01 March 21
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Dexter Filkins | Last Exit From Afghanistan
Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker
Filkins writes: "Will peace talks with the Taliban and the prospect of an American withdrawal create a breakthrough or a collapse?"
n the night of August 14th, Fawzia Koofi was on her way home to Kabul from the funeral of family friends. Koofi, forty-five, is one of Afghanistan’s leading advocates for women’s rights—a former parliament member who, in the twenty years since the United States and its allies toppled the Taliban, has carried on a ferocious public fight to reverse a history of oppression. She and her twenty-one-year-old daughter, Shuhra, were riding in an armored car, as they often do. A second car, filled with security guards, trailed behind. The guards were necessary; in 2010, Taliban gunmen had attempted to kill her.
As they neared Kabul, her driver pulled over to get gas, and Koofi decided to switch cars. “Sometimes the armored car feels like a prison,” she explained, when I visited Afghanistan in December. As they left the gas station, she saw a car behind hers, seeming to track its moves; she was being followed. While she watched, a second car veered into the road, blocking the lane. Koofi’s driver accelerated and swerved onto the shoulder, but, before he could get clear of the blockade, men in the other car opened fire. Bullets smashed through the windows and tore through her upper arm. The assailants sped away. Koofi was rushed to the nearest safe hospital, forty-five minutes away, where surgeons removed a bullet and set her shattered bone.
A month later, Koofi was due to represent the government in peace talks with the Taliban—the latest in a decade-long series of attempts to end the Afghan conflict. As she prepared, the mood in Kabul was unusually fraught. A wave of assassinations had begun, which has since claimed the lives of hundreds of Afghans, including prosecutors, journalists, and activists. Officials in Afghanistan and in the U.S. suspect that the Taliban committed most of the killings—both to strengthen their position in talks and to weaken the civil society that has tenuously established itself since the Taliban were deposed. “They are trying to terrorize the post-2001 generation,” Sima Samar, a former chairperson of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, told me.
The peace talks began last September, in Doha, Qatar, a Persian Gulf microstate that sits atop the world’s largest natural-gas field. For seven years, Qatar’s leaders have hosted several of the Taliban’s most senior members in luxurious captivity, housing them and their families with all expenses paid. At the opening ceremony, delegates from the Taliban and the Afghan government gathered at the Doha Sheraton, in a cavernous convention space staffed by an army of guest workers. When Koofi walked into the lobby, she saw a group of Taliban negotiators. They were staring at her arm, which was still in a cast. Koofi smiled at them. “As you can see, I’m fine,” she said.
Despite Koofi’s assurance, the Afghan government was in a precarious position. For decades, it had been buttressed by U.S. military power. But, as Americans have lost patience with the war, the U.S. has reduced its presence in Afghanistan, from about a hundred thousand troops to some twenty-five hundred. Seven months before Koofi went to Doha, officials in the Trump Administration concluded their own talks with the Taliban, in which they agreed to withdraw the remaining forces by May 1, 2021. The prevailing ethos, a senior American official told me, was “Just get out.”
Afghanistan presents Joe Biden with one of the most immediate and vexing problems of his Presidency. If he completes the military withdrawal, he will end a seemingly interminable intervention and bring home thousands of troops. But, if he wants the war to be considered anything short of an abject failure, the Afghan state will have to be able to stand on its own.
For Koofi and her fellow-negotiators, a question hangs over the talks: How much of the American-backed project, which has cost thousands of lives and more than two trillion dollars, will survive? Before the U.S. and its allies intervened, in 2001, the Taliban imposed a draconian brand of Islam, in which thieves’ hands were cut off and women were put to death for adultery. After the Taliban were defeated, a new constitution opened the way for democratic elections, a free press, and expanded rights for women. Koofi worries that the Taliban leaders, many of whom were imprisoned for years at Guantánamo, do not grasp how much the country has changed—or that they view those changes as errors to be corrected. “I want their eyes to see me, to get used to what Afghan women are today,” Koofi told me. “A lot of them, for the past twenty years, have been in a time capsule.” She hopes that a deal can be made to keep the Americans in the country until a comprehensive agreement brings peace. But she fears that the talks won’t be enough to save the Afghan state: “Even now, there are some people among the Taliban who believe they can shoot their way into power.”
The United States has spent more than a hundred and thirty billion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan. The effort has been beset by graft and misrepresented by Presidents and commanders, but in Kabul the effects were evident. High-rise apartment buildings remade the skyline, and the streets filled with cars; foreign aid helped create new jobs, and women began going to work and to school. After decades of civil war and repressive government, the capital became a rollicking international city. Diplomats, aid workers, and journalists gathered at a French restaurant called L’Atmosphère and a Lebanese place known as Taverna; after hours, they stumbled over to the bar of the Gandamack Lodge, named for a site where nineteenth-century Afghan tribesmen massacred British invaders. The Taliban were gaining strength in the countryside, but the cities flourished.
These days, assassinations and bombings have driven most of the foreigners away. Taverna closed in 2014, after a Taliban attack there killed twenty-one civilians. As American and NATO troops have departed, blast walls, barbed wire, and armed checkpoints have risen to provide a semblance of security. The few Western visitors mostly stay at the fortress-like Serena hotel, even though American officials warn that the insurgent Haqqani network, an adjunct of the Taliban, is scouting the place for people to kidnap. At night, the streets are quiet. Twenty years into the American-led war, Kabul feels again like the capital of a poor and troubled country.
On a frigid evening in January, I paid a visit to Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan President. I got out of my taxi at the edge of the security cordon, about half a mile from his office, and trekked past concrete barricades, armed guards, and machine-gun nests. At the center of the defenses is the Arg—a nineteenth-century castle, replete with towers and parapets, which houses Ghani’s administration. Inside, guards searched and X-rayed me, then confiscated my voice recorder and my phone. I was led to a waiting area, a chilly room with rock walls and marble floors, and finally to the office of the President. Ghani was at his desk, wearing a mask, alone. “Welcome,” he said.
Ghani, who is seventy-one, was born to an educated family near Kabul and went abroad as a teen-ager to study. He taught anthropology at Johns Hopkins and then spent a decade at the World Bank, in Washington, D.C., helping developing nations strengthen their economies. After the U.S. invasion, he returned to Afghanistan and threw himself into the reconstruction. Ghani has the cool demeanor of a technocrat, but he spoke passionately about giving up a stable career to work for his country. “I made my decision to come home, and I never looked back,” he said.
Ghani’s Presidency has been a long struggle. He came to power in 2014, in an election marred by fraud. He promised to unite the country but instead watched it deteriorate around him, as more American troops departed. When he won reëlection, in 2019, fewer than two million Afghans cast ballots. In the past year, he has seemed increasingly aware that his country’s future is being decided far from Kabul—first in the Trump Administration’s negotiations with the Taliban over an American withdrawal, and then in the Afghan government’s talks with the Taliban over the potential for peace.
When Trump decided to reach out to the Taliban, in 2018, he chose as his envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned diplomat and a native Afghan. Khalilzad had known Ghani since high school, when they played basketball together. But the two found themselves at odds over the country’s direction, and their relationship soured. In January, Khalilzad arrived for a visit, and Ghani declined to see him.
Trump was clearly desperate to make a deal that would allow him to say that he had ended the war. When the Taliban refused to include the Afghan government in the talks, the U.S. did not insist. The senior American official told me, “The Trump people were saying, ‘Fuck this—the Afghans are never going to make peace anyway. Besides, who cares whether they agree or not?’ ” As the talks progressed, Trump repeatedly announced troop withdrawals, depriving his negotiators of leverage. “He was steadily undermining us,” a second senior American official told me. “The trouble with the Taliban was, they were getting it for free.” In the end, the two sides agreed not to attack each other, and the Americans agreed to withdraw.
The Taliban had to meet a list of conditions, including preventing terrorists from operating out of Afghanistan and refraining from major attacks on the country’s government and military. But the prospect of insuring a total pullout was appealing enough that the Taliban began rooting for Trump to win reëlection. In one of the odder moments of the U.S. campaign season, they issued an endorsement of his candidacy. “When we heard about Trump being COVID-19-positive, we got worried,” a senior Taliban leader told CBS News. (The group subsequently claimed that it had been misquoted.)
In my meeting with Ghani, he seemed abandoned, like a pilot pulling levers that weren’t connected to anything. He professed gratitude to the United States, but was clearly uneasy with the deal. Recently, he said, he had ordered the release of five thousand Taliban prisoners—“not because I wanted to, because the U.S. pushed me.” He feared a security disaster, as Taliban fighters returned to the streets and American soldiers left the country. “The U.S. can withdraw its troops anytime it wants, but they ought to negotiate with the elected President,” he went on. “They should call me. I’m the elected President.”
Many Afghans say that Ghani is to blame for his predicament, describing him as remote, vindictive, and surrounded by sycophants. A prominent businessman who meets often with senior government officials told me that, when Khalilzad reported that Trump had ordered a pullout, Ghani should have tried to win over his old friend. Instead, the businessman said, “Ghani went around town announcing his intention to destroy him.” I noticed that Ghani did not have a television in his office; he prefers to read transcripts of shows afterward. “He is delusional,” the businessman said. “He has no idea what the country thinks of him.”
Ghani was still hoping that Afghanistan would retain its place in the minds of American policymakers. “All I need from the U.S. is four or five videoconferences a year,” he told me. But the Americans have given every sign that Afghanistan is no longer a major consideration. U.S. officials now see Ghani as an obstacle to a peace deal—wedded to the status quo, which keeps troops in the country and him in power. “Each step of the way, he’s resisting,” the senior American official said.
In 2018, the U.S. asked Ghani to appoint a negotiating team; it took two years—and the announcement of a billion-dollar cut in American aid—for him to complete the process. Before the current talks began, he assembled his negotiators for a historical seminar on persistent conflicts. He walked them through Colombia’s civil war, which lasted fifty-two years; Nepal’s, which lasted ten; and Sri Lanka’s, which dragged on for twenty-five. Ghani’s message was that long wars take a long time to end. When talks were convened to end the Vietnam War, he noted, it took nearly three months just to agree on the shape of the negotiating table. Whatever pressure his negotiators felt—from the Americans or from the Taliban—ought to be resisted, he said, instructing them, “Don’t bring home a bad deal.”
