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Gen. Mark Milley. (photo: Caroline Brehman/Reuters)
Woodward and Costa write that Milley, deeply shaken by the assault, 'was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.'
Milley worried that Trump could 'go rogue,' the authors write.
"You never know what a president's trigger point is," Milley told his senior staff, according to the book.
In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon's war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.
"No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I'm part of that procedure," Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.
"Got it?" Milley asked, according to the book.
"Yes, sir."
'Milley considered it an oath,' the authors write.
"Peril" is based on more than 200 interviews with firsthand participants and witnesses, and it paints a chilling picture of Trump's final days in office. The book, Woodward's third on the Trump presidency, recounts behind-the-scenes moments of a commander in chief unhinged and explosive, yelling at senior advisers and aides as he desperately sought to cling to power.
It also includes exclusive reporting on the events leading up to January 6 and Trump's reaction to the insurrection, as well as newly revealed details about Trump's January 5 Oval Office showdown with his vice president, Mike Pence.
Woodward and Costa obtained documents, calendars, diaries, emails, meeting notes, transcripts and other records.
The book also examines Joe Biden's decision to run for office again; the first six months of his presidency; why he pushed so hard to get out of Afghanistan; and how he really feels about Trump. CNN obtained a copy of "Peril" ahead of its release on September 21.
'You know he's crazy'
Milley's fear was based on his own observations of Trump's erratic behavior. His concern was magnified by the events of January 6 and the 'extraordinary risk' the situation posed to US national security, the authors write. Milley had already had two back-channel phone calls with China's top general, who was on high alert over the chaos in the US.
Then Milley received a blunt phone call from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to the book. Woodward and Costa exclusively obtained a transcript of the call, during which Milley tried to reassure Pelosi that the nuclear weapons were safe.
Pelosi pushed back.
"What I'm saying to you is that if they couldn't even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?"
Pelosi continued, "You know he's crazy. He's been crazy for a long time."
According to Woodward and Costa, Milley responded, "Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything."
After the call, Milley decided he had to act. He told his top service chiefs to watch everything "all the time." He called the director of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone, and told him, "Needles up ... keep watching, scan." And he told then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, "Aggressively watch everything, 360."
The authors write, 'Milley was overseeing the mobilization of America's national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world.'
Woodward and Costa also write that 'some might contend that Milley had overstepped his authority and taken extraordinary power for himself,' but he believed his actions were 'a good faith precaution to ensure there was no historic rupture in the international order, no accidental war with China or others, and no use of nuclear weapons.'
Trump going rogue
Milley's fear that Trump could do something unpredictable came from experience. Right after Trump lost the election, Milley discovered the President had signed a military order to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021, before he left the White House.
The memo had been secretly drafted by two Trump loyalists. No one on the national security team knew about it, according to the book. The memo was eventually nullified, but Milley could not forget that Trump had done an end run around his top military advisers.
Woodward and Costa write that after January 6, Milley 'felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump and believed it was his job as the senior military officer to think the unthinkable and take any and all necessary precautions.'
Milley called it the 'absolute darkest moment of theoretical possibility,' the authors write.
"Peril" is one of several books released this year that have documented the tumultuous final days of Trump's presidency. In "I Alone Can Fix It," Washington Post reporters Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig detailed how Milley discussed a plan with the Joint Chiefs to resist potential illegal orders from Trump amid fears that he or his allies might attempt a coup.
'Wag the Dog'
Woodward and Costa write that top national security officials were worried Trump might pull a "Wag the Dog" -- provoking a conflict domestically or abroad to distract from his crushing election loss.
When Trump refused to concede in November 2020, Haspel warned Milley, "We are on the way to a right-wing coup. The whole thing is insanity. He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum." Haspel also worried that Trump would try to attack Iran.
"This is a highly dangerous situation. We are going to lash out for his ego?" she asked Milley, according to the book.
Even some of Trump's most loyal advisers privately expressed concern after the election. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Milley that Trump was "in a very dark place right now."
Milley had just one goal: ensuring a peaceful transfer of power on January 20. As he told Pompeo, "We've got a plane with four engines and three of them are out. We've got no landing gear. But we're going to land this plane and we're going to land it safely."
'We're going to bury Biden on January 6th'
"Peril" offers a behind-the-scenes account of Trump's refusal to concede the election and how those around him tried -- and failed -- to contain his desperation.
On November 4, the day after the election, Trump seemed privately ready to acknowledge defeat, asking adviser Kellyanne Conway, "How the hell did we lose the vote to Joe Biden?" But after making phone calls to loyalists, including Rudy Giuliani, Trump embraced the false and damaging conspiracy theories of election fraud.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump took a light touch, the authors write, and Kushner told aides he did not want to be the point person for an intervention. Then-Attorney General William Barr tried to talk sense into Trump, telling him the claims of fraud were bogus. "The problem is this stuff about the voting machines is just bullshit," Barr said, according to the book.
"Your team is a bunch of clowns," he told Trump.
According to the book, a key figure from Trump's earliest days as president reemerged: former White House adviser Steve Bannon. The authors write that Bannon, who had been indicted in April 2020 and later pardoned by Trump, played a critical role in the events leading up to January 6.
On December 30, Bannon convinced Trump to come back to the White House from Mar-a-Lago to prepare for the events of January 6, the date Congress would certify the election results.
"You've got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today," Bannon told Trump, according to the book. "You've got to call Pence off the fucking ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis."
The authors write that Bannon told Trump that January 6 was "the moment for reckoning."
"People are going to go, 'What the fuck is going on here?' " Bannon believed. "We're going to bury Biden on January 6th, fucking bury him," Bannon said.
Trump to Pence: 'I don't want to be your friend anymore'
"Peril" also describes the tense encounter in the Oval Office on January 5 when Trump pressured Pence to overturn the results of the election. While the showdown went on inside, the two men could hear MAGA supporters cheering and chanting outside near Pennsylvania Avenue.
