CharonY

Here is an interesting take from the viewpoint of the Afghan forces https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/opinion/afghanistan-taliban-army.html The author (Commander in the Afghan National Army) counters the narrative of the Afghan unwillingness to fight. The author highlights three factors resulting in the collapse: The article is worth a read and provides an interesting perspective.

That is to be expected. As I outlined in OP the vaccines do not fully protect from infection. As such, big unmasked gatherings without social distancing will further the spread of the virus even in a vaccinated population. They are, however, protecting from serious illness, which is the major goal of vaccines. A big issue is that for some folks this distinction is lost and sometimes poorly communicated. Immediately lifting restrictions once a certain vaccination threshold has been reached is, in my opinion, premature, as we do not have all the data in yet for proper risk assessment related to health burden in vaccinated folks. Fundamentally we are looking at balancing various risks and they require somewhat different approaches. The most critical one is reducing critical illness and death. For now, the mRNA vaccines seem to be the most effective measure to prevent these events. Challenges are unvaccinated folks who are at higher risk. Additional management is done by a variety of treatment options to reduce severity, though obviously those are less effective than vaccinations. A second challenge is to minimize infections (or conversely, thinking about how much infection we are comfortable with). The reason why we want that is to reduce the rate of new variants but also because even in a largely vaccinated population some folks may still become ill (though again, unvaccinated folks are at a vastly higher risk). This is much harder to achieve at this point, given that vaccinations are much less effective in preventing infections as they are in preventing disease. Here, additional measures, including isolation and masking are needed in addition to vaccines. Then there is the big unknown of long-term COVID-19 symptoms, and how protective vaccines are against them. At one point or another we need to figure out what the overall risks of opening, unmasking etc. are given a particular achievable vaccination rate (and potential availability of new, potential seasonal vaccines). But until then it is IMO a mistake to assume that we can just pretend that the virus is gone. Edit: that is actually also a very local perspective as globally we are still looking at a relatively poor vaccination rate, meaning we do have a large potential reservoir for the virus and the rise of new variants.

As noted before, the vast majority of the trillions went to military/police and related expenses. It was clear that rebuilding seemed a bit of an afterthought if at all. Moreover, as some outlets reported, those few initiatives could fall under infrastructure or other forms of rebuilding were often not properly supervised and often fell prey to corruption. Which further supports the notion that these initiatives were more window dressing compared to the military project, where the big bucks were. Moreover, it appears that the military contracts were also not done with sustainability in mind, where US soldiers, companies and contractors ran most of the show (and consumed the money).

I don't think that this is correct for rice. The water efficiency of a crop can be measured by the crop water productivity (CWP) which is given in kg/m3. A quick search for global CWPs indiate that the CWP is highly site-specific but for countries like USA, China and Philippines rice has a CWPs that are similar (and in some areas higher) than wheat but often lower than corn. I.e. it is at least somewhat comparable to the other main crops. I doubt similar data exist for cattails.

! Moderator Note Does not seem like it is news and seems more conducive to a discussion in the Lobby section.

Actually I would like to add that Biden (and the whole senate at that time) voted for the invasion. While it is possible that he and other lawmakers where misled by the respective administrations (one of which he was part of as vice-president), it only highlights that seemingly no one really knew what was going on, or particularly cared about it, either. It was rather clear that whoever does anything, would make it fall apart.

Well, that was later after the Nazis got to power. Before, they were considered a loud, belligerent but controllable fringe. Especially in the early days, Nazi rhetoric was dominated by anti-establishment (including anti-business themes, which were very popular among the workign class) rhetoric, which, after they got closer to the established right-wing parties got increasingly dominated by anti-semitic and anti-Marxist rhetoric. That all being said, I think it goes a tad off-topic here.

Another good article from the Atlantic focusing in saving US allies. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/america-afghanistan-allies/619784/ A huge issue is that the US has stated repeatedly that they did not had an interest in nation-building (as MigL mentioned) and Afghanistan was a mostly self-serving endeavor, which barely involved Afghan interest. It was an attempt to graft an American model on Afghanistan. It was not just bad intelligence, but just overall poor knowledge of the society (because frankly, no one really cared, there was money to be made).

