13 September 21
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Of the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked four U.S. commercial airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia — and of course, Osama bin Laden was a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families.
Immediately after the attacks, the Bush administration downplayed the Saudi connection and suppressed evidence that might link powerful Saudis to the funding of Islamic extremism and terrorism. The Bush White House didn’t want to upset its relationship with one of the world’s largest oil-producing nations, which was also an American ally with enormous political influence in Washington, and much of what the FBI discovered about possible Saudi links to the attacks remains secret even today.
“What are they hiding? What is the big secret?” Terry Strada, whose husband was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, asked in an interview. “We’ve been operating on lies for 20 years. I’ve always just wanted to know the truth: Who was behind this, and how did it happen?”
Many U.S. officials have insisted over the last two decades that the American government is not really hiding any conclusive evidence of Saudi involvement, and it is quite possible that successive presidents, along with the intelligence community, have closed ranks simply to avoid revealing classified information. And it’s plausible that officials want to avoid exposing details that might be politically embarrassing for both Washington and the Saudis yet don’t prove that the Saudi royal family, the Saudi government, or other powerful Saudi individuals played any role in providing funding or assistance for the September 11 attacks. But the refusal to be open and transparent about such a fundamental issue has fed suspicions.
Two decades later, however, glimpses of material that have become public provide mounting evidence that senior Saudi officials, including one diplomat in the Saudi Embassy in Washington, may in fact have indirectly provided assistance for two of the Al Qaeda hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were the first of the hijackers to arrive in the United States in 2000 and lived for about a year and a half in San Diego beforehand.
The CIA had identified both Mihdhar and Hazmi as Al Qaeda operatives by early 2000, based partly on Mihdhar’s participation in an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, and the agency was tracking the pair’s international movements. But the CIA did not pass on that information to officials at the FBI or other domestic agencies at the time, and the two plotters were not placed on any watch lists that might have prevented them from entering the United States weeks later. It was not until weeks before the September 11 attacks that the FBI learned that Mihdhar and Hazmi had entered the country and began a belated and unsuccessful search for them, even as both men were living openly in San Diego, according to multiple government reviews.
While no smoking gun has emerged, the evidence indicates that the two hijackers had received logistical and financial support from a handful of people inside the United States with connections to Saudi Arabia, including a man in California whose family received tens of thousands of dollars from the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
The ongoing scrutiny of the Saudis’ role has been driven by a massive lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan brought by families of the victims, who maintain that senior Saudi officials were complicit in the attacks. The families were blocked for 15 years from even bringing their claims because of the “sovereign immunity” protection for foreign governments in court. In 2016, Congress overrode a veto by President Barak Obama to clear the way for the lawsuit by approving the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.
Lawyers for the families have now collected some 11,000 still-secret pages of internal documents from the U.S. government and have deposed numerous Saudi witnesses to determine what they knew of the hijackers’ plot, bolstering what they say is a trail of connections leading back to Riyadh.
“Our view has always been that there were agents of the Saudi government acting in coordination with one another … to provide a critical support network for the first hijackers,” Sean P. Carter, one of the lawyers representing the victims’ families, said in an interview. “There are a lot of contact points between the bad actors here.”
“Our view has always been that there were agents of the Saudi government acting in coordination with one another … to provide a critical support network for the first hijackers.”
Carter said that a verdict against the Saudis, finding them financially liable in the attacks, could result in “many billions of dollars” in damages. But he added that bringing out the truth would be just as important. “This is the only vehicle the families have to correct the historical record and achieve some sort of accountability on behalf of their loved ones,” he said. “That’s a huge piece of it.”
One of the most explosive pieces of evidence against the Saudis emerged only by accident. It came in a court filing by the Trump administration last year that was intended, ironically, to support the government’s arguments for keeping the FBI’s Saudi records sealed as state secrets. The Justice Department’s public filing, first reported by Yahoo News, redacted numerous sections on national security grounds but inadvertently disclosed the name of a former official in the Saudi Embassy in Washington — “Jarrah” — or Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, who worked as a senior diplomat until about 2000 under Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was then the long-serving Saudi ambassador to the United States. The document, citing a 2012 internal FBI summary, indicated that Jarrah was believed to have “tasked” two other Saudi men living in southern California “with assisting the hijackers” in San Diego, Mihdhar and Hazmi, who spoke little English.
The accidental disclosure, reaching inside the Saudi Embassy in Washington, could prove critical for the victims’ families in establishing that Saudi Arabia bears some responsibility for the attacks.
There has long been scrutiny on the two Saudi men who helped the hijackers in southern California — Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy, both of whom have left the United States. Bayoumi, a Saudi expatriate who was on the payroll of a Saudi defense contractor, befriended the two hijackers in San Diego soon after their arrival in 2000 and worked with them step by step to settle into their new lives. He helped them open bank accounts, apply for Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, find a place to live in San Diego, and even receive flying lessons.
Bayoumi later told the FBI that he had met the two men by chance at a restaurant in Los Angeles and agreed to help them as simple hospitality toward fellow Saudis. But the FBI was skeptical of his account, according to documents that have since become public.
The second man, Thumairy, was a diplomat in the Saudi consulate’s office in Los Angeles at the time. The FBI found extensive phone contacts between Thumairy and Bayoumi, and agents suspected that Thumairy also worked to help Mihdhar and Hazmi after their arrival.
