Kabul falls. What did we learn?

I’m guest editing the CTRL ALT RIGHT DELETE newsletter this week while Melissa and her family move to their new home across the country.

This should be a day of national mourning.

The Taliban has taken Kabul. While this outcome may have been inevitable, the pace at which it has happened is stunning- and seems to have caught U.S. officials off guard. Just more than a month ago, President Joe Biden said that “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

He was wrong, but he is hardly the only one- and certainly not the main one- to blame in this crushing historical moment. Anyone that has read The Afghanistan Papers- crucial reporting from The Washington Post- knows that for twenty years the United States government has been lying to the American people about the war in Afghanistan.

Source

What I’m mourning today is not President Biden’s decision. It’s the nation’s decision, made with a profound lack of reflection and imagination- one that we took in near unison twenty years ago. In November 2001, a CNN/Gallup poll found 92% of Americans supported going to war in Afghanistan. Amidst the flag waving and the mourning for the lost in the terror attacks of September 11th, military action to avenge those acts of terrorism may have been inevitable.

But in retrospect, we can assess the implications of that grim consensus. We can look at the cost, measured in trillions. We can count the bodies. And we can mourn the future for the Afghan people- especially the women and girls who will now be returned to Taliban rule.

And, as should be the natural inclination for the readers of this newsletter, we can think about the relationship between the “War on Terror” abroad and the rise of bigotry and right wing domestic terror at home.

Arguably, Donald Trump is a product of that relationship. Trump’s superpowers as a demagogue were forged in the ooze of anti-Muslim bigotry after September 11th, which morphed into the medium for his racist claims about Barack Obama’s citizenship.

What’s more, the military, scarred from two decades of war, is only now looking at the ways in which domestic extremism has proliferated in its ranks. For a small but notable number of people with prior military experience, far-right extremism is especially appealing. And police in this country- trained and equipped in a context defined by the War on Terror- are themselves a vector for extremism and, more broadly, violence against the communities they serve.

None of this even begins to consider the implications for the world more generally- for Iraq and Syria, and for everywhere else in the world shaped by the War on Terror. Millions of people are dead following the actions we took twenty years ago. The chess pieces that fell- and some that were pushed over by leaders like Vladimir Putin, eager to take advantage of the situation- have weakened America, and indeed Europe. Many of the same forces that gave us Trump gave the UK Brexit. The flood of refugees from Syria aroused a populist backlash in multiple nations.

What have we learned? What is the lesson? Perhaps it is that hate breeds hate, violence breeds violence. What could we have done to take a proportional response- a wise response- to the terror attacks of September 11th? I’m reminded that the U.S. rejected multiple Taliban offers to turn Osama bin Laden over in 2001. If we took that offer, and spent a fraction of our $2.4 trillion on non-military intervention in Afghanistan, where would that nation be today? If we did not use the attacks of September 11th as a false justification for the war in Iraq, what would the health of democracy in the United States and Europe look like today? If we had invested those trillions in our own education and infrastructure, where would we be?

What if.

ICYMI

• Last month, I spoke to Jonathan Stray, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Human Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, about his new paper, Designing Recommender Systems to Depolarize, which asks whether social media platform can play a role in reducing extremism and division. Jonathan’s paper “examines algorithmic depolarization interventions with the goal of conflict transformation: not suppressing or eliminating conflict but moving towards more constructive conflict.”
• In an open letter, a coalition of tech accountability and social justice organizations led –Media Matters for America and GLAAD — called on YouTube to strengthen its policies around harassment such as deadnaming and misgendering of trans people. The letter accompanies the release of new research from Media Matters that identified high-profile examples of misgendering and deadnaming of trans people on YouTube that have accumulated millions of views from right-wing personalities such as Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and The Hodgetwins.
• In a summary of their decisions, CNN reports that “As the congressional investigations grow more partisan — and Democratic and Republican viewpoints on the significance of the Capitol attack grow farther apart — it’s notable that judges appointed by presidents of both parties have described the riot as an existential danger to American democracy.” The Department of Homeland Security says calls for violence online are similar to those before the January 6 attack.
• A man who killed five people in Plymouth, a town in the UK, “expressed misogynistic and homophobic views and portrayed himself as a man in despair who raged against his mother and his failure to find a girlfriend” in his social media posts, according to the Guardian.
• A new site that permits users to create deepfake “nudes” of women from any picture of them clothed has amassed tens of millions of hits, according to the Huffington Post. “The website’s stunning success lays bare the grim and increasingly dangerous reality of being a woman on the internet as malicious deepfake technology continues to advance undeterred,” writes reporter Jesselyn Cook.

Coda

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Do you need a cleanser after reading this depressing message from me? Check this out. Put your local exorcist on speed dial first.

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