Colossal Failure

As U.S. troops continue to withdraw from Afghanistan, the Taliban are on the verge of reclaiming control of the country. This comes about in a matter of days after nearly 20 years of U.S. involvement. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and $2 trillion wasted that could have been spent much more productively. Lindsey German:

The whole war on terror has proved a terrible failure and this should be admitted. We should also consider how the lives of Afghanis would have been improved if only a fraction of the money committed to this war ... had gone into improving their lives through investment in infrastructure, housing, education, agriculture. That was an opportunity that could have been taken but was ignored in favor of military solutions. And those have brought us to where we are today.

Update (August 17):  Derek Davidson (via Luke O'Neil) notes that the Washington Post exposed 18 years of government lies about the progress of the war--but there's little attention paid to that.

Whatever form the war apologia takes you can be sure that it will be heavily cloaked in claims of deep concern for the Afghan people.

But you shouldn’t for a second suppose that the people who cheerled endless war and occupation in Afghanistan ever did so out of concern for the Afghan people. If the United States were really concerned for the Afghan people it wouldn’t have spent well over a decade ignoring the evidence that its nation building efforts were failing.

And Thom Hartmann offers these reminders for just how much American presidents cared about the Afghan people.

After 9/11 the Taliban offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a "wartime president" to have a "successful presidency." ... With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war, George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to today.

More recently, [Dear Leader] and [Mike] Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted — power, legitimacy and the release of 5,000 of their worst war criminals — over the strong objections of the Afghan government in 2019 so [the Orange Turd] could falsely claim, heading into the 2020 election, that he'd "negotiated peace" in Afghanistan when in fact he'd set up this week's debacle.

Update (August 18):  Heather Digby Parton places the greatest blame for the failure on George W. Bush.

[P]erhaps the most cynical of all the rationales they offered in those early days before they pivoted to Iraq and pretty much put Afghanistan on cruise control was the unctuous, insincere, marketing campaign they launched to convince the American people that they were fighting the war on behalf of Afghan women. On November 17, 2001, just a few weeks after the attacks, they sent out First Lady Laura Bush to make a speech about the repressive Taliban regime's treatment of women, all of which was true but was clearly designed to make the war into something nobler than the crude act of vengeance it really was. ... There was zero interest in the issue on the right until the Bush administration decided to make it a central rationale for the war in Afghanistan.

Update (August 30):  The U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan is complete. 

Code Red for Humanity

The first part of the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change finds that

It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.

Human activities are responsible for about 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming since the late 19th century and warming will likely exceed 1.5 degrees within 20 years.

But it is not just about temperature. Climate change is bringing multiple different changes in different regions – which will all increase with further warming. These include changes to wetness and dryness, to winds, snow and ice, coastal areas and oceans. For example:

Climate change is intensifying the water cycle. This brings more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions.

Climate change is affecting rainfall patterns. In high latitudes, precipitation is likely to increase, while it is projected to decrease over large parts of the subtropics. Changes to monsoon precipitation are expected, which will vary by region.

Coastal areas will see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, contributing to more frequent and severe coastal flooding in low-lying areas and coastal erosion. Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.

Further warming will amplify permafrost thawing, and the loss of seasonal snow cover, melting of glaciers and ice sheets, and loss of summer Arctic sea ice.

Changes to the ocean, including warming, more frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels have been clearly linked to human influence. These changes affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them, and they will continue throughout at least the rest of this century.

For cities, some aspects of climate change may be amplified, including heat (since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings), flooding from heavy precipitation events and sea level rise in coastal cities.

Update (August 20):  Brian Tokar summarizes key points from the IPCC report. 

The report affirms much of what we already knew about the state of the global climate, but does so with considerably more clarity and precision than earlier reports. It removes several elements of uncertainty from the climate picture, including some that have wrongly served to reassure powerful interests and the wider public that things may not be as bad as we thought. The IPCC’s latest conclusions reinforce and significantly strengthen all the most urgent warnings that have emerged from the past 30 to 40 years of climate science.