‘He Wanted The Taliban In Charge’: Trump’s Defense Sec. Explains How Trump Sabotaged Afghanistan
Carl Anthony August 19, 2021
Former Trump administration official Chris Miller, who served as the acting Defense Department secretary for the final months, said on Wednesday that “Trump’s public promise to finish withdrawing U.S. troops by May 1, as negotiated with the Taliban, was actually a ‘play’ that masked the Trump administration’s true intentions: to convince Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to quit,” leaving the Taliban in charge.
Miller’s comments came during an interview with DefenseOne. The former official also claimed that “many Trump administration officials expected that the United States would be able to broker a new shared government in Afghanistan composed primarily of Taliban officials. The new government would then permit U.S. forces to remain in the country to support the Afghan military and fight terrorist elements.”
But that’s not what happened, in large part because Trump spent the final months of his presidency trying to overturn the 2020 election after his defeat to Joe Biden.
The comments were similar to revelations from former Pentagon chief Mark Esper, who told CNN International on Tuesday that he warned Trump that the plan he was crafting wouldn’t end well.
Another former senior Trump administration official told DefenseOne that Trump’s efforts to oust Ghani were to appease the Taliban.
“That’s what the Taliban wanted. They wanted to get rid of the legitimate government,” said the official.
“The decision space was either: keep a small U.S. counterterrorism presence along with 7,000 to 8,000 NATO troops and kind of hold down the fort and protect our counterterrorism interests, or go to zero and cede the country to the Taliban,” the official said.
“The Taliban were never going to agree to let any U.S. forces stay in the country and if any U.S. official thought that was possible, I think they were a victim of wishful thinking,” the official said.
Yet once he was infected, he was given Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment, despite being fully vaccinated and having no symptoms.
Gupta, a pulmonologist, tweeted:
COVID-19 cases have skyrocketed in Texas in recent weeks, from around 1,000 daily cases reported in early July to over 20,000 cases reported on Monday.
Despite those rising numbers, just 45% of the state is fully vaccinated, well below the U.S. average of 51%.
Abbott has also undermined efforts to slow the spread of the virus with his ban on mask mandates, and by going to court to uphold that ban.
NBC News reported on Tuesday that Abbott has told friends he has received a third dose of the vaccine.
Abbott’s positive test results came less than 24 hours after he attended a crowded GOP event and posted images online showing him at the largely mask-free gathering.
‘Please Don’t Leave Us Behind. We Will Be Great Americans.’
An interview with a U.S.-trained Afghan Air Force pilot, now hiding from the Taliban.
by The Editors August 16, 2021
Afghan Air Force pilots land their UH-60 Blackhawks on a narrow landing strip during a resupply mission to an outpost in Ghazni Province,
Afghanistan, Sunday, May 9, 2021. The Afghan Air Force, which the U.S. and its partners has nurtured to the tune of $8.5 billion since 2010, is now the government’s spearhead in its fight against the Taliban. Since May 1, the original deadline for the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban have overpowered government troops to take at least 23 districts to date, according to local media outlets. That has further denied Afghan security forces the use of roads, meaning all logistical support to the thousands of outposts and checkpoints including re-supplies of ammunition and food, medical evacuations or personnel rotation must be done by air. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)
As the world watched the United States pull out from Afghanistan and Taliban forces take over the country, we spoke by text message with an Afghan Air Force pilot, now in hiding along with several other pilots and hoping to be evacuated.
Who are you? Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
I was born in Kunar, Afghanistan and joined the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in 2005. I’m married with seven beautiful children. Unfortunately, we are currently separated, because the Taliban took Kabul.
I’m at an undisclosed location with other Afghan Air Force (AAF) pilots, hiding from the Taliban. They are hunting us.
Actually, they’ve been hunting us for years, but this really increased over the last year. The AAF, along with the Afghan National Army Special Operations Corps (ANASOC), were the best fighters for the Afghan government. The AAF was very good. Because we were very good, the Taliban hunted us relentlessly over the last year. I lost many friends to Taliban assassins.
They’ve already executed a few pilots over the weekend.
