Read about willful misunderstandings of the Taliban. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about willful misunderstandings of the Taliban.

Agonizing over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan draws in equal parts on concerns very real and very absurd. The plight of Afghans who worked with the US or the elected Afghan government — and who now face violent reprisals from the ascendant Taliban — is all too real, in ways US refugee policy is disgracefully unprepared to contend with. The gnashing of teeth from a certain type of US pundit about how the Afghanistan withdrawal signals the end of US hegemony and the fall of American values, however, is domestic political theater with no relationship to events on the ground in Afghanistan. To help understand the difference, Alex Thurston wrote a short history [[link removed]] of willful misunderstandings of the Taliban by US commentators. In US discourse, Thurston persuasively argues, the Taliban has been melded together with al-Qaeda, despite the groups’ stark differences. Losing a war to the Taliban should cause soul searching in the US foreign policy establishment, but not because it constitutes some great victory for a group that threatens the US. Instead, it lays bare the failures of US strategy and understanding of the world that have led to two decades of foreign policy disaster.

Military coups are bad for public health

Myanmar’s military coup has been bad for civilians on all kinds of vectors, but the junta’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been notably terrible [[link removed]]. Medical personnel largely opposed the coup, and participated in mass protests against the junta. Now, in response, the junta is persecuting them when the country needs their expertise to deal with the spread of the delta variant.

Prior to the coup, the civilian government in Myanmar had begun a vaccination program and enforced lockdowns that largely kept early waves of COVID-19 under control.

Since the coup and the resulting protests, however, over 500 doctors have gone into hiding to avoid arrest warrants, and security forces have targeted doctors trying to offer COVID-19 care. Currently, only members of the military can consistently receive hospital care for COVID infections.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Vaccine inequality by the numbers

A new article [[link removed](21)01967-X/fulltext] in The Lancet quantifies the outrageous lag between COVID-19 vaccine rollouts in the US and Europe, which bought up a huge proportion of available vaccines, and in Africa. African countries have had a difficult time accessing vaccines due to hoarding policies in the US and Europe.

As vaccine booster shot programs are being rolled out in the US, only 2.5% of Africans are vaccinated against the virus. By the time Ghana received its first doses of the vaccine in February of this year — the first received anywhere in Africa — 191 million doses had already been administered on other continents. About 143 million of those doses had been used in ten of the richest countries.

Eventually, African countries were able to acquire doses from India, but the Indian government soon stopped vaccine exports in an effort to prioritize its domestic pandemic response. Today, the World Health Organization estimates that African countries combined face a 793 million dose shortfall, preventing them from meeting even modest vaccination goals for 2021.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE checking in on the pandemic: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at how local leaders in Brazil were able to affect public health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic, even in the face of resistance from the national government. This week, we’ll examine new research on the other side of the ledger — people who looked at the pandemic and asked, “How can I exploit this?” We’re going to delve into cybercrime in the age of COVID-19.

Cybercrime, despite its technical reputation, is primarily a social phenomenon. When you click the phishing link in your email, for example, it’s not because some hacker arranged zeroes and ones in precisely the right order. Instead, it’s because you really did want to help that poor minor European noble recover their lost fortune — it plays on your conscience. When something — say, a pandemic — causes worldwide social upheaval, therefore, we can expect it to change the world of cybercrime.

In a new article [[link removed]] in the journal Computers & Security, researchers Harjinder Singh Lallie, Lynsey Shepherd, Jason Nurse, Arnau Erola, Gregory Epiphaniou, Carsten Maple, and Xavier Bellekens attempt to track that change. Their work is informed by past instances of real world events causing spikes in cybercrime. Some of those spikes play on people’s sympathies during a disaster. After Hurricane Katrina (and basically every major natural disaster since), for instance, fraudulent websites appeared soliciting donations for hurricane victims. Others have exploited people’s curiosity in a confusing situation, such as the wave of spam emails that circulated after Michael Jackson’s death promising to reveal the truth in exchange for cash. COVID-19 offers the most widespread combination of disaster and confusion humans have seen in a lifetime, so Lallie et al. figured that there would be a substantial cybercrime response. Indeed, early numbers bear this out — according to one report, phishing attacks jumped 600% in March 2020.

