Talking Points
- "Worst-case scenario" of Indonesian outbreak realised on Java
- A bomb attack targeting Chinese workers in Pakistan killed 9
- Thailand allowed vaccinated tourists into its "Phuket sandbox"
- Football didn't come home, but English racism did
- Italy banned cruise ships from entering the Venice lagoon
- The Amazon's carbon sink has been emptied by human exploitation
- This has placed 10,000 Amazonian species at risk of extinction
- Cuba shut down the internet to quell ongoing protests
- President Biden shamed Republicans over US voting rights curbs
- Cash is pouring into the creator economy – billions of it
Dive deeper
This week the Taliban offered a ceasefire to the beleaguered government in Kabul in exchange for thousands of prisoners. The collapse is coming swiftly, even more so than Western military planners had expected. What kind of reign will the Taliban bring?
Afghanistan in free-fall
Afghanistan's future is now being measured in weeks, not years. The Pentagon – no doubt haunted by images of choppers on the embassy roof during the Fall of Saigon – has accelerated the withdrawal timeline. US war planners describe the situation as dynamic. We'd call it chaotic . The national government, not much more than a patchwork of provincial and tribal interests bound to Kabul with bribery, is ripping asunder. One component of what makes a nation is the capacity to maintain territorial borders. By this measure, Afghanistan has already disintegrated: the Taliban have seized major border-crossings to Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Iran.
At the crossing at Chaman , the Taliban have established a safe route to funnel reserves from their stronghold at Quetta into Afghanistan. The hundreds of Talib flooding across the Chaman crossing with battle flags and weapons will be headed straight up the highway to Kandahar. Sporadic fighting around Afghanistan's second city has intensified in recent weeks. Probing attacks into the city at night are growing bolder each night . Taliban fighters will move into homes close to government fixed positions under the cover of darkness (it's too hot to fight during the day) and rain fire on them. Still, Kandahar's parlous security situation is significantly better than some other cities.
In the provincial capital of Kunduz – home to 250,000 – the future isn't counted in weeks, but in hours. There is no frontline . The Taliban are attacking the city from without and within. As we saw in detail during the retaking of Mosul and Raqqa from Islamic State, modern urban warfare is insanity. Mortars land on government positions all night as the Taliban advance. Highly-trained commandos are fighting tooth and nail to retain the city centre but with no support on the way it is only a matter of time before Kunduz falls. The prospects for those who fight and lose are chilling: two-dozen commandos were executed in Faryab province after they ran out of ammunition defending a town.
Another provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, is encircled. So too Ghazni . A noose is being fitted around Kabul.
To the victor go the spoils
In sympathetic areas the Taliban have gone to great lengths to retain the orderly function of civic bodies, utilities, and government services. The tribal elders of Qala-e-Naw negotiated an indefinite ceasefire with the Taliban to avoid civilian casualties. In fact, the group's spokespeople claim to not want to see fighting in the city centres. This might be true in Pashtun areas, but the rest of the country's mosaic of ethnic groups are not so lucky. The insurgents' propagandists also want their fight to be perceived as a struggle against the corrupt central government – the cronies of the West.
But as foreign fighters and national forces disappear, local militias are filling the vacuum. One wealthy politician has raised a militia to help defend Mazar-i-Sharif , while the wily warlord Ismail Khan has secured the city of Herat with his ethnic Tajik fighters. Across the country the Taliban is surrounding military bases and towns in a show of strength and then meeting with local elders to encourage the poorly-equipped local forces to surrender. It is effective – in many places there is no will (or ammunition) to keep fighting. If this doesn't work, and the fighting does devolve along communal or ethnic lines, then the Taliban will face years of conflict. The fragmentation of Afghanistan is a possibility that all who lived through the civil war fear .
Taliban is the Pashto word for students – held by the Afghani zealots who studied in Pakistan's Saudi-funded madrassas during the 1970s. For those areas that have been captured, t here is no mistaking what kind of teachings the Taliban hew to. An extremely strict interpretation of Islam – not uncommon in some areas of Afghanistan – is now being administered widely. Women are not allowed in public without a male guardian (if at all). Girls are banned from attending classes beyond the sixth grade. Smoking and shaving beards are punishable offences. One letter of uncertain provenance alleges that in one district the Taliban has demanded that imams furnish them with a list of all local girls over 15 and widows under 45 . It's alleged they are to be married off to fighters. For millions of Afghanis, this is not a life worth living: refugees are streaming out of the country by the thousands.
Late in the week Taliban negotiators in Qatar offered the government a three month ceasefire if 7,000 of their imprisoned fighters were freed. The Taliban choose when to fight and they choose when to broker peace. They are calling the shots.
Worldlywise
Europe – the final countdown
In the last race for the presidency of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen was viewed as a somewhat ineffectual figure – a compromise candidate. But in actual fact she is proving to be quite uncompromising in her pursuit of positive and lasting change for the European Union. On Wednesday, von der Leyen revealed the Green Deal; a "comprehensive architecture to meet our climate ambitions" of a 55% reduction in emissions on 1990 levels by 2030. It may be a roiling bureaucratic tangle of unrepresentative technocrats but you can't damn the European Union for not trying.
Every part of the bloc will change. There's an effective ban on the sale of new petrol cars by 2035 . Airlines will be forced to reduce emissions faster and pay 50 times more in tax on aviation fuel than they currently do. A levy on goods from countries with lax carbon rules is perhaps the most controversial. Then there is the ETS. At 16-years-old, Europe's Emissions Trading Scheme is the largest in the world and is about to get a lot bigger . Maritime transport, one of the dirtiest industries, will be brought under the ETS and required to meet tight pollution caps by 2026. In fact, the speed at which pollution caps tighten has been increased from 2.2% to 4.2% per annum. The sharpened restrictions have made carbon futures jump to €55 per metric ton. Other transport fuels and heating will also be included in a separate new trading scheme.
