The 1919 Volstead Act prohibiting the production and sale of alcohol across the United States failed to stop people from drinking, and instead fostered an economy of smuggling and home-brewing. Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs” didn’t stop drug addiction; on the contrary, since the 1971 Controlled Substances Act, drug use has increased and both illicit and legal drugs have become more available and diverse in the U.S. than they were 50 years ago.

And as far as I know, the ban on Big Gulps in New York City has failed to curb the intake of large quantities of unhealthy sugary drinks.

But in 2022, the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada, announced a religious edict banning the production of all drugs, to be put into effect in spring 2023. As of August 2023, the Taliban have reduced Afghanistan’s opium supply by nearly 80%, and possibly more.

Their prohibition may be the most successful ban of drugs in history.

Afghanistan has tried to ban opium many times before, but was never so successful. For the last 30 years, the country has been the world’s largest producer of illicit heroin. The Taliban themselves have played a critical role in nurturing the trade, helping protect farmers and stoking political resistance when the Afghan government sought to prohibit it.

Opium didn’t play a major role in Afghanistan until the early 20th century. It started out as a quasi-legal crop, bought by various pharmaceutical companies in Europe and the United States. But in 1945, in exchange for diplomatic recognition and economic aid, the U.S. convinced Afghanistan to prohibit opium. For the next 20 years, the Afghan government enacted and tried to enforce a series of prohibitions of the drug.

None of them successfully deterred the growth of the opium trade. By the 1970s, opium had gained traction as a critical cash crop for rural Afghan farmers, building off of networks created by traffickers bringing Afghan hashish to markets west. It became even more important to the rural economy in the following decades, and when the Afghan government collapsed in the late 1970s and the Afghan–Soviet war broke out in the ’80s, opium was entrenched as arguably the only viable commodity for rural farmers.

The Taliban, a group of Islamic fundamentalists and Pashtun nationalists, came to power in 1994, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar. Throughout the 1990s, opium flourished under Taliban rule. Even though Mullah Omar spoke out against the drug he never made it illegal. He knew that his main political constituency—rural Afghans—depended on it economically.

However, that changed in 2000, when the Taliban, claiming opium to be immoral, banned opium for the first time. At the time, the ban was considered the most successful opium ban in world history, because the area dedicated to opium cultivation fell from more than 82,000 hectares in 2000 to less than 8,000 the following year.

In hindsight, the ban came with significant unforeseen consequences. Most farmers agreed to the ban because the market had become oversaturated by product, leading to a dramatic decrease in price. Other farmers, particularly in more rural parts of the country, openly defied the ban, knowing it would significantly undermine their annual income.

The political consequences of the ban were significant too. Thousands of rural Afghans lost vital seasonal employment from the opium harvest. This sparked various uprisings against the Taliban and local elites, most notably in the eastern district of Achin in April 2001.

The Taliban were ousted later that year following the attacks of 9/11.  But while it didn’t last long, the ban signaled that the Taliban were willing to risk their political future to ban opium.

So why did they do it? The Taliban’s moral claims about opium bans tend to mask the political reality.  Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, prohibitions were often used by governments to garner international credibility, and in turn, monetary aid. In this way, the Taliban were no different: The ban was an attempt to garner international credibility.

Similarly, when the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001 the subsequent Hamid Karzai regime also maintained opium’s illegality to conform to the standards of the international drug control system. Under immense pressure from the United States, efforts to curb opium production became a mainstay of Afghan drug politics. Between 2002–2018, the U.S. contributed nearly $8.78 billion in counter-narcotics aid aimed at helping support eradication campaigns throughout the country.

But the Karzai regime’s eradication campaigns were ineffective and politically detrimental. Opium production grew almost every year; by 2007, production had quadrupled and Afghan opium was feeding nearly 93% of the global heroin supply. And as the anti-drug policies alienated many rural Afghan farmers who depended on the opium trade for survival, the Taliban took it as an opportunity to build a base of support among them. It wasn’t surprising, then, that the Taliban took power back in 2021.

What is happening today is unprecedented not so much because the Taliban have banned opium—they did that before—but because the ban undermines the economic livelihoods of the political constituency that brought them back to power: rural farmers.

The ban will likely have significant and unforeseen consequences in Afghanistan and beyond. For now, though, it raises more questions than answers. How much will the ban strain the rural Afghan economy? For the past three decades, opium has been a lifeline for rural farmers in an otherwise moribund economy. If farmers struggle economically and revert back to opium production, what will the Taliban do?

One area to keep an eye on is northeastern Afghanistan, which is largely populated by ethnic minorities, many of whom resisted Taliban rule in the 1990s. So far, evidence indicates that some areas of the north (and in the eastern province of Nangarhar) have not complied with the Taliban ban—opium is still being grown and traded. The possible explanations for this are both economic and political. Economically, the sudden absence of competition presents an opportunity for farmers and traders to garner additional market share. Politically, growing in contravention to Taliban policy carries massive weight as a form of resistance. In other words, the opium ban could stoke the embers of resistance, as it did in ways that benefited the Taliban under the previous political regimes.

There are global implications to the ban as well. The American opioid epidemic, which originated largely from pharmaceutical opioids, has shifted to the more fatal Fentanyl, which in turn has devastated communities. But Europe, Asia, and Africa’s opioid trades have been fed largely by the Afghan heroin supply. Some fear that the Taliban’s new ban will facilitate the rise of fentanyl in those regions and that they will face similar consequences as has the U.S. The Taliban ban has also led to the resurgence in production in other parts of the world: Myanmar has possibly taken over Afghanistan as the world’s largest supplier of illicit opium.

Whether the Taliban can, and remain willing, to maintain its ban on opium remains to be seen. 2024 will likely reveal, possibly in dramatic ways, the political and economic consequences of this ban.

The post Will the Taliban’s Opium Ban Last? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rahimullah waits. In order to get picked for a day’s work, it’s best to get started early. He’s said his morning prayers. Had breakfast. Eggs, bread, and tea. He’s walked for 40 minutes to find a good spot on one of the busiest roads in the city. Rahimullah will likely be picked for a day’s work to fix plants on the sidewalk of a suburban housing area. Peshawar, a city of 4 million people in the northwest of Pakistan, seems sleepy right now, but that will soon change.

Cities, they say, have souls. They emit a mythology from their buildings and infrastructure, from their layers of history and anonymous crowds. But it is also the people who make its soul. Pakistan’s daily wage laborers, including Afghan nationals such as Rahimullah, are makers of Peshawar and other cities across Pakistan.

Rahimullah has, literally, transformed Peshawar with his own hands. Roads, sewage lines, buildings, planting flowers, planting crops—you name them, he’s worked them all. Within his neighborhood, a small informal housing area—or slums, as they’re often called—he’s built homes, made footpaths, bridges, and more.

