The Morally Troubling ‘Dirty Work’ We Pay Others to Do in Our Place

 The Morally Troubling ‘Dirty Work’ We Pay Others to Do in Our Place 

By Tamsin Shaw The New York Times

DIRTY WORK
Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America

By Eyal Press

“Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America,” a disturbing and necessary new book by Eyal Press, describes with great empathy the lives of workers who do jobs that they themselves find morally horrifying. Press acquaints us intimately with the trauma suffered by a participant in a drone strike who watches a child slowly reassemble his father’s exploded remains into human shape; by a worker in a slaughterhouse who is nuzzled affectionately by pigs only to have to kill them moments later; and by a psychologist who is supposed to provide therapy to psychiatric patients in one of the correctional facilities where America often confines the severely mentally ill, but instead witnesses daily brutality including a homicide so gruesome it will be seared in any reader’s memory.

But the book isn’t entirely about those workers. It’s about us. Press’s thesis is that our society confers on these workers an “unconscious mandate” to do jobs that are morally objectionable and at the same time wants those jobs to remain invisible. He takes the term “dirty work” from the American sociologist Everett Hughes, who taught for a semester in Frankfurt in 1948, socializing with the kind of cosmopolitan liberal intellectuals he felt he might find anywhere. When he asked one about Germany’s war guilt and the Holocaust, the man responded by saying German citizens hadn’t known what was going on, they’d had to join the party, they were under tremendous pressure. He added that the Holocaust “was no way to solve the Jewish problem. But there was a problem and it had to be settled some way.” To Hughes, such comments revealed the “unconscious mandate” for unethical actions, the “dirty work” that could be delegated and disavowed.

Of course, there are questions about the moral culpability of the workers Press describes, about how they can continue to do the jobs they do. He is fascinated by Hannah Arendt’s thesis from “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963) about the banality of evil, the horrors committed thoughtlessly by those “just following orders.” Her view was supported by the results of Stanley Milgram’s “shock experiments,” published during the same period, in which subjects were instructed to deliver dangerous electrical shocks to a person (in fact an actor screaming on a tape recorder) in an adjacent room. At least in the version of the results Milgram publicized widely, most subjects complied. The New York Times framed a 1963 report on the experiments by asking, “What sort of people, slavishly doing what they are told, would send millions of fellow humans into gas chambers or commit other such atrocities?” The answer was that conditions could quite easily be created in which people acted with blind obedience. Milgram himself frequently compared his subjects to Eichmann.

Press gently pushes back against this reductive account of human behavior. In his previous book, “Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times,” he recounted the stories of ordinary people who refused to follow immoral orders, regardless of the consequences. He was explicitly disputing the popular view, derived from Arendt and Milgram, that there are circumstances under which people become incapable of moral choice. In both books he ushers us into a world of moral nuance and psychological complexity that behavioral science rarely captures. 

In “Dirty Work,” Press shows us many different forms of complicity with the business of harm. Most of the people who do our “dirty work,” he stresses, are marginalized and invisible because they are poor. Their opportunities are extremely limited; the extra $2 an hour they can earn working in the slaughterhouse over the $9 an hour they might make at Chick-fil-A are desperately needed. The prison psychologists who stand by while mentally ill patients suffer grotesque abuse at the hands of guards may risk reprisals if they protest.

As for drone warriors, toward whom the most vitriolic disapprobation has often been directed, Press reminds us that joining the military is often a way to escape poverty and the many traps it entails. Within the military, cyberwarfare is often considered dishonorable compared with in-person operations, because the dangers are not at all commensurate with the capacity to harm. But Press reports that some of those working in secretive drone warfare programs were offered little explanation of what they would be doing, and as they came to comprehend their missions they spiraled psychologically, from disappointment to disgust or suicidal despair.

In Press’s moral worldview, there are not only guilt and innocence, but rather fine-grained degrees of culpability and exculpation that fit uneasily with the sensibilities of a sound-bite-driven social media culture. Many of the workers he encountered blamed themselves for the harms they had done. They were victims of “moral injury,” meaning they had violated their own core values and were suffering profoundly for it. Press often reveals this suffering in descriptions of physical symptoms; Harriet, a prison psychologist, finds that her hair is falling out in clumps.

