SINZAI, Afghanistan — The white flags flutter in the apple orchards of this serene hamlet ringed by oatmeal-colored mountains. They mark the precise spots where U.S. airstrikes killed Afghans. In the village center lies the destroyed shell of a building that once housed shops; down the road is a mangled, rusted car.
There are white flags there, too.
Together, they’re reminders of the legacy the United States has left in many rural areas across Afghanistan.
“Everyone here hated the Americans,” said Zabiullah Haideri, 30. His shop was shattered by an airstrike in 2019 that killed 12 villagers. “They murdered civilians and committed atrocities.”
In Kabul and other Afghan cities, the United States will be remembered for enabling two decades of progress in women’s rights, an independent media and other freedoms. But in the nation’s hinterlands, the main battlegrounds of America’s longest war, many Afghans view the United States primarily through the prism of conflict, brutality and death.
Here in Wardak province, 25 miles southwest of the capital, the U.S. military, the CIA and the ruthless Afghan militias they armed and trained fought the Taliban for years. Trapped in the crossfire were villagers and farmers. Many became casualties of U.S. counterterrorism operations, drone strikes and gun battles.
They [the Taliban] were abetted by the harsh tactics of U.S. forces and their Afghan allies and by the corruption and ineffectiveness of the U.S.-backed Afghan government. Exacting any justice or compensation from the U.S. military or the government was elusive. So the killings of their relatives and the lack of accountability drove many villagers to support the Taliban.
To be certain, the Taliban controlled the villagers through fear, intimidation and their own brand of viciousness. But rural Afghan society is largely conservative, and residents mostly agreed with the militants’ harsh interpretation of Islam.
With the departure of U.S. forces and the fall of President Ashraf Ghani’s government, there’s now a calm unlike any the villagers have experienced in two decades. With the conflict ended and the Taliban in control, the violence has stopped.
“The major change is there is peace and security now, and the killings of the people have stopped,” Mohammed Omar, the village imam, said in front of a mosque peppered with bullet holes. “You can move freely now anywhere. Death has disappeared.”
“There are no airstrikes, no night raids, no bombings,” said Haideri, tall and wiry with a black beard and wavy hair. “But the problem now is there is no work and no money. People here are facing hunger.”
The Taliban, by then [2015], controlled much of Nerkh. The government was entrenched in the district’s center. The villagers were caught in between. Even mundane tasks became matters of life or death. If Haideri shaved, for example, would the Taliban consider him loyal to the foreigners and the government? If he grew out his beard, would the government or U.S. forces consider him a spy?
“Whenever we left our homes we told our families, ‘goodbye,’ ” he said. “We didn’t know whether we would return home alive.”
Wikipedia: Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), was a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court set forth the legal test for determining whether to grant deference to a government agency’s interpretation of a statute which it administers. The decision articulated a doctrine now known as the “Chevron deference.” The doctrine consists of a two-part test applied by the court, when appropriate, that is highly deferential to government agencies: “whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction [emphasis added] of the statute”, so long as Congress has not spoken directly to the precise issue at question.
But the real blockbuster environmental battles could come through a series of pending petitions for the Supreme Court to get involved in legal fights over the scope of EPA regulations under the nation’s bedrock clean air and water laws.
“The fight about the environment at the Supreme Court significantly overlaps with the fight about executive power and agency power,” said Sean Marotta, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells. “What we see in the court’s environmental rulings is not so much strong feelings about the environment but fears of agency overreach.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence turned up in Hungary last month to speak to a conference on conservative social values hosted by the far-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, was another recent visitor. Tucker Carlson did his Fox News show from Hungary for a week this summer. The American Conservative Union is planning a version of its CPAC gathering in Budapest early next year.
Those are among the more visible recent fruits of a well-funded campaign by Mr. Orban in the United States that stretches back a decade and now stands as a case study in how governments around the world seek to shape policies and debates in Washington, sometimes raising concerns about improper foreign influence in U.S. politics.
Carried out by a network of government offices, Washington lobbyists, Hungarian diaspora groups, educational institutions and government-funded foundations, the effort’s main impact has been to bolster Mr. Orban’s image as a conservative leader on the world stage — and to counter his reputation as an authoritarian nationalist who is cozying up to Russia and China.It has also notched some tangible, if fleeting, policy victories for Mr. Orban, including the withdrawal during the Trump administration of a State Department grant to nurture independent news media in Hungary and the securing of a long-coveted Oval Office meeting for Mr. Orban in 2019 with President Donald J. Trump.Much of what the Hungarian network has done is legal and standard operating procedure in Washington. But some of its activities touch on gray areas, including transparency requirements for those acting on behalf of foreign interests, concerns arising from overseas efforts to sway presidential campaigns, and the ethics of think tanks accepting money from governments or their proxies.
