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‘America After 9/11’ Review: Frontline’s Outstanding Deconstruction of the War on Terror Is a Must-Watch

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‘America After 9/11’ Review: Frontline’s Outstanding Deconstruction of the War on Terror Is a Must-Watch

“America After 9/11” examines the nation’s policy failures over the last two decades and how the War on Terror has impacted the homefront.

Tyler Hersko                       September 7, 2021 

"America After 9/11"

“America After 9/11”

PBS

America’s War on Terror began with ill-defined intentions and led to 20 years of brutality that eroded the country’s international goodwill while fostering paranoia, mistrust of public institutions, and xenophobia at home. This is the crux of “America After 9/11,” the latest investigative journalism project from PBS’ Frontline team, and it’s a belief that the two-hour film effectively relays via its facts-first reporting and extensive sourcing.

To call the film timely is both stating the obvious and an understatement; while “America After 9/11” is one of numerous media productions being published this month to coincide with the 20th anniversary of World Trade Center attacks, the film’s release also comes just weeks after the United States’ contentious exit from Afghanistan. As its title implies (and as is to be expected from Frontline), “America After 9/11,” which is directed by longtime political documentarian Michael Kirk, centers on the United States’ political and military actions following the 2001 terrorist attack — it’s a must-watch deconstruction of the War on Terror explained in clear and illuminating terms by numerous experts involved in or affected by the last 20 years of American politics.

“America After 9/11” analyzes numerous developments and individual incidents that stemmed from the last 20 years of the country’s policy-making but most of these topics are used to answer two key questions: How did America’s War on Terror affect the international community’s perception of the country, and what were its impacts inside the United States’ borders?

On the latter question: One of the film’s earliest scenes shows prominent Democratic and Republican politicians coming together at the U.S. Capitol to sing “God Bless America” the evening after 9/11; the scene is followed by footage of the Donald Trump-inspired insurrection at the same building around 20 years later. The juxtaposition of the War on Terror and the January attack on the U.S. Capitol may sound unusual, but “America After 9/11” makes strong, repeated points about how the United States’ foreign policy decisions have had starkly negative influences on domestic politics. As Ben Rhodes, a White House staffer during Barack Obama’s presidency and one of over 30 sources interviewed in the film, argues: “The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was the logical endpoint of the 9/11 era. When you have people who can’t trust institutions anymore, who are angry that the wars they were promised great victories in didn’t turn out well, they start to look for people to blame.”

“Who are we and what do we want to do as a nation? We answered that question too simply on 9/11: ‘We’re the good guys,’” journalist Thomas E. Ricks said in one of the film’s interviews. “And 20 years later, we found out that we are the enemy. That the biggest national security threat facing the United States is internal, and it has grown partly as a result of American leadership failures over the last 20 years since 9/11.”

The United States’ attempts to postulate itself as “the good guys” in the War on Terror is a key point in the film’s first hour, which primarily hones in on the foreign policies of George W. Bush’s administration. Ample time is dedicated to the tactical mistakes in the war, as well the United States’ many violations of human rights, particularly the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and the nation’s ongoing failure to close Guantanamo Bay. The film clearly lays out the government’s initial intentions behind the war — go to Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden — and details how the initial failure to do so, amplified by fear-mongering about threats ranging from nuclear weapons to anthrax, influenced the White House.

One of the film’s most surreal anecdotes concerns Vice President Dick Cheney: “This was Cheney’s nightmare come true. He’d been getting ready for doomsday for years and thought a lot about it,” The New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer said in the film. “And then on 9/11 , it seemed like it was almost coming true. He felt death was stalking him. He kept a gas mask and a hazmat suit in a bag in the back seat.”

“America After 9/11” later pivots to the United States public’s erosion of trust in the government and in the media as the war continued and public support waned. The film cites lie-riddled speeches from Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Joe Biden: “People who knew better voted for it because they were afraid of being called weak,” Rhodes said in one of the film’s interviews. “You have Democratic, as well as Republican members of Congress, voting for a war that does anybody really believe if they were president they would have chosen to do that? That undermined, I think, confidence in the American public in their leaders. ‘Who can I trust anymore? The Democrats voted for this war too. Why should I trust them anymore than I trust the Republicans?’” The news media’s role on the erosion of public trust after 9/11 — leading newspapers effectively gave credibility to the lies of politicians via pro-war op-eds and reports, while television news channels drummed up fears of potential terrorism attacks for ratings — is also examined in the film.

These segments come into sharp focus in the second half of “America After 9/11,” which analyzes the War on Terror under the Obama and Trump administrations and aptly connects the public’s growing war fatigue and paranoia to issues that are more topical than ever, ranging from racism and conspiracy theories to hyper-partisanship and the devaluation of basic facts. The roughly 30-minute section of the film that revolves around Obama’s presidency focuses on his messages of hope and de-escalation during his 2008 campaign, and how his war policies — namely, the expansion of drone strikes, the short-lived exit from Iraq, and a failure to close Guantanamo Bay — further eroded trust in the government at home and abroad, despite the eventual killing of bin Laden. As the wars dragged on, the right-wing media helped to direct the country’s growing sentiments of nationalism and racism towards Obama and Muslims.

As the film notes, those attitudes contributed to Trump’s election. Trump’s presidency is the focus of the documentary final 20 minutes, which notes that he further escalated targeted killings and affirmed his support for Guantanamo Bay. That said, the film primarily focuses on how the consequences of the War on Terror impacted America under Trump during the George Floyd protests and the Capitol insurrection.

‘It seemed to be the wars came home. You can look at police in America and you can see all the kit that they’ve got,” Emma Sky, a former political advisor to U.S. generals, said in the film while footage of militarized police and federal agents attacking, intimidating, and detaining peaceful protestors in the summer of 2020 plays. “They’ve taken all the surplus from Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s come back and a lot of these weapons, a lot of these vehicles, are now being used by law enforcement. […]By the time you get to January 6, so much doubt has been sown in the system, so much fear, that how this opposition is described by Trump and Trump supporters, it looks terrifying.”

There is a call to action near the end of “America After 9/11”: a need for America to take a proper accounting of what it has done in the last 20 years and what the impacts of those actions. After that, the film closes with a brief look at the United States’ exit from Afghanistan under Biden and a note that a war in the country will likely persist — with deadly consequences for those who supported America over the last two decades. It’s a grim, albeit suitable sendoff; Frontline’s latest film is equal parts a fearless deconstruction on the United States’ foreign policy failures over the last two decades and an illuminating analysis on how those failures have impacted the home front.

Hurricane Ida power outages, misery persist 9 days later

Hurricane Ida power outages, misery persist 9 days later

Kevin McGill and Melinda Deslatte           

 

LaPlace, La. (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Louisiana, most of them outside New Orleans, still didn’t have power Tuesday and more than half the gas stations in two major cities were without fuel nine days after Hurricane Ida slammed into the state, splintering homes and toppling electric lines.

