HOT AIR BALLOON FLIGHT

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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November 3, 2021

The Best Explanation of America's Failure in Afghanistan?

Recent news from Afghanistan has been dire: As the economy has hurtled toward collapse, crime has followed. At Nikkei Asia, Andrew North details the desperation, including "early signs of famine."
 
As a crisis unfolds, analysts are not finished hashing out how Afghanistan reached this point—specifically, what went wrong in the two-decade US and NATO war effort. At War on the Rocks, Barnett Rubin offers perhaps the best, or at least the most fulsome, explanation to be published since Kabul fell.
 
Revisiting in-country anecdotes and conversations with decades-long contacts—including Afghanistan's last two presidents—Rubin describes a lack of consideration for how rural Afghanistan functioned, an inadequate counterinsurgency strategy, a "Ponzi scheme" of corruption effectively funded by US dollars, former President Ashraf Ghani's refusal to believe defeat was possible, a missed opportunity to reconcile with the Taliban after the 2001 US invasion, and diminished US influence in the region. From start to finish, the US-backed project of "good governance" was ill conceived, as Rubin tells it.
 
Rubin also offers a warning for the present: "Now the Taliban are making the same mistake. They have announced an 'interim government' with no procedure or timetable for becoming a permanent government. ... Under a superficial calm reminiscent of 2002, things are simmering, and the alternative to the Taliban" isn't the sort of Western-friendly leaders Afghanistan had for nearly 20 years. "It is the Islamic State in Afghanistan. Even as it terrorizes Afghanistan's minority Shi'a with mass killings, it is recruiting members from across Afghanistan's Sunni groups … Afghanistan needs a political settlement as much today as it did on Aug. 14, 2021."

UK Infections and the Limits of Vaccines

The UK has suffered high Covid-19 infection rates since summer, and while deaths remain relatively few, cases have ticked up in recent weeks. Some say that arc is exposing the limits of vaccines.
 
As the Global Briefing has noted, the UK has been eyed as a test case for how effectively vaccines can stave off Covid-19. The country vaccinated citizens quickly beginning in spring, and nearly 69% are now fully inoculated. But it has also lifted anti-Covid-19 restrictions, leaving vaccine-induced immunity as the main line of defense. "The surge in infections shows that vaccines alone cannot contain the virus, say scientists calling for the introduction of 'soft' public-health measures to avoid another lockdown," Luke Taylor writes for Nature.

Is China Repeating the USSR's Mistakes?

Chinese President Xi Jinping has seemed to have an "obsession" with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, a Nikkei Asia essay argued in 2020, but at Bloomberg, Hal Brands writes that Xi's China is repeating some of the USSR's mistakes. It has courted an arms race with the US, posed the global order as a Manichaean East–West struggle, and has unleashed its diplomats to "chastise American officials publicly, in tones reminiscent of Cold War rhetorical clashes." In Brands' view, the strategy smacks of needless antagonism, ignores interdependence, and could disadvantage Beijing in the long run.

Erdoğan's Headwinds

"Turkey's opposition has never been so bullish," Laura Pitel writes in a Financial Times essay detailing Turkey's economic struggles, as its central bank slashes interest rates (a growth-spurring move) even as inflation rears its head and the lira's value sinks.
 
Pitel suggests this is a poor macroeconomic tradeoff spurred by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is "surrounded by sycophants and dogged by rumours about his health." His opposition appears convinced it has a good chance of unseating him given the economy's trajectory, Pitel writes, noting that with elections slated for 2023, "some analysts predict that a snap vote could be held as early as the first half of next year."