Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Trying—and Failing—to Save the Family of the Afghan Who Saved Me - Twelve years ago, Tahir Luddin helped us both escape after we were kidnapped by the Taliban. Now I am struggling to get his family out of Kabul. - link

• Pumpers, Dumpers, and Shills: The Skycoin Saga - The cryptocurrency promised to change the world and make its users rich in the process. Then it began to fall apart. - link

• Will the Next American War Be with China? - Elbridge Colby is leading a conservative effort to prepare Americans for a military conflict in Taiwan. - link

• Have You Already Had a Breakthrough COVID Infection? - The question of what “infection” means is just one of the riddles posed by the late-stage pandemic. - link

• After the Earthquake, a Mayor in Haiti Struggles to Console His Town - In Saint-Louis-du-Sud, ten miles from the epicenter, the medical clinic is overrun and thousands of people are sleeping in the streets. - link

From Vox

• Biden backs school districts in fight against GOP mask mandate bans -

  

  Eight states, including Florida and Texas, are trying to ban mask mandates.

  The 2021-22 school year is here, and with the US once more facing an out-of-control surge of Covid-19 cases, the fight over public health measures in schools is reaching a fever pitch as K-12 students head back into classrooms.

  Republicans in at least eight states are taking a hard line against classroom mask requirements, contrary to federal public health guidance — and increasingly, individual school districts, with the support of the Biden administration, are moving to mandate masks anyway to protect their students.

  In Texas and Florida, the two largest states to block school mask mandates outright, the school year has already gotten off to a bad start. More and more students and teachers in both states are testing positive for the virus, and some school districts have been forced to shut down entirely.

  Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah have all prohibited mask mandates in schools, according to Politico, though in Texas that ban is currently not in effect pending further litigation.

  In Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last month issued a blanket ban on mask mandates imposed by school districts in the name of “parents’ freedom to choose,” teenagers and children under 12 are now testing positive for the virus at a higher rater than any other group, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

  Overall, the state has seen one of the worst Covid resurgences in the country. Over the past week, Florida has reported an average of about 21,500 cases per day — more than it did during the worst of the pandemic in January.

  Thousands of Florida students have been sent home because of possible Covid exposure, disrupting the school year almost before it begins. In places like Palm Beach County, as many as one in 50 students are currently under stay-at-home orders, the Palm Beach Post reported on Friday.

  Pediatric hospitalizations from the virus are also climbing, even as ICU wards around the state approach capacity amid Florida’s delta variant-fueled surge — and the worst may be yet to come, since Florida’s most populous county, Miami-Dade, won’t even resume classes until next week.

  Things in Texas are looking equally dire: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott banned mask and vaccination mandates in July, and as of this month, Covid outbreaks have temporarily shuttered at least four Texas school districts, while cases are soaring among students as the virus runs rampant throughout the state.

  Abbott, who is fully vaccinated and has also received a booster shot, tested positive for a breakthrough case of Covid-19 on Tuesday, and Texas had more pediatric hospitalizations from Covid than any other state in the US as of earlier this week.

  Some school districts are requiring masks anyway

  In several states, school districts are ignoring their governors to implement mask mandates anyway, despite the threat of sanctions and lawsuits.

  At least five school districts in Florida — those in Alachua, Broward, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties — have done so as of this week.

  And at least eight counties in Texas have done likewise, according to the Texas Tribune. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has promised to sue any entity that requires masks contrary to Abbott’s order banning such mandates, but has yet to do so.

  “Yesterday I spoke with a mother of a child who died. Over the week, I’ve spoken with employees and their relatives, begging me to do the right thing,” Miami-Dade public schools superintendent Alberto Carvalho, whose school district is now requiring masks in schools, said this week. “I will do all that I can to do that.”

  Currently, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance “recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status” because of the delta variant, which is highly transmissible and may also result in more severe illness among unvaccinated people.

  Studies indicate that masks not only make a difference in limiting Covid-19 transmission by “asymptomatic or presymptomatic” individuals, but provide protection for uninfected people who are exposed to “respiratory droplets” from people who are sick with the virus.

  And their importance is particularly pronounced for unvaccinated people — such as students younger than 12, who are not currently eligible to receive a Covid-19 vaccine.

  As Vox’s Anna North reported earlier this month,

  Schools that used masks well were still able to keep transmission low last year, Maldonado emphasized. And masks still work against delta, Zimmerman said, but with the variant more transmissible, it’s more critical than ever for schools to be meticulous about compliance. “It can’t be that there’s a slippage, or it’s hanging down at your chin for 10 minutes.”

  However, DeSantis, who has made his opposition to public health measures like mask and vaccine mandates core to his national political profile, has threatened that the state board of education could withhold the salaries of public school officials who don’t go along with his ban on mask mandates.