There were also continuing signs of recovery, however, as the total number of people without electricity has fallen from more than a million at its peak, while hundreds of thousands of people have had their water restored.

State health officials, meanwhile, announced that they are revoking the licenses of seven nursing homes that evacuated to a warehouse where seven residents died amid deteriorating conditions after the hurricane.

The disparity in power restoration between New Orleans, where nearly 3/4 of the city had electricity again, and other communities where almost all residents were still in the dark prompted frustration and finger-pointing.

State Rep. Tanner Magee, the House’s second-ranking Republican who lives in the devastated city of Houma in Terrebonne Parish, said he’s convinced his region is being shortchanged in favor of New Orleans.

“It’s very infuriating to me,” Magee said.

Though water was running again in his area, most hospitals in the region remained shuttered and the parish was in desperate need of temporary shelter for first responders and others vital to the rebuilding effort, he said.

Warner Thomas, president and CEO of the state’s largest hospital system Ochsner Health warned that it would be “some time” before two Ochsner hospitals — one in Terrebonne Parish and the other in Lafourche Parish — fully reopen. Emergency rooms at the two hospitals, however, were operating.

Carnival Cruise Line announced Tuesday that it will keep one of its ships, Carnival Glory, docked in New Orleans through Sept. 18 to serve as housing for first responders.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said while there had been much progress in restoring water and power, “there’s an awful lot of work to be done.”

Without power, the Louisiana heat is the hardest thing to cope with, said Kim Bass, who lives in St. John the Baptist Parish. She and her husband are using a generator to keep food refrigerated but have no air conditioning. Water service is intermittent.

“So you may have water one minute, then you may not have water for the next two days,” Bass said.

In many neighborhoods, homes were uninhabitable. State and federal officials said about 3,200 people are in mass shelters around Louisiana while another 25,000 people whose houses have been damaged are staying in hotel rooms through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s transitional sheltering program. FEMA already has approved more than 159,000 household applications for disaster assistance, according to Louisiana’s emergency preparedness office.

Shontrece and Michael Lathers looked on despondently as workers wrestled a billowing blue tarp into place over what was left of the roof of their home in the St. John the Baptist Parish town of LaPlace. Ida’s floodwaters had risen to about 3 feet (1 meter) inside their home and rain that had poured in through the wind-damaged roof obliterated most of the drywall ceilings.

 

The house will have to be gutted floor to ceiling, Michael Lathers said, adding that he had no idea how much the repairs will cost.

Fuel shortages also persisted across hard-hit areas of the state. More than 50% of gas stations in New Orleans and Baton Rouge remained without gasoline Tuesday afternoon, according to GasBuddy.com.

The power situation has improved greatly since Ida first hit. In the first hours after the storm, nearly 1.1 million customers were in the dark, but that number was down to about 430,000 on Tuesday. With the help of tens of thousands of workers from power companies in numerous states, the state’s biggest energy provider, Entergy, has been able to slowly bring electricity back, leaving only 19% of its customers in the region without power as of Tuesday.

For residents in the state’s five hardest-hit parishes in southeastern Louisiana, however, that number is little comfort. Fully 98% of those residents are still without power more than a week after Ida slammed onshore with 150 mph winds (240 kph) on Aug. 29.

Power probably won’t be widely restored to St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes until Sept. 17 and until Sept. 29 to Lafourche, St. Charles and Terrebonne parishes, Entergy said Tuesday. The parishes are home to about 325,000 people.

In contrast, nearly all power has been restored in the capital of Baton Rouge, and only 25% of homes and businesses are still suffering outages in New Orleans. Entergy said it expected to have the vast majority of New Orleans brought online by Wednesday. Once areas such as New Orleans have their power restored, Entergy is moving its crews into communities south and west of the city that saw more widespread damage, said Entergy Louisiana President and CEO Phillip May.

As Entergy worked to get the lights turned on everywhere, the Louisiana Department of Health reported that the number of people without water had fallen from a peak of 850,000 to 62,000, though about 580,000 people were being advised to boil their water for safety. And grocery stores reopened in some places.

Ida’s death toll in Louisiana rose to 15 people Tuesday after the state Department of Health reported two additional storm-related fatalities: a 68-year-old man who fell off of a roof while making repairs to damage caused by Hurricane Ida and a 71-year-old man who died of a lack of oxygen during an extended power outage. The storm’s remnants also brought historic flooding, record rains and tornados from Virginia to Massachusetts, killing at least 50 more people.

Deslatte reported from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana in New Orleans; Jeff Martin in Marietta, Georgia; Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta; and Lisa J. Adams Wagner in Evans, Georgia, contributed to this report.

Is the white population in the US really ‘shrinking’?

Is the white population in the US really ‘shrinking’?

Allison Plyer and Joseph Salvo             
<span>Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock</span>
Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock

 

The Census Bureau released the first detailed results of the 2020 census this month, and many media reports highlighted the nation’s growing diversity, which is real, and the dramatically shrinking white population, which is … not so much.

First the data: The white population didn’t “shrink” to 57.8% as widely reported – unless you believe in the old “one-drop” rule, where one ancestor of another race means you are not fully and authentically accepted as white. Moreover, this statistic excludes people who checked the Hispanic box, many of whom identify as ethnically Hispanic but racially white.

What happened for the first time was people who identify as “white” were also able to document their detailed multi-racial ancestry. In fact, including the 31.1 million white people who indicated they also were part of another racial group, whites in 2020 constituted 71% of the population – an increase of more than 4 million white people since 2010. That’s because the 2020 census form made it much easier for Americans to claim their diverse heritage compared with 2010, and this affects all groups, including the white population.

What’s becoming less common is Americans identifying as only one race. Fully 10% of all Americans selected more than one race, up from just 3% in 2010, a jump from 9 million to 33.8 million in only one decade. So, what could account for the incredible increase in multiracial population by 2020? Birth records indicate that just 2.3 million multiracial children were born during this decade. Certainly, more Black people or Pacific Islanders, for example, may have claimed white ancestry for the first time this decade. But people who previously identified as “white alone”, and who are claiming their Native American, Asian or African American ancestry for the first time, are probably the driving force behind the increase. The Census Bureau itself acknowledged that the “decline” in the white population is largely due to more white people choosing additional race categories.

A more accommodating decennial census form seems to be driving a strong increase in the number of people identifying as multiracial – particularly among white people. All those DNA tests we’ve been taking may have contributed as well.

And we need to also applaud the Census Bureau, not only for completing a census despite a pandemic, forest fires and legal obstacles, but also for a decade of research by Nicholas Jones and others on how best to provide Americans with the wherewithal to self-identify. As a result, what the 2020 census reveals is a more thorough understanding of how diverse, interconnected, and yes, interrelated we actually are – regardless of the categories society lumps us into … for better or worse.