According to U.S. officials, the most favorable outcome of the talks is a ceasefire and an agreement to form a transitional government, with power shared between the Taliban and the existing Afghan government. The transitional government would write a new constitution and lay the groundwork for nationwide elections.
Ghani insists that compromise is dangerous. He was chosen by the Afghan people, in an election that was open, at least notionally, to every adult in the country. Why would an elected President hand over power to a group of unelected insurgents? “My power rests on my legitimacy,” he said. “The moment that legitimacy is gone, the whole thing implodes.”
The negotiators gathered in Doha at the Sharq hotel—a sprawling beach resort, owned by the Ritz-Carlton, with high-arched buildings set alongside ornately tiled pools. It struck some delegates as a peculiar place to end a war. “You walk around the hotel and people are swimming,” Koofi said. “Women are walking around in bikinis. And then you go inside a meeting room to talk about the fate of the country.”
At first, the loathing between the two sides was so intense that they bridled at standing together in the same room. “They wouldn’t even look at each other,” a Qatari official told me. After a couple of days, they sat down in a conference room, but even then some of the delegates found their anger difficult to contain. Three weeks earlier, Taliban gunmen had killed the nephew of Nader Nadery, one of the government negotiators. Nadery himself had been arrested and tortured by the Taliban in the nineties, when he was a student activist. “I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to leave the talks,” he told me. Another negotiator, Matin Bek, had lost his father to a Taliban attack ten years before; a third, Masoom Stanekzai, had survived three attacks in which bombs blew up his car.
The Taliban had their own grievances. Among their negotiators was Khairullah Khairkhwa, who helped found the Taliban and served as an interior minister in its government. In the chaotic days after the U.S. began attacking, in 2001, Khairkhwa negotiated to become a C.I.A. informant. (He denies this.) As the talks broke down, Khairkhwa fled to the Pakistani border town of Chaman. He was captured, put on a plane, bound and blindfolded, and flown to the newly opened prison at Guantánamo Bay. “The flight was endless for me, a journey to Hell,” he told me.
At Guantánamo, Khairkhwa said, he was denied sleep, handcuffed to chairs for hours, denied prompt medical treatment, and subjected to months of interrogation. There were occasional moments of tenderness, as when a female military-police officer slipped him earplugs, hidden in a roll of toilet paper, to help him sleep. Mostly it was boring.
In prison, Khairkhwa insisted that he was merely a bureaucrat in the Taliban’s administration. American prosecutors said that he was a military commander, who had helped foment a massacre of ethnic Hazara civilians—but much of the evidence was classified. In 2009, President Barack Obama gave a speech suggesting that cases like Khairkhwa’s belonged in an uneasy category: too innocent to charge, too guilty to free.
Then, in 2014, an American soldier appeared at his cell and told him that he was being transferred to house arrest in Qatar. He and four other Taliban leaders were being swapped for Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier who had been captured five years before. Khairkhwa didn’t know much about Qatar, but his guards assured him it was a Muslim country. As it turned out, life was easy there; his wife and children joined him, and he had an apartment, all expenses paid by the Qatari government.
Just as Khairkhwa settled in, he was summoned again: he had been chosen to be a negotiator on behalf of the Taliban for an Afghan peace settlement. Soon afterward, he met for the first time with his American counterparts—diplomats instead of soldiers. “All of a sudden, I was negotiating with the same people who had imprisoned me,” he said. “It is a very strange feeling.”
In the current talks, American observers noted that the Talibs who had been held in Guantánamo seemed to struggle to stay focussed. “Their physical and mental resilience has clearly been affected by their time there,” the second senior U.S. official told me. Still, their team was audacious. Before the negotiators could work on matters of substance, they had to devise a code of conduct. The Taliban proposed that disputes be decided exclusively by Sunni jurisprudence. Government delegates insisted that Afghanistan’s Shiite populace be represented, too. “We made it clear to them that we stood for the diversity of our society,” Sadat Naderi, one of the negotiators, told me. The Taliban—whose members had massacred Shiite civilians before 2001—stormed out of the room.
Eventually, they returned to the bargaining table, but things didn’t go much better. “They told us we were puppets of the infidels,” Naderi recalled. “They told us the war was over.” Khairkhwa suggested to me that the 2020 peace deal with the U.S. had established the Taliban as the victors in the conflict. “We defeated the Americans on the battlefield,” he said. Hafiz Mansoor, a former minister in the Afghan government, blamed the Americans for giving the Taliban the impression that they had won the war: “By making the deal, the U.S. legitimized them.”
In meetings, the two sides shouted at each other; Taliban leaders said the Afghan officials represented an illegitimate government, propped up by infidels and bankrolled by Western money. “They were so arrogant,” Nadery said. “They thought they were there just to discuss the terms of surrender. They said, ‘We don’t need to talk to you. We can just take over.’ ”
Since 2001, the main arena of conflict in Afghanistan has been the countryside: the government held the cities, while the Taliban fought to control the villages and towns, particularly in the south, their heartland. But by early this year the paradigm had begun to fall apart. The Taliban were entrenched across the north; their shadow government had begun to creep into the cities.
In January, I visited the Qalai Abdul Ali neighborhood, in western Kabul; it straddles the national highway, which runs south to Kandahar. Taliban fighters, distinguished by black turbans that trail down their backs, were strolling through the streets. A decade ago, when there were nearly a hundred and fifty thousand American and NATO troops in the country, such a scene was unimaginable.
In Qalai Abdul Ali, the government was mostly in hiding. A squad of police hunkered down behind Hesco barricades. The real authority, the locals said, was a Talib called Sheikh Ali, who took me on a driving tour of the neighborhood. “I am the mayor,” he said, as he climbed into my car.
While we drove, an Afghan Army truck passed through without stopping. The police and other security agencies were not technically banned from the neighborhood, but those who entered risked attack. As Ali and I drove by a large, abandoned house on a hill, he pointed out the window and said, “Last year, we killed a judge who was living there.” We passed a tangle of twisted metal. “Here, you can see, we blew up an N.D.S. vehicle”—a truck from the National Directorate of Security, the equivalent of the F.B.I.
Ali, soft-spoken but assured, told me that the Taliban in Qalai Abdul Ali were collecting taxes, providing security, patrolling the streets. Every truck that passed through—hundreds a day, on the highway—had paid a toll to the Taliban. He produced a receipt for a payment from a driver who had recently carried a truckful of laundry detergent from Faryab Province. The receipt, marked “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” was complete with a contact phone number and an e-mail address. “The government is full of thieves,” Ali said. “We’re the real authority.”
The neighborhood’s residents weren’t necessarily happy to see the Taliban take control, but they didn’t trust the government, either. A former police officer named Sultan told me that, in the years after 2001, he had thrown himself into his job, inspired by the local police chief, whom he regarded as competent and honest. But his colleagues extorted bribes from the locals; to get hired, he said, he was forced to hand over several months’ salary. Meanwhile, tales spread of corruption and illicit activities among the country’s leaders. They included bacha bazi—a tradition, practiced by warlords in the nineties, of keeping boys as sex slaves. Sultan showed me a video, which was making the rounds on social media, of a former Afghan official ogling a dancing boy. “It turns my heart black,” he said. Sultan gave up his job a year and a half ago, after the Taliban assassinated the local police chief. Now he was working as a minibus driver. The Taliban patrolled the highway at night, all the way to Kandahar, he said: “The road is safe now.”
On the second floor of a house on Qalai Abdul Ali’s main street, I sat with three Talibs—middle-aged men who said they’d been fighting since the Americans first arrived. The group’s leader called himself Hedyat; he had a scraggly gray beard and slouched against a pillow, regarding me with narrowed eyes. Hedyat said tersely that Taliban fighters had moved into the neighborhood two years ago from Wardak, an adjacent province. “The Taliban control all of Wardak now,” he said. “We can bring people from all over the country.”
These days, he said, Qalai Abdul Ali was so secure that the Taliban were using it to stage attacks in other parts of the capital. “Oh, yes,” one of the other Talibs crowed. Hedyat told me that his local group was observing the ceasefire with the Americans. But, when I asked about making a deal with the Afghan government, he smiled scornfully. “We’re not sharing power with anyone,” he said.
Freshta Kohistani was fifteen when the Taliban government fell, and she thrived on the new freedoms. In the next two decades, she became an advocate for the poor in her ancestral province of Kapisa, north of Kabul, where she helped families find food and medicine. She carried herself in a defiantly modern way, driving her own car, walking around in jeans, flashing a bright smile, and asking direct questions of powerful men. She used Facebook to publicly demand better conditions; she separated from her husband when he discouraged her activism. “You can’t imagine someone as brave as Freshta,” her brother Roheen told me. “She was confronting our stupid traditional society.”
For years, Kohistani received threatening text messages, but she ignored them. Then, about a year ago, a group of men with knives surrounded her, and one of them slashed her side as she escaped. In December, Kohistani pleaded for the government to protect her. “I am not a frightened little girl,” she wrote in a Facebook post. But she was worried about what her family and her co-workers would “do in this ruined country after I’m gone.” Twelve days later, as she and her brother Shahram were driving in Kapisa, two motorcycles pulled alongside them, and a man on the back shot them both dead. When I arrived at the Kohistanis’ home, the family was still greeting mourners. Freshta’s father, Najibullah, said that he wasn’t sure who killed her, but that her death resembled many others in recent months. “They are killing the élites,” he said.
When the U.S. negotiated its withdrawal with the Taliban, American officials made it clear that they expected suicide bombings and other mass-casualty attacks to end. In their place, the Taliban appear to have launched a campaign aimed at terrorizing the educated élite, just as the Afghan government began its own talks. More than five hundred Afghans have been killed in targeted attacks in the past year, many of them shot or struck by “sticky bombs,” explosives placed underneath cars. Among them are Malala Maiwand, a female journalist in Jalalabad; Pamir Faizan, a military prosecutor; and Zakia Herawi, one of two female Supreme Court justices who were killed. A deep unease has permeated Afghanistan’s cities. “I feel like I’m in a dark room filled with people, and I don’t know who’s hitting me,” an official named Ali Howaida told me in Kabul.