Then you have women like Qayinat, also Afghan. Her hands are hardened from detergent and water and covered in calluses. Every day she walks from her informal house on the outskirts of the city to get to upper-middle-class homes where she washes clothes and cleans for a day’s pay of around 550 Pakistani rupees (around 2.50 U.S. dollars).

You won’t hear much about Rahimullah or Qayinat though. Daily wage laborers are not venerated in the official and, increasingly, even popular, imagination. Refugees and undocumented migrants are often reduced to tropes and discussed only through the prism of geopolitics, situated outside of the discourse on cities or mentioned only in passing, assumed simply to be waiting to return home.

The Afghans in urban Pakistan that I spoke to for my book project claimed the city as their own, not because they saw themselves as “contributors to the economy,” but because they knew their labor underpinned its very functioning.

Pakistan has the fastest rate of urbanization in South Asia. For years, policymakers have boasted they are building “world-class” cities. Much of their inspiration (and funding) comes from their modernization crush, the Gulf Arab states (read: gated communities, securitized high-rises, shopping malls, and Sunni mosques).

Yet, as the late, great Mike Davis told us, urbanization in the Global South is riddled with inequalities, driven by colonial legacies of spatial segregation, the rampant restructuring of postcolonial economies by international financial institutions, and the middle-class domination over the state.

The same is true in Pakistan. There’s no oil-rich economy as in the Gulf Arab countries, industrialization is non-existent, the country’s main exports are textiles and agricultural produce, and the dependency on IMF loans and World Bank projects are debilitating.

Urbanization in Pakistan is driven by forced migration from internal and regional wars, climate disaster, and botched development projects. Alongside Afghans, you also have Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, Sri Lankans, Yemenis, and more. Yet Pakistan’s Afghans are the labor that allows capitalist development projects and aspirations to middle-class urbanism.

Millions of Afghans have lived in Pakistan over the past 40 years—at least 8 million persons at its peak and around 3 million today. The Pakistani establishment, and international actors—states, NGOs, and liberal commentators—like to celebrate the country’s “hospitality” toward Afghan refugees.

This is disingenuous.

Most of Pakistan’s Afghans have come from low-income backgrounds. The majority have been unable to become citizens. While constitutionally anyone born in the country is eligible for citizenship, successive governments have blocked this.

In recent years millions of Afghans have been coerced to leave Pakistan, often with the complicity of the international humanitarian regime. Since the mid-2000s, millions of Afghans have left Pakistan. Some returned to Afghanistan, but since war never stopped in the country, many moved elsewhere—Europe, Iran, Turkey—lived transnational lives, or, simply, stayed in Pakistan.

When, in 2021 the Taliban recaptured power in Afghanistan and Afghan nationals sought refuge, medical treatment, transit, or reunification with family already in Pakistan, they found land borders difficult to cross, beatings and extortion rampant, and visas nearly impossible to get. Pakistan’s hostile borders have been emboldened by the violent, racist, and exclusionary border regimes of richer nations that have consistently been hostile to Afghans.

The Pakistani state also shoulders sizeable responsibility for the protracted conflicts in Afghanistan, especially from the 1990s onward, when it has contributed to elongating conflict in Afghanistan, most notably through its support of the Taliban. It also supported the disastrous U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan, marked by massive civilian casualties.

The nation is jingoistic and exclusionary. Anti-poor urban planning, the shuttering of refugee camps, and displaced persons being told to “move on” from relief camps means many can’t get access to the basics (housing, electricity, sanitation), so they find other ways to do so. Despite the increasingly hostile attitudes of those in power at the national level, the city accommodates different ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities, and classes within a single space—albeit subject to hierarchical, uneven divisions. Afghans and Pakistanis live and work side by side with each other in shared daily struggles, forming community and companionship as they do so.

They literally expand the city—not through the skyline of malls, mosques, and high-rises policymakers would have you believe, but, through the katchi abadi, the informal housing area, which is the true and more complex face of urbanity in the country.

In sympathetic policy circles or polite middle-class living room conversation, when it comes to Pakistan’s low-income Afghans, you might hear how they are economically useful, They’ve contributed a lot to our economy. At other times its, Afghans know how to manage hardship, or, They’re so resilient.

But should one’s humanity be contingent on economic productivity? “Love us… when we’re wretched, suicidal, naked, contributing nothing,” British Muslim poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan teaches us.

Tropes of resilience distract from the more insidious reasons as to why people need to be resilient in the first place—and not everyone can be.

Most of the people I interviewed were unequivocal: Their lives are hard because of failings of the state, elites, international humanitarian agencies, and repeated military interventions in Afghanistan—including Pakistan’s own repeated interference in its neighboring country and those of imperialist persuasions (Soviet, American, European). Perhaps, then, as anthropologist Anila Daulatzai, urges us, we should be thinking about the reparations Pakistan owes Afghan people, which must include Pakistan’s own Afghan population.

So, if we choose to reflect, as you pass through Pakistan’s cities, Bertolt Brecht’s compassionate recognition of workers across civilizations will echo in your ears. So too will the region’s own Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ode to those who live in the broken roads of slum dwellings. Stop in Hayatabad, a township celebrated as Peshawar’s architectural jewel-in-the-crown, and ask any local, Afghan or Pakistani, and they’ll tell you: It was Afghan laborers who built it.

The post Afghans Built This City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The sea is stormy, please help me!

My wings are small, please help me!

The butterflies are afraid, please help me!

My world is ignored, please help me!

Parwana Amiri, a poet from Herat Province, Afghanistan, was 16 years old and living in Ritsona, a refugee camp north of Athens, Greece, when she wrote these words. Her poem “Fly With Me” challenges us to look and beckons us to listen. We do. And we feel her desperation, her hope, her anger. But we also anticipate this narrative. Her words fulfill and breathe life into our expectations of the experiences of a teenager displaced by war. But what happens when we move beyond passively receiving a work like this? What happens when young people, in particular, consider these works with more context—about the artists, their life histories, and even the more mundane aspects of their everyday lives?

Getting past the immediate expression of knee-jerk empathy—as human as that feeling may be—and creating an experience of deep reflection rooted in knowledge and personal connection is a core operating principle of the Stone Soup Refugee Project, which I direct. In collaboration with organizations around the world, we publish young refugee artists in Stone Soup, a literary magazine by and for children, facilitate creative writing workshops, and connect young people living in refugee camps to those living outside of such precarious situations as artists and writers. Through sharing creative works produced under starkly different circumstances, the young people gain dimension and nuance to one another, and move beyond dominant narratives of war and suffering.