This section of the book, on the incarceration of the mentally ill, is the most disturbing, powerfully evoking our hypocrisy as a society. Harriet’s anguish is juxtaposed on the one hand with the terrifying plight of her incarcerated patients and on the other with the psychopathic cruelty of the guards responsible for them. Since the closure of many state psychiatric hospitals beginning in the 1970s, mentally ill people have often been held in prisons. Their psychological torment is not incomprehensible to educated Americans: Our literary culture is powerfully rooted in experiences of depression, mania and psychosis — conditions taken to have quasi-religious significance in the work of Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and others.

But this attitude isn’t necessarily extended to Black and brown people, who make up a disproportionate percentage of the prison population. They are often regarded simply as dangerous, particularly if they are homeless. In a recent mayoral debate in New York City, for example, where the overwhelming majority of the homeless are Black or Latinx, Andrew Yang suggested that citizens had the right to be protected from mentally ill people on the streets — remarks that prompted a backlash. Press’s visceral descriptions of the treatment of mentally ill prisoners are agonizing to read. One correctional officer told him that the behavior he often saw by other guards was “real cruelty, just intentional cruelty. It’s like husbands who beat their wives.” The moral culpability sanctioned by our silence is deeper than most of us might imagine.

So where does this leave “us,” the society that tacitly condones this dirty work? That collective “we” is of course in some sense a fiction. There’s no homogeneous entity to which we can ascribe praise or blame. It would be consoling to think that if everyone were aware of the work Press describes, “we” would no longer condone it. Democracy in fact requires of us the constant hope that this potential “we” exists — that there is a sense of collective responsibility that comes with being part of a shared moral community. This is the very basis of the democratic ideal of accountability.

But when Press makes us feel the casual sadism of the prison officers, he also introduces a doubt, one that has been creeping into the national consciousness since the election of Donald Trump: There are those who enjoy spectacles of cruelty. “We” are not all “decent people” who will absorb the correct moral lesson. Sadism is a perpetual subterranean force that the politics of hate can unleash. This was shown most devastatingly in the cruelty exhibited by many Germans and their allies during the Holocaust. After the war, Arendt and Milgram inadvertently encouraged a mischaracterization of the Nazis’ motives. Much of the killing of Jews was not done in an orderly fashion at concentration camps (which in any case constituted, as Abram de Swaan put it in his 2015 book “The Killing Compartments,” scenes of “obscene savagery and gory barbarity”) but rather at killing sites where local conscripts engaged in a wild collective frenzy, with victims being humiliated and tortured before they were killed. But what Milgram and his generation did was to create the illusion that science could comprehend human behavior and therefore control it. Irrational delight in cruelty was written out of the story.

Press exhorts us not to look away from our dirty secrets but rather to take responsibility for the “dirty work” being done to meet the sicker needs of our society. At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, he leaves some doubt as to whether a humane “us” who will take such responsibility is attainable. Such doubt would go against the spirit of his book: Doubt is a corrosive force; skepticism about the moral capacities of human beings is self-fulfilling. Press would presumably accept that there are times when our faith in one another doesn’t come naturally; it must be willed. It’s a testament to his insight and vision that in spite of the ugliness to which he exposes us on almost every page, he still makes us want to set aside cynicism and pessimism and join him in finding ways to strengthen the moral bonds between us, however flawed we might be.

Tamsin Shaw is a professor of European and Mediterranean studies and philosophy at N.Y.U. and the author of “Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism.”

DIRTY WORK

Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America

By Eyal Press

303 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

 

 SCAM OR NOT

Is Coffee Good for You?

Yes! But it depends on the kind of coffee and the quantity.

By Dawn MacKeen New York Times

We’ve come a long way from the cans of Folgers that filled our grandparents’ cupboards, with our oat milk lattes, cold brews and Frappuccino's. Some of us are still very utilitarian about the drink while others perform elaborate rituals. The fourth most popular beverage in the country, coffee is steeped into our culture. Just the right amount can improve our mood; too much may make us feel anxious and jittery. 

