerged over the years, the international community was forced to realize that new interpretations or legal instruments were needed to regulate non-international conflicts with non-state participants.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, later Protocol II, several other treaties and customary law all deal with non- international armed conflicts. Neither the U.S. nor the GSL is a signatory of Protocol II, but both are parties to Article 3. The latter requires that each Party to a conflict in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties is proscribed from a range of inhumane behaviours, including cruel treatment and torture, the taking of hostages, and extra-legal executions. Construed broadly, many of the provisions of the Article are applicable not only to the LTTE fighting cadre but also to non-combatants supporting them by fundraising, propaganda, legal counselling, and the like. If the USG were serious about accountability, it would call for surviving Tiger leaders and their international accessories to be tried in international courts. Any questions about the legality of such action in U.S. courts were resolved in June 2010, when the US Supreme Court upheld a federal law that makes it a crime to provide material support to foreign terrorist organisations, even if that help is itself not violent. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said the law’s prohibition on some types of intangible assistance to groups the State Department determines engage in terrorism does not violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Despite this growing body of support for legal action against non-state terrorists, the USG continues to target only the GSL for human rights violations.

In February 2020, for example, the USG announced sanctions against Sri Lankan military chief Lt. Gen. Shavendra Silva, who served as a division commander leading the final assault against the Tigers. At the end of April 2023, Admiral of the Fleet Wasantha Karannagoda was declared persona-non-grata in the United States by Washington. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. would impose individual sanctions against Gen. Silva, denying him and his family admittance to the U.S., “due to gross violations of human rights.” The State Department declared the same, imposing individual sanctions against Karannagoda. Nothing similar has been said or done with regard to the expatriate Tamils, now domiciled in Western countries, who served as advisors and agents to LTTE leader Prabhakaran and his top lieutenants.

In June 2010 the US Supreme Court upheld the federal law criminalizing material support to foreign terrorist organisations in a case brought by the LTTE and the Kurdish PKK, contesting their designations as FTOs. In its written opinion the Court stated, inter alia, that:

“The PKK and the LTTE are deadly groups. It is not difficult to conclude, as Congress did, that the taint of their violent activities is so great that working in coordination with them or at their command legitimises and furthers their terrorist means. Moreover, material support meant to promote peaceable, lawful conduct can be diverted to advance terrorism in multiple ways. The record shows that designated foreign terrorist organisations do not maintain organisational firewalls between social, political, and terrorist operations, or financial firewalls between funds raised for humanitarian activities and those used to carry out terrorist attacks. Providing material support in any form would also undermine cooperative international efforts to prevent terrorism and strain the United States’ relationships with its allies, including those that are defending themselves against violent insurgencies waged by foreign terrorist groups.”

It is clear from the foregoing that the USG has the legal tools to pursue its own residents and citizens who helped to defend and empower the LTTE. Unfortunately, despite more than a decade of efforts to pressure the GSL to accept accountability for war crimes committed by its forces, the USG has not taken commensurate steps to pursue accountability for LTTE supporters at home. There are believed to be thousands of former LTTE activists living safely in the US, Canada, and Europe who have never had to face justice for their roles in enabling more than two decades of vicious crimes and human rights abuses. Many continue to use their foreign domiciles as platforms from which to militate for a separate Tamil homeland and to demonise the Colombo government. Had the USG, coordinating with its law enforcement partners internationally, worked to disable the LTTE’s support network during the war, it could have contributed to a negotiated settlement or at least saved countless lives.

A high-profile example of an expatriate activist in the U.S. is Visvanathan Rudrakumaran, who, according to his own website, served during the war as “international legal advisor to Prabhakaran and in-charge of [the LTTE’s] international and diplomatic affairs.”

This writer and his co-author have gone deep into this issue of Washington’s faulty foreign relations and the blatant double standards when dealing with Sri Lanka. Similarly, we have unearthed how Sri Lanka, since the 1980s, has failed not only to defend herself but her inability to make Washington policymakers and lawmakers conversant with the ground situation. In these series of articles, this writer expects professionals and erudite parliamentarians to bring these matters for public debate even now.