  Let me be clear: We will do everything we can to support local school districts in safely reopening schools. American Rescue Plan funds can be used to backfill the salaries of the brave Florida school board members, superintendents, and other educators keeping our children safe. https://t.co/sDoZHm3MMH

  — President Biden

1. August 20, 2021

In response, President Joe Biden announced Wednesday as part of a larger push to support school districts that require masks in classrooms that funds from the American Rescue Plan — the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that Democrats passed earlier this year — could be used to “backfill” any salaries withheld by the Florida board of education.

“As I’ve said before, if you aren’t going to fight COVID-19, at least get out of the way of everyone else who is trying,” Biden said. “You know, we’re not going to sit by as governors try to block and intimidate educators protecting our children.”

In addition to backfilling salaries, Biden’s secretary of education, former public school teacher and administrator Miguel Cardona, said this week in a blog post that the department could use its civil rights authority to support mask requirements, citing “students who may experience discrimination as a result of states not allowing local school districts to reduce virus transmission risk through masking requirements and other mitigation measures.”

“Let me reiterate,” Cardona said in a Friday statement. “We stand ready to assist any district facing repercussions for imposing CDC-recommended COVID-19 prevention strategies that will protect the health and safety of students, educators, and staff.”

Polling suggests public health mandates are popular

While Abbott, DeSantis, and other GOP governors have successfully launched school mask requirements as a national controversy — to the point that teachers have been physically assaulted by anti-mask parents in several cases — mandates actually have broad support in the US, according to several recent polls.

According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, almost two thirds of parents support schools requiring masks for unvaccinated students and staff, though results split sharply along partisan lines.

Additionally, an Axios-Ipsos poll released Wednesday found 69 percent of American adults support school mask mandates, and almost as many — 66 percent — oppose Texas-style laws prohibiting local mask mandates.

Even vaccine mandates had majority support in the Axios-Ipsos poll, with 55 percent of adults saying they would support their employers requiring vaccinations. Separately, a poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Friday also found majority support for vaccine mandates to attend “crowded public events,” eat at restaurants, or fly.

Such measures haven’t yet become widespread in the US — only 16 percent of adults told Axios and Ipsos that their workplaces require them to get vaccinated, for example — but there are signs they are picking up momentum.

Already, Biden has said that civilian federal employees must either be vaccinated or submit to frequent Covid tests, and the Pentagon is expected to require service members to get vaccinated starting next month, if not sooner.

Several states, including California, New York and Washington, also put similar requirements in place for state employees, and California, Oregon, and Washington all imposed a new vaccine mandate on teachers this month.

“This virus is increasingly impacting young people, and those under the age of 12 still can’t get the vaccine for themselves,” Washington state Governor Jay Inslee said at a news conference on Wednesday. “We won’t gamble with the health of our children, our educators and school staff, nor the health of the communities they serve.”

Cases and vaccinations are both on the rise

As vaccine mandates begin to gain traction in the US, the country is also reporting the highest number of new infections and hospitalizations since February 2021.

This week, the US reported more than 1 million cases in a seven-day stretch for the first time since February 2, according to CNN’s Ryan Struyk, and the rolling seven-day case average is closing in on 146,000 new cases per day.

The South has been particularly hard-hit, with Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee reporting more new cases per 100,000 people than any other state, and the surge has been fueled by the delta variant, which now makes up about 98.8 percent of all Covid cases in the US, according to the CDC.

The severity of the outbreak, however, may also be boosting vaccine uptake in the US: According to White House Covid-19 data director Cyrus Shapar, the US administered more than 1 million shots for the third day in a row on Saturday, the first time it has done so in more than two months.

There’s also more good news coming on the vaccination front: The Food and Drug Administration is set to issue a full approval for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as early as Monday, more than eight months after it was first approved for use under an emergency use authorization.

According to the New York Times, “the approval is expected to pave the way for a series of vaccination requirements by public and private organizations who were awaiting final regulatory action before putting in effect mandates,” including the Pentagon.

It could also be a boon for vaccine confidence in the US: About three in 10 unvaccinated people, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, say they would be “more likely to get vaccinated if the FDA moved vaccines from emergency use to full approval.”

The Pfizer vaccine is by far the most common in the US: More than 203 million doses have been administered, according to the CDC, versus 142 million doses of the Moderna vaccine and just 14 million of the Johnson & Johnson shot.

Vaccinations for children under 12 could be coming soon

In addition to being the first Covid-19 vaccine to receive an EUA and (likely) the first to receive full FDA approval, the Pfizer vaccine could also be the first shot authorized for children younger than 12.