Is coffee good for me?

Yes.

In moderation, coffee seems to be good for most people — that’s 3 to 5 cups daily, or up to 400 milligrams of caffeine.

“The evidence is pretty consistent that coffee is associated with a lower risk of mortality,” said Erikka Loftfield, a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute who has studied the beverage.

For years, coffee was believed to be a possible carcinogen, but the 2015 Dietary Guidelines helped to change perception. For the first time, moderate coffee drinking was included as part of a healthy diet. When researchers controlled for lifestyle factors, like how many heavy coffee drinkers also smoked, the data tipped in coffee’s favor.

A large 2017 review on coffee consumption and human health in the British Medical Journal also found that most of the time, coffee was associated with a benefit, rather than a harm. In examining more than 200 reviews of previous studies, the authors observed that moderate coffee drinkers had less cardiovascular disease, and premature death from all causes, including heart attacks and stroke, than those skipping the beverage.

In addition, experts say some of the strongest protective effects may be with Type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and liver conditions such as cirrhosis, liver cancer and chronic liver disease. For example, having about five cups of coffee a day, instead of none, is correlated with a 30 percent decreased risk of Type 2 diabetes, according to a meta-analysis of 30 studies.

The potential benefit from coffee might be from the polyphenols, which are plant compounds that have antioxidant properties, according to Dr. Giuseppe Grosso, an assistant professor in human nutrition at University of Catania in Italy and the lead author of an umbrella review in the Annual Review of Nutrition.

However, coffee isn’t for everyone. There are concerns about overconsumption. This is especially true for expecting mothers because the safety of caffeine during pregnancy is unclear. While the research into coffee’s impact on health is ongoing, most of the work in this field is observational. 

“We don’t know for sure if coffee is the cause of the health benefits,” said Jonathan Fallowfield, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and co-author of the British Medical Journal review. “These findings could be due to other factors or behaviors present in coffee drinkers.”

Does the way coffee is prepared matter?

Yes. Do you prefer a dark or light roast? Coarse grinding or fine? Arabica or robusta?

“All of these different aspects affect the taste, but also affect the compounds within the coffees,” said Neal Freedman, a senior investigator with the National Cancer Institute. “But it’s not clear at all how these different levels of compounds may be related to health.”

Roasting, for example, reduces the amount of chlorogenic acids, but other antioxidant compounds are formed. Espresso has the highest concentration of many compounds because it has less water than drip coffee.

A study in JAMA Internal Medicine examined the coffee habits of nearly 500,000 people in the U.K. and found that it didn’t matter if they drank one cup or chain-drank eight — regular or decaf — or whether they were fast metabolizers of coffee or slow. They were linked to a lower risk of death from all causes, except with instant coffee, the evidence was weaker.

The way you prepare your cup of joe may influence your cholesterol levels, too. “The one coffee we know not suitable to be drinking is the boiled coffee,” said Marilyn C. Cornelis, an assistant professor in preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and co-author of the JAMA Internal Medicine study. 

Examples of this include the plunge-happy French press, Scandinavian coffee, or Greek and Turkish coffee — the kind commonly consumed in the Middle East. (When poured, the unfiltered grounds settle on the tiny cup’s bottom like sludge. To peek into the future, elders in the region have a tradition of reading the sediment of an overturned cup, like a crystal ball.)

However, the oil in boiled coffee has cafestol and kahweol, compounds called diterpenes. They are shown to raise LDL, the bad cholesterol, and slightly lower HDL, what’s known as the good kind.

“If you filter the coffee, then it’s no issue at all,” said Rob van Dam, a professor at Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at National University of Singapore. “For people with cholesterol issues, it’s better to switch to other types of coffee.” He’s been studying coffee for two decades. (And, yes, he’s had a lot of coffee in that time.)

However, other researchers say not to throw out the boiled coffee just yet. The clinical significance of such small increases in cholesterol may be questionable, given that it’s not associated with an increase in cardiovascular deaths.