What was your career with the Afghan Air Force like?
I was very proud to be an AAF pilot. I was a commander. I spent years in the United States, learning to speak English and going through undergraduate pilot training. I visited San Antonio, Fort Rucker, and a lot of other places, too. I like Texas the best. I thought the people were very friendly.
I started at the Defense Language Institute, then moved onto undergraduate pilot training, and then eventually more advanced pilot training for my aircraft. I have so many fond memories of my time in the United States. However, I loved working with my American Air Force advisors the most. They were incredible men and women. When they left [Afghanistan] in May, I was very scared that this day would come.
However, we fought for a long time, and it was the loss of the contractors that really hurt us. Although we have a lot of really good pilots, it takes a very long time to train maintainers. Although we had made great strides, especially with the Mi-17s, we weren’t ready to do it alone without the contractors. A lot of the American-made aircraft are very sophisticated and they take years of training to maintain them adequately.
What’s your current situation?
Like I said, I’m currently in hiding. We are hoping to get out. If we are not rescued, then the Taliban will execute us.
The AAF and the Afghan Special Operations Forces are not the same as regular rank-and-file soldiers. We are very well known. We were celebrated by the Afghan people, so everyone knows us. It’s a very big deal to be an Afghan pilot or a commando.
Anyway, we are hoping that the Americans will take us, and our families, to safety. We spent decades fighting alongside American forces.
Anything you want the American public to know?
Many Afghan soldiers died bravely. I’ve been fighting for over fifteen years. We did not all just give up and quit. Yes, some did. Once the Americans left, we weren’t ready to start doing all the logistics. The logistics, the maintenance, and corruption really hurt us.
I know people in the U.S. are upset that we didn’t fight longer. But we’ve been fighting for decades—and some of us, even longer. When the U.S. left, it really affected morale, especially how quickly it happened. We woke up one day, then Bagram was gone. Everyone got scared. It got out of control.
I’m mad at many of the senior leaders who lined their pockets and simply vanished from the country. However, thousands of Afghan officers were not responsible for that. We were simply doing the best we could.
There are a lot of Afghans who trusted the United States. Not just translators. Not just civil society activists, but also Afghan soldiers. We loved fighting alongside Americans.
Please don’t leave us behind. Please. We will be great Americans.
Insurance companies are bailing in risk areas—what to do if your homeowners policy isn’t renewed
By Ben Moore August 16, 2021
Nonrenewals are on the rise—but there are alternatives
In July, fire swept through Greenville, Calif., destroying homes, historic buildings and forcing hundreds to evacuate. Getty Images
Homeowners insurance non-renewals are on the rise as private insurers steer clear of locations at high risk for natural disasters. The West Coast’s blazing wildfires are leaving some Californians scrambling to find coverage, while many Floridians are facing non-renewals during hurricane season.
In the midst of changing climate conditions and increasing weather-related catastrophes, it’s more crucial than ever to have insurance coverage for your home to have peace of mind. Here’s what to do if your homeowners insurance policy isn’t renewed.
1. Know your rights
An insurance company is usually required to provide a nonrenewal notice, typically at least 30 days prior to the end of coverage, unless you’ve missed a payment or committed fraud on your application. But you might get more time to find a new policy. For example, Florida homeowners could get up to 120 days’ notice, according to Stacey Giulianti, chief legal officer for Florida Peninsula Insurance Company.
If you believe you were wrongly dropped, you can contest the nonrenewal. You’ll likely need to prove that your home isn’t in a high-risk area, or that you’ve made efforts to mitigate that risk, like replacing the roof or removing flammable shrubs near your house.
2. Make home improvements
If your policy isn’t renewed because of a failed inspection, making the proper updates could help you maintain coverage, even if you’re in a high-risk area.
Inspections give homeowners the opportunity to fix problems, like leaky roofs or exposed electrical wiring, so they can keep an insurance policy, according to Michael Peltier, media relations manager for Citizens Property Insurance.
When making improvements, consider upgrading your home’s building materials. Newer materials may withstand weather catastrophes better than older ones while simultaneously lowering your insurance costs, Giulianti says. “The houses that are a hundred years old … aren’t going to withstand storms the same way as a brand-new concrete building.”
