In late June, Canada’s minister of infrastructure and former minister of environment and climate change, Catherine McKenna, raised eyebrows when she announced she’d be leaving politics to spend more time with her family — and work on ending the climate emergency. “This is a critical year for climate action in the most important decade that…
The assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise has sent the country into shock and turmoil, sparking discussions in the international community on how to help bring stability. But Haiti’s long history of interventions by foreign powers can’t be ignored, nor can the fact that often, they have been made whether or not Haiti itself benefited….
“Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan inevitable?” That’s the question a reporter put to President Joe Biden this week at a press conference on the US’s drawdown in Afghanistan. “No, it is not,” Biden said, noting that Afghan government troops greatly outnumber the Taliban and are “as well-equipped as any army in the world.” That…
The reason we should care about refugees is because they are people. But, unfortunately, for many people that is an insufficient moral claim. Even for the tens of thousands of Afghan people who put their lives in jeopardy working alongside the US military over the past 20 years. So let’s put it another way: Evidence…
Afghanistan, after the Taliban takeover, is a waiting game. And for Afghan women, the waiting game is agonizing. The last time the Taliban held power, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, repression was a feature of their rule. This was especially true for women. Girls could not attend school; women could not hold jobs…
The biggest question since the Taliban recaptured Kabul on August 15 has been whether the group’s return to power means the same thing for Afghans that it did 25 years ago. The last time the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, was marked by brutal oppression, particularly of minorities and women. Their…
A vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum — 90 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans — support resettling vulnerable Afghans in the US amid the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The Biden administration is surging resources to make that happen, speeding up visa processing for Afghans employed by the US government to…
The United States issued a warning this week amid the crush and chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan: Avoid the area because of a possible ISIS terror attack. On Thursday, the threat bore out. The full tragedy of the attack is still unclear, but at least 170 Afghans and 13 US…
Inside a clinic in eastern Afghanistan, a nine-months-pregnant Afghan woman shivered on an old metal bed as an Afghan midwife examined her. It was 2012, and the war in Afghanistan had already been going on for 11 years. The woman had just traveled from an outlying village along the Pakistan border, seeking a safe place…
Afghanistan wasn’t just America’s 20-year war. It also belonged to US allies. “This has been above all a catastrophe for the Afghan people. It’s a failure of the Western world and it’s a game changer for international relations,” the European Union’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell told an Italian newspaper Monday, according to the Washington Post….