The Taliban deny responsibility for the attacks, but Afghan officials say that many of them are orchestrated by the Haqqani network. Amrullah Saleh, one of the country’s two Vice-Presidents, told me that Taliban commanders, meeting in Pakistan, mapped out the campaign early last year. Saleh said that he passed a warning to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper before the United States made the deal with the Taliban. (The State Department says that it has no record of this.) “We told them exactly what was going to happen,” Saleh said. Pompeo and Esper were undeterred.
But not all the victims of assassination are enemies of the Taliban. In June, 2019, as Ustadh Abdul Salaam Abed was being driven to his office, a bomb blew off the back of his car and wounded him in the neck. Every week, during Friday prayers at the Osman Ghani mosque, Abed had been telling his congregation that Afghans had to reconcile. While he sometimes criticized the Taliban, he advocated dialogue; it was the government and its American supporters who were driving the violence, he maintained. At his house in Kabul, he gestured to his wound and told me, “I’m a hundred per cent certain the government did this.”
A growing number of Afghans believe that people inside the government are directing some of the killings. In August, a group of prominent former officials, many of whom are close to former President Hamid Karzai, wrote to Ghani alleging that there were “high-ranking officials who are credibly suspected of being involved in targeted assassinations.” The letter also accused a Vice-President and a deputy in the N.D.S. of “attempting to spread an environment of fear and terror among government critics and opposition figures.” A senior Afghan leader told me, “I don’t have proof, but there are people around Ghani who are determined to destroy the peace process.”
Ghani denied that anyone in his administration was behind the killings. Saleh, the Vice-President, dismissed the claims, saying, “They equated our lack of capability to stop the targeted assassinations with being complicit.” The senior American official told me that it seemed plausible that people in the government were behind some of the killings: “Why would the Taliban kill someone who supports the peace talks?” But, he added, with so few troops left in the country, the U.S. was struggling to gather reliable intelligence. “We don’t exactly know what’s going on.”
In January, General Austin Miller, the commander of NATO forces in the country, flew to Doha to deliver a message to the Taliban: The assassination campaign was putting the deal with the Americans at risk. If the Taliban didn’t back off, the U.S. could resume attacks. The Taliban maintained that it had no obligation to reduce violence: “the Islamic Emirate has not committed itself to any such undertaking.”
At fifty-nine, Miller is compact, no-nonsense, and direct. When I arrived at his base, he was leading his soldiers in an hour of running and calisthenics, which, at nearly six thousand feet above sea level, were enough to tire a soldier half his age. He is a kind of living symbol of America’s post-9/11 wars. Since 2001, he has spent more than seven years fighting alongside Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, he hunted members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban; in Iraq, he took part in the operation that killed the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He noted wryly that many of the Afghan leaders that he and his staff encountered, friend and foe, were already present when he first came to the region. “We’re dealing with their sons now,” he said.
Since 2002, American soldiers and officers have typically served tours of a year or less. With each rotation, new soldiers have to learn the country, and senior officers devise fresh plans. The result is that twenty years of effort in Afghanistan has meant twenty different campaigns. Miller returned to the country in 2010 and took the top job in 2018. “This is my fourth, fifth, or sixth tour,” he told me. “I haven’t counted.”
Miller arrived at the peak of the American effort, and has presided over a rapidly shrinking force. Where the U.S. once pursued ambitious goals, instilling democracy and economic development, he defined his mission narrowly: Don’t let Afghanistan become a terrorist haven. But, he said, there’s a catch. “You need a government for that.”
Senior officials in the Biden Administration say that they intend to take their time before they decide how to handle Afghanistan. “They’re trying to figure out the best of the bad options they inherited,” the second senior American official told me. They are conscious that, if Biden ignores Trump’s deal and decides to keep the roughly twenty-five hundred American troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban will almost certainly resume attacking them.
In January, a senior U.S. military-intelligence officer told a group of American soldiers to get ready for attacks. “We’ve been in this country for twenty years, and we may be entering the last four months. These could be the most uncertain of all,” the officer said. “Come May 1st, if we are still here, I think it’s game on for the Taliban.”
Miller told me, “If the Taliban were to attack U.S. or coalition forces, we are prepared to respond proportionally, with precision, and with capacity to spare.” But he also said that he was prepared to pull out the last of his soldiers if ordered to do so. The unanswered question—which has hung over the country since 2001—is whether the Afghan state can survive without Western troops. When I asked if he thought that the Afghan Army could secure the country alone, his answer was not reassuring. “They have to,” he said.
In early January, I flew with Miller to Afghan Army bases in Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north, and near the Helmand River, in the south. Looking down on the Hindu Kush from our C-130 transport plane, I was reminded of the country’s natural beauty but also of the geographic realities that have hampered every attempt to help it stand on its own: it’s landlocked and covered by mountains and desert, with only twelve per cent of its land suitable for farming. For much of its modern history, Afghanistan has been a ward of the international community: foreigners pay seventy-five per cent of its federal budget, and American taxpayers largely underwrite its Army and its security forces, at a cost of four billion dollars a year. But, if there is any hope that the Afghan state can become self-sufficient, it resides with the soldiers who train here.
In Mazar-i-Sharif, we met General Sami Alizai, the commander of the 209th Corps. (He has since been promoted to lead the Afghan Army’s special-operations corps.) An ethnic Pashtun from the south, Alizai signed up in 2004 and went on to graduate from the Joint Services Command and Staff College, one of the United Kingdom’s élite military academies. A typical U.S. officer of Alizai’s rank is in his fifties; Alizai is thirty-five and exudes restless confidence. “It was a tough fighting season,” he told Miller. “There are a lot of Taliban dead.”
At a lunch meeting with Miller, the limitations of NATO’s campaign became clear. When the season began, five of the fifty districts that Alizai’s troops oversaw were under Taliban control, and twenty-nine were “on the edge,” he said. His men had secured a dozen of them, he told Miller. But the Taliban had captured several villages along Highway 1, effectively cutting off the northern and western parts of the country. In Maimana, the capital of Faryab Province, the local government’s control extends barely past the city center. “You can only go to the end of the bazaar,” he said. Several local leaders had been assassinated.
“What do you think is happening?” Miller asked.
“The Taliban are trying to set up a network here,” Alizai said. “We don’t know who they are.” It was a conversation that might have taken place fifteen years ago.
The 209th Corps is assisted by sixteen hundred NATO troops, who help with training, and by an American Special Forces team, which provides both training and protection in combat; if an Afghan unit comes under attack, the Americans can call in a plane or a drone. (In one of the more unusual aspects of the U.S.-Taliban peace deal, the United States is allowed to protect Afghan forces from attacks. In practice, that means almost daily American air strikes and drone attacks; when I visited Helmand Province, the U.S. had carried out two drone strikes that morning.) The U.S. team was highly competent; all of its twenty members were seasoned, with some having served a dozen combat tours, and many spoke Dari and Pashto. But Alizai worried that the West’s commitment might be coming to an end—or that it might become too small to matter. Over lunch, Miller told him bluntly that he didn’t know what the future would bring. “You know where we’re at,” Miller said. “It’s just not clear.”
The 209th, budgeted for fifteen thousand troops, was fielding barely ten thousand. Even though the Army guarantees employment, in a country where jobs are scarce, Afghan officers struggle to find recruits; young people are often reluctant to leave their families for long tours. Alizai was undeterred. “I think we can get it up to ninety per cent soon,” he told Miller.
Alizai said that he was trying to contain the militias of two local warlords: Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former Vice-President, and Atta Mohamed Noor. Both men befriended the Americans in 2001, and both fight the Taliban. But they operate more like local fiefs than like agents of the government. Dostum has been accused of murder, rape, torture, and mass executions. “I will try to bring them in,” Alizai told Miller. “Once we pay them, we can influence them.” But there was little sign that this time would be different.
Alizai told me that, despite all the problems besetting the Afghan Army so late in the American era, his sponsors shouldn’t give up hope. “It takes time to build an army, brother,” he said. “We are trying to train the right people. We started from nothing. Please be patient.”
At the Sharq hotel in Doha, Fawzia Koofi was often the only woman in a room full of male negotiators. At first, she told me, some of her Taliban counterparts refused to speak to her. At a lunch meeting, two Taliban seated across from her asked her to move to another table. A third Talib at the table stared at the floor, unwilling to meet her gaze. Koofi picked up a plate and offered him a kebab; the Talib took it and smiled. “Miss Koofi, you are a very dangerous woman,” he told her. They have been talking ever since.
By the time I arrived, in late December, the negotiators had begun to relax. “They let their hair down,” the senior American official told me. The government delegates found that the Taliban, though often hostile in groups, were friendlier one on one. The harsher rhetoric began to fade, and on some afternoons I saw Taliban and government delegates walking together through the Sharq’s gardens.
Negotiators from both sides told me that they felt a heavy responsibility to end the conflict. Most believe that the Taliban would accept a deal under the right circumstances—that they are as tired of war as everyone else is. But many observers in Kabul suspect that the Taliban are using the talks to buy time until the Americans depart. One of the skeptics was Sima Samar, who for seventeen years presided over the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which seeks to bring modern concepts of justice and equality to the country. Samar believes that the Taliban will ultimately decide it’s easier to take power by force. “The Taliban?” she said. “They haven’t changed a bit.” In December, during a break in the talks, a video surfaced of Fazel Akhund, one of the Taliban negotiators, greeting a group of masked men at what appears to be a military training camp. As Akhund embraced the trainees, one of them cried out, “Long live the holy warriors of Afghanistan!”
In Kabul, Vice-President Amrullah Saleh suggested to me that pro-government Afghans would be no less reluctant than the Taliban to share control of the country. I met Saleh in 1999, as the Taliban were surging to victory in the country’s long, brutal civil war; back then, Saleh and a few holdouts were clinging to a tiny piece of territory in the northeast. In 2004, Saleh became the head of the National Directorate of Security, and earned a reputation among the Taliban as a fierce and efficient foe. In July, 2019, suicide bombers breached Saleh’s security cordon and killed thirty-two people.
Saleh argued that, if the Afghan government is forced to make a deal with the Taliban before the group forsakes violence, the peace will fail, and the group will try to reimpose its medieval vision. “Society has changed,” he said. Women have been educated, young people are connected to the wider world, English has become common in the cities. “People will not accept the Taliban,” he said. “They will not lie down. We have forty thousand Special Forces. Do you think they will let the Taliban slaughter them one by one?” He went on, “It will be another civil war.” The first, in the nineties, killed more than fifty thousand people. “But it will be worse than the last one. Absolutely worse.”
