Author: Nafisa Hoodbhoy

Boris Johnson’s has the unique ability to be ridiculous and charming at the same time. The London mayor and his inexplicable haircut can offend entire cities, get stuck on zip lines in front of crowds of journalists and be sacked from government for lying about an affair (“an inverted pyramid of piffle,” he claimed), yet still somehow end up one of Britain’s most important and beloved politicians. Many think he will be prime minister sooner or later.

However, Johnson’s charm may well fall flat with one organization: The U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

The mayor’s dispute with American tax-collectors was brought to light recently when he traveled to the United States and did a blitz of interviews with the American news media. While talking to WAMU’s Diane Rehm Show, Johnson explained that the U.S. government was forcing him to pay the capital gains tax on the sale of his Islington home. “Can you believe it?” he exclaimed. When asked by Rehm if he intended to pay the bill, he said that he would not. “I think it’s absolutely outrageous,” he added.

Johnson’s problem comes down to one important factor: His dual-citizenship. Despite being very, very British, Johnson was born in New York and lived in the United States until he was 5, hence becoming a natural born citizen. And despite some threats to renounce his citizenship (“After 42 happy years I am getting a divorce from America,” he wrote in 2006 after a spat with a U.S. immigration officer), he renewed his U.S. passport just two years ago.

It’s certainly tempting to dismiss Johnson’s dilemma as the simple case of a very rich man attempting to float the law (“Come on, Boris!,” the New York Times’s Roger Cohen wrote this week. “Give us a break.”) but there is a degree of sympathy to be found here: American citizenship carries with it a uniquely vexing taxation problem. The United States is one of only two countries where taxation is based on citizenship rather than residence (Eritrea is the other). If Johnson lived in the United States, for instance, he would not have to file a British tax return.

The unusual U.S. policy dates back to the Civil War and the Revenue Act of 1862, which called for the taxing of American citizens abroad, in part to punish men who fled the country to avoid joining the Union army.

In practice, this is usually often just an annoying bit of paperwork for foreigners — while the average citizen would have to file a tax return, it’s unlikely they’ll have to pay anything. However, it can become expensive for higher earners, especially when tax laws don’t line up. As Lisa Pollack, an American expat herself, explains for the Financial Times, this is what appears to have happened for poor old Boris:

In the U.K., gain on the sale of one’s home is not subject to tax. In the U.S., a gain above $250,000 (for a single filer) is subject to capital gains tax. Also in the US, home ownership is subsidised by a deduction against income of mortgage interest. In short, the countries have different tax breaks on housing.

Johnson’s U.S. tax bill for the sale of his home in London is thought to be in six figures. Given that the home is in the country he lives and works in, and he has not lived in the U.S. since he was 5, you can see why he thinks it’s “outrageous.”

Johnson does have the option of giving up his citizenship. If he did so, he would be joining a growing number of Americans: Last year 2,999 people renounced their American citizenship or green card status, the largest number ever revealed by the U.S. government, and its thought that number may end up being higher this year. The United States recently increased the administrative fee for renouncing one’s citizenship from $450 to $2,350, in what is unlikely to be a coincidence.

Experts believe that the increasing number of Americans renouncing their citizenship is due to a 2010 law called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATC), which forced foreign banks to help claim back tax money from U.S. citizens living abroad. FATC has become a deeply unpopular with American expatriates. So far, it’s thought that the campaign has netted the U.S. Treasury $6 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.

There are significant upsides to being a U.S. citizen, of course, and if Johnson wants to keep his passport, perhaps he could kick up a fuss. He might point toward the fact that the U.S. Embassy in London owes more than $10 million in fines related to the city’s congestion charge. He could also side with the legal battle being started by other expats against America’s taxation policies and the foreign governments that work with them.

Better still, he could put his very expensive citizenship to use: As an American citizen who was born in the United States, Johnson could one day run for president. His absurd charm could well win over American voters, too.

It would be a challenge for any leader: balance the books after years of systemic corruption, battle a resurgent rebellion and form a government despite entrenched ethnic divisions. But Afghan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, must do all this as thousands of foreign troops pull out, taking their services, experience, hardware and dollars with them.

