1. Why
Afghanistan’s War Defies Solutions
The New York Times AUG. 24, 2017
Boys
in Kabul, the Afghan capital, last year. Afghanistan’s combination of state
collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and multisided intervention has
locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be beyond outside
resolution. CreditSergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
The
generals publicly supported their intervention in Afghanistan, but in private they worried they
were trapped. After 16 years, they feared they had produced “a recipe for
endless war,” according to an American ambassador who met with them. But the
generals, the ambassador said, “felt there was no alternative, no realistic
alternative” than to continue fighting a doomed mission.
Those
generals were Pakistani. Their meetings with the ambassador, Tom Simons, took
place in 1996. Mr. Simons recounted the experience to the journalist Steve Coll
in 2002, one year into an American mission in Afghanistan that has now also
lasted 16, and which President Trump announced on Monday that his
administration would extend.
There
is a reason that Afghanistan’s conflict, then and now, so defies solutions.
Its
combination of state collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and
multisided intervention has locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be
simply beyond outside resolution.
“I’m
not saying that state formation will never work in Afghanistan, but externally
building, as we’re trying to do it, cannot work,” said Romain Malejacq, a
political scientist at the Center for International Conflict Analysis and
Management in the Netherlands.
American-led
efforts, despite some successes, have ended up reinforcing and accelerating the
broader cycles of violence and fragmentation that have been growing since the
state’s collapse in the early 1990s.
“The more we go on, the more fragmented it
gets,” Professor Malejacq said. “I’m getting more and more pessimistic. I don’t
really know how Afghanistan is going to get out of it, to be truly honest.”
The Peace-Building Paradox
There
is a seemingly unresolvable contradiction at the heart of any Afghanistan
strategy.
Two
conditions are necessary for any agenda: ending the fighting and rebuilding the
state, if only incrementally. Peace and governance would reinforce one another,
creating space for other goals like rooting out terrorists or halting the
exodus of refugees.
But
scholars increasingly believe that when a state has failed as utterly as
Afghanistan’s, improving either one can end up setting back the other.
Ken
Menkhaus, a Davidson College political scientist, documented this dynamic
in his study of Somalia, a case that experts
often compare to Afghanistan.
Somalis
had adapted to their country’s disintegration, he found, by setting up local,
informal institutions of their own — often under what might be called warlords.
These systems were rife with corruption and injustice, but they produced
something like relative peace.
But
the more these groups grew, the greater the threat they posed to the central
government, whose absence they thrived in. Rebuilding the Somali state became
what Professor Menkhaus called “a conflict-producing exercise.”
Dipali
Mukhopadhyay, a Columbia University political scientist, said the United States
had tried to work both sides of this equation, apparently never realizing that
“there’s actually a conflict between those two missions.”
The
United States at times aided state building, reasoning that Afghan institutions
could impose a more sustainable peace, although more slowly.
But
this put the state at odds with local warlords and armed groups who had risen
in its absence. Often, this increased conflict and deepened insecurity.
Other
times, the United States aided peace building, working through local warlords
who could fight the Taliban and impose order, even if just one village at a
time.
In
the short term, it worked. But in the long term, a 2016 report by the Special
Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found, this strategy
undermined the government, alienated Afghans and further pushed Afghanistan
into a collection of fiefs run by strongmen whose interests cut against
American aims.
Even
the Afghan government has worked through local militias and warlords whose
existence undermines its authority. With no other options, Professor
Mukhopadhyay said, “that’s kind of the way the game is played.”
2.
Partition 70 years on: The turmoil, trauma - and legacy
BBC 27 July 2017
As India and Pakistan celebrate 70 years of independence, Andrew
Whitehead looks at the lasting legacy of the Partition of British India, and
the turmoil and trauma which marred the birth of the two nations.
t's
about 700km (430 miles) from Delhi to Islamabad - less than the distance
between London and Geneva. A short hop in aviation terms.
But
you can't fly non-stop from the Indian capital to the Pakistani capital. There
are no direct flights at all. It is only one of the legacies of seven decades
of mutual suspicion and tension.
Take
another example: cricket.
India
and Pakistan played each other a few weeks ago in the final of the Champions' Trophy. Both countries are
cricket crazy.
Partition of India in August 1947
- Perhaps the biggest
movement of people in history, outside war and famine.
- Two
newly-independent states were created - India and Pakistan.
- About 12 million
people became refugees. Between half a million and a million people were
killed in religious violence.