It is shortsighted for journalists and even some social scientists to repeat the myth that the white population of the United States is dramatically shrinking. Instead of pretending that being white is part of a narrowly defined monolithic hulk, America needs to lean in on a new census category that will increasingly come to define us all – “people in combination with everyone else”. Not to do so will continue to feed into a whole suite of white supremacy and fearmongering that denies we are all created equal and are equal before the law and each other. But that’s not the reason it’s wrong to say the white population is shrinking. The reason is, it’s not true.

  • Dr. Allison Plyer, chief demographer of the Data Center in New Orleans and former chair of the US Census Scientific Advisory Committee
  • Dr. Joseph Salvo, former chief demographer of New York City and senior advisor to the National Conference on Citizenship

The Afghanistan Meltdown Proves Vietnam Taught Us Nothing

The Afghanistan Meltdown Proves Vietnam Taught Us Nothing

James A. Warren                    
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

 

The American war in Afghanistan came to a long-overdue end on the evening of Aug. 30, when the last U.S. military plane, a C-17 transport, lumbered into the skies above the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Among its passengers was the last American soldier to depart this hard, mountainous, war-ravaged country, Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. Shortly thereafter, the Taliban’s senior spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, announced to the Afghan people: “This victory belongs to us all.”

The harried American withdrawal, replete with scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to the rear of a giant U.S. Air Force transport as began its takeoff, parents passing a baby to Marine guards on the tense perimeter of the airport, and horrific mayhem following two massive suicide bombings by Islamic State of Khorasan terrorists, succeeded in evacuating about 123,000 people—an astonishing feat, carried out with great skill and courage by the American military.

Nonetheless, the evacuation will be seen by historians for generations for what it was: the sobering last act in yet another lost American war.

Inside the State Department’s Afghanistan Evacuation

Inevitably the exhausting saga of the final U.S military operation in Afghanistan evokes memories of another grim evacuation: Operation Frequent Wind, the dramatic, last-ditch effort to evacuate the last Americans remaining in Saigon, along with their South Vietnamese allies on April 29-30, 1975. That operation, also carried out with extraordinary cool-headedness by U.S. Marines under intense pressure, succeeded in bringing out every American, but thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked for the United States as faithful servants of the cause were left to fend for themselves. Many ended up serving multiple-year tours in communist re-education camps, or drowning in rickety boats in the South China Sea as they tried to make their escape.

The Marines who took the last chopper off the embassy roof around 7:50 a.m. on April 30, 1975, were blinded for a few minutes by tear gas they had fired to keep desperate Vietnamese from trying to jump into their overloaded aircraft. It was somehow fitting that the last Americans who left Vietnam did so when they were for all intents and purposes blind.

Any soldier or Marine can tell you that orchestrating a “retrograde movement” is among the trickiest and most delicate of military maneuvers. In Kabul, this extremely difficult operation was unnecessarily complicated and compromised by the failure of senior decision-makers in the White House and State Department to anticipate the rapid collapse of the Kabul government’s armed forces and government in the face of a determined and well-organized adversary, the Taliban. Their failure is all the more inexplicable in light of the fact that both the CIA and the State Department provided the president with sound intelligence estimates during the last weeks of the Taliban’s stunning advance.

The same thing happened in 1975, more or less, as the ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, mysteriously refused to give the order to evacuate when the writing was on the wall, and CIA operatives had already begun evacuating their Vietnamese allies surreptitiously.

The forced withdrawal from Afghanistan ranks among the most humiliating episodes in all of America’s 400-year history, for it symbolizes in dramatic fashion the end of a horrendously destructive failed crusade to export American-style democracy by arrogant policymakers transfixed by their own country’s raw military power.

It is depressing, to say the least, but we failed in Afghanistan for many of the same reasons we stumbled in Vietnam, almost 50 years ago.

At the outset of each conflict, U.S. policymakers were woefully ignorant of the political and cultural dynamics of the nation they aimed to transform. And so, to a greater degree than is usually realized, the United States went into both conflicts half-blind, convinced that the righteousness of the cause would compensate for ignorance, and ensure success.

The Johnson administration made the absurd assumption that deep in the heart of every Vietnamese there was an American yearning to be born. George W. Bush and his advisers made the same assumption about the Afghan people. Time proved the utter bankruptcy of this assumption in both cases, as well several others, including the idea that the United States possessed the wisdom and wherewithal to crush a well-organized insurgency while it simultaneously built an entirely new government apparatus.

Like Vietnam, Afghanistan was an “irregular war,” a brutal counterinsurgency struggle in which the United States failed to find a way to counter the ingenious protracted war strategy adopted by its adversary. The Taliban’s way of war, much like the Vietcong’s, pivoted largely on hanging on and outlasting the Americans and their vast array of war machines. They were willing to suffer innumerable tactical setbacks—including being driven out of Afghanistan entirely back in 2002—sure in the knowledge that eventually the United States would weary of supporting a corrupt and dysfunctional government, pack up, and go home. Like the Vietcong, the Taliban drew comfort and sustenance from its possession of a sanctuary, in this case Pakistan, and from the inability of the United States or its allies to seal off the flow of enemy fighters into Afghanistan.

Once America grew tired of the fighting, the Taliban high command reckoned, it would be a relatively simple matter to conquer the broken and illegitimate administration that the United States had tried to create and support. So it was.

The strategy worked brilliantly, just as it had in Vietnam.

In both wars, the United States had enormous military power at its disposal, but very little political power, and even less understanding of how politics actually functioned locally. But as the history of irregular war tells us again and again, in conflicts between powerful conventional armies and local insurgencies, politics, political organization, and mobilization are invariably more important factors in determining the outcome than battles.

In irregular warfare, coercive politics—assassination, terrorism, subversion, propaganda, the methodical construction of a shadow government—figure prominently, and cannot be countered by strictly military means alone. Human relationships and political mobilization are more important than military technology, and restraint in the use of armed force, rather than sheer firepower, is often critical to success. In these kinds of conflicts, said a prominent recent U.S. Army Special Forces officer, “You can’t kill your way to victory.”

When Major Harry Summers told his North Vietnamese counterpart on a small team of officers who were negotiating the terms for the American evacuation of Saigon that the communists had never defeated the Americans in a major battle, the officer, a Colonel Tu, replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.” How right he was!

The United States never lost a multi-battalion battle in Afghanistan, but in light of the failure to build a legitimate, functional government, the Americans’ tactical victories were essentially “irrelevant.”

