Hello, and happy Friday. Over the past several days, I’ve been speaking with Afghans, in Afghanistan and in the diaspora, about the chaotic withdrawal of the United States and other allied forces this week and the consequences it stands to have for the 38 million people who now face the return of Taliban rule after 20 years.
It’s still early days and there is immense uncertainty, particularly for young Afghans who have known their country only under the protection of NATO forces. As one 25-year-old in Kabul told me, “We don’t know what will happen in the future … We just want to live normal lives.”
Normalcy is the furthest thing from Afghanistan right now. This week, thousands of people have converged on Kabul airport in a desperate bid to catch evacuation flights out of the country. Afghans who contributed to the U.S. war effort as interpreters and contractors are desperate for the Biden administration to return the favor. One young woman I reached out to explained that she couldn’t talk because she was in a rush to find somewhere safe for her family to go. “I’m not afraid of death,” she told me, “but it’s just for my family’s safety.”
These are just some of the messages that have been haunting me this week. As the world invariably turns to the question of refugees and which countries should be responsible for them in, I’ll be thinking about the people who sent them to me, as well as this:
What I’ve written
The average Afghan is 18 years old. Nearly two-thirds of the country is under 25. For these young people, the 2001 American invasion and the Taliban reign that preceded it aren’t memories, but history. Theirs is a generation that has known Afghanistan only under the protection of NATO forces.
As the Taliban retakes power after 20 years, I wrote about how this young generation won’t easily revert to the pre-2001 status quo:
As the group seeks international legitimacy, among its priorities will be to win over the young people who came of age in the years after its fall—those who have grown accustomed to many of the freedoms that the Taliban has long been hostile to, among them the right to an education and a free press. Though the Taliban will certainly face challenges from an array of other armed and ethnic groups, Afghanistan’s young people represent the greatest long-term domestic threat to the Taliban’s aims. Demographically, ideologically, and economically, theirs is the generation best positioned to determine what shape the country’s future takes.
Today marks three years since Greta Thunberg began her weekly school strike against climate inaction—a demonstration that has since ballooned into a global movement involving millions of students across more than 150 countries, with Thunberg as its Joan of Arc. Through her protests and speeches, she has galvanized the world about the climate crisis in ways few have before her. She has met world leaders, addressed the United Nations, and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—thrice.
Though these accolades have given her an enormous platform, they have also made her the target of far-right hatred online. Keep reading here
In the aftermath of last week’s grim climate assessment from the United Nations, I wrote about how climate change is the populist right’s next political battleground.
Populist parties have traded outright denialism for the position that climate policy, like that of immigration and the coronavirus pandemic, represents yet another top-down elite agenda that stands to hit ordinary people, particularly those in the working class, the hardest.
What I’ve read
The Atlantic’s latest cover story, which is without question one of the most compelling and touching stories I’ve ever read (The Atlantic)
He says he almost wishes sometimes that he could trade his current well-being for the suffering he felt 20 years ago, because Bobby was so much easier to conjure back then, the sense-memories of him still within reach. “No matter how painful September 11 was,” he explains, “I had just seen him on September 6.”
It’s the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.
It’s really not surprising that Jeff should have this fantasy from time to time, to trade his happiness for just one chance to see Bobby again in a warmer hue. As Bobby wrote in that last diary, suffering, or the prospect of it, is the price we’re willing to pay for the bonds we make.
This piece about one American journalist trying (and failing) to save the family of the Afghan who saved him (New Yorker)
“We saw the city full of these strange armed men. With strange clothing and hair styles. We are back in the nineties, you can’t believe these people are back.” The last time the Taliban had seized power, in 1996, their reign had begun with relative calm, but they quickly started conducting house raids, making arrests, and inflicting other abuses. … “I’m strong, you know I am strong,” he said, but he was having trouble sleeping. “I cried so many times. Everyone says we’re left behind. What shall we do?”
This essay from the great American photojournalist Lynsey Addario on why the Taliban’s return is catastrophic for women (The Atlantic)
All I know is that the women I’ve met these past 20 years have astonished me with their determination and wit. They have made me crumble in laughter and in tears. I think about the crisp afternoon in Kabul in 2010 when I was driving around with an Afghan actress in the passenger seat of her car. Her beautiful, fully made-up face and hair were in full view as she blasted Iranian music and danced with her hands around the steering wheel. She drove past checkpoints, huddles of burkas, and startled and sneering men. She laughed, and I laughed, and I thought about how far Afghan women had come. The Taliban cannot take away who Afghan women have become in the past 20 years—their education, their drive to work, their taste of freedom.
What I’m thinking about
This moving speech by British lawmaker and veteran Tom Tugendhat on the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Until next time,
Yasmeen