Yet the government negotiators will have to make some concessions to the Taliban, or the talks will break down, and the Western countries will likely leave the population to fend for itself. “I will fight with my claws and my teeth for the rights we have gained,” Fatima Gailani, a government delegate and an advocate for women, told me. “But there is a risk that some of these rights are going to be lost.”
One place to measure that risk is the Afghan Women’s Skills Development Center, in Kabul. The center offers training in sewing and catering, and works with a restaurant to supply jobs for trainees. It also provides a shelter for women and children escaping the difficulties of a society that, in many places, is still bound by age-old rules. Almost every day, a woman or a girl appears at the doorstep: a child bride fleeing her husband; a wife forced into an abusive marriage; a recently divorced woman whose family regards her as a disgrace and sent her into the streets. One recent morning, a young woman arrived so badly pummelled that attendants massaged her every day for two weeks. “There wasn’t a spot on her body—not one—that was not black-and-blue,” a worker at the center told me. “I wanted to scream.” The shelter, the first of its kind in Kabul, has a maximum capacity of seventy; it is often full.
One of the women who run the shelter is Mahbouba Seraj, an ebullient seventy-year-old. Born to royal lineage, she fled Afghanistan with her family in 1978, as the country disintegrated, and settled for a time in Manhattan, at Lexington Avenue and Forty-third Street. After 2001, Seraj was drawn back by the prospect of change in her homeland. Ever since, she has been sustained by a sense that outdated traditions were falling away. “There’s a lot of change here, and a lot of possibility—and a lot of pain and a lot of happiness,” she told me. “All these things used to get swept under the rug, and there was nowhere for a woman to go. Now there is.”
Would the shelter survive a Taliban regime? Seraj isn’t sure. She believes that the younger generations, which constitute most of the country’s urban population, will fight. “I have a belief in the energy and the idea and the newness and the commitment of the young people of this country,” she said. “We have doctors now, we have people with master’s degrees and Ph.D.s now. So many women and so many young people, so full of energy. They’re not going to give this up.”
Seraj is less sure about everyone else. She told me that she’d been chatting with friends recently, and they all agreed that the situation was likely to get much worse: “For the first time after all these years, I said to my friends, ‘Let’s not be heroes. At this point, we have to save our lives.’ ”
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A health care worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. (photo: Roger Kisby/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
How Inequity Gets Built Into America's Vaccination System
Maryam Jameel and Caroline Chen, ProPublica
Excerpt: "People eligible for the coronavirus vaccine tell us they are running up against barriers that are designed into the very systems meant to serve those most at risk of dying of the disease."
t’s a fact that simply being eligible for a vaccine in America doesn’t mean that you can instantly get one. Yet the ability to get to the front of the line isn’t the same for everyone. ProPublica has found that, whether intentionally or not, some vaccine programs have been designed with inherent barriers that disadvantage many people who are most at risk of dying from the disease, exacerbating inequities in access to health care.
In many regions of the U.S., it’s much more difficult to schedule a vaccine appointment if you do not have access to the internet. In some areas, drive-through vaccinations are the only option, excluding those who do not have cars or someone who can give them a ride. In other places, people who do not speak English are having trouble getting information from government hotlines and websites. One state is even flat-out refusing to allow undocumented workers with high-risk jobs to get prioritized for vaccination.
The vaccine supply is too low to inoculate everyone who is eligible, and competition for appointments is fierce.
“My nightmare scenario is that we have this two-tiered health system where there are people who are wealthy, privileged or connected, and then there's everybody else,” Dr. Jonathan Jackson, director of the Community Access, Recruitment, and Engagement Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, told ProPublica. “Once we hit that saturation point where the first tier has all gotten their vaccines, the narrative will shift to blame. It'll be ‘Why haven't you taken care of this yet?’”
For People With Disabilities, It Can Be a Struggle Just to Access Their Appointments
From the moment her 69-year-old father, Jose Balboa, became eligible for the vaccine in January, Kristine Mathason spent part of each day on the phone and online trying to get him a shot. She found available appointments a few times, but couldn’t find a way to actually take her father to the vaccination sites. Balboa is paralyzed on his left side after a stroke and needs a wheelchair to get around. In Miami, where he lives, most vaccine sites are drive-up only.
Mathason doesn’t have a van that can accommodate Balboa’s wheelchair, and she isn’t able to lift her father out of it. To move him between his bed and the chair, his home health aides use a patient lift. This isn’t possible when trying to get him into a car, Mathason said, as the door gets in the way of either a lifting device or two people trying to support him at once. In the past when family members tried to move him, Balboa fell.
Mathason said she was “willing to jump through all the hoops” to get Balboa the vaccine. “He’s super high-risk: He’s diabetic, he had a stroke 17 years ago,” she said. “He has high blood pressure. My half brother who lives with him works at a restaurant, so that’s like a high-risk job. We do our best.”
Mathason checked out every other avenue she can think of, but each was a dead end. She looked into renting a van, but she’s been out of work because of the pandemic and couldn’t afford it. She thought about Uber, but wheelchair access and the cost of waiting in a drive-through were prohibitive. “He’s just one of those people who unfortunately is falling through the cracks,” she said.
A county service offers scheduled rides for seniors, but it only provides drop-off services and wouldn’t take Balboa through a drive-through. There was an additional Catch-22: The scheduled rides require 24 hours’ notice for pickup, but the local hospital that offers walk-up appointments schedules them less than 24 hours in advance. The health department in Miami-Dade County directed questions to the Florida state health department, which did not respond to requests for comment.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 14% of adults in Florida have disabilities that affect mobility, which the CDC defines as serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs. While some people with mobility limitations may be able to access a car more easily than Balboa, he and his family were left with very few options.
“I just wish they had thought about people like my dad,” Mathason said. “What about the people who don’t have a me who’s trying to move heaven and earth to get him an appointment? What about the people who just don’t have a car and can’t get anywhere?”
After more than a month of searching, Balboa got a call from the medical center he goes to for doctor visits. The center had gotten a supply of doses, and they picked him up and took him to the site in one of their wheelchair-accessible vans. On February 24th, he got his first shot.
If You Can’t Access or Navigate the Internet, You Might Have Fewer Options
Eneyda Morales, a 40-year-old mother of three in East Hampton, New York, was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago and is still undergoing treatment. Four days a week, she works at a bagel shop near her home. “I’d like to get a vaccine because of the health issues I have and because I work in a place where I have to serve people,” Morales said in Spanish. But she’s not sure how she’s actually going to get a vaccine; while many Americans are hunting for information online, Morales doesn’t own a computer, nor does she know how to use one. She has a smartphone, but she primarily uses it for simple searches like looking up addresses. The only computer at her home is the one her 8-year-old daughter’s school provided for classwork.
New York state has a vaccination hotline for scheduling appointments by phone, but only for vaccines administered at state-run sites. The state site closest to Morales is about 60 miles away, an hour and a half by car. If Morales wants to get an appointment closer to home, she’ll need to contact local hospitals and pharmacies directly. The state hotline’s automated message tells callers that the quickest way to get information about eligibility and appointment scheduling is online.
Morales plans to seek help from OLA of Eastern Long Island, a local nonprofit, to schedule an appointment closer to home on one of her days off. Without their help, she said, she wouldn’t know where to begin searching.
Some states that have tried to provide offline options for booking vaccine appointments have stumbled. A phone line set up in Maryland was inundated with callers, who complained of being put on hold and then hung up on. In Tennessee, Shelby County’s decision to allow internet users to sign up first meant all the slots were snapped up by those with web access before phone appointments even opened.
About 10% of U.S. adults don’t use the internet, according to the Pew Research Center. Americans who are older, have less income, have less education or are nonwhite are less likely to go online, researchers found.
People Who Don’t Speak English May Have Trouble Getting Information
Gladys Godinez, the daughter of retired meatpacking workers, is an organizer for Solidarity with Packing Plant Workers who lives in Lexington, Nebraska. Her parents, like many of the immigrant workers she represents, are not fluent in English. Nebraska’s Spanish-language vaccine website offers a hotline to schedule appointments by phone. Godinez wanted to see what people in her parents’ situation were up against if they didn’t have a tech-savvy English speaker to help, so she called the number on Feb. 2. She said it took 15 minutes for someone to pick up the phone; that person answered in English.
Godinez said she was told that no one who could speak Spanish was available. She tried to insist: “I said, ‘Please, I would really like to be able to register for the vaccine.’ I said it in Spanish. She said, ‘We don’t have anybody that can talk to you in Spanish.’ So I just said ‘gracias’ and hung up.”
Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services said that since Feb. 13, 25% of each hotline shift is staffed by fluent Spanish speakers, but each call center agent can connect with interpretation services as needed. A spokesperson for the department did not comment on Godinez’s experience.
Language isn’t the only potential barrier facing immigrant workers in Nebraska. In January, Gov. Pete Ricketts was asked if undocumented immigrants in meatpacking facilities would be included in the state’s upcoming vaccination push. His response was discouraging: “You’re supposed to be a legal resident of the country to be able to be working in those plants. So I do not expect that illegal immigrants will be part of the vaccine with that program.”
Godinez said the governor’s words did a lot of damage even for people who are legal residents. “That scared a lot of individuals,” she said. “Just Spanish-speaking individuals living their life, they have legal status, they’re already scared of being profiled. Now here is your governor saying, ‘Sorry, not sorry, undocumented workers are not going to get the vaccine.’”
Later that day, the governor’s communications director tweeted that “while the federal government is expected to eventually make the vaccine available for everyone in the country, Nebraska is going to prioritize citizens and legal residents ahead of illegal immigrants.” Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica that proof of citizenship is not a requirement to receive the vaccine.
The federal government, even under the Trump administration, has encouraged undocumented immigrants to get vaccinated. According to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation about immigrant vaccine access, Arizona has specifically prioritized undocumented immigrants, while Virginia and New Jersey have prioritized migrant workers. Several states, including Utah, have emphasized that undocumented immigrants are eligible for the vaccine and their personal information will not be shared with authorities. Oregon and Washington have discussed doing outreach to immigrant communities to make sure they have the right information.