Clinical trials for both mRNA vaccines — Moderna and Pfizer — are currently underway in the US, and Pfizer’s chief scientific officer for viral vaccines, Dr. Phil Dormitzer, told NPR this week that “we’re hoping to have authorization” for children ages 5 through 11 “not too long after the school year starts,” with an EUA for children younger than 5 coming shortly after that.

An EUA could make a big difference as the pandemic wears on, especially as school starts up again. The US reported a record 1,902 children hospitalized from Covid-19 last week, according to Reuters, and high levels of Covid-19 transmission throughout the country mean that the unvaccinated — including young children — are particularly vulnerable.

From August 5 through August 12, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the US reported 121,427 Covid-19 cases among children, or about 18 percent of the total number of US cases over that span.

With a vaccine authorization likely still weeks or months away, however, officials are urging adults and teenagers who are still unvaccinated to get their shot — to protect themselves, and their community.

“When you decide to get a vaccine, you’re protecting a kid out there who can’t get it,” Inslee said Wednesday.

• The history of US intervention in Afghanistan, from the Cold War to 9/11 -

  

  How American meddling shaped life in Afghanistan.

  The United States’ decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan closes a 20-year chapter between the two countries. But US intervention in Afghanistan far predates the 21st century, stretching back decades.

  In the weeks and months ahead, there are going to be a lot of questions about what’s next for Afghanistan, including how the US approaches it. But contemplating what happens going forward also means looking at the past, including the ways American involvement has shaped Afghan politics and life for more than 50 years.

  During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union sought to gain footholds in Afghanistan, first through infrastructure investments and then military intervention. Once they withdrew in the late 1980s, the country entered a civil war — a backdrop to the rise of the Taliban. And while the US took a back seat in Afghanistan during much of the ’90s, it invaded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and undertook a two-decade project for which the underlying mission would evolve. Now President Joe Biden has finally pulled American troops out of Afghanistan, but the two nations are still intertwined.

  Romano Cagnoni/Getty Images

  Rob Curtis/AFP via Getty Images

  I recently spoke with Ali A. Olomi, a historian of the Middle East and Islam at Penn State Abington, about the long, storied history of US meddling in Afghanistan and how it has shaped the country and people’s lives there. Olomi, who is the host of the podcast Head on History, discussed the US’s funding of some factions of the mujahedeen, or Afghan guerrilla fighters, during the 1970s and ’80s; America’s rolling reasoning for its involvement in Afghanistan post-2001; and whether the US, even without soldiers present, is really gone.

  Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

  A lot of people date US intervention in Afghanistan to 2001. But is that the right place to start?

  The actuality is that the United States was involved all the way back in the 1950s. Afghanistan was going through a series of modernizing projects, and it attempted to really build into a modern nation-state under two subsequent leaders: first, King Zahir Shah, and then followed by his cousin who overthrew him, President Mohammad Daoud Khan. And it was right in the midst of the Cold War.

  Both the Soviet Union and the United States were involved in Afghanistan, namely through infrastructure building. The Soviet Union really built what’s known as the Salang Tunnel, which connected northern Afghanistan to Kabul. The United States was involved in what was known as the Helmand Valley project, which was an irrigation project and agricultural project about building dams in southern Afghanistan. It had been funneling a significant amount of money from the ’50s and ’60s on.

  There was a lot of money coming from both of these big, great powers in Afghanistan. And that really sets the stage for what eventually becomes a more formal military relationship to the country.

  And where does the military relationship start? The 1970s?

  Yes. In the ’70s, the United States is at first quite hesitant to support any type of military expansion.

  Daoud Khan starts to ally himself more and more with the Soviet Union. He tries to establish a friendly relationship. He has a very famous phrase that he uses: “I feel happiest when I light my American cigarette with Soviet matches.” That really speaks to his attempt to leverage his really weird, uncomfortable Cold War relationship. But his allying with the Soviet Union makes the United States very, very nervous.

  Things get even worse in 1978, when Daoud Khan is formally overthrown in what’s known as the Saur Revolution and a Marxist-Leninist government is established, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Here, the United States starts to slowly funnel money toward some resistance groups. It doesn’t have a unified policy. It’s not like, okay, we need to start a resistance movement to overthrow this communist government. It has a little bit of a muddled approach.

  There were some in the [US] government, like former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was very interested in getting involved. There were other military leaders that thought if we get involved, that’s going to force the Soviet Union to get involved. And so they have a bit of a mixed bag approach. But they do start to agitate quite early on in 1978, and in 1979, they are funneling money to Pakistan’s intelligence services, who are then funneling it into the hands of the resistance. That does eventually induce a Soviet invasion.

  The US was actually involved a little before the Soviets invaded. Once they got invaded, then the United States throws its full backing. It goes from meddling and funneling and agitating to outright saying, “Okay, we need to support the mujahedeen,” and allying themselves with the anti-communist resistance movement.