Many consumers have also swapped loose grounds for coffee pods. While there are environmental concerns with single use pods, researchers believe them to hold the same benefits as, say, drip coffee. The latter applies to cold brew, too, but more research is needed.

Do all kinds of coffee have the same amount of caffeine?

No. Espresso has the highest concentration of caffeine, packing about 70 milligrams into a one-ounce shot, but is consumed in smaller quantities. By comparison, a typical 12-ounce serving of drip coffee has 200 milligrams of caffeine, more than instant’s 140. And, yes, brewed decaf has caffeine, too — 8 milligrams — which can add up.

When buying coffee, you never really know what you’re going to get. At one Florida coffee house, over a six-day period, the same 16-ounce breakfast blend fluctuated from 259 milligrams all the way up to 564 — which goes beyond federal recommendations.

But for some of us, knowing how much caffeine is in our coffee can be especially important. You’ve probably noticed it before. How a friend can pound quadruple espresso shots at 10 p.m. and sleep afterward, while you can’t have any past noon, or you’ll be watching “Seinfeld” reruns until dawn. Some of us have a polymorphism, a genetic variant that slows our metabolism for caffeine. It’s these individuals that Dr. Grosso recommends limit their refills. “They take a coffee, and then they have the second and the third, and they still have the caffeine of the first,” he said.

You can even find out whether you are a fast or slow metabolizer through a variety of direct-to-consumer testing services, including 23andMe. 

Is coffee addictive?

Evidence suggests there can be a reliance on the drink, and tolerance builds over time. Withdrawal symptoms include a headache, fatigue, irritability, difficulty concentrating, and depressed mood.

Indeed, caffeine is a psychoactive drug, and coffee is its biggest dietary source. About a half-hour after sipping a cup of joe, the caffeine kicks in, and is quickly absorbed. Blood vessels constrict. Blood pressure increases. A moderate amount of caffeine can wake you up, boost your mood, energy, alertness, concentration and even athletic performance. On average, it takes four to six hours to metabolize half the caffeine.

For those knocking back more than 400 milligrams of caffeine a day, there’s not enough evidence to assess the safety, according to the Dietary Guidelines. Higher doses can lead to caffeine intoxication, with its shakiness, nervousness, and irregular heartbeat. Caffeine is also linked with delaying the time it takes for you fall asleep, how long you stay there, and the reported quality of that shut eye.

“I think that caffeine is so common and so ingrained in our culture, and daily habits, that we often don’t think about it as a potential source of problems,” said Mary M. Sweeney, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Cutting down coffee may help with gastroesophageal reflux, too. A new study found that women drinking caffeinated beverages — coffee, tea, or soda — were associated with a small but increased risk of symptoms, like heartburn. The study’s authors predicted fewer symptoms when substituting two servings of the drinks with water.

Current available research hasn’t determined what amount of caffeine can be safely consumed during pregnancy, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Caffeine does cross the placenta so some doctors may recommend pregnant women stay below 200 milligrams of coffee daily.

Extremely high doses of caffeine can be fatal. But researchers say that’s more likely to occur accidentally with caffeine powder or pills. “You don’t see a lot of people going into the emergency room because they accidentally drank too much coffee,” said Dr. van Dam.

What is a coffee bean?

Inside the red fruit of coffea lie two coffee beans. Green in color, the duo spoon together, the rich brown hue to appear only after roasting. In fact, they aren’t beans at all. “It’s like a cherry, you pick off the tree,” said Patrick Brown, a professor of plant sciences at University of California, Davis. Unlike the cherry, though, the seed is the prize, and the flesh is discarded.

In addition to caffeine, coffee is a dark brew of a thousand chemical compounds that could have potential therapeutic effects on the body. One key component, chlorogenic acid, is a polyphenol found in many fruits and vegetables. Coffee is also a good dietary source of vitamin B3, magnesium and potassium.

“People often see coffee just as a vehicle for caffeine, but, of course, it’s a very complex plant beverage,” said Dr. van Dam.