Health care workers and advocates are also trying to make access to COVID-19 vaccines more realistic for undocumented residents. In Baltimore, local nonprofit CASA de Maryland is hiring people to knock on doors to share vaccine information and pushing for its Baltimore office, located in a COVID-19 hot spot, to become a vaccination site.
Vaccine Sites That Are Drive-Through Exclude People Without Cars
Los Angeles’s Chinatown is about a mile from Dodger Stadium, one of the largest vaccination sites in the country. Despite the short distance, many of the neighborhood’s seniors have no way to get vaccinated at the stadium; the site is drive-up only, and many of them have no cars. Sissy Trinh, executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance, which has been providing aid to families in Chinatown and nearby Lincoln Heights during the pandemic, said community members face various hurdles that local government and testing sites haven’t accounted for.
Along with lacking access to cars, many of the seniors served by SEACA primarily speak Chinese dialects, Vietnamese, Khmer or Spanish and aren’t internet users. Trinh and her colleagues have been scrambling to figure out how to get these seniors vaccinated. They considered hiring Ubers or Lyfts, but the cost of paying drivers to wait in line would be too high for the small nonprofit. SEACA also can’t bus the seniors together to a vaccination site for fear of exposing them to potential infection.
In late February, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the city would send a mobile vaccination clinic to Chinatown and a few other neighborhoods prioritized for their medically vulnerable residents. The city reserved 800 doses for Chinatown. SEACA helped get them to residents, scheduling appointments from its waiting list of 2,500 people, translating documents for them and recruiting volunteers who are fluent in Cantonese, Taishanese, Teochew or Vietnamese.
Trinh said she’s excited that some doses are finally reaching seniors in the neighborhood, but she wishes officials had started planning for this when the pandemic started. “I know a lot of people were rushing to figure out how to get PPE to people and updating stay-at-home orders,” she said. “But there should have been a dedicated team to figure out the vaccine rollout.” Los Angeles officials said they hope to open additional mobile clinic sites by the end of March.
In Pima County, Arizona, health officials are also using mobile clinics to bring vaccines to high-risk residents. Baltimore and Fort Worth, Texas, are among other places attempting to overcome transportation barriers by using mobile sites.
Unclear Communication Leaves People Anxious and Unable to Plan
James, 82, lives in Chesterfield County, Virginia, outside of Richmond. (He asked to be identified only by his first name for privacy reasons.) Like many Americans, he turned first to his primary care physician for information about the vaccine. “I contacted my physician’s office to find out if they’d let me, as a patient, know when I’d get the vaccine, and they said, ‘Oh, no, no, we’re not going to do that.’” They instead directed him to the Virginia Department of Health. So James went on the state health department’s website. “I filled in all their little boxes, and that was it — I never heard a word,” he said. “I had no idea whether I’m registered or not.” He also tried registering on his county health department’s website, and had the same experience. “You don’t know whether you’re talking to a computer or to a garbage can,” he said. “When you’re filling it in, where does the form go? I’m concerned that when I finally get to go to the vaccine site, someone’s going to say I’m not registered.”
James contrasted the experience to online shopping: “When you go buy something off the web, you get an immediate response from the vendor saying, ‘Thank you for your purchase.’ Why can’t they do that? Say thank you for your registration?”
Virginia’s initial vaccine registration system indeed provided no email confirmation, but the new system, implemented on Feb. 16, now provides “an immediate acknowledgement on the screen” as well as an email or text message, according to health department spokesperson Melissa Gordon. She added that “it is not practical to give an exact place ‘in line’ or estimated appointment time frame, because clinics are put together based on capacity, eligibility and equity drivers that change over time.” The only thing the email confirmation can do, she said, is to “notify the recipient that their information had been transferred to the new statewide system and no other action was needed.” Residents who signed up under the old system, including James, eventually got an email to acknowledge their registration, albeit weeks after they filled in the form. Gordon added, “Unfortunately, it may be several weeks or months before everyone can get an appointment.”
Confusion over “When’s it going to be my turn?” has only increased as states start to expand access to people with underlying health conditions, with criteria that can be hard to interpret. Some Massachusetts residents with asthma, for example, are at a loss as to whether they qualify, WBUR recently reported. Massachusetts has “moderate to severe” asthma on its list of eligible medical conditions, but what counts as “moderate” asthma is ambiguous.
James has been waiting for the vaccine so he can safely visit his children and four grandchildren, who range in age from 11 to 28. In the absence of information from his local health department, he’s been relying on the news to glean details about the rollout. He said he read about one couple who drove nearly five hours each way from the Richmond area to Abingdon to get a vaccine. James thinks it’s not worth going that far, especially since that could involve an overnight stay somewhere. “I’ll just sit around and wait and mind my p’s and q’s,” he said.
The experience so far has made him “lose faith in the whole process,” he said. “The president can get on TV and say he’s purchased 600 million, 600 billion of these things, and I say, ‘Fine, but where is this stuff? Tell me, when is it going to be on my street?’”
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Capitol Police officers outside the Capitol this month saluting Officer Brian D. Sicknick, whose remains lay in honor in the Rotunda. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT)
Andrea Mazzarino | America Goes to War: Perspectives on the Storming of the Capitol From a Military Spouse
Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
Mazzarino writes: "'Are you okay?' asked a friend and military spouse in the voicemail she left me on the afternoon the mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol so violently."
If you don’t think that the January 6th attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters armed with everything from baseball bats to guns wasn’t as much of a sign of how America’s wars are coming home as the way the Pentagon has armed police forces with weaponry directly off those distant battlefields, think again. After all, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, the two “militia” groups that evidently did the most planning prior to leading the charge on the Capitol aimed at murdering America’s elected representatives and halting the presidential vote count, are evidently filled with veterans of this country’s forever wars (or at least of the military that has never stopped fighting them).
In fact, as the New York Times reported recently, more than one-third of the members of those two groups known to have been at the Capitol were once in that military (unlike less than a fifth of the rioters generally). Even before that assault, such militias had evidently been thinking rather specifically about bringing war home. Within a week of Joe Biden’s November 3rd electoral victory, the Oath Keepers, for instance, were already setting up training sessions for “urban warfare” and stationing members near Washington, D.C., prepared to act on President Trump’s orders.
And lest you imagine that those distant wars are now ending, think again. When it comes to Iraq, for instance, the Pentagon is already discussing sending yet more U.S. troops to the Middle East, supposedly to support the “training” of Iraqi forces to protect against the return of ISIS. Similarly, in Afghanistan, the pressure on President Biden not to pull the last U.S. military personnel out (as President Trump had agreed) on May 1st is only growing. For a special perspective on just how war, American-style, is indeed coming home within the military itself, consider the experiences of the co-founder of the invaluable Costs of War Project, military spouse, and TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
re you okay?” asked a friend and military spouse in the voicemail she left me on the afternoon the mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol so violently. At home with a new baby, her Navy reservist husband stationed in Germany, the thoughts running through her head that day would prove remarkably similar to mine. As she said when we spoke, “It’s as if the U.S. has become a war zone.”
Do a Google search and you’ll find very little suggesting that the January 6th attack on the Capitol in any way resembled a war. A notable exception: a Washington Post op-ed by former Missouri secretary of state and Afghanistan combat veteran Jason Kander. He saw that day’s violence for the combat it was and urged congressional representatives and others who bore the brunt of those “armed insurrectionists” to seek help (as, to his regret, he hadn’t done after his tours of duty in combat zones).
Now, take a look back at that “riot” and tell me how it differs from a military attack: President Trump asked his supporters to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He swore he would go with them, though he didn’t, of course, just as those who launched and continued our “forever wars” of the last almost 20 years sent Americans to fight abroad without ever doing so themselves. Trump’s small army destroyed property with their metal baseball bats and other implements of aggression, in one case even planted pipe bombs near Republican and Democratic party headquarters (that didn’t go off), and looted congressional chambers, including carrying away House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern.
The rioters used intimidation against those in the Capitol. Some screamed insults like “traitor” and the n-word (reserved, of course, for the black police officers protecting Congress). One rioter wore a sweatshirt emblazed with the words “Camp Auschwitz,” a reference to the Nazi death camp. Make no mistake: the America these rioters envisioned was one full of hate and disdain for difference.
In their disregard for pandemic safety protocols, they employed the equivalent of biological warfare against lawmakers and the Capitol police, breaking into the building, screaming and largely unmasked during a pandemic, forcing lawmakers to jam into enclosed spaces to save (but also endanger) their own lives. The rioters smeared blood on walls and on the busts of former presidents. Their purpose was clear: to overturn democratic processes by brute force in the name of what they saw as an existential threat to their country, the certification of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president and vice president.
Among those aggressors were veterans and some active-duty personnel from elite U.S. combat forces (as well as from police departments) who brought years of expertise to bear on orchestrating an attempted takeover of our government, based — much like the costliest of our still-ongoing wars, the one in Iraq — on lies told by their commander in chief (“Stop the steal!”).
My Own Personal War
To fight wars, you need to summon a mix of rage, adrenaline, and disregard for the humanity of those whose project you seek to annihilate. That seemed evident in the mob of the supposedly pro-law-and-order president that attacked Congress, their acts leading to five deaths – including that of Capitol Hill police officer Brian Sicknick, a former New Jersey Air National Guard member. More than 140 police officers who tried to protect lawmakers sustained injuries: Some, who were not given helmets prior to that day, are now living with brain injuries (which, as a therapist, I can assure are likely to come with debilitating lifelong implications). Another officer has two cracked ribs and smashed spinal disks. Yet another was stabbed by a rioter with a metal fence stake. Still another lost his eye.
These deaths and injuries will have ripple effects for the spouses, children, friends, employers, and others in the communities where those officers live. And they do not include the countless invisible injuries (such as post-traumatic stress disorder) that result from such war-like scenarios. In this respect, the cost of armed violence to human life is incalculable.
