Inside a clinic in eastern Afghanistan, a nine-months-pregnant Afghan woman shivered on an old metal bed as an Afghan midwife examined her. It was 2012, and the war in Afghanistan had already been going on for 11 years. The woman had just traveled from an outlying village along the Pakistan border, seeking a safe place to deliver her third child. After repeated miscarriages, her family was determined to make their way to the Afghan government’s sponsored clinic at the district’s center, where they had heard news about better maternal outcomes. Part of my job, as a Cultural Support Team (CST) leader with special operations in the US military, was to…

Afghanistan wasn’t just America’s 20-year war. It also belonged to US allies. “This has been above all a catastrophe for the Afghan people. It’s a failure of the Western world and it’s a game changer for international relations,” the European Union’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell told an Italian newspaper Monday, according to the Washington Post. “Certainly,” he continued, “we Europeans share our part of responsibility. We cannot consider that this was just an American war.” As President George W. Bush said in October 2001 while announcing airstrikes against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the US had the “collective will of the world” behind its mission in Afghanistan. (Iraq, of course, was…

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban took over Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. The Afghan president fled the country. Almost all of Afghanistan is now under Taliban control. It marks the end of an era: America’s longest war is now over, and America lost. It happened fast, stunning the world and leaving many in the country racing to find an exit. But even among those surprised by the way the end played out, many knew the war was destined to end badly. According to some experts, the seeds of disaster were planted back at the war’s very beginning. Soon after the American war in Afghanistan began in the aftermath of the 9/11…

The global supply chain is in hot water. The pandemic has made it notoriously difficult for shoppers to buy certain consumer goods, from home appliances and furniture to laptops and bicycles. And things aren’t getting better anytime soon, at least not this year. Shipments have been delayed, raw materials are in short supply, and businesses have scrambled to dole out apologies and assurances to anxious customers. With the holidays a few months away, experts are predicting that the year’s busiest shopping season will be “a perfect storm” of supply chain bottlenecks. Shoppers, as a result, will face higher prices, even as retailers remain uncertain as to whether they can keep…

In December 2018, I visited a large dyeing facility inside the Shaoxing Industrial Zone, south of the coastal city of Hangzhou, China. Twenty minutes out from the manufacturing hub, I began to smell it: the rotten-egg stench of dye effluent. The Zone, as it’s known, is 100 square kilometers, nearly double the size of Manhattan. More than 50 textile printing and dyeing companies stand in huge rows, facing out over the Cao’e River where it flows into Hangzhou Bay. Trucks stream north on the highway from the Zone carrying miles of dyed and printed fabrics, en route to becoming billions of dollars’ worth of shirts, dresses, shorts, and leggings. I…

By removing all troops from Afghanistan shortly before the 9/11 attacks’ 20th anniversary, President Joe Biden sent a none-too-subtle message: He wanted America, and the world, to see that he was turning the page — that the war on terror era was well and truly over. In a speech last week justifying his decision, he stated the rationale explicitly: “It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” It’s easy to be skeptical of Biden’s seriousness. US forces remain engaged in counterterrorism operations across the globe. After an ISIS suicide bombing at Kabul airport during the withdrawal killed an estimated 170 people, including 13 American service…

September 7 was Brazil’s Independence Day, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the occasion to continue his assault on the country’s democratic institutions. Bolsonaro had called on his hardcore supporters to rally, as he battles Congress and the judiciary over their refusal to go along with his attempts to rewrite electoral rules ahead of the 2022 election and over probes into him and his allies that could imperil them criminally. He addressed crowds in Brasilia and São Paulo, using the platform to attack and threaten the supreme court. “Either the leader of this branch of power gets this minister under control, or this branch will suffer what none of us…

America’s evacuation of Afghanistan is over. But that doesn’t mean the US has fulfilled its obligation to vulnerable Afghans, some of whom are still trapped in their home country. Even if the decision to withdraw from the country was ultimately the right one, the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is the product of America’s ill-conceived and failed attempts at nation-building. The US therefore has a responsibility to ensure that Afghans facing danger or persecution as the Taliban reassert their vision of religious law can reach safety in the US or in other countries, whether or not they worked alongside American troops. The US has taken some halting steps toward meeting…

The US is struggling with a resurgence of the coronavirus in the South and West. But the severity of Arizona’s Covid-19 outbreak is in a league of its own. Over the week of June 30, Arizona reported 55 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people per day. That’s 34 percent more than the second-worst state, Florida. It’s more than double Texas, another hard-hit state. It’s more than triple the US average. Arizona also maintained the highest rate of positive tests of any state at more than 25 percent over the week of June 30 — meaning more than a quarter of people who were tested for the coronavirus ultimately had it.…

When will an effective Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine be ready for production for the general public? Some top US health officials and researchers now expect one will be approved for use in less than a year. The specific estimates vary, but they say that the current push for a Covid-19 vaccine is unmatched in its scale and speed. With over 140 vaccine candidates being studied, more than one is likely to pan out, they say. “I am guardedly optimistic that by the end of 2020 we will have at least one vaccine that has been proven safe and effective in a large-scale trial,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of…