Hello, and happy Friday! Tomorrow, I’ll be boarding my first transatlantic flight since the pandemic began to go and see my family after nearly two years apart. Despite having lived abroad for four years, this is the longest that I’ve gone without seeing them. It’s also the longest that I’ve ever been away from the States. To put it into perspective: The last time I stood on American shores, Donald Trump was still president, COVID-19 was a virtual unknown, and masks were things that people wore on Halloween.
I’ve mentally prepared myself for the public-health changes that await me, both in flight and back home. But what I haven’t prepared for is the fact that my kid brother is now in high school and taller than me 😩
In podcast news: I joined this week’s Bunker to discuss COVID-19 booster shots and the fallout of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. You can tune in via your favorite podcast app (find yours here).
What I’ve written
When the last of the remaining United States forces departed from Afghanistan this week, they took with them more than 100,000 people, some of whom were Afghanistan’s most educated and skilled citizens. For these politicians, artists, scholars, and activists, the withdrawal represented not only the end of their country as they knew it, but the end of any hope they might have had in helping shape its future.
These aren’t the only people Afghanistan has lost over the past few weeks. Perhaps just as important is another group: Those still in the country who have gone into hiding in fear for their lives under Taliban rule, some erasing any remnants of who they once were—female journalists who have deleted evidence of their work, artists who have destroyed their creations, and women who have burned their degrees.
I spoke with Afghans in Kabul and across the diaspora about the void that these two groups have left, and the impact it stands to have on the Taliban and the country as a whole. Keep reading here
For a while, it seemed as though the COVID-19 crisis in India had taught the world a valuable lesson about the perils of vaccine nationalism and how ending the pandemic anywhere means ending it everywhere. But as wealthy countries announce plans to begin administering booster shots to offer extra protection against Delta—despite the fact that the majority of the global population has yet to receive even one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine—I’m less convinced that this is true.
There is nothing wrong with governments wanting to safeguard their citizens. But if Delta has taught the world anything, it’s that protecting one’s own populace at the expense of the rest of the world is a loser’s game—one that results in more transmission, more variants, and more Band-Aid solutions. Boosters alone won’t be enough to shield those who receive them from new and dangerous variants that might emerge elsewhere. Keep reading here
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with a man called Saboor, who has spent years trying to save his younger brother Habib, who worked with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, from the Taliban. His account, which you can read in his own words here, is emblematic of just how unprepared the U.S. government was to help those who risked their lives to help Americans.
Thankfully, Habib and his family managed to flee Afghanistan the day before the Taliban announced that they would no longer allow other Afghans to do the same. He is now officially reunited with his brother in the United States. While their story had a happy ending, the same cannot be said for countless others. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This heartbreaking story about the 17-year-old soccer star who was among the Afghans clinging to a departing U.S. military jet in a desperate bid to escape the Taliban (Wall Street Journal)
Mr. Anwari was determined to make his own escape. Earlier this month, as the Taliban’s lightning offensive brought them closer to the capital, Mr. Anwari and his friends had been discussing what to do. “We should all leave,” one said, over a lunch of rice and beef. “If they come, I will leave this country,” Mr. Anwari told them, according to a friend.
Mr. Anwari was born in Kabul two years after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban and on the eve of Afghanistan’s new constitution and elections. He was a citizen of the country’s most socially liberal city and his life traced the arc of a segment of society slowly globalizing.
This fascinating profile of the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman (The Washington Post)
After overcoming her skepticism about Trump as a candidate, Haberman, 47, quickly became the highest-profile reporter covering his campaign, and eventually his presidency. She was the most-cited journalist in the Mueller report, and yet she continues to be attacked from certain corners of the left as a supposed water carrier for the 45th president. Like nearly everything Trump touched, she also became part of the culture war — a symbol, bigger than the sum of her stories.
This insightful piece about the purpose, and the failures, of the 9/11 Museum (New York Magazine)
Imagining a better, more civically healthy 9/11 museum ultimately requires imagining a better, more civically healthy national response to 9/11 than we’ve seen at any point in the past two decades. Cochran told me that the museum “has striven to be above politics and to bring all Americans together in solemn remembrance.” But there is no way to put the memory of 9/11 “above politics.” Everything about 9/11 — from its origins in Cold War proxy battles, to the Bush administration’s failure to heed credible warnings of an attack on American soil, to the Republican Party’s shameless post-9/11 embrace of militarism for partisan advantage and the Democratic Party’s craven acquiescence, to Guantanamo to Iraq to drones to the current fight over Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan — is inherently political.
What I’m thinking about
How we should all dance like n̶o̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶c̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ Michael Gove.
Until next time,
Yasmeen