What are the parallels between the 19-year US occupations of Haiti and Afghanistan? Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about the parallels between the 19-year US occupations of Haiti and Afghanistan.

The US war in Afghanistan, which formally began with the invasion on Oct. 7, 2001 and appears to have ended slightly ahead of schedule in August 2021, is the second war the United States fought that lasted longer than 19 years. The first was the occupation of Haiti, which began in July 1915 and ended in August 1934, and which saw the hallmarks of an extractive colony in all but name, with a constitution imposed at gunpoint and a new economy directed to funnel money and resources out of the country and into the hands of American capital.

Jonathan Katz, writing for The New Republic, details [[link removed]] this shared legacy, from durable insurgency radicalized in isolation to the military experimenting with new uses for combat aircraft — from the Marines pioneering dive bombing in Haiti to the defining drone strikes of Afghanistan. The parallel, Katz concludes, “puts the lie to the idea that Haiti or Afghanistan are naturally ‘failed states,’ waiting around for paternalistic aid, pity, or scorn. Instead, a bright light has been shone on our obligations: To make real restitution to the millions harmed in our name and to accept as refugees those we left behind.”

the many fathers of defeat

Understanding the how and why of Taliban victory in Afghanistan is going to be an ongoing task. In the first drafts of a post-mortem, filed before any metaphorical death warrant was formally signed, we have a pair of obvious candidates. The first, presented by former NPR journalist and former Pentagon advisor Sarah Chayes, suggests the US role in aiding and abetting corruption [[link removed]] in Afghanistan’s government built a fatal flaw into the political task of the war, one which Chayes goes on to suggest was exploited by Pakistan’s intelligence services. Retired diplomat and now-professor at King’s College London, Tim Willasey-Wilsey, echoes [[link removed]] the focus on corruption and argues that NATO erred in building a mass army to contest insurgents, instead of a larger professional police force to resolve rural disputes.

Both accounts emphasize how Western expediency created situations, from the start through the end of the war, that failed to meet the needs of locals for safety or justice.

The open-source evidence for foreign guidance shaping Taliban advances is presently lacking. Looking at emerging literature on rebel governance [[link removed]] may be more fruitful.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] The orphans of social punishment

Creating social costs for political ideology is hardly a new phenomena, but in the wake of the coup in Myanmar, this kind of hostile social sanction has followed well-worn patterns of gender violence. That’s the conclusion from Amara Thiha, the Director at Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security, who argues that these “social punishment” campaigns of harassment against women [[link removed]], including releasing phone numbers and nonconsensual sharing of nude images, undermine the prospects of mass resistance to the coup.

Fighting against notions that any tool is fair play in resistance against an authoritarian and repressive government, Thiha asks those resisting to consider how the choice of weapon and tactic can harm allies.

Thiha concludes “Dignity is not a priority for the military regime, but it should be a core value of the pro-democracy cause.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Media matters: Part II

Looming over the news of the past month like the sword of Damocles is the coming 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack. It is around this anniversary that Biden timed his withdrawal, bumping back the negotiated May exit but not so far that it hit any of the meaningful 2001 dates. These dates could have included the Sept. 18 signing of the 2001 AUMF, the Oct. 7 invasion of Afghanistan by a multinational coalition, the Taliban surrender offered by Dec. 7, 2001, or even the conclusion of the Battle of Tora Bora on Dec. 17. Militaries and cultures can build reverence around specific dates, whose observations in turn take on a logic of their own.

Last week on Deep Dive, we took a look at how government responsiveness to information requests correlates to media coverage, and to what kind of story the government agency is able to tell. If the agency in question can mitigate bad press by showing a proactive response to media, it’s more inclined to share records. If, instead, the scandal suggests corruption, government agencies may instead stonewall, letting the truth remain in unpublished documents until the pressure passes.

For militaries looking to media to justify their existence, rituals around dates, anniversaries, and traditions, as well as specific approaches to war dead, can similarly shape press coverage. That’s one of the central arguments in an article [[link removed]] by Nicole Wenger, published in the September issue of Global Studies Quarterly.

“War commemorative rituals involve a hyper focus on mourning ‘our’ dead, grieving and revering those ‘we’ have lost, and in turn, obscuring the political contexts in which these deaths have occurred,” writes Wenger. “[Contemporary] Western military affairs have been called the ‘forever wars,’ long-term military occupations that have been accompanied by cultural attitudes of the ‘military normal.’”