Building upgrades could include:
Replacing walls with ignition-resistant materials like stucco or fiber-cement siding to mitigate fire damage.
Switching to impact-resistant shingles to prevent roof damage.
Installing hurricane-resistant windows if you live on the coast.
3. Shop around for another policy
Your previous insurer may not be an option, but you should still shop around. “There’s almost always another company … that will pick you up,” Giulianti says.
An independent insurance agent can research home insurance quotes for companies in your area. You can also ask your real-estate agent, mortgage lender, home builder or previous owner for a list of companies, or call your state’s insurance department.
4. Turn to your state’s shared market option
If you still can’t find coverage, you may need a state-run shared market policy. Many states offer Fair Access to Insurance Requirements policies for high-risk homes, or beach and windstorm plans for coastal properties. Aptly named “last-resort” policies, FAIR policies offer limited coverage and are often more expensive than a standard home policy from a private insurer.
California’s FAIR Plan
The California FAIR Plan sells insurance for damage from fire, lightning, internal explosions and smoke, with optional coverage available at an additional cost. As wildfires worsen in the state, more customers are turning to the FAIR Plan for coverage, and this trend is expected to continue, Natalie Haskell, a spokesperson for the California FAIR Plan, wrote in an email.
But these policies don’t cover everything standard homeowners insurance policies do, like personal liability, your belongings or additional living expenses. For more extensive coverage, homeowners in California need to purchase a “difference in conditions” policy that complements FAIR Plan coverage to create a comprehensive home insurance policy.
Florida’s state-run insurer
Citizens Property Insurance, Florida’s insurer of last resort, has also seen an uptick in policy sales. But the reasons differ — worsening hurricane seasons combined with increasing litigation have driven up home insurance costs and non-renewals in the state.
Citizens offers coverage similar to that of private insurers, including dwelling, personal property, other structures and additional living expense coverage, though limits may be lower. In some areas, the company also sells wind-only policies that cover damage from hurricanes and other wind-related catastrophes. Policies are available only through an independent agent.
If you’ve exhausted all other options, surplus lines insurance may be available. Provided by specialized insurers that are regulated differently from standard companies, surplus lines offer coverage for risky properties when other insurers won’t. Available companies may vary by state, so speak with an insurance agent about surplus lines once you’ve been rejected by at least three other insurers.
Op-Ed: Afghanistan’s rapid fall shows Biden was right to pull out
By Charles A. Kupchan August 16, 2021
A Taliban fighter in Ghazni, an Afghan provincial capital, last week.
(Gulabuddin Amiri / Associated Press)
It has been excruciating to watch the Taliban roll across Afghanistan, undoing in a matter of months two decades of efforts by the Afghan people and the international community to build a decent, secure and functioning state.
The Taliban’s virtually uncontested takeover raises obvious questions about the wisdom of President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces from the country. However, the rapidity and ease of the Taliban’s advance provides a clear answer: that Biden made the right decision — and that he should not reverse course.
Biden doubted that U.S.-led efforts to prop up the government in Kabul would ever enable it to stand on its own. The international community took down Al Qaeda; beat back the Taliban; supported, advised, trained and equipped the Afghan military; bolstered governing institutions; and invested in the country’s civil society. None of that created Afghan institutions capable of holding their own.
That is because the mission was fatally flawed from the outset. It was a fool’s errand to try to turn Afghanistan into a centralized, unitary state. The country’s difficult topography, ethnic complexity, and tribal and local loyalties produce enduring political fragmentation. Its troubled neighborhoods and hostility to outside interference make foreign intervention perilous.
Biden made the tough and correct choice to withdraw and end a losing effort in search of an unattainable goal.
The case for withdrawal is also buttressed by the reality that even if the U.S. has fallen short on the nation-building front, it has achieved its primary strategic goal: preventing future attacks on America or its allies from Afghan territory. The U.S. and its coalition partners have decimated Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The same goes for the Afghan branch of the Islamic State, which has demonstrated no ability to carry out transnational attacks from Afghanistan.
