Attention to the Unseen

Brian Whitaker writes: Hundreds of people died — many of them in their sleep — when rockets laden with the nerve agent sarin struck Ghouta, a rebel-held area on the outskirts of the Syrian capital early one morning in August 2013. It was the deadliest chemical attack anywhere in the world since the 1980s. Considering that Ghouta was under fire from the Assad regime’s forces at the time, that the casualties were on the rebels’ side and that the regime…

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Michael Beckley and Hal Brands write: President Xi Jinping declared in July that those who get in the way of China’s ascent will have their “heads bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel.” The People’s Liberation Army Navy is churning out ships at a rate not seen since World War II, as Beijing issues threats against Taiwan and other neighbors. Top Pentagon officials have warned that China could start a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait or other geopolitical…

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Reuters reports: The top U.S. military officer, General Mark Milley, has provided the first official U.S. confirmation of a Chinese hypersonic weapons test that military experts say appears to show Beijing’s pursuit of an Earth-orbiting system designed to evade American missile defenses. The Pentagon has been at pains to avoid direct confirmation of the Chinese test this summer, first reported by the Financial Times, even as President Joe Biden and other officials have expressed general concerns about Chinese hypersonic weapons…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Desperate to feed her family, Saleha, a housecleaner here in western Afghanistan, has incurred such an insurmountable debt that the only way she sees out is to hand over her 3-year-old daughter, Najiba, to the man who lent her the money. The debt is $550. Saleha, a 40-year-old mother of six who goes by one name, earns 70 cents a day cleaning homes in a wealthier neighborhood of Herat. Her much older husband doesn’t have…

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Der Spiegel reports: The narrow, unpaved road winds though a world of rock for hours on end, navigable only at a snail’s pace. Rocky, weathered crags line the horizon, their color ranging from a pale ochre to dark granite in the glistening sun, as though all life here was extinguished long ago. Only a couple of crows can be seen rising on the thermals along the cliff walls. This makes what appears far below all the more intense as we…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: A U.S. special-operations unit and a contingent of Marines have been secretly operating in Taiwan to train military forces there, U.S. officials said, part of efforts to shore up the island’s defenses as concern regarding potential Chinese aggression mounts. About two dozen members of U.S. special-operations and support troops are conducting training for small units of Taiwan’s ground forces, the officials said. The U.S. Marines are working with local maritime forces on small-boat training. The…

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The Washington Post reports: The white flags flutter in the apple orchards of this serene hamlet ringed by oatmeal-colored mountains. They mark the precise spots where U.S. airstrikes killed Afghans. In the village center lies the destroyed shell of a building that once housed shops; down the road is a mangled, rusted car. There are white flags there, too. Together, they’re reminders of the legacy the United States has left in many rural areas across Afghanistan. “Everyone here hated the…

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  When journalism forces government to admit mistakes. The @nytimes Visual Investigation team once against defy official stories and prove unnecessary targeting of civilians. Outstanding work from @heytherehaIey ,@trbrtc ,@whitney_hurst ,@ckoettl and othershttps://t.co/ffSt1mPVUm — Rasha Al Aqeedi (@RashaAlAqeedi) September 18, 2021 Almost everything senior defence officials said publicly in the hours, days and weeks after the August 29 drone strike turned out to be false. The car posed no threat at all. https://t.co/MHie1f8EbT — Louisa Loveluck (@leloveluck) September 18, 2021…

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Tom McTague writes: A new world is beginning to take shape, even if it remains disguised in the clothes of the old. The United States, Britain, and Australia have announced what is in effect a new “Anglo” military alliance. The basics are these: In 2016, Australia struck a deal with France to buy a fleet of diesel-powered submarines, rejecting an Anglo-American alternative for nuclear-powered vessels. In March this year, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (or, “that fellow down under,” as…

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Michelle Goldberg writes: I’ll always remember Sept. 11 as something that happened in the evening. At the time I was living in a town in northern India, and I watched the towers fall on a TV someone had dragged into the street. Because I was so far away, I’ll never know the terror people in New York and Washington felt on that day, the fear that more attacks were coming, that the epic disaster movies so popular during the bored…

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Dylan Matthews writes: There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including…

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  The New York Times reports: It was the last known missile fired by the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and the military called it a “righteous strike” — a drone attack after hours of surveillance on Aug. 29 against a vehicle that American officials thought contained an ISIS bomb and posed an imminent threat to troops at Kabul’s airport. But a New York Times investigation of video evidence, along with interviews with more than a dozen…

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The Guardian reports: The men of Zangabad village, Panjwai district lined up on the eve of 11 September to count and remember their dead, the dozens of relatives who they say were killed at the hands of the foreign forces that first appeared in their midst nearly 20 years ago. Their cluster of mud houses, fields and pomegranate orchards was the site of perhaps the most notorious massacre of the war, when US SSgt Robert Bales walked out of a…

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