Sandy Milne writes: Speaking to me via Zoom from his flat in Amsterdam, Ali al-Sadr pauses to take a sip from a clear glass of water. The irony dawning on him, he lets out a laugh. “Before I left Iraq, I struggled every day to find clean drinking water.” Three years earlier, al-Sadr had joined protests in the streets of his native Basra, demanding the authorities address the city’s growing water crisis. “Before the war, Basra was a beautiful place,”…
Mahmood Mamdani writes: In the course of the struggle against apartheid, South Africans did something remarkable: they tried, with incomplete success, to destroy the settler and the native by reconfiguring both as survivors. They did so by adopting a response to extreme violence that defied the logic of Nuremberg – the logic of separating perpetrators from victims, punishing the perpetrators, and creating separate spheres in which the two could live without harming each other in an ongoing cycle of violence….
Politico reports: A Taliban spokesperson on Tuesday worked to position the group as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan, pledging that the Islamic militants would not seek revenge against Afghan civil servants or those who worked with the U.S. Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesperson for the Taliban, said that the group would look to establish ties with other countries and announce the formation of a new government in the near future. “Afghanistan will have an Islamic — and a strong Islamic…
CNN reports: Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Tuesday that he was concerned that then-President Donald Trump “undermined” the US’ 2020 agreement with the Taliban by pushing for US forces to leave Afghanistan without the Taliban meeting the conditions of the deal. The Trump administration’s “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” outlined a series of commitments from the US and the Taliban related to troop levels, counterterrorism and intra-Afghan dialogue aimed at bringing about “a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire.” But,…
The New York Times reports: Military and intelligence assessments predicting that the government in Kabul could hold on at least a year before a Taliban takeover were built on a premise that proved to be flawed: that the Afghan army would put up a fight. “Most of the U.S. assessments inside and outside the U.S. government had focused on how well the Afghan security forces would fare in a fight with the Taliban. In reality, they never really fought” during…
CNN reports: The federal government on Monday declared a water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time, triggering mandatory water consumption cuts for states in the Southwest, as climate change-fueled drought pushes the level in Lake Mead to unprecedented lows. Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US by volume, has drained at an alarming rate this year. At around 1,067 feet above sea level and 35% full, the Colorado River reservoir is at its lowest since the…
The New York Times reports: The Biden administration has decided that most Americans should get a coronavirus booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, and could begin offering third shots as early as mid-September, according to administration officials familiar with the discussions. Officials are planning to announce the decision as early as this week. Their goal is to let Americans who received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines know now that they will need additional protection against the…
The Wall Street Journal reports: The Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus appears to be breaking through the protection vaccines provide at a higher rate than previous strains, a Wall Street Journal analysis found, though infections among the fully inoculated remain a tiny fraction of overall cases, and symptoms tend to be milder. U.S. states counted at least 193,204 so-called breakthrough cases among vaccinated people between Jan. 1 and early August, according to data that health departments in 44 states…
Dhruv Khullar writes: In 1988, Richard Lenski, a thirty-one-year-old biologist at UC Irvine, started an experiment. He divided a population of a common bacterium, E. coli, into twelve flasks. Each flask was kept at thirty-seven degrees Celsius, and contained an identical cocktail of water, glucose, and other nutrients. Each day, as the bacteria replicated, Lenski transferred several drops of each cocktail to a new flask, and every so often he stored samples away in a freezer. His goal was to…
Anatol Lieven writes: In the winter of 1989, as a journalist for the Times of London, I accompanied a group of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. At one point, a fortified military post became visible on the other side of a valley. As we got closer, the flag flying above it also became visible — the flag of the Afghan Communist state, which the mujahideen were fighting to overthrow. “Isn’t that a government post?” I asked my interpreter. “Yes,”…
Robin Wright writes: The fall of Kabul may serve as a bookend for the era of U.S. global power. In the nineteen-forties, the United States launched the Great Rescue to help liberate Western Europe from the powerful Nazi war machine. It then used its vast land, sea, and air power to defeat the formidable Japanese empire in East Asia. Eighty years later, the U.S. is engaged in what historians may someday call a Great Retreat from a ragtag militia that…
The Guardian reports: Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban leader freed from a Pakistani jail on the request of the US less than three years ago, has emerged as an undisputed victor of the 20-year war. While Haibatullah Akhundzada is the Taliban’s overall leader, Baradar is its political chief and its most public face. He was said to be on his way from his office in Doha to Kabul on Sunday evening. In a televised statement on the fall of Kabul,…
South China Morning Post reports: After two decades of the United States’ costly and bloody efforts to support the Afghan government, the Taliban has retaken control of the country in stunning fashion, posing new risks – and opportunities – for neighbouring China. Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday that China “respects the wishes and choices of the Afghan people”, and hoped the Taliban’s declarations that it would transition the country under an “open, inclusive Islamic government” and…
Pankaj Mishra writes: As apocalyptic wildfires raged in Greece, California and Turkey last week, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered a sobering assessment of the damage inflicted by human beings on their planet since the industrial revolution. Certainly, as droughts parch entire countries, fuel civil wars that spill across national borders and drive uncontrolled migration, collaborative action seems imperative, regardless of which countries industrialized first and kick-started the process of climate change. But the…