In both of these tragic counterinsurgency conflicts, the lion’s share of the nation-building work fell by default on the U.S. military, which is neither properly trained to undertake such work, nor temperamentally suited for it. The efforts of the State Department, USAID, and other civilian agencies and NGOs were notoriously disjointed and ineffective. In both Afghanistan and Vietnam, billions were spent each year on ambitious social engineering projects, but the host governments remained dysfunctional, corrupt and utterly unresponsive to the needs of the population.

As both conflicts morphed from stalemate to quagmire to looming disaster, the American public was fed a steady, unremitting diet of upbeat assessments of progress being made on the ground, served up by presidents, their advisers, and commanding generals. These assessments, it is now all too clear, were fairy tales, born of a lethal amalgam of wishful thinking, obtuseness, and outright dissembling.

As the futility of the fighting became more and more apparent in both these conflicts, American ground forces were ultimately withdrawn, and the American people were assured by the White House that the cause was not lost, that the good fight would be carried on by our local allies.

But this, too, was dissembling.

Only the most naïve observers of the scene in Vietnam in 1973 on the eve of the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces believed the South Vietnamese Army could stand up to the combined forces of the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong on its own. They had invariably been bested by the enemy during the war with the Americans. How could they be expected to survive against such powerful, well-motivated forces as the Vietnamese communists without them?

Even granting that, the South Vietnamese managed to hang on for more than two years after the last Americans departed Vietnam in March 1973, and they were defeated by a powerful conventional army force of more than 20 divisions, several of them amply supplied with tanks. So corrupt and hollow was the regime in Kabul that it folded just four months after President Biden announced the final American withdrawal.

This precipitous collapse of the Kabul government certainly has no upside for the long-suffering Afghan people, who seemingly cannot escape the curse of devastating civil war. Indeed, it may not be long before the country’s warlords resume the fight against the Taliban. But the failure of the government or the army to put up much a fight, I think, go a long way toward confirming the wisdom of President Biden’s decision to withdraw. The Kabul government was fatally, irrevocably shaky, and had been kept on life support by the United States troops and dollars. Yet the very presence of the world’s largest, most powerful foreign army only served to erode the government’s sliver of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.

Where these two failed wars differ fundamentally is on the question of their impact on American society. Vietnam was at the heart of a tumultuous social revolution in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The war pervaded every aspect of American life, and came perilously close to tearing the social fabric of the country irrevocably. “Nothing did more than the conflict in Vietnam to alter the course of post–World War II society and politics, or unleash the emotions that polarized the nation after 1965” than Vietnam, writes Brown historian James T. Patterson. Few historians would disagree. More than any single event of this time, the war broke the trust between the government and the people. It was the first war the United States had ever lost.

Afghanistan has aroused no such passions, nor has it altered significantly the lives of many Americans outside the relatively small universe of the American military and their families. The conflict went on and on, and Americans in general seemed to care less and less about it. In truth, the major reason the war lasted so long is that the American people didn’t care enough about it to demand that it end.

The collective weight of three lost wars—Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—surely demands a searching re-examination of how the United States goes about making the decision to go to war, and how it develops strategies for achieving its objectives. It would also seem to call for a less activist foreign policy—a foreign policy of military restraint that would focus on the use of the United States’ economic and political power rather than the military to shape the world.

But don’t count on any of this happening soon. As Mary L. Dudziak, a law professor at Duke who has written extensively about war, told The New York Times, “In our toxic political environment, Republicans are likely to use this moment to undermine President Biden, and partisanship may foreclose the deeper re-examination of American war politics that is sorely needed now, and was also needed after the war in Vietnam.”

U.N. says basic services in Afghanistan are collapsing

U.N. says basic services in Afghanistan are collapsing

Afghans line up outside a bank to take out their money after Taliban takeover in Kabul

 

GENEVA (Reuters) – Afghanistan is facing the collapse of basic services and food and other aid is about to run out, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Tuesday.

OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke told a U.N. briefing in Geneva that millions of Afghans were in need of food aid and health assistance, urging donors to give more ahead of an international aid conference for Afghanistan on Sept. 13.

The agency has released a flash appeal for around $600 million to meet humanitarian needs for 11 million people for the remainder of the year amid warnings of drought and starvation.

“Basic services in Afghanistan are collapsing and food and other lifesaving aid is about to run out,” he said. “We urge international donors to support this appeal fast and generously.”

More than half a million people have been displaced internally in Afghanistan this year as the Taliban has swept across the country, culminating in its seizure of the capital Kabul on Aug. 15.

(Reporting by Emma Farge and Emma Thomasson)

The alleged corruption and abuse by Afghan leaders that the US ignored was a ‘big factor’ in the country’s fall, human rights expert says

The alleged corruption and abuse by Afghan leaders that the US ignored was a ‘big factor’ in the country’s fall, human rights expert says

Ryan Pickrell                      
A member of the Afghan army stands guard at a high point overlooking the Panjshir Valley
A member of the Afghan army stands guard at a high point overlooking the Panjshir Valley Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

  • The Afghan institutions the US and its allies propped up for years collapsed in a matter of weeks.
  • One key problem, experts argue, was overlooked corruption and human rights abuses at senior levels.
  • One expert told Insider that when it came to Afghanistan, the US and its allies were “choosing the least bad partner.”

The US and its NATO allies propped up the Afghan government and security forces for years, but the moment they withdrew, both crumbled in a matter of weeks.

The stunning collapse of these institutions, which allowed the Taliban to retake Afghanistan, have raised a host of questions about what went wrong after decades of international support.

Some experts contend that persistent and troubling allegations of corruption and abuse surrounding Afghan leaders that were largely ignored by the US and its NATO allies crippled efforts to build a government and military able to withstand the Taliban, gain strong popular support, and meet Afghanistan’s needs.

In a recent New York Times column following the Taliban takeover, Gen. Sami Sadat, a three-star Afghan army general, blamed American politics for the collapse. He also blamed Afghanistan’s leaders, some of whom have been accused of serious corruption and abuse, what he characterized as a “national tragedy” that “rotted our government and military.”

There were generals put in place through connections rather than capability, soldiers in the Afghan security forces that existed only on paper, and supply lines disrupted by officials who siphoned off essential resources. The problems in Afghanistan ran much deeper though, experts said.

Patricia Gossman, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher who has interviewed Afghans and international officials and conducted on-the-ground investigations in Afghanistan, told Insider that problems such as human rights abuses and corruption were “a big factor” in the country’s fall.

In Afghanistan, the US and its allies aligned themselves with “some very notorious figures reviled by many communities that they were in because of previous atrocities,” Gossman told Insider, explaining that they also empowered some people that later became problematic while focusing on short-sighted needs.

Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat who served the US as the ambassador to Afghanistan during the Obama administration, once recounted for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) a truly uncomfortable encounter with Mohammed Fahim, an Afghan defense minister who later became a vice president.

