A hot discussion topic in Afghanistan these days is the extreme crime allegedly plaguing various cities in the United States, most of them Democratic-led ones.<\/p>\n
This, at least, is one of the notions to have recently emerged<\/a> from the brain of US President Donald Trump, as justification for his efforts to unleash the National Guard on the city of Chicago, Illinois: \u201cIt\u2019s probably worse than almost any city in the world. You could go to Afghanistan, you can go to a lot of different places, and they probably marvel at how much crime we have.\u201d<\/p>\n In reality, of course, a lot of folks in Afghanistan and other \u201cdifferent places\u201d are probably marvelling at the fact that the country that has made a name for itself illegally waging war across the world is now illegally waging war on its own cities.<\/p>\n As Trump himself put it<\/a>: \u201cWe should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.\u201d Never mind that the military is intended for use abroad \u2013 the president has detected an \u201cenemy within\u201d.<\/p>\n Currently in the Trumpian crosshairs are Chicago and Portland, Oregon, both of which the administration has labelled as \u201cwar zones\u201d. And what better way to will a war zone into being than by sending in the military?<\/p>\n Notably, the two heavily Democratic cities have played host to significant public protests over Trump\u2019s sadistic immigration crackdown<\/a>, with peaceful protesters \u2013 pardon, \u201cenemies within\u201d \u2013 being on the receiving end of tear gas, rubber bullets, and other treats courtesy of US forces of law and order. And yet people wouldn\u2019t be protesting in the first place had Trump not authorised US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to wantonly eviscerate rights and rip communities apart.<\/p>\n But without such protests and other \u201ccivil disturbances\u201d, there would be no excuse for rampant militarisation by Commander-in-Chief Trump, who would then have so much extra money on his hands that he might have to invest in, I dunno, healthcare or education.<\/p>\n In June, Trump deployed thousands<\/a> of National Guard troops as well as hundreds of US Marines to Los Angeles, California, to help combat protests against ICE\u2019s manic immigration raids. A US district judge subsequently ruled<\/a> that the Trump administration had wilfully violated federal law in doing so.<\/p>\n Then in August, Trump imposed federal control on the local police force in the nation\u2019s capital of Washington, DC, and mobilised 800<\/a> National Guard troops, ostensibly to fight \u201cout of control<\/a>\u201d crime levels. As everyone pointed out<\/a>, however, crime in DC was in fact down.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s nothing like the sight of the military patrolling the streets to keep Americans in line \u2013 and living in fear.<\/p>\n In the case of Portland, Trump\u2019s militarised vision has been stymied for the moment<\/a> by a federal judge \u2013 appointed by Trump himself<\/a>, no less \u2013 who temporarily blocked the administration\u2019s move to send National Guard troops from California into Oregon.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s appointed \u201chellhole<\/a>\u201d of Chicago, on the other hand, looks poised to receive the Trumpian treatment sooner rather than later, as hundreds of National Guard troops from Texas arrived in Illinois<\/a> on Tuesday despite legal challenges. A lawsuit<\/a> filed on October 6 by the state of Illinois and city of Chicago argued that \u201cthe American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president\u2019s favor\u201d.<\/p>\n Trump has warned that, if necessary, he will not hesitate to invoke the Insurrection Act<\/a>, a federal law dating from 1807 that would effectively permit military occupation whether state and city officials like it or not. The last usage of said act took place in 1992 under then-president George H W Bush, who whipped it out in response to unrest in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of a Black man named Rodney King.<\/p>\n Again, the unrest never would have happened had US forces of law and order not engaged in egregiously criminal behaviour. From any objective standpoint, the solution to abuses committed by armed representatives of the state is not the deployment of more armed representatives of the state.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Chicago and Portland are hardly the end<\/a> of Trump\u2019s list of targets, which comprises many more \u201cdangerous cities\u201d that can potentially be used \u201cas training grounds for our military.\u201d But as journalist Melissa del Bosque reveals in a recent dispatch<\/a> for the Border Chronicle, the Texas-Mexico frontier is already being utilised as just such a training venue.<\/p>\n Since Republican governor of Texas and anti-immigrant extraordinaire Greg Abbott launched \u201cOperation Lone Star<\/a>\u201d in 2021, del Bosque writes, Democratic-leaning Texas border communities have \u201cbeen occupied by National Guard troops deployed by Republican-led states, including Tennessee\u201d. Over the past four-and-a-half years, \u201cAbbott and other MAGA-aligned governors have spent billions of taxpayer dollars to send troops and police to the border,\u201d with Operation Lone Star serving \u201cas a testing ground for Trump\u2019s mass-deportation campaign and for his troop deployments\u201d.<\/p>\n