A more personal note than usual this week, because this will be the last of these Climate Crisis columns I’ll write (though it’s not the end of my work for the magazine). I’m incredibly grateful to The New Yorker for letting me do them—and especially thankful for Virginia Cannon, who has edited them each week with grace and aplomb. Our run has overlapped almost perfectly with the course of the pandemic, and for me it’s been the perfect moment to sit back and appreciate and highlight the work of so many across the wide universe of activists, scientists, economists, and politicians who are taking on the deepest problem that humans have ever wandered into. I can’t overstate the comfort of that universe: it didn’t exist thirty-two years ago, when I started writing about climate change; its slow but inexorable rise has given me not just welcome company but real hope. I’ve particularly enjoyed “passing the mic” to many members of that gathering throng. The only rule I set myself was that I’d reach beyond the world of white guys like me, and, as I expected, that proved no boundary at all: this world of thinkers and doers—of poets, bureaucrats, sculptors, civil disobedients, statisticians, architects, farmers—is powerfully diverse. Appreciating their work gives me enormous pleasure.
I’ll continue doing some of that as I transition to a free newsletter at Substack—but one reason I’m leaving the all-consuming labor of this column is to free up some time and energy for the next round of my own work. I’ve long had two identities, as a writer and an activist; for the past couple of years, the former has dominated—in part because the pandemic has made activism hard. And, in truth, part of me hoped that all those who had built movements in the past decade had done enough. Victories have been won, from Keystone XL to fracking bans to divestment to—one hopes—the infrastructure bill now making its tenuous way through Congress. Certainly, the Zeitgeist has been moved—the polling makes clear that even Americans, living in the center of well-funded climate denial, have decisively shifted toward concern about global warming.
But the science has also shifted. As Louisiana digs out and Lake Tahoe evacuates, it feels to me that, with each passing week, the pace of climate destruction increases. And so do researchers’ fears that we’ve underestimated the vulnerability of the planet. Already we’re seeing real disruption of the most basic forces on Earth: the jet stream, the Gulf Stream, the hydrological cycle. From regularly interviewing scientists, I know that their sense of our peril grows—especially the sense that we must act quickly, making enormous changes by decade’s end. And, at the same time, I sense the growing ability of the fossil-fuel industry and its friends in politics and finance to finesse the increasing public outrage. Just as, in 1990, the industry built an intricate architecture of climate denial that cost us three decades, now they’re erecting a similar buttress, constructed of something that is not quite denial but is just as dangerous. They imply that we have plenty of time, that they’re moving as fast as they can. They’re getting good at spreading the message that there’s as much danger in moving too fast as in delaying too long. If they succeed with this grotesque agenda, they’ll lock in such extravagantly high temperatures that I fear the damage will overwhelm our societies.
The only way I can think of to meet this challenge is with more mass organizing. Young people are now fully engaged and leading the way; we’re seeing remarkable activism in frontline and indigenous communities. But there’s a group that, I think, is not pulling its weight, and it’s a group I’m now a part of. Call us “experienced Americans”—the baby boomers and silent generations that make up a huge percentage of the population, own a remarkable share of its financial assets, and vote in large numbers. As a rule, people do become more conservative as they age, but it’s not an inviolable maxim—many of the people in these generations witnessed broad cultural and political change in their early years, and now, conscious of their kids and their grandkids, they may be emerging from the primes of their lives with the skills and the resources to help make big change again. And so some of us are planning an organization called Third Act, an effort to mobilize older Americans in defense of environmental sanity and economic and racial fairness. We need a working, equitable society, both because it will do less damage and because it will be better able to cope with the damage that’s no longer preventable. If you’re part of this demographic, I hope you’ll figure out a way to help with this new venture—or that you’ll join with existing efforts such as Elders Climate Action and Great Old Broads for Wilderness. In any event, much of my writing going forward will be more closely tied to that activism. Not that I’ll give up writing for The New Yorker—I’ve been proud to be in its pages since I started as a staff writer, at the age of twenty-one. It’s the best magazine there ever was (and my colleague Elizabeth Kolbert may be the single most elegant chronicler of our climate peril); to be numbered among its contributors is an enormous honor. Because you’ve subscribed to this newsletter, the magazine will kindly e-mail you commentaries that I write for the publication in the future. (To hear from The New Yorker more often, you can also sign up for The Daily newsletter.)
I do not, precisely, relish the prospect of another bout of organizing. Part of me has always thought it’s crazy that we have to build these movements: Why must we fight so hard, even go to jail, in order to get our leaders to take more seriously the clear and unequivocal warnings of scientists? But I’ve long accepted that we’re engaged in a fight, not an argument—and that the main way to counter the malign power of vested interest is to meet organized money with organized people. I’ve highlighted many brilliant people in this column; the best shot at giving their ideas a chance is to keep shifting the balance of power. And that, in the end, is the point of activism. I have no idea whether we’ll be successful, but we’ll try.
Passing the Mic
In a 2008 election, Mohamed Nasheed toppled the longtime strongman ruler of the Maldives. Nasheed’s governance of the archipelago, which stretches across the equator, included a sharp focus on the existential peril caused by climate change. (His cabinet members learned to scuba dive so that they could hold a meeting on one of the nation’s imperilled coral reefs.) Deposed in a coup, in 2012, he spent time in exile abroad, but returned in 2018 after the party that he’d founded won new elections. He’s currently serving as the speaker of the Majlis, or Parliament. The Maldives remains turbulent: Nasheed survived an assassination attempt, in May, when an I.E.D. stuffed with ball bearings exploded near his home. In the run-up to the global climate talks in Glasgow, in November, he has been pushing for debt restructuring or debt repudiation for what he calls the Climate Vulnerable Forum countries—an alliance of forty-eight developing countries heavily exposed to the effects of global warming—in order to free up funds to spend on climate resilience. The Maldives will be chairing the U.N. General Assembly for the next six months, perhaps allowing the nation to amplify this call. (Our conversation has been edited.)