Young people, like most of us, approach the art and writing of young refugees from a place of empathy. When we see the tear-streaked face of a father cradling the smiling head of a dismembered body, limbs strewn about while bombs drop debris overhead, in a drawing by a 13-year-old Syrian girl, we feel empathy. When we see 12-year-old Ali’s painting of a lone boat floating beneath a smiling sun on an otherwise empty, rolling sea, its passengers’ stick-figure arms outstretched in desperation, we feel empathy.

Indeed, Jack*, a British participant in our pen pal program, expressed this sentiment in his correspondence with Sammah, a young refugee in Kenya. “I know that you have a hard life. You must be so brave to survive,” Jack wrote. “I can’t believe that you have an alien identity. I live in a solid house, with a passport. I wouldn’t survive in your condition.”

Sammah responded with a picture of her coffee grinder and explained, “We’re Ethiopian, we like coffee.” Alongside a picture of her house, she wrote, “This is what the houses here look like.” Her letter closed with an echo of Jack’s sentiments. “I will not give up” sits wedged between a drawing of a tree and her thatched roof house. Amid the vivid imagery and enthusiastic descriptions of the material objects that comprise her daily life, these words feel like an afterthought.

Through personal contact, a different, richer story emerges between young people. A story grounded in context wherein school work, friendship, and family life emerge with deeper significance against the backdrop of a starker reality of which Jack was already, perhaps vaguely, aware. Through these kinds of exchanges, young writers and artists, like Jack and Sammah, become people to each other.

Another project, the “Half-Baked Art Exchange,” a joint initiative of the Stone Soup Refugee Project and U.K.-based My Start project, allowed South Sudanese boys living in Kakuma Refugee Camp to create a piece of artwork in collaboration with young members of the broader Stone Soup community based in the U.S. and the U.K.

We began with a workshop where Kakuma Camp participants created an original piece of artwork, reflective of their lives, with a My Start project facilitator. Meanwhile, Stone Soup participants attended a workshop to learn about life in Kakuma Camp and various aspects of their partners’ cultural practices and lived environments. Following this, Stone Soup participants received the works created in Kakuma Camp and added to them in ways that sought to highlight the original piece while creating a dialogue between two people and two worlds.

Akech, from Kakuma Camp, began “Silver Specks” by layering found objects, colored packing paper, and thick glue baked in the desert sun to depict a line of yellow, green, and red squares with scattered flecks of silver against a brown background. His U.S.-based partner, Georgia, interpreted the colored squares in “Silver Specks” as a road, and added shadowed silhouettes, and little bits of sticks tied with wire to represent a fence. “I wanted to show joy, bright and bold,” she said, “but still trapped in the brown land, caught by the sharp threads of a barbed wire fence.”

For participants like Georgia, the workshop offered an opportunity to humanize and gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of young people displaced by war, social collapse, and climate crisis. As part of their workshop about life in Kakuma Camp, Georgia and her fellow Stone Soup participants had viewed a video showcasing the lives of Akech and other Sudanese artists. “Most people imagine [a refugee camp] to be a toxic wasteland full of sadness and hunger and a weary thirst for escape,” Georgia explained. But the video “showed people dancing, laughing, hugging, and going about their daily lives.”

For the young refugee participants, this workshop, and other Stone Soup initiatives, offer a platform to tell their own stories, in their own voices, for an audience of their peers. Lobola, a Sudanese boy, said his piece, “Full Pink Sun Half a Yellow Sun,” depicted how being in the camp “is like being in another world [apart] from the rest of the world and the sun is in the middle because it is so so hot here.” His collaborative U.S.-based partner, Anika, added a piece of paper with the word “Home”—because it is not just a place of abstract suffering, but a home, and for many, including Lobola, the only one he’s ever known.

This storytelling has powerful effects. Parwana Amiri, the 16-year-old writer of “Fly With Me,” says that for her, “writing is immortality.” By immortalizing a young person’s experience of war and trauma, and providing a deeper connection and context for their art, we move beyond the simplistic initial response of empathy that war narratives provoke. And in forging deeper solidarities, our own sense of agency comes into being—a sense of agency from which we might disrupt hollow deflections of suffering in favor of imagining alternative possibilities.

The post When Kids Make Art, a Richer Story of War Emerges appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A joke can be the best way to present real-life issues. Comedians can poke fun at the absurdity of the human condition, even take on topics that feel taboo—like America’s brutal war in my home country of Afghanistan.

It took until I was in college, when Fahim Anwar’s “So, you’ve been invited to an Afghan wedding” dropped in 2007, to finally see an Afghan man who managed to do what other comedians were doing. Anwar, who was still working his day job as an aerospace engineer, racked up 500,000 views on YouTube for the “how-to” video, which quickly became a cult a hit among Afghan Americans. Finally, one of our own was talking about how ridiculous but endearing our practices and family expectations could be. It wasn’t heavy-handed, but rather put a humorous twist on the conversations we had with our cousins in our bedrooms, a safe distance from our parents.

But comedians like Anwar were outliers in a post 9/11 America. Mostly, we had to suffer through hackneyed, partisan pandering and racist jabs at Afghans, Arabs, and Muslims in general. Think of the Islamophobic jokes that Joan Rivers felt perfectly comfortable making about Palestinians, whom she infamously said “deserved” to die. Or her unfunny joke about there being “one outlet” in all of energy-poor Afghanistan. Plus Kathy Griffin’s dumb “the entire country of Kuwait smells like a fart” standup or her story of finding her “gay, even in Kandahar, Afghanistan.”

And then there is Bill Maher saying, “It’s that time of year again, April 15, taxes. I know it’s depressing, but just remember, you’re paying for roads, bridges, hospitals, and an army to keep the nation free. Unfortunately, that nation is Afghanistan.” He may have had a political point about the military industrial complex (a point he made in other comments following 9/11 that cost him his show). But the joke came off as smug and uncaring, considering his years of Islamophobic rhetoric. Not to mention the numerous reports of abuse, killings, and intimidation of Afghan civilians by U.S.-led forces.

As much as these comedians may have abhorred the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and even Donald Trump, their comedy was not that far off from what those men and their supporters have been spouting since the early 2000s. The jokesters presumably voted Democrat, but their jokes recalled Trump’s “shithole countries” remark.

However, in recent years, some political comedy has evolved beyond crypto-racist cringe to address the hypocrisy of America’s “War on Terror,” signaling people’s fatigue and anger with it. A month before the one-year anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, for instance, the comedian Andrew Schulz opened his comedy special Infamous with a joke about the politics surrounding the war: “Be honest, is there anybody here who loves Joe Biden? We have any Taliban here?” Schulz managed to break down the result of 20 years of U.S.-led occupation in Afghanistan with a single punchline.