"If these people say you had the power, wouldn't you want to?" Trump asked.
"I wouldn't want any one person to have that authority," Pence said.
"But wouldn't it be almost cool to have that power?" Trump asked, according to Woodward and Costa.
"No," Pence said. He went on, "I've done everything I could and then some to find a way around this. It's simply not possible."
When Pence did not budge, Trump turned on him.
"No, no, no!" Trump shouted, according to the authors. "You don't understand, Mike. You can do this. I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this."
Trump called Pence again the morning of January 6. "If you don't do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago," Trump said, according to the authors. "You're going to wimp out," he said, his anger visible to others in the office.
Even though Pence stood up to Trump in the end, "Peril" reveals that after four years of abject loyalty, he struggled with the decision. Woodward and Costa write that Pence reached out to Dan Quayle, who had been the vice president to George H.W. Bush, seeking his advice.
Over and over, Pence asked if there was anything he could do.
"Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away," Quayle told him.
Pence pressed again.
"You don't know the position I'm in," he said, according to the authors.
"I do know the position you're in," Quayle responded. "I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That's all you do. You have no power."
'You really should do a tweet'
According to the authors, Trump ignored repeated requests by both staff and his daughter Ivanka Trump to call off the rioters at the Capitol on January 6.
In one episode, retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served as Pence's national security adviser, was in the White House with Trump while he watched the insurrection unfold on television.
Kellogg urged Trump to act.
"You really should do a tweet," Kellogg said, according to the authors. "You need to get a tweet out real quick, help control the crowd up there. This is out of control. They're not going to be able to control this. Sir, they're not prepared for it. Once a mob starts turning like that, you've lost it."
"Yeah," Trump said. The authors write, 'Trump blinked and kept watching television.'
Ivanka Trump also repeatedly tried to intervene, talking to her father three times. "Let this thing go," she told him. "Let it go," she said, according to the book.
Rage 2.0
Woodward's previous book on Trump was called "Rage," but "Peril," filled with expletive-laced shouting matches, takes the rage up a notch.
Top officials told the authors that Trump's outbursts reminded them of "Full Metal Jacket" at times and "Doctor Strangelove" at others.
In June 2020, after Black Lives Matter protests near the White House, Trump lit into then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had just announced at a news conference that he opposed invoking the Insurrection Act in response to the protests.
"You took away my authority!" Trump screamed at Esper in the Oval Office. "You're not the president! I'm the goddamn president."
But Trump wasn't done, according to the book, turning to the rest of his team in the room. "You're all fucked up," he yelled. "Everybody. You're all fucked. Every one of you is fucked up!"
In the aftermath of the election, Trump's rage was directed at Barr for daring to even mention the incoming Biden administration.
"First part of the Biden administration!" Trump shouted, according to the authors. Trump was so mad, Barr thought, 'if a human being can have flames come out of his ears, this was it,' Woodward and Costa write.
The book also reveals that Trump is still angry with Republicans who blamed him for the insurrection, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
"This guy called me every single day, pretended to be my best friend, and then, he fucked me. He's not a good guy," Trump said, according to the book.
While McCarthy has walked back his initial comments after the insurrection, Trump is quoted as dismissing McCarthy's attempts to get back into his good graces.
"Kevin came down to kiss my ass and wants my help to win the House back," Trump said, according to the authors.
The book ends with Trump allies speculating about his plans for 2024. Privately, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is quoted as saying, "if he wants to run, then he's going to have to deal with his personality problems ... we've got a very damaged team captain."
But in a conversation with Trump directly, Graham was much more optimistic.
"You've been written off as dead because of January the 6th. The conventional wisdom is that the Republican Party, under your leadership, has collapsed," Graham told Trump, according to the book. Graham continued, telling Trump that if "you came back to take the White House, it would be the biggest comeback in American history."
In July, Trump's former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who had been demoted and then stepped aside from the campaign in September 2020, asked the question.
"Sir, are you going to run?"
"I'm thinking about it ... I'm really strongly thinking about running," Trump said, according to the book.
"He had an army. An army for Trump. He wants that back," Parscale later told others. "I don't think he sees it as a comeback. He sees it as vengeance."
A protest outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin on May 29. (photo: Sergio Flores/Getty Images)
S.B. 8 isn’t the only frightening law coming out of the state.
It’s hardly a coincidence that these two legislative assaults came together. S.B. 1 was being passed as S.B. 8 was going into effect. Texas Republicans are acutely aware that as their numbers contract demographically, they can’t continue to rule over racial and ethnic minorities, or pass unpopular laws like S.B. 8, unless those minorities are systematically discouraged from voting. S.B. 1 helps laws like S.B. 8—laws that are wildly out of sync with public opinion and polling—to exist.
S.B. 1 and S.B. 8 not only are symbiotic, but they also share some frightening symbolic similarities. Both confer some of the state’s enforcement and police powers upon random citizens seeking to target minorities. S.B. 8 does so by offering $10,000 (at a minimum) bounties to anyone willing to prosecute those who help women obtain an abortion, and S.B. 1 does so by practically ensuring the harassment and intimidation of voters and ballot counters in order to combat nonexistent voter fraud. If you thought the 2020 election was acrimonious, Texas and the states that will soon fall in line behind it have bad news for you in the many Novembers to come.
The Supreme Court has been a willing accomplice in both assaults. A majority let the abortion rule stand by pretending S.B. 8’s novel jurisdictional questions could and should render Roe v. Wade moot for the time being. In that case, the majority of the court was in essence saying, “Sure, I’ll grant you that the house is ablaze, but that fire extinguisher didn’t come with instructions. Let’s table this for later.” (On Thursday, the Justice Department filed suit against Texas to enjoin the law.) As others have pointed out, it’s impossible to imagine Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett cavalierly permitting random citizens to enforce unconstitutional gun laws against their neighbors.