With coffea’s estimated 124 species, most of flavors remain untapped; and perhaps will be forever, with an estimated 60 percent under threat of extinction, largely from climate change, disease, pests and deforestation. What fills our mugs at cafes, the office, and on road trips are from two species: arabica and canephora, known as robusta. Arabica fills specialty cafes, and costs more than robusta, which fuels instant coffees and some espressos.

For all of the pomp swirling around arabica, the fact remains it is an extremely homogeneous little seed. Almost all of the world’s arabica coffee progeny traces itself back a few plants from Ethiopia, coffee’s birthplace, or Yemen. 

Does adding milk or sugar cancel out benefits?

Doctors don’t know. One 2015 study found that those adding sugar, cream or milk had the same associated benefit as those who preferred it black. But the coffee industry has exploded since the ’90s when the older adults in the study filled out their dietary history. “It was only about a tablespoon of cream or milk, and a teaspoon of sugar,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Loftfield, with the National Cancer Institute. “This is very different, potentially, than some of these coffee beverages you see on the market today.”

Sweet coffee and tea are the fourth largest source of sugar in the diets of adults, according to the October survey from the U.S.D.A. That includes dessert-like beverages, like Dunkin’ Donuts’ 860-calorie creamy frozen coconut caramel coffee drink, with 17 grams of saturated fat, and 129 grams of total sugars. Experts say some of these drinks bear little relation to the 2-calorie cup of black coffee of the past, worrying health officials.

“When you talk about a drink that has that load of unhealthy fats and that much sugar, can’t possibly be a healthy beverage on balance,” Dr. Jim Krieger, a clinical professor of medicine and health services at the University of Washington. “That amount of sugar alone is astronomical compared to the current recommendations of U.S. Dietary Guidelines of 50 grams of sugar a day.”

The concern is heightened, experts say, especially because an estimated 43 percent of teens are now drinking coffee — nearly doubling since 2003 — according to the research firm Kantar, driven partly by sweet drinks.

“People should worry a lot about what they put in the coffee and what the food and beverage industry puts in it,” said Laura Schmidt, a professor at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. “And sweetened coffee is one of the things that the beverage industry is pushing on the public now that consumers have turned away from soda for health reasons.”

 Should I start pounding down more coffee?

Depends on your goals in life.

If you are enjoying the drink in moderation, doctors say continue onward, and savor those sips. And for those patients with a sensitivity to the beverage, Dr. Sophie Balzora, a gastroenterologist, weighs the benefits and risks very carefully. The clinical associate professor of medicine at N.Y.U. School of Medicine understands its cultural significance and knows to tread lightly. As she put it: “Robbing people of their coffee seems cruel.”

President Biden Speech concerning Afghanistan

Mr. Biden spoke from the White House on Monday afternoon after the collapse of the Afghan government to the Taliban.

 

Good afternoon.

I want to speak today to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan, the developments that have taken place in the last week and the steps we’re taking to address the rapidly evolving events.

My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every contingency, including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now.

I’ll speak more in a moment about the specific steps we’re taking. But I want to remind everyone how we got here and what America’s interests are in Afghanistan.

We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure Al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and we got him.

That was a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.

I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not counterinsurgency or nation-building. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was vice president. And that’s why as president I’m adamant we focus on the threats we face today, in 2021, not yesterday’s threats.

Today a terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan. Al Shabab in Somalia, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources. We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have permanent military presence. If necessary, we’ll do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the direct threats to the United States in the region, and act quickly and decisively if needed.

When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, just a little over three months after I took office. U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country. And the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.

 

The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. There would have been no cease-fire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1. There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, and lurching into the third decade of conflict.

I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That’s why we’re still there. We were cleareyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency. But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you.

The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.

American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.

There are some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers. But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one year — one more year, five more years or 20 more years — that U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.

Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down. They would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them. And our true strategic competitors, China and Russia, would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.

When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June, and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U.S. military departed. To clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically. They failed to do any of that. I also urged them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement with the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.