(The writer Daya Gamage is a retired Foreign Service National Political Specialist of the U.S. Department of State once accredited to the Political Section of the U.S. Embassy in Colombo)

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Features

The NPP Government is more than a JVP offspring:

Published

5 days ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Rohana Wijeweera

It is also different from all past governments as it faces new and different challenges

No one knows whether the already broken ceasefire between the US and Iran, with Israel as a reluctant adjunct, will last the full 10 days, or what will come thereafter. The world’s economic woes are not over and the markets are yo-yoing in response to Trump’s twitches and Iran’s gate keeping at the Strait of Hormuz. The gloomy expert foretelling is that full economic normalcy will not return until the year is over even if the war were to end with the ceasefire. That means continuing challenges for Sri Lanka and more of the tough learning in the art of governing for the NPP.

The NPP government has been doing what most governments in Asia have been doing to cope with the current global crisis, which is also an Asian crisis insofar as oil supplies and other supply chains are concerned. What the government can and must do additionally is to be totally candid with the people and keep them informed of everything that it is doing – from monitoring import prices to the timely arranging of supplies, all the details of tender, the tracking of arrivals, and keeping the distribution flow through the market without bottlenecks. That way the government can eliminate upstream tender rackets and downstream hoarding swindles. People do not expect miracles from their government, only honest, sincere and serious effort in difficult circumstances. Backed up by clear communication and constant public engagement.

But nothing is going to stop the flow of criticisms against the NPP government. That is a fact of Sri Lankan politics. Even though the opposition forces are weak and have little traction and even less credibility, there has not been any drought in the criticisms levelled against the still fledgling government. These criticisms can be categorized as ideological, institutional and oppositional criticisms, with each category having its own constituency and/or commentators. The three categories invariably overlap and there are instances of criticisms that excite only the pundits but have no political resonance.

April 5 anniversary nostalgia

There is also a new line of criticism that might be inspired by the April 5 anniversary nostalgia for the 1971 JVP insurrection. This new line traces the NPP government to the distant roots of the JVP – its April 1965 founding “in a working-class home in Akmeemana, Galle” by a 22-year old Rohana Wijeweera and seven others; the short lived 1971 insurrection that was easily defeated; and the much longer and more devastating second (1987 to 1989) insurrection that led to the elimination of the JVP’s frontline leaders including Wijeweera, and brought about a change in the JVP’s political direction with commitment to parliamentary democracy. So far, so good, as history goes.

But where the nostalgic narrative starts to bend is in attempting a straight line connection from the 1965 Akmeemana origins of the JVP to the national electoral victories of the NPP in 2024. And the bend gets broken in trying to bridge the gap between the “founding anti-imperialist economics” of the JVP and the practical imperatives of the NPP government in “governing a debt-laden small open economy.” Yet this line of criticism differs from the other lines of criticism that I have alluded to, but more so for its moral purpose than for its analytical clarity. The search for clarity could begin with question – why is the NPP government more than a JVP offspring? The answer is not so simple, but it is also not too complicated.

For starters, the JVP was a political response to the national and global conditions of the 1960s and 1970s, piggybacking socialism on the bandwagon of ethno-nationalism in a bi-polar world that was ideologically split between status quo capitalism and the alternative of socialism. The NPP government, on the other hand, is not only a response to, but is also a product of the conditions of the 2010s and 2020s. The twain cannot be more different. Nothing is the same between then and now, locally and globally.

A pragmatic way to look at the differences between the origins of the JVP and the circumstances of the NPP government is to look at the very range of criticisms that are levelled against the NPP government. What I categorize as ideological criticisms include criticisms of the government’s pro-IMF and allegedly neo-liberal economic policies, as well as the government’s foreign policy stances – on Israel, on the current US-Israel war against Iran, the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, and the apparent closeness to the Modi government in India. These criticisms emanate from the non-JVP left and Sinhala Buddhist nationalists.

Strands of nationalism

To digress briefly, there are several strands in the overall bundle of Sri Lankan nationalism. There is the liberal inclusive strand, the left-progressive strand, the exclusive Sinhala Buddhist Nationalist (SBN) strand, and the defensive strands of minority nationalisms. Given Sri Lanka’s historical political formations and alliances, much overlapping goes on between the different strands. The overlapping gets selective on an issue by issue basis, which in itself is not unwelcome insofar as it promotes plurality in place of exclusivity.

Historically as well, and certainly after 1956, the SBN strand has been the dominant strand of nationalism in Sri Lanka and has had the most influential say in every government until now. Past versions of the JVP frequently straddled the dominant SBN space. Currently, however, the dominant SBN strand is in one of its more dormant phases and the NPP government could be a reason for the current dormancy. This is an obvious difference between the old JVP and the new NPP.

