Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. August 11, 2021 A Warning From an Afghan Activist: 'Shame' on World Leaders As New America President and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter told Fareed on Sunday, the near-term future for Afghans may be "very painful." According to Afghan women's-rights and civil-society advocate Mahbouba Seraj, it already is.
Women are fleeing areas where the Taliban are advancing, including the recently seized city of Kunduz, Seraj tells Turkish broadcaster TRT World. Asked for a message to world leaders, Seraj responds: "I'm going to say, really, shame on you. I'm going to say to the whole world, shame on you for what you did to Afghanistan. … We talked to you, we demanded, we asked, we did everything, and nobody paid any attention. They just made decisions with their gut feelings or whatever, all of these men of the world that … are in power, and they're destroying something that we worked so hard for. … What is happening in Afghanistan today is going to put this country 200 years back … Now there's going to be an exodus … What are we going to do ? We are going to sit again, and fight again, and lose again, and then make another generation, and then for the world to make another stupid decision and destroy us all? … I don't understand it. ... We are disgusted." More From Afghanistan: A Mix of Exhaustion, Fear, and Apathy Some have painted a more ambiguous—if equally saddening—picture. At Newlines Magazine, Aaquib Khan interviews women and girls studying at the Kandahar Institute of Modern Studies (KIMS) who fear what's to come. "In an interview, the [Taliban]'s spokesperson, Suhail Shaheen, made assurances that" under a new Taliban government, if the group takes control, "women will be allowed to work, go to school and participate in politics, as long as they wear the hijab," Khan writes. "Few of the female students at KIMS trust these promises, however. And the fear is genuine."
Some Afghan men express to Khan a mix of exhaustion and apathy about who governs the country, voicing dissatisfaction with the Kabul government. But given fears of Taliban violence, the situation is tense. "Ordinary Afghans have no say in the peace process, nor can they stop the war," Khan writes. "They are stuck between different forces and different countries with competing interests. They are both victims and spectators. The battle lines are now more blurred than ever. To stay alive, an ordinary Afghan has no room for error." China's New Covid-19 Challenge In the early days of the pandemic, Covid-19 was posed by some as a test for Chinese President Xi Jinping and authoritarian governance writ large. After conquering the first viral wave, China now faces another, and countries that relied on Chinese vaccines are suffering surges of their own.
Given all that, William Pesek writes for Nikkei Asia that Covid-19 is testing Xi again.
The Delta variant "is a narrative Xi's censors cannot silence," Pesek writes. "Facebook and Google operate in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, where Sinovac is flopping. Nor can Xi's censorship-industrial complex mask the big flaw in China's COVID-19 response. Strict lockdowns, mass testing and travel bans were fine for the first iteration of COVID-19. Not for the wildly transmissible sequel. Delta, odds are, will be followed by other variants that find ways around Xi's lockdown strategy. China's relatively higher vaccination rates matter little if its immunization technology is not ready for battle. It needs a Sinovac 2.0, and fast. Or to make some frantic calls to Pfizer headquarters." What the Founders Thought of Vaccines What would America's Founders have thought of Covid-19 vaccination? We can't know, of course, but at The Boston Globe, Jared Cohen writes that some enthusiastically embraced vaccinating against smallpox, despite the newness of vaccination as a medical practice.
Having seen smallpox devastate American troops, George Washington pushed for the Continental Army to get inoculated, Cohen writes. Abigail Adams got her children vaccinated; Benjamin Franklin wrote that he "bitterly" regretted not having done the same for a son who died of smallpox. Thomas Jefferson vaccinated residents of Monticello, "including his family and the people he enslaved," and told Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to spread the word about smallpox vaccination to Native Americans they encountered when exploring the newly purchased rest of the country, Cohen writes. 'Technopopulism': The New Trend in the West? No, it's not populism enhanced by technology. At American Purpose, Samuel McIlhagga reviews two books—Michael Burleigh's "Populism: Before and After the Pandemic" and Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti's "Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics"—and identifies "technopopulism" as a mix of populism and technocracy.
Around the world, leaders are fusing two political modes, McIlhagga writes: populist claims to represent the will of the people against a supposedly corrupt (or, in the case of French President Emmanuel Macron's semi-populist rhetoric) ineffectual ruling elite, and technocratic claims of expertise, efficiency, and the ability to get things done. "You can spot this pairing of populism and technocracy, for instance, in [British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson's public promises to 'level up' and 'get Brexit done' by respecting 'the will of the people,'" McIlhagga writes. "Privately, Johnson has admitted to something like technopopulism in a little-viewed video interview with the biologist Denis Noble, emeritus professor at Balliol College, Oxford, where he says, '[the] terrible truth about politics and human nature is that ... you can probably make a good case for almost any course of action … the most important thing is to do it.'"
As the pandemic forces, or allows, citizens to reexamine styles of governance and how politicians advertise them, McIlhagga suggests "technopopulism" is a trend worth watching. |
