United States of America eSeries: Afghanistan in Free Fall

Afghanistan in Free Fall

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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August 13, 2021

Afghanistan in Free Fall

Now that Herat and Kandahar have fallen to the Taliban, the insurgent group controls half of Afghanistan's provincial capitals. As CNN's Clarissa Ward has reported from government forces' front lines, the fight against this advance has been desperate.

The swiftness of the Taliban's onrush has stunned some observers. It's a replay of what happened in Iraq after then-President Barack Obama withdrew the final remaining US troops in 2011, Peter Bergen writes for CNN. (In the years to come, ISIS would seize territory quickly, as the US-trained Iraqi military collapsed against the onslaught; as ISIS advanced toward Baghdad, the US would return in 2014.)

The consequences will be grave, Bergen writes, and not only for Afghan civilians fearing for their lives. "For the global jihadist movement, the victory of the Taliban will be as significant as ISIS victories were in Iraq and Syria," Bergen writes. "Just as they did after those ISIS victories, many thousands of foreign fighters are likely to pour into Afghanistan to join the victorious 'holy warriors' and receive military training."

At The New Yorker, Susan Glasser seconds Bergen's warning: "The possibilities, from large-scale human-rights atrocities to a new center for international jihadist terrorism, are bloodcurdling."

Fareed: The US Could Cut Carbon Emissions Tomorrow. Does It Want To?

After the Biden administration encouraged OPEC and countries with which it cooperates to pump more oil, in order to keep gasoline prices low, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column that America's approach to energy routinely seems shortsighted—among climate denialists on the right, but also among climate Cassandras on the left, as the latter engage in "magical thinking" of their own.

It's right to subsidize renewables and fund new technologies, Fareed writes, but it would also be wise to "stop retiring nuclear power plants and start building new ones," as they provide electricity without burning fossil fuels. As developing countries seek new coal power, the world could keep large quantities of carbon out of the atmosphere by convincing them to use natural gas instead.

"Yes, I know there are problems with all of these approaches, but there are problems with every solution," Fareed writes. "But the actions I describe here would all cut emissions tomorrow. Not 10 years from now, and not after development and research. Tomorrow. So the question really is this: Do we want to cut carbon emissions tomorrow?"

What Does China's Tech Future Hold?

"The vision is becoming clear," The Economist writes. "In a decade or so China will, if the Communist Party has its way, become a techno-utopia with Chinese characteristics, replete with 'deep tech' such as cloud-computing, artificial-intelligence (AI), self-driving cars and home-made cutting-edge chips."

But how will it get there? As the government wields regulation against its tech giants, some have accused the Communist Party of kneecapping a growing sector. "The threat of government bans and fines has weighed on share prices, costing investors around $1trn," The Economist notes elsewhere.

What the magazine predicts is a grand experiment in government-managed, tech-driven growth. Gone are the days of unfettered, anything-goes economic expansion, the magazine writes, as the Communist Party takes the reins, steering companies with a heavy hand, seeking to distribute gains to workers, and raising a few red flags for investors. The startup climate figures to cool—counterintuitively, given that the titanic tech incumbents are the firms being hemmed in—and it's not clear whether the tech sector will boom or bust under China's emerging approach. But the magazine wonders if it just might work, writing that "China is about to become a policy laboratory in which an unaccountable state wrestles with the world's biggest firms for control of the 21st century's essential infrastructure."

The US Was Warned About Racial Inequity

After a scuffle involving police and a Black motorist prompted the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, the Lyndon Johnson administration launched an inquest into racial tension and Black rioting, known as the Kerner Commission. At the New York Review of Books, Jelani Cobb writes that more than half a century ago, the US was warned by the Kerner Commission's findings that racial strife was driven by systemic inequalities, deeply embedded in the country's ways of functioning. In an oft-cited line, Cobb notes, the bipartisan, mostly White and male commission wrote, "What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

Today, America is still struggling to absorb that lesson, Cobb writes, examining how and why. His answer, to sum it up, seems to be that conservatism took the place of Johnsonian liberalism at the forefront of America's political culture and assigned blame elsewhere. Small-government Reaganites and their ideological descendants found fault not with housing policies, voter suppression, or policing practices, but with the government's purported habit of giving Black people "too much 'free stuff,'" Cobb writes. The 1994 crime bill, signed by Bill Clinton, didn't help.

For decades, Cobb writes, the Kerner Commission's findings have gone ignored. "In many ways American society did exactly what it warned against and, as the disturbances of recent years suggest, reaped the consequences it predicted," Cobb writes. "Its warnings remain strikingly relevant."