At this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner Trevor Noah told a similar joke: “No president in my memory has given more marginalized groups opportunities. I’m talking about women, the LGBTQ community, the Taliban—the list goes on and on.”

These jokes bring some pointed humor where usually there are rushes of anger and resentment at the botched occupation and withdrawal. The humor works because it manages to be both subtle and direct. It’s political, not pandering. And it trades on political realities, not tired punchlines about chadaris, “burqas,” or beards.

Those of us who lived through the 20-year U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan know that it was President Biden who followed through with former President Donald Trump’s 2020 peace agreement with the Taliban. We also know that Biden’s poorly thought-out withdrawal from Afghanistan cost the lives of many Afghans, some trying to flee by clinging to the wheels of departing U.S. military jets days after the Taliban returned to power. Immediately after the Taliban retook the country, Biden instated sanctions, withheld Afghan assets, and cut back on aid, all of which was quickly followed by other Western countries and international organizations. This left the Afghan people unemployed, without money, and hungry just as a government accused of massive human rights abuses had taken control of the country.

That’s the kind of hypocrisy that hurts.

I appeared on a podcast produced by former Obama White House staffers shortly after the Taliban takeover, where I said: “Biden, in a lot of ways, has turned out to be a thousand times worse than Trump.” I stand by those words. For Afghans, Trump’s honesty about hating us lacked the hypocrisy of Biden pretending he ever cared. Especially since he called one of the most beautiful provinces of Afghanistan “hell on Earth” and reportedly told former President Hamid Karzai that Pakistan, whom Afghans have long accused of aiding and abetting the Taliban, is “50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”

My comment led to an online backlash from Democratic Party loyalists, who refused to criticize the 79-year-old politician’s policy on sanctions. My point instantly became lost to entrenched partisanship. Smart comedy, which is becoming more common, is moving in the direction of deriding the rigid partisanship in America and getting to the root of important issues.

In Kabul, where I’ve lived since 2013, we spent years watching sketch comedy shows like Shabak-e Khanda, a popular program that pulled no punches in its criticism of corrupt, self-serving Western-backed politicians and the hypocrisies and double standards of Afghan culture. Now, many of these comedians have left the country in fear of the Taliban. With their programs off the air, we’ve had to rely on our own family, friends, and social media for comedy. When the Taliban’s prime minister, Mullah Hasan Akhund, asked “Chi shai ghwari?” (“What do you want?”) during an Eid-day address at the palace in Kabul, we mockingly quoted in a multitude of crude punchlines about everything wrong with the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, presenting pressing real-life issues, some literal—we want jobs, we want our teenage daughters back in school—and others cruder and mocking—“You want to know what we want? We’ll show you what we want!” (among other things that can’t be printed in case the Islamic Emirate reads this). As always, each impression and response is a reminder that Afghans have not lost their sense of humor, and that jokes cuts through the most difficult and twisted of times—and is the steadiest hand to the truth.

The post American Comedians Are Finally Getting Afghanistan Right appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yale University’s Emma Sky, director of the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program and a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute, interviewed Miska, whom she first met when they were both in Iraq in 2007. She is also among the people who encouraged him to chronicle his experience helping interpreters come to the United States as refugees in a book.

“Why should Americans care about the fate of those who interpreted for U.S. troops?” asked Sky.

“We serve by an ethos of leave nobody behind, and we tend to think of that as those of us in uniform,” answered Miska of the U.S. military. However, he pointed out, interpreters “are men and women who go on patrol with us every day,” and do so under the threat of death, of kidnappings for ransom, and of harm coming to their families. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. enemies have used violence against interpreters “to send a message to anyone who would think about working alongside us,” said Miska. “We don’t want to violate this ethos that the military inculcated in us.”

Who are these interpreters, Sky asked Miska, and why do they put themselves and their families at risk to help the U.S.?

They have a variety of motives, and those motives have changed and evolved over the past 20 years, said Miska. In the early days, he speculated, “hope was a real driving factor.” For example, a man Miska calls Ronnie, whose story is detailed in Baghdad Underground Railroad, became an interpreter as a teenager just out of high school looking to help renew Iraq post-Saddam Hussein. As the job got increasingly risky, though, he stayed on in order to survive. “Once you’ve committed,” said Miska, “it’s hard to get away from that and to hide that from the nefarious actors who are out there.”

In 2007, Ronnie got approved for a Special Immigrant Visa; at the time, there were only 500 such Visas available for Afghan and Iraqi interpreters annually, so Miska explained, it “felt like winning the lottery.” Over the past two decades, thanks to Special Immigrant Visas, 18,000 interpreters have arrived in the U.S. with 45,000 family members; more than 18,000 applicants and 70,000 family members remain in Afghanistan waiting to come.

Their situation is extremely precarious. “These are people the Taliban are mercilessly hunting,” said Miska.

The post-9/11 wars have taken an enormous toll on the military, said Sky, pointing to the 7,036 American service members who have been killed to date, but also that “we’ve been fighting without winning for 20 years,” with goalposts that kept moving. The costs to Afghanistan and Iraq have been even higher. Are Miska and his partners in helping interpreters driven “by guilt, by a type of penance… because this is something we could actually do and do right?” she asked.

Miska said there are many reasons to protect interpreters, including assisting U.S. troops and counterterrorism investigators around the world, who need local allies that will trust them. “There might be some guilt in there; that’s absolutely true,” he added. “But it’s guilt because we’re being precluded from trying to honor something that we really believe in,” he said, returning to his point about the military’s “no one left behind” ethos.

Turning to Sky, who is British, Miska said that there’s a long, global history of protecting allies; after the American Revolution, for example, the British evacuated between 60,000 and 70,000 Loyalists to Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and London.

What would the equivalent of that action be right now, asked Sky: What is Miska asking from President Biden and his administration?

Miska said that the interpreters and their families in Afghanistan who have applied for Special Immigrant Visas need to be evacuated to Guam, or some other safe third territory—preferably under U.S. jurisdiction—as quickly as possible, before U.S. troops fully withdraw. Government resettlement agencies—which have worked at a similar scale after wars in Vietnam and Kosovo, for instance—need more support to do so. “It won’t be easy,” he said.

The difficulties don’t end when interpreters are able to ultimately arrive in the U.S. Challenges range from enrolling children in school to adjusting to a culture of paper plates. (Miska’s mother, who sponsored a family, would find dinner plates and silverware in the trash due to a misunderstanding about which place settings were indeed disposable.)

Miska called on veterans and civilians alike to do whatever they can to help refugee interpreters, from becoming sponsors to getting involved with organizations like Miry’s List in Los Angeles, No One Left Behind, and the International Refugee Assistance Project. For veterans, specifically, he advised that they check in with their interpreters, and contact their representatives in Congress for help because unlike most issues that have become politically polarizing, assisting interpreters is one of the precious few issues that both parties agree on.

