海角大神

Was the United States鈥� abrupt final departure from Afghanistan a strategic necessity or a slap in the face? We consider how it looks to the U.S. military, to Afghans, and to the global community.

This last Supreme Court term didn鈥檛 take shape as many expected. But the key to understanding how the court might evolve could lie in its most conservative member.

The assassination of Haiti鈥檚 president adds to a growing climate of fear. Our former Haiti correspondent sees building civic and interpersonal trust as the only antidote.

Over the past year anti-racism protests have swept the United States, sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of now-convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Marches and protests spanned every U.S. state 鈥� a massive expression of public concern but also a movement聽聽to be violent.聽

In January Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona said Black Lives Matter 鈥渂urns and loots,鈥� for example. And in a Morning Consult poll 13 months ago, 42% of Americans said聽most protesters are trying to incite violence or destroy property.

A zoomed-in view on a particular protest may show violence, but data from the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) provides a zoomed-out view, showing that protests in the aggregate were largely peaceful.聽

Started in 2017, the CCC is a public access database that tracks protest activity in the United States. With the help of a web crawler and citizen reporting, a research team compiles and codes protests reported in the media. The CCC breaks down violence into four categories: number of arrests, number of participant injuries, number of police injuries, and property damage.聽The group also tracks聽published estimates of crowd size.聽

In CCC data collected from May 2020 to June 2021, 94% of protests involved no participant arrests, 97.9% involved no participant injuries, 98.6% involved no injuries to police, and 96.7% involved no property damage.

鈥淲orldwide, we鈥檙e living in a time where we鈥檝e seen more revolutionary movements using protest and nonviolent action more generally as their primary method than we鈥檝e seen at any other time in the past 120 years,鈥� says Erica Chenoweth, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the CCC.

Inaccurately labeling a protest group as violent can be a political tool to delegitimize a movement鈥檚 claims. A protest movement deemed violent by the media or political officials can lose momentum, depressing public interest and support,聽says Dr. Chenoweth.聽聽鈥淔ar more people are willing to participate in a movement that they perceive to be nonviolent. [Because of the] political salience of these terms ... we have to be really careful when we鈥檙e using them.鈥澛犅�

In our progress roundup, new applications of technology are both protecting and uplifting vulnerable populations, including children who鈥檝e been abused and refugees who鈥檝e lost their homelands.

In the three months since President Joe Biden announced a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, most American forces have left. And as the Taliban advances in the countryside, many Afghan government soldiers have also quit. Yet amid this mass retreat, a new set of fighters has emerged. According to news reports, hundreds of Afghan women have taken up arms 鈥� or at least brandished them 鈥� to prevent a return of the Taliban and its harsh Islamic rule.

鈥淭here were some women who just wanted to inspire security forces, just symbolic, but many more [are] ready to go to the battlefields,鈥� Halima Parastish, the head of the women鈥檚 directorate in Ghor province, told The Guardian.

Other women, less prone to violence, have taken another tactic. Many are making efforts for a cease-fire, according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. Still others are providing moral support. According to a new survey by the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), rural women are very concerned about retaining the civic rights that they have gained since a U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban two decades ago.

The survey challenges the notion that women in rural areas might accept the norms of the Taliban. 鈥淎lmost every woman we spoke to, regardless of the political stance and level of conservatism that could be gleaned from the answers, expressed a longing for greater freedom of movement, education for their children (and sometimes themselves) and a greater role in their families and wider social circles,鈥� according to AAN. Nationwide, more than half of Afghan girls now attend school.

The sudden activism by Afghan women comes with some irony for America鈥檚 longest war. To help justify the war, many U.S. officials cited the 鈥減light of Afghan women.鈥� Now it is Afghan women who are actively rejecting their plight in case the Taliban takes power.

鈥淭he struggle for fairer gender relations and therefore a more just and peaceful society is certainly here to stay in one manifestation or another,鈥� states an article about Afghan women in AAN.

The Taliban may be able to outgun the Afghan Army, but for many women, civic聽rights聽now have what legal scholars call 鈥減ositive vitality.鈥� In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, President Ashraf Ghani put it this way, 鈥淚 assure you, the聽women聽will no longer give up their聽rights聽here.鈥� He added that 30% of government workers are women.

This optimism is reflected by many foreign observers. 鈥淭he聽Afghanistan聽of today is not the聽Afghanistan聽of 20 years ago. It has moved on. The role of聽women聽is now聽irreversible,鈥� says Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

A country with some 27 million smartphones and a population in which 70% of people are under the age of 25 is unlikely to go back to the dark ages of Taliban rule in the 1990s. The group will be forced to adjust or, as many Afghan women now contend with arms or activism, it cannot take power. Civic rights are too firmly planted for Taliban guns to keep them from blossoming.