Ghani’s most pressing task at a summit with international donors in London on 3-4 December may be to make sure the world does not forget Afghanistan once foreign soldiers are no longer fighting on its soil.

Nato troops are due to withdraw from Afghanistan by 31 December. From a peak of around 140,000 in 2011, the force will shrink to 12,000 soldiers, who will stay mainly to train Afghan security forces.

The withdrawal leaves Afghanistan more vulnerable to Taliban insurgents, who have been gaining ground this year, and deprives the economy of the benefits of having tens of thousands of foreign troops stationed in the country.

“The Afghan economy is a war bubble and we are seeing it slowly deflate,” says Graeme Smith, senior analyst at International Crisis Group. He says the budget deficit was $300m-750m, with security costs eating up around $650m of the government’s meagre funds.

“If the Afghans were not paying that … to fight the war which, to be frank, we started, then most of these budgetary pressures would disappear overnight,” he says. “While we’re putting Afghanistan through these shocking political and military transitions, it behoves us to try to ease the economic transition, to smooth the way with some cash.”

However, many international partners are disillusioned after 13 years of rampant administrative corruption. Although Ghani represents a new start after Hamid Karzai’s discredited presidency, it is not clear yet whether this will be enough to guarantee continued, long-term financial support.

At the London conference, Afghanistan and its international partners are meant to review progress against the 2012 Tokyo mutual accountability framework, which includes commitments on governance, democracy, finance and rights.

Omar Samad, a former Afghan ambassador to France and Canada, says Ghani may want to recast some of these commitments to try to make aid more effective and accountable.

“This is going to be seen by the new Afghan government as an occasion to renew ties with the international community and to receive strong political and … development support for [its] agenda,” Samad says.“It’s a very critical moment because the glass is seen as half-full from the Afghan side. We need to solidify the gains of the last 13 years but we also need to enhance and … grow in a sustainable manner.”

There is real fear of gains being lost in the sphere of women’s rights, with activists warning that women could be excluded from future peace talks with the Taliban, endangering their status and protection. Peace talks are seen as inevitable despite a decade of failed negotiations with the insurgents, who are partly funded by profits from the illegal opium trade, which fuels corruption and subverts the legal economy.

Aid groups have urged British and Afghan authorities to make it clear in London that women’s rights are non-negotiable. The main conference meeting on 4 December will be preceded by a civil society event – the Ayenda conference, which means “future” in Dari – on 3 December. Britain’s Department for International Development said it expects women to be actively involved throughout the two days.

The withdrawal of most Nato troops has triggered soul-searching about the achievements of a military mission that cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, including 2,210 American and 453 British soldiers.

Ghani, too, may be reassessing his options, with some signs that he may turn increasingly to China, which has signalled willingness to take a more active role in Afghanistan, with which it shares a narrow, mostly impassable, border.

“Ghani is making a very rational move by reaching out to China, not only because China has legitimate economic interests in Afghanistan and Afghanistan desperately needs new economic partners, but also because of China’s significant sway over Islamabad, and Islamabad’s very significant influence over the [Taliban] insurgency,” Smith says.

An Afghan woman buys silk yarn for weaving from a shop in Herat. Photograph: Aref Karimi/AFP/Getty Images

Samad says the greatest gains since 2001 include the creation of greater political, economic and social spaces, especially for women and young people. But governance and rule of law are still lacking, infrastructure projects are not well thought out, and there is a middle-management skills gap.

The troop withdrawal will affect every aspect of life: Smith says there will no longer be demand for armies of trucks to carry gravel, diesel or other inputs to military bases, and construction activity is expected to slow.

David Haines, country director for Mercy Corps, says employment rates among people who have completed the aid group’s vocational training in Helmand province have already dropped significantly for men and dramatically for women this year as fighting raged and business slowed.

He hopes the London conference will underline international support for Ghani to allow him “to get his house in order” over the next few years. “If he has to try and negotiate peace with the Taliban, deal with a massive falling economy, deal with corruption and a lack of accountability of public servants … it’s an impossible task to ask of anybody,” he says.