There is a bit of lit out there but most is still exploratory. A somewhat outdated but well-written review is Baeck and Hanssons Nat Rev. Cardiol. 12, 199-211 (2015). I would agree that for the most part there is insufficient data for either assertion. And again, at this point I think that there is more of an interaction which makes causal (rather than correlative) conclusions difficult. That is not to say that the paper is not interesting, quite the contrary, and there are things that I would be interested in looking into eventually. Another fundamental issue is that mice models only work moderately well compared when it comes to inflammation responses (and the ldl mutant commonly used as a athersclerosis mutant has also issues, but that is a whole other discussion). In short, it is intriguing but IMO more data is required to decipher the underlying mechanisms.

Another possible (or additional) route is the reduction of overall inflammation. The atherosclerotic formation is characterized by local inflammatory responses and it has been shown that certain microbiota compositions are associated with reduced inflammatory responses. The cause-effect relationship is a bit unclear, i.e. whether inflammation changes the microbiota or whether certain gut composition increases inflammation. My gut feeling (heh) is that it is an interaction between these effects and e.g. a pro-inflammatory life style can allow a microbiota to form that in turn increases pro-inflammatory markers. That interaction would explain why fecal transplantation often has relative short term effects. That being said, both vitamins are involved in suppression of immune responses so the interesting question becomes where it is indeed the main mechanism, and/or part of a more complex network.

! Moderator Note Most likely you mean IgA (immunoglobulin A). However, no one on this site is qualified to provide medical advice. Please seek a physician to discuss the results of these tests.

Uh, that is getting off-topic but I doubt that is true for much of Europe. Of course there are very divergent systems, so a sweeping statement is going to be close to impossible. However, in Germany the auto industry is notoriously powerful. I think something around 20% of the industrial revenue is automobiles and three of the ten largest companies in Germany are car manufacturers. I think part of the big difference is that cities in Europe are old- they were not built with cars in mind and many of the suburbanization and related consequences did not happen in the same degree in many European countries, compared to the Americas, at least. Though with increasing housing prices, commutes did increase.

It make quite some waves when it came out (I do not have access anymore), and there is a book on this matter titled "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War". A couple of excerpts and comments from reviews:

I think it is worthwhile mentioning this article again: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

There is another aspect to to the whole issue, with is urban planning in much of the US cities are built around cars, Canada tends to be a bit better, though weather in many parts (except for the coasts) have their own challenges. Barcelona has started to build superblocks which reduces traffic and increases areas where walking and bicycling becomes more feasible. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/11/barcelona-launches-10-year-plan-to-reclaim-city-streets-from-cars If planned strategically, public transit and and on-demand cars could become quite a bit more efficient.

Yes, unfortunately that is what the current pandemic has exposed. In fact, many countries struggled with figuring out coherent strategies within their borders. Part of my disappointment is that it does not seem that we are learning and/or developing better strategies to prepare us for the future. Instead, it feels like much more energy is being invested in finger pointing as if that would change reality somehow.

I think that is the issue here, though. In the cities folks clearly enjoyed their rights and privileges (and this is where we see protests against the Taliban). In rural areas even primary schools may not even be feasible (or having a car). As such the theoretical freedom of being able to do that has no or little tangible impact to them. That is why I mentioned that you likely need to have tangible outcomes (e.g. in form of economic benefits) as otherwise whatever we (from a very privileged position) consider to be freedom remains an abstract entity. One can make an even simpler calculation. Assuming that the only way to feed your family is grow opium and there is one group who pays you, and another group who burns your field but promises you freedom, where would your sympathies be? You cannot get a good taste of freedom if you are hungry. I think most of our thoughts on that matter are colored by our own histories and how we think about things like freedom. I think we and also the US going in, simply did not know about the Afghan people to make the right choices and changes. This, in fact seems to be a common theme that I read from interviews going over a decade back. Almost every year you can find documents from the US (or UK) highlighting the discrepancy between the public presentation of the situation in Afghanistan and the internal bewilderment and lack of strategy.