While that attack on the Capitol was underway, at the tiny community mental health clinic where I work as a therapist, I was speaking to clients who had migrated here from countries plagued by armed conflict. I listened to concerns that the far-right nationalist attack on the Capitol would, sooner or later, inspire violence against their own families. After all, those storming the Capitol backed a president who had referred to immigrants as “animals” and whose administration had put the children of undocumented migrants in cages – or sub-prison like conditions with zero-provision for their care. In the days after the attack, an acquaintance of mine, an African American man, was indeed pursued by a carful of people wearing Trump hats and shouting racial slurs. (They slowed their vehicle and followed him down the road towards his Maryland apartment.)
The day of the riots, I arrived home from my job to find my husband, a Naval officer, in front of the television news, tears in his eyes and sweat dripping down his face. My children, unprepared for bed (as they should have been), were staring at him in confusion. That night, he and I bolted awake at every sound, as we had in the weeks after Trump was first elected.
Of course, given our incomes and our home in the countryside outside Washington, D.C., we were about as far from danger as one could imagine. Still, our sense of distress was acute. After the riot was over, my husband, gritting his teeth, wondered: “Why aren’t the Capitol floors covered in rioters in zip ties right now?” We noted that, if there had been Black Lives Matter slogans and black fists on the flags and banners those rioters were carrying, the National Guard would have arrived quickly.
As time wore on, my husband and I attempted to comfort each another and explain those televised scenes of violence to our two children, four and five, who had been stunned both by glimpses of what grownups could do and by how visibly upset their father had become. And we weren’t alone. I soon found myself scrolling through texts and voicemails from other military spouses with similar fears who wanted to know if my husband and I were okay and if the violence in the Capitol had made it anywhere near our home.
In our minds, fearful scenarios were playing out about what January 6th might mean for military families like ours — and little wonder, since in those tense two weeks before Joe Biden’s inauguration, the military still answered to a commander in chief who had visibly incited the possible takeover of our government. What would the military members of our families be asked to do in the days to come, we wondered, and by whom? What would have happened if those rioters had actually succeeded in hanging Mike Pence or slaughtering other members of Congress?
Preparing for War
In truth, in Donald Trump’s America, my spouse and I had been conjuring up scenarios of violence for months. We had found ourselves obsessed with the fears of rising political violence in what, during wartime, used to be known as the home front in the country with the most heavily armed civilian population on Earth. (I had even written about that very subject in those very months.) No wonder then that, before November 3rd, I was so focused not just on dispelling Trumpian disinformation about the election to come, but on helping voters locate their polling stations and finding transportation to them.
As it happens, my husband’s jobs in recent years have often involved anticipating war and what our military would do if Americans ever faced it on our own soil. He’s served as an officer on a battleship and three nuclear and ballistic-missile armed submarines. He’s had to collect intelligence under the leadership of presidents with very different levels of impulse control. Most recently, he’s worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinking through scenarios in which the United States might be engaged in nuclear war — and what the costs might be.
Together, we have been amazed at how few Americans, other than our fellow military families, have been preoccupied with the violence beginning to unfold on our nation’s streets and the way, in some strange fashion, America’s distant, never-ending wars of these last nearly 20 years were threatening to come home.
One lesson of these years, in an America with an “all-volunteer” military, is that wars essentially don’t exist unless you’re directly or indirectly involved in fighting them. At no time did that seem more evident to me than on January 6th, in the divergent responses of my own family and those we know who aren’t in the military. If you’re interested (as I am as a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project) in how, during these years, voters and their representatives have justified (or simply ignored) the decision to “solve” our global problems with unending war, then you might frame what happened on January 6th in these terms: some 74 million Americans voted for a president who portrayed those who disagreed with him as existential threats to America.
In the meantime, for almost two decades our government has invested staggering, almost unimaginable sums in this country’s military machine (and the war-making industries linked to it), while diverting funds from key social services, ranging from healthcare to domestic job creation. Meanwhile, it has consistently “retired” military-grade weaponry from our war zones into the hands of police departments across the country and so onto our city streets. I mean, given such a formula, what could possibly go wrong? Why would anyone connected to the military be worried?
Of course, why wouldn’t we worry, since we — or our loved ones — are the people who are ordered to participate when wars of any kind happen?
The Isolation of Military Service
There are about two million Americans who serve in the U.S. military and 2.6 million more who are military spouses and dependents. Altogether that’s just a little more than 1% of our entire population. We are, believe me, in another world of fears and worries than the rest of you. We’ve been involved, directly or indirectly, in fighting those godforsaken wars launched after 9/11 for almost two decades now. You haven’t. You’ve generally thanked us religiously for our “service” and otherwise forgotten about those wars and gone about your business. We haven’t. Our sense of the world, our fears, are different than yours.
We military spouses are charged with comforting and caring for those who serve, especially (but not exclusively) when they are sent to one of the many countries where that never-ending “war on terror” continues to be fought into the Biden years. Caring for those who serve is no small task in a country where the very act of trying to get mental-health care could be a career-ending move for a soldier. Families are often their only recourse.
Military spouses also care for children in mourning, temporarily or in some cases permanently, over the loss of a parent. In an anemic military healthcare system, we are often left to marshal the necessary care for ourselves and our children, even as many of us struggle with depression, anxiety, and trauma thanks to the multiple, often unpredictable deployments of those very loved ones and being left alone to imagine what they’re going through. According to a recent op-ed by my colleague and military spouse Aleha Landry, approximately 25% of us are unemployed in this Covid-19 moment. On average, we also earn 27% less than our counterparts in the civilian world, not least of all because the burden of childcare and frequent redeployments prevent us from moving up in our chosen fields of work.
In this pandemic-stricken, distinctly over-armed world of ours, in which nationalist militia groups (often with veterans among them) backing the former president continue to talk about war right here in what, after 9/11, we came to call “the homeland,” it’s not surprising how increasingly anxious people like me have come to feel. Personally, what January 6th brought home was this: as a military spouse, I was living in a community that didn’t know my family, while my husband, in his own personal hell of hypothetical nuclear wars, could be called upon at any time to represent a president who had incited an assault on the Capitol, leaving my children and me alone. And that, believe me, was scary.
I was struck, for instance, that a military spouse I became friends with and who occupied a very different part of the political spectrum from me nonetheless feared that, in the event of conflict, she would be vulnerable — and it wasn’t just foreign conflicts that she was worrying about after Trump was elected. At one point, her husband had told her, “If you see a flash in the sky, then take the kids and drive in this direction,” indicating a spot on the map where he felt, based on wind patterns, nuclear fallout was less likely to blow. After the Charlottesville Unite the Right riot of 2017, she stocked up on food, water, and extra gas so she could head for Canada if armed conflict broke out among Americans. “We’d be alone,” she told me, “because obviously, he’d be gone.”
Stopping Our Endless Wars
These, then, are the sorts of fears that arise in my militarized world on this careening planet of ours. Yes, Joe Biden is now president, but this country is still on edge. And the military that’s been fighting those hopeless, bloody wars in distant lands for so long is on edge, too. After all, military personnel were present in significant numbers in that mob on January 6th. Almost one in five members of Trump’s invading crew were reportedly veterans or active military personnel.
Sometimes, the people I feel closest to (when I do my work for the Costs of War Project) are the women who must mother and maintain households in the places my country has had such a hand in turning into constant war zones. Right now, there exist millions of people living in just such places where the anticipation of air raids, drone attacks, suicide bombings, snipers, or sophisticated roadside IEDs is a daily reality. Already, over 335,000 civilians (and counting) have been killed in those foreign war zones of ours. Mothers and their children in such lands are often cut off from hospitals, reliable food, clean water, or the infrastructure that would help them get to school, work, or the doctor. Unlike most Americans, they don’t have the luxury of forgetting about war. Their spouses and children are in constant danger.
Democrat or Republican, the presidents of the past 20 years are responsible for the violence that continues in those war zones and for the (not unrelated) violence that has begun to unfold at home — and even, thank you very much, for my own family’s fears and fantasies about war, up close and personal. It’s about time that all of us in this disturbed country of ours at least bear witness to what such violence means for those living it and start thinking about what the United States should do to stop it. It can’t just be the most vulnerable and directly involved among us who lose sleep — not to speak of lives, limbs, mental stability, and livelihoods — due to the cloistered decisions of our public leaders.
Believe this at least: if we can’t stop fighting those wars across significant parts of the planet, this country won’t remain immune to them either. It hasn’t, in fact. It’s just that so many of us have yet to fully take that in.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Andrea Mazzarino, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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A boutique is shut down in San Diego in May. Business closures during the pandemic have put millions out of work. (photo: Sam Hodgson/San Diego Union-Tribune)
'It Just Sucks': America's Jobless Owe Thousands of Dollars in Taxes on Their Unemployment
Heather Long, The Washington Post
Long writes:
Unemployment compensation is taxable. Many are just figuring this out as they sit down to do their 2020 taxes, even though they remain out of work
rika Rose was shocked this month when she sat down to do her taxes and realized she owed $600 to the federal government. She’s been on unemployment since April and has spent much of the winter stretching every penny to pay rent and to keep the lights on. On a recent trip to the grocery store, she only had $20 in her bank account.
“I was so upset. How do I owe over $600 in taxes?" said Rose, 31, who lives in Los Angeles. “I have never been so fearful in my life of how I’m going to pay my bills.”
Rose is among millions of unemployed workers facing surprise tax bills, ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars, and many say they just cannot pay. For tax purposes, weekly unemployment payments count as income just like wages from a job. But few people realize the money they get from the government is actually taxable. Fewer than 40 percent of the 40 million unemployed workers in 2020 had taxes withheld from their payments, according to the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank.
For people who have been without a job for nearly a year, finding money to pay their tax bills is yet another financial burden coming at a fraught time. Advocates for the poor as well as some Democratic lawmakers are trying to get these tax bills waived entirely — or at least reduced.
“I don’t think we should be taxing unemployment insurance benefits, generally, but we really should not be taxing them during a terrible recession,” said Brian Galle, a professor at Georgetown Law. “The right thing to do is just zero out unemployment insurance income from last year."
Among the unemployed, there was hope that Congress would eliminate taxes on unemployment income, but that provision did not make it into the latest $1.9 trillion bill Democrats are aiming to have on President Biden’s desk by mid-March.