EC environment chief Frans Timmermans was clear-eyed about the Green Deal, "Nothing we have presented today is going to be easy. It's going to be bloody hard. I know that." The concern is real – the Green Deal must now wind its way through the bloc's legislature where it will be exposed to intra-bloc horse-trading and pitchfork-waving lobbyists. The EU nations most-exposed to heavy-polluting industries and power generation (namely Poland and Hungary) are bristling for a fight. An €85b fund has been set aside to help such countries ease the transition.
There will be no such handout for the international opponents. The rogues' gallery of climate laggards (Russia, China, Australia, and America) has expressed concern about the "carbon border adjustment mechanism". It will no doubt be a repercussive tariff. But, short of a land war, there isn't much any of them can do to stop the EU from dragging the rest of the world into the future.
Thinking your way out of the abyss
Imagine, if you will, being trapped inside your own mind . You have no impediment to the breadth and depth of your thoughts, but also no ability to communicate with the outside world. A day passes without words, then a week. The world around you isn't disappearing – you are disappearing from it. A month, then a year. To think without expression is a great burden for an intelligent, social species. To alleviate such an ill is a good in the truest sense. Enter Dr Edward Chang , a neurosurgeon from the University of California, San Francisco, and co-author of a paper published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Chang has laid claim to the first "successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralysed and cannot speak". In layman's terms: giving the gift of speech to a speechless person. The technology named BRAVO (Brain-Computer Interface Restoration of Arm and Voice), is a neuroprosthesis: a series of electrodes attached to the outside of the brain intercept signals that then control the vocal system. The individual in question was a man in his 30s who was severely paralysed in a brainstem stroke over a decade ago. Over dozens of sessions, Chang's team flashed a series of pre-determined words onto a screen, and the paralysed man was instructed to imagine saying the words out loud. The resulting signals were fed through word-prediction algorithms to help transcribe the thoughts.
76% of the time Chang's team could discern what the man was trying to say through just his thoughts. An incredible step forward. Bravo.
The worst of times
Vaccination breaking point
Africa’s hospitals are quickly reaching their breaking point as Covid surges throughout the continent. Covid-related deaths rose by 43% this week, marking the eighth straight week of increases. It’s taken just a month for the continent to record its latest million cases. As a result, hospitals are facing staff, bed, and oxygen shortages. And with a mere 1.5% of its population vaccinated, the continent’s surge is sure to continue.
South Africa simmers
Deadly riots spread across South Africa this week, leaving 117 people dead and hundreds of businesses destroyed. Some 25,000 troops were deployed in an attempt to restore order. The riots started after former President Jacob Zuma refused to testify at a corruption inquiry. However, the unrest later became about the country’s inequality. Half of the population lives below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate is at a record high of 32.6%.
The best of times
'My boy is found'
In 1997, two-year-old Guo Xinzhen was abducted from outside his home by human traffickers. This week he was reunited with his father, Guo Gangtang, who has travelled 300,000 miles over the past 24 years in search of his son. Local authorities used DNA tracing to find Xinzhen after the story attracted the public’s attention. After being brought together, Gangtang said ‘now that my boy is found, everything can only be happy from now on’.
The Dutch reach(ing goals)
Ever wanted to feel electricity being generated underneath you? In Maartensdijk, Netherlands, you can. This week the village unveiled the world’s largest solar bike path , a 330-metre-long concrete strip. The multi-purpose path was created by having a thin layer of transparent solar cells put on top of the concrete blocks. It provides a blueprint for how countries can make their power supplies greener without having to plant fields full of panels .
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
"We continue to believe it is implausible that thousands of people around the globe ordered seeds and either forgot about them or lied about forgetting them."
– Osama el-Lissy of the United States Department of Agriculture's Plant Protection and Quarantine Program adds a final note to this investigation into the Amazon mystery seed saga . If you have the time (it's a long one) please read this perplexing and incredibly fun piece of writing.
The numbers
3,000,000,000 downloads
- Nearly half of our species has downloaded TikTok or its Chinese sister app Douyin. Three billion humans. Three billion downloads. Three billion swiftly abandoned attempts to build a bird-feeder.
A 15,000ft fall
- A British paratrooper survived a 4.5km plummet during a training jump when his parachute failed to open. Okay!
The headline
" How Do You Solve an Extinction Mystery? Put a Tiny Computer on a Snail. " – The New York Times .
The special mention
A concerning special mention this week goes to our planet's faithful satellite, the Moon. Our little pock-marked friend has, for the longest time, dutifully furnished us with tides and the inspiration for excruciating sonnets. But NASA scientists suggest things are going to get a little wobbly in the next decade. Usually we'd overlook this (what people do on the weekend is their business) but this lunar teetering is expected to unleash dangerous coastal floods in the 2030s. Get a grip of yourself, Moon!
A few choice long-reads
- Moderna (kind of) solved the novel coronavirus Covid-19. Now they want to take on just about every other disease known to humans. Businessweek on a company with unbridled ambition and know-how to back it up.
- Why don't we dilute the vaccines and give people one-quarter of a shot. No, seriously – here the Financial Times out on this one...
- The big diplomatic fight between friends this year will be over the European Union's border carbon levy. The Economist has the inside word.
Tom Wharton @trwinwriting