I think we are in agreement, though I am shifting perspective a little bit here. I will preface that by acknowledging that my position is extremely hypocritical as I have benefitted from the current strategy myself. But the broader issue here is not so much how much capacity is really being diverted, but rather one of overall strategy. Rich countries have implemented local strategies, prioritizing their own citizens over the world and thereby effectively implementing an outbreak rather than a pandemic strategy. The fact that folks are even thinking about a broader implementation of booster shots despite somewhat limited data regarding need and efficacy is more a symptom than a cause of existing vaccine inequality. A moral argument is made here for example: https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2027 But aside from that, if we step back and ignore our own needs and fears for a second, we would clearly acknowledge that as a world-wide strategy, vaccinating for example frontline and essential workers on a world-wide scale it would have reduced overall loss of life. This is especially tragic for poorer countries who have shut down already struggling economies in order to contain the virus and now get all the new variants unleashed on them without the ability to recover. I.e. if we had a centralized strategy many of us may not have been vaccinated yet. However, we may be in a better position to prevent or reduce the incoming humanitarian catastrophe (and new variants). I think few countries implemented a zero COVID-19 strategy and if they did, the primary means were lockdowns, not vaccination. The idea of vaccination was originally to get herd immunity, but that was already very unlikely when the UK variant (B.1.1.7 or Alpha) came out and at this point I doubt that there a lot of folks believing in it anymore. The issue with treatments is that you alleviate symptoms and therefore do not prevent spread or creation of new mutants. I.e. it would not be part of COVID-19 reduction but one of mitigation. As you may have noticed, key strategies other than vaccination have been hygiene, distancing and masks.

I think it is a nice notion that does not hold up well empirically. There are quite a few failed attempts of democracies, both historical as well as recent ones, where economic hardship toppled democratic governments and made way for dictatorships. Conversely, there countries which are barely free or struggling in that regard, but which are surprisingly stable, at least in part kept going by a robust economy (though it is certainly not the only factor). More specifically, I think freedom as as good in itself is a bit of a privileged way of thinking. There is a huge gap between having necessity of life fulfilled and a decent standard of living. If whatever is considered freedom (say elections) do not make any change in everyday's life, it does not appear like a tangible benefit for most. Moreover, we also have seen that there are always quite a few folks even in a free system, which actually do not like freedom if it counters their beliefs (looking at the US here, though Poland and Hungary certainly are also good examples).

Freedom means little when there is no economic benefit. Conversely, high economic status can make tyranny palatable. It is not only a matter of time, but of distribution. Folks in Kabul are far more critical (and fearful) of the Taliban and the repressions that they will bring than those in rural areas where the purported freedom had little effect on their daily lives. Also, while folks in the big cities did not seem to mind the Americans, some might actually think that folks like the Taliban are actually those that freed folks from the yoke of oppressive regimes like the British, Soviets or Americans....

There are a wide range of treatment options that have been developed. However, except for vaccine there is none that prevents getting sick. The issue here is that all vaccinated countries will continue to hoard the supply. Regardless how much the US has committed, (and obviously other wealthy nations should do more) much of the world do not even have their frontline workers fully (or even partially) vaccinated. There is also a financial incentive for Pfizer and Moderna to prioritize booster shot deliveries to countries who pay a premium on it. However, whole continent of Africa is about 5% vaccinated, for example and even those countries which managed to control the spread to some degree are struggling. The idea is that looking at the whole planet (which we should) a booster shot has diminishing return compared to giving first or second shots in entirely unvaccinated and/or high-risk areas such as hospitals, for example. The ability to reduce or even prevent outbreak or death as well as spread are vastly magnified in those areas over protection of potential loss of vaccination efficacy in a mostly vaccinated population.

The big issue I think is that much of the world is hang out to dry, whereas in some countries the unvaccinated population is mostly so by choice. I do not understand why those countries are not putting more effort in to get vaccines into those that want it, globally. Just thinking in terms of national consequences is, as the pandemic has demonstrated, incredibly short-sighted.

From what I read, the