The post Leaving No One Behind—Interpreters Included appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

While we sipped coffee at a roadside cafe in southern India, about 1,500 miles from the private military compound that supplied fuel to U.S. bases in Southern Afghanistan, Raj explained how his boss made it clear that the missing items were to be labeled “lost” or “stolen,” in order to keep the books balanced.

For six years, Raj was one of over 100,000 non-American contract employees working for the Department of Defense in Afghanistan. For most of this conflict there have been more contractors working on U.S. contracts than there have been U.S. military personnel in the country. Through no fault of their own, the shift from American soldiers to contractors like Raj has made the war more expensive, less democratic, and more dangerous.

Contractors come from countries including Bosnia, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, the Philippines, and Nepal, to name a few—and do much of the day-to-day work of the war. But unlike soldiers deployed to these war zones, they have fewer rights and fewer protections. Most can be fired at a moment’s notice. If injured, some receive compensation, but others I interviewed did not. Many had borrowed significant amounts from brokers to get their initial contracts, meaning they lived in fear of termination. With constant anxiety over deportation, such an environment is ideal for both corruption and rights abuses.

In Raj’s case, being a vulnerable low-level administrator gave him a perfect view of the corruption and mismanagement of the war in Afghanistan, but no ability to do anything about it. As a manager, he oversaw the work of the mostly South Asian laborers on the base and could watch various scams in progress. He knew that his American and European bosses did little to hide these operations, since they did not fear being reported by those below them. By contrast, if Raj complained, he could be fired and sent out of the country on the next flight.

Like many of his colleagues in low-level management, he was from Kerala and had struggled to find work in India. “There are no jobs here,” he said. So he stayed quiet. So did thousands of other contractors who felt they had no other means to support their families, inadvertently becoming a part of a corrupt war economy.

Raj’s story explains some of the corruption and high cost of the war in Afghanistan, but it also helps explain why U.S. voters have lost interest in America’s ongoing wars. With the bulk of the work being done by contractors rather than their children and neighbors, Americans have stopped watching the war. In the process, they’ve given up much of the democratic oversight that is meant to help shape American foreign policy.

Part of the lack of opposition to ongoing U.S. wars is that Americans have become less involved in both policymaking and policy implementation. Without conscription, participation in war is perceived as voluntary. And while numbers of American dead in wars formerly affected public opinion about continuing to fight those wars, with fewer deaths of American soldiers, the public has become disengaged—and so have its elected representatives.

U.S. voters have long been more interested in domestic issues than in international affairs, but the organization of America’s recent wars has made civilian oversight more and more difficult. The shift to contracting means that military strategies are less likely to be discussed in public forums and more likely to be simply embedded in contracting or budget agreements out of the public eye. When things go wrong on a contract, companies have significant incentives to cover up their shortcomings, while lower-ranking workers like Raj are pressured to remain silent. Further, as the work has shifted to international contractors, the result is that wars are increasingly shaped not by generals and soldiers, but by companies and the businessmen who run them and who are primarily driven by profit.

In part, these wars also remain out of the news because of a deliberate strategy by the U.S. military to limit access to information about the war. The majority of international reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan embed with U.S. troops and report primarily through the lens of the experience of an American soldier. They do not visit bases like the one that Raj worked on.

Little reporting is done on contract workers. In fact, the total number of these workers is impossible to track because some U.S. government agencies outside the Department of Defense—including USAID—didn’t even record the number of contract workers they were employing until recently. Other agencies still don’t.

While many of the popular narratives about private contractors suggest that this work is not as dangerous as soldiering, it is not clear if this is true. Department of Labor statistics suggest that almost 4,000 contractors have been killed while working to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this number includes only those working directly for the Department of Defense. More importantly, contractors have self-reported these numbers to the U.S. government, so the real number of those killed is no doubt higher.

Contractors also face dangers through exploitation that soldiers may avoid. One of Raj’s colleagues, for example, explained to me how his boss instructed him to climb into an empty fuel truck to inspect a rocket that had been fired at it, even though he was not hired to do security work. Other employees I interviewed described being trafficked to Afghanistan, having their passports confiscated and being forced to work long hours for less pay than they had initially been promised.

Contracting in conflict zones is organized by nationality. At Raj’s base, the security guards were Nepali, the engineers were Turkish, and the cooks and cleaners were Filipino. Generally, it is those from the poorest countries who face the most danger and get paid the least. The outer guards at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, like at many international bases and installations, are all Afghan, while the next layer is Nepali, and only far inside do you encounter American or European contractors.

This economic angle brings up another undiscussed aspect of outsourcing wars: For the majority of the international contracts actually involved, the war is not about service or patriotism, as with soldiers. It is about a paycheck. And a paycheck that their extended family might be relying on to repay high interest rate loans to brokers that trafficked them to the war zone. Contractors find themselves in compromised situations, with complex loyalties, which may affect the conduct of the war itself. Raj was doing nothing to actively try to extend the war in Afghanistan, yet it was also clear that he did not want it to end—because that would mean termination. The majority of those that the U.S. is employing to fight its wars have a vested interest in seeing those wars continue despite their dangers.

While Raj returned home fine, other colleagues were not so lucky. More than one I spoke with had been kidnapped—a difficult situation for someone from a country like Nepal, which had no diplomatic presence in the country. In cases like these, workers become pawns that brokers trade and companies use or simply discard. Another Nepali I interviewed spent three years in an Afghan prison after sitting through a trial he could not understand, with the Nepali government only learning of his fate much later through a reporter.

The economic costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are staggering and should not be dismissed. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, when taking into account debt incurred and long term costs, like benefits to veterans, America’s post-9/11 wars will cost the U.S. $5.6 trillion dollars.

But critiques of the war done by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and other overseers focus almost exclusively on financial audits and mismanagement of funds. Unfortunately, less work has been done on how contracting has made the management of the war itself even more difficult to monitor. Few are interested in the corruption happening on small contracting bases, and fewer still are tracking human rights abuses that occur as workers make their way toward these war zones.

With the drawdown of troops from Afghanistan, some might hope that democratic control over U.S. foreign policy will improve, but exactly the opposite is happening. While the number of contractors the U.S. is employing in Afghanistan has decreased, it has not decreased as quickly as the number of troops. This means that while in 2011 there were approximately 1.5 contractors for every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, there are now three contractors for every soldier, making contractors increasingly the face of the U.S. presence. Furthermore, as the war wanes, contractors like Raj are looking for work elsewhere: Syria, Yemen, Russia and the Central African Republic. Some of Raj’s coworkers are now providing security for oil-rich countries in the Gulf, like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

This suggests that we are not far from a world where wars between rich nations could be fought entirely by contractors. Already, proposals to privatize the war in Afghanistan, allegedly to save tax dollars have gained political traction in Washington. But really, as Raj knows, such strategies will further move war away from transparency and democratic oversight and into the shadowy world of corruption.