  In the Cold War, the US backs Afghan reactionaries to fight a Soviet-friendly regime

  AP

  And just to be clear, what is the mujahedeen?

  The mujahedeen is a sort of resistance movement that emerges in response to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The People’s Democratic Republic party is wildly, wildly repressive, which as a result produces a good deal of resistance.

  Now, we should note that it’s also a really progressive government. This is a government that expands women’s rights, it extends literacy, it builds agricultural reforms in the economy. But at the same time, they’re also disappearing people. There are people who are like, hey, I can finally find a job, and other people who are like, wait a minute, we have health care. But if you spoke up against the government, there were chances that you’d be thrown in jail, arrested, disappeared. As a result of that repressive component, there were pockets of resistance that have been growing.

  The mujahedeen are not a single group. We often talk about the mujahedeen as one group, but [they were] actually four different kinds of groups that roughly align as resisting this new oppressive, repressive government.

  The first is the more organized. There is the Islamist faction, led by people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is trained in the sort of jihadist ideology; he’d like to see an Islamic government. He’s a really regressive, retrograde, reactionary figure. In fact, even before the Soviet invasion, he carried out a series of horrific acid attacks against women.

  This is a very unsavory character. And he happens to be one of the more organized groups, allied with the more moderate Ahmad Shah Massoud, who’s not carrying out acid attacks. He’s not regressive. He is much more interested in a sort of egalitarian vision of an Islamic republic, one with representative rather than this kind of autocratic rule. And yet despite these ideological differences, these two people ally themselves or at least align in opposition to communist government.

  

  AP

There’s also leftists as part of the mujahedeen; Maoists and leftists who have been disaffected by this government, who felt that they weren’t being heard or being repressed. And the mujahedeen is also made up of the Communist Party’s own military commanders, a group of young military commanders who defect from the government.

Then the fourth and final group are just ordinary people — people that just pick up arms and fight and resist. They don’t have an ideology. They don’t have any particular vision of what the government is supposed to look like or what the government is supposed to do. They just realize that, wait a minute, this government is oppressive, or they’re changing things in a way that they’re not happy with, and they resist. This movement is a little slower. Once the Soviets invade, this group of ordinary people will grow dramatically, and this is the bulk of the mujahedeen.

We’re talking about a coalition of groups with different aims, different goals that only align when the Soviets are there. Once the Soviets are gone, this group will turn amongst itself and we will see the civil war of the ’90s.

What was the US’s involvement with those different groups?

The US involvement is uneven. The US isn’t just funding mujahedeen. There’s an oversimplification that happens sometimes in this discourse, partly as a result of the US’s own claims. Brzezinski very proudly pats himself on the back and says, “We created the mujahedeen.” But he says this after the fact. In reality, when we look at the archives, that’s not true. [The US] exploits the mujahedeen. They definitely use the mujahedeen to their advantage. And they do funnel money through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). But that money is mostly going into the hands of the more organized groups of the mujahedeen.

Ordinary people aren’t receiving training from the CIA or Pakistan’s ISI. They’re just ordinary people who have guns in their houses, pick up their guns, and fight. But unfortunately, the more organized groups are those reactionary elements. It’s people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is an Islamist who is quite dangerous, who does receive funds, who does receive some form of training.

You even have CIA documents that complain that the Afghans are very hard to train because they operate on a different sense of time, that they won’t organize in the same way that the US military will organize. Anyone who’s familiar with Middle Eastern culture, Central Asian culture, or Indian culture knows that if you go to a wedding that says it starts at 7 pm, it’ll start at 9 pm. There’s a similar experience with the mujahedeen: They tell mujahedeen, hey, we’re going to start at 0800, and they’ll do it on their own time.

But it is to these more reactionary elements that the US allies itself. And, in fact, it makes some really horrific blunders. One of the things that the US ends up doing is that it pressures Egypt to release a group of Islamists that it had arrested. And one of the Islamists that was arrested in Egypt and then is released is Ayman al-Zawahiri, who happens to be the second-in-command of al-Qaeda.

The US inadvertently imports him — and we don’t have the full picture, so it could very easily have been intentional as an attempt to bolster the mujahedeen by bringing in foreign fighters. But they start to bring in what are known as the Arab Afghans, or the Arab mujahedeen, and these are people from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, these are people from Yemen, people from Saudi Arabia, who then go on to form al-Qaeda.

There is a relationship here in which the US, through funneling money to ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence services, either inadvertently or intentionally ends up funding a group of foreign fighters who ally with the more organized elements of the mujahedeen. The consequence of that will be that once the US and the Soviet Union withdraw their influence, Afghanistan falls into a civil war. And in that civil war, both al-Qaeda will be born and the Taliban.