Osama Basnan, a Saudi living in San Diego, may have also played a role with Bayoumi. Basnan’s wife received tens of thousands of dollars in checks from the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Saudis insisted that Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, sent the money as part of a charitable effort to help with medical bills for Basnan’s wife, who was ill at the time. But FBI investigators believed that a chunk of the money ended up with Bayoumi.
Other possible connections also led back to Prince Bandar, according to a 28-page section of a joint congressional inquiry in 2002, which was kept secret until its partial release in 2016. One intriguing piece of evidence came when an Al Qaeda operative was captured with the unlisted number for a Colorado company that managed Prince Bandar’s estate in Aspen.
The 28 pages, kept secret through the Bush administration and most of Obama’s, laid out a panoply of other connections between the hijackers and people inside or connected to the Saudi government, raising as many questions as they answered. Former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who was co-chair of the joint congressional review that produced the report, had pushed for years for it to be declassified. He said at the time that the release of the partially redacted document “suggests a strong linkage between those terrorists and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Saudi charities, and other Saudi stakeholders” and represented “the removal of the cork at the end of the bottle.”
But many thousands of pages of government files on the possible Saudi connections remain bottled up, even as families of the victims have pushed in court for greater access to them as part of their lawsuit against the Saudis. And Prince Bandar himself reportedly refused to answer questions from lawyers for the victims’ families as part of the recent depositions of Saudi officials in their lawsuit. For years, Saudi Arabia has strenuously rejected charges that its officials had any knowledge of or involvement with the 9/11 terror plot.
The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return messages seeking comment on the lawsuit or the ongoing questions about the royal kingdom’s possible involvement in the attacks.
Because of Saudi Arabia’s status as a critical Middle East ally, successive presidents have walked a diplomatic tightrope with Riyadh for two decades, selling billions in arms to the kingdom even in the face of human rights abuses and the ongoing questions about connections to the September 11 attacks. The alliance was tested again three years ago by another brutal act of violence — the killing and dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist. While the Trump administration drew wide criticism for failing to take any action over the assassination, the Biden administration publicly released an intelligence report earlier this year laying responsibility for the murder directly at the feet of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and issued financial sanctions against some of those Saudi operatives thought to have been involved. But Biden stopped short of taking action against the royal prince himself because of concerns about the damage it might cause to the partnership.
The final report of the 9/11 Commission in 2004, after a 20-month investigation, acknowledged that “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of Al Qaeda funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” Some of the more intriguing financial connections between Saudis and the hijackers were consigned to unexplained footnotes.
But some commissioners now doubt the report’s conclusions about the lack of Saudi involvement. “I don’t think we know all the answers. We got what the FBI had,” Jamie Gorelick said in an interview. “There were a number of trails that went dead on us, and it has been my assumption that funds from people in Saudi Arabia — not necessarily the government — flowed into the United States to help the hijackers,” she added. “They must have had some help, a network of support.”
Indeed, the possible Saudi connections had generated intense scrutiny from investigators at the 9/11 Commission and debate over the final conclusions. Staffers believed that they had found a close Saudi connection to the hijackers in San Diego, but Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the commission, and Dieter Snell, a top aide, had doubts and rewrote that section of the final report before it went to the printers, removing the most damning material against the Saudis, according to “The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission,” a 2008 book by Philip Shenon, who covered the commission for the New York Times.
For years after the commission report, a team of FBI agents continued pursuing possible connections between the Saudis and the hijackers and built more evidence, but the Justice Department closed down the investigation without charges. In 2015, a federal commission revisited the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and findings, but on the question of complicity by the Saudis or anyone else, it arrived at the same place — even in light of potentially significant new material gathered by the FBI in its investigation. “This new information is not sufficient to change the 9/11 Commission’s original findings regarding the presence of witting assistance to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar,” the review concluded.
Most of the FBI files on the possible links still remain secret, even though the investigation has been closed. The Justice Department told the judges hearing the families’ lawsuit in August that the FBI would review the classified documents to determine what additional files could be disclosed publicly, and Biden signed an executive order last week formally authorizing that review process. But some victims’ family members say they are not optimistic that the review will produce much of value after fighting for 20 years — through four different presidential administrations — to find out what role Saudi officials might have played in the 9/11 plot. Some 1,700 survivors have been so upset by the ongoing blockage of the internal information in the case that they signed a letter to Biden last month asking him not to attend memorial events this week commemorating the anniversary.
The possible Saudi connection overlaps with another lingering mystery from 9/11: How was it that even with the system “blinking red” at the CIA over intelligence indicating a possible attack, the CIA failed to communicate with the FBI about what it had learned about the Malaysia meeting and the fact that two of the would-be hijackers were in the United States?
The explanation that communication failures and turf issues between the CIA and the FBI were to blame has never satisfied former intelligence officials like Daniel J. Jones, who led the six-year Senate intelligence staff investigation in the aftermath of 9/11 into the CIA’s use of torture against Al Qaeda detainees.
“It has never made sense to me how the CIA requested surveillance of the meeting in Malaysia — this is after the embassy bombings and when there was a belief another attack was coming — yet nobody at the CIA officially relayed this information to the FBI, even after the CIA tracked two of the operatives to Los Angeles,” he told The Intercept.
Richard A. Clarke, counterterrorism director at the National Security Council in both the Clinton and Bush White Houses, has theorized that one explanation may come from Saudi Arabia: With the CIA prevented from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, it might have turned to a friendly foreign intelligence service — the Saudis — to track the movements of the two San Diego hijackers using Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy.