- Tens of thousands of
women were abducted.
- This article is the
first in a BBC series looking at Partition 70 years on.
However,
the game was played not in South Asia, but in London. India and Pakistan don't
play cricket in each other's countries any more, although they have met in
one-day matches around the world, including in countries in their region like
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
But
it is almost 10 years since they faced each other on South Asian soil in a Test
match. Despite a lot of shared culture and history, they are not simply rivals, but more
like enemies.
In
the 70 years since India and Pakistan gained independence, they have fought
three wars. Some would say four, although when their armies last fought in
1999, there was no formal declaration of war.
The
simmering tension between India and Pakistan is one of the world's most
enduring geopolitical fault lines. It has prompted both countries to develop
their own nuclear weapons.
So
the uneasy stand-off is much more than a regional dispute: it is fraught with
wider danger.
India
and Pakistan gained their independence at the same moment. British rule over
India, by far its biggest colony, ended on 15 August 1947.
After
months of political deadlock, Britain agreed to divide the country in two.
A separate and mainly Muslim nation,
Pakistan, was created to meet concerns that the large Muslim minority
would be at a disadvantage in Hindu-majority India.
This
involved partitioning two of India's biggest provinces, Punjab and Bengal. The
details of where the new international boundary would lie were made public only
two days after independence.
Partition
triggered one of the great calamities of the modern era, perhaps the biggest
movement of people - outside war and famine - that the world has ever seen.
No
one knows the precise numbers, but about 12 million people became refugees as
they sought desperately to move from one newly independent nation to another.
3.
Can young blood really
rejuvenate the old?
Research in mice seems to suggest it can
The Economist Jul 21st 2017
THE
vampire jokes write themselves. In the past few years a steady trickle of
scientific papers has suggested something straight out of an airport horror
novel: that the blood of young animals, infused into the old, has rejuvenating
effects. Scientists are excited enough that at least two clinical trials are
currently running in humans. But is it true? And if it is, how does it work?
The
answer to the first question seems to be a qualified yes, at least in animals.
The rejuvenating effects are seen when lab mice are joined together in a rather
gruesome procedure called parabiosis. That involves making cuts in the skin of
two animals, then suturing them together at the site of the wound. As the cuts
heal, the pair’s blood vessels will grow together and merge. The result is two
animals that share a circulatory system, with both hearts pumping both sets of
blood around both bodies. Doing this with an old mouse and a young mouse has
some spectacular effects. As with humans, old mice have a harder time healing
from injuries. But link an old mouse to a young one and it becomes able to
repair muscle injuries nearly as well as its younger counterpart. Similar
benefits are seen in liver cells and the nervous system. And it works in reverse,
too: old blood can have a decrepifying effect on the young.
Exactly
how this all works is much less clear. The best guess is that some combination
of hormones, signalling factors and the like in the young blood affect the
behaviour of stem cells in the old animal. Like everything else, stem
cells—which are vital for healing wounds and for general maintenance—begin to
fail with age. But that process seems to be reversible, with young blood
restoring the cells’ ability to proliferate and mend broken tissue. Another
theory is that the old animal benefits from access to the organs (kidneys,
liver and so on) of its young companion. It may be that both are true:
experiments in which animals are given quick transfusions, rather than being
stitched together for weeks, still show benefits, though not as many as with
full-on parabiosis.
That
uncertainty has not stopped people jumping into trials with humans. One
company, called Alkahest, has recruited 18 people with Alzheimer's disease. It
plans to give them regular blood transfusions from young donors. The trial is
primarily designed to prove that the treatment is safe. But because blood
transfusions are already routine, Alkahest hopes that will be easy, and plans
to look for mental benefits, too. Another company, Ambrosia, has raised
eyebrows by charging people $8,000 to take part in its clinical trial, which
will see people over 35 receiving blood from under-25s. It is far from clear
whether any of this will work (anti-ageing research is dogged by cycles of hype
and disappointment). And if it does, there is already a perennial shortage of
donated blood, and that is needed for surgery and medical emergencies more than
for speculative anti-ageing therapies. The best-case scenario is that blood
compounds do indeed turn out to be responsible for the salutary effects;
scientists can identify them; and biochemists can work out a way to
mass-produce them as drugs. Even then, the result would not necessarily be a
life-extension potion. The hope instead is to extend “healthspan”, keeping
elderly people hale and hearty for longer. Which would itself be quite
something.