For one case study, Wenger turned to the hearse procession of repatriated soldiers along Highway 401 east of Toronto, Ontario. These gatherings are the subject of media coverage, from a commemorative book by a photojournalist to repeated news coverage in the press. There is official handling of the war dead: The bodies of deceased Canadian soldiers receive a military ceremony at Canadian Forces Base Trenton where they arrive. The procession from that base, to the coroner’s office in Toronto, passes under highway overpasses, where citizens gather in ritual praise and honoring of the dead.

These rituals thus act as a sort of xxxxxx in support of the war effort, by limiting coverage of the dead to the impressions shared by public mourners, flattening expressions of grief into a reaffirmation that questioning the war means dishonoring the dead.

“Through rituals, the personal affects of war are showcased and the politics are hidden,” Wenger writes.

By narrowing the spectrum of publicly visible sorrow to that of the crowds assembled to watch a hearse motorcade, media sets bounds on the debate over the war at the exact moment its most direct consequences are brought home, under flag-draped coffins. Wegner’s work is about how society as a whole produces and reproduces these rituals. To the extent that it is a media story, it is a media story because it shows how media, consciously or passively, acquiesces to the norms of mourning war dead, set by political elites and reinforced by the public acts of some subset of citizens.

If there is unease in reading this, if talking about rituals around war dead as political acts feels disrespectful, it is because the logics of militarism in support of war are pervasive. That language, in another form, is visible throughout President Biden’s remarks on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is also, almost certainly, why the hard deadline for the US exit from Afghanistan was predetermined by another date, already synonymous with the commemoration of American dead.

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Joanne Seoyoung Lee challenged [[link removed]] the humanitarian aid community to live up to its stated ideals when it comes to delivering food aid to North Korea. Carefully acknowledging the political calculus at play between relaxing restrictions on and extending support to an authoritarian regime, Lee shows the current crisis is bad enough that the regime itself may directly appeal for help. Providing that food aid, Lee concludes, would be a way for the US to affirm “the belief in the universal value of human life, aiming to protect lives regardless of political convenience.”

Marco Werman interviewed [[link removed]] Welton Chang, the chief technology officer at Human Rights First, about the hazards posed to people in Afghanistan from captured US biometric devices. Paper records can be destroyed, providing some return to anonymity for people worried about reprisal violence. Biometric data, like iris scans or fingerprints, are always identifying, posing a risk to anyone whose unchangeable characteristics remain unerased in the devices. Says Chang, “you could use the data and the devices to systematically find individuals who were previously a part of security forces, the government, worked with the US as an interpreter or as a local national worker on a base. And that systematic process could lead to many people being harmed.”

Henda Fellah witnessed [[link removed]] what might have been a coup in Tunisia. When on July 25 [[link removed]], Tunisian President Kais Saied dismissed the government and froze parliament, he did so within the confines of the powers granted to him in the constitution. As Fellah writes, the long stagnation and ineptness of Parliament meant that its dismissal was greeted with fireworks and public celebration, by people breaking curfew to do so. Yet the nature of this abrupt break with the past can herald consolidation around a president with emergency powers, as has happened across countless countries, leading to dictatorship. In the face of all this uncertainty, Fellah placed her faith in the legitimacy of people to making their demands known in the streets.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

“Reign of Terror" [[link removed]]journalist Spencer Ackerman’s scathing look at the first 20 years of the War on Terror is out, and the reviews are in [[link removed]].

The good news is cable has found the architects of the forever war, the bad news is that they’re bringing them on to explain why the end of the war is bad [[link removed]] instead of grilling them about how the US chose this war in the first place.

Twitter has plenty of mechanisms for marking a bad tweet [[link removed]], like a good old-fashioned dunk [[link removed]], but perhaps none is more of the moment than author Rick Paulas showing up [[link removed]] to plug his new collection of short stories [[link removed]].

Cyberpunk villain cosplayer Elon Musk paid a dancer to dress in a unitard, told people it was a plan for a future robot, and somehow got favorable tech press coverage [[link removed]] despite the fact that the dancer didn’t even dance the robot convincingly [[link removed]].

It’s rough experiencing history in real time [[link removed]]. For a gentle break, consider the saga of Miette, weird Twitter’s favorite cat, who apparently ate a lizard and saw the universe [[link removed]].

For a somewhat more metal break, consider Romania’s official TikTok [[link removed]].

Thanks to Sam Ratner for letting me pinch-hit on these exceptionally newsy weeks. You can find me on Twitter [[link removed]], but now I’m going to hand Critical State back so he can pick it up pick it up pick it up [[link removed]].

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

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.

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Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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