The post Why Using Foreign Contractors Helps Prolong Foreign Wars appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But, as a matter of history, the “Silk Road” was nothing like the Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, in its time, there was no “Silk Road” at all. The Silk Road is actually a modern label in widespread use only since the late 20th century. It refers variously and imprecisely to long-distance trade and interactions across Afro-Eurasia.

In reality, the Silk Road was never a formal network directed by one state power, as the Chinese propose with the Belt and Road. To the contrary, there were numerous mutable trading networks over this period. Some of these dealt in silk, raw and woven. Others did not. Some started in China or Rome, some in Central Asia, India, or Africa—and many other places. Journeys were by sea, by rivers, and by land—or by all three. Sometimes governments were involved in trade, sometimes private traders, and sometimes it was both.

Despite these ambiguities, the Silk Road should not be dismissed as a concept. The Silk Road has acquired a familiarity that has real value, because it has brought regions that are rarely covered in modern historical writing to greater prominence and accessibility. As a result, the term’s growing popularity has encouraged a more global historical viewpoint.

Central to the idea of the Silk Road is the interaction across boundaries, be they chronological, geographical, cultural, political, or imaginary. Those interactions, and the effect they had on individuals and their cultures, are the Silk Road’s real legacy, especially since the vast majority of objects of the Silk Road—everyday and luxury, traded or not—disappeared long ago. Food, wine, and medicines were consumed. Slaves, elephants, and horses died. Textiles, wood, and ivory decayed. Glass and pottery were broken. Only in rare cases did objects survive by design or accident, as in hoards of metal or glass, or in burials when objects were sufficiently valued to be interred with corpses.

Nevertheless, the story of a single object can sometimes encapsulate the rich interactions of the Silk Road. Such is the case with a gilt-silver ewer found in the tomb of a sixth-century general and his wife in what is now northwestern China.

The ewer was probably made at the heart of the Silk Road in Bactria (present-day northern Afghanistan), possibly when the region was under the rule of peoples who had migrated from the borders of China and the steppe, the Hephthalites. The ewer, 14.5 inches tall, shows its diverse background. Made with Sasanian Persian metalwork hammering techniques, it features both literary motifs from classical Greece far to the west as well as influences from India to the south. The biography of this ewer, therefore, covers the whole geographical length and breadth of the Silk Road.

In one sense, the ewer spans 3,000 years. The scenes portrayed on it date to classical Greece, 1,500 years before its actual creation. Since its burial, it has spent another fifteen centuries to the east of its birthplace in northwestern China.

Everything about this piece encapsulates Silk Road movement and interaction. Its form and materials, for example: metalware ewers spread from Rome through Sasanian Persia to central Asia, while in China the form is usually emulated in ceramics. Each place gave its own characteristics to the ewer’s basic form: the square handle of the Sasanians (the last Persian empire before the rise of Islam in the seventh century) or the camel’s head on this Bactrian piece. But perhaps its most fascinating features are the scenes from the Trojan War depicted around the ewer.

The gilt-silver ewer found in the tomb of sixth-century general Li Xian in what is now northwestern China. Courtesy of the Guyuan Museum.

Stories of the Trojan War probably traveled eastwards long before the Silk Road, with people, on objects, and possibly in texts. In the fourth century B.C. the Greek world and its influence expanded dramatically, owing to the campaigns of Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 B.C.).

Alexander reached Bactria in 329 B.C., conquering it over the next two years. On his victory in 327 he took a bride, Roxane, who is usually described by historians as a Bactrian. Although Alexander’s rule did not last long—he died in Babylon four years later—the introduction of Greek language, administration, architecture, art, and culture eastwards into Central Asia was to have a significant influence, the so-called Hellenization of this region. And this influence might have spread further east: Some have attributed to it the appearance of life-size realistic statuary in China—exemplified by the terracotta warriors guarding the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi (r. 221–206 B.C.).

While aspects of the Greek legacy were adopted into Roman culture, and while it is plausible to believe that depictions of the Trojan War were readily understood—and used—by many in the Roman Empire, it is more difficult to understand how such images were viewed by the peoples on what was once the fringes of Alexander’s empire in central Asia. The craftsmen of Hephthalite Bactria who produced this ewer were separated from the story and its birthplace by a thousand years in time and over three thousand miles in space. Even if the episodes depicted on this ewer can be traced back to Greek mythology, they might have been incorporated into some other more local narrative by this time and would have been described by their makers and owners in a way that we would not recognize.

The ewer probably did not stay more than a few decades at most in Bactria before being taken east, to Guyuan in the northwest borders of China. Its new owner, Li Xian, was the son of immigrants. According to the biography inscribed on stone inside his tomb, his ancestors were from the steppe to the north and had moved to the border regions some generations before. By the time of Li Xian, they had taken a Chinese surname. We do not know whether they had retained their own language, or even what that language was. But this biography shows that they had not lost the knowledge of their northern steppe ancestry.

In this way, the ewer demonstrates how culturally complex China has always been, with waves of invaders and migrants, especially from the porous and oft-challenged borders to the north and northwest. We should not assume that people living in China at that time were accustomed to being part of a unified empire or that everyone saw this as the norm or ideal.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, northern China, including western areas into the trade routes and along the Hexi corridor, was under the rule of proto-Mongol Xianbei, who also came from the northern steppe. Around the time Li Xian was born, the Xianbei were ruling from Luoyang on the Yellow River, but their empire was in trouble. Rebellions in the north and battles between competing factions led to the empire’s division in 534. One of the reasons given for this was the growing divide between the regional rulers in the north, who still retained their contacts with the steppe, and what these rulers saw as the increasingly distant and sinified Xianbei elite in the Luoyang capital.

As a military commander posted to frontier stations, Li Xian would have traveled considerably, and many of his travels would have taken him along the trade routes of the Silk Road as well as to the capital to give reports and receive orders. In the year 525, a Hephthalite envoy passed through Guyuan en route to Luoyang; he was accompanied by a lion, one of his diplomatic gifts. This was not a unique gift: Lions were presented to the Chinese court by Tocharians in the seventh and eighth centuries, and one sent from Samarkand in 635 received an imperially commissioned rhapsody in its honor. Li Xian would have been only a young man in 525, but given the status of his family, it would be expected that they would have entertained the envoy during his stay and possibly they received the ewer as a gift.

How did Li Xian see and use the ewer? Was it an exotic piece brought out for formal banquets, filled with local grape wine for his guests and intended to reflect his status and cosmopolitanism? Or was it used at less formal occasions—or not used at all?