“Nothing in the joint congressional investigation, the 9/11 Commission’s work or the CIA Inspector General’s investigation explains why the CIA hid its knowledge about these two al-Qaeda operatives,” Clarke wrote after the partial release of the 28 pages on the Saudis’ possible involvement in 2016.
But a “false flag operation that went wrong” just might explain it, Clarke said. By this theory, the CIA — rather than going to the FBI for help — might have gotten the Saudi intelligence to have Bayoumi ingratiate himself with the two would-be hijackers in Southern California in 2000 and track their movements to determine why they had come to America. And in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA and the Saudis “would have good reason to hide it,” he said.
The lingering questions beg for answers, families of 9/11 victims say.
Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband was killed in the attacks, said in an interview that the families are fighting not just the Saudis, but their own government, which she said appears more intent on protecting an important foreign ally than aiding the victims’ families.
“We’re fed up. We want accountability and transparency,” Breitweiser said. “I want to know why the Department of Justice is protecting the Saudi kingdom. I’m being robbed of justice for the murder of my husband. It’s just a cover-up, I’m sorry to say.”
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who underwent brutal interrogations while he was held at Guantánamo Bay, is a free man in Mauritania after nearly 15 years as a detainee. (photo: Btihal Remli/NYT)
There were the guards who menaced him with attack dogs and beat him so badly they broke his ribs. The troops who shackled him, blasted him with heavy metal music and strobe lights or drenched him in ice water to deny him sleep for months on end. The mind-numbing isolation in a darkened cell without his Quran. The female guards who exposed themselves and touched him sexually in an effort to undermine his adherence to Islam.
But what left Mr. Slahi in utter despair, he said, was the interrogator who tried to threaten him into acknowledging that he was complicit in plotting a terrorist attack.
'I cannot support $3.5 trillion. If I can't go home and explain [the bill], I can't vote for it,' Manchin told ABC's This Week. (photo: Bonnie Cash/UPI/REX/Shutterstock)
The West Virginia senator, who earlier this month urged the administration to “hit the pause button” on the ambitious measure, is the swing vote in a divided 50-50 chamber. Last week, Ronald Klain, the White House chief of staff, said he thought Manchin was “very persuadable”, while Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said the budget reconciliation bill was “full speed ahead”.
But in appearances Sunday on two political talkshows, Manchin reiterated his opposition, telling ABC’s This Week: “I cannot support $3.5tn. If I can’t go home and explain [the bill], I can’t vote for it.
“There’s not a rush to do that right now. We don’t have an urgency. Don’t you think we ought to debate a little bit more, talk about it, and see what we’ve got out there?”
Manchin did not say what figure he thought would be an acceptable federal investment in the bill, which targets healthcare, immigration reform and efforts to counter the climate crisis among other social priorities and programs. But in private discussions with colleagues he is reported to have floated a total of $1tn to $1.5tn.
His resistance has drawn the ire of progressives in his own caucus, including some House Democrats who are threatening to block a smaller, bipartisan $1tn infrastructure bill that has already passed the Senate unless Manchin gives way.
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and Senate budget committee chair who has said $3.5tn was “already the result of a major, major compromise”, urged Manchin to reconsider.
“You have an overwhelming majority of working families in America who want us to do this. You have the president, you have over 90% of the people in the House, over 90% of senators,” Sanders said in his own appearance on This Week.
“Is it appropriate for one person to destroy two pieces of legislation? Joe Manchin has the right to get his views heard. He has to sit down with all of us and we’ll work it out. It would really be a terrible, terrible shame for the American people if both bills went down.”
Manchin also spoke out against one of his most vocal critics in the House, the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has criticized his perceived opposition to spending money on social and infrastructure programs while at the same time being close to the fossil fuel industry.
“[I’m] sick of this ‘bipartisan’ corruption that masquerades as clear-eyed moderation,” she wrote in a tweet earlier this month, asserting that Manchin held weekly “huddles” with the oil company Exxon, and that “so-called ‘bipartisan’ fossil fuel bills” were “killing people”.
On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Manchin denied the allegation. “I keep my door open for everybody, it’s totally false,” he said.
“Those type of superlatives are just awful. I don’t know the young lady, I’ve met her one time. She’s just speculating.”
Of the House Democrats’ threat to derail the infrastructure bill, he said: “They have to do what they have to do. If they play politics with the needs of America, I can tell you America will recoil.”
U.S. Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett at the McConnell Center. (photo: Sam Upshaw Jr./Courier Journal)
“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she told the guests at a Sunday celebration of the 30th anniversary of the opening of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.
Barrett, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020, spent much of her talk at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel arguing the court is defined by "judicial philosophies" rather than personal political views.
"Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties," she said, noting that she identifies as an "originalist" and citing fellow Justice Stephen Breyer as an example of the other main school of thought, "pragmatism."
Barrett cited a number of cases in which the nine justices on the court did not rule along "party lines" — meaning each justice appointed by Republican voting together and each justice appointed by a Democrat doing the same.
"The media, along with hot takes on Twitter, report the results and decisions. … That makes the decision seem results-oriented. It leaves the reader to judge whether the court was right or wrong, based on whether she liked the results of the decision," Barrett said.
"And here's the thing: Sometimes, I don't like the results of my decisions. But it's not my job to decide cases based on the outcome I want."
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was in attendance at the event — in addition to Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, U of L President Neeli Bendapudi and others — and introduced Barrett.
He praised the court's most junior justice for not trying to "legislate from the bench" and for being from "Middle America," noting the Indiana native is the only current justice to not attend Harvard or Yale.