In the meantime, the U.S. has built a global network of partners with which to fight terrorism worldwide, share relevant intelligence and jointly boost domestic defenses against terrorist attacks. The U.S. and its allies are today much harder targets than they were on Sept. 11, 2001. Al Qaeda has not been able to carry out a major overseas attack since the bombings in London in 2005.
There is, of course, no guarantee that the Taliban won’t again provide safe harbor to Al Qaeda or similar groups. But that outcome is highly unlikely. The Taliban has been doing just fine on its own and has little reason to revive its partnership with the likes of Al Qaeda. The Taliban will also want to maintain a measure of international legitimacy and support, likely quashing any temptation to host groups seeking to organize terrorist attacks against foreign powers. Moreover, those groups have little incentive to seek to regroup in Afghanistan when they can do so more easily elsewhere.
Finally, Biden is right to stand by his decision to end the military mission in Afghanistan, because doing so is consistent with the will of the electorate. Most Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, have lost patience with the “forever wars” in the Middle East. The illiberal populism that led to Donald Trump’s election (and near reelection) emerged in part as a response to perceived American overreach in the broader Middle East. Against a backdrop of decades of economic discontent among U.S. workers, recently exacerbated by the devastation of the pandemic, voters want their tax dollars to go to Kansas, not Kandahar.
The success of Biden’s effort to repair American democracy depends principally on delivering domestic investment; the infrastructure and social policy bills now moving through Congress are critical steps in the right direction. But foreign policy also matters. When Biden pledges to pursue a “foreign policy for the middle class,” he needs to deliver by pursuing a brand of statecraft that enjoys the backing of the American public.
Afghanistan deserves the support of the international community for the foreseeable future. But the U.S.-led military mission has run its course. Sadly, the best the international community can do for now is help alleviate humanitarian suffering and press Afghans to look to diplomacy, compromise and restraint as their country searches for a peaceful and stable political equilibrium.
Joe Biden’s Surrender Is an Ugly, Needless Disaster
Matt Lewis
–
With the Taliban retaking Afghanistan amid a frenzied U.S. exit, I am reminded that Robert Gates, Barack Obama’s defense secretary, famously said that Joe Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” That isn’t an exaggeration.
Biden opposed the Persian Gulf War (later, reversing his decision and saying George H.W. Bush should have gone all the way to Baghdad) and supported the Iraq War, before opposing the surge in Iraq (not to mention famously wanting to partition Iraq into three countries). As vice president, he opposed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
This brings us to Afghanistan. As recently as a month ago, Biden denied a Taliban takeover was inevitable. Everyone knew that was wrong. Everyone except Biden, I suppose. Based on his horrible track record, we can assume he was being sincere. If he wasn’t, he would have demanded a more responsible exit plan before proceeding.
Biden inherited an Afghanistan where Americans were suffering few casualties, and where a small residual force was seemingly maintaining some semblance of order (not to mention preventing the country from once again being used as a staging ground for international terrorists to launch attacks against the U.S.). With his what-could-go-wrong withdrawal, he has managed to turn it into the tragic debacle that is happening now in front of our eyes.
To be sure, Biden didn’t do it alone. His predecessor, Donald Trump, deserves much of the blame. Biden claims that, by withdrawing forces, he’s honoring his predecessor’s commitment. But he has reversed lots of other Trump policies, didn’t adhere to Trump’s May 1 deadline for withdrawal, and could have easily cited examples of the Taliban not living up to their side of the agreement as reason enough to scuttle the deal.
The point is that Biden was not locked in to following through with Trump’s unwise “America First” policy. As much as Trump deserves blame for this situation (and so much more), the fall of Afghanistan is happening on Biden’s watch. This is his rodeo. This is, if not his Vietnam, his fall of Saigon.
Now, Biden is rushing troops back into Afghanistan to try and end or at least mitigate the optics of a desperate evacuation that leaves translators and other allies and Afghans who’d depended on us behind. But it’s already terribly late, as the civilians waiting for flights that may never come can vouch.