A second set of criticisms, or institutional criticisms, emanate from political liberals and human rights activists and these are about the NPP government’s actions or non-actions in regard to constitutional changes, the future of the elected executive presidency, the status of provincial devolution and the timing of provincial council elections, progress on human rights issues, the resolution of unfinished postwar businesses including the amnesia over mass graves. These criticisms and the issues they represent are also in varying ways the primary concerns of the island’s Tamils, Muslims and the Malaiyaka (planntationn) Tamils. As with the overlapping between the left and the non-minority nationalists, there is also overlapping between the liberal activists and minority representatives.

A third category includes what might be called oppositional criticisms and they counterpose the JVP’s past against the NPP’s present, call into question the JVP’s commitment to multi-party democracy and raise alarms about a creeping constitutional dictatorship. This category also includes criticisms of the NPP government’s lack of governmental experience and competence; alleged instances of abuse of power, mismanagement and even corruption; alleged harassment of past politicians; and the failure to find the alleged mastermind behind the 2019 Easter bombings. At a policy and implementational level, there have been criticisms of the government’s educational reforms and electricity reforms, the responses to cyclone Ditwah, and the current global oil and economic crises. The purveyors of oppositional criticisms are drawn from the general political class which includes political parties, current and past parliamentarians, as well as media pundits.

Criticisms as expectations

What is common to all three categories of criticisms is that they collectively represent what were understood to be promises by the NPP before the elections, and have become expectations of the NPP government after the elections. It is the range and nature of these criticisms and the corresponding expectations that make the NPP government a lot more than a mere JVP offspring, and significantly differentiate it from every previous government.

The deliverables that are expected of the NPP government were never a part of the vocabulary of the original JVP platform and programs. The very mode of parliamentary politics was ideologically anathema to the JVP of Akmeemana. And there was no mention of or concern for minority rights, or constitutional reforms. On foreign policy, it was all India phobia without Anglo mania – a halfway variation of Sri Lanka’s mainstream foreign policy of Anglo mania and India phobia. For a party of the rural proletariat, the JVP was virulently opposed to the plantation proletariat. The JVP’s version of anti-imperialist economics would hardly have excited the Sri Lankan electorate at any time, and certainly not at the present time.

At the same time, the NPP government is also the only government that has genealogical antecedents to a political movement or organization like the JVP. That in itself makes the NPP government unique among Sri Lanka’s other governments. The formation of the NPP is the culmination of the evolution of the JVP that began after the second insurrection with the shedding of political violence, acceptance of political plurality and commitment to electoral democracy.

But the evolution was not entirely a process of internal transformation. It was also a response to a rapidly and radically changing circumstances both within Sri Lanka and beyond. This evolution has not been a rejection of the founding socialist purposes of the JVP in 1968, but their adaptation in the endless political search, under constantly changing conditions, for a non-violent, socialist and democratic framework that would facilitate the full development of the human potential of all Sri Lankans.

The burden of expectations is unmistakable, but what is also remarkable is their comprehensiveness and the NPP’s formal commitment to all of them at the same time. No previous government shouldered such an extensive burden or showed such a willing commitment to each and every one of the expectations. In the brewing global economic crisis, the criticisms, expectations and the priorities of the government will invariably be focussed on keeping the economy alive and alleviating the day-to-day difficulties of millions of Sri Lankan families. While what the NPP government can and must do may not differ much from what other Asian governments – from Pakistan to Vietnam – are doing, it could and should do better than what any and all past Sri Lankan governments did when facing economic challenges.

by Rajan Philips

Features

A Fragile Ceasefire: Pakistan’s Glory and Israel’s Sabotage

Published

5 days ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Smokes over Beirut: Israel’s Ceasefire Attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon

After threatening to annihilate one of the planet’s oldest civilizations, TACO* Trump chickened out again by grasping the ceasefire lifeline that Pakistan had assiduously prepared. Trump needed the ceasefire badly to stem the mounting opposition to the war in America. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted the war to continue because he needed it badly for his political survival. So, he contrived a fiction and convinced Trump that Lebanon is not included in the ceasefire. Trump as usual may not have noticed that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Shariff had clearly indicated Lebanon’s inclusion in his announcement of the ceasefire at 7:50 PM, Tuesday, on X. Ten minutes before Donald Trump’s fake deadline.

