As I write this, two new images from Hamid Karzai International Airport are circulating on social media. The first, blurry, is of a C-17 US Air Force transport aircraft flying over Kabul, with a figure slipping off the outside and crashing below; reports suggest it was a person clinging to the wheel who fell. A second image, higher resolution, shows a crowd on the runway making it difficult for the C-17 to safely take off, as people cling to the outside of the plane.

These are grim images, and they succeeded in a way where few others had. If the timing of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan had been designed to avoid a repeat of the Saigon image, it instead created the unique specter of the Kabul image.

As an object of media focus, images like this can spur bureaucratic activity. A February article in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory demonstrates how media attention to bureaucratic failing can spur both action and resistance.

“Our findings suggest that anomalously heightened media attention has markedly different effects depending on the nature of the media attention,” write study authors Aaron Erlich, Daniel Berliner, Brian Palmer-Rubin, and Benjamin E Bagozzi.

For their research, the authors looked at information requests and responses to 22 Mexican federal agencies between 2005 — 2015. By processing 150,000 news articles, the authors were able to find periods of anomalously high attention. By cross-referencing this news database with the time period of information requests and nature of attention, the authors then matched government responses to crises with media attention.

The attention matters, and the kind of attention matters. Stories about corruption generated less information and fewer overt government responses, which the authors theorize as a way to limit coverage.

Yet there were other instances where heightened attention brought about a real and immediate change in behavior.

“Negative attention owing to government failure — for example botched responses to natural disasters — is associated with increased responsiveness, likely in an effort to salvage the agency’s reputation.”

There is more at play. How a government agency responds to information requests varies greatly on how it envisions shaping the news. If asked about a newly announced policy, being able to publish documents that support it lets the agency claim credit.

If the news is bad, and the information requests flooding in are instead a reaction to crisis, the organization may slow its response as a part of blame avoidance. Yet that isn’t always the case; by responding quickly, a government agency may instead be trying to bolster its reputation for competence, letting the fast media response take the place of doing the job right the first time.

While not every government will have public records requests as a handy metric, understanding the way bureaucracies incentivize sharing some information and suppressing others is a crucial tool for policymakers and the public. A collapse of security that seems sudden in public may in fact have an extensive paper trail in documents for official use only, and one way to unearth that is to convince the parties responsible that publishing their right-yet-overlooked grim assessments serves them more than hiding the existence of dire predictions after dire news.

Shirin Jaafari documented the tension and reality of life in Herat at the start of the week that saw the Taliban advance from contesting much of the country to the de facto power over all of it. In her report, published Aug. 9, we hear the stories of people seeking shelter from the constant fighting. Hours after an interview at a checkpoint held by Afghan security forces, the checkpoint came under fire. Salimeh, a 50-year-old woman who lives on the outskirts of Herat, collected firewood to warm the women and children of families seeking shelter in the city. Sima Fakhruddin, one of Salimeh’s guests, had walked hours to find a car for hire. The last lines of Jaafari’s story go to 17-year-old Elham Mansouri, years younger than the last time the Taliban ruled the country. Mansouri promises resistance against the harms visited upon her mother. 

Rishma Vora confronted racism in US foreign policy, highlighting not just historical harms but how limitations in the study of foreign policy perpetuate racist practices in the field. As upcoming research by political scientists Devorah Manekin and Tamar Mitts (covered in Critical State) shows, security forces respond differently to nonviolent action based on the ethnicity of those doing the protesting. And as Vora writes, “The role of race and racism in shaping postcolonial global power structures should be central to [International Relations] courses, not confined to a ‘special day’ to discuss racism.”

Kenneth Brownell, Chen-Yang Lin, and Ash Maria lamented the limited scope of President Biden’s July 16 proclamation of National Atomic Veterans Day. While focused on those servicemembers harmed from exposure to nuclear tests (like the Trinity test on July 16, 1945), the holiday neglects the workers in and out of uniform who cleaned up the after-effects. Those cleanup veterans are excluded not just from holiday recognition, but because they were not directly exposed to a blast, they are left out of VA-sponsored medical care and financial compensation. The civilians who cleaned this waste fare even worse, and the authors urge greater presidential action to right the wrongs of the past.

For a brief moment, President Ashraf Ghani managed to be not just the head of a collapsing real-world experiment in reconstruction theory, but the main character on Twitter.

Ghani’s quiet exit, mere months after promising he would remain and fight in the face of violence, drew warranted digs, perhaps none more brutal than the now-deleted tweet from Afghanistan’s Embassy in India, which read in part “He screwed and f***ed everything up… His legacy will be a stain on our history.”

In a summer full of intelligence failures, tweeting the faces of some CIA agents from the White House account certainly seems like another one.

Speaking of failures, it turns out mixing a war on drugs with the war on terror was a brilliant way to shift cash crop cultivation out of government-controlled provinces. Oops!

On the Korean Peninsula, the Eighth Army welcomed this weird Monday with all the enthusiasm of a throbbing hangover and a countdown to Friday.

Speaking of weird vibes, it turns out you can get second-hand jitters from hearing that the head of STRATCOM calmly pounds a couple energy drinks before briefing press. If there’s anything I want in the part of the military tasked with executing nuclear war, it’s the jitters.

Finally, it’s a week and a month for wildly different interpretations of the recent past. To ease us along, we’ve got some pretty great "Simpsons" jokes.

*This week's Critical State is brought to you by guest author Kelsey Atherton.