Kentucky's senior senator was Senate majority leader at the time of Barrett's appointment, the third time Republican President Donald Trump filled a seat on the Supreme Court.
McConnell faced criticism from Democrats for his handling of judicial vacancies during his time running the Senate, and that was a focus of many of the protesters who gathered outside Sunday's event.
"I'm aware that they stay in power through unethical and unscrupulous means. … I'm just tired of it," said a woman dressed like a handmaiden from "The Handmaid's Tale" series, who declined to give her name.
The court's recent decision to deny an emergency appeal to block a Texas law banning abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, virtually outlawing the procedure because most don't know they're pregnant before that point, was another point of contention with the group of about 30 protesters outside the event.
"With what's been happening in Texas, I don't want it to spread to Kentucky. … And so, we're just coming to let Mitch know how a lot of citizens feel about this issue," Jane Martin Buckley, of Louisville, said.
Barrett was asked about the decision and the so-called "shadow docket" by a group of students in the McConnell Scholars program during the event but said "emergency" decisions such as this one can come before the court again, so it would be "inappropriate" for her to comment on the case.
McConnell founded the center bearing his name in 1991. It gives U of L scholarships to students around Kentucky, hosts a public speaker series and houses the archives of McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao, the former U.S. transportation secretary.
The Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar has been named as the deputy leader in the new caretaker government of Afghanistan. Baradar represented the Taliban in negotiations with the US in the Qatari capital Doha. (photo: Hussein Sayed/AP)
What is it about this country and enemies? It can’t even pretend to do without them. Of course, it just lost one enemy, the Taliban, in a humiliating fashion, even as President Biden bragged that no country had ever airlifted itself out of a losing war quite so brilliantly. (“No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and ability to do it, and we did it today.”) In the process, he also announced that the forever wars of the last 20 years were finally ending. But don’t panic — not, at least, if you happen to be a failed commander from those wars or a CEO in one of the many companies that make up the industrial part of the military-industrial complex. There’s so much more to come. As Biden said, “The world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.”
Keep in mind that, in these last two decades, the U.S. has spent an estimated $8 trillion just on our forever wars (and the care of the veterans of those conflicts). Worse yet, possibly $21 trillion went into those conflicts and the militarization of American society that went with them. That scale of investment can’t continue without an enemy. Of course, from its earliest moments in office, the Biden foreign-policy team has been focused on “pivoting” from war-on-terror targets to provoking China. That’s included threatening naval gestures in the Strait of Taiwan and the South China Sea, a calling-together of allies to confront Beijing in an ever-more-militarized fashion, and greater support for Taiwan. It all adds up to an enemy-filled future in which Congress must continue to invest ever more staggering sums in the military-industrial complex rather than in this country’s true infrastructure or genuine needs.
In fact, the House Armed Services Committee promptly endorsed a plan to add an extra $24 billion (above and beyond the staggering $715 billion the Biden administration had requested for the 2022 Pentagon budget). The equivalent Senate committee had already given a thumbs up to a similar sum, indicating that the next Pentagon budget will be in the range of $740 billion dollars. California Representative Ro Khanna was among the few who gave the measure a thumbs down. (“We just ended the longest war in American history, now is the time to decrease defense spending, not increase it… We are already spending three times as much on our military as China did.”)
In that context, let historian Alfred McCoy, author of the soon-to-be-published groundbreaking imperial history, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, tell you what full-scale defeat in Afghanistan really means for this country. He considers how, as taxpayer dollars are put into yet more militarization (and the global failure that goes with it), China has proven so much cannier about its investments on a planet that itself needs some genuine human investment before it becomes a gigantic Kabul. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Winner in Afghanistan: China
A Debacle Marks the Decline of Washington's World Leadership
“Remember, this is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a television audience on August 15th, the day the Taliban swept into the Afghan capital, pausing to pose for photos in the grandly gilded presidential palace. He was dutifully echoing his boss, President Joe Biden, who had earlier rejected any comparison with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, in 1975, insisting that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
Both were right, but not in the ways they intended. Indeed, the collapse of Kabul was not comparable. It was worse, incomparably so. And its implications for the future of U.S. global power are far more serious than the loss of Saigon.
On the surface, similarities abound. In both South Vietnam and Afghanistan, Washington spent 20 years and countless billions of dollars building up massive, conventional armies, convinced that they could hold off the enemy for a decent interval after the U.S. departure. But presidents Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan both proved to be incompetent leaders who never had a chance of retaining power without continued fulsome American backing.
Amid a massive North Vietnamese offensive in the spring of 1975, President Thieu panicked and ordered his army to abandon the northern half of the country, a disastrous decision that precipitated Saigon’s fall just six weeks later. As the Taliban swept across the countryside this summer, President Ghani retreated into a fog of denial, insisting his troops defend every remote, rural district, allowing the Taliban to springboard from seizing provincial capitals to capturing Kabul in just 10 days.
With the enemy at the gates, President Thieu filled his suitcases with clinking gold bars for his flight into exile, while President Ghani (according to Russian reports) snuck off to the airport in a cavalcade of cars loaded with cash. As enemy forces entered Saigon and Kabul, helicopters ferried American officials from the U.S. embassy to safety, even as surrounding city streets swarmed with panicked local citizens desperate to board departing flights.