Some people believe that Biden’s real problem was his execution. For example, why would he refuse to leave a residual force behind, and why would he time his withdrawal for the summer fighting season? With more prudent logistics and better timing, Biden might have bought a cushion of time between the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban takeover. That would have resulted in better PR for Biden, but the fundamental problem was the decision to withdraw U.S. troops without leaving a residual force behind—not the hamfisted way he did it.
It could have been even worse. Biden originally had this insane idea of linking the Afghanistan withdrawal to September 11, and that may be why he couldn’t wait for the fighting season to end before giving in. In his mind, he somehow thought that ending a 20-year war on this particular date would be romantic and symbolic. And it would. For the Taliban!
In this pathetic departure, with American arms again ending up with our enemies as they did in Iraq, Biden is reinforcing the notion that our enemies can simply outlast us. Likewise, he is demonstrating (as Trump before him did with the Kurds) that putting your neck on the line for this nation is a fool’s errand. These decisions will make any future military interventions that more difficult.
This naivete is on full display with the anemic threats the U.S. is now issuing. Their behavior could lead to “international isolation.” Executions, our embassy warns, show a lack of “human rights.” It’s not a perfect analogy, but I am reminded of Die Hard, when John McClane tries to use a police radio to report a terrorist attack and is threatened with an FCC violation: “Fine, report me. Come the fuck down here and arrest me!” The Taliban are pillaging, executing and pressing 15-year-old girls into “service” as Taliban brides while we are threatening to, what, ruin their reputation in the international community?
In short, it’s a shit show. If you had told me 10 ten years ago that Biden would be elected president to clean up after Trump, I would have worried about precisely this kind of mess. Trump was so chaotic and dangerous that Biden, who (aside from his track record of bad foreign policy calls) had been a handsy gaffe machine, looked like Abe Lincoln by comparison. Today, however, we are witnessing the one-two punch of the Trump-Biden era. The scene unfolding in Afghanistan is exactly what you might expect from a policy that both men endorsed.
US Veterans View Afghan Collapse With Anguish, Rage and Relief
Dave Philipps
Ginger Wallace, right, a retired Air Force colonel, with her wife, Janet Holliday, a retired Army colonel, in Louisville, Ky., on Monday, August 16, 2021. (Andrew Cenci/The New York Times)
On Javier Mackey’s second deployment to Afghanistan, one of his friends was shot in an ambush and bled to death in his arms. He saw high-ranking Afghan officers selling off equipment for personal gain and Afghan troops running away during firefights. And he started wondering what the United States could really achieve by sending thousands of troops to a distant land that seemed to have never known peace. That was in 2008.
Mackey, an Army Special Forces soldier, deployed there five more times, was shot twice, and, he said, grew more cynical on each trip, until he decided the only sensible thing for the U.S. to do was cut its losses and leave.
Even so, seeing the swift and chaotic collapse of the Afghan government in recent days hit him with the intensity of a bomb blast.
“It’s pain — pain I thought I had gotten used to,” said Mackey, who retired as a sergeant first class in 2018 and now lives in Florida. “I sacrificed a lot, I saw death every year. And the guys I served with, we knew it would probably come to an end like this. But to see it end in chaos, it makes us angry. After everything we gave, I just wish there had been a way to leave with honor.”
In the 20 years that the U.S. military was in Afghanistan, more than 775,000 U.S. troops deployed there, to citylike air bases and sandbag outposts on lonely mountaintops. As the Taliban swept into Kabul on Sunday, wiping away any gains made, veterans said in interviews that they watched with a roiling mix of sadness, rage and relief. Some were thankful that America’s involvement in the country seemed to have ended, but were also dismayed that hard-won progress was squandered. Others were fearful for Afghan friends left behind.
In interviews, text messages and on Facebook, men and women who collectively spent decades in Afghanistan said they were angry that despite a drawdown that has spanned years, the United States could not manage to exit the country with more dignity.
The anguish can be especially raw because veterans often worked side by side with Afghans during the years of attempts at nation-building, and now in that nation’s collapse they see the individual faces of friends who have been enveloped by the anarchy.