For all we know, he might have acquired it only shortly before his death and never put it to use.

These are tantalizing questions but ones on which we can only speculate. The same goes for what Li Xian made of the design on the ewer. Did he know anything of the Trojan War story, even if it had become assimilated into local myths? Or was the piece interpreted as depicting another local story? Or not interpreted at all, just seen as an attractive or an exotic design?

Not all people ask questions about the world around them and the objects they encounter. Indeed, perhaps this ewer held more interest and value to his wife: theirs was a joint tomb. But this object and its journey reflects a time of cultural movement and encounters—the story of the Silk Road—which left an imprint on pre-modern society across Afro-Eurasia and still resonates today.

The post The Centuries-Old Silver Jug That Conjures the Mysteries of the Silk Road appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Prior to the visit, my family and colleagues were supportive. When I confessed to a close friend that I was nervous, he said, “Time to get out of your comfort zone.” That was an understatement. My law partner gave me the pep talk about everyone being entitled to representation, but I wasn’t even a criminal defense attorney. Hardly any of us in the “GITMO Bar” were.

According to what had been scared up through a Freedom of Information Act request, Obaidullah was accused of being part of an Al Qaeda-affiliated cell that was preparing roadside bombs against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan. Official reports said he confessed while in custody in Afghanistan. Later, at Guantánamo, he’d recanted, saying he’d been tortured and the confession coerced. Was my client guilty of terrorism? Who knew! There had never been any test of guilt or innocence, just six years of reported interrogations and torture.

My first day on the base, after being thoroughly patted down and every piece of paper removed of its staples, I met Obaidullah in a small concrete bunker. He wore a simple tan smock and trousers, and his ankles were shackled to the floor. He was about five foot seven, 150 pounds. But mostly, he seemed young. Captured at age 19, he had grown into a man in this prison. He told me he was not guilty of the claims made against him. He was polite but skeptical that I or anyone else could help him. His voice, speaking his native Pashto, was soft, but with an occasional strain that would end in a note of incredulity. “Tell your government that all I want is to go back to my family,” he said through an interpreter. “Why do they keep us here, without giving us a chance to prove we are not guilty?”

Here was a face to put to the name; here was a man struggling to understand who I was, and whether he could trust me. In those early days, most of the Americans he had met had been military or intelligence personnel. His first attorney had failed to gain his confidence. So many lawyers were fired by their clients at GITMO that it was a running joke among the attorneys. Just stay hired, I told myself. That’s the first step.

Official Guantanamo photo of Obaidullah.

For me, this journey to GITMO had started with a simple request. My law firm was asked by the Center for Constitutional Rights to represent a single detainee in Guantánamo Bay in his habeas proceedings. The Center had filed the first lawsuit on behalf of the roughly 780 men detained there as enemy combatants, and was co-counsel in the 2008 Supreme Court decision securing their right to judicial review. But a large number of these men, who had been detained for up to six years, still did not have attorneys who were willing, pro bono, to contest their imprisonment. The Center was reaching out to law firms nationwide, building a “GITMO bar” to take these cases. Would our small firm be willing to handle just one?

Obaidullah (as with many Afghans, he has only one name) had been arrested at his home during a raid in the middle of the night. No charges were leveled against him until 2008 (after six years of detention). They included conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Later, in 2011, a military lawyer assigned to his defense team found evidence to support Obaidullah’s claims of innocence, including substantiating his family’s claims that the seemingly incriminating mines had actually been left there during the Soviet occupation, while he and his family were in Pakistan. Although his military lawyers sought a speedy trial, the U.S. government simply dropped the charges. The government didn’t need them. They could rely on indefinite detention instead, as they did with most of the other Guantánamo detainees. Detention without charge. Obaidullah remained in custody at Guantánamo for another five years until his release in 2016, and 31 men remain in the same situation today with no charges pending.

But that all came later.

How do you establish rapport with someone without any shared cultural reference points? Obaidullah had been living on a small farm and working in a general store in rural Afghanistan outside of Khost, a two and a half hour drive from Kabul. His entire life had been subject to the ebb and flow of the constant state of war in Afghanistan, from the Soviet invasion to the Taliban takeover. His family bore no love for the Taliban. He had an 11th grade education and had learned a little English in school.

Before being captured, he thought that Britain was more powerful than the United States, so little did he know of the world outside his village. Once captured, he had no access to any outside information about his fate; he relied on what other detainees, guards, or interrogators told him. He also had no way to find out anything about me. It wasn’t until after our habeas hearing, in which he had been allowed to listen remotely to my public opening statement (the rest was classified and not even he was allowed to hear it), and saw how hard we had worked for him, that I think he let himself believe in me.

For my part, meeting Obaidullah face-to-face removed any doubt about what I was doing. At the time of his capture he was recently married—his daughter had been born just days before U.S. forces took him from his home. To this day I know his daughter’s age. My own son had been born the same month.

Obaidullah told me he was tortured at Bagram Air Base, and that the abuse continued in interrogations at Guantánamo. Not until later, after we’d known each other for several years, did he tell me what happened. He signed a statement that we filed in court describing what the judge called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” International law calls it torture. Obaidullah described being beaten on the head with a gun and threatened with death by a guard who was sharpening a long knife. He was forced to carry sandbags all night and not allowed to sleep. He was kept in a small barbed wire cage. His hands were tied above his head for hours. He was subjected to extreme heat and cold over many months’ time.

Fazel Karim holds a picture of his brother, who was recently released from the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

Obaidullah asked me why I was trying to help him. I told him that I believed that everyone should have the right to present their evidence in court, and that I understood he had little hope my government would do the right thing, and that I was committed to doing everything I could to allow him to have a hearing. It sounded pretty theoretical and pie-in-the-sky, even to me. We talked about President Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo Bay, which had been delivered just months before my first visit. We talked about the political battles that made it hard for Obama to fulfill that promise.

Over the next seven years, I went to Guantánamo Bay a dozen times to meet with Obaidullah. For his habeas hearing we coordinated multiple attorneys and expert witnesses, and pulled together a brief that was over a hundred pages long with more than a hundred exhibits. But we still lost. After the Supreme Court in Boumediene granted detainees the right to petition for release through the writ of habeas corpus the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals never again approved of any detainee’s release, and the system ground to a halt.

My colleagues and I went often to Guantánamo to meet with Obaidullah. We were the only ones allowed to, after all. We talked movies, children, pets, family, books. He liked My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the Fast and Furious franchise. He was a fan of How I Met Your Mother. Over the years, we had shared with him tales of our honeymoons, camping trips, and trekking tours around the world, and in one of our last conversations before his release, he told me that he liked in particular our habit of taking vacations with our families. Family travel, he told me, was not something he had heard of, and he looked forward to trying it with his.