Smith says history has shown that when troops pull out of a country, funds tend to follow. “When you don’t have fresh-faced British soldiers whose lives are at risk, it’s much easier to turn off the tap. And that’s the real danger now for Afghanistan: that the world will forget.”

New Delhi, Nov. 8: A tip from Indian soil which shed new light on how US diplomat Robin Raphel empowered the Taliban may have hastened her downfall in Washington.

Accounts from Raisina Hill, the seat of government in New Delhi and from Chanakyapuri, the capital’s diplomatic enclave, however, indicated that India’s official apparatus was not involved in the tip. The US embassy was behind relaying the information, albeit in the course of routine transmission of material.

The long-running counter-intelligence probe of Raphel, who began her American civil service career with the CIA, appears to have taken a critical turn when Hamid Mir, executive editor of Pakistan’s Geo TV, made credible revelations about her nearly two-decade-old support for the Taliban to senior editorial staff of The Indian Express in the third week of October.

Mir, along with Shafqat Mahmood, a leader of Imran Khan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf, said in the course of an exchange on India-Pakistan relations with the editors in New Delhi that Raphel had weighed heavily on then Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1995 to throw Islamabad’s weight behind the Taliban. At that time, the world viewed the Taliban as a curiosity and it was mistaken by many countries as a nascent student movement for reforming Afghanistan and getting rid of its endemic corruption and war-lordism.

Raphel was then the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, a new entity created with much fanfare in the state department. A middle-ranking diplomat at the US embassy in Chankayapuri, Raphel was catapulted to head the new bureau over several others her senior because she was an “FoB,” Friend of Bill.

Like Strobe Talbott, another FoB who became deputy secretary of state as a political appointee, Bill Clinton brought in a number of his old friends from his Oxford and London years into his administration. Of all of them, Raphel is the one who did maximum damage to America, albeit in retrospect.

She had no excuse for confusing the Taliban for an innocent student movement. She was already an expert on Pakistan and had her resourceful CIA experience behind her. Raphel’s husband (they were divorced by then) gave up his life travelling with General Zia-ul-Haq on their fatal flight in Bahawalpur in 1988.

Here is what Mir said on the record in the third week of October: “The Taliban movement emerged in Afghanistan in 1994. In 1995, I was travelling with then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to the US. Bhutto met ambassador Robin Raphel in New York. We came to know that Raphel had asked Bhutto to announce her support to the Taliban. It was very disturbing. I wrote in my column from New York that here is the first elected woman Prime Minister in the whole Muslim world, the Taliban are imposing a ban on girls’ education (in Afghanistan) and she had been asked by Robin Raphel, another woman, to announce her support for the Taliban.”

Benazir did not take kindly to Mir and other journalists getting wind of what had transpired at the meeting with Raphel and she was even less kindly to Mir for writing a column revealing Raphel’s advice.

Here is Mir again in his own words: “When we were coming (back home) from New York, the Prime Minister met me on the plane and said, ‘You are criticising me’. I replied, ‘Yes, this is democracy, I don’t like the Taliban and you are supporting the Taliban at the behest of Raphel’. So she instructed her interior minister to brief me why the Taliban are good for Pakistan.”

A few days passed. “The interior minister organised a briefing for me and Nusrat Javed, a colleague, and explained that we (Pakistan) were using the Taliban as the ‘pipeline police’. We wanted a gas pipeline from Uzbekistan to Pakistan and there was nobody who could protect it because the government in Kabul, the Northern Alliance, was supported by the Indians and the Iranians and they might destroy the gas pipeline.”

Now Mir demanded his price for changing course. “I said OK, I would like to meet Mullah Omar (the Taliban chief). The interior minister said ‘OK’. I met Mullah Omar in Kandahar…. I was astonished he was not aware Raphel was American.”

With Mir’s talk of the pipeline stake, there may be wheels within wheels in the raid on Raphel by the FBI. Not that the investigating agencies did not know. But Mir’s account is confirmation of what the FBI may have long suspected.