“My heart breaks for the Afghan people,” said Ginger Wallace, a retired Air Force colonel who in 2012 oversaw a program that retrained low-level Taliban fighters to clear land mines and work in other jobs that offered an alternative to combat.
At the time, she thought that efforts to stabilize Afghanistan were succeeding, and that U.S. troops would one day leave the country a better place. But her optimism slowly wore down as the Taliban gained ground.
“It’s heartbreaking, absolutely. I hate to see it end like this, but you don’t know what else we could have done,” she said from her home in Louisville, Kentucky. “Do we have an expectation that U.S. service members should stay and fight the Taliban when the Afghan army won’t?”
Wallace met her wife, Janet Holliday, while deployed in Afghanistan. The two normally watch the news each morning, but Monday, as scenes of mayhem unfolded at the airport in Kabul, Holliday, a retired Army colonel, switched to the Food Channel.
“It was too hard to watch,” Holliday said, excusing herself as she became upset. “I just can’t help thinking about what a waste it is. I can’t allow myself to think about how after all that blood and treasure, it ends like this.”
More than with other wars in the nation’s history, Americans have been mostly insulated from the fighting in Afghanistan. There was no draft or mass mobilization. Less than 1% of the nation served and a disproportionate number of troops came from rural counties in the South and West, far from the seats of power.
But veterans have said in interviews over the years that they were cleareyed about the challenges posed by the war, perhaps more so than the rest of the nation. They saw firsthand the deeply ingrained traditional cultures, tribal allegiances and endemic corruption that continually hobbled U.S. efforts.
Mackey agreed with President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw, but thought the way it was done was slapdash and unprofessional.
“We train to have contingencies. The way it was handled was just irresponsible,” Mackey said. “We didn’t want to have another Vietnam, we wanted to do better.”
Jake Wood was a 25-year-old Marine sniper deployed to a forgotten corner of Afghanistan in 2008 when he started to see how much daylight there was between the optimistic pronouncements of top U.S. leaders and the reality of serving with Afghans on the ground.
Villagers in the district center of Sangin, where he manned an outpost, seemed to have little allegiance to the Afghan government in Kabul or the U.S. vision of democracy.
“We had no idea what our mission was, even back then,” said Wood, who now runs the nationwide veteran volunteering network Team Rubicon. “Were we trying to defeat the Taliban? Were we nation-building? I don’t think we knew.”
The Afghans he served with seemed to accept the uncertainty with a weary fatalism foreign to young Marines. At one point over small cups of tea, he said, he spoke with a young Afghan he served with who said Afghanistan only knows war, and when the U.S. war ended, another would come.
“He told me that maybe the Americans would come back,” Wood said. Then he recalled the Afghan saying, “But if you do, I can’t tell you if we’ll be friends or enemies.”
Wood said the veterans he has been in touch with feel a mix of sadness and fury watching the fall of Kabul: sadness that the folly that seemed so obvious in the ranks took years and thousands of lives for top leaders to accept; fury that the result of that ignorance and hubris was playing out on cable television in a way that would tarnish the reputation of the nation and the hundreds of thousands of troops who fought.
“We already knew we were losing the war,” he said. “But now we are losing it live on TV in front of the rest of the world. That’s what’s so hard.”
The Taliban now controls one of the world’s biggest lithium deposits
By Tim McDonnell, Climate reporter August 16, 2021
REUTERS/MOHAMMAD ISMAIL.
Illegal mining of lapis lazuli, a gem, is a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
When Taliban fighters entered Kabul on Aug. 15, they didn’t just seize control of the Afghan government. They also gained the ability to control access to huge deposits of minerals that are crucial to the global clean energy economy.
In 2010, an internal US Department of Defense memo called Afghanistan “the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” after American geologists discovered the vast extent of the country’s mineral wealth, valued at at least $1 trillion. The silvery metal is essential for electric vehicles and renewable energy batteries.
Ten years later, thanks to conflict, corruption, and bureaucratic dysfunction, those resources remain almost entirely untapped. And as the US looks to disentangle its clean energy supply chains from China, the world’s top lithium producer, to have Afghanistan’s minerals under Taliban control is a severe blow to American economic interests.