Critical Differences
So much for similarities. As it happens, the differences were deep and portentous. By every measure, the U.S. capacity for building and supporting allied armies has declined markedly in the 45 years between Saigon and Kabul. After President Thieu ordered that disastrous northern retreat, replete with dismal scenes of soldiers clubbing civilians to board evacuation flights bound for Saigon, South Vietnam’s generals ignored their incompetent commander-in-chief and actually began to fight.
On the road to Saigon at Xuan Loc, an ordinary South Vietnamese unit, the 18th Division, fought battle-hardened North Vietnamese regulars backed by tanks, trucks, and artillery to a standstill for two full weeks. Not only did those South Vietnamese soldiers take heavy casualties, with more than a third of their men killed or wounded, but they held their positions through those long days of “meat-grinder” combat until the enemy had to circle around them to reach the capital.
In those desperate hours as Saigon was falling, General Nguyen Khoa Nam, head of the only intact South Vietnamese command, faced an impossible choice between making a last stand in the Mekong Delta and capitulating to communist emissaries who promised him a peaceful surrender. “If I am unable to carry out my job of protecting the nation,” the general told a subordinate, “then I must die, along with my nation.” That night, seated at his desk, the general shot himself in the head. In South Vietnam’s last hours as a state, four of his fellow generals also committed suicide. At least 40 more lower-ranking officers and soldiers also chose death over dishonor.
On the road to Kabul, by contrast, there were no heroic last stands by regular Afghan army units, no protracted combat, no heavy casualties, and certainly no command suicides. In the nine days between the fall of Afghanistan’s first provincial capital on August 6th and the capture of Kabul on August 15th, all of the well-equipped, well-trained Afghan soldiers simply faded away before Taliban guerrillas equipped mainly with rifles and tennis sneakers.
After losing their salaries and rations to graft for the previous six to nine months, those hungry Afghan troops simply surrendered en masse, took Taliban cash payments, and handed over their weapons and other costly U.S. equipment. By the time the guerrillas reached Kabul, driving Humvees and wearing Kevlar helmets, night-vision goggles, and body armor, they looked like so many NATO soldiers. Instead of taking a bullet, Afghanistan’s commanders took the cash — both graft from padding their payrolls with “ghost soldiers” and bribes from the Taliban.
The difference between Saigon and Kabul has little to do with the fighting ability of the Afghan soldier. As the British and Soviet empires learned to their dismay when guerrillas slaughtered their soldiers in spectacular numbers, ordinary Afghan farmers are arguably the world’s finest fighters. So why wouldn’t they fight for Ashraf Ghani and his secular democratic state in far-off Kabul?
The key difference would seem to lie in the fading of America’s aura as the planet’s number one power and of its state-building capacities. At the peak of its global hegemony back in the 1960s, the United States, with its unequalled material resources and moral authority, could make a reasonably convincing case to the South Vietnamese that the political mix of electoral democracy and capitalist development it sponsored was the way forward for any nation. Today, with its reduced global clout and tarnished record in Iraq, Libya, and Syria (as well as in prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo), America’s capacity to infuse its nation-building projects with any real legitimacy — that elusive sine qua non for the survival of any state — has apparently dropped significantly.
The Impact on U.S. Global Power
In 1975, the fall of Saigon did indeed prove a setback to Washington’s world order. Still, America’s underlying strength, both economic and military, was robust enough then for a partial rebound.
Adding to the sense of crisis at the time, the loss of South Vietnam coincided with two more substantial blows to Washington’s international system and the clout that went with it. Just a few years before Saigon’s collapse, the German and Japanese export booms had so eroded America’s commanding global economic position that the Nixon administration had to end the automatic convertibility of the dollar to gold. That, in turn, effectively broke the Bretton Woods system that had been the foundation of U.S. economic strength since 1944.
Meanwhile, with Washington mired in its self-made Vietnam quagmire, that other Cold War power, the Soviet Union, continued to build hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles and so functionally forced Washington to recognize its military parity in 1972 by signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Strategic Arms Limitation Protocol.
With the weakening of the economic and nuclear pillars on which so much of America’s paramount power rested, Washington was forced to retreat from its role as the great global hegemon and become a mere first among equals.
Washington’s Relations with Europe
Almost half a century later, the sudden, humiliating fall of Kabul threatens even that more limited leadership role. Although the U.S. occupied Afghanistan for 20 years with the full support of its NATO allies, when President Biden walked away from that shared “nation-building” mission, he did so without the slightest consultation with those very allies.
America lost 2,461 soldiers in Afghanistan, including 13 who died tragically during the airport evacuation. Its allies suffered 1,145 killed, including 62 German soldiers and 457 British troops. No wonder those partners held understandable grievances when Biden acted without the slightest notice to or discussion with them. “There is serious loss of trust,” observed Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to Washington. “But the real lesson… for Europe is this: Do we really want to be totally dependent on U.S. capabilities and decisions forever, or can Europe finally begin to be serious about becoming a credible strategic actor?”
For Europe’s more visionary leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, the answer to that timely question was obvious: build a European defense force free from Washington’s whims and so avoid “the Chinese-American duopoly, the dislocation, the return of hostile regional powers.” In fact, right after the last American planes left Kabul, a summit of European Union officials made it clear that the time had come to stop “depending on American decisions.” They called for the creation of a European army that would give them “greater decision-making autonomy and greater capacity for action in the world.”
In short, with America First populism now a major force in this country’s politics, assume that Europe will pursue a foreign policy increasingly freed from Washington’s influence.