Fahim giggled as he related to Crocker a story of another senior Afghan minister who had been killed, the ambassador recalled in a conversation obtained as part of The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers.” Later, Crocker revealed, it came out that Fahim might have actually had the official killed.

Crocker explained that he “certainly came out of those opening months with the feeling that even by Afghan standards” he “was in the presence of a totally evil person.”

Afghan leaders within the government, military, and police have been accused of crimes ranging from corruption to murder, rape, torture, and war crimes.

For example, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s defense minister Asadullah Khalid, previously the head of the National Directorate of Security, allegedly personally engaged in or ordered torture, sexual violence, and extrajudicial killings, according to Human Rights Watch.

Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan vice president and later a senior Afghan military leader, is accused of war crimes, specifically suffocating enemies in shipping containers, as well as rape, kidnapping, and other rights abuses.

And Abdul Raziq, a powerful Afghan National Police chief until he was killed, was accused of running secret detention centers and carrying out or ordering torture and extrajudicial killings.

Soldiers with the U.S. Army&#39;s 4th squadron 2nd Cavalry Regiment and the Afghan National Army (ANA) return to their vehicles following a patrol through a village on March 5, 2014 near Kandahar, Afghanistan
Soldiers with the U.S. Army’s 4th squadron 2nd Cavalry Regiment and the Afghan National Army (ANA) return to their vehicles following a patrol through a village on March 5, 2014 near Kandahar, Afghanistan. Scott Olson/Getty Images
‘Choosing the least bad partner’

Experts say that issues at the top exacerbated problems at other levels. “There was this sense that nobody was held accountable for anything,” Gossman said. “You have a trickle down lack of accountability.”

A US Army veteran of the Afghan war that Insider spoke to recently revealed that he encountered police leaders that expected bribes for information on the Taliban, security checkpoints that had made deals with the Taliban, and some security forces members engaged in child sex trafficking.

Some other veterans had similar experiences. Capt. Dan Quinn, a former US Special Forces soldier, was famously relieved after he beat up a US-backed militia leader sexually abusing a young boy.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” Quinn told The New York Times in 2015.

“But,” he added, “we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did – that was something village elders voiced to me.”

A senior US official reflecting on the situation in Afghanistan in 2015 said that “our money was empowering a lot of bad people,” adding that “there was massive resentment among the Afghan people,” according to The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers.

Another US official said that “we were giving out contracts to pretty nasty people, empowering people we shouldn’t have empowered, in order to achieve our own goals.”

“Successive US administrations have largely perceived human rights more as an obstacle than as an essential component of addressing Afghanistan’s problems,” Gossman asserted in a recent Just Security column, adding that “this approach has been catastrophic.”

“It affected the legitimacy of the government,” Gossman, who has spent years documenting human rights abuses in Afghanistan, told Insider. “Maybe it didn’t make people want the Taliban, but they may have seen the Taliban as a better option in certain circumstances.”

Sarah Chayes, who ran non-governmental organizations in Afghanistan and served as a senior advisor to US military leaders in country, told PBS last month that “Afghan government officials would shake people down at every interaction.”

She added that “from Afghans’ perspective, it almost looked like the United States was in favor of this system because our officials were always seen partnering with these venal Afghan leaders.”

Chayes explained that when she was working with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2011, interagency policy was to ignore high-level corruption and other misdeeds.

“Why would a population take risks to fight the Taliban on behalf of a government that is treating them almost as badly as the Taliban do?” she asked.

That said, not every interaction between the US and NATO and their Afghan partners was necessarily plagued by problems.

“Did we back bad horses across the country? I think probably the answer is no,” Erol Yayboke, a Center for Strategic and International Studies expert and a former international development contractor, told Insider, saying there was likely a mix of both good and bad actors.

“I think the question is less did we back a bad horse and is more were there actual alternatives? What you hear from people who spent years and years working in Afghanistan is that the option was backing people that we had concerns about over corruption, etc., or leaving,” he said.

With US leaders largely against leaving, “we had to find some local partners,” Yayboke said. “I think that a lot of folks that were out there would argue that, in many cases, it was not choosing the best partner. It was choosing the least bad partner.”

“I think that decisions that people were making, including our people in the field, American leaders, were based primarily on least bad options,” he said.

‘I don’t have a choice’: Hurricane Ida leaves devastated Louisiana communities struggling with new reality

‘I don’t have a choice’: Hurricane Ida leaves devastated Louisiana communities struggling with new reality

Oliver Laughland in Mount Airy and Reserve, Louisiana  

As they sifted through the wreckage of their childhood home in Mount Airy, members of the Robinson family were hunting for memories.

They came in the form of a dozen family photo albums, somehow preserved amid the rubble. There was nothing much else to salvage as most of the house was destroyed. It had been in the family for generations, built and preserved with toil and hard work.

Judy Robinson, 70, had raised her two children here, working as a plant operator at a nearby Marathon Oil refinery and then living on income support as a retiree.

Related: Florida shooting: ex-US marine suspected of killing four, including a baby

Her daughter, Gayle Robinson, struggled as she watched Judy’s reaction to seeing home for the first time since Hurricane Ida struck seven days ago.

“I have never seen her look how she looked,” she said, outside in the oppressive heat. “Confused. Lost for words. It’s like someone threw a grenade into the house.”

As cable news channels pivoted away from Ida’s destruction in south-east Louisiana over the weekend, the storm only a week into history, thousands of people, including the Robinson family, were still coming to terms with a new reality. Power is gradually returning to New Orleans, with hopes for full restoration by the middle of this week, but residents here in St John the Baptist parish, just 35 miles (56km) away and which took a harder hit than New Orleans, look set for at least another two weeks waiting.

The Robinson family had evacuated during the storm, fanning out across Louisiana and Texas and now returning for the first time on Sunday. Their family home is just a few miles from where president Joe Biden visited on Friday, promising: “We’re not going to leave any community behind.”

But for Gayle Robinson, the words were beginning to feel a little hollow. She had tried and failed to reach the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the US government agency tasked with managing the aftermath of disasters, to request a tarp for her mother’s decimated roof in order to protect the remains inside. It left her questioning what resources were available to assist.

I have no telephone service, so I have no way of knowing a thing

Sterling Bazilet

“You’ve got to do more than just show up. We need support,” she said, clutching a family photo album. “It’s not about a show and tell. People’s lives are at stake right now. They have lost everything, when they have worked so hard to provide for their families. And right now, Fema are not trying to help.”

With limited funds available and faltering federal government assistance, the family worried they would be forced to live out of their car in a matter of days.

Down the street, Sterling Bazilet, 63, sat out on the half of his front porch that remained. The rest was strewn as rubble over the roadside. A retired pipe fitter, who has lived here all his life, Bazilet was unable to evacuate as his truck was broken down. He had been living without power and no generator for the past seven days, finding comfortable sleep nearly impossible in the still, stifling late summer air.