The unintended consequence of that meddling is chaos. And that chaos will give us al-Qaeda and the Taliban, both of whom have American training manuals, some American funds, and American guns, all that they received funneled through Pakistan’s ISI. And now the CIA says, “Oops. We’ve just allowed these groups to take form because we took our eye off of Afghanistan.”

After the Cold War, a civil war brings the Taliban to power

Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Once the Soviet Union withdraws, and there’s a civil war in Afghanistan, is the US still present during that time? Like, during the ’90s?

The Soviet Union and the United States both sign an agreement, or at least, they are the guarantors of this agreement known as the Geneva Accords. It’s technically between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the United States agrees that we will no longer fund the mujahedeen, or at least that one group of the mujahedeen, and the Soviet Union agrees that they will withdraw. The Soviet Union does formally withdraw. It leaves no real support for its former allies, the government. And the United States continues to funnel some money, but it mostly turns away.

The result is that within three years, the government collapses and the civil war emerges between these old and mujahedeen factions, who, again, like I mentioned, are completely different with very different visions. It’s in that moment that the United States is not involved, the Soviet Union’s not involved. In fact, the former Soviet Union ambassador will actually blast the United States and the Soviet Union and say, “We meddled in Afghanistan, and then we stopped paying attention.”

It is hidden in that language of “stopped paying attention” that really speaks to what ends up happening. A power vacuum is created, and into that vacuum will step the civil war. From that civil war will be born the Taliban who emerged as a completely new actor. They’re the second generation that grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan — Afghans were born in refugee camps, raised in refugee camps. They arrived fresh onto the scene. They intervene into this civil war, are able to exploit it, and therefore establish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996-’97.

The US invades after 9/11, without clear goals. The Taliban wait out the long war.

How long were the Taliban in control? Until 2001?

The Taliban exerts its authority through most of Afghanistan, not all of it. Unlike now, where they seem to have extended their control to everywhere other than the Panjshir Valley. In the ’90s, they only controlled from Kandahar to Kabul, both Herat and the North did resist quite a bit.

Herat will eventually fall, but the North — led again by the Panjshir Valley, and Ahmad Shah Massoud and what would eventually become known as the United Front or the Northern Alliance — they will have their own autonomous territory that the Taliban will never conquer. So Afghanistan will kind of be split between the Northern Alliance in the North and the Taliban, who establish the Islamic Emirate. And only a few countries will recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. But they fall in 2001, relatively quickly.

And that’s after the US invades?

The US starts, actually, through a bombing campaign, and the Taliban really collapses there. The Taliban doesn’t have air support, there’s no Taliban air force. And so they actually pursued peace quite early on.

In October 2001, they offer to hand over Osama bin Laden in return for an end to the bombing campaign. The Bush administration, at the time, didn’t accept it, and a formal invasion is undertaken. The offer was rejected because the Taliban wanted to hand him over to a third party and for a trial. The US also viewed their mission as “ending a safe haven for terror,” so invasion was explicitly part of the plans.

The Taliban just completely vanish and become a small insurgency group that lives mostly in mountains. Some of them try to escape into hiding in Pakistan, some of them end up in pockets in Kandahar, some of them are in safe houses. But they’re no longer a sort of organized, unified group. They’re no longer in government.

They’re just pockets of insurgency allied with al-Qaeda. They won’t really emerge until the mid-2010s, where they are much more organized and seem to have received more money than they ever had. There’s some estimates that we’re looking at billions of dollars. Somehow, in the process, they were defeated, they went away and hid and kind of built a spate of an economic base through extortion and drug trafficking. They were reorganized in the 2010s and emerged as once more a sort of unified political movement.

To back up a bit, and I feel odd asking this, but why did the US even go to Afghanistan in 2001? Because of al-Qaeda? Because of bin Laden? I feel like we all sort of know this and we don’t.

Ostensibly, the reason was, first, some form of justice against Osama bin Laden, some form of revenge, that we need to get him for what he did, for 9/11. But there was also a language of liberation that was woven into it. And that was more of an addition, a post-hoc, after-the-fact justification. The main justification was to go after Osama bin Laden. Once the Taliban collapses, and they say, “Hey, we’ll hand over Osama bin Laden,” a sort of new justification had to be invented. And that was, we need to nation-build, we need to build Afghanistan up.

What we can see of the internal discussions between former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Vice President Cheney and former President George W. Bush, the argument or justification for why they want to nation-build is, one, so that they can create a pro-American government, a foothold in the region, and therefore are able to extend American bases. And two, so that they can therefore create a nation-state that’s favorable to the United States and would not allow terror bases to ever take root there again.