True to form on Wednesday, Israel unleashed the heaviest assault by far on Lebanon, reportedly killing over 300 people, the highest single-day death toll in the current war. Iran responded by re-closing the Strait of Hormuz and questioning the need for talks in Islamabad over the weekend. There were other incidents as well, with an oil refinery attacked in Iran, and Iranian drones and missiles slamming oil and gas infrastructure in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar.

The US tried to insist that Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire, with the argumentative US Vice President JD Vance, who was in Budapest, Hungary, campaigning for Viktor Orban, calling the whole thing a matter of “bad faith negotiation” as well as “legitimate misunderstanding” on the part of Iran, and warning Iran that “it would be dumb to jeopardise its ceasefire with Washington over Israel’s attacks in Lebanon.”

But as the attack in Lebanon drew international condemnation – from Pope Leo to UN Secretary General António Guterres, and several world leaders, and amidst fears of Lebanon becoming another Gaza with 1,500 people including 130 children killed and more than a million people displaced, Washington got Israel to stop its “lawn mowing” in southern Lebanon.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to “open direct negotiations with Lebanon as soon as possible,”. Lebanese President Joeseph Aoun has also called for “a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, followed by direct negotiations between them.” Israel’s involvement in Lebanon remains a wild card that threatens the ceasefire and could scuttle the talks between the US and Iran scheduled for Saturday in Islamabad.

Losers and Winners

After the ceasefire, both the Trump Administration and Iran have claimed total victories while the Israeli government wants the war to continue. The truth is that after more than a month into nonstop bombing of Iran, America and Israel have won nothing. Only Iran has won something it did not have when Trump and Netanyahu started their war. Iran now has not only a say over but control of the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire acknowledges this. Both Trump and Netanyahu are under fire in their respective countries and have no allies in the world except one another.

The real diplomatic winner is Pakistan. Salman Rushdie’s palimpsest-country has emerged as a key player in global politics and an influential mediator in a volatile region. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chief of Defence Field Marshal Asim Munir have both been praised by President Trump and credited for achieving the current ceasefire. The Iranian regime has also been effusive in its praise of Pakistan’s efforts.

It is Pakistan that persisted with the effort after initial attempts at backdoor diplomacy by Egypt, Pakistan and Türkiye started floundering. Sharing a 900 km border and deep cultural history with Iran, and having a skirmish of its own on the eastern front with Afghanistan, Pakistan has all the reason to contain and potentially resolve the current conflict in Iran. Although a majority Sunni Muslim country, Pakistan is home to the second largest Shia Muslim population after Iran, and is the easterly terminus of the Shia Arc that stretches from Lebanon. The country also has a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia that includes Pakistan’s nuclear cover for the Kingdom. An open conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia would have put Pakistan in a dangerously awkward position.

It is now known and Trump has acknowledged that China had a hand in helping Iran get to the diplomatic table. Pakistan used its connections well to get Chinese diplomatic reinforcement. Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Beijing to brief his Chinese counterpart and secured China’s public support for the diplomatic efforts. The visit produced a Five-Point Plan that became a sequel to America’s 15-point proposal and the eventual ten-point offer by Iran.

There is no consensus between parties as to which points are where and who is agreeing to what. The chaos is par for the course the way Donald Trumps conducts global affairs. So, all kudos to Pakistan for quietly persisting with old school toing and froing and producing a semblance of an agreement on a tweet without a parchment.

It is also noteworthy that Israel has been excluded from all the diplomatic efforts so far. And it is remarkable, but should not be surprising, the way Trump has sidelined Isreal from the talks. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been enjoying overwhelming support of Israelis for starting the war of his life against Iran and getting the US to spearhead it. But now the country is getting confused and is exposed to Iranian missiles and drones far more than ever before. The Israeli opposition is finally coming alive realizing what little has Netanyahu’s wars have achieved and at what cost. Israel has alienated a majority of Americans and has no ally anywhere else.

It will be a busy Saturday in Islamabad, where the US and Iranian delegations are set to meet. Iran would seem to have insisted and secured the assurance that the US delegation will be led by Vice President Vance, while including Trump’s personal diplomats – Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Iran has not announced its team but it is expected to be led, for protocol parity, by Iran’s Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and will likely include its suave Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Vice President Vance’s attendance will be the most senior US engagement with Iran since Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal under President Obama.