“With no electricity there’s no way to keep cool,” he said, sitting topless.

Fema had not reached his home yet either, but a group of church volunteers had begun to tarp his roof and the left side of his home, almost completely destroyed.

Without power or connectivity, Bazilet was not even aware Biden had visited on Friday.

“I have no telephone service, so I have no way of knowing a thing,” he said.

‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take’

Related: How a Tahoe refuge saved owls, coyotes and raccoons from wildfire

Officials in St John the Baptist parish have issued an area-wide water boil advisory and told residents to limit “all non-essential sewer services”. There are three food, ice and water handouts throughout the parish, which is comprised of 42,000 residents, 58% of whom are Black.

The roadway between Mount Airy and the neighboring town of Reserve gives a small taste of the continuing catastrophe here. In the heart of the region’s “Cancer Alley”, a heavily industrialized region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with some of the most polluted air in America, petrochemical plants with flaring stacks frame the felled trees and shattered homes. One main road remains blocked after a grain export elevator, owned by the agricultural giant Cargill, collapsed during the storm.

In Reserve, many families and residents have left amid widespread destruction. But of the handful still present on Sunday, some were attempting to keep their spirits up.

Brian Millet, a 59-year-old drummer and DJ, had bought a generator, allowing him to blast big band jazz onto the empty streets through a loudspeaker. He had cobbled together some coals and cuts of meat and was barbequing by his home, battered by Ida and sustaining significant roof damage.

The six sausages, two steaks and handful of chicken wings were supposed to last the next three days, he said. “I’m thankful for what I have.”

Millet lost his home over a decade ago when Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana in 2008. As Ida’s floodwaters crept into his new home , he thought about that experience all over again.

Millet had been handed a roof tarp by local volunteers, but he had no means to put it in place. He has splints in both his legs and suffers with diabetes, high blood pressure and ​​carpal tunnel syndrome.

But as grey skies loomed on the horizon and rain began to fall, Millet’s spirits took a turn. He worried his roof would leak again, and the water put out the fire on his barbeque.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he said. “But I don’t have a choice.”

For Louisiana’s coastal tribes, ‘being at the end of the earth is a dangerous place’

The Times Picayune – nola

For Louisiana’s coastal tribes, ‘being at the end of the earth is a dangerous place’

After Hurricane Ida, Native Americans confront loss of homes, income, sacred sites

By Halle Parker, Staff Writer                     September 6, 2021

 

When Shirell Parfait-Dardar returned to her home in Dulac, she found that Hurricane Ida’s unforgiving winds had ripped the roof off and blown the walls in. A dressmaker by trade, she discovered her sewing shop seemed to have been lifted off the ground, flipped upside down and smashed.

“Every building on my property was destroyed,” said the chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, now staying with her mother in Thibodaux. Almost every member of her Native American tribe suffered the same fate. Those who lived in mobile homes saw their trailers blown up or “thrown to the ground and beaten up to the point where it’s unlivable,” she said.

“If they haven’t lost their home, they’re on the verge of losing their home because there’s so much damage to it,” she said. And for those residents, the clock’s ticking a week after the Category 4 storm struck: They must salvage what they can and secure their property before mold sets in.

From the air, tribal communities across Louisiana’s coast appear to have been decimated by Hurricane Ida:

  • In Pointe-aux-Chênes, home of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe, the storm leveled the elevated houses near the bayou’s end. Left behind were piles of splintered wood surrounded by a pool of water five days after the storm. Just 15 homes remained livable, said Theresa Dardar, a Pointe-au-Chien tribal member.
  • The United Houma Nation, a tribe of 19,000 spread across several communities from Houma to Golden Meadow and the Lafitte area, saw more than three quarters of its residents’ houses destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, said Thomas Dardar, the tribe’s hurricane relief manager. “The storm was pretty much as if a bomb went off,” he said, speaking from the tribal center where more than a dozen people and several pets were still sheltering Friday. Recovery will take years, he added.

All four of the state-recognized tribes suffered tremendous loss from Ida, as well as several other tribes without any formal status such as the Grand Bayou Indian Village in Plaquemines Parish. Surveying the coast by airplane, Tammy Greer, a United Houma Nation citizen with family in other tribes, was astounded by the scope of the damage.

“This one was so spread out,” she said. “Usually it’s one or two communities affected, and we can help each other out. This time, everybody else is just as bad as you are.”

Without federal recognition, recovery will be slower. None of the coastal tribes has met the criteria put in place for Washington, D.C., to recognize their tribal governments as sovereign powers.

Adam Crepelle, an assistant law professor at George Mason University and a United Houma Nation citizen, said federal recognition would allow tribes to negotiate directly with the U.S. government and open up more aid money and relief programs.

“As far as the federal government is concerned, they’re not a tribe,” Crepelle said, who specializes in federal law concerning Native Americans. “It’s definitely a barrier because, historically, the tribe was denied access to education and things like that, so they’re already starting from lower opportunities to begin with.”

Lafitte after Hurricane Ida
Boaters try to contain an oil spill after Hurricane Ida in the Lafitte area on Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. (Flight courtesy of SouthWings). STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER

Instead, unrecognized tribes are treated as nonprofits. That lets them apply for some grants, but their citizens are treated the same as any other U.S. citizen: Each must file an individual claim if aid is wanted. And the lack of federal recognition precludes some relief money for the tribes, Crepelle said.

“I’m definitely Indian, but I’m not Indian enough,” said Parfait-Dardar, who views the recognition process as discriminatory.

Without direct help from the federal government, each tribe leans on its own networks to obtain supplies and donations and shares with other tribes. They also try to secure help from the parish and state governments. So far, however, Parfait-Dardar and Theresa Dardar said they’ve yet to hear from Terrebonne and Lafourche parish officials as of Sunday.

Dulac after Hurricane Ida
A levee in Dulac is flanked by water on both sides on after Hurricane Ida on Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. (Flight courtesy of SouthWings). STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER

Louisiana tribes outside of the disaster zone, and ones out of state, also send help. Thomas Dardar said the United Houma Nation had already begun distributing supplies and was working alongside Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes to erect communications towers in some of the hardest-hit areas.

“We’re operating in a disaster, but we’re not in disaster mode,” he said.

Greer and Parfait-Dardar expect many of their tribes’ citizens to return and rebuild. Still, each storm can make their citizens anxious over a loss of culture and identity should members choose to migrate inland.

Pointe-aux-Chênes after Hurricane Ida
A house that was ripped to its foundation by Hurricane Ida on Sunday, Aug. 29, 2021, is shown in Pointe-aux-Chênes.  PHOTO BY MÉLANIE AKOKA

Thinking of her tribe’s elders, Greer said the constant rebuilding process can take a physical toll. And for those who make money off traditional wood carving or basket weaving, losing a home means losing inventory and income.

