If You Live Long Enough . . .

 While we were in LA I tried to go through more boxes of stuff in the garage.  The most obvious things have been taken home, given away, donated, recycled, and tossed into the trash.  What's most left are various tools - screwdrivers, saws, gardening tools - that can be used around the house, and items that have some sentimental value.  

One day I found a valise full of condolence cards my mom received when my step-father died back in 1983.  That's almost 40 years ago!

The nearest empty  horizontal space was the hood of the car.  There were lots of cards and letters, most local, but a fair number from other parts of the US, Mexico, and Europe.  Do people get so many letters still today?  Not famous people, but just ordinary folks?  Or has email and FB and text and other media cut way back on communications via the post office?  

I went through them all and decided it was time for most of them to go on to a new life via the recycling bin.  I saved some with foreign stamps for my grandson who I'm hoping will find them of interest since there are drawers of stamps in the garage too.  

Most of the cards and letters were what you'd expect from condolence messages.  There were quite a few from people I had never hear of.  And then there was one that stood out from all the rest - from someone I'd never heard of that gave a glimpse of my step-father's life I'd never heard about:  his World War II service in the US Army.  

I don't know the exact chronology, but he was a German Jew who had escaped Hitler before the war broke out.  He had gotten his US citizenship and then (probably) was drafted into the army when WWII broke out.  What he did during the war, I had no idea.  

Until I read this letter, which I think may be of interest to others as well.  It covers, fairly briefly, the story of native German speakers, who were also fluent in English, who were used in Europe to interrogate prisoners and translate documents.  I've made it higher than normal resolution in hopes people will be able to read it.  

you should be able to enlarge by clicking on the image

I'm also putting it here in hopes that it might eventually be discovered by John Henry Richter's children and/or grandchildren because I would love to hear the tapes he talks about making in the letter.  Or maybe someone has transcribed them.  

The letter got me to do something I'd been putting off - call my mom's friend Edith.  We'd been taking her out to dinner during out annual visits to LA, but hadn't seen her since before the pandemic.  And I know why I didn't call.  She was about 95 last time we saw her.  I was afraid she was no longer with us.  But I called anyway and left a message - though it was her daughter's voice on the voice mail.  

But Edith called us back shortly and invited us for coffee.  We offered to bring the pastries.  She told us she was 95!  When we got to her house the next day we were pleasantly surprised to see how easily she was walking and carrying things from the kitchen to the dining room, and even bending down to pick things up.  And her mind was totally clear.  Only her hearing is a problem.  She was good on the phone because she has an app that turns the speech into text on the phone.  And while she did talk about the past in response to a couple of questions I had, she also asked detailed questions about the mechanics of renting out my mom's house when we aren't there (most of the time.)  I was going to video some of her WW II experiences - she got out of Austria as a 14 year old just after the Germans took over there.  She got to England where her mother was doing domestic work in a large house.  

But she said that the Austrian government had sent someone out to interview her a couple of years ago.  They are documenting the lives of Austrian Jews who fled - and perhaps some that survived but I don't know.  In fact you can hear her story here.

Best Book In Many Years: Apeirogon Part 1 - Hoopoe

 

Been reading marathon like to finish this by book club Monday night.  

It's fantastic!!  Yesterday I'd read the 500th section and at the Juneteenth Festival I was telling everyone I met about the book.  

You're going to hear more about this book in coming days here.  But for now, this its sort of a diversion.  

The cover is full of birds. And birds fly in and out  throughout.  This is not a book about birds, it's just that the author brings in all sorts of topics that are relevant to the key tale, which is about an Israeli Jew whose daughter was blown up in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem and a Palestinian Muslim whose daughter was shot in the head by Israeli police.  Both meet at a group called the Parents Circle - an organization that gets parents who have lost children in the battles between Israelis and Palestinians.  They connect and then start making presentations to groups all over the the world, But mostly in Israel and Occupied Palestine.  

It's a fictionalized account of real events.  Perhaps telling us more truths than a non-fiction account could.  It's divided into 1001 sections. Each of different lengths.  Some span half a dozen pages or more.  Others are just one line.  They number 1 -500. The next one is 1000,  The next one is 500 again and the rest go back to 1.  It's almost like a book of many, many short stories.  Sections 500 are perhaps the crux of the book,  all the bits and pieces we've already heard about in previous sections, but knitted together.  The first section 500 is the talk given by Rami, the Israeli, at the Cremisan Monastery at Beit Jala in the Occupied Territories.  The second section 500 is the talk given by Bassam, the Palestinian, the same night and in the same place.  

But I want to save 500 for later.  In this post I want to mention birds.  Particularly hoopoes.  

Section 3, on page 4 (Section 1 starts on page 3) begins 

"Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year.  They move by ancient ancestry:  hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swift's, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bush chats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns.  

It is the world's second busiest migratory superhighway:  at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels in the sky.  Long fees of honking intent.  Sole travelers skimming low over the grass."

Already in this section, though I didn't realize it at the time, it prepares us for that talk at the Cremisan Monastery in Beit Jala.  And sections like this put the present day events into perspective. The birds have been flying by here for thousands of years.  Many, many young girls have died during that time span in this place.  While the book focuses on two particular girls, Smadar and Abir, all the other girls' lives were important too and at the same time all those birds flew by totally unaware.  

And the book is like that.   Fragments of life spiral in and out of center stage, all adding rich links, illustrating the interconnection of everything.  

But this post is about hoopoes.  (Did you catch that hoopoes are the first bird mentioned in Section 3?)

We hear about them again in Sections 469 - 471.  469 is about a group of actors (including Helen Mirren) who travel through rural Algeria.

"The troupe journeyed through the desert, stopping in the evenings in the smallest and most isolated villages they could find.  They unfurled a large carpet and set up a series of corrugated boxes while one of the actors sounded out a drum call.  An audience formed, and the troupe began their performance of an adaption of The Conference of the Birds, based on an allegorical poem by Farid ud-Din Attar, using hand puppets to illustrate the story of a gathering of the world's birds trying to decide who should be their king.

In the play, each bird represents a human fault which prevents man from attaining enlightenment.  The wisest bird among the, the hoopoe, suggest that together they try to find the legendary Persian Simorgh to gain enlightenment for themselves. . . 

The village crowds reacted variously - some cheered, others laughed, while a few stayed silent . . "

[As I think of my two years in a rural Thai town, itinerant troops of actors would come through, set up their stage, and perform for folks in the evening - Thai dramas and Chinese opera perhaps the most popular.] 

470

"The Conference of the Birds was written in Persia, at the end of the twelfth century.

When the last birds - thirty of them - finally get to the home of the Simorgh, exhausted, they gaze into a lake and instead of meeting the mythical creature they've been searching for, they find only their own reflections."

471

"On the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel, the hoopoe -the loquacious, dappled, with a long beak and slicked-back tuft of hair - was chosen as the national bird.

During the vote, Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, said he was only sorry that the most Zionist of birds, the dove, had not made the final cut.  

It was, said Nurit [wife of Rami, the Israeli father] one of the most perverse lines she had heard in her life, although it was, she added, apt that the name Peres in Hebrew meant bearded vulture."

In a sense, this is a book of 1001 short stories that all intertwine.  

The hoopoe references are among the least intertwined into the story itself.  

But the hoopoe is a bird that has fascinated me since I first saw it in the Hong Kong Bird Guide I bought in 1989 when I was teaching there.  The picture from that book should help you see why I was so taken.

Those are all cool looking birds, but the hoopoe is in a class all by itself.  I never saw a hoopoe in Hong Kong.  But in 2006, after giving a paper at a conference in New Delhi, we went to see the Taj Mahal.  I couldn't imagine that after seeing pictures of the Taj all my life, that the real thing would live up to my expectations.  I was wrong.  It was amazing.  

We were sitting on a bench in front of this exquisite love letter in the form of enchanting white curves, when a strange bird caught my attention.  As I looked closer, I suddenly realized, whoa, that's a real live hoopoe.  

There were a bunch of them on the lawn.  The history of the Taj would have to wait a bit. 

So, there you have an appetizer for Apeirogon.  There will be at least one more post on this book.  But I still have about 40 pages to go.  I'll let you know if the hoopoe makes another surprise appearance at the end.  

 NOTE July 5, 2022:  I've put up a second, meatier post about Apeirogon here.

Oil, Ukraine, Flopping, And A Cameo Part For Sen.Dan Sullivan

 When you get a chance, tie up one of your oil fanatic Republican family members and/or friends and make them watch this.  It covers most of the relevant issues.  Trust me.  It's worth watching.

Thanks, George.

Bainbridge Island Supports People Of Ukraine

Sunday I joined my daughter and about 100 other folks from the island in a short procession and quiet rally for the people of Ukraine.  It was organized by the Interfaith Council.  Some pictures. 

We're about to board a plane back to Anchorage.  Looking forward to a second spring, but it could be a while.  

It's Hard Not To Focus On Ukraine - Two Good Videos

 We're all caught up in the real life drama of Ukraine, in a way relatively few people were during the impeachment hearings when Trump's phone call with Zelensky was discussed in detail.  When Trump held up Javelin missiles until Zelensky promised to dig up dirt on Biden's son.  

There is so much to say.  And so much has been said.  Really, Republicans, when are you going to figure out how you to quit Trump?  The man who calls Putin a genius.  That truly sums Trump up - it's all about winning or losing.  There's no morality involved.  If you can take it and get away with it, it's all good.  

This first video is a bit of very slick marketing.  But all I'm reading and seeing these last couple of days suggests it's the right message - of people fighting for the survival of their country.  Not to destroy it. This is February 2022, not January 6, 2021.                          

This second one is to give you a smile.  And let's hope that Zelensky is alive and well to show us what a good dancer he still is next month and next year.  

so apparently Zelenskyy won the Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars in 2006 and the tape is even better than whatever you're imagining pic.twitter.com/L1gnKD2ISr

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) February 27, 2022

1000 Years Of Joys And Sorrows - Ai Weiwei/ Japan Invades China 1937

As Russia moves into Ukraine, it seems that Ai Weiwei's description of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 seems an appropriate reading.  Not just for the people of Ukraine, but for the people
of the world.  If Putin is able to 'take' Ukraine, what's next?  And what does this foretell about future relations between Europe, Russia, and the US, not to mention China, and the rest of the world?  

In July 1937.  Ai Weiwei's father Ai Qing was a young poet who had started getting noticed.  Three months earlier, the wife had their first baby on the day the Japanese began their invasion of China.  They are trying to keep ahead of the Japanese army and have arrived at Hangzhou.  Hangzhou is a little west of Shanghai and is known for its beautiful West Lake which is now a World Heritage Site.

Ai Weiwei writes:  

"The West Lake was unchanged, hazy and indistinct.  It seemed to him that the locals were drifting through life, still clinging to an illusory notion of leisure.  The onset of war had failed to shock Hangzhou;  while the fate of the nation hung in the balance, people simply continue with their routines. 'I cannot pretend to love Hangzhou," Father would soon confess.  'Like so many cities in China, it is crammed with narrow-minded, selfish residents,  with complacent and vulgar office workers, low-level officials accustomed to currying favor, and cultural types who make a hobby of hyping things up. They commonly think of themselves as living in unparalleled happiness, as though lounging in their mother's lap.'  He would write these words at the end of the year, when news came to him that Hangzhou had fallen, after he and his family had escaped to Wuhan." (p. 51)

Sound familiar?  

Ai Qing, who had moved his family further west, was once again faced with an advancing army.  This is surely happening right now in parts of Ukraine.

"When they arrived at Jinhua Railway Station at eight o'clock in the morning, wounded soldiers, freshly evacuated from battlefield, lay strewn along the platform.  One of the soldiers, a faint gray light shining in his eyes, told Father that hospitals in the area were no longer taking in casualties.  Some had covered themselves with straw for warmth, while others threw straw in a heap and set fire to it to warm up inside dirty bedrolls.  The fight had disrupted the normal train schedule, and in the confusion it was unclear whether rail service would even continue.  Ticket sales had been halted, and if a train came in everyone simply piled in,whether they had tickets or not."(pp 51-52)

Later, he writes about poetry and democracy.  Ideas to contemplate as those in power aim to abolish truth with mistruths.  

"'Poetry today ought to be a bold experiment in the democratic spirit,' he declared, ' and the future of poetry is inseparable from the future of democratic politics.  A constitution matters even more to poets than to others, because only when the right to expression guaranteed can one give voice to the hopes of people at large, and only then is progress possible.  To suppress the voices of the people is the cruelest form of violence.'  Eighty years later, his faith in poetry's freedom's ambassador has yet to find vindication in China."

For those of you unfamiliar with Ai Weiwei, he's probably modern China's best known artist, though he's living in exile now.  Here's a short bio.

I haven't seen much of Ai Weiwei's art in person.  But I did see this tree at an exhibition of modern Chinese artists at the Louis Vuitton museum in Paris five or six years ago. The link describes it somewhat.  

The Trevor Noah interview below doesn't tell you much about his art or life, but it's worth watching as we deal with an increasingly oppressive takeover of the Republican party.   

I have to add, reading a good book is so much more satisfying that scanning Twitter or other online collections of alarmism and distraction.  

AIFF 2021: Captive and Tall Tales [Updated]

My Favorite Doc and Most Powerful Film So Far:

The film Captive is why I like film festivals.  This is not an easy film.  The journalist/film maker, Melissa Fung, is in Nigeria interviewing young girls who have been kidnapped and forced to marry Boko Haram soldiers.  She looks in on them over a couple of years as she reveals to the audience that she too has been captured and raped.  The screenshot gives a sense of the rapport that Fung has with her subject, which is part of why this is such a powerful film.  Given the stories we hear everyday about the US, we have many similar survivors.  And, given the Texas legislature, the rape statistics in the US in general, and the naked power lust of January 6,  we have many men in the U who have no empathy or understanding of women or other human beings.  And while these young women live in comparative poverty, their clothing and beauty are exquisite.  

[UPDATE Dec. 7, 2021 4:13 pm

I couldn't resist this link which showed up today.  The abduction of women is a global and local problem.]

My Favorite Feature So Far                 

Tall Tales.  Hungarian film maker Attila Szasz has had the best film at the Anchorage International Film Festival twice already.  He makes beautiful, tight, thought provoking films. This one takes place at the end of WWII.  Men have been scattered all over the war zone and wives and parents are desperate for word about their husbands and sons who haven't returned.  The main character reads the classified ads seeking information and goes to visit the desperate families and tells them what they want to hear.  But things get complicated.  He's not the only one telling Tall Tales.  The credits and the noirish color add to the that post war period feel.  

Libraries And Schools Are Targets In GOP War Against Truth

First Anchorage mayor Dave Bronson appointed a library director who didn't meet the minimum qualifications of the job description - a masters in library science and some years experience working in libraries.    When the Assembly didn't approve her, he appointed a second unqualified head librarian who isn't likely to be approved. (Or maybe they've already voted her down, there's so much nonsense going on it's hard to keep all the details straight. I can't find proof one way or the other.)

So now he's reorganizing the city through his budget which, according to Cheryl Lovegreen would  put the library into the Department of Parks and Recreation which changes the head librarian to a position that doesn't need Assembly approval. 

In an earlier post I pointed out that these actions are deliberate and that the GOP is pushing library takeovers around the country.  

I don't know how much of this Mayor Bronson consciously understands and how much he is just following the party instructions supported by the various national anti-think tanks and those organizations set up to get ideologically driven legislation passed at the state and local level.  

In the earlier post on taking over libraries, I'd found that a key goal is to purge libraries of books about race, about the history of race relations, that discuss diversity in a positive way.  It's part of the anti critical race campaign.  Mustn't allow people access to alternatives to the sacred myths of US exceptionalism.  

All of this is about lying on a pretty spectacular scale.  Lying as a form of keeping the masses ignorant, as a way to make them believe in an alternative reality.  It's how you create a cult of followers who deny what's in front of their own eyes and accept what their leader tells them.  

What's this got to do with libraries?   Lying isn't new to politics. 

"Secrecy - what diplomatically is called discretion," as well as the arcana imperil, the mysteries of government - and deception,  the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie, used as legitimate means to achieve political ends have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.

--Hannah Arendt (1971) “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers”, 

The Trump presidency took lying to a new level, at least in the US.   Journalists kept tab of how many lies he told in a day.  Twitter made it easier to track. And people are saying things like, "the lying was the point." But it's more than that.  Politicians have always lied about their opponents so they could take over their jobs.

Now it's a frontal attack on truth itself.  The constant denial of truth and the ways we evaluate and measure what is true, is intended to destroy people's confidence in education and in science.   It's an attack to take over as the arbiter of what is true.

If we look at the evolution of intentional lying in the modern United States, of well funded and scientifically based (science was used to determine the best ways to convince people, not to seek the truth) campaigns, we see things like the tobacco industry's decades long campaign to convince the US public that smoking was not bad for your health (for example here and here.) and the oil industry's campaigns denying climate change.  Both industries knew they were lying.  We see it again today with COVID.  People earn lots of money packaging and selling lies. These are just the big ones that have been exposed. There are thousands of lesser ones to get people to by 'health food' or to lose weight and on and on and on.  

But counting the lies and offering scientific evidence that 'prove' the inconsistencies are all besides the point.  The new GOP is now about obliterating truth.  By creating false realities, they can challenge science itself.  Trump may or may not believe he really won the election. (I tend to think he knows the truth, but he's also enough of a narcissist that he maybe can't imagine he didn't win.  I don't know.)  By still challenging the election, he cultivates the doubts of his supporters, and hopes to harvest their votes in the future. And to cast doubt on the legitimacy of any election he loses.

They have to lie and to eradicate any kind of objective truth because the truth does them no favors.  The US Justice system has huge flaws that favor the wealthy and the white and delivers injustice to the poor and the people of color.  But they have to maintain the facade that it is fair, at least when it punishes the poor and not-so white.  The economic system now takes from the poor and gives to the rich through systemic laws and rules that make it hard, if not dangerous, for workers to unite for better pay and better working conditions.  Their unions that fought for 40 hour weeks and vacations and overtime pay and fair grievance procedures have been gutted.  But they must maintain the fiction that if you work hard and honestly you'll do well.  

The elimination of any sort of verifiable truth gives the GOP the possibility of splitting the population and continuing to get many to vote against their own self interest.  They do this by creating an emotional self interest based on race, religion, abortion, immigration.  It's built on a quarter truth and three quarters lies. (No, I have not measured the truth ratios.  Think about this metaphorically.)

Thus They Want To Gut Libraries And Schools

So, if elimination of truth and the ability to evaluate what is true is the GOP goal, then it makes perfect sense for them to go after libraries and schools - all levels - and to go after libraries.  Because these are institutions that give average people access to the truth.  And access to alternative truths and to logic and science.  

Our governor's drastic cuts to the University of Alaska are a similar effort to destroy public universities.  I also believe that schools are prime targets of private takeovers.  But that idea distracted me from recognizing the other, larger,  goal - obfuscating truth.  

Viktor Klemperer (cousin of conductor Otto Klemperer) was a distinguished university professor and WW I veteran when Hitler came to power.  Klemperer kept a diary during WWII - I Will Bear Witness in two volumes - where, among other observations,  he kept notes on the language used by the Nazis in their speeches and in the news.  This later resulted in The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist's Notebook.

These books are careful studies of how the Nazis manipulated language to hide truths they didn't want the German people to hear and to believe the truths the Nazis wanted them to believe.  

Good lesson for citizens of the United States to learn.  

And since I brought Nazis into the discussion, I had found the GOP's embrace of White Supremacists AND their flipping this completely by crying that they are victims of Nazi like suppression of liberties (for having to wear masks, for example) pretty bizarre.  

But on reflection, it's part of obliterating any kind of objective truth.  We are Nazis and we are the victim of Nazis.  Consistency and truth broken, leaving logical thinkers sputtering in disbelief.  That is the point.  To capture truth and make it their own way to rule the world.  

Links Of Interest: Hide Your House, Russian Mercenaries, Doctors Without Borders

Some things I've run into recently that may be of interest.  

1.  How To Hide Your House On Google (and other online) maps - street view.

"With the rise of increasingly convenient features such as street-level 360º photos available on Google Maps and other competing mapping services, there’s always a risk your personal data will be captured in a publicly available photo in a way you’d rather avoid—whether than means the outside of your house or the location where you park your car.

If you face this kind of a problem, there’s a simple solution available in many cases—you can ask the mapping service to blur or remove the picture. We’ll going to show you how to do that on the most popular mapping services."

Then it gives you step-by-step instructions.  Doesn't look hard 

2.  Another story I found fascinating - from NewslinesMag. A British reporter, a fluent Russian speaker apparently, pokes around the remains of what had been a Russian mercenary post outside of Tripoli. A story about the Wagner Group.  A couple of excerpts:

"From September 2019, photographs and reports had begun to emerge of Russian mercenaries in Tripoli. They were identified as units from the so-called Wagner Group, a secretive and highly controversial organization of mercenaries that fought first in Ukraine, then in Syria, and later in Sudan, Mozambique, the Central African Republic and Libya.

"Reportedly financed by the Russian catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been sanctioned and indicted by the United States for his election interference efforts, the Wagner Group has been accused of acting as President Vladimir Putin’s shadowy expeditionary force, even though mercenaries are technically illegal in Russia. The group has also been linked to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, from whose ranks its ostensible head, Dmitry Utkin, and other rank-and-file members hail. And yet, as has often been the case with Wagner, beyond such reports and speculation over Wagner personnel’s involvement in the fighting, little detailed evidence had emerged.

"But this spring we obtained a small white Samsung tablet with a cracked screen, protected by a battered brown leather case. GNA fighters said they had recovered it from positions held by Russian fighters in Ain Zara, the area where Haitham had fought. We put it through extensive tests to ensure it didn’t contain some kind of tracking device or malware; we examined it minutely, searching for clues to its users and making sure it was the genuine article. It was."

3.  For a different view of foreigners working in poor countries, we have the group Doctors Without Borders  (MSF French acronym) which saves lives but its local staff says it also  perpetuates colonialism and racism.  I heard this riveting radio show on Reveal the other day.  Decolonize MSF is an organization trying to change how things are done.  It's troublesome.  The organization does a lot of great work around the world, providing life saving care who otherwise might die.  Yet, this radio report is really well done.  It maps out, through interviews, what structural racism and colonialism looks like.  Do go to the website with the audio.  Below is some description from that page.

"The organization, also known by its French acronym MSF, has about 63,000 people working in 88 countries. While foreign doctors parachuting into crisis zones get most of the attention, 90% of the work is done by local health workers. 

In the summer of 2020, more than 1,000 current and former staffers wrote a letter calling out institutional racism at MSF. They say MSF operates a two-tiered system that favors  foreign doctors, or expat doctors, over local health workers. 

On the eve of MSF’s 50th anniversary, reporters Mara Kardas-Nelson, Ngozi Cole and Sean Campbell talked to about 100 current and former MSF workers to investigate how deep these issues run. We meet Dr. Indira Govender, a South African doctor who in 2011 accepted what she thought was her dream job with MSF in South Africa, only to get a front-row seat to the organization’s institutional racism. Even though she’s officially the second-in-command of her project, she says it feels like a select group of European expats and White South Africans are running the show."  

We think of the doctors going from Western countries to help out in poor countries as being better than this and I'm sure many, if not most, are.  But this shows us how blatantly racist some are but also how the separate treatment of foreign doctors and native medical staff institutionalizes the separation between local staff (about 90% of the staff) from those who come to help from overseas.  

Maybe I can believe this troubling story because I've run into this sort of thing.  When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand I got pressed into helping a Thai dentist negotiate with the Israeli construction company paving the highway near the town I was teaching in.  She needed a translator and so I went along.  After it was over the Israeli negotiator offered me a job because he couldn't trust any of the Thais and was surprised that I could live alone with them.  I was shocked by his view of Thais.

And when I traveled home from Thailand I took the long route so I could visit D who was teaching in Uganda.  I'd met him while I was a student in Germany and we'd hit it off and we traveled together a bit in England where he was from.  There, he came from a modest background, didn't drive, and had dropped out of college without completing his degree to start teaching.  In Uganda he lived in this giant compound surrounded by a ten foot wall.  Inside was like a giant golf course - green grass, trees, and cute little cottages scattered all around.  D lived in one and his car sat outside it.  There was dining hall with white table cloths and napkins and there four or five course dinners served by African waiters.  D's main interactions with Africans was with his students at the elite school he taught at, maybe some African teachers (I don't remember meeting any of them), the waiters and other help in the compound where he lived.  Again I was shocked.  But as we talked it was clear that D was socialized to live separate like this.  That's how all the Brit ex-pats, or at least the ones he knew, lived.  He didn't learn any of the local languages because "everyone speaks English" in this recently independent country.  When I'd talk with Africans in the market or anywhere, they would be very reticent, and after a few minutes they'd say something like, "You aren't a resident are you?"   Coming from Thailand where we'd had to learn Thai before even getting to Thailand and living and working completely with Thais, D's situation was hard for me to believe.  This was not the kind of life he' d had back in England.  We had long talks while I was there and that continued for years via letters.  And eventually he visited Alaska and I later visited him in England.  He had some harrowing experiences there and one African he did get to meet was Idi Amin.  But that's another story - his to tell.  

But those experiences were 50 years ago!  I would have thought things had changed since then.  I'm sure they have, but not as much as one might expect.  

As someone who has contributed to Doctors Without Borders I'm forced to think about how to support the good things they do and push for change.  The program talks about a protest group within MSF - Decolonize MSF.  Maybe contributing to them would be the way to go.  

Who lost America?

 Wikipedia tells us that 

"Dawn is the largest and oldest English-language newspaper in Pakistan and the country's newspaper of record.[3]"

A Pakistani friend of mine sent me a link to this Dawn piece - Who Lost America? - today .  I don't think there is anything too startling in here for people who pay attention and have opened their minds to the views of people of different cultures.  Here's a brief bio of the author from the Middle East Institute:

Touqir Hussain is a former senior diplomat from Pakistan who has served as Ambassador to Brazil, Spain, and Japan. He also held senior positions in the Pakistani Foreign Office, including that of Additional Foreign Secretary, heading the bureaus of the Middle East and of the Americas and Europe. From 1996 to 1998, he was the Diplomatic Adviser to the Prime Minister. Additionally, he was a Senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace in 2004–2005, and subsequently has been a Research Fellow at the George Washington University and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and the University of Virginia. Currently, he is Senior Pakistan Visiting Fellow at SAIS besides teaching at Georgetown.

Here are several excerpts:

"At its heart, the loss is of democracy at home and hegemony abroad. For much of its history, American democracy has been led by elites. The system helped America’s rise as a great power but worked only when the elites were committed to public service, and the United States led the world. But much has changed. Both the domestic and international orders have been under challenge. And America has been courting failure at home and abroad. There can be no more apt expression of this failure than the shame and infamy of the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and the desperate scenes of chaos during evacuation at Kabul airport."

"The historical experience of Americans had made them self-centred and often overbearing and thus unable to understand the cultural and political substance of other societies. No wonder America failed in every war that it started, especially following the history-making changes that had taken place since the end of the Cold War, the rise of globalisation and 9/11. "

"The failing elite-led system has now merged with mass politics that is causing its own set of problems. It has enhanced the influence of money and media on politics. As money and politics began chasing each other, it gave a new opportunity and role to the mushrooming 24/7 cable television to be a broker between special interests, politics and the public. The commercially motivated media, joined by social media now, interpreted the world around people, and made choices for them, even choosing their politics. And often it did so by misinforming the public."

"America long lost the status of the indispensable power, but for all its moral failure, political dysfunction and perceived ‘decline’ it was still a consequential power. Even that America is lost now."

The whole piece is here. 

This is a man who, presumably, watched from a colony as Great Britain gave up its empire.   It's a perspective most American neither know nor understand.  

 

Maybe Vietnam Is The Wrong War For Afghanistan Comparisons

 We keep hearing that Biden has ended the US's longest war.  Technically that's true, but also technically, the Korean War isn't over.  There's never been a peace treaty.  And the US has about 28,500 troops still in Korea, some 60 years after the active shooting war is over.  

There are 80,000 US troops stationed in Japan.  

And 35,000 more in Germany.

What's different about Germany, Japan, and Korea from Vietnam and Afghanistan?  First Germany and Japan.  Both were soundly defeated in WWII.  Germany was divided by the Soviet Union, the US, France, and England.  The Soviet Union, which controlled East Germany, was seen as the biggest threat to West Germany.  

Japan was also soundly defeated and ruled by the Allied forces, though effectively headed by General Douglas MacArthur.  A democratic Constitution for Japan was created under MacArthur's leadership.  Japan's two greatest adversaries were neighboring China and the Soviet Union.  Again, the US presence served as protection for the severely battered post-WWII Japan.  

South Korea was threatened by North Korea supported by the Chinese.  The US helped keep the North Koreans and their Chinese allies from taking over South Korea.  

In all three cases, the US was seen as a military protection from outside invasion - China in Korea's case, the Soviet Union and China in Japan's case, and the Soviet Union in West Germany's case.  

In contrast, both in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the US was supporting a government that was more aligned with foreign powers.  Vietnam had recently gotten rid of the French colonial rulers.  The US came in backing the Catholic French colonial Vietnamese against the indigenous Buddhist Vietnamese.  

In Afghanistan, again, the Kabul government was aligned with the US against Afghan groups - Taliban and local tribal leaders.  It's more complicated than that, of course, but basically the Muslim nation was fighting a basically Christian outside force.  

In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, there was outside support for the North Vietnamese and the Taliban, but it was to oust was was seen as an occupying force from the West.  

So in the cases of Vietnam and Afghanistan, the US military was fighting a war, far away from home, in a country they knew little or nothing about.  They didn't speak the language and needed interpreters or locals who spoke English to communicate.  They couldn't tell their friends from their enemies.  Their opponents were fighting for their homeland and to expel the invaders.  

Perhaps this is one of the key lessons we should have learned.  We can support countries that see us as allies against their fight against a feared enemy.  We oughtn't, otherwise, be outsiders picking a side in a civil war, especially in countries we (the average US citizen and the soldiers) know little or nothing about.  

And, of course, we should not assume that what happens us in the future will be exact matches to what happened in the past.  We must be careful to choose our models carefully and to weigh various factors.  

And the world has to figure out how to protect humans from their own ruthless rulers.  It's all very thorny and no one emerges unscathed.  

Afghanistan Takes Over NPR's Morning Edition, With Brief Nod To Haiti Earthquake

Afghanistan has been a disaster waiting to happen for the last 19 years or so.  The English has to give up and leave Afghanistan and then later, so did the Russians.  

The US didn't learn from these examples, or from Vietnam.  We think of ourselves as exceptional and above history.  

Now NPR is struggling to figure out what is happening today. The line up of stories today was pretty much all Afghanistan, plus two segments on the Haitian earthquake.  It's what you'd expect of coverage in the middle of a crisis - lots of random comments, some blame game activity, and lots of opinion, most of it focused, without context, on right now..  The basic impression is disaster, failure, catastrophe.  

Of the NPR segments I heard two people who seemed, at least in part, clear headed:

• Former U.S. Ambassador To Afghanistan Comments On Developing Situation In The Country Ronald Neumann served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007   He said, in various ways, "I really don't know enough to say."  That's probably what many others should have said more.  He also said that Biden's decision to pull out was a correct decision, but the execution of that decision has been absolutely disastrous.  I think that's probably the clearest and most accurate assessment I heard.  

KEITH: The Biden administration has essentially indicated they don't see this as all their fault. You know, this was two decades in the making. The Afghan military was trained by the U.S. and equipped. And in a way, it's like President Biden does not want to own this. Do you think that that is possible?

NEUMANN: Short answer is no. The long answer is you need to distinguish between the decision to withdraw, which I didn't like but is arguably correct, and the manner of implementation, of execution of that decision, which has been an absolute disaster from beginning to end. They could have taken more time. They had no plan how to support the Afghan military that they were leaving. We built an air force that depended on contractors for maintenance and pulled the contractors. Supply system - ditto. And we profoundly shocked the Afghan army and morale by pulling out and pulling our air cover when we trained them.

[I'd note that Neumann served as the Ambassador to Afghanistan under Bush/Cheney.] 

But the US has been training the Afghan army for 20 years.  How we're getting out is, the problem, but is there a different exit available.  Neumann complains that we pulled out the contractors who maintained the equipment.  Should we have left them in there?  Many of them were highly skilled whites from around the world.  Others were low skilled laborers hired on the cheap from poor countries.  Why hadn't we trained Afghans for those positions?  Surely in 20 years we could have.  There are many highly educated Afghans.  They aren't incapable of learning those skills.  

The specific disaster he and others are speaking of is the failure to get out all the interpreters and others who helped the US.  And all the women who are in jeopardy of a Taliban patriarchal dictatorship.  But the Trump State Department and Homeland Security had been holding up those visas for years.   Biden announced, in the end of June, that he was relocating tens of thousands of Afghans out of the country.  But bureaucratic obstacles have held many of these up.  

But realistically, how many Afghan women would the US take and how long would that take?  My sense is that this was a disaster that was going to happen eventually and up to now, no president was willing to let it happen on their watch.  

If, indeed, the women of Afghanistan have the most to lose from the Taliban, maybe the US should have trained an all women Afghan army that would have fought as hard as the Taliban.  

But maybe even that wouldn't have been enough.  

The other interview that I thought made the most sense was an Army vet. Mike Jason.

• A Vet Formerly Deployed In Afghanistan Shares His Perspective On The Chaos In The Country   -  "JASON: We're all trying to process that, right? Like, 20 years - $89 billion, 300,000-some odd Afghan security forces. How is it collapsing as we watch? And so all I can write is my own little corner of the global war on terror. You know, Afghanistan - righteous anger and indignation over the 9/11 attack. And we went in with a light footprint and took the country over, like, lightning quick. And then what? What was the next step? And all of a sudden, we turn around, and two years later, we're in Iraq, and resources start flowing over there.                    And the question is, what was the strategy and policy for what the military should be doing with regard to security forces in both theaters? We didn't fight a 20-year war. We fought 20 individual wars incoherently, kind of without a policy strategic direction. So at the same time, the Afghans who are the recipients of this training, advice and equipment also know the clock is ticking and making their own calculus for their own safety and the safety of their families, while never really tackling, you know - all this cash is flowing in, the corruption, the drugs, the morale, the logistics. Why weren't we able to ever address these really problematic institutional issues?                  We voted - we, the American people - we voted for four sequential administrations that campaigned on getting out of this operation. The intent was clear. But I look back on the presidential debates over the last several elections. I mean, Afghanistan may have gotten seconds or minutes of debate. It was always in the background. But why didn't we debate it more? Why didn't we discuss it more forcefully? Why didn't somebody make the case to the American people clearly and forcefully why we should stay or go and why the sacrifice is or is not worth it?"

His take makes a lot of sense to me, as a former Peace Corps volunteer, who knows how much being able to speak to the people in their own language matters. It means you don't have to depend on interpreters, and it means you have a much better understanding of the culture and the differences between yours and theirs.  Your struggle with their language means you understand your own ignorance and appreciate when they speak your language much better than you speak theirs.

I also did research in China, using my own Hong Kong students to help me out with interpretation.  They would tell me when the official translation was not what the Chinese speaker had actually said.  They told me about unspoken cues such as when the Chinese speaker's response was a non-sequitur:   it meant, "Drop this line of questioning because I don't want to answer these questions."  My students even took advantage of my foreignness and apologized for my ignorance and sometimes were able to get answers they themselves, because of culture, would never had asked.  In other situations I had just one Hong Kong student acting as my interpreter and I could negotiate with him to ask the question a different way that sometimes gave us break throughs.  I learned a lot about the politics of translations. Interpreters are human beings with egos.  My students had to be sure they were respectful to the official interpreters and avoid making him look bad.  And my Peace Corps experiences in Thailand helped me understand that I knew nothing and which made it easier to be humble and respectful. 

I'm sure, from the fervor some US vets are showing in their efforts to get their Afghan interpreters out of the country, that many of them, if not most, had very close bonds with the interpreters.  But I also suspect there were interpreters whose motivation for being their friend was a visa to the US, while others were passing on information to the Taliban.  We all want to be liked and even knowing the culture and language, we get taken in by people who see us as a ticket to their freedom - whether that be financial, political, or professional.  

We Didn't Learn From Vietnam

The basic justification for getting into Vietnam was the Domino Theory, based on how the Soviet Union took over the countries of Eastern Europe after World War II.  The politicians and the military leaders in the 1950s and 1960s had been part of WWII and didn't want to repeat the mistake of trusting the Soviet Union.  Thus we had to hold Vietnam lest China and the Soviet Union use Vietnam as the stepping stone to take over the rest of Southeast Asia.  One domino falling after the other.  

It was the wrong model.  In Vietnam we were fighting a battle of independence from colonial masters.  The French threw in the towel, but the US stepped in to take France's place.  The US backed the Catholic (learned from their colonial conqueror) faction in the South and spent years trying to train the ARVN- the South Vietnamese army - so it could defeat the North.  In that war, we had a conventional military mentality fighting against an army that used guerrilla tactics.  The US troops never really knew who was one of our Vietnamese and who was one of theirs.  We were fighting on Vietnamese land against an enemy that wanted to rule its own country.  We were supporting the remnants of the colonial rulers.  And we had the same problems with corruption because of the massive amounts of supplies and money coming into the country.  

You'd think that the military and political leaders - again, many of whom had fought in Vietnam - would have learned from that war.  But again, we went into a country that had thrown out two world powers - first the British and then the Soviet Union.  Again, most of our soldiers knew nothing about Afghan culture or language.  Again, there was an assumption that "the greatest country in the world" knew better.  There was an assumption that modern weapons would defeat a guerrilla army.  

A couple aspects of Afghanistan today are quite different from Vietnam in 1975.

• Afghanistan has been fought with an all volunteer army and extensive use of contracted labor.  Since only those who wanted to serve (or saw the military as a way to get a job and education), the rest of the country could ignore the war.  With all 18 year old men eligible to be drafted, the anti-war movement had a much more vocal and aware support to end the war.
• In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military had more control over what battle field footage the US public saw in the evening news.  Embedding journalists with units had much different results than the way journalists and photographers were assigned in Vietnam.  (See Embedded Journalism and the Forward of The Military and the Media 1962 - 1968)
• As Kabul falls, modern technology - phone cameras and social media - mean that we're seeing civilian created content and people are talking by phone live today and putting video on social media.  For Vietnam we only saw or heard what the news media offered us.  

Finally, Jason mentioned $89 billion.  There's another way to look at this war. 

💯As @attackerman has written, the GWOT was a historic transfer of public wealth to private hands. https://t.co/YqgFW2PF1K

— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) August 14, 2021

Happiness - A Novel By Aminatta Forna - "People want choices without consequences"

Aminatta Forna's novel starts with a Wolfer killing the last pair of wolves in Greenhampton, Massachusetts  in 1834.  One of the key characters, Jean, carries on that theme by studying coyotes in upstate New York in the 21st Century as well as urban foxes in London.  But this is secondary, though related to the main theme and main character Attila. 

Attila describes his job working in crisis zones around the world.

"'I specialise in trauma, among civilian populations principally,' said Attila.  'Much of my work is as you would imagine.  Teams of us go in, some to count the dead, others to trace the living and return them to where they should be or send them somewhere else.  I work with the survivors.  My job is less to fix the damage than to catalogue the extent of it."

'What happens then?'

'After us?  More reconstruction.  The aid agencies, the people who have won the contracts to fix the roads, mend the dams, repair the bridges.'

'I meant to the victims.'

'We file our reports, they can run to thousands of pages.  Sometimes a perpetrator or two is imprisoned in The Hague.  A few of the survivors will be called as witnesses and have their moment in court.  They get to see some general or president or warlord  whose name they have heard but who they've never laid eyes on put behind bars.  They go there wanting to face the person who tortured them, but that never happens, the system doesn't work like that.  The lawyers argue about chains of command, utmost responsibility.  Those words don't mean anything to the woman whose daughter was taken away or who's son's bones turned up in a ditch he had to dig himself.'  Attila shrugged.  'While all that's happening, somewhere in the world somebody else gets ready to go to war.'

'Wow!' Jean exhaled, not knowing what to say next.  (p. 118)

All that proceeds the next paragraph: 

Attila gave a small wry smile.  'I'm not being cynical, just realistic.  War is in the blood of humans.  The kind of people who torture and rape during war, they're always among us, every time you walk own a busy street you're passing killers waiting to kill.  War gives them license.  We tell ourselves people are ordinarily good, but where is the proof of that?  There are no ordinarily good people, just a lot of people who've never been offered the opportunity to be anything else.  As for the rest, the followers and foot soldiers - well you can't imprison half a nation.  For them and for everyone else life carries on, only not quite as before."(118)

I should add that Attila is a Ghanian psychiatrist who's in London to present a paper at a conference. It's there that Jean bumps into him (literally) while she's jogging over the Waterloo Bridge observing one of her foxes weaving unnoticed through the crowd.  

He goes on, and I had to think of all the white supremacists that Trump has unleashed:

"There was no big secret to war, Attila thought.  There would always be people who relished violence, all they ever needed was a leader and an opportunity.  If someone could unite the gang members of New York or Chicago or London, they could take over their respective cities if that person was the president they could take over the country.  A lot could be achieved by offering young men power and sex."

The book was published in 2018.  Usually books take years to be written, edited, and published, so the odds are good it was started before Trump was seen as a viable candidate, though passages like this could have been edited closer to the publication date.  

The chapters are titled Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc. as we follow Attila during the two weeks or so he's in London for the conference.  He and Jean run into each other a couple of times and then team up after Attila goes to see his niece and a neighbor tells him that the niece and her son were taken by immigration.  He tracks down he niece in a hospital bed who was let go because it was a mistaken identity (well, actually, an unscrupulous landlord who reported her as illegal so he could get her out of the apartment and raise the rent), but the boy, who'd been put in a foster home, had run away.  Jean, who's been mapping out sections of the neighborhoods to keep track of her foxes, offers to help find the boy.  Jean has also enlisted the help of night workers - street cleaners, doormen, restaurant workers, many of them Africans) to report fox sightings to her.  She recruits them to help look for the boy.  

After Jean gets ambushed on a talk radio show by the host who believes urban foxes should all be killed - Attila gives her this advice:

"Attila laughed. 'Do you know what a diplomat I once worked with told me?  That in government they are taught to treat the electorate like six-year-olds.  If you ask a member of the voting public a question on any subject most of us can only come up with three words we identify with that thing  The words depend on what our concerns are or what the papers tell us our concerns are. . .

As a retired public administration professor, I assure you I never taught my students to treat the public like six year olds, but then few government employees have public administration degrees.  And thinking about the three words can be useful. 

There are other events and characters in the week and a half that's covered in the book.  And some flashbacks to prior events.  How Jean's marriage fell apart in the States.  Rosie, an old lover of Attila's who's got Alzheimers and is living in a nursing home and Emmanuel, who's bonded with Rosie, through his job at the home as a caregiver.  Attila's dead wife Marysa also hovers over the interwoven plot lines.  

The flashbacks take us back to war zones - either those between humans and wolves and coyotes, or between humans and humans - to give us background on Jean and Attila.

Attila muses about war frequently.

"His mind was on the mission ahead which was not the kind for which he cared a seminar on frontline training  for the military.  Young men giving their bodies and their minds to battle sent by middle-aged men who only ever handled a gun on their weekend duck shoots and men like Attila tasked with the job of trying to keep the young men sane while what they were being asked to do was an insanity itself."

There's also a fair amount of discussion about psychiatry.  Here's one example.

“In Attila’s second year of medical school the psychiatric establishment was rocked by an incendiary laid treacherously by one of their own a psychologist called David Rosenhan,  Rosenhan had attended a lecture by the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing a hard-drinking radical who liked to irritate his peers by challenging psychiatric shibboleths among them the notion that psychiatric diagnoses were objective and could be compared with medical ones  Rosenhan wondered if there were any empirical way to test this assertion and decided to conduct his own experiments  He recruited a group of six volunteers including (alongside several medical professionals) a painter and a housewife and himself as the seventh  Each volunteer was detailed to ring one of several psychiatric hospitals and to request an appointment, to which they presented themselves unwashed and unshaved.  They were to describe hearing voices.  Nothing too dramatic and always the same words, ‘Empty’, ‘Hollow’, ‘Thud’.  All but one of the volunteers was admitted, after which the six, in accordance with their instructions, behaved perfectly normally and told staff the voices had gone away.  Nevertheless the participants were held for an average of nineteen days, and one poor soul was kept inside for fifty-two.  When eventually they were discharged each of the patients was described not as sane or cured but ‘in remission’.  In every case the only people who suspected the volunteers of being perfectly sane frauds were other patients.” (pp 229-230)

Rosenhan was a real person.  The experiment was real.  Though Wikipedia has the details slightly different and cites cites Susannah Cahalan who challenges that it happened.  Here's an NPR review of Cahalan's book, The Great Pretender.  

I'm close to the end of the book and finding it fascinating, in no small part because many of the characters are part of an African immigrant underclass in London, taking on low level service jobs.  It's a part of London I'm much less familiar with.  

From the author's website:

"Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water, and the forthcoming essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion."

As I near the final pages, I'd say the book is about the human need to control.  To control the world, to control nature, to control others.  This is demonstrate by how psychiatrists try to control mental illness by categorizing and then treating it. By how people try to control the uncontrollable by killing it - culling urban foxes, refusing to listen to Jean who has been studying the fox behavior and who says that just killing them won't work. 

From Ayo, one of the immigrants in Jean's team of fox watchers:

"Cannot become rich from [foxes], cannot control them, not even kill them.  That's why the foxes make some people angry.  The problem with those people is that they themselves have forgotten they are alive."

A career diplomat echoes that theme.  He's holding a snow globe given him long ago by his daughter:

"'This is how most people want to live.'  He put his hand out for the [snow] globe and Attila handed it to him.  Quell held it up to the light.  'They want to be safe, they want to be comfortable.  They want to believe that they are in control of their lives, and they want that thing we call freedom.  It all comes at a price, but don't you dare mention that.  People want choices without consequences.  And we give it to them, fools that we are.  We are the "somebody" people who have no bloody intention of doing anything themselves mean when they say somebody must do something.  I blame books, films, all that nonsense.'"

 

"While America has the watch, the Taliban have the time" Thoughts On Afghanistan

[US consumers of news get lots of click-bate photos and headlines, but very little depth on any topic. This post offers a peek at the complexities involved in predicting the future of Afghanistan. ] 

I was going to sort out my thoughts on the US pulling all troops out of Afghanistan.  What exactly did I know, not know?  What do I think the likely consequences might be for the people of Afghanistan, the US, and the power dynamics of Central Asia.

My basic sense was that Afghanistan is likely to be taken over by the Taliban - that an extreme male oriented version of Islamic law would be imposed and those associated with the US would be assassinated, 

This would lead to lots of headlines blaming Biden for 'losing Afghanistan,' losing face for the US internationally, and give the Republicans one of their most effective weapons for the 2022 and 2024 elections.  

So I outlined those ideas, including the context that I didn't think would be included - that already England and the USSR have tried to take control of Afghanistan and eventually withdrew.  That others - particularly Afghanistan's neighbors - would work to keep Afghanistan stable and safe for them, as well as developing more extensive beneficial relationships between their countries.  I also saw come comparisons with our war in Vietnam and the kinds of rhetoric used when it was clear we had lost and were going to withdraw.  

Then I started googling to find out more about the interests and relationships Afghanistan has with its neighbors.  

After reading a number of articles on Afghanistan's relationships with its neighbors, my outlook is more hopeful.  The people of Afghanistan have suffered a great deal over the last 40 years - including the Taliban.  The US' departure may give the Taliban the symbolic victory they need to work more cooperatively with the Afghan government, and more importantly, with neighboring governments.  

Iran and Pakistan have vested interests in a friendly Afghanistan.  Iran's Shi'a government has serious issues with the Sunni Taliban.  But all the countries in the region have interests in regional infrastructure - roads, power, communications, trade.

Most significantly, China's been aggressively building a road to Pakistan as well as infrastructure projects in Africa, and trade agreements with Europe.  China's border with Afghanistan is the smallest, but China's power and expansionist interests the largest.  

While some of the terror people expect when the US pulls out completely may happen, I suspect the long term outlook for Afghanistan is not so grim.  China will spread its largesse among the Taliban and the Afghan government in exchange for a more secure country and an extension of their  Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and their China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).  

No matter what actually happens, we can count on the GOP to focus on the worst aspects.  But if they don't have any real issues with Biden, they would fabricate some fantastic tales.  

So here is my original outline and below are some links you might find interesting.

These are thoughts about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.  

1. The GOP will try to use Afghanistan to defeat Biden in 2024.  Even though the GOP is not too interested in women's rights in the US, they used women's rights as one of the reasons to go into Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban. We will see images and stories after the US pulls out completely of assassinations, of girls being barred from schools, of imposition of Taliban rules like before US troops entered the country.  
2. The stories we won't hear 
1. A serious evaluation of why, after 20 years, the Afghan government couldn't defeat the Taliban.  
2. What would likely happen in Afghanistan and the cost to the US if we stayed and continued our 'nation building'
3. Calls for US troops to intervene to help the millions of people around the world whose lives are as difficult, as at risk, or worse, in other countries (remember how Trump helped the Syrian people?)
3. Stories we may hear:
1. How the British and Russians both withdrew from Afghanistan, unable to defeat local resistance.
2. How our initial goal was to get Al Qaeda and bin Laden, not to do democracy building
3. How getting into war is easier than getting out of it
4. How this is a humiliating defeat for the US
5. How Vietnam was also a humiliating defeat for the US, but eventually has become a thriving country, doing much better without us, even though we portrayed the Communist North as evil demons
6. How Afghanistan is not Vietnam 
4. The biggest irony, I think, is that the corruption we hear about in the Afghan government is, if not the result of, certainly greatly magnified, by the billions of dollars of US money and weapons and contracts that have flooded the country.  For those in a position to scoop up some of that largesse, it was an irresistible opportunity to make one's fortune, with hopes to leave when the spigot got turned off.  
5. Likely outcomes of leaving
1. The initial outcomes will favor the Taliban, 
2. The opposition to the Taliban, without the cushion of US money, will either be killed, flee the country, or take on the Taliban more seriously and without the fighting over US money
3. Neighboring countries (there are six - can you name them? Three were part of the Soviet Union which no longer has a border with Afghanistan.  See map below) will begin to adjust their Afghan policies when the US is gone and exert influence to protect their own interests such as
1. those who supported the Taliban because they were fighting the US will likely have a strong influence on the Taliban and/or withdraw their support
2. concern for radical religious beliefs destabilizing their own populations (Taliban are Sunni Muslims. Iran are Shi'a)
3. protect their borders 
1. stem tide of Afghan refugees coming over their borders
2. prevent military threats
4. exploit minerals and develop infrastructure projects and other economic opportunities  in Afghanistan
5. make deals to export their products to their nearest neighbor

US voters have short term memories.  Pulling out in 2021 gives Biden three years for this action to be lost in the flood of events that will occur between now and the election.  There may even be glimmers of good news to emerge from Afghanistan - but I think that will take longer.  

Source:  Geo Politics of South Asia and MENA

Don't miss the tiny, but significant border with China.  

Some interesting background:

Iran's Influence on Afghanistan (June 23, 2020) Middle East Institute - SourceWatch lists MEI's biggest funders as the world's major oil companies.

Iran-Taliban Growing Ties - What's Different This Time? (Feb 16, 2021)  The Atlantic Council - Media Bias/Fact Check says it's factual with a center-right bias.

Iran's Influence in Afghanistan (2014) Rand Corporation - AllSides rates Rand as "Leans Left" (Note, this was before Trump was seen even as a viable candidate)

No-Win War:  The Paradox of U.S.-Pakistan Relations in Afganistan's Shadow - Event Recap - (May 11, 2021) Wilson Center - MediaBias/Fact check rates Wilson Center between "least biased" and "left of center"

The headline quote of this post comes from this article and is attributed to Zahid Hussain quoting a Taliban leader

How Qatar came to host the Taliban (2013) BBC - Interesting background on how the Taliban leaders came to have their headquarters in Qatar.

Turkmenistan:  The Afghan connection (Jan 12, 2021) Eurasianet   Media Bias/Fact Check gives Eurasianet a high rating in factual reporting and a slightly left of center bia.Gives a sense of the kinds of issues  and projects that connect the two countries - particularly infrastructure projects. 

China Has a BIG Plan for Post-U.S. Afghanistan—and It’s Worth Billions: Beijing just can’t wait for the U.S. to get out of the way.(July 4, 2021) Daily Beast

Who are the Taliban? ( July 1, 2021) BBC

Will Turkey take over at Afghanistan's main airport?   (July 9, 2021)  Al Jazeera - Al Jazeera, like the Taliban, are headquartered in Doha, Qatar.

If China does move into the vacuum there are many possibilities.

• The GOP will trumpet how Biden 'lost' Afghanistan to China, as they did about losing Vietnam to the Communists and earlier, how Truman 'lost' China.  Of course, the US never 'had' any of those places to lose in the first place.
• The Afghan resistance to foreign rulers has been impressive.  They may quickly find China to be one more foreign nation trying to exploit them.  And they know how China is treating their fellow Muslims the Uighurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, which has China's tiny border with Afghanistan.  
• Tired of 40 years of war, the Taliban (they fought under other names before they became Taliban) may be ready to use the US withdrawal to declare victory and enjoy peace.  Though fighting is the one activity they are really good at and so may be more comfortable in that, and they may see this as their turn again to rule Afghanistan.