S.B. 1, for its part, which President Joe Biden has labeled “un-American,” is a vicious blend of some of the most oppressive and discriminatory ideas any state has dared to entertain with respect to quashing broad voting rights. It imposes stringent restrictions on absentee ballots and voting by mail. It limits the times for voting, complicates registration, and constrains other mechanisms that helped Biden secure votes in 2020. And similar to Texas’ equally regressive abortion ban, it imposes draconian penalties on those who help others vote. Perhaps the most viscerally galling provision of Texas S.B. 1 is the subsection that mandates the “free movement” of partisan poll-watchers, setting the stage for physical conflict after, say, a self-deputized patriot gets it into his head (it’ll almost certainly be a man) that someone moved a box of uncounted ballots where he didn’t think it should go and he’s going to save Democracy right here and now, dammit. The coming lunacy will rival the lunacy we saw play out in the aftermath of the 2020 election in swing-state recounts. And this time it will all be livestreamed, by statute, so we can all referee from our couches about where ballot boxes should and shouldn’t be.
It’s been widely noted that one of the cruelest aspects of S.B. 8 is that it sets its sights not on the woman seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, but on anyone who “aids and abets”—indeed, anyone who “intends” to aid and abet a pregnant person in considering options. The object here is to isolate the most vulnerable person at a vulnerable time, and to chill anyone in the vast network of potential helpers and advisers from offering guidance. The vigilantism rewarded in S.B. 1 similarly creates dire criminal consequences for those seeking to offer help to vulnerable, confused, non-English-speaking, or disabled voters. While the authoritarian aspects of rewarding vigilante self-help by well-meaning citizens who would take law enforcement into their own hands has been broadly noted, the more troubling turn here is the targeting of vulnerable citizens who simply need help. In a sense we are witnessing two sides of the same coin: empowering and emboldening those who are certain they know what the law is, and isolating and terrifying those who are uncertain and require assistance and clarification. Texas isn’t only rewarding vigilantes; it’s threatening anyone who might get in their way.
In so doing, Texas—with an assist from the Supreme Court—is also turning fundamental notions of privacy upside down. Roe, you might recall, was rooted in the idea that a pregnant woman and her physician should have the breathing room to make fundamental life decisions outside the scrum of public and political pressure. S.B. 8 all but guarantees that every aspect of a pregnant person’s life, from last menstrual period to private consultations with counselors, is on public display. In a paradoxical way, S.B. 8 says that one is entitled to medical privacy and bodily autonomy in all matters except reproduction, and that these choices are to be aired in public and litigated by anyone and everyone. S.B. 1 similarly inserts anyone who calls himself a poll watcher into a private act of voting; it asks that voters run the gantlet of neighbors and activists, in order to be seen and heard at the ballot box.
On Jan. 6, a marauding legion of Trump supporters formed an ad hoc committee of private attorneys general and violently attempted to overturn the United States election. Rather than viewing that episode as a teachable moment about the particular dangers of empowering inchoate political rage, Republicans in Texas and elsewhere are placating that same angry beast as if that dark day was a negotiation opening. “Maybe you took it a bit too far that time, but you were basically right” is the message conveyed, in essence.
The net result of arming anti-abortion activists with the legal standing to target the most vulnerable among us may not result in actual violence, given that abortion providers in Texas promptly shut down or stopped offering services at six weeks, which was always the point of the law. But the threat underpinning the legalized self-help and vigilantism couldn’t be more clearly implied. That threat was daunting enough to end lawful abortion in Texas overnight. And it is the same threat that is now being wielded over access to the ballot box. We’re all going to vote this November and in the foreseeable Novembers that follow, but we now know that many voters will do so feeling they have targets painted on their backs, just like they’re on the backs of vulnerable women and those who offer them assistance.
Protesters advocate for a path to citizenship for DACA recipients on August 17, 2021, in New York City. (photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images)
Democrats are pushing to include immigration reform in an upcoming reconciliation measure.
Democrats hope the parliamentarian will allow a pathway to permanent residence to stay in the bill, giving Democrats a chance to achieve a longtime priority without being blocked by the filibuster.
Whether the Democrats’ strategy will fly depends on a woman whose name rarely makes headlines: Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, who interprets the rules of the upper chamber. MacDonough’s decision remains unknown following September 10’s meetings, and she hasn’t indicated when she will issue her ruling, which itself could have major implications.
If MacDonough signs off on the immigration provisions, which must have a “more than incidental” impact on the federal budget to make the cut, several million undocumented immigrants could be given the opportunity to establish legal residence in the US, a necessary step on the pathway to citizenship.
According to NBC, Democrats on Friday argued that the immigration deal is germane to the budget since it would require $139.6 billion in additional spending on Medicare, Medicaid, refundable tax credits, and other federal benefits over the next 10 years.
If MacDonough deems the immigration measure extraneous to the budget bill, however, it could stymie Democrats’ plans for immigration reform. But that’s not a given: Though it is rarely done, Democrats could overrule MacDonough’s formal opinion with a simple Senate majority and include immigration reform in the budget bill anyway.
If they take that route, the decision then falls to Vice President Kamala Harris. As Vox’s Dylan Scott pointed out in January, Harris is also president of the Senate and has ultimate authority over its proceedings.
But, Scott noted, “The vice president hasn’t overruled a parliamentarian since 1975, when Nelson Rockefeller pushed through a change to the Senate filibuster rules against the advice of the parliamentarian.”
Democrats could also potentially fire MacDonough, as Republicans did in 2001 after then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott reportedly disagreed with parliamentarian Robert Dove’s decision limiting Senate Republicans to one reconciliation process per year.
In February, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) called for MacDonough to be replaced after she ruled against including a minimum-wage hike in the Covid-19 relief package.
While Senate Democrats promised to continue pushing for a $15 federal minimum wage, they ultimately complied with MacDonough’s ruling and dropped that provision from the legislation.
If MacDonough decides the immigration reform legislation isn’t relevant to the upcoming reconciliation package and Democrats don’t force the issue, it could be a death knell for immigration reform’s chances in a 50-50 Senate.