Central Asia’s Geopolitics
And Europe may be the least of it. The stunning capture of Kabul highlighted an American loss of leadership that extended into Asia and Africa, with profound geopolitical implications for the future of U.S. global power. Above all, the Taliban’s victory will effectively force Washington out of Central Asia and so help to consolidate Beijing’s already ongoing control over parts of that strategic region. It, in turn, could prove to be the potential geopolitical pivot for China’s dominance over the vast Eurasian land mass, home to 70% of the globe’s population and productivity.
Speaking at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan in 2013 (though nobody in Washington was then listening), China’s President Xi Jinping announced his country’s strategy for winning the twenty-first-century version of the deadly “great game” that nineteenth-century empires once played for control of Central Asia. With gentle gestures that belied his imperious intent, Xi asked that academic audience to join him in building an “economic belt along the Silk Road” that would “expand development space in the Eurasian region” through infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea.” In the process of establishing that “belt and road” structure, they would, he claimed, be building “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”
In the eight years since that speech, China has indeed been spending over a trillion dollars on its “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) to construct a transcontinental grid of railroads, oil pipelines, and industrial infrastructure in a bid to become the world’s premier economic power. More specifically, Beijing has used the BRI as a geopolitical pincers movement, a diplomatic squeeze play. By laying down infrastructure around the northern, eastern, and western borders of Afghanistan, it has prepared the way for that war-torn nation, freed of American influence and full of untapped mineral resources (estimated at a trillion dollars), to fall safely into Beijing’s grasp without a shot being fired.
To the north of Afghanistan, the China National Petroleum Corporation has collaborated with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch the Central Asia–China gas pipeline, a system that will eventually extend more than 4,000 miles across the heart of Eurasia. Along Afghanistan’s eastern frontier, Beijing began spending $200 million in 2011 to transform a sleepy fishing village at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea, into a modern commercial port only 370 miles from the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Four years later, President Xi committed $46 billion to building a China–Pakistan Economic Corridor of roads, rails, and pipelines stretching nearly 2,000 miles along Afghanistan’s eastern borderlands from China’s western provinces to the now-modernized port of Gwadar.
To the west of Afghanistan, Beijing broke through Iran’s diplomatic isolation last March by signing a $400 billion development agreement with Tehran. Over the next 25 years, China’s legions of laborers and engineers will lay down a transit corridor of oil and natural gas pipelines to China, while also building a vast new rail network that will make Tehran the hub of a line stretching from Istanbul, Turkey, to Islamabad, Pakistan.
By the time these geopolitical pincers pull Afghanistan firmly into Beijing’s BRI system, the country may have become just another Middle Eastern theocracy like Iran or Saudi Arabia. While the religious police harass women and troops battle festering insurgencies, the Taliban state can get down to its real business — not defending Islam, but cutting deals with China to mine its vast reserves of rare minerals and collect transit taxes on the new $10 billion TAPI gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan (which desperately needs affordable energy).
With lucrative royalties from its vast store of rare-earth minerals, the Taliban could afford to end its current fiscal dependence on drugs. They could actually ban the country’s now booming opium harvest, a promise their new government spokesman has already made in a bid for international recognition. Over time, the Taliban leadership might discover, like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Iran, that a developing economy can’t afford to waste its women. As a result, there might even be some slow, fitful progress on that front, too.
If such a projection of China’s future economic role in Afghanistan seems fanciful to you, consider that the underpinnings for just such a future deal were being put in place while Washington was still dithering over Kabul’s fate. At a formal meeting with a Taliban delegation in July, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi hailed their movement as “an important military and political force.”
In response, Taliban head Mullah Abdul Baradar, displaying the very leadership that American-installed President Ashraf Ghani so clearly lacked, praised China as a “reliable friend” and promised to foster “an enabling investment environment” so that Beijing could play “a bigger role in future reconstruction and economic development.” Formalities finished, the Afghan delegation then met behind closed doors with China’s assistant foreign minister to exchange what the official communiqué called “in-depth views on issues of common concern, which helped enhance mutual understanding” — in short, who gets what and for how much.
The World-Island Strategy
China’s capture of Eurasia, should it be successful, will be but one part of a far grander design for control over what Victorian geographer Halford Mackinder, an early master of modern geopolitics, called the “world island.” He meant the tricontinental land mass comprising the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. For the past 500 years, one imperial hegemon after another, including Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the United States, has deployed its strategic forces around that world island in a bid to dominate such a sprawling land mass.
While for the last half-century Washington has arrayed its vast air and naval armadas around Eurasia, it generally relegated Africa to, at best, an afterthought — at worst, a battleground. Beijing, by contrast, has consistently treated that continent with the utmost seriousness.
When the Cold War came to southern Africa in the early 1970s, Washington spent the next 20 years in an arm’s-length alliance with apartheid South Africa, while using the CIA to fight a leftist liberation movement in Portuguese-controlled Angola. While Washington spent billions wreaking havoc by supplying right-wing African warlords with automatic weapons and land mines, Beijing launched its first major foreign-aid project. It built the thousand-mile Tanzania-to-Zambia railway. Not only was it the longest in Africa when completed in 1975, but it allowed landlocked Zambia, a front-line state in the struggle against the apartheid regime in Pretoria, to avoid South Africa when exporting its copper.
From 2015 on, building upon its historic ties to the liberation movements that won power across southern Africa, Beijing planned a decade-long trillion-dollar infusion of capital there. Much of it was to be designated for commodities-extraction projects that would make that continent China’s second-largest source of crude oil. With such an investment (equaling its later BRI commitments to Eurasia), China also doubled its annual trade with Africa to $222 billion, three times America’s total.