Three days after Mir spoke to the editors in New Delhi, Raphel lost her security clearance. This week’s developments, including the sealing of her state department office and a search of her residence, are a follow-up to the revocation of her security clearance.

US embassies across the world routinely send to the state department material such as Mir’s statements that are in the public domain. Sometimes, as in Raphel’s case, they have rare and unexpected consequences.

It was well-known in South Block in the 1990s, the period under review, that the Americans were willing to overlook ideological anathema, including Islamic extremism, for the sake of energy and mineral resources in Central Asia and Afghanistan.

Those who approached India as lobbyists on behalf of US oil companies during those years include some big names: Condoleezza Rice, who later became US national security adviser and secretary of state; and Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who was later US ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, and whom the US unsuccessfully tried to foist on Kabul as President in succession to Hamid Karzai.

When the Taliban took power in Kabul in December 1996, Raphel was the assistant secretary of state in charge of South Asia. At her persuasion, the US extended recognition to the Taliban, only to withdraw it 10 minutes later.

Even though Raphel left her post a year after the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the US continued her policy of mollycoddling the Taliban, nurturing a monster that would devour the US in association with al Qaida on September 11, 2001.

That policy was abandoned only in August 1998 after two US embassies in east Africa were bombed by terrorists.

During the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, Raphel held the purse strings to US aid to Pakistan and she shuttled between Islamabad and Washington, residing alternately in both of her favourite cities.

It is not known if the latest FBI probe covers the huge amount of money she disbursed and whether it went into the hands of those who are a threat to America, like the Taliban.

LONDON, Nov 19 — Mazher Mahmood was 21 when he first posed as a wealthy sheikh. A reporter from Birmingham, England, intent on exposing a prostitution ring at a local hotel, he donned a white robe he had bought for 12 pounds at an Islamic bookshop, checked into the hotel, the Metropole, and persuaded the concierge to send women to his room.

Three decades later, Mr. Mahmood owns at least a dozen sheikh outfits and a Rolex costing 5,000 pounds to perfect his disguise. With an entourage of pretend bodyguards, assistants and even three stand-in sheikhs, the man known here as “the fake sheikh” has exposed drug deals, immigration fraud and, four years ago, one of the biggest match-fixing scandals in the history of cricket.

But he has also targeted second-tier celebrities, embarrassed royalty and baited a politician with anti-Semitic jokes. Under investigation for perjury after a judge accused him of lying in court, Mr. Mahmood was suspended in July from the newspaper The Sun on Sunday.

He now faces the sort of public embarassment that some of his targets once faced: Last week, the BBC aired a 30-minute documentary that included interviews with some of his former targets and assistants and, for the first time, high-definition footage of Mr. Mahmood himself.

Photo

Mazher Mahmood in a screen grab from a BBC documentary, which was posted on YouTube after a judge refused to block it. Credit BBC Panorama, ‘The Fake Sheikh Exposed’

In one instance highlighted in the documentary, he flew a 24-year-old model to the Canary Islands in 1996, promised her a lucrative modeling contract in the Middle East and then encouraged her to buy him cocaine from a dealer he had specially hired for that purpose. His story in the now-defunct tabloid The News of the World branded her “a mob-connected drugs pusher.”

In Britain’s pantheon of notorious tabloid reporters, the “fake sheikh” is among the most notorious. Long a star in Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid stable, Mr. Mahmood has become a symbol of the excesses of British journalism at a time when the country is still reeling from the fallout of the newspaper phone hacking scandal.

Since the scandal broke in 2011, more than 200 people have been arrested, among them private investigators, police officers and about 60 journalists. Rebekah Brooks, the head of Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper business until 2011 and onetime editor of The News of The World, was acquitted this year. But her successor as editor, Andy Coulson, was convicted, along with five others who had pleaded guilty. Last month, Ian Edmondson, a former news editor at the tabloid, was sent to jail for eight months. More cases are pending, including several concerning the bribery of public officials..