A Senate rule from the ’80s could determine the fate of immigration reform
The Senate parliamentarian’s involvement in the budget reconciliation process stems from something called the Byrd rule. Named for former Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the rule limits what can be included in reconciliation packages.
As Scott explained earlier this year:
Byrd proposed and the Senate codified constraints on what can be passed through budget reconciliation, to make sure the process was actually used for matters affecting the federal budget. Those constraints are now colloquially called the Byrd Rule.
Under the rule, reconciliation bills can’t change Social Security. They can’t be projected to increase the federal deficit after 10 years. They must affect federal spending or revenue — and their effect on spending or revenue must be “more than incidental” to their policy impact.
While the Budget Act of 1974 does include criteria for determining what counts as an extraneous measure, whether a proposal meets those requirements is still open to interpretation by the presiding officer.
On immigration, Republicans argue that the legislation Democrats have put forth isn’t strictly related to the budget; Democrats say that it is a budgetary concern, since immigration affects matters such as benefits, spending, and the economy.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee, tweeted his criticism of the Democrat’s strategy on Friday, saying they “persist in pursuing partisan bills rather than bipartisan immigration reform.”
Despite reconciliation’s limits, however, the strategy has clear advantages in a polarized Senate — unlike a standalone immigration reform bill, the budget reconciliation process isn’t subject to the filibuster, and measures can pass with only a simple majority.
Even if MacDonough signs off on immigration provisions in the bill, the broader measure still faces a potentially rocky future in the Senate. While he hasn’t taken issue with immigration specifically, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a frequent thorn in the side of progressive Democrats, told CNN on Sunday that he would not support a $3.5 trillion reconciliation measure. Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) has also signaled that she would oppose that level of spending.
Draft legislation for the reconciliation bill is due Wednesday, ahead of a September 27 deadline to vote on a separate, bipartisan infrastructure bill.
On Sunday, Manchin accused his colleagues of holding the infrastructure bill hostage to the reconciliation package in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Senate Budget Committee chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT), however, told Stephanopoulos that both bills are urgently needed.
“I happen to think that Joe Manchin is right, physical infrastructure is terribly important,” Sanders said. “But I happen to think that the needs of the human beings of our country, working families, the children, the elderly, the poor are even more important, and we can and must do both.”
In an evenly split Senate, Democrats would need every member of their caucus to support the package for it to pass, with Harris as the tie-breaking vote in her role as Senate president.
Biden has repeatedly called for a path to citizenship
If Democrats succeed in passing immigration legislation as part of the reconciliation package, it will be a major achievement for the party. Biden and congressional Democrats have previously proposed a pathway to citizenship as a standalone bill, and a July court decision declaring the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA, unlawful also raises the stakes of the issue.
In February 2021, shortly after Biden took office, he sent his US Citizenship Act of 2021 to Congress for consideration. The bill proposes an eight-year process to grant US citizenship to young people brought to this country by their parents before January 1, 2021, as well as people in the US under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a designation that safeguards people fleeing for humanitarian reasons from countries such as Haiti, Myanmar, and Syria. Agricultural workers and other essential workers would be subject to the legislation, too.
All told, according to Vox’s Nicole Narea, the bill offers a comprehensive plan for the approximately 10.5 million undocumented immigrants currently in the US to become citizens:
Initially, immigrants would be able to obtain a work permit and travel abroad with the assurance that they would be permitted to reenter the US. After five years, they could apply for a green card if they pass background checks and pay taxes. Immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and Temporary Protected Status, as well as farmworkers, would be able to apply for green cards immediately, however.
The legislation also makes room for addressing issues in immigrants’ home countries, like violence and dire economic problems, which help drive immigration to the US from Central America.
Immigration reforms included in the reconciliation bill could be narrower, according to the Hill, with a focus on allowing immigrants to apply for legal permanent residence — a green card — but no direct mention of citizenship.
Still, the measure would extend legal status to four categories of noncitizens, according to the New York Times: DREAMers, TPS recipients, almost 1 million farmworkers, and millions more considered to be “essential workers.”
There’s particular urgency when it comes to protecting DREAMers. Though the program has acted as a shield for many young immigrants since it was established in 2012, allowing them to work, pursue higher education, and sometimes — depending on where they live — access benefits such as in-state college tuition and state-subsidized health insurance, its future is uncertain.
Specifically, DACA is once again in jeopardy after a federal judge in Texas ruled it unconstitutional in July, freezing the program’s ability to accept new applicants. The Department of Justice filed an appeal in that case on Friday.
Now, with the Biden administration’s DACA appeal headed to the deeply conservative Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals and hundreds of thousands of DREAMers in limbo, lawmakers say there is more urgency than ever to passing immigration reform.
“If we don’t move, there’s a very real chance these people will be subject to deportation,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told the New York Times.
Afghanistan. (photo: Getty Images)
TomDispatch began with the Afghan War — with a sense I had from its earliest moments that it was a misbegotten venture of the first order. Here, for instance, is a comment I wrote about that disaster in December 2002, a little over a year after the U.S. began bombing and then invaded that country:
“This week, two wounded American soldiers and a dead one brought some modest attention to the American situation in Afghanistan. [The Toronto Sun‘s Eric] Margolis reminds us that the Soviets, too, were initially triumphant in Afghanistan, installed a puppet government, declared the liberation of Afghan women, and churned out similar propaganda about their good deeds. Where the analogy breaks down, of course, is that there is no other superpower left to fund and arm a resistance movement against an American Afghanistan. Still, we declared victory awfully early and didn’t go home. It’s likely to prove a dangerous combination. (The word to watch for in the American press is ‘quagmire.’ When you see that and Afghanistan appearing in the same articles, you’ll know we know we’re in trouble.)”
Unfortunately, when it came to the American media, that Vietnam-era word never made a serious appearance, even as the Afghan War stretched on, year after year, ever more quagmirishly. In a sense, on a planet without another superpower, America was left to play the roles of both the Soviet Union during its disastrous war of the 1980s in Afghanistan and of the United States in those same years when it put such effort into creating a crew of extreme Islamist fighters to take the Russians down. In other words, in a world of one, all the imperial roles were ours and it couldn’t be clearer now that we did indeed take ourselves down in a fashion that, in its final moments at Kabul’s airport, proved all too desperately dramatic.
Today, TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon considers just what lessons Washington might now draw (but undoubtedly won’t) from those endless decades of involvement in Afghanistan. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Be Careful What You Wish For
The True Lessons of the Afghan War
Not surprisingly, the entire spectacle has been tiresome and unproductive. Better to devote time and energy to distilling the Afghan war’s larger lessons.
Here are four worth considering.
Lesson One: When You Make Policy, Give Serious Thought to Possible Unintended Consequences
The architects of American policy toward Afghanistan since the late 1970s bear responsibility for the disasters that occurred there because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look beyond their noses. As a result, their policies backfired with drastic consequences. Some historical scene-setting is required to understand just why and how.
Let’s start in another country and another time. Consider the December 1979 decision of the leadership of the Soviet Union to send in the Red Army to save the ruling Marxist and pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Having seized control of that country the previous year, the PDPA was soon pleading for help. By centralizing its power in the Afghan capital, Kabul (never a good way to govern that land), and seeking to modernize society at breakneck speed — through, among other things, promoting the education and advancement of women — it had provoked an Islamic insurgency that spread rapidly. Once Soviet troops joined the fray, the United States, assisted by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and even China, would start funding, arming, and training the mujahedeen, a collection of Islamist groups committed to waging jihad there.
The decision to arm them set the stage for much of what happened in Afghanistan ever since, especially because Washington gave Pakistan carte blanche to decide which of the jihadist groups would be armed, leaving that country’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Agency to call the shots. The ISI favored the most radical mujahedeen groups, calculating that an Islamist-ruled Afghanistan would provide Pakistan with “strategic depth” by ending India’s influence there.
India did indeed have close ties with the PDPA, as well as the previous government of Mohammed Daoud, who had overthrown King Zahir Shah, his cousin, in 1973. Pakistan’s Islamist parties, especially the Jama’at-i-Islami, which had been proselytizing among the millions of Afghan refugees then in Pakistan, along with the most fundamentalist of the exiled Afghan Islamist groups, also helped recruit fighters for the war against the Soviet troops.
From 1980 until 1989, when the defeated Red Army finally departed from Afghanistan, Washington’s foreign policy crew focused in a single-minded fashion on expelling them by arming those anti-Soviet insurgents. One rationale for this was a ludicrous theory that the Soviet move into Afghanistan was an initial step toward Moscow’s ultimate goal: conquering the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The spinners of this apocalyptic fantasy, notably President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, seemed not to have even bothered to peruse a map of the terrain between Afghanistan and the Gulf. It would have shown that among the obstacles awaiting Russian forces headed there was the 900-mile-long, 14,000-foot-high Zagros mountain range.
Enmeshed in a Cold War-driven frenzy and eager to stick it to the Soviets, Brzezinski and others of like mind gave no thought to a critical question: What would happen if the Soviets were finally expelled and the mujahedeen gained control of Afghanistan? That lapse in judgment and lack of foresight was just the beginning of what proved to be a chain of mistakes.
Though the PDPA government outlasted the Red Army’s retreat, the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 proved a death sentence for its Afghan allies. Instead of forming a unity government, however, the mujahedeen promptly turned on one another. There ensued a vicious civil war, pitting Pashtun mujahedeen groups against their Tajik and Uzbek counterparts, with Kabul as the prize. The fighting destroyed large parts of that city’s western and southern neighborhoods, killing as many as 25,000 civilians, and forcing 500,000 of them, nearly a third of the population, to flee. So wearied were Afghans by the chaos and bloodletting that many were relieved when the Taliban, themselves former participants in the anti-Soviet jihad, emerged in 1994, established themselves in Kabul in 1996, and pledged to reestablish order.
Some of the Taliban and Taliban-allied leaders who would later make the United States’ most-wanted list had, in fact, been bankrolled by the CIA to fight the Red Army, including Jalaluddin Haqqani, founder of the now-infamous Haqqani Network, and the notoriously cruel Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami, arguably the most extreme of the mujahedeen groups, who is now negotiating with the Taliban, perhaps angling for a spot in its new government.
Osama Bin Laden’s links with Afghanistan can also be traced to the anti-Soviet war. He achieved his fame thanks to his role in that American-backed jihad and, along with other Arabs involved in it, founded al-Qaeda in 1988. Later, he decamped to Sudan, but after American officials demanded his expulsion, moved, in 1996, back to Afghanistan, a natural haven given his renown there.
Though the Taliban, unlike al-Qaeda, never had a transnational Islamist agenda, they couldn’t deny him succor — and not just because of his cachet. A main tenet of Pashtunwali, the Pashtun social code they lived by, was the duty to provide refuge (nanawati) to those seeking it. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, became increasingly perturbed by Bin Laden’s incendiary messages proclaiming it “an individual duty for every Muslim” to kill Americans, including civilians, and personally implored him to stop, but to no avail. The Taliban were stuck with him.
Now, fast forward a couple of decades. American leaders certainly didn’t create the Islamic State-Khorasan Province — aka IS-K, an affiliate of the main Islamic State — whose suicide bombers killed 170 people at Kabul airport on August 26th, 13 of them American troops. Yet IS-K and its parent body emerged partly from the ideological evolution of various extremists, including many Taliban commanders, who had fought the Soviets. Later, inspired, especially after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, to continue the jihad, they yearned for something bolder and more ambitious than the Taliban’s version, which was confined to Afghanistan.
It should hardly have required clairvoyance in the 1980s to grasp that funding an anti-Soviet Islamist insurgency might have dangerous long-term consequences. After all, the mujahedeen were hardly secretive about the sort of political system and society they envisaged for their country.
Lesson Two: Beware the Overwhelming Pride Produced by the Possession of Unrivaled Global Power
The idea that the U.S. could topple the Taliban and create a new state and society in Afghanistan was outlandish considering that country’s history. But after the Soviet Union started to wobble and eventually collapsed and the Cold War was won, Washington was giddy with optimism. Recall the paeans in those years to “the unipolar moment” and “the end of history.” We were Number One, which meant that the possibilities, including remaking entire countries, were limitless.
The response to the 9/11 attacks then wasn’t simply a matter of shock and fear. Only one person in Washington urged reflection and humility in that moment. On September 14, 2001, as Congress prepared to authorize a war against al-Qaeda and its allies (the Taliban), Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) gave a prescient speech. “I know,” she said, “this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However… let’s step back for a moment… and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.”
In the heat of that moment, in a country that had become a military power beyond compare, no one cared to consider alternative responses to the al-Qaeda attacks. Lee’s would be the lone no vote against that Authorization to Use Military Force. Afterward, she would receive hate mail, even death threats.
So confident was Washington that it rejected the Taliban’s offer to discuss surrendering Bin Laden to a third country if the U.S. stopped the bombing and provided proof of his responsibility for 9/11. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld also refused to consider the Taliban’s leadership attempts to negotiate a surrender and amnesty. The Bush administration treated the Taliban and al-Qaeda as identical and excluded the former from the December 2001 Bonn talks it had convened to form a new Afghan government. As it happened, the Taliban, never having received the memo from various eminences who pronounced it dead, soon regrouped and revved up its insurgency.
The United States then faced two choices, neither of them good. Its top officials could have decided that the government they had created in Kabul wouldn’t survive and simply withdrawn their forces. Or they could have stuck with nation-building and periodically “surged” troops into the country in hopes that a viable government and army would eventually emerge. They chose the latter. No president or senior military commander wanted to be blamed for “losing” Afghanistan or the “war on terror,” so the baton was passed from one commander to the next and one administration to another, each claiming to have made significant progress. The result: a 20-year, $2.3-trillion fiasco that ended chaotically at Kabul airport.
Lesson Three: Don’t Assume That Opponents Whose Values Don’t Fit Yours Won’t Be Supported Locally
Reporting on the Taliban’s retrograde beliefs and pitiless practices helped foster the belief that such a group, itself supposedly a Pakistani creation, could be routed because Afghans reviled it. Moreover, the bulk of the dealings American officials and senior military leaders had were with educated, urbane Afghan men and women, and that strengthened their view that the Taliban lacked legitimacy while the U.S.-backed government had growing public confidence.
Had the Taliban truly been a foreign transplant, however, they could never have kept fighting, dying, and recruiting new members for nearly two decades in opposition to a government and army backed by the world’s sole superpower. The Taliban certainly inspired fear and committed numerous acts of brutality and horror, but poor rural Pashtuns, their social base, didn’t view them as outsiders with strange beliefs and customs, but as part of the local social fabric.
Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s first supreme leader, was born in Kandahar Province and raised in Uruzgun Province. His father, Moulavi Ghulam Nabi, had been respected locally for his learning. Omar became the leader of the Hotaki tribe, part of one of the two main Pashtun tribal confederacies, the Ghilzai, which was a Taliban mainstay. He joined the war against the Soviet occupation in 1979, returning to Kandahar once it ended, where he ran a madrassa, or religious school. After the Taliban took power in 1996, though its leader, he remained in Kandahar, seldom visiting the capital.
The Kabul government and its American patrons may have inadvertently helped the Taliban’s cause. The more that ordinary Afghans experienced the raging corruption of the American-created system and the viciousness of the paramilitary forces, militias, and warlords the U.S. military relied on, the more successful the insurgents were at portraying themselves as the country’s true nationalists resisting foreign occupiers and their collaborators. Not for nothing did the Taliban liken Afghanistan’s U.S.-supported presidents to Shah Shuja, an exiled Afghan monarch the invading British placed on the throne, triggering an armed uprising that lasted from 1839 to 1842 and ended with British troops suffering a catastrophic defeat.
But who needed history? Certainly not the greatest power ever.
Lesson Four: Beware the Generals, Contractors, Consultants, and Advisers Who Eternally Issue Cheery Reports From War Zones
The managers of wars and economic projects acquire a vested interest in touting their “successes” (even when they know quite well that they’re actually failures). Generals worry about their professional reputations, nation-builders about losing lucrative government contracts.
Senior American commanders repeatedly assured the president and Congress that the Afghan army was becoming a thoroughly professional fighting force, even when they knew better. (If you doubt this, just read the scathing analysis of retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan.)
Reporter Craig Whitlock’s Afghanistan Papers — based on a trove of once-private documents as well as extensive interviews with numerous American officials — contains endless example of such happy talk. After serving 19 months leading U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen declared that the Afghan army could hold its own, adding that “this is what winning looks like.” General John Campbell, who held the same position during the last quarter of 2015, praised those troops as a “capable” and “modern, professional force.” American generals constantly talked about corners being turned.
Torrents of data were cited to tout the social and economic progress produced by American aid. It mattered not at all that reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction questioned the readiness and capabilities of the Afghan army, while uncovering information about schools and hospitals funded but never built, or built but never used, or “unsafe,” “literally crumbling,” or saddled with unsustainable operating costs. Staggering sums of American aid were also lost to systemic corruption. U.S.-funded fuel supplies were typically stolen on a “massive scale” and sold on the black market.
Afghan commanders padded payrolls with thousands of “ghost soldiers,” pocketing the cash as they often did the salaries of unpaid actual soldiers. The economic aid that American commander General David Petraeus wanted ramped up because he considered it essential to victory fueled bribe-taking by officials managing basic services. That, in turn, only added to the mistrust of the U.S.-backed government by ordinary citizens.
Have policymakers learned any lessons from the Afghan War? President Biden did declare an end to this country’s “forever wars” and its nation-building (though not to its anti-terror strategy driven by drone attacks and commando raids). Real change, however, won’t happen until the vast national security establishment and military-industrial complex nourished by the post-9/11 commitment to the war on terror, regime change, and nation building reaches a similar conclusion. And only a wild optimist could believe that likely.
Here, then, is the simplest lesson of all: no matter how powerful your country may be, your wishes are not necessarily the world’s desires and you probably understand a lot less than you think.
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.
Palestinian prisoner Mahmoud al-Ardah sits in court after he was recaptured. (photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters)
Lawyers say prisoners likely to face additional years on their initial sentences as well as harsh punitive measures.
The four prisoners appeared separately on Saturday before the Israeli Magistrate Court in Nazareth, which decided to extend their detention until September 19 to “complete the investigation”, according to a statement from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Commission of Detainees Affairs.
Israeli authorities announced the rearrest of Mahmoud Abdullah al-Ardah, 46, and Yaqoub Mahmoud Qadri, 49, on the southern outskirts of Nazareth late on Friday. Zakaria Zubeidi, 46 and Mohammad al-Ardah, 39, were arrested nearby early on Saturday, in the Palestinian village of Shibli-Umm al-Ghanam.
They were among six men – along with Ayham Nayef Kamanji, 35, and Munadel Infaat, 26, whose whereabouts remain unknown – who broke out of Israel’s Gilboa prison at dawn on September 6.
The prisoners had uncovered a point in their cell’s toilet that led to an underground cavity where they dug a tunnel that opened up a few metres beyond the prison wall.
Israeli forces launched an enormous manhunt to search for the six men, finding the first pair five days later.
At the court hearing on Saturday, according to the PA Commission, several initial charges were presented against the four: “Escape, aiding and abetting in an escape, conspiracy to commit an attack, and membership in a hostile organisation and providing services to it.”
Khaled Mahajneh, the lawyer for several of the prisoners on behalf of the Commission, said authorities refused to provide information about the “conspiring to commit an attack” allegation.
“I asked the interrogation officer in court what they’re basing this claim on, but we got no answers. They said it is a secret file. We have no idea where that claim came from, or what it has to do with the escape from prison,” he told Al Jazeera.
Trial proceedings could last at least a year, said Mahajneh. While an official indictment has not yet been presented, he said his team expects the prisoners could face an additional four to five years on their sentences based on the initial charges.
Before breaking out of the prison, four of the six prisoners had been serving life sentences, while two were being held in detention awaiting military trial. Those sentenced were arrested between 1996 and 2006 and had been convicted of carrying out attacks against Israeli military and civilian targets. Five of them are affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, while one is a senior member of the armed wing of Fatah, a Palestinian group that dominates the PA.
Under international law, a prisoner of war who escapes from prison “shall be liable only to a disciplinary punishment”, meaning that no additional years should be added to their initial sentence, even if it is a repeated attempt.
In previous incidents where Palestinian prisoners escaped from Israeli prisons and were rearrested, several faced punitive measures such as long periods in solitary confinement but did not receive longer sentences, according to lawyers.
On Saturday, a spokesman for Hamas, the Palestinian group that governs the besieged Gaza Strip, said in a televised statement it would place the six prisoners at the top of any future prisoner exchange deal with Israel.
Interrogation
The four prisoners are being held at the Jalama Interrogation Facility near Haifa and, according to their lawyers, have undergone interrogation by the Israeli intelligence services and the Lahav 443 unit of the police. The interrogation could last for up to 45 days, lawyers said, during which time they will remain at the Jalama facility.
The prisoners have been banned from accessing their lawyers under an order from the Israeli intelligence services effective until September 14 and likely to be renewed, according to Mahajneh. Due to the ban, the lawyers have not been able to speak to the prisoners and have little information about the nature of the interrogations and potential violations being carried out against the prisoners.
In similar high-profile cases that Israel has classified as security-related, detainees can be denied access to a lawyer for up to 21 days. The prisoners’ lawyers have submitted an appeal against the ban that will be heard in court on Monday.
Mahajneh said the information blackout and the lack of restrictions on interrogators is cause for worry. “I think the intelligence services will do everything – all that they have and haven’t done before – to obtain information from the prisoners.”
He said authorities are expected to be using “ugly tactics” including long interrogations that exceed 20 consecutive hours, sleep deprivation, providing them with insufficient, bad quality food, as well as physical assault and torture.
While the Israeli Supreme Court outlawed the use of torture in 1999, interrogators – particularly the intelligence services – have continued to use violence against Palestinian detainees, which courts have retroactively sanctioned.
Zubaidi, one of the prisoners, appeared in court with severe bruising on his face. According to local media, Israeli forces beat him during his arrest, and he was transferred to a hospital early on Sunday for treatment.
Punitive measures
Mahajneh said he expects Israeli prison authorities to place the re-arrested prisoners in solitary cells in the country’s southern prisons, where detention conditions are notoriously more difficult during the summer and winter seasons because of the lack of ventilation and heating.
Sahar Francis, a lawyer and director of the Ramallah-based Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, told Al Jazeera she expects the prisoners will be put in total solitary confinement, including a ban on family visits and restrictions on lawyer access.
Francis said Palestinian prisoners are usually allowed between three to four hours in the prison yard during the day but expects the prisoners will “only be allowed one hour a day in the yard, and they will be alone”.
“They won’t be allowed to mix with the other prisoners. They’ll be completely isolated from the world. They may get a visit from their lawyer or from a Red Cross representative, but that’s it,” said Francis.
She added the prisoners will have their legs shackled, and possibly their hands too, during their hour in the yard.
Khaled Zabarqa, a lawyer and human rights defender who represents Palestinian political prisoners, described solitary confinement as “the most difficult punishment that can be imposed on a prisoner”.
He told Al Jazeera he believes Israeli forces are likely to launch an arrest campaign in the coming weeks against individuals suspected of having aided the prisoners.
“They will take anyone who provided the prisoners with food, shelter, or any other help,” he said.
Climate activists commemorate the five-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement with a call to fight for 1.5 and to end the killing of environmental defenders in Quezon City, Philippines, Dec. 11, 2020. (photo: Aileen Dimatatac/Majority World/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)
That's an average of more than four people a week, and more than double the number reported in 2013, the report authors wrote. Further, they connected that rise in violence with the worsening of the climate crisis itself.
"It's the communities that are most impacted by the climate crisis who are speaking up to protect their land, their communities and our planet," Global Witness head of U.S. communications and global partnerships Julie Anne Miranda-Brobeck told EcoWatch. "It's those environmental and land defenders who are especially vulnerable to killings and attacks."
'Another Climate Metric'
The number of environmental or land defenders — defined as anyone who peacefully protests the exploitation of the natural world — killed has risen every year but one since Global Witness began issuing its reports in 2012.
Miranda-Brobeck said that increase was not the result of better reporting. In fact, because the yearly counts are based on publicly available data and subject to strict verification criteria, Global Witness believes it underestimates the true number of fatalities. Instead, 2020's record death toll "can be understood as another climate metric," the report authors wrote, along with the fact that the year tied for the hottest on record and saw the worst North Atlantic hurricane season.
"Over time as the climate crisis worsens, as corporations get more and more access to land for mining and extraction and agribusiness, killings increase," Miranda-Brobeck said.
The report authors noted that the climate crisis and the violence against defenders share three key traits:
1. Inequality: Climate change disproportionately impacts poorer countries in the Global South that have historically contributed less to its impacts. The violence meted out against environmental defenders also predominantly occurs in Global South countries. This year, only one of the killings took place in a Global North country (Canada), and the top three deadliest countries were Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines. The deadliest region was Latin America, while killings in Africa more than doubled from 7 to 18.
2. Business: The same extractive industries that perpetuate the climate crisis are also responsible for a significant amount of the killings. This year, more than a third of the attacks were linked to logging, mining, agribusiness and large hydroelectric projects. Logging was the deadliest this year, and more than 71 percent of the defenders killed this year died defending forests. In this case there is a clear connection between the forces robbing Earth of its natural carbon sinks and the violence enacted against the people who fight to preserve them.
3. Government (In)action: As with the climate crisis, governments either actively perpetuate the violence or do not do enough to curb it. This year in particular, many governments used the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to limit freedoms such as the right to protest or to a free press. In fact, 158 countries imposed new restrictions on demonstrations in 2020. This is a problem because attacks are more frequent in countries that put more restrictions on civil society.
Case Study: Guatemala
One example of how rising authoritarianism, climate change and the coronavirus pandemic interact to increase violence is in Guatemala, where a total of 13 people were killed in 2020, according to the report.
"Guatemala is counted among the countries that will be most deeply impacted by the climate crisis, and this is evident in the contradictions surrounding land disputes in the country," general coordinator of the Unit for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala (UDEFEGUA) Jorge Santos told EcoWatch.
One of the main causes of violence in the country is the attempt to impose an extractivist economic model. Outside of the capital, most of the aggressions against human rights defenders reported by UDEFEGUA in Guatemala occur in five departments rich in natural resources.
At the same time, the country is in the midst of an authoritarian turn, Santos said. The group recorded 1,055 aggressions against human rights defenders in 2020 and a further 551 in the first six months of 2021. Beyond outright killings, nearly 50 percent of the aggressions reported by UDEFEGUA this year were acts of criminalization of human rights defenders, such as illegal detentions or false accusations.
The pandemic has exacerbated this repressive trend. Santos noted that, of the 11 states of emergency declared in 2020, only one was justifiable under international standards. Further, in its 20 years of reporting, UDEFEGUA has observed that violence tends to decrease in the first few years of a new government. 2020 broke that trend.
"Last year, in the first year of [the presidency of] Alejandro Giammattei, there's an increase in aggressions and it's the largest UDEFEGUA has ever registered," Santos said.
Guatemala has something else in common with the broader trend of violence against defenders: Indigenous communities are disproportionately targeted. Worldwide, Indigenous people make up a fifth of the total population, but were subject to more than a third of the attacks reported by Global Witness between 2015 and 2019.
In Guatemala, Indigenous people were often targeted by the state as an internal enemy during the country's 36 years of civil conflict. While peace accords were finally signed in 1996, the situation has begun to regress.
"Those Indigenous people who were victims of genocide are the same people who today peacefully resist the imposition of an extractivist economic model," Santos said.
However, he said the leadership of Indigenous communities in both resisting resource extraction and promoting democracy was likely "the most hopeful phenomenon that exists in the country today."
He argued that the repression evident in Guatemala against human rights defenders was likely a response to a more organized populace willing to defend their rights and called on the government to stop the violence.
Solutions
Global Witness also issued recommendations for reversing the tide of violence against environmental defenders. These included separate action plans for the UN, governments and businesses.
The UN, Global Witness argued, should recognize the human right to a safe environment and make sure that commitments made at the next climate change conference comply with human rights obligations.
Governments should protect defenders by regulating extractive businesses and ending any attempts to criminalize protest and land defense. Further, they should hold companies located within their borders to account for anything that happens in their supply chain and fairly investigate and prosecute all acts of violence.
Businesses should enact "due diligence" procedures to prevent violence from happening anywhere in their supply chain, adopt a "zero tolerance" policy against any violence and offer reparations when it does occur.
Further, all of us can be aware of the sacrifices made by defenders and take their needs into consideration as we rebuild the global economy following the coronavirus pandemic.
"It's important that our economies and the health of our communities recovers during this pandemic," Miranda-Brobeck said, "but I think it's also really important that we recognize the threat to land and environmental activists on the ground, who not only are facing the health threats from the pandemic and the economic impacts of the pandemic, but are also facing the worst of the climate catastrophe and are just trying to defend our planet and their homes."
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