So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth, how many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past. The mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces. Those are the mistakes we cannot continue to repeat because we have significant vital interest in the world that we cannot afford to ignore.

I also want to acknowledge how painful this is to so many of us. The scenes that we’re seeing in Afghanistan, they’re gut-wrenching, particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers — for anyone who has spent time on the ground working to support the Afghan people. For those who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan, and for Americans who have fought and served our country in Afghanistan, this is deeply, deeply personal. It is for me as well.

I’ve worked on these issues as long as anyone. I’ve been throughout Afghanistan during this war, while the war was going on, from Kabul to Kandahar, to the Kunar Valley. I’ve traveled there on four different occasions. I’ve met with the people. I’ve spoken with the leaders. I spent time with our troops, and I came to understand firsthand what was and was not possible in Afghanistan. So now we’re focused on what is possible.

We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence and our humanitarian aid. We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability. We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, of women and girls, just as we speak out all over the world.

I’ve been clear, the human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. It’s with our diplomacy, our economic tools and rallying the world to join us.

Let me lay out the current mission in Afghanistan: I was asked to authorize, and I did, 6,000 U.S. troops to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting in the departure of U.S. and allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan, and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan. Our troops are working to secure the airfield and ensure continued operation on both the civilian and military flights. We’re taking over air traffic control. We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats. Our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well.

Over the coming days we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan. We’ll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel — the civilian personnel of our allies who are still serving in Afghanistan. Operation Allies Refuge, which I announced back in July, has already moved 2,000 Afghans who are eligible for special immigration visas and their families to the United States. In the coming days, the U.S. military will provide assistance to move more S.I.V.-eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan.

We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who work for our embassy. U.S. nongovernmental organizations and Afghans who otherwise are a great risk in U.S. news agencies — I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.

American troops are performing this mission as professionally and as effectively as they always do. But it is not without risks. As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban: If they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the U.S. presence will be swift, and the response will be swift and forceful. We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary. Our current military mission is short on time, limited in scope and focused in its objectives: Get our people and our allies as safely and quickly as possible. And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal. We will end America’s longest war after 20 long years of bloodshed.

The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan, as known in history as the graveyard of empires. What’s happening now could just as easily happen five years ago or 15 years in the future. We have to be honest, our mission in Afghanistan made many missteps over the past two decades.

I’m now the fourth American president to preside over war in Afghanistan. Two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president. I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here. I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.

I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face. But I do not regret my decision to end America’s war-fighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser focus on our counterterrorism mission, there and other parts of the world. Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success. Our decades-long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not, and I wrote and believed it never could be.

I cannot and will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss. This is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades deserve. I made a commitment to the American people when I ran for president that I would bring America’s military involvement in Afghanistan to an end. While it’s been hard and messy and, yes, far from perfect, I’ve honored that commitment.

More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn’t going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should’ve ended long ago. Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan.

I know my decision will be criticized. But I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president of the United States, yet another one, a fifth one. Because it’s the right one, it’s the right decision for our people. The right one for our brave service members who risked their lives serving our nation. And it’s the right one for America.

Thank you. May God protect our troops, our diplomats and all brave Americans serving in harm’s way.

 

Vaccine hesitancy

Vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of people’s broken relationship with the state

Nesrine Malik The Guardian

It’s hard to explain what it feels like when someone you thought you knew intimately starts to repeat conspiracy theories about the pandemic and vaccines. You don’t really grasp what’s happening immediately: it’s too vast and jarring a realization to gulp down in one go. So you go through phases. First you clutch at straws. Perhaps it’s a bad joke, or they didn’t really mean it, or they’re just misinformed. Then you enter a stage of hot, disorienting rage and frustrated remonstration. Once that is spent, finally you cool off. But inside you is a leaden realisation that not only is this person you love putting their life at risk: perhaps you never really knew them at all.