“The big picture here is that the commercial pressure to deliver stories that will sell the paper and make more money is an irresistible force in those newsrooms,” said Nick Davies of The Guardian and author of “Hack Attack,” about the scandal. “What it translates into is reporters being told, ‘Do whatever you need to do, and if that involves breaking the law, that’s O.K.’  ″

“Mazher Mahmood is part of that culture of ruthlessness,” Mr. Davies added. “He was given free rein. He was given vast amounts of money to protect his identity as a fake sheikh. But often he is simply exposing people he has manipulated into doing something wrong.″

In 1997, Mr. Mahmood put on his sheikh costume and offered a popular television actor film roles alongside Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Footage from a meeting at the Savoy Hotel in London, obtained by the BBC, shows the actor John Alford nervously decline both alcohol and drugs. But pressed to buy drugs for the sheikh, he eventually delivered a small amount of marijuana and cocaine and ended up in jail for nine months.

“I lost my house, I lost my career,” Mr. Alford told the BBC. “I’m lucky to be here. There were times when I’ve really thought of ending it. For the last 18 years, I’ve been through hell.”

More than 90 people have served jail time as a result of Mr. Mahmood’s reporting.

Now 51, Mr. Mahmood has denied any wrongdoing, saying that he used legitimate investigative methods. His lawyer, Angus McBride, called the BBC program “deeply misleading and inaccurate,” and said it was not representative of his client’s work and should not have been allowed to air while he is under police investigation.

Mr. Mahmood tried to stop the BBC from revealing his identity, claiming that his life would be at risk. Twice, the program was delayed. But a judge ruled that there was not enough evidence to support this claim, pointing out that Mr. Mahmood had written his autobiography, “Confessions of a Fake Sheik,” under his real name. It was published in 2008 with photographs of the author that merely concealed his eyes with a thin black strip.

Others have tried to blow his cover: George Galloway, a left-wing British politician and supporter of the Palestinian cause, published Mr. Mahmood’s photo on his website in 2006 and accused Mr. Mahmood of disguising himself as an Arab businessman and trying to entice him to make anti-Semitic comments over lunch.

Besides the infamous sheikh, British tabloid journalism has featured Benji the Binman, who scavenged through celebrity trash cans, and Ms. Brooks, who once dressed as a cleaner and sneaked into the building of a rival newspaper to snatch a paper off the presses and match an exclusive report on the royal family.

But Mr. Mahmood was a legend — and for the most part a respected one. He counted 500 exclusives at The News of the World, where he worked for two decades, and won Reporter of the Year at the 1998 British Press Awards. His former editor at The News of the World, Phil Hall, called him “the most diligent reporter we had.” After Mr. Murdoch shut the tabloid in 2011, a consequence of the scandal, Mr. Mahmood was hired by The Sun on Sunday, which was started a year later.

But since the phone hacking scandal, the tabloid atmosphere has changed.

Last year, Mr. Mahmood dressed up again, this time as a wealthy Indian film mogul. He flew the singer Tulisa Contostavlos and two of her friends to Las Vegas first class and offered her a £3 million film contract for a role alongside Leonardo DiCaprio. Mr. Mahmood then pressed her to buy him cocaine. When she did, he wrote a front page “world exclusive” in The Sun on Sunday: “X Factor star caught setting up secret deal with drugs pal.”

But Ms. Contostavlos fought back and won. Dismissing the case in July, Judge Alistair McCreath said there were strong grounds to believe Mr. Mahmood had told him “lies” and had been “manipulating the evidence” in the case against Ms. Contostavlos. Since then, prosecutors have dropped a number of pending cases that relied on his evidence, and some of his former targets are planning to sue. Mr. Mahmood has been questioned by the police, his lawyer said.

“The actions of the fake sheikh are more far reaching than phone hacking,” Mark Lewis, a lawyer representing some of Mr. Mahmood’s targets, said in an email message. “People’s lives have been ruined. People have been sent to prison for committing crimes solicited by Mazher Mahmood.”

Mr. Lewis has called for an investigation into the role of law enforcement officials. He said the BBC program, watched by 2.5 million people last Wednesday, had made litigation inevitable.

“There will be some very worried people in the police, prosecution and at News Corp.,” he said. “Maybe one day we will have a free press in U.K. telling us what really happened.”