Unemployment insurance was created in 1935 during the Great Depression era as a safety net to help people out of work. For decades, it was not taxed, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a push to make all forms of income taxable. All unemployment payments were subject to federal income tax by 1986. The thinking was that if a rich person lost their job and collected unemployment, they should still be taxed. Others argued that not taxing unemployment aid might discourage people from looking for work where their wages would be taxed.
“The basic theory is everyone should pay tax on it as income. Just because they are unemployed doesn’t change that,” said Pete Davis, who worked on tax reform in the 1970s and 80s in Congress.
Outside of a recession, Americans usually remain on unemployment for a few months, so the tax bills are modest. But during recessions, or large-scale natural disasters, it is more common for people to be unemployed for a year or more, causing a much heftier tax bill. That is why Congress has typically eliminated at least some of the tax bill for the unemployed during past downturns as a way to lessen the financial pain.
States handle taxation of unemployment benefits in very different ways. Nine states do not have income taxes, so they do not tax unemployment benefits. Another six states — Alabama, California, Montana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia — opted not to tax unemployment at the state level. And during the pandemic, Maryland and Delaware decided to temporarily not tax unemployment, according to Lucy Dadayan, a senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center.
Some argue that the unemployed should have done a better job saving up for their tax bill. When people fill out the application for unemployment aid, there is a box they can check to have taxes withheld, similar to what most people do with paychecks at a job.
But several jobless Americans told The Washington Post that they ended up with hefty tax bills even though they did check the box. Rose is one of them. When she lost her job in April at a company that processes debit and credit card transactions, she made sure to check the box to have taxes withheld. But she still ended up owing the federal government taxes.
It was the same for Taryn Johnston. Since being laid off from her medical aesthetician job at a plastic surgery practice when the pandemic escalated, she had the maximum withheld every week from her unemployment checks for taxes. Despite trying to do the right thing, she still ended up owing $1,500 when she sat down recently to fill out her federal and state tax forms for 2020.
“This whole situation is crazy,” said Johnston, 41, who lives in Brooklyn. “My savings is gone. Most of my 401k is gone. I’m $6,000 in credit card debt and behind on my rent, and now I owe the government $1,500 in taxes on my unemployment.”
Johnston says she is trying to save up money to pay the tax bill by the April 15 deadline. The plastic surgery practice where she works has started giving her more hours, but she is living on half the money she made pre-pandemic. Her best hope is for Congress to pass the $1,400 stimulus checks — money that she would receive and then turn right around and send to the Internal Revenue Service.
“When I get this stimulus check that’s coming, it’s going to end up going to my taxes,” Johnston said.
Among other ideas in Congress, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa) have introduced separate legislation that would eliminate taxes on the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits received in 2020. This proposal is similar to what Congress did during the Great Recession when a portion of unemployment income was not taxed. So far, the bill has not advanced.
Opponents of the Durbin bill argue that it is a costly provision — estimates are around $30 billion — and the money is better spent elsewhere. They say it would be wiser to extend unemployment insurance benefits longer to continue helping those deeply in need. Lowering taxes now on 2020 unemployment aid would help a lot of people who have already returned to work, critics say.
“The important policy question is: Who is falling through the cracks?” said Jared Walczak, a vice president at the right-leaning Tax Foundation. “The priority should be making sure there’s uninterrupted benefits for those in need."
Time is running out for Congress to make tax changes to help with the tax filling season underway since Feb. 12.
Another option discussed in economic policy circles and advocated by the law professor Galle and Elizabeth Pancotti of Employ America would be for Biden’s Treasury Department to simply waive taxes on most of the unemployment payments in 2020. Galle and Pancotti argue Treasury has done this before during natural disasters, and the pandemic is a large-scale disaster. However, two senior Treasury officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that idea is not on the table.
Elaine Maag, a researcher at the Tax Policy Center, says a more practical solution at this point is probably for the IRS to grant people who were on unemployment last year more time to pay their taxes.
“I’m very sympathetic to someone showing up having a large tax bill they weren’t expecting,” said Maag. “I think they should get a generous payment plan and not have anything due for many months or until they are back at work.”
Longer term, Maag said the ideal solution would be for the unemployed to fill out W-4 withholding tax forms, the same as most workers hand into their employers when they start a new job. Most states withhold a flat 10 percent for federal taxes on unemployment compensation, which does not take into account the complexity of many people’s tax situations. This is the reason so many owe more now, even if they did check the box for withholding.
Proponents of forgiving taxes on unemployment point out that the pandemic recession was the most unequal in modern U.S. history, decimating low-wage workers. These Americans are the least likely to have any savings or be able to handle a surprise bill. Nearly half of adults receiving unemployment between March and November lived in households with incomes below $50,000, according to a Century Foundation analysis of U.S. Census data.
They also point out that the pandemic was an especially chaotic situation, with such a flood of people applying for unemployment last spring that many state offices were overwhelmed and unable to give people guidance on withholding.
Take what happened to Kate Shine in Brooklyn. The state of New York told her there was a problem with her unemployment record in the state’s computer system so the only way she could get unemployment was to call each week to file her claim. Shine, 34, did that, but she says there was not an option on the phone system to withhold taxes.
Now Shine owes several thousand dollars in taxes, a huge bill she is struggling to figure out how to pay, as she has still not been able to find another copywriter job.
“Lots of us feel surprised we owe thousands of dollars,” Shine said. “It just sucks. And it feels so unfair given everything that’s been happening in this pandemic.”
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Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., raises her fist during the 57th annual March on Washington, referred to as the ‘Get Off Our Necks’ march, in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 2020. (photo: Erin Lefevre/NurPhoto/AP)
Massachusetts' Progressive Lawmakers Push Congress to Abolish Qualified Immunity
Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Lacy writes:
A bill introduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren comes as the House prepares to vote on major policing reform.
ep. Ayanna Pressley and Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, Democrats of Massachusetts, are introducing a bill to fully end qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects police and law enforcement officials from civil liability in cases where they are accused of violating someone’s constitutional rights.
Pressley and former Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich, first introduced a bipartisan version of the bill last summer, as an amendment to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a package of sweeping police reforms developed in response to nationwide protests against police brutality. Pressley and Amash’s amendment did not make it into the version of the JPA that was passed by the House in June, which instead included a provision to reform qualified immunity to allow individuals who file civil suits against local and federal law enforcement officers the possibility to recover damages, something the current qualified immunity doctrine widely protects against.
The doctrine of qualified immunity “for too long has shielded law enforcement from accountability and denied recourse for the countless families robbed of their loved ones,” Pressley said, noting that ending systemic racism in policing depends in part on ending qualified immunity. “There can be no justice without healing and accountability, and there can be no true accountability with qualified immunity.”
Markey echoed that sentiment, citing the cases of Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York; Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colorado; “and countless others” that inspired a renewed push to end the doctrine. Colorado became the first state to end qualified immunity in June, picking up efforts to do so in the wake of McClain’s death. The doctrine would have theoretically protected police officers who chose to administer an inappropriate dose of ketamine, a fast-acting sedative, to McClain. “It’s time we end the outdated and judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity and start delivering accountability for the officers who abuse their positions of trust and responsibility in our communities,” Markey said. “There will not be true racial justice until we end qualified immunity.”
The bill, the full text of which was shared exclusively with The Intercept, is substantially similar to last year’s amendment. It would apply to future civil litigation, in addition to cases that are pending when it’s passed. The full list of sponsors includes Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The bill from the Massachusetts Democrats comes as Congress prepares to vote a second time on the Justice in Policing Act, which includes a provision that would limit but not end qualified immunity. It would also ban the use of chokeholds and no-knock warrants by federal officers, limit the transfer of military equipment to state and local law enforcement, require state and local law enforcement agencies to report data on use of force, and establish a national registry of officers who engage in misconduct.
The prospect of narrowing qualified immunity has historically had broad bipartisan support, from the libertarian Cato Institute, to NFL quarterback Tom Brady, to the American Civil Liberties Union, and even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, with some disagreement on particulars. As The Intercept previously reported, however, some Democrats have backed away from efforts to reform qualified immunity for fear of angering law enforcement groups and Republicans, as well as facing attack ads in the next round of midterm elections. During a call with House Democrats just after last year’s elections, New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell said he didn’t want to be made to “walk the plank” on qualified immunity.
A group of moderate lawmakers — including Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J.; Tom O’Halleran, D-Ariz; and Fred Upton, R-Mich. — is now pushing to water down the JPA’s provision on qualified immunity before the bill comes to the House floor for a vote, Politico reported last week. They are arguing that the current provision will endanger their chances of reelection and make it harder to work with Republicans down the road.
Efforts to weaken the qualified immunity provision in the JPA, Pressley told The Intercept, are “bad-faith attempts from people in the pockets of special interests spreading misinformation to undermine our progress on ending qualified immunity and we will not back down in our pursuit of true justice and accountability.”
Asked about pushback to the JPA provision, Markey said there was no room to make half-hearted efforts to reform qualified immunity. “The lives that are lost to excessive force and police brutality are not half lives, so there can be no half measures to ending qualified immunity,” Markey said. “Full accountability means abolishing qualified immunity once and for all. We owe it to the families of those who have been murdered to provide them this full measure of justice.”
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The former French president arrives to hear the final verdict in the corruption trial on Monday. (photo: Getty Images)
France: Sarkozy Found Guilty of Corruption, Sentenced to Prison
Al Jazeera
Former president handed one year in prison and a two-year suspended sentence over corruption and influence peddling.
Paris court has found Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s former president, guilty of corruption and influence peddling, sentencing him to one year in prison and a two-year suspended sentence.
He is the second former president in modern France, after Jacques Chirac, to be convicted of corruption.
The 66-year-old politician, who served as president from 2007 to 2012, was convicted on Monday for having tried to illegally obtain information from a senior magistrate in 2014 about a legal action in which he was involved.
Prosecutors told the judges that Sarkozy had offered to secure a job in Monaco for judge Gilbert Azibert, in return for confidential information about an inquiry into allegations that he had accepted illegal payments from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for his 2007 presidential campaign.
This came to light while they were wiretapping conversations between Sarkozy and his lawyer Thierry Herzog after the right-wing leader left office. The wiretapping was carried out in relation to another investigation into alleged Libyan financing of the same campaign.
The court said Sarkozy, a former lawyer himself, was “perfectly informed” about committing such illegal action. His two co-defendants were also found guilty and handed the same sentence.
