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…
Author: FASHIONISLANDBLOG
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…
The war on terror and the long death of liberal interventionism
By removing all troops from Afghanistan shortly before the 9/11 attacks’ 20th anniversary, President Joe Biden sent a none-too-subtle message: He wanted America, and the world, to see that he was turning the page — that the war on terror era was well and truly over. In a speech last week justifying his decision, he…
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….
Brazil escaped a January 6-style insurrection — for now
September 7 was Brazil’s Independence Day, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the occasion to continue his assault on the country’s democratic institutions. Bolsonaro had called on his hardcore supporters to rally, as he battles Congress and the judiciary over their refusal to go along with his attempts to rewrite electoral rules ahead of the…
The fight to resettle Afghans in the US has just begun
America’s evacuation of Afghanistan is over. But that doesn’t mean the US has fulfilled its obligation to vulnerable Afghans, some of whom are still trapped in their home country. Even if the decision to withdraw from the country was ultimately the right one, the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is the product of America’s ill-conceived…
Why Arizona is suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreak in the US
The US is struggling with a resurgence of the coronavirus in the South and West. But the severity of Arizona’s Covid-19 outbreak is in a league of its own. Over the week of June 30, Arizona reported 55 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people per day. That’s 34 percent more than the second-worst state, Florida….