People with the wildest theories about the pandemic can be found in countries even where most people don’t have access to the internet, cable TV or the shock jocks of commercial radio. A common impulse is to write off those espousing conspiracies, consigning them to the casualties claimed by WhatsApp groups, disinformation or silent mental health issues. These things may be true – but vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of broader failures. What all people wary of vaccines have in common, from Khartoum to Kansas, is their trust in the state has been eroded. Without understanding this, we will be fated to keep channelling our frustrations towards individuals without grasping why they have lost trust in the first place.

This mistrust can run so deep that people will trust almost any source of information other than the government. In my birthplace of Sudan, fewer than 1% of the population have been fully vaccinated and ventilators are even rarer than vaccines. The story is much the same in several other African countries, where vaccine availability is so poor that people will drop everything and head to a hospital based on nothing but a rumour that free shots are available that day. But for many other people, those rare lifesaving vaccines sound suspiciously like too much of a good thing.

When the first batch of donated vaccines was sent to Sudan earlier this year, two vulnerable members of my family rejected them because someone had started a rumour that an electrical power shortage in the country meant vaccines couldn’t be properly stored, and thus they would certainly have “gone off” and be harmful. I and others tried to convince them that, even if that were the case, the worst case scenario was the shots would be ineffective rather than actually harmful. Our efforts were futile. Still, I clutched at those straws, hoping that once the first shots were administered and no harm was reported, my relatives would come round. But their excuses were ready. The new batch was a “reject”, I was told, donated by western countries that sent the vaccines to Africa for some good PR rather than throwing them away.

This sounds like completely irrational behaviour, but in fact it is the opposite. In countries such as Sudan, nothing good, and certainly nothing free, comes from the state. The government is an extractive body that exists not to serve citizens, but to rifle through their pockets and charge them for going about their daily business. Corruption is endemic – from bribing one’s way through traffic violations, to being forced to use private hospitals because government cronies have hoarded medical technology. The state is something that you thrive in spite of. The government’s communication reflects this uneasy relationship. Officials speak to the public either to scold them or spread propaganda, and dissent is banned; in Egypt, doctors who contradicted the government’s account of the pandemic were arrested, while oxygen tanks ran out in intensive care units in Cairo.

How do you try to convince someone that the provision of free and effective Covid vaccines is the exception to the rules they have lived under their whole life? That vaccines are a sudden outbreak of generosity and competence? Suspicion is easily sown, because political systems don’t need to be fully authoritarian to sustain exploitative and dishonest regimes that breed mistrust. You might think there is a dodgy hidden profit motive behind Covid vaccines if you live in the US, for example, where there is extreme political resistance to publicly funded healthcare, an outrageously profitable healthcare and pharmaceutical industry that spends $306m (£221m) on lobbying a year, and exorbitant, unregulated pricing of everything from flu shots to holding your baby after birth. You might, if you lived in the UK, doubt the government’s assurances that the vaccine had been rigorously tested, after seeing senior officials appear to make up pandemic policies as they went along, dragging the nation with them through U-turns and lockdowns whose rules they did not follow themselves.

State failure breeds paranoia. And when trust in government breaks down, people turn to personal vigilance. This climate of hesitancy and wariness is heightened by poorly regulated media that trade in falsehoods. In the UK, for example, a misleading report about ethnic minority people being excluded from vaccine trials was resolved only with a short correction in a footnote.

Vaccine rejection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s easier to dismiss hesitancy and conspiracies as unhinged behaviour; it makes us feel less unnerved by displays of unreason from those who we think are, or should be, rational people. Sure, among vaccine-hesitant people are those who are simply stubborn, misanthropic or selfish. But, just as the pandemic exploited the weaknesses of our economic and public health systems, vaccine hesitancy has exposed the weaknesses of states’ bond with their citizens. There are no easy answers for how to deal with those who repeat conspiracy theories and falsehoods, but scrutinizing the systems that lost their trust is perhaps a good place to start.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

 

Vous avez échoué au test.

Votre espèce s'est trompée et s'est livrée à la violence psychotique.

Les autres civilisations de la Kullon-Stratda (Voie lactée) ont peur de vous.

Le 6 janvier 2022, Tynesta (Terre) sera détruite.

Sois prêt.