The justification was that it was to prevent future attacks, but it was also about extending American military bases and allowing more bases to be built there and therefore extending American military might.

Part of the strength of the American military has always been the ability to deploy quickly. If you have to deploy from the United States, that’s going to take time. This is one of the reasons we have aircraft carriers in various parts of the ocean; it’s why we build the bases in places like Djibouti. And the United States thinks in those terms. So the ability to build bases is a very important aspect of invading Afghanistan — build American bases, make an American-friendly government, or at least allow it to take root there.

Technically, the US could have accepted the surrender, accepted Osama bin Laden, and that’s it. Justice is served, right? Put Osama bin Laden on trial or execute him or whatever. But going further by invading was an attempt to extend American influence in that region.

That’s where the United States got involved in, I think, a bit of a quagmire, because not only did it not know how to build the infrastructure, or the democratic institutions, but more importantly, it flooded Afghanistan with money that often went into the hands of military contractors and advisers and all these different segments — even warlords — who all got really rich off of American dollars.

Afghan society never really got any of those benefits. The economic disparity was still real. There was no real social mobility; jobs were incredibly hard to come by. So, yeah, you develop Kabul with new skyscrapers, and maybe you have a couple KFCs there, but the rural parts of Afghanistan remain neglected. And that, in many ways, is the great failure of the United States’ invasion.

A failed rebuilding, and the US withdraws once more. But is this the end?

Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

How has the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan shaped life for the people there?

I think that in one instance, it did offer an opportunity to think of the future in a different way. There was a sense of hopelessness with the Taliban. I think post-2001, there is a great sense of energy and excitement and opportunity that does open up when we’re talking about people who are thinking about becoming engineers or journalists or going into government. So there is a great activity of optimism and an attempt to really reform society.

Also, it is coupled with a very real contradiction of that, that the United States was a major aggressor still. The United States wasn’t just in Afghanistan, it was carrying out a droning campaign. And so young Afghans would grow up with the experience of, okay, I can go to school today, something I may not have been able to do under the Taliban. But that also means that if the skies are blue, I might get droned.

So they had to live in this really precarious, frustrated environment where, yes, there was some really great progress, some really great strides, things opening up. But simultaneously, they were recognizing and acknowledging the fact that the US was still at war, carrying out bombing campaigns. The government that was set up was precarious, at best, corrupt at worst. And so there was a real complicated feeling.

I speak to Afghans, I have family there, and they’ll tell you that there’s a lot of great and beautiful things, jobs and opportunities. But there’s also the real sense that an American tank is just going to roll down your street, that if you, unfortunately, move in a certain way, nervous troops are going to fire on you because they think you have a bomb, they think that you are part of al- Qaeda.

That anxiety was real. Afghans felt occupied, while simultaneously also seeing that there were these different changes in society, that there was a transformation taking place. And that tension was very real for them — the experience of occupation and the experience of change and transformation.

How do you describe the situation now? I mean, I don’t know how to describe the situation now.

Nobody does; you’re not alone. Experts don’t know how to describe this situation. It’s a bizarre moment. We don’t know what the formal policy toward Afghanistan will be. There is obviously a military withdrawal, but will the United States normalize the relationship with the Taliban? Will the former enemies suddenly become a government?

We know that they’re thinking of blocking the money, so there’s that element of it. But what happens if most of the countries in the world recognize the Taliban as the rightful leaders of Afghanistan, even if Afghans themselves don’t? The majority of Afghans despise the Taliban; they’re universally hated across ethnic groups and political spectrums. But what happens with the de facto relationship that’s going to be? The United States allied itself with all sorts of unsavory governments — Saudi Arabia, right? What is that relationship going to be? Nobody knows.

Shakib Rahmani/AFP via Getty Images

It seems that the military engagement, at least in terms of troops, is going to end, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that droning is going to end. So the Afghan experience of death from above is going to continue. In fact, President Joe Biden made it very openly clear that he will continue to use America’s Air Force to “degrade the terrorists,” which is a code for drone warfare. The continuation of drones in Afghanistan means that while US troops might be gone, US presence might be gone, the threat of US military is still there.

We also don’t know what the US’s commitments are to ordinary Afghans. Will they now be willing to take more refugees? The answer is yes, so far, but there’s no real talk about really raising the cap of dealing with things like the visa process, which is a complete quagmire, a labyrinthine process that is impossible to navigate. An Afghan who’s been cut off from the internet, how are they supposed to navigate that process?

There are no answers, just questions that have been raised by what is going on. There’s also the real anxiety that Afghanistan may fall into an outright civil war within a matter of years. What happens there? Do we stand by and watch a humanitarian crisis unfold? I think the universal feeling among most Afghans — and I should be careful not to speak for every Afghan — but there is a sort of acceptance that US withdrawal is a good thing. But what is the US going to do after is a crucial question that needs to be answered. And it is not being answered yet.