Plus, as storms grow more intense and Louisiana’s coast continues to recede, tribes have less protection from the sea and cultural sites such as sacred mounds or cemeteries are at risk of washing away, taking history with them.

“We’re not protecting them, and that’s the history of this land and this place,” Greer said. “Being at the end of the Earth is a dangerous place to be.”

Golden Meadow after Hurricane Ida
A workboat blocks Bayou Lafourche after Hurricane Ida in Golden Meadow on Friday, Sept. 3, 2021. (Flight courtesy of SouthWings). STAFF PHOTO BY SOPHIA GERMER

Outsiders forget, she said, that the tribes didn’t choose to settle in the swamp but were forced there as others moved onto their land to the north. Yet they made it work and adapted over centuries.

As Ida relief donations trickled in, Parfait-Dardar hoped her community will manage to build back stronger, using more innovative techniques to live with water.

“I can’t live anywhere else. I love my home, I love our people, and I love the environment that I’m in,” the Dulac chief said. “We need to respect the environment we’re in if we’re going to live here safely.”

President Biden, Texas shows we can’t wait any longer. It’s time to pack the court

President Biden, Texas shows we can’t wait any longer. It’s time to pack the court

Lawrence Douglas                       
<span>Photograph: Allison Bailey/Rex/Shutterstock</span>
Photograph: Allison Bailey/Rex/Shutterstock

 

William Brennan, the great US supreme court justice, liked to greet his incoming law clerks with a bracingly simple definition of constitutional doctrine: five votes. “You can’t do anything around here,” Brennan would say, wiggling the fingers of his hand, “without five votes.”

Underscoring the truth of Brennan’s hardboiled definition was the court’s 5-4 ruling this week (with Chief Justice John Roberts in dissent alongside his three liberal colleagues) to let stand a Texas law that turns ordinary citizens into de facto bounty hunters empowered to sue anyone who performs or “aids and abets” an abortion on a woman past her sixth week of pregnancy. True, the single-paragraph unsigned majority opinion emphasized that in letting the Texas law take effect the court was not ruling on the statute’s ultimate constitutionality.

Related: Texas now has abortion ‘bounty hunters’: Sonia Sotomayor’s scathing legal dissent

And yet. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a passionate dissent, “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law … a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.” President Biden powerfully joined those critical of the court’s decision. Declaring that the ruling promises to “unleash [..] unconstitutional chaos”, Biden promised to work to protect the constitutional right to abortion first recognized in Roe v Wade.

How might the president do so? Back in April, Biden empaneled a bipartisan commission of scholars, lawyers and jurists tasked with exploring the issue of “court packing”. The commission is scheduled to submit its report later this fall, which returns us to Justice Brennan’s five wiggling fingers.

There is nothing magical about the number nine, the present size of the supreme court. The constitution provides that there shall be “one supreme Court”, but says nothing about the court’s size or composition; these are matters left to Congress. In the early decades of the nation, Congress changed the number of justices six different times, from as few as five to as many as 10, before settling on nine in 1869. In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt, frustrated by a reactionary supreme court that resisted his New Deal initiatives, proposed expanding the supreme court’s bench to 15. Congress correctly rejected that court-packing plan as an attempt to manipulate the court to generate specific outcomes.

Biden, however, could now fairly and legitimately propose expanding the number of justices from nine to 11. Such an expansion would counterbalance the abuse of constitutional rules that enabled the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett and the installation of the hardcore conservative bloc responsible for the Texas decision.

This is not to say the effort would be successful. Assuming Biden could find support in the House, expanding the number of justices would require Democratic senators to first eliminate the filibuster, something that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema staunchly oppose. And we know that Republican lawmakers, led by Mitch McConnell, would accuse Biden of dangerously politicizing the court.

To which we may respond: pah-leeze. After all, it was McConnell who, in the wake of Antonin Scalia’s death nine months before the 2016 election, announced: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next supreme court justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

Armed with a rule of his own creation and a Republican Senate majority, McConnell flagrantly refused to grant a hearing to Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the supreme court vacancy ultimately filled by Trump’s choice, Neil Gorsuch.

As the Texas ruling underscored, this is a court far more conservative than the nation whose constitutional meanings it is meant to protect

But when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, six weeks before the 2020 election, McConnell suddenly pronounced a new rule. It turns out the American people should not have a voice in the selection of supreme court justice in an election year when the incumbent president is a Republican.

The confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett did more than install a supermajority of conservatives in the court. The locus of power on the court shifted from the more mainstream conservatism of Justice Roberts to the more ideological and rigid extremes of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

As the Texas ruling underscored, this is a court far more conservative than the nation whose constitutional meanings it is meant to protect. And it is a court that owes its composition to the triumph of anti-democratic processes, in which a majority of its members were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and/or were confirmed by a bloc of senators elected by a minority of voters.

In proposing the addition of two additional justices, Biden could hardly be charged with tit-for-tat politics or with further politicizing the court. Conservatives would continue to enjoy a 6-5 majority, but with Justice Roberts, a stalwart institutionalist, serving as the swing vote. Were Biden to succeed, such an expansion would make the court more legitimate, not less.

  • Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020 and is also a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US. He teaches at Amherst College

Drought has farmworkers dreaming of escape from California’s breadbasket

Drought has farmworkers dreaming of escape from California’s breadbasket

Priscella Vega                            
A truck rolls through nut trees almost ready for harvest near Cantua Creek. The drought in the Central Valley is taking its toll of farmworkers with reduced hours and jobs evaporating like the limited water resources.
A truck rolls through nut trees almost ready for harvest near Cantua Creek, Calif. The drought in the Central Valley is taking its toll on farmworkers, with reduced hours and jobs evaporating like the limited water resources. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Rosario Rodríguez never wanted to leave her hometown of Trigomil, Nayarit. She was surrounded by family and could quickly get to the nearest grocery store or clinic.

But love called, and she followed her then-boyfriend to Three Rocks — a speck in Fresno County where he worked in the fields.

At first life there reminded her of home in central Mexico — the enticing small-town feel, the lushness all around. The charm wore off as the reality of living in a rural town in Central California set in. Then the drought broke the spell.

“It was never my intention to come to this country,” Rodríguez said. “I was happy in Nayarit, but we got married and he brought me here. And so here I am.”

Rosario Rodr&#xed;guez hold a picture of her parents, Herminia and Martin Rodriguez in her garage in Three Rocks.
Rosario Rodríguez hold a picture of her parents, Herminia and Martin Rodriguez, in her garage in Three Rocks, Calif. “It was never my intention to come to this country,” she said. “I was happy in Nayarit, but we got married and he brought me here. And so here I am.” (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

For decades, farm labor has kept unincorporated communities alive throughout the Central Valley. But the drought is making it hard to stay. The dearth of essential resources — clean water, adequate housing and fair employment wages — has crippled towns that are easily overlooked and triggered a slow exodus to bigger places.