“I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate -- that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased. .... I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance in a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. .... Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.”
“Textbooks don’t want to touch this idea. ‘There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,’ an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, ‘sex, religion and social class.’ While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. .... Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has ‘the power to rise in the world,’ is anathema to textbook authors and to many teachers as well. .... [Authors, editors and educators] leave out her adult life and make her entire existence over into a vague ‘up by the bootstraps’ operation. In the process, they make this passionate fighter for the poor into something she never was in life: boring.”
“Students also develop no understanding of causality in history. Our nation’s thirteen separate incursions into Nicaragua, for instance, are surely worth knowing about as we attempt why that country embraced a communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should show history as contingent, affected by the power of ideas and individuals. Instead, they present history as a ‘done deal.’”
“American needs to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response. .... Wilson vetoed a bill that would have abolished Espionage and Sedition Acts. .... Neither before nor since these [pro-WW I federal government propaganda] campaigns has the United States come closer to being a police state.”
My assessment of the debacle that is unfolding over the Democrat's inability to get Joe Biden's agenda over the finish line is pretty much echoed by the following opinion piece, because folks, I simply couldn't have written it any more concisely than the following:
Back when my kids were little and I was always schlepping them hither and yon, they’d squabble in the back seat at ever-increasing decibels until I would inevitably unleash my most fervent Dad-ism:
“I don’t care who started it, just knock it off!”
Well, Dad is even more pissed these days at the House and Senate Democrats. Do they somehow not understand that failing to enact President Biden’s sweeping infrastructure and social spending packages – at least in some form, with wise compromises – would be tantamount to political suicide? That their voters will dismiss them as do-nothings and stay home in droves during the 2022 midterm elections, to the delight of the galvanized MAGA hordes?
I don’t care which faction – the “centrists” or the “progressives” – has the better grievances. Just knock it off.
The centrists think the $3.5-trillion social reform price tag is too big? Well, guess what: That money would be spent over a period of 10 years, and it totals roughly 1.2 percent of the economy.
The progressives don’t want to compromise by perhaps shaving that price tag a bit? Well, guess what: The facts of life on Capitol Hill require compromise, because the Democratic majorities are thinner than dental floss and, given the unified Republican opposition, nothing will pass unless virtually every Democrat of blue and purple hue is brought on board.
That’s because Biden, despite his solid victory, had no coattails. The Democrats lost 12 House seats, and eked out a no-wiggle-room Senate majority only because Stacey Abrams ginned up grassroots turnout in Georgia.
This is not the New Deal or Great Society era, when Democrats had power in numbers. In the words of commentator Jeff Greenfield (a former Democratic operative), our current era requires “an honest embrace of what the politics of the moment will accept. It recognizes the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s aphorism that ‘my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy.’ It argues for the kind of result that gives Democrats the only reasonable chance to wage a midterm fight where they will be weighed down by Republican perfidy in gerrymandering and voter restrictions…Without visible evidence of the Democrats’ core (agenda) – without (universal) pre-K, some form of expanded health care, some steps toward a fairer tax system – Democrats will go into next year with one or both hands tied behind their back.”
Or, as House Democrat Jim McGovern, chairman of the Rules Committee, reportedly said the other day, “If we can’t deliver on this, God help us in the next election.”
Biden staked his candidacy on the promise of leveraging his Washington experience in order to get things done – most notably, things that are long overdue (lowering prescription drug prices, expanding child tax credits, fighting climate change, repairing roads, broadening Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing, and much more), but it won’t help his case, or the party’s, if the squabbling rank and file makes our legislative process even more dysfunctional than it already is. If the party of government can’t prove that it can govern – and this particular week is crucial, with a looming Sept. 30 deadline to avoid a federal shutdown – then what’s the remaining alternative? The cult that doesn’t give two figs about governing?
On policy, in fact, Democrats have public opinion on their side. A recent national poll found landslide support for Biden’s infrastructure bill (65 percent yes, 28 percent no), and landslide support for the $3.5-trillion social reform package (62 percent yes, 32 percent no).
In a sense, they’ve already won the argument.
The only road forward is to deliver something substantive, even if it falls short of the most sweeping ambitions. That way Democrats can go to the voters in 2022 and say, with empirical proof, that “we’re making a positive difference in your lives, and the Republicans opposed every single thing.”
That’s a whole lot more palatable than blowing their best opportunity in years to fix so much of what’s broken. All of them surely must realize that with democracy itself now hanging in the balance, failing to deliver is not an option.
NOW IF the Dems DO deliver, I will be happy to revisit this thread and eat my hat, but till then................................................. they need to KNOCK IT OFF!