We lawyers were sometimes allowed to bring in food, and we tried to anticipate what he might like—mocha ice cream was a favorite (though it nearly melted by the time we got back from the Navy Exchange where we bought it during lunch). Nutella spread onto a biscuit with a military-issue spork was also a hit. Sometimes we talked about having a proper meal together outside the prison, after he was freed.

What amazed me the most was Obaidullah’s compassion—at this point, under these circumstances—and his ability to express empathy and appreciation, even humor. He began our visits with inquiries into the wellbeing of our families, and recalled what we’d told him about their interests in soccer and science. When one of our lawyers dropped her cell phone into the bay he found that a rich vein for relentless teasing, as he did if we were late to a meeting. During our regular phone conversations, which I took from home as they were scheduled very early West Coast time, he loved it when my dog barked: It was a small but vivid reminder of the real world.

Since 2002, nine detainees have died at Guantánamo. Of those, at least one died of an apparent suicide and another from injuries sustained while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. With the situation looking hopeless, the prisoners felt that refusing to eat was the one means they had to register their protest. In 2013, with transfers out of Guantánamo Bay at a complete standstill, the majority of the men in the camp began a hunger strike. In part as a result of those desperate hunger strikes—my client withered to about 120 pounds—Obama instituted Periodic Review Board hearings that would assess whether each detainee currently constituted a threat, regardless of what he may or may not have done in the past.

In December of 2015, Obaidullah was informed that he was scheduled for a hearing before the Periodic Review Board, and in April 2016, I went down for 10 days to prepare for and participate in the hearing as his private counsel. In May, we were notified that he had indeed been cleared for transfer, and this past August, he was finally released from Guantánamo Bay to the United Arab Emirates. He has been placed in a government rehabilitation program there. I won’t be able to hear from him for many months. It will not be easy for him to readjust to the world after suffering what he has been through, or to live as an Afghan immigrant in the UAE. His future is unclear—after a few years he should be able to return to Afghanistan. That too will be no picnic for a former detainee. But one thing is clear. The minute I am given the go-ahead, I plan to take my son and husband, go meet his family, and share that meal outside the prison walls.

The post Winning Freedom From Guantánamo With Forbearance and Trust appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is refusing to sign the U.S. peace agreement that outlines the terms of our 2014 withdrawal. What is he thinking, and how will his actions impact the security of both Afghanistan and America? Omar Samad and Douglas Ollivant, senior fellows at the New America Foundation’s National Security Program, talk with Anne-Marie Slaughter and New America’s managing editor Fuzz Hogan about the future of Afghanistan after the U.S. leaves.

The post What the Heck is Hamid Karzai Thinking? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Let’s back up. A few years ago, the administration announced a big change to the country’s National Security Strategy: instead of encouraging different agencies to pursue their own disparate policies, the “Whole of Government” approach proposed we weave together the tools of defense, diplomacy, and development. The idea was that if we could unite our response to big, global problems and to tackle them on all sides, we’d be a much more efficient in meeting our security goals. In Afghanistan, for example, the new strategy partnered USAID and the Department of Defense to fund counter-insurgency investments.

It’s a great plan. But it has yet to gain traction in the one place where we really need it: global health. Failure on that front is a real threat to American lives. So it’s about time the “Whole of Government” plan to strengthen our national security started meaning more than “fitting in with the folks who kill people.”

Take the case of the Obama administration-appointed special investigator general for Afghanistan. Here is an auditor with his eye firmly off the ball when it comes to cost effectiveness. He wants to shut down the USAID health program in Afghanistan because it is run through the country’s ministry of health, and he’s worried about corruption there.

Not that he’s actually found any corruption—he just notes that the financial management systems operating in the government of one of the poorest countries in the world aren’t up to usual U.S. standards.

What is the USAID-backed program in Afghanistan doing, exactly? It’s delivering basic health care to about 90 percent of the population at about $4.50 a head (compare that to per head health expenditure in the U.S.: $8,608). In no small part thanks to the impact of that program, Afghanistan saw the most rapid increase in life expectancy of any place on the planet between 2004 and 2010—from 42 to 62 years. About 100,000 kids each year aren’t dying in Afghanistan thanks to the decline in child mortality over just that six-year period.

Yet the inspector general suggests we forget the fact that the program is achieving spectacular results, and we pay no attention to the fact that it is one of the very few parts of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan that has actually gone according to plan. That’s not just ignoring the whole of government, or our national security interests—that’s ignoring common sense.

Or what about global vaccination programs that help keep Americans free of infectious diseases? For the past few years, America has supported some amazing programs to improve health outcomes worldwide. For example, the administration has made a $1.65 billion 2014 budget request for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The Global Fund is looking for $15 billion over the next three years, which it says will help save as many as 6 million lives. That’s an overestimate of the impact of the Fund’s money, but even if the direct number is really closer to 15 percent of that, or only 870,000, we’re still talking about twice the number of people the U.S. lost in all of World War II—a pretty impressive performance. Again, the United States pledged $450 million to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI) from 2012 to 2014. GAVI is on track to support developing countries in immunizing an additional quarter of a billion children by 2015, preventing nearly 4 million deaths in the process. That’s maybe three times the total of all U.S. military casualties in every war back to the American Revolution.

Despite that immense success, other parts of the administration’s national security apparatus appear happy to ride roughshod over the U.S.-backed fight against global infectious disease. I’ve complained before about the fact that the CIA used a vaccination program as part of a failed intelligence gathering operation against Osama bin Laden. It didn’t even bother to complete the program, leaving a bunch of people unprotected against disease. But the knock-on effects continue: vaccination workers have been targeted again and again, and the number of parents refusing to get their kids vaccinated is on the rise. That’s a real health threat to the United States given the increase in vaccine deniers in this country who are leaving their own children at risk. For example, measles is returning to the U.S. thanks to declining vaccination rates; the same problem in France recently led to 5,000 hospitalizations and 10 deaths. Ten kids died from whooping cough in 2010 in California thanks once again to parents who refused to vaccinate their kids. So for purely domestic health reasons, it is about time America foreswore using vaccination programs as part of defense and intelligence operations.

In fact, it’s about time ‘Whole of Government’ became a mandate for actors across the diplomacy, development, and defense sectors to start working together to strengthen national security using whichever tool is most effective to keep Americans secure. In some cases, that means defense and diplomacy should back development solutions. Or if actually getting support from the other parts of the triad is a stretch for the development leg, defense and diplomacy should at least leave it in peace to do its job. Just because USAID employees rarely shoot people doesn’t mean they can’t help make the world safer for America.

The post We’re Winning in Afghanistan (At Least With Vaccines) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.