• Fox News ignores a DC bomb threat inspired by right-wing conspiracy theory culture -

  

  Nothing to see here.

  A Thursday night news brief on Fox News contained a remarkable claim — that the network doesn’t have enough information to determine what motivated a man spouting right-wing conspiracy theories to shut down a significant portion of Washington, DC, around the Library of Congress by claiming to have a bomb earlier in the day.

  “So far, no word on a possible motive,” said anchor Jackie Ibanez at the conclusion of a 15-second brief that amounted to the entirety of Fox News’s Thursday night coverage of the incident.

  Incredible — Fox News just reported “no word on a possible motive” for DC bomb threat suspect Floyd Ray Roseberry, even though Roseberry posted video rants in which he echoed right-wing Trump and Fox News talking points pic.twitter.com/warM2ulPCS

  — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2021

The brevity could conceivably be excused: No one was injured, and US Capitol Police announced Thursday evening they had cleared the suspect’s black pickup truck. And Fox News covered the incident as it was ongoing earlier in the day. But Ibanez’s claim about motive bears more scrutiny.

It’s true that after the bomb threat suspect — later identified as 49-year-old Floyd Ray Roseberry, of Grover, North Carolina — surrendered to law enforcement, police said “we don’t know what his motives are at this time.” (Fox News didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from Vox asking the network to explain Ibanez’s “no word on a possible motive” report.)

But Ibanez’s comment may have been intended to obscure an uncomfortable truth for America’s most-watched cable news network. In videos streamed to Facebook before and during the bomb threat while he sat in a truck, Roseberry made clear he’s immersed in right-wing conspiracy theories and grievances that receive heavy play on Fox.

“Once this dickhead Biden’s out of office and the Democrats sitting down there in the f**kin’ jailhouse, our president’s gonna be Donald Trump, and this is no limit on his pardons,” claimed Roseberry in a video posted early Tuesday morning, alluding to a lie propagated by former President Donald Trump on Fox News as recently as Wednesday about the 2020 election being stolen from him.

“I just got chose for the job. Unlike you,” Roseberry added. “This ain’t about politics. I don’t care if Donald Trump ever becomes president again. I think y’all Democrats need to step down. Y’all need to understand people don’t want you there.”

Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall reviewed Roseberry’s videos and concluded that “his core grievance seemed to be focused on the illegitimacy of Joe Biden and his need to resign from office,” adding:

As the day grew nearer he would speak to Joe Biden, essentially saying that if anyone were killed in Washington it would be the President’s fault since he wouldn’t fire the first shot. The videos are strewn with what we might call the ideational detritus of Trumpism: Trump’s reinstatement as President, the imprisonment of Democratic leaders, refusals to mask, claims that Hunter Biden was wealthy enough that Biden could afford to retire peacefully, etc.

Roseberry ranted about alleged Facebook shadow-banning and complained about immigrants receiving government subsidies for health care — gripes regularly stoked by Fox during segments that frame social media companies’ effort to root out hate speech and disinformation as censorship and portray immigration as an existential threat to white America. He complained about the quality of American coinage, said “Southern boys are here,” and vowed, “You can take me out. But when you do, you know what’s going to happen, Joe Biden? There’s going to be a chain reaction. And that chain reaction’s going to be on your hands.” He ultimately surrendered to police.

Facebook eventually removed Roseberry’s profile, but not before his videos were widely watched and summarized in media reports. Yet if you’d watched Fox News Thursday night, you’d have no idea those videos existed.

The bomb threat isn’t just the story of an individual conspiracy theorist — it’s about US political culture, too

It’s certainly possible to dismiss Roseberry as a disturbed individual, but notably, one of the Trumpiest members of Congress went out of his way on Thursday to do the opposite.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who’s perhaps best known for the speech he delivered before the January 6 Capitol insurrection urging Trump supporters to start “kicking ass,” released a statement condemning the suspect’s tactics — even as he expressed sympathy with Roseberry’s views.

“Although this terrorist’s motivation is not yet publicly known, and generally speaking, I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society. The way to stop Socialism’s march is for patriotic Americans to fight back in the 2022 and 2024 election,” Brooks wrote.

Brooks wasn’t alone among members of Congress in identifying Thursday’s bomb threat as a symptom of political culture. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) decried the incident as a manifestation of the “violent cult” surrounding Trump that views “violence as an extension of politics.”

Meanwhile, another Democratic senator, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, tweeted in response to Brooks’s statement that “I know it seems like hyperbole when we say that Republicans have become enemies of democracy, but here is a mainstream Republican taking the side of the bomber.”