Lallie et al. wanted to know more specifics about the relationship between the pandemic and cybercrime, so they built a timeline of major events in the cybercrime world and the COVID-19 spread and response. They found that many cybercrimes closely tracked the evolution of the pandemic, responding to changes in infection rates and public health policies quite quickly. What’s more, cybercriminals got quicker at responding to those changes as the pandemic went on. In the UK, for instance, in early March 2020 hospitals announced they were running out of personal protective equipment. It took over a month for scammers to send emails with fake offers of personal protective equipment, capturing credit card information from people desperate for functional masks. By late April of that year, however, scammers took just two days to respond to the UK government’s job retention scheme with a phishing email urging people to sign up for a fake version of the scheme.

The pandemic also changed how people take in online threats. Many people who work on computers in their day jobs do so (or, rather, did so) at companies with on-site tech support and anti-virus protections. When the pandemic turned those employees into work-from-homers conducting Zoom meetings on their personal computers, the protection offered by in-office tech support largely vanished. People needed the internet more for work, but were also left more exposed on the internet than ever before. This vulnerability, the researchers believe, may be contributing to the increase in pandemic-era cybercrime.

At the same time, the pandemic forced governments to gather large datasets for use in public health campaigns. The tendency toward data sharing is important for managing public health response, but, Lallie et al. warn, it also creates inviting targets for cybercriminals. Those databases could be very valuable if hacked, both to cybercriminals themselves and to a range of state and private buyers. The pandemic is creating more opportunities for people to have their private information exposed without their consent.

Most of all, though, the pandemic has created an environment of uncertainty and fear in which crimes relying on information asymmetries can thrive. One extortion email Lallie et al. tracked threatens recipients by saying “If I do not get the payment, I will infect every member of your family with coronavirus.” Today, that threat seems laughable — how would some mass emailer give your family COVID? In March 2020, however, when the email was going around and there was widespread confusion about how the virus spread, the not knowing made more than a few people cough up some Bitcoin just to be safe.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Orla Barry described [[link removed]] the predicament faced by a group of 32 Afghan migrants stranded at the border between Poland and Belarus. The migrants have been living in a small patch of forest that each country insists is in the other’s territory for over a month, with no prospects of actually being able to enter either country. Instead, Polish border guards insist that the migrants should apply for asylum in Belarus and vice versa. In addition to the strain of living in a Kafka story, the migrants are facing severe health hazards due to cold conditions and lack of access to medication. Humanitarian workers have not been allowed access to the migrants.

Alexandra Greig-Duarte argued [[link removed]] that the nuclear taboo — the human sense that nuclear weapons are too horrible to use — has done more to prevent nuclear war than any version of deterrence theory yet put forward. No country has used nuclear weapons against an enemy since the US bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, but there have been numerous close calls, many of which were averted at the last minute by leaders’ unwillingness to actually engage in nuclear combat. To strengthen the taboo, she argued, countries should publicly pledge not to launch nuclear first strikes, thus increasing their social stake in keeping the nuclear peace.

Rebecca Collard reported [[link removed]] on the Kurdish response to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. With a US withdrawal from Iraq impending, Kurds have viewed the dire consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal for Afghans who worked with the US with concern. The two countries are in very different situations — the Iraqi government is unlikely to fall to an insurgent power in the immediate aftermath of a US withdrawal — but some Kurds still fear the results of a political reshuffle after US troops leave. For a population so closely associated with the US, having their most prominent ally leave is a daunting prospect.

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

It’s hard to remember what education experts mean when they keep talking about STEM, but this [[link removed]] video should help you jog your memory. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mortars.

We’ve discovered not one [[link removed]] but two [[link removed]] highly relevant songs this week. Happy listening!

This [[link removed]] arguably underrates the strangeness of Commander Magnum’s career path. Today, he’d face strong incentives to become a mercenary and live in a more global-scale noir.

How can you tell that some Raytheon engineer’s kid just turned six? Stories like this [[link removed]].

A rare photo [[link removed]] from inside the Israeli nuclear program.

When open source intelligence strikes back [[link removed]].

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

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

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

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

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]