While that aid to liberation movements once had an ideological undercurrent, today it’s been succeeded by savvy geopolitics. Beijing seems to understand just how fast Africa’s progress has been in the single generation since that continent won its freedom from a particularly rapacious version of colonial rule. Given that it’s the planet’s second most populous continent, rich in human and material resources, China’s trillion-dollar bet on Africa’s future will likely pay rich dividends, both political and economic, someday soon.
With a trillion dollars invested in Eurasia and another trillion in Africa, China is engaged in nothing less than history’s largest infrastructure project. It’s crisscrossing those three continents with rails and pipelines, building naval bases around the southern rim of Asia, and ringing the whole tricontinental world island with a string of 40 major commercial ports.
Such a geopolitical strategy has become Beijing’s battering ram to crack open Washington’s control over Eurasia and thereby challenge what’s left of its global hegemony. America’s unequalled military air and sea armadas still allow it rapid movement above and around those continents, as the mass evacuation from Kabul showed so forcefully. But the slow, inch-by-inch advance of China’s land-based, steel-ribbed infrastructure across the deserts, plains, and mountains of that world island represents a far more fundamental form of future control.
As China’s geopolitical squeeze play on Afghanistan shows all too vividly, there is still much wisdom in the words that Sir Halford Mackinder wrote over a century ago: “Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
To that, after watching a Washington that’s invested so much in its military be humiliated in Afghanistan, we might add: Who does not command the World Island cannot command the World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his 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.
A road blockade set up during the Nipah virus outbreak in India this month. (photo: C. K Thanseer/DeFodi Images/Getty Images)
While figuring out how to prevent and treat the Nipah virus is very much a work in progress, there have been advances.
Nonetheless, Nipah remains a concern, not just in India but for the entire planet. The World Health Organization classifies it as a "virus of concern" for future epidemics because "each year it spills over from its animal reservoir into humans," says Dr. Stephen Luby, professor of infectious disease at Stanford University. And when humans are infected it can be transmitted from person-to-person.
But the virus is not as transmissible as some other viruses. "There are occasional Nipah superspreaders who infect a lot of people," says Luby. "But the average transmission rate is less than one person per infection.
"However, each time a person is infected, the virus is in an environment that selects for human adaptation and transmissibility. The risk is that a new strain that is more efficiently transmitted person-to-person could generate a devastating outbreak. Indeed, since 70% of people who are infected with Nipah virus die, such a strain could represent the worst pandemic humanity has ever faced."
That's why, he says, it's important to "continue to invest in strategies to reduce the risk of spillover and to develop countermeasures across a range of high-risk pathogens."
Still a mysterious virus
Following the boy's death, public health authorities swung into action, contact tracing friends, family and health workers. They identified and isolated 251 people, including 30 close family members. Eleven samples from those in close contact with the boy were sent for testing, and on Aug. 8; they were negative. But how this child contracted Nipah is still unclear.
"It's really difficult to establish the cause of the boy's illness," says Dr. Thekkumkara Surendran Anish, associate professor of community medicine at the Government Medical College in Thiruvananthapuram. "The infected patient was just too sick to tell us anything about what he ate or did. That's why it's all speculation."
In the two strains of Nipah encountered so far — originating in Malaysia in 1999 and later in Bangladesh — pigs and fruit bats are believed to be the intermediary hosts. "One plausible theory is that those who've been infected [in Kerala] ate food or fruit contaminated with bat saliva or excreta," says Anish.
When reports emerged that the boy could have possibly contracted Nipah from eating the rambutan — a tropical fruit with thick red spines resembling lychee that grew around his home — sales of the fruit plunged in Kerala. But the fear that the fruit is the cause of the disease is pure speculation and without evidence, experts say.
By contrast, information about the route of virus' spread has been established in prior outbreaks. In strains of Nipah originating in Malaysia in 1999 and later in Bangladesh, pigs and fruit bats are believed to be the intermediary hosts, says Anish.
"We have a very clear understanding of how Nipah virus moves from fruit bats into people," says Luby. "Bats are attracted to raw date palm sap that is harvested during the wintertime. When people drink raw date palm sap that has been contaminated by bats, they are at risk of contracting Nipah." The World Health Organization calls the drink a "likely source" of outbreaks in humans in India and Bangladesh.
Survival rates are low
While it is possible to recover, the virus has a high fatality rate.
In 2018, when Nipah emerged for the first time in Kerala, only two of the 19 infected people survived. When it was detected again in 2019, a 23-year-old man was infected, but swift isolation ensured the virus did not spread to others in his community. The patient survived.
"[With] COVID, you are most infectious before the symptoms set in," says Anish. "Once they do, your ability to infect other people wanes. But that's not the case with Nipah. When the symptoms set in, you start spreading the virus." In areas more prone to Nipah infections (Bangladesh, Malaysia, India, and Singapore) being aware of this can help, he says.
After the current case was identified, COVID precautions have helped control the spread of Nipah in Kerala, says Dr. K Puthiyaveettil Aravindan, a former professor of pathology at the Government Kozhikode Medical College. "Hospital workers were already kitted out in full protective equipment. People were masked." Since the virus is spread from human-to-human through bodily fluids, physical distancing and masking helped.
The virus is not, however, as transmissible as some other viruses. "There are occasional Nipah superspreaders who infect a lot of people," says Luby. "But the average transmission rate is less than one person per infection."