“The Taliban is now sitting on some of the most important strategic minerals in the world,” said Rod Schoonover, head of the ecological security program at the Center for Strategic Risks, a Washington think tank. “Whether they can/will utilize them will be an important question going forward.”
Minerals are a double-edged sword for Afghanistan
Global demand for lithium is projected to skyrocket 40-fold above 2020 levels by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency, along with rare earth elements, copper, cobalt, and other minerals in which Afghanistan is naturally rich. These minerals are concentrated in a small number of pockets around the globe, so the clean energy transition has the potential to yield a substantial payday for Afghanistan.
In the past, Afghan government officials have dangled the prospect of lucrative mining contracts in front of their US counterparts as an enticement to prolong the American military presence in the country. With the Taliban in charge, that option is likely off the table.
But Ashraf Ghani, the World Bank economist-turned-Afghan president, who fled the country the day of the Taliban takeover, saw the minerals as a potential “curse.” For one, most economists agree that mineral riches breed corruption and violence, particularly in developing countries, and that they often fail to yield many benefits for average citizens. At the same time, the Taliban have long illegally tapped the country’s minerals (especially lapis lazuli, a gem) as a source of up to $300 million in annual revenue for their insurgency.
What happens now that the Taliban is in control
The Taliban can’t simply flick a switch and dive into the global lithium trade, Schoonover said. Years of conflict have left the country’s physical infrastructure—roads, power plants, railways—in tatters. And at the moment Taliban militants are reportedly struggling even to maintain the provision of basic public services and utilities in the cities they have captured, let alone carry out economic policies that can attract international investors.
Competing factions within the Taliban would make it very difficult for any company to negotiate mining deals, and China is unlikely to extend to the group the scale of infrastructure loans that would be required to bring any sizable mining operations online, said Nick Crawford, a development economics researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank. That’s especially true after Chinese investors got burned on a $3 billion copper mining project in Afghanistan, that started in 2007 and failed to produce anything, largely because of challenges related to the lack of infrastructure.
“As long as there are safer and more reliable sources elsewhere, full utilization of Afghan minerals is likely to remain slow,” Schoonover said. However, China and Russia are already retaining diplomatic ties with the Taliban, and will almost certainly do business with the new regime on its home turf.
One reason for China to do so, Crawford said, could be to offshore some of the localized environmental destruction that comes with rare earth and lithium mining. In that case, mining is likely to add to the range of other environmental hazards—including water scarcity, air pollution, and extreme weather disastersrelated to climate change—already faced by the Afghan people.
“The climate is f’d. Even worse than it seems.” That’s from the opening page of a 12-page letter sent by venture capitalist Chris Sacca to potential investors in Lowercarbon Capital, the climate-focused firm he launched last year after a brief retirement.
What’s new: Lowercarbon, which initially funded more than 50 startups via money from Sacca and his wife Crystal, last week announced that it raised $800 million in outside capital.
The $800 million is split among four funds, two early-stage and two later-stage. Each strategy includes a small fund that contains a slice of existing Lowercarbon portfolio companies, so that LP and GP interests are more aligned (plus, it was a marketing sweetener).
Why it matters: Both institutional and individual investors have gotten over ROI PTSD from the initial green-tech investing boom, with Sacca telling me that the funds were more than 2x oversubscribed in just a matter of days.
“Carbon is an expensive, inefficient thing,” Sacca argues. “Anywhere we can remove it from the process, it’s cheaper. That means customers. We’re not running a nonprofit here.”
“One big difference between now and years ago is that current tech makes it so much faster for startups to get to the binary point of understanding if something works or not. Biotech’s binary moment usually comes much later, and even web/app stuff can take a couple years to build something that you don’t actually know if it will catch on.”
Big picture: There is still a relative dearth of early-stage firms investing in green tech, despite an emerging consensus that climate change is an existential threat and that it can’t be stemmed (let alone reversed) via policy change alone.