It can be seen in the dwindling number of people attending nonprofit-led workshops and meetings on agricultural worker rights, said Chucho Mendoza, an environmental and public health advocate who has worked with migrants and small farming families in the Central Valley for 25 years. The pandemic further hollowed out rural life.

In the Cantua Creek area, where pistachio and almond crops reign, some families are grappling with what’s next. Faced with a confluence of challenges, some are leaving; others are arguing over whether they should. Still others are determined to make it work here.

“They don’t know what to pinpoint but they’ll say, ‘We know something is wrong, but we don’t know what it is,'” Mendoza said. “Those who leave move to the next town but don’t realize hell is a lot bigger.”

The California Aqueduct brings water through Cantua Creek.
The California Aqueduct brings water through Cantua Creek. In this area, where pistachio and almond crops reign, some families are grappling with what’s next. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

As the drought worsened, Rodríguez’s husband traveled farther and farther for work. She considered joining him in the field, but leaving her two teenager daughters alone at 3 a.m. felt dangerous. So she began baby-sitting for $25 a day.

Wishing a better future for her daughters, Rodríguez proposed moving to a “bigger” town like Kerman, population 15,000, where there were schools, churches, a fire station and doctors’ offices. But her husband didn’t want to leave. Why push their luck if they were making ends meet?

“It’s a decision we have to make together,” Rodríguez said reluctantly.

For most families in small Central Valley communities, where the residents are overwhelmingly Latino, the emotional toll of staying or fleeing to a new place is exacerbated by scarce finances, immigration status and the lack of a family safety net to fall back on.

Moments before Victor Avila watched his eldest daughter celebrate her quinceañera, he told his wife, Maria, about an idea. A visit to his brother-in-law in Bakersfield inspired him to imagine a life outside of the valley, away from the field work he’d known his whole life.

Maria Avila sits in her kitchen in Three Rocks.
Maria Avila sits in her kitchen in Three Rocks. She said her husband has floated the idea of moving. “I’m not leaving,” she told him. But despite her reluctance, deep down she feels as though the drought is making leaving an inevitability. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Since he arrived here from Durango, Mexico, in the 1990s, Victor did everything he could on a farm. For 12 hours, six days a week, he exhausted his body harvesting tomatoes and cotton. He tried his hand at welding metals with a blowtorch. He even tested out new agricultural machines.

His dedication paid off. He no longer spends shifts in the blistering sun. Instead he sits inside a giant, crab-like harvesting machine he steers down rows of almond trees. It helps keep his respiratory problems at bay after years of inhaling dust.

But he knows fellow laborers have it worse. Some struggle finding steady work, with the rise of agricultural machines that no longer require as many bodies to work the harvest. A bill that requires employers to gradually increase minimum wage and pay employees time and a half by 2022 has prompted some to slash overtime.

Maria knew her husband was worried. To help with finances, she thought about applying at the local Carl’s Jr. about 30 minutes away, but it would mainly be night and weekend shifts. They both agreed she couldn’t leave their four children alone that long.

Amid a worsening drought, Victor knew he needed a backup plan. But when he told Maria about moving, she shot it down.

Nut trees adjacent to Cantua Creek.
Nut trees adjacent to Cantua Creek. Faced with a confluence of challenges, some families are leaving; others are arguing over whether they should. Still others are determined to make it work here. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Their eldest daughter, a rising senior at Tranquillity High School, didn’t want to spend her final year adapting to a new campus. Moving away from the fields would also exclude her from a college scholarship, she said.

Maria said her husband has floated the idea about three more times. “I’m not leaving,” she told him.

But despite her reluctance, deep down Maria feels as though the drought is making leaving an inevitability. The dusty, discolored jungle gym at a run-down park across from her house is a daily reminder.

“In the end, I’ll go wherever,” she said.

About two miles from Rodríguez and Avila’s neighborhood, Lucia Salmeron Torres wishes her husband would agree to return one day to their beloved Jalisco, Mexico.

“This is the worst place to live in,” said Torres, 57.

Her home is situated on the edge of a rancher’s property where her husband works. She keeps the house tidy, even though there isn’t much inside. Portraits of Jesus next to artificial roses decorate the living room and hallway walls. She gardens for fun, but only when there aren’t workers nearby because she doesn’t like to feel under surveillance.

Lucia Salmeron Torres sits in her living room on the outskirts of Fresno County.
Lucia Salmeron Torres, 57, sits in her living room on the outskirts of Fresno County. She wishes her husband would agree to return one day to their beloved Jalisco, Mexico. “This is the worst place to live in,” she said. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Her 5-year-old granddaughter and son’s pit bull are her only companions when her husband and five sons are at work. In years past, she could count on seeing them more during the rainy season. The drought changed that.

“Now they rarely come home” during the day, she said. “And they struggle with work because there aren’t enough hours.”

Torres first tried persuading her husband to move to the city when one of her sons began attending college. Then she wanted to join her son, Sergio, when he started working as a truck driver for an agricultural company and talked about moving. He had worked in the fields since he was 14, but he saw how the drought was choking the valley.

He knew it wasn’t as simple as packing up and leaving, however. He needed a better income to help provide for his daughter and help his parents.

“I always thought of a better future,” Sergio said. He used to get paid $11 an hour but now makes twice as much, he said.

With few community activities, Torres looks forward to the days when school administrators call for parent-teacher meetings. Or when nonprofit organizations host community workshops on healthful eating and how to be better parents.

On those days, she, Avila and Rodríguez organize a potluck among themselves. They stay as long as possible until they have to return to their routines. Torres and Rodríguez each pay about $5 for a ride from the county’s rural transit agency; Avila drives home in her car.

Irrigation pipes lay unused in Cantua Creek.
Irrigation pipes lay unused in Cantua Creek. For decades, farm labor has kept unincorporated communities alive throughout the Central Valley. But the drought is making it hard to stay. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)

 

Still, Rodríguez hasn’t lost hope.

She believes they will move when her daughters are older and ready for college. Fresno City College and Fresno State are both about an hour away, and the commute can be dangerous in the winter when tule fog blankets the area.

Her daughters are looking to the future too. Her eldest, Bianca, is eager to explore places where she isn’t told to be cautious of the water and mindful of the drought.

“The only good thing about this place is that it’s pretty peaceful,” she said. “But it gets lonely and there’s not much to do out here, so it gets really boring.”

For now, Rodríguez is thinking of ways to remain busy. If she isn’t baby-sitting, she’ll take orders for homemade piñatas and make mosaic gelatin for parties. So far she’s had only a handful of orders.

“It’s not that we can’t be successful here,” she said. “But we have to fight for better.”