Hopes for treatment and a vaccine
With all the concerns about Nipah, efforts to develop a vaccine are ongoing. "There are several promising Nipah virus [vaccine] candidates that have demonstrated high efficacy in animals," says Luby. In addition, CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, is supporting human trials of multiple vaccine candidates.
One study on vaccines, a pre-print, focused on the effectiveness of ChAdOx1 — a multipurpose vaccine vector which can be customized to carry DNA from a wide variety of pathogens. In a trial on African green monkeys, it proved effective when tailored against the Nipah virus.
While the vaccine is still in clinical trials, there's also a non-patented drug called M 102.4 developed by Christopher C. Broder, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. It's a monoclonal antibody that can attach to proteins in a virus and render it ineffective.
"Suppose you get a massive dose of a virus in your body. It's a matter of time before the pathological process begins and it damages your cells," says Anish. "You don't have time to depend on the immune reaction generated by a vaccine at that point. In this narrow window [before you develop symptoms], you can use an agent that can neutralize the virus."
During Kerala's 2018 outbreak, M 102.4 was flown in from Queensland, Australia for use on an emergency basis. At the time, it had not been tested on humans. Since then, initial tests in humans have been successful. In a study published by The Lancet, Phase I clinical trials in humans have shown the drug can neutralize Nipah.
In case of any major outbreak, health authorities in Kerala and elsewhere now can use the antibody to get it under control, says Aravindan.
A virus on the move
It's likely that other Indian states may be affected, too. "Kerala can't be the only hot spot" says Aravindan. "It's possible that the health system in other states may not be catching these infections at all."
He also has concerns about future spread. Genetic changes in the virus are likely, making hosts out of new species of bats and making the virus more transmissible among humans, he says. He adds that Nipah could emerge as a global problem similar to COVID due to international trade, global travel and climate change that causes bats to seek new habitats.
For those reasons, he says, it's imperative "to analyze which species [of bats] could be infected, the places they're located" and whether there might be additional intermediary host animals.
For now, the Nipah virus scare in Kerala seems to be under control. But "as long as there's a lot we don't know, the possibility of an epidemic can't be ruled out," Anish says.
A kayaker fishes in Lake Oroville as water levels remain low due to continuing drought conditions in Oroville, California. (photo: Ethan Swope/AP)
A new report, released Thursday from nonprofit think tank Next 10 and researchers at the Pacific Institute, estimates that if California’s water demand and use stay the same, population growth means that urban water demand could increase 24% by 2035. That, in turn, could drive up water-related electricity use by 21% over that same time period, with an accompanying 25% increase in natural gas use.
Keeping water flowing and available around a state as big as California takes a lot of energy. California’s State Water Project, the state storage and delivery system, is the single largest consumer of electricity in the state. Previous studies have estimated that all the systems designed to deliver and treat water for the state’s population account for a whopping 20% of California’s electricity use each year. The system requires 88 billion gallons of diesel each year, with a large chunk devoted to groundwater pumping. Hot water heaters also burn a third of the state’s natural gas that’s not fed into power plants.
“In California, we have a great aqueduct system of moving water, and you need a lot of pumps to move the water,” said Noel Perry, the founder of Next 10. “It’s very mechanical. In order to move it, you need electricity to power these machines and pumps to move the water. Then, every house has a way of heating water, and most of the ways in which it’s heated is natural gas. Then, with things like wastewater treatment plants, you need to move the water into the plant, process the water, and move it out. That all takes electricity to perform those processes.”
Not all water use is created equal. While agriculture takes up a lot of actual water resources in California, urban indoor water use is much more energy-intensive. That makes sense: People using water in their homes need it cleaned, heated, treated, and disposed of. Farmers and ranchers have, in recent years, been forced to pump more as groundwater levels decline—which uses up electricity—but urban water use is still twice as energy-intensive as agricultural use, the report found.
Some solutions are being developed and popularized to create new water sources for urban populations, like desalination and treating used water. In terms of energy use, these options are better than transporting water long distances, the report said, but they’re still more energy-intensive than drawing from a well-managed reservoir that can be better maintained with efficiency measures.
Making small improvements in how much water homes in California flush down the toilet, for instance, may seem like small potatoes. But wastewater treatment alone currently uses up about 1% of U.S. electricity. Reducing the amount of water treated may seem small in the grand scheme of the climate crisis, but every ton of carbon not emitted counts.
And fortunately, there’s a lot of room for improvement with California’s water system. Implementing widespread conservation and efficiency efforts, the report said, could reduce water-related electricity usage 19% by 2035, as well as decrease natural gas usage by 16%. That would cut greenhouse emissions by 41%, putting the state closer to meeting its climate goals. Some of the top recommendations include electrifying water heaters to move entirely off natural gas and creating more energy-efficient pumps for groundwater. There are even nifty suggestions for capturing gas from waste decomposition and then using that gas to power wastewater treatment.
But there’s also the simple math of water conservation: Using less water overall means using less electricity to move it around and deliver it. Perry ticked off some common-sense practices and reforms that can lower water’s carbon footprint in people’s homes, like planting native, less-water-intensive plants in yards and using more energy-efficient appliances that take less water to do the same job. These same reforms are often touted as necessary to make sure there’s more water for everyone in the future. Climate change is exacerbating the megadrought hitting the West, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued last month found that climate change is making serious droughts much more common. When it comes to making water make sense in the West, it’s clear that energy and conservation can go hand-in-hand.
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