Sacca believes we’ll know the money is matching the opportunity when we see more VC firms hire climate scientists like Lowercarbon’s Clea Kolster.
“I’m seeing more traditional VCs who do care and want to be proud of what they do. But we’re still not seeing too much competition, because most of these firms are clustering around lower-impact, consumer-facing technologies like basic reuse and recycling because they don’t yet have the skill set for deeper tech.”
Also: Lowercarbon had planned to offer some fund allocations to Historically Black Colleges and Universities on a no-fee/no-carry basis. But it hasn’t happened yet, as Sacca says it’s proven surprisingly difficult to find “decision-makers” at schools that haven’t traditionally had access to top VC funds.
“Our goal now is to donate a few million of each fund to HBCUs, while setting up direct relationships with the schools so they can get similar deals with other big VC funds. It’s kind of an open invitation because we have a chunk of these funds waiting for them. Maybe this interview will help get the word out.”
The bottom line: If we’re going to innovate our way out of global climate catastrophe, venture capital must play a key role. Right now.
A new UN report on climate change is “a warning for the entire global community,” McArthur said.
Astronauts have a better view of Earth than anybody, but lately it’s a discouraging one.
“We’ve been very saddened to see fires over huge sections of the Earth, not just the United States,” NASA astronaut Megan McArthur told Insider on a recent call from the space station.
Wildfires are raging across the US, Canada, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Algeria, and Siberia. McArthur’s crewmate, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, has posted photos of those blazes from above on Twitter.
Wildfires are one of the most visible hallmarks of the climate crisis. This summer, they’ve come alongside historic heat waves and the western US’s worst drought in the 20-year history of the US Drought Monitor.
A new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that “fire weather” will probably increase by 2050 in North America, Central America, parts of South America, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, north Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. That means more days where conditions are warm, dry, and windy enough to trigger and sustain wildfires.
The amount of fuel available to burn in those places – dry vegetation – is also likely to increase as rising temperatures cause the air to absorb more moisture and bring about more droughts.
The IPCC report, released Monday, is the first part of the group’s sixth assessment, which recruits hundreds of experts to analyze years of scientific research on climate change. Those experts determined that global temperatures will almost certainly rise at least 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average by 2040.
That may sound small, but it brings about huge changes across the planet, including further melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. This contributes to sea-level rise, and water expands as it heats up, so it is virtually certain that oceans will continue rising through the end of this century. In the best case scenario, the IPCC authors said, oceans will rise by nearly a foot over the next 80 years.
“Over many years, scientists around the world have been sounding this alarm bell,” McArthur said. “This is a warning for the entire global community. It’s going to take the entire global community to face this and to work through these challenges.”
Astronauts can see the climate crisis unfolding across the planet
A photo of Hurricane Laura taken from the International Space Station on August 25, 2020. Chris Cassidy/NASA
Astronauts can see other signs of the changing climate, too: “Big tropical storms – those are always coming, and potentially the flooding that comes after them,” McArthur said. “We can see all of those effects from up here.”
Future astronauts will probably observe even more of that. The IPCC report found that combinations of extreme events like heavy rainfall and hurricane-caused storm surge, paired with rising seas, will continue to make flooding more likely in coming decades.
“The other thing that we can see, of course, is the very thin lens of atmosphere,” McArthur said. “That is what protects our Earth and everything on it. And we see how fragile that is, and we know how important it is.”
The atmosphere glows above the southeastern African coast, as seen from the International Space Station. NASA
The burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil is drastically changing that thin atmosphere by filling it with heat-trapping gas.
In 2019, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was higher than at any time in at least 2 million years, according to the IPCC report. Concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide – more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide – were higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.
On August 4, 2021, an astronaut on the International Space Station shot a photo of the Dixie fire’s thick smoke plume. NASA/JSC
As those gases fill the atmosphere, they prevent more and more heat from the sun from bouncing back into space. That’s what’s causing global temperatures to rise and bringing about the extreme weather that astronauts are watching in horror.
“That is the place that we need to be able to live. So it’s important that we take ownership of whatever we can do to help maintain it,” NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei told Insider.