Reputation ‘in tatters’
Sarkozy had denied any wrongdoing, saying he was the victim of a witch-hunt by financial prosecutors who used excessive means to snoop on his affairs. He now has 10 days to appeal Monday’s ruling.
Taking into account the two years suspended, the one-year prison term means it is unlikely Sarkozy will physically go to prison, a punishment that in France usually applies to jail terms of above two years.
The court said Sarkozy will be entitled to request to be detained at home with an electronic bracelet.
Sarkozy will face another trial later this month along with 13 other people on charges of illegal financing of his 2012 presidential campaign.
Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris, said Sarkozy’s lawyers had intended to appeal the ruling.
Butler said Sarkozy’s reputation was now “in tatters”, adding the court’s decision was a “devastating blow” to any political ambitions he may still harbour.
“It is hard to imagine that a former president with a jail sentence to contend with could possibly take the centre stage once again politically,” she said.
‘You won’t hear about me any more’
During his five-year term, Sarkozy took a hard line on immigration, security and national identity.
After winning the presidency at age 52, Sarkozy was initially seen as injecting a much-needed dose of dynamism, making a splash on the international scene and wooing the corporate world.
But his presidency was overshadowed by the 2008 financial crisis, and he left office with the lowest popularity ratings of any previous post-war French leader.
After his humiliating defeat in the 2012 presidential race to Socialist Francois Hollande – making him the first president since Valery Giscard d’Estaing (1974-81) to be denied a second term – Sarkozy famously promised: “You won’t hear about me any more.”
That prediction turned out to be premature.
His continuing legal problems and marriage to former top model Carla Bruni have ensured the man known as “Sarko” remained very much in the public eye.
Few were surprised when he returned to front-line politics in 2014, winning the leadership of the conservative UMP party, since being renamed Les Republicains (LR).
He made a fresh bid for the presidency in 2016, trying to bury the “bling-bling” image he gained for his love of the high-life, and casting himself as a defender of the down-and-outs against the elites.
Sarkozy did not even make it past the LR party’s primaries but despite the defeat, he has remained hugely popular on the right.
“I have a special link with the French. It may stretch, it may tighten, but it exists,” the ex-president said at the time.
Even now, with no obvious candidate on the right to take on President Emmanuel Macron in 2022, there remained whispers that Sarkozy could yet want another crack at the presidency.
But the conviction will likely end all such speculation.
A litany of other legal woes lies ahead: on March 17 he is scheduled to face a second trial over accusations of fraudulently overspending in his failed 2012 re-election bid.
He has also been charged over allegations he received millions of euros from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for his 2007 election campaign.
In January, prosecutors opened another probe into alleged influence-peddling by Sarkozy over his advisory activities in Russia.
Sarkozy denies the allegations and has accused the judiciary of hounding him.
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A whale. (photo: Patagonia PhotoSafaris/Mongabay)
To Fight Climate Change, Save the Whales, Some Scientists Say
Michelle Carrere, Mongabay
Carrere writes: "The conservation of whales plays a key role in the race to stop this planetary crisis, some scientists say."
cience has established the urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. If humans do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% from 2010 levels in the next nine years and eliminate them completely by 2050, the planet’s temperature will rise to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above that of the pre-industrial period. This would have far-reaching effects on ecosystems and on humankind’s ways of life — effects that are already beginning to unfold.
The conservation of whales plays a key role in the race to stop this planetary crisis, some scientists say. “Contrary to most terrestrial organisms, which release their carbon into the atmosphere after death, carcasses of large marine fish sink and sequester carbon in the deep ocean,” according to the authors of a study published last October in the journal Science Advances. This is an example of what’s known as “blue carbon,” and the principle applies to whales as much as to fish.
For decades, a large portion of this blue carbon, instead of coming to eternal rest on the ocean floor, has been released into the atmosphere as a result of people capturing excessive numbers of fish and whales.
According to the study, fisheries have released at least 730 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since 1950, about the same amount as 188 coal-fired power plants release in a year. These emissions come from the release of carbon in fish bodies into the air when they’re eaten or disposed of on land instead of in the sea, and from vessels’ fuel consumption, and they contribute significantly to global warming and climate change.
The figure accounts for the capture of large-bodied fish, including tunas, mackerels, billfish and sharks, that typically sink when they die of natural causes. It does not, however, account for the biggest-bodied creatures in the sea and therefore the ones that store the most carbon: whales.
When whales die of natural causes, “their bodies, which are gigantic and which have captured carbon during their lives, fall to the bottom of the sea, keeping carbon dioxide on the ocean floor,” said Elsa Cabrera, executive director of the Cetacean Conservation Center in Chile, who was not involved in the study.
A 2019 report in the magazine of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stated that “each great whale sequesters 33 tons of CO2 on average, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries.” Rebuilding populations of large baleen whales would store carbon in their bodies equivalent to the amount in 110,000 hectares (272,000 acres) of forest, “an area the size of the Rocky Mountain National Park,” in Colorado, U.S., the authors of a 2010 paper in PLOS ONE calculated.
This is why whales are “an extremely powerful ally in the fight against the climate crisis,” Cabrera said.
Whales still being hunted
According to the Science Advances study, 43.5% of the blue carbon extracted by fisheries in international waters comes from areas that would not be profitable to fish in without governments subsidizing the fisheries that operate there.
Many scientists and conservationists say fishing subsidies are one of the main drivers of the overexploitation of marine resources. “It is very important to reach an agreement to stop them,” said Alex Muñoz, the director of National Geographic’s Pristine Seas program for Latin America.
The international community has been attempting do just that for 20 years, with talks at the World Trade Organization missing the latest deadline to reach an agreement at the end of 2020. Negotiations resumed early this year but numerous large sticking points remain.
The study provides more reasons to end subsidies for fishing that occurs far offshore. Doing so would curtail fishing in unprofitable areas, not only allowing depleted fish stocks to rebound but also reducing carbon dioxide emissions, according to the study.
A similar logic applies to whaling, Cabrera said. “In this sense … Japan has a very dark record regarding whales, because with the number that it has helped to capture through state subsidies, it is responsible for a large loss of these animals from the ocean, even though they are key allies,” said Cabrera, who is an accredited observer in meetings held by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the international body that manages whale conservation and regulates whale hunting.
On June 29, 2019, Japan exited the IWC so it could restart commercial whale hunting in its maritime territory after a 31-year hiatus. It did so immediately, by July 1 of that year. For 2020, the number of large whales it could capture — within Japanese waters only — was 171 minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), 187 Bryde’s whales (Balaenoptera edeni) and 25 sei whales (Balaenoptera borealis), according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. The numbers for 2021 are reportedly the same.
Prior to withdrawing from the IWC, Japan conducted a controversial whale hunt for what it called scientific purposes under two different programs. One was in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and involved the capture of minke whales; the other was in the North Pacific Ocean and involved the capture of minke, Bryde’s and sei whales. Japan was killing about 600 whales per year under the programs, according to IWC figures.
Japan argued that the objective of these studies was to collect information necessary to give future commercial whaling a scientific basis. However, critics said Japan’s whale hunt never had scientific objectives. “This was never an issue of science,” Cabrera said.
This was evident in 2014, she said, when the International Court of Justice ruled against Japan in a lawsuit filed by Australia and New Zealand. “The special permits granted by Japan for the killing, taking, and treating of whales in connection with JARPA II [the Antarctic program] were not ‘for purposes of scientific research,’” the court ruling stated.
In addition to Japan, Norway and Iceland are the two other countries that currently allow commercial whaling. However, some scientists believe the days of whaling are numbered. While Norwegian whalers are going strong, Iceland hunted no whales in 2019 and 2020, apparently due to financial decisions by the country’s two main whaling companies. According to a July 2019 article in The New York Times, “The [Japanese] government also hopes to start reducing the $46 million in annual subsidies it pays to whale hunters within three years.” Without subsidies, whaling would be economically unviable.
More whales in the fight against climate change
In addition to the carbon dioxide that whales capture in their bodies and store deep in the ocean when they die, they also fertilize the ocean with their feces and urine, leading to large phytoplankton blooms. Phytoplankton produce at least 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere and capture an estimated 40% of all the carbon dioxide produced in the world, according to the IMF report. “To put things in perspective, we calculate that this is equivalent to the amount of CO2 captured by 1.70 trillion trees — four Amazon forests’ worth,” the report says.
Decades of industrialized whaling greatly reduced whale populations, a number of which have yet to fully rebound, and biologists estimate that there are now fewer than a quarter of the whales that once existed, according to whale experts Mongabay interviewed for this story.
“We are realizing that oceans were once more productive because there were so many whales,” said marine biologist Rodrigo Hucke-Gaete, a professor at the Austral University of Chile and president of the Chilean NGO Blue Whale Center, who was not involved in the recent study. “We need to let them recover to see if they are able, in their astonishing role that they play on a global level, to return the oceans to what they were at the time.”
The IMF magazine report calculates that if the 1.3 million or so whales alive today are left to rebound to their pre-whaling numbers of 4 million to 5 million, “it could significantly increase the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans.” Even if phytoplankton productivity increased by just 1%, it “would capture hundreds of millions of tons of additional CO2 a year, equivalent to the sudden appearance of two billion mature trees,” the report says.
The upshot, according to the report and whale experts consulted for this story, is that supporting international efforts to restore whale populations could help advance the fight against climate change.
For Hucke-Gaete and Cabrera, continuing to hunt whales makes no sense and does not align with the science. “We are in an enormous environmental crisis from which we do not know whether we will emerge,” Cabrera said.
“We should not have whaling in the 21st century,” Hucke-Gaete said. He noted, however, that other factors take an even greater toll on whale populations: collisions with ships; climate change, which is causing whales’ ecosystems and food supplies to shift and encouraging harmful algal blooms; pollution; and fisheries, which affect the entire marine food web as well as injure or kill whales that become entangled in fishing gear.
“We have to minimize every threat affecting whales (and marine ecosystems as a whole) arising from human activities through decisive and concerted actions,” Hucke-Gaete said. Because of their ability to capture and store atmospheric carbon, as well as the many other ways they help stabilize marine ecosystems, he said, “Every whale counts and we should take care of them as if they were the golden goose.”
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