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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December 15, 2021

Taliban Rule Still Hasn't Taken Shape

Four months to the day after the Taliban seized Kabul, a clear picture of their rule still has yet to emerge, Andrew North writes in a reported essay for New Lines Magazine. 
 
Many had expected a return to the brutal austerity that marked the Taliban's 1990s government, but some women have foregone burkas, and policies remain undefined, North writes—possibly because the Taliban lack the manpower to enforce thoroughgoing religious conservatism, or possibly because there seems to be a divide between the Taliban's political elites and its more-conservative fighters. 
 
"While many working women were sent home, many remain in their jobs," North writes. "Most girls of high school age are not going to class, but the situation is ambiguous, with no blanket ban … the group once dubbed 'Islamic Maoists' has not been quite as ruthless as many feared—so far. Therein lies the issue. There are no rules to Taliban rule, only exceptions. … And there is no trust. Even women who still have their jobs have little faith it will last. Meanwhile, continued reports of vendetta-style killings and beatings puncture a hole in the supposed amnesty that Taliban leaders offered to Afghans who worked for the former government. Their response has been that renegade elements are responsible and that this is not policy."

Meanwhile, North writes, public workers are largely going without pay, and the Taliban have struggled in the reversed role of counterinsurgents, as an ISIS threat looms.

Will Russia and Ukraine Stay Locked in a Stalemate?

Russia's troop buildup near Ukraine has raised serious concerns, but Katharine Quinn-Judge predicts in a Foreign Affairs essay that a full-scale invasion is unlikely, as "over the past year and a half, Kyiv and Moscow have grown increasingly comfortable with a stalemate that brings benefits to them both." Russia can claim "de facto" rule of Ukraine's eastern, separatist enclaves, Quinn-Judge writes, and Kyiv has its own nationalists who might rather say good riddance to Russian-speaking enclaves than compromise with Moscow. 
 
Russia's troop buildup could be less an invasion prelude than a response to "perceived Western slights … such as the presence of U.S. ships in the Black Sea and various delays in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline" linking Russian gas fields to Europe, Quinn-Judge suggests. If that's true, Western concessions, rather than territorial acquisitions, might be Russian President Vladimir Putin's real goal.

Has America Given Up on War?

What is the US willing to fight for, these days? That's the question posed by an Economist cover story noting that the shadow cast by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—plus the deep an unending political divisions within the US itself—have left the American public less appetized by the prospect of fighting, particularly to promote a liberal-democratic governing model overseas. At the same time, an aversion to war has percolated among America's foreign-policy elite: Hawks now want the US to avoid entanglements that distract from the challenge of China, while doves want a pullback for its own sake, as the magazine writes in a related briefing.
 
To The Economist, this is bad news. The US has not been a perfect hegemon, but compared with other great powers of the past, it has allowed itself to be bound by constraints and has not, generally, sought to trample its allies. The international system propped up by American military power after World War II "was not perfect, and did not apply everywhere," the magazine writes. "But it was better than anything that had come before. … If the liberal order breaks down, America's allies will suffer grievously. Once it is gone, Americans themselves may be surprised to discover how much they benefited from it."
 
America is tiring of war at a particularly difficult time, Gideon Rachman writes for the Financial Times: Tensions with China over Taiwan, with Russia over Ukraine, and with Iran over its nuclear program have all arisen as simultaneous challenges that seem, to some, to cry out for the credible threat of military action, if not for its actual use. In Rachman's view, the US is likely to fall back on economic sanctions as its weapon of choice in all three scenarios, which would avoid "world war three" but "might mean the end of globalisation."

What's on Weibo?

For those curious about the particularities of China's walled-off Internet, the latest episode of The Spectator podcast "Chinese Whispers" sketches the various platforms and Chinese netizens' proclivities. In conversation with What's on Weibo (a Chinese-social-media-trends-reporting outlet) founder Manya Koetse and tech journalist Shen Lu, host Cindy Yu depicts an online landscape where controversial topics are censored, but sometimes by platforms themselves rather than by government agents—and where users are neither as young-skewing or as liberal as one might expect, as so-called "little pinkies" push a nationalist agenda. 
 
The recent controversy over tennis star Peng Shuai's allegations of sexual assault against a former vice-premiere shows both the inclination toward online censorship in China and the power of social platforms, as Yu and guests tell it: Peng's full name is now censored, but had she not taken her allegations public on the popular microblog platform Weibo, the story wouldn't have made international news.