The physical arrangements for the talks are still not public although Islamabad has been turned into a security fortress given the stakes and risks involved. The talks are expected to be ‘indirect’, with the two delegations in separate rooms and Pakistani officials shuttling between them. The status of Iran’s enriched uranium and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will be the major points of contention. After Netanyahu’s overreach on Wednesday, Lebanon is also on the short list

The 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan) took months of negotiations and involved multiple parties besides the US and Iran, including China, France, Germany, UK, Russia and the EU. That served the cause of regional and world peace well until Trump tore up the deal to spite Obama. It would be too much to expect anything similar after a weekend encounter in Islamabad. But if the talks could lead to at least a permanent ceasefire and the return to diplomacy that would be a huge achievement.

(*As of 2025–2026, Donald Trump is nicknamed “TACO Trump” by Wall Street traders and investors as an acronym for “”. This term highlights a perceived pattern of him making strong tariff threats that cause market panic, only to later retreat or weaken them, causing a rebound.)

by Rajan Philips

Features

CIA’s hidden weapon in Iran

Published

5 days ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

We are passing through the ten-day interregnum called a ceasefire over the War on Iran. The world may breathe briefly, but this pause is not reassurance—it is a deliberate interlude, a vacuum in which every actor positions for the next escalation. Iran is far from secure. Behind the veneer of calm, external powers and local forces are preparing, arming, and coordinating. The United States is unlikely to deploy conventional ground troops; the next moves will be executed through proxies whose behaviour will defy expectation. These insurgents are shaped, guided, and amplified by intelligence and technology, capable of moving silently, striking precisely, and vanishing before retaliation. The ceasefire is not peace—it is the prelude to disruption.

The Kurds, historically instruments of Tehran against Baghdad, are now vectors for the next insurgency inside Iran. This movement is neither organic nor local. It is externally orchestrated, with the CIA as the principal architect. History provides the blueprint: under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi, Kurdish uprisings were manipulated, never supported out of sympathy. They were instruments of leverage against Iraq, a way to weaken a rival while projecting influence beyond Iran’s borders. Colonel Isa Pejman, Iranian military intelligence officer who played a role in Kurdish affairs, recalled proposing support for a military insurgency in Iraq, only for the Shah to respond coldly: “[Mustafa] Barzani killed my Army soldiers… please forget it. The zeitgeist and regional context have been completely transformed.” The Kurds were pawns, but pawns with strategic weight. Pejman later noted: “When the Shah wrote on the back of the letter ‘Accepted’ to General Pakravan, I felt I was the true leader of the Kurdish movement.” The seeds planted then are now being activated under new, technologically empowered auspices.

Iran’s geographic vulnerabilities make this possible. The Shah understood the trap: a vast territory with porous borders, squeezed by Soviet pressure from the north and radical Arab states from the west. “We are in a really terrible situation since Moscow’s twin pincers coming down through Kabul and Baghdad surround us,” he warned Asadollah Alam. From Soviet support for the Mahabad Republic to Barzani’s dream of a unified Kurdistan, Tehran knew an autonomous Kurdish bloc could destabilize both Iraq and Iran. “Since the formation of the Soviet-backed Mahabad Republic, the Shah had been considerably worried about the Kurdish threat,” a US assessment concluded.

Today, the Kurds’ significance is operational, not symbolic. The CIA’s recent rescue of a downed F-15 airman using Ghost Murmur, a quantum magnetometry system, demonstrated the reach of technology in intelligence operations. The airman survived two days on Iranian soil before extraction. This was not a simple rescue; it was proof that highly mobile, technologically augmented operations can penetrate Iranian territory with surgical precision. The same logic applies to insurgency preparation: when individuals can be tracked through electromagnetic signatures, AI-enhanced surveillance, and drones, proxy forces can be armed, guided, and coordinated with unprecedented efficiency. The Kurds are no longer pawns—they are a living network capable of fracturing Iranian cohesion while providing deniability to foreign powers.

Iran’s engagement with Iraqi Kurds was always containment, not empowerment. The Shah’s goal was never Kurdish independence. “We do not approve an independent [Iraqi] Kurdistan,” he stated explicitly. Yet their utility as instruments of regional strategy was undeniable. The CIA’s revival of these networks continues a long-standing pattern: insurgent groups integrated into the wider calculus of international power. Israel, Iran, and the Kurds formed a triangular strategic relationship that terrified Baghdad. “For Baghdad, an Iranian-Israeli-Kurdish triangular alliance was an existential threat,” contemporary reports noted. This is the template for modern manipulation: a networked insurgency, externally supported, capable of destabilizing regimes from within while giving foreign powers plausible deniability.