But Brooks’s remarkable statement and the backlash to it have been totally ignored by Fox, which didn’t mention the bomb threat a single time on Friday morning after barely covering it Thursday evening, even as CNN and MSNBC covered the incident and its fallout extensively.

This isn’t the first time in recent years a violent right-wing extremist has been motivated by the same sort of incendiary rhetoric that the network traffics in.

In October 2018, social media posts from the lone suspect in a shooting that killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh indicated he was motivated by conspiracy theories about migrant caravans to the southern border representing an “invasion” of the country, conspiracy theories that continued to receive play on the network even in the days immediately following the shooting.

That same month, Fox News strained to avoid acknowledging the right-wing fanaticism that inspired a man to send explosive devices to CNN and other perceived enemies of then-President Trump.

Hammering people with lies about Democrats stealing elections and overseeing an immigrant invasion of the country can have deadly consequences. It’s notable but not surprising that Fox News is unwilling to reckon with those consequences — especially in comparison to the wall-to-wall coverage that would likely ensue if an adherent of antifa or Black Lives Matter shut down the Capitol area with a bomb threat.

From The Hindu: Sports

• West Indies all the way - it’s no brainer for me: Darren Sammy on T20 World Cup - The men’s T20 World Cup will be held between October 17 and November 14 in Oman and the UAE

• Defence Minister to felicitate armed forces personnel who participated in Tokyo Olympics at ASI - ASI has produced 34 Olympians, 22 Commonwealth Games medalists, 21 Asian Games medalists, six Youth Games medalists and 13 Arjuna Awardees

• Tokyo Paralympics to open under shadow of pandemic - As at the Olympics, the event will be marked by strict virus rules, with almost all spectators banned and tough restrictions on athletes

• Silverwood should have asked Root, “What hell is going on”: Vaughan on bouncer tactic - Michael Vaughan said the onus is on Silverwood to change the momentum of the series

• ‘I almost broke my hand,’ Medvedev collides with camera in shock loss - The compatriots were tied 1-1 in the second set when Medvedev crashed into an on-court camera and knocked it to the ground while chasing the ball at the baseline.

From The Hindu: National News

• ‘Chinese hurdle’: KSEB looks at other options - Installing power plant machinery at Pallivasal Extension Scheme

• 3 shot dead as Assam police foil bid to rob bank - Gang fired on police while fleeing bank in Kokrajhar district’s Chengmari area

• From 1,095 days to 306: Govt data shows quicker disposal of commercial disputes - Time standards are respected in more than 50% of cases in dedicated commercial courts, the Department of Justice said

• PDP leader Parra moves HC over similarity of charges levelled by NIA and J&K Police, says violation of rights - In the petition, PDP leader Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra submitted that he was investigated for the same offences by the NIA as well as the Counter Intelligence (Kashmir) wing of J&K Police separately

• Haryana extends lockdown till Sep 6, earlier relaxations to continue - The relaxations include the opening of restaurants, bars, malls, clubhouses and shops

From BBC: Europe

• Greece erects fence at Turkey border amid warnings of Afghan migrant surge - A 40km (25-mile) barrier is placed at the land border amid warnings of a surge of Afghan migrants.

• Spain migrants: Sole survivor rescued in dinghy in Atlantic - The woman, who was spotted clinging to an upturned boat, says at least 52 other people died.

• Alexei Navalny: UK sanctions for seven Russians over poisoning - The staunch critic of President Vladimir Putin almost died in a nerve agent attack last year.

• Belgium stabbing suspect won’t be charged over unborn baby’s death - A man in Belgium is charged with allegedly stabbing his partner, but not her unborn baby’s death.

• Trabzonspor 1-2 Roma: Jose Mourinho reign starts with European win - Jose Mourinho’s spell as Roma boss starts with a win at Turkish side Trabzonspor in the Europa Conference League play- off.

From Ars Technica

• Looking for a new job in tech? It may be your lucky day - Employers are turning on the charm to attract engineers and developers to their firms. - link

• Hydrogen lobbyist quits, slams oil companies’ “false claims” about blue hydrogen - Recent studies have questioned blue hydrogen’s low-carbon bona fides. - link

• On Roblox, kids learn it’s hard to earn money making games - New report claims that the massive video game platform can exploit young developers. - link

• Now that machines can learn, can they unlearn? - Researchers see if they can remove sensitive data without retraining AI from scratch. - link

• Report: Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may get full FDA approval Monday - Regulators are reportedly working to finish approval Friday, but timeline could slip. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Statistics -

  Statistically:

  • 5 people out of 6 are satisfied with the result of Russian roulette
    • 0 out of 6 people complain about the result

  submitted by /u/Aelita_beauty
  [link] [comments]