Explain the logic of this idea, both moral and political.
When Climate Vulnerable Forum countries went into debt, they did not envisage such a sharp increase in climate-adaptation expenses. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was implying that substantial climate-change impacts were in the future, and would not affect the loan periods of the existing debt. Most C.V.F. countries spend more than twenty-five per cent of their annual budget for adaptation, and, with the new extreme weather that the I.P.C.C. report says is on the horizon, it is likely that adaptation spending will drastically increase. It is therefore paramount that the C.V.F. countries’ debt is restructured. Debt-restructured expenditure requirements for countries will create enough space in domestic budgets to increase their spending on adaptation, giving the instant ability to adapt to new extreme weather. Funds provided to C.V.F. countries without debt restructuring will go to the debt holders and not to the intended projects.
You were in Copenhagen when the developed nations promised a hundred billion dollars in annual climate aid by 2020. Is this a different way to get that money?
This is a pledge that has manifestly been broken. According to the Organization for Economic Coöperation and Development, the total amount provided and mobilized in 2018, 2017, and 2016 was $78.9 billion, $71.2 billion, and $58.6 billion, respectively. The missing twenty billion dollars is a breach of a promise that was made in front of the whole world, and it means that the developed countries are the defaulters—not us in the vulnerable developing countries. As Prime Minister Hasina [of Bangladesh] has stated, the high emitters have not kept their side of the bargain, therefore climate-vulnerable countries must change their position, too. With such a shortage of external funds, we have no choice but to shift resources from repaying debts to focussing on adaptation needs for survival in the face of escalating climate damage. Moreover, we simply cannot tolerate a situation where any provided funds for adaptation flow straight out of the country again in debt repayments.
How are you recovering from the assassination attempt? What’s your plan for the climate fight in the years ahead?
I received injuries from at least twenty-five pieces of shrapnel. I am healing well, though I still have some difficulty walking distances. I asked God to let me stay alive because I felt that my life’s work was not yet complete. We still have so much left to fight for, both in the democracy struggle and in terms of the survival of small island states like my own. I am also trying to put forward a positive vision for developing countries, in my capacity as ambassador with the Climate Vulnerable Forum. I call this positive vision “climate prosperity,” a vision of how the poorer nations can become prosperous as part of the transition to net zero. We can do better than merely surviving—we should aim to flourish.
Climate School
Many climate activists have been calling on President Biden to appoint a replacement for Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve, on the ground that he hasn’t moved with sufficient vigor to fight climate change by reining in lending to the fossil-fuel industry. Writing in the Times, Neil Irwin argues that the most important thing the Fed can do is to maintain a prosperous economy, because people with jobs are more likely to care about global warming. But that seems like an argument that eats its tail: there are no jobs on a broken planet.
Speaking of economists: Stanford’s Ben Franta, in a landmark article in the journal Environmental Politics, uncovers extensive evidence that the fossil-fuel industry used economists on its payroll much as it used scientists—i.e., dishonestly.
Dealing with the climate crisis kicks off a thousand smaller battles. In this essay, Fred Bernstein writes that some architects have given up on designing buildings that produce less carbon and are instead insisting it’s “green” to simply build stouter structures that stand up to floods and storms. “Being green is about using less; being resilient is almost always about using more,” Bernstein writes. “Or as Eric Corey Freed, a California architect and the author of half a dozen books on green design, put it to me, ‘Green buildings seek to be efficient. Resilient buildings seek to be redundant.’ ”
The Kenyan tree planter Clifford Akwana has been forced out of Nairobi and to the countryside by the pandemic; he’s still working with young people to plant forests, and you can support his work here. Meanwhile, Fridays for Future—the youthful arm of the climate movement—is mounting a campaign to safely evacuate climate activists from Afghanistan.
The Liberal Democrats, usually the U.K.’s third party, have proposed a powerful new set of policies: new listings of fossil-fuel companies would be banned on the London Stock Exchange, and new bonds backing oil, coal, or gas exploration would no longer be issued in the city. Pension funds would have to divest from fossil fuels by 2035. “The reality is that no matter how much governments spend, it’s going to be totally dwarfed by the amounts banks, private equity and hedge funds invest every day,” the Party leader, Ed Davey, told the Guardian. “So if you’re going to really take on climate change you’ve got to get that private capital to switch from dirty into clean. And this is a fundamental role for Britain in global leadership on climate change.”
A remarkable investigation by HuffPost’s Dan Zegart found that a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide to inject into oil and gas wells along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast ruptured in February of 2020; the resulting leak of highly pressurized CO2 sickened dozens. Cars even stopped running, because the atmosphere suddenly lacked the oxygen required for combustion. The reporting highlights key questions around environmental justice. But it also makes clear what a bad idea it is to build out a huge network of pipes for “carbon sequestration,” a task undertaken mostly to allow the continued burning of coal and gas in power plants. It’s endlessly cheaper and safer just to build solar panels and wind turbines, unless you own a coal mine. Or unless you’re a Republican ideologue: note, for instance, last week’s call from Governor Pete Ricketts to build out one of these Rube Goldberg schemes for a coal-fired plant in Nebraska.
Rebecca Solnit patiently explains why you should worry a little more about your society’s carbon footprint than about your own. “Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception,” she writes. “People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around. The very short counterargument is that individual acts of thrift and abstinence won’t get us the huge distance we need to go in this decade.” And, as she notes, it was the oil companies and their P.R. firms that did much to advance the idea of our personal “footprints.”
Indigenous people from across the Amazon region are gathering in Brasilia this week for large-scale demonstrations to demand protection of their rights and territories. It comes amid reports that deforestation under Jair Bolsonaro is proceeding at a faster pace than any time since 2012, and as drought seems to be setting the stage for more fires.
I had the rare honor of interviewing Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the widely acclaimed cli-fi novel “The Ministry for the Future,” for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Here’s an essay that he published recently in the Financial Times. Don’t depend on markets to fix our mess, he writes. “That whole notion of rule by market was a catastrophic example of monocausotaxophilia, ‘the love of single causes that explain everything,’ Ernst Pöppel’s joke neologism for a tendency very common in all of us. This weakness in our thinking, the futile hope for a reliable algorithm, or a monarch, needs to be resisted at all times but especially when constructing a global economy.”
Scoreboard
An intriguing debate over history is playing out in the halls of the Sierra Club, which last year officially began to distance itself from its founder, John Muir, on the ground that he was unenlightened about racial issues. Now the Club’s first Black president, Aaron Mair, and its first Black board member, Mary Ann Nelson, have joined with Chad Hanson to write an essay arguing that Muir was, in many ways, ahead of his time. “Like many of us, he had his blind spots and prejudices, particularly in his early writings. But also, like many of us, he increased his knowledge and understanding of people different than him as he gained more exposure and experience. In all, he kickstarted a new era of environmentalism, fueled by ideals that are still relevant as we continue to face a series of ecological crises.”
A viral tweet last week announced that, for the first time ever, California’s Mt. Shasta was without snow. On closer examination, meteorologists determined that, while this phenomenon was unusual, it may have happened at least once before, during a similarly deep drought in 2014. Happily, the original news had already inspired the irrepressible climate scientist Michael Mann to do a little artwork of his own.
We learned earlier this year that pollution from the combustion of fossil fuels kills 8.7 million people a year, more than H.I.V., malaria, and tuberculosis combined. A new study shows that air pollution is linked to an increased severity of mental illness.
Drought and heat are cutting grain yields in many places around the world. Particularly depressing is the situation in Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s biggest grain producer, where harvests are forecast to fall twenty-four per cent this year, and where, for lack of food and water, thousands of animals including dead horses are strewn across the steppe. The same drop in yields is expected across many grain belts this autumn: in the American Midwest, the Wall Street Journalreports, scorching heat is wreaking havoc. North Dakota and Minnesota, in particular, “are experiencing near-record lows in soil moisture, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As a result, many crops planted this spring are wilting. Some 63% of the U.S. spring wheat crop is in poor or very poor condition, versus 6% at this time last year, according to Agriculture Department data.”
Warming Up
It feels to me that this is a hard moment in our collective history: hot, muggy, shaken by storms, our body politic fatefully divided. I’m pretty sure that it’s for times like this that Marvin Gaye went into the studio in 1966 to cut his version of Bobby Hebb’s classic, “Sunny.” I’ll take it as an ode both to the power of our nearest star and to our collective hope for an easier time ahead.
Now the dark days are done, and the bright days are here My sunny one shines so sincere Sunny one so true, I love you
The smaller donors have plugged away all month long, and we have made some hard-fought progress. But if we are going to have any real chance of making our August budget, we will need at least a few slightly larger matching donations.
n the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S.-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners by jamming them into metal shipping containers and letting them suffocate. At the time, Dostum was on the CIA’s payroll and had been working with U.S. special forces to oust the Taliban from power.
The Bush administration blocked subsequent efforts to investigate the mass murder, even after the FBI interviewed witnesses among the surviving Afghans who had been moved to the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after human rights officials publicly identified the mass grave site where Dostum’s forces had disposed of bodies. Later, President Barack Obama promised to investigate, and then took no action.
Instead, Hollywood stepped in and turned Dostum into a hero. The 2018 movie, “12 Strong,” a jingoistic account of the partnership between U.S. special forces and Dostum in the 2001 invasion, whitewashed Dostum — even as his crimes continued to pile up in the years after the prisoner massacre. At the time of the movie’s January 2018 release, Dostum was in exile, hiding from criminal charges in Afghanistan for having ordered his bodyguards to rape a political opponent, including with an assault rifle. The movie (filmed in New Mexico, not Afghanistan) was based on a book that a New York Times reviewer called “a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work.”
For two decades, Americans have told each other one lie after another about the war in Afghanistan. The lies have come from the White House, Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA, as well as from Hollywood, cable news pundits, journalists, and the broader culture.
Americans have hungered for a simple storyline, with heroes and villains, to make sense of the longest war in U.S. history. They have wanted stories like “12 Strong” to make them feel good. But at the very edge of the American empire, the war was nasty and brutish, and brought out in Americans the same imperial arrogance that doomed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
This month, as the Taliban swiftly took control of Kabul and the American-backed government collapsed, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the government’s watchdog over the Afghan experience, issued his final report. The assessment includes remarkably candid interviews with former American officials involved in shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan that, collectively, offer perhaps the most biting critique of the 20-year American enterprise ever published in an official U.S. government report.
“The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose,” the report notes, “though the definition of that purpose evolved over time.”
Released in the days after Kabul fell, the report reads like an epitaph for America’s involvement in Afghanistan.
One of the first things the U.S. did after gaining effective control over Afghanistan following the Taliban’s ouster in 2001 was to set up secret torture chambers. Beginning in 2002, the CIA tortured both Afghans and foreign prisoners flown to these torture rooms from all over Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The worst torture chamber was nicknamed “The Darkness” by the prisoners sent there, who suffered such complete sensory deprivation that they did not even know they were in Afghanistan. They were chained in solitary confinement with no light and music blaring constantly. They were hung by their arms for as long as two days, slammed against walls, forced to lie naked on tarps while gallons of ice water were poured over their bodies. At least one prisoner died in CIA custody after being left shackled in frigid temperatures.
No one was ever held to account for the American torture regime in Afghanistan.
American drone strikes also started early in Afghanistan. The CIA killed Al Qaeda operative Mohammed Atef and others with a drone there in November 2001, just two months after 9/11. Afghanistan soon became the beta test site for high-tech drone warfare, leading to countless civilian casualties and deep resentment among the Afghan people, who felt helpless against the unseen threat circling overhead.
America’s early adoption of drone warfare in Afghanistan helped make a fortune for Neal Blue, the chair of General Atomics; the Southern California energy and defense corporation manufactured the Predator, the first armed drone to fly over Afghanistan. (General Atomics subsequently produced the Predator’s follow-on model, the Reaper.) Blue and his brother, Linden Blue, vice chair of General Atomics, maintained low public profiles throughout the war, but as owners of privately held General Atomics, they were among the first — but hardly the last — American contractors to enrich themselves as blood spilled in Afghanistan.
Before long, the CIA’s drone campaign shifted from going after the few Al Qaeda operatives it could find in Afghanistan to targeting the Taliban — thus placing the drone campaign squarely in the midst of the Afghan domestic insurgency.
The U.S. launched more than 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan between 2015 and 2020, killing up to 10,000 people, according to statistics kept by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The CIA, relying on cellphone numbers to find, fix, and finish its alleged enemies, often launched its Hellfire missiles at the wrong targets or at targets standing amid groups of civilians.
The practice devastated Afghan villages, yet the U.S. refused to keep track of civilian casualties from drone strikes. Instead, officials insisted that each strike had hit its intended target, while ignoring the claims of villagers that the missiles had killed a tribal chief or decimated a meeting of village elders.
Former Marine infantry officer Ian Cameron, who oversaw drone targeting in Afghanistan for nine months in 2018 and 2019, wrote in the Washington Post of the “sterility of this type of warfare, which allowed me to kill Taliban fighters in one moment and finish a half-eaten hamburger lunch the next.” It seemed to him a “Sisyphean exercise (since the Taliban never ran out of replacement fighters).”
Along with drone strikes came “night raids,” in which U.S. and Afghan forces would burst into a home in the middle of the night and kill or capture those inside, breeding further resentment. The raids were so deeply unpopular that they sometimes led an entire village to switch its allegiance to the Taliban. What was worse, the U.S. military and the CIA failed for years to fully grasp the degree to which their airstrikes and night raids were being manipulated by Afghans who fed them false information to convince the Americans to launch raids against their local rivals or have those rivals carted off to Guantánamo.
After the initial invasion that ousted the Taliban, the U.S. shifted most of its military and intelligence resources from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003. The Bush administration believed that Iraq was a more important theater of war than Afghanistan and falsely thought that the war in Afghanistan was over.
The shift of American resources by the Bush administration to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 was the greatest military miscalculation of the entire war in Afghanistan. While the U.S. was distracted by Iraq, the Taliban, which had been all but defeated and dispersed, recovered, and regained strength.
James Dobbins, a career diplomat who served as the Bush administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan, said in an interview with the special inspector general that officials soon realized they had to decide which war would receive the most government resources, and “they chose Iraq. … You had several years of calculated neglect [in Afghanistan]. … It was intentional.”
Yet even as the Bush administration drew down militarily in Afghanistan, it still insisted on creating a new, pro-Western government in Kabul and began a massive nation-building project in the country. It did so without grasping the significance of several basic facts about the conditions it faced.
The first was that the Afghan militias with whom the United States had joined forces to overthrow the Taliban in 2001 were largely composed of and loyal to the country’s minority ethnic groups, while the Taliban were Pashtun, by far the largest ethnic group in the country, representing more than 40 percent of the population. The Tajiks, who dominated the Northern Alliance, were America’s most dependable allies throughout the war, but they accounted for only a little more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s population.
Even after the Taliban were ousted from power, they largely retained their support in rural southern Afghanistan, the country’s Pashtun base. The U.S. and the government it installed in Kabul never figured out how to gain the loyalty of the rural Pashtun heartland.
The U.S. failed to fully understand how deeply those ethnic divides would undercut nation-building in a country whose national identity had been weakened by decades of war. Even years after the U.S.-backed government was installed, it was still easy in Kabul to identify which government ministers were Tajik. They were the ones whose offices were dominated by large portraits of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the so-called Lion of the Panjshir, who led the Northern Alliance until he was assassinated by Al Qaeda two days before 9/11.
Another fundamental miscalculation involved Pakistan. In the 1980s, the CIA had worked with Pakistan’s intelligence service to support the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan. But following the U.S. invasion in 2001, the Taliban leadership found sanctuary in Pakistan. The Taliban were able to reorganize and recruit new forces from among the more than one million, mainly Pashtun, Afghan refugees on Pakistan’s side of the Durand Line, the boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan established by the British at the end of the 19th century.
Pakistan’s intelligence and military services played a double game with the U.S. throughout the American war in Afghanistan. For years, Pakistan provided America with logistical support, allowing supplies for U.S. forces in landlocked Afghanistan to be transported through its territory. It also sometimes provided critical intelligence on Al Qaeda and terrorism suspects believed to be traversing the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet many officers in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence were Islamists who were sympathetic to the Pashtuns and the Taliban, and had a long history of support for related Pashtun groups like the Haqqani network, whose founder, Jalaluddin Haqqani, had been on the CIA payroll during the 1980s campaign against the Soviet occupation.
What’s more, Pakistani officials saw the war in Afghanistan through the lens of their ongoing cold war with India. They were deeply suspicious of the ties between India and the Northern Alliance-based government installed by the U.S. in Kabul.
The U.S.-Pakistan alliance, built on lies, proved unsustainable. The Taliban survived the initial American onslaught in 2001 in large part because it had Pakistan’s backing. A decade into the war, Pakistan began to tighten its grip on American supply routes. Relations worsened after protests erupted in Pakistan against U.S. drone strikes there, and they nearly broke down following the U.S. raid on Abbottabad in May 2011, in which American special forces killed Osama bin Laden. A subsequent NATO airstrike that hit two military facilities in Pakistan and killed 28 Pakistani troops in November 2011 further strained ties. The U.S. was eventually forced to rely on far more costly supply routes through Russia and Central Asia.
Another miscalculation came when the United States turned its back on an early opportunity to work with Iran on Afghanistan. Iran has a long border with western Afghanistan, and the Persian influence in Herat and the surrounding region dates back to the days of the ancient Silk Road trade route. When the Taliban came to power in the 1990s, Iran saw the group as its enemy. Iran is predominantly Shia Muslim, while the Pashtun are Sunni, and the Taliban had a history in the 1990s of persecuting the Hazara minority group, which is predominantly Shia.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when the U.S. was preparing to invade Afghanistan, U.S. and Iranian officials secretly met in Geneva to discuss possible collaboration against the Taliban. Iranian officials even provided the Americans with targeting information for its anti-Taliban air campaign in late 2001, according to former U.S. officials.
But the brief possibility of an opening with Tehran ended as the Bush administration decided to widen its war on terror beyond Afghanistan. In his 2002 State of the Union, George W. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea. Iran then reversed course and began to provide covert support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, while also supporting the insurgency against American forces in Iraq.
As the Taliban revived, the Bush administration had few troops left in Afghanistan to counter the threat. Within a few years of its initial victory in 2001, the U.S. was stuck in a quagmire of its own making in Afghanistan, just as it was in Iraq.
The Bush administration decided to stay in Afghanistan, but it no longer had any clear objectives. The original targets of the military mission — Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership – had clearly escaped. So what was America’s new mission?
Despite years of debate, the Bush White House couldn’t decide. The Bush administration wanted to leave Afghanistan and focus on Iraq — yet it didn’t want to leave the military field open to the Taliban. Bush didn’t want to engage in nation-building in Afghanistan, yet his government remained committed to creating a new, Western-style central government with modern roads, schools, hospitals, and a national army. (The CIA even quietly did nation-building of its own, creating the Afghan intelligence service, called the National Directorate of Security, and filling it with Tajiks on the CIA payroll.)
The result was that throughout his time in office, George W. Bush had one foot in and one foot out of Afghanistan. Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser in his second term, weakly told the special inspector general that “there was just no process to do post-war mission planning.”
The U.S. installed Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun who had been living in exile in Pakistan, as Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban leader, and he went on to become Afghanistan’s president. The Americans literally escorted Karzai into Afghanistan from Pakistan in 2001; when a U.S. aircraft accidentally bombed the group of Special Forces and CIA personnel bringing Karzai into the country, CIA officer Greg Vogle famously dove on top of Karzai, saving his life.
Karzai had been chosen largely because he was pro-Western and because, in the view of the ethnic groups and warlords in Afghanistan at the time, he was the least offensive candidate. The fact that he was an ethnic Pashtun was thought to be an important olive branch to Pashtuns resentful of the U.S.-backed victory of the Tajiks and the Northern Alliance. But he was from a small Pashtun tribe based in the village of Karz, outside Kandahar, and was not considered a prominent leader among the major Pashtun tribes.
It didn’t take long for corruption to become rampant under Karzai. With the CIA’s backing, the new president made his younger half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the de-facto viceroy of Kandahar and southern Afghanistan — and the boss of the massive Afghan heroin trade.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration repeatedly uncovered evidence of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s leading role in the Afghan drug trade; in one instance, American investigators discovered links between a truck found with 110 pounds of heroin and an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai. The White House refused to allow the DEA to take any action against Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was secretly on the CIA’s payroll.
The willingness of the U.S. to turn a blind eye to Ahmed Wali Karzai’s role as a drug lord was just one symptom of a much larger problem. The U.S. had invaded a country whose most lucrative businesses, besides war, were opium production and heroin smuggling, and yet American officials could never figure out what to do about it. In the end, they did nothing.
For 20 years, America essentially ran a narco-state in Afghanistan.
During the initial invasion and bombing campaign in 2001, the Bush administration ignored the drug problem, believing that it was a distraction from America’s main counterterrorism mission, and refused to bomb drug-related facilities.
Later, American officials assigned to deal with Afghanistan would occasionally push for greater counternarcotics measures; at one point they even brought in Colombian counternarcotics agents to try to train a new Afghan counternarcotics force. The Justice Department also built a special Afghan drug court, while the State Department launched a campaign to eradicate poppy crops.
But the efforts were just window dressing. The Karzai government refused to allow aerial chemical spraying of poppy fields, fearing a backlash among farmers. As a result, the State Department relied on manual eradication, which meant that hundreds of Afghans with tractors and sticks were sent out to manually rip up poppy fields — thus risking the wrath of the farmers. State Department officials soon realized that the fields identified for eradication by Afghan officials and local leaders were those of their rivals or of unimportant farmers. The crops of powerful Afghans were almost never touched.
Each time American officials sought to make counternarcotics a priority, they ran into the reality that the drug lords of Afghanistan were also the warlords of Afghanistan who were on the CIA payroll and who the U.S. military relied upon to battle the Taliban.
The U.S. spent nearly $9 billion on its token counternarcotics programs in Afghanistan, yet opium production and heroin smuggling in Afghanistan skyrocketed under the U.S.-backed government. Afghanistan now produces more than 80 percent of the world’s heroin supply.
Afghanistan’s opium production soared in 2002 — and just kept growing. By 2020, 224,000 hectares of land were under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, compared with 123,000 hectares in 2010, according to the United Nations.
American aid and reconstruction money overwhelmed Afghanistan’s economy. The U.S. provided $145 billion over 20 years to rebuild a country that had a gross domestic product of just $19 billion in 2019. As recently as 2018, nearly 80 percent of Afghan government spending came from Western donors.
The combined effects of the massive flows of Western aid dollars, funding for combat operations, and the river of narco-dollars created a surreal economic bubble in Afghanistan. A new, Western-style urban professional class sprang up in Kabul, many of whose members are now fleeing the Taliban. But the money also triggered an epidemic of corruption and insider dealing that thoroughly discredited both the Afghan central government and the United States.
Much of the American money enriched U.S. contractors without ever entering the Afghan economy. Much of it also disappeared into secret bank accounts in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, held by Afghan government officials, warlords, and their families, a phenomenon described in a 2020 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as “the cross-pollination of criminality between Afghanistan and Dubai.”
The frenetic example set by Kabul Bank provided the model for how the Afghan elite could efficiently and blatantly move American aid money out of Afghanistan and into their private offshore bank accounts. The bank, once the largest in Afghanistan, was founded by Sherkhan Farnood, a money-exchange dealer with operations in Kabul and Dubai who had fled Russia under suspicion that he was a money launderer. After he obtained the bank charter from the Karzai government, he used Kabul Bank to embezzle money from Afghan depositors to pay for his personal investments in Dubai real estate. Farnood also took out a $100 million loan from Kabul Bank to buy Pamir Airways, which flew commercial routes from Kabul to Dubai.
Farnood’s couriers transporting cash from his money exchange in Kabul could “now more easily transport money embezzled from a Farnood-controlled bank (Kabul Bank) on a Farnood-owned airline (Pamir Airways) and deliver it to a Farnood-owned exchange house (Shaheen Money Exchange) in Dubai,” the Carnegie report concluded.
Before the bank finally and spectacularly collapsed in 2010, Farnood enjoyed plenty of political protection, because he was also using Kabul Bank to help Afghanistan’s most powerful politicians launder their ill-gotten cash in Dubai.
Meanwhile, petty corruption — bribes to local officials to obtain any service or job — was endemic, stoking more resentment against the government among average Afghans. The U.N. found that by 2012, Afghans were paying $3.9 billion in bribes per year; half of all Afghans paid a bribe for a public service.
As the U.S.-backed government continued, petty bribery and corruption grew worse, not better. Militias “were using their position and closeness with the government and U.S. military to control roads, secure lucrative contracts, establish themselves as regional powers, and sometimes serve both sides, cooperating with both international and Taliban forces to maximize profits,” concluded a 2018 report from the Institute of World Politics.
The government-fueled bribery and corruption forced many Afghans into the arms of the Taliban, who gained a reputation for settling financial and other disputes using more straightforward — if far more brutal — methods. “Trying to compete with the Taliban’s successful dispute resolution would have meant allowing sharia, and that’s not something we could do politically,” Barnett Rubin, a longtime Afghanistan expert who advised the State Department, told the special inspector general.
Often, American reconstruction projects provided funding directly to the Taliban and related extremist groups. Afghan contractors frequently had to pay off the Taliban so they wouldn’t attack U.S.-backed projects, “making the insurgents in effect unofficial subcontractors to the U.S. government,” the special inspector general concluded. One example was a U.S.-funded project to build a highway from Gardez to Khost in southeastern Afghanistan. In order to avoid attacks in 2011, the road’s contractors paid $1 million a year to a local figure known only as Arafat, who was believed to have ties to the Haqqani network.
Perhaps the most cynical decision in the war in Afghanistan was taken by Obama in 2009. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama sought to distinguish himself from his main political rivals with his emphatic denunciations of the war in Iraq. Fearful of being attacked from the right for being too dovish, Obama balanced his attacks on the Iraq War by claiming that he would do more than the Bush administration had done to win “the good war” in Afghanistan.
In 2009, Obama announced that he was escalating U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan: his ill-considered Afghan “surge.” The surge came with no real long-term strategy, and it is hard not to see Obama’s decision as little more than a political calculation to live up to his earlier campaign promise, which had only been made to insulate him from attacks on his position on Iraq.
As American troops flowed steadily into Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, combat operations were focused on the south, notably Helmand Province, a stronghold of both the Taliban and opium production. U.S. troop levels peaked at about 100,000 during the surge, the highest levels of the entire war in Afghanistan.
But the surge quickly descended into an inconclusive war of attrition. U.S. casualties reached their highest levels of the war during the surge, with fatalities rising to 496 in 2010. Obama drew down U.S. forces to around 8,400 by the time he left office.
Donald Trump came into the presidency in 2017, having campaigned on a vow to end America’s forever wars. He was determined to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But he was easily distracted by cronies eager to make money. Erik Prince, the infamous founder of Blackwater, nearly convinced Trump to let him take over the entire combat mission in Afghanistan by using paid mercenaries instead of U.S. troops. Instead, Trump got so sidetracked that he let the Pentagon talk him into increasing troop levels to about 14,000 in 2017.
Trump finally got his way in February 2020, when the U.S. and the Taliban signed an agreement setting the conditions for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. After the 2020 presidential election, Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller announced that U.S. troop levels had been reduced to 2,500.
Joe Biden came into office this year, making the case that, after 20 years, the war in Afghanistan had to end. Getting out of Afghanistan was perhaps the only issue on which he publicly agreed with Donald Trump.
On April 14, he announced that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn by September 11, 2021: the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Trump promptly criticized Biden for failing to meet the May 1 deadline he had negotiated with the Taliban, saying that “we can and should get out earlier,” and that “getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.”
The Taliban also issued a statement in April criticizing Biden for failing to meet the agreed-upon deadline. They warned ominously that the delay “opens the way for [the Taliban] to take every necessary countermeasure.”
The meaning and consequences of that Taliban statement in April are now playing out at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
The U.S. certainly did some good in Afghanistan. Its nation-building created a new educated, urban middle class, and the U.S.-backed government offered unprecedented rights to women. By 2018, life expectancy had increased by nine years, literacy rates rose, and child mortality fell.
But the special inspector general’s final report, which documents those gains, concluded that they were not “commensurate with the U.S. investment.” A former Pentagon official told the special inspector general that “when you look at how much we spent and what we got for it, it’s mind boggling.”
In an interview with the special inspector general, Douglas Lute, who coordinated strategy for Afghanistan at the National Security Council from 2007 to 2013, gave a brief and devastating critique of the American enterprise in Afghanistan.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan,” Lute said. “We didn’t know what we were doing.”
On the 58th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic 'I Have a Dream' speech, leaders march with activists in the nation's capital. (photo: WP)
housands converged on the nation's capital Saturday to demand the protection of voting rights, walking in the footsteps of the 250,000 people who marched in the historic March on Washington 58 years before.
As part of March On for Voting Rights, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King III, Arndrea Waters King and the Rev. Al Sharpton, were leading marches in Washington, D.C., Houston, Miami, Phoenix and more than 40 other cities.
Speakers for the D.C. event included Rep. Joyce Beatty, the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus; Philonise Floyd, an activist and George Floyd's brother; high-profile civil rights attorney Ben Crump; and other politicians and civil rights leaders.
"This nation has a moral obligation to make sure that every citizen has full voting rights," said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. "Anything short of that is a true threat to our democracy."
Meanwhile, about a thousand more people loosely gathered near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the Make Good Trouble Rally in Washington, D.C. on the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.
Among the group’s demands are action on voting rights legislation currently stalled in Congress, an end to the Senate filibuster rule and movement on a range of issues including police reform, infrastructure, healthcare and the environment.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, one of the main sponsors of the rally, called it a "defining moment in the political history of this nation."
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter said the nationwide rallies follow in the footsteps of the direct action and civil disobedience strategies King used.
“Part of what gives us hope is that we've been here before, and we won,” Albright said.
Brown added many of the demands of the original March of Washington have yet to be addressed, including more protections for voting rights.
"It's not just about lifting up the legacy of what happened 58 years ago," Brown said. "America has unfinished business."
"These bills are incredibly essential to ensure that we have access to the ballot," said Stasha Rhodes, campaign manager of 51 for 51, an advocacy group for Washington, D.C., statehood and one of the march's organizers.
The marches oppose almost 400 bills in 48 states that organizers say "amount to shameful, outright voter suppression," according to the event website.
At least six bills in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky and Oklahoma shorten windows to apply for mail-in ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy nonprofit that tracks voter suppression legislation. Bills in Iowa and Montana call for reducing polling place availability. Georgia and Iowa bills seek to limit voting days and hours. Other bills, many of which have already been signed into law, ban ballot drop boxes and mail-in voting, impose harsher voter ID requirements and prohibit giving water to voters in line.Advocates say these efforts target Black voters and other voters of color, who have faced voter suppression throughout U.S. history.
"There's relics of the Jim Crow past that we see in these laws and its efforts to prevent the voter turnout of Black and brown communities," Rhodes said.
Johnson urged protesters to spend time reflecting on the work of civil rights leaders of the past and to know that the fight for voting rights is not a new battle. He added that marching is not the final step in creating change and that attendees should also contact their local representatives and organize within their own communities.
"Freedom is a constant struggle," he said. "We have to protect it. We need to speak loudly, in unison, just like those before us did."
Democrats in Washington hope to spend the next month writing the largest partisan spending bill in a generation. The plan is to spend up to $3.5 trillion to overhaul and expand the reach of the federal government. It hinges on the expectation that every Democrat in the Senate will rally around the idea. That's why budget committee chairman Bernie Sanders is returning to his presidential campaign roots and hitting the road this weekend to sell the plan. NPR congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell has this report.
KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Budget committee chairman Bernie Sanders has lofty hopes for the list of problems Democrats can address with their upcoming spending plan - child care, health care, education and climate change, all for starters.
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BERNIE SANDERS: But it will also, I hope, restore the faith of the American people in the belief that we can have a government that works for all of us.
SNELL: That was Sanders outlining his goals to fellow senators ahead of a vote to begin writing the massive spending bill. Now Congress is getting ready to actually do the very complicated work of deciding exactly how to spend the money to meet those goals. And Sanders is going out to Indiana and Iowa this weekend - two states that went for former President Trump in 2020 - to try to convince everyday Americans that all of this spending is intended to help people like them.
SANDERS: Most people, whether you are conservative, moderate or progressive, understand that for many decades, the government has paid a lot of attention to the wealthy, the powerful and campaign contributors and has kind of turned its back on the working class and the middle class of this country.
SNELL: Sanders spoke to NPR ahead of his trip, and he says voters in both parties will benefit from those populist ideas. This mini budget tour harkens back to the hugely popular rallies of the Sanders presidential campaign. But this time, instead of selling a vision of what progressive politics could do for people, Sanders aims to remind people that policies he's backed, like monthly child tax credit payments and expanded unemployment insurance, are working for them.
SANDERS: And at the end of the day, what will happen is millions of people will have good-paying jobs.
SNELL: Sanders is attempting to deliver this message as a kind of counterprogramming to what residents in these states are hearing from the mostly Republican lawmakers who represent them in Washington - people like Iowa Senator Joni Ernst. She has been a major messenger for Republicans, saying the tax increases Democrats have planned to help pay for this bill are going to hit farmers and small businesses, not just the wealthy.
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JONI ERNST: This Bernie and Biden's tax and spending spree is going to be paid for one way or another by our middle-class Iowans, middle-class Americans.
SNELL: And Indiana Congressman Jim Banks.
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JIM BANKS: I can't think of a greater threat to the future of this country than the Democrats' socialist big-government takeover.
SNELL: Banks is one of the many Republicans and even some centrist Democrats who worry that all of this federal spending will drive up prices on everything from gas to milk and lumber.
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BANKS: If you think inflation is bad right now, can you imagine what it will be like when Democrats pass this budget?
SNELL: But instead of arguing that Republicans are overblowing how much Democrats want to spend, Sanders says he actually thinks this budget they're considering should be much, much bigger. Sanders also says the legislation will be paid for with tax increases on the wealthy and that people making under $400,000 a year won't see their taxes rise at all. And he wants to drive that message home to regular people.
SANDERS: I think this is an enormously popular proposal, and it's going to be paid for.
SNELL: But Sanders needs to convince more than just the people of Iowa and Indiana. He needs to win over every single Democrat in the Senate and virtually every Democrat in the House, and there's no sign that he's there yet.
Indigenous Brazilians protest against President Jair Bolsonaro at the Struggle For Life encampment in Brasília, Brazil, August 25, 2021. (photo: Antonio Molina/AP)
n February of last year, a CO2 pipeline exploded, engulfing Satartia, Mississippi in a noxious green fog that left residents confused, convulsing, foaming at the mouth and even unconscious — an episode that augurs danger for what could be a coming wave of new CO2 pipelines across the country, a 19-month investigation by HuffPost and the Climate Investigations Center reveals.
The reporting comes as the oil and gas industry is seeking to reinvent themselves, or at least their public image, through massive carbon capture and storage (CCS) investments that would include a whole new network of pipelines.
If and when these pipes leak, they will send clouds of CO2 (and in this specific case, poisonous hydrogen sulfide, which gave the cloud its green hue, rotten egg smell and particularly noxious respiratory impacts) into the surrounding environment, where it will displace the lighter air at ground level and threaten to cause "air hunger" and asphyxiate every oxygen-breathing organism incapable of escaping the area — made harder by the fact that gas- and diesel-powered cars also need oxygen to work.
"It was almost like something you'd see in a zombie movie — they were just walking in circles," sheriff's officer Terry Gann told HuffPost, while survivor Hugh Martin said the "only thing I been through worse than this was the gas chamber when I was in the Army training for Desert Storm, and that was cyanide gas."
Bad as that may sound, though, the situation could have been significantly worse, as they actually "got lucky," as Yazoo County Emergency Management Agency director Jack Willingham explained. "If the wind blew the other way, if it'd been later when people were sleeping, we would have had deaths."
The Verge called its competitor's reporting a "scathing investigation of the company, Denbury, that operates the pipeline," and its headline exhorted readers to "Go read the harrowing story of the world's first CO2 pipeline explosion."
n the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S.-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners by jamming them into metal shipping containers and letting them suffocate. At the time, Dostum was on the CIA’s payroll and had been working with U.S. special forces to oust the Taliban from power.
housands converged on the nation's capital Saturday to demand the protection of voting rights, walking in the footsteps of the 250,000 people who marched in the historic March on Washington 58 years before.