Iran today faces fragility. Years of sanctions, repression, and targeted strikes have weakened educational and scientific hubs; Sharif University in Tehran, one of the country’s leading scientific centres, was bombed. Leaders, scholars, and innovators have been eliminated. Military readiness is compromised. Generations-long setbacks leave Iran exposed. Against this backdrop, a Kurdish insurgency armed with drones, AI-supported surveillance, and precision munitions could do more than disrupt—it could fracture the state internally. The current ten-day ceasefire is a mirage; the next wave of revolt is already being orchestrated.

CIA involvement is deliberate. Operations are coordinated with allied intelligence agencies, leveraging Kurdish grievances, mobility, and ethnolinguistic networks. The Kurds’ spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria provides operational depth—allowing insurgents to strike, vanish, and regroup with impunity. Barzani understood leverage decades ago: “We could be useful to the United States… Look at our strategic location on the flank of any possible Soviet advance into the Middle East.” Today, the calculation is inverted: Kurds are no longer instruments against Baghdad; they are potential disruptors inside Tehran itself.

Technology is central. Ghost Murmur’s ability to detect a single heartbeat remotely exemplifies how intelligence can underpin insurgent networks. Drones, satellite communications, AI predictive modeling, and battlefield sensors create an infrastructure that can transform a dispersed Kurdish insurgency into a high-precision operation. Iran can no longer rely on fortifications or loyalty alone; the external environment has been recalibrated by technology.

History provides the roadmap. The Shah’s betrayal of Barzani after the 1975 Algiers Agreement demonstrated that external actors can manipulate both Iranian ambitions and Kurdish loyalties. “The Shah sold out the Kurds,” Yitzhak Rabin told Kissinger. “We could not station our troops there and keep fighting forever,” the Shah explained to Alam. The Kurds are a pivot, not a cause. Networks once acting under Tehran’s influence are now being repurposed against it.

The insurgency exploits societal fissures. Kurdish discontent in Iran, suppressed for decades, provides fertile ground. Historical betrayal fuels modern narratives: “Barzani claimed that ‘Isa Pejman sold us out to the Shah and the Shah sold us out to the US.’” Intelligence agencies weaponize these grievances, pairing them with training, technological augmentation, and covert support.

Geopolitically, the stakes are immense. The Shah’s defensive-offensive doctrine projected Iranian influence outward to neutralize threats. Today, the logic is inverted: the same networks used to contain Iraq are being readied to contain Iran. A technologically augmented Kurdish insurgency, covertly backed, could achieve in months what decades of sanctions, diplomacy, or repression have failed to accomplish.

The operation will be asymmetric, high-tech, and dispersed. UAVs, quantum-enhanced surveillance, encrypted communications, and AI-directed logistics will dominate. Conventional Iranian forces are vulnerable to this type of warfare. As Pejman reflected decades ago, “Our Army was fighting there, rather than the Kurds who were harshly defeated… How could we keep such a place?” Today, the challenge is magnified by intelligence superiority on the insurgents’ side.

This is not a temporary flare-up. The CIA and its allies are constructing a generational network of influence. Experience from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon proves these networks endure once operationalised. The Shah recognized this: “Iran’s non-state foreign policy under the Shah’s reign left a lasting legacy for the post-Revolution era.” Today, those instruments are being remade as vectors of foreign influence inside Iran.

The future is stark. Iran faces not simply external threats, but a carefully engineered insurgency exploiting historical grievances, technological superiority, and precise intelligence. The Kurds are central. History, technology, and geopolitical calculation converge to create a transformative threat. Tehran’s miscalculations, betrayals, and suppressed grievances now form the lattice for this insurgency. The Kurds are positioned not just as an ethnic minority, but as a vector of international strategy—Tehran may be powerless to stop it.

Iran’s containment strategies have been weaponized, fused with technology, and inverted against it. The ghosts of Barzani’s Peshmerga, the shadows of Algiers, and the Shah’s strategic vision now converge with Ghost Murmur, drones, and AI. Tehran faces a paradox: the instruments it once controlled are now calibrated to undermine its authority. The next Kurdish revolt will not only fight in the mountains but in the electromagnetic shadows where intelligence operates, consequences are lethal, and visibility is scarce.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa