The economic case for letting in as many refugees as possible
The reason we should care about refugees is because they are people. But, unfortunately, for many people that is an insufficient moral claim. Even for the tens of thousands of Afghan people who put their lives in jeopardy working alongside the US military over the past 20 years. So let’s put it another way: Evidence…
Women’s rights have an uncertain future in Afghanistan
Afghanistan, after the Taliban takeover, is a waiting game. And for Afghan women, the waiting game is agonizing. The last time the Taliban held power, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, repression was a feature of their rule. This was especially true for women. Girls could not attend school; women could not hold jobs…
The 3 things experts are watching to evaluate the Taliban
The biggest question since the Taliban recaptured Kabul on August 15 has been whether the group’s return to power means the same thing for Afghans that it did 25 years ago. The last time the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, was marked by brutal oppression, particularly of minorities and women. Their…
The long road to resettling Afghans in the US
A vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum — 90 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans — support resettling vulnerable Afghans in the US amid the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The Biden administration is surging resources to make that happen, speeding up visa processing for Afghans employed by the US government to…
ISIS-K, explained by an expert
The United States issued a warning this week amid the crush and chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan: Avoid the area because of a possible ISIS terror attack. On Thursday, the threat bore out. The full tragedy of the attack is still unclear, but at least 170 Afghans and 13 US…
The helplessness of being an Afghanistan War vet
Inside a clinic in eastern Afghanistan, a nine-months-pregnant Afghan woman shivered on an old metal bed as an Afghan midwife examined her. It was 2012, and the war in Afghanistan had already been going on for 11 years. The woman had just traveled from an outlying village along the Pakistan border, seeking a safe place…
NATO allies are preparing for a future without America’s “forever wars”
Afghanistan wasn’t just America’s 20-year war. It also belonged to US allies. “This has been above all a catastrophe for the Afghan people. It’s a failure of the Western world and it’s a game changer for international relations,” the European Union’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell told an Italian newspaper Monday, according to the Washington Post.…
How the US created a disaster in Afghanistan
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban took over Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. The Afghan president fled the country. Almost all of Afghanistan is now under Taliban control. It marks the end of an era: America’s longest war is now over, and America lost. It happened fast, stunning the world and leaving many in the country racing…
You can buy stuff online, but getting it is another story
The global supply chain is in hot water. The pandemic has made it notoriously difficult for shoppers to buy certain consumer goods, from home appliances and furniture to laptops and bicycles. And things aren’t getting better anytime soon, at least not this year. Shipments have been delayed, raw materials are in short supply, and businesses…
How your favorite jeans might be fueling a human rights crisis
In December 2018, I visited a large dyeing facility inside the Shaoxing Industrial Zone, south of the coastal city of Hangzhou, China. Twenty minutes out from the manufacturing hub, I began to smell it: the rotten-egg stench of dye effluent. The Zone, as it’s known, is 100 square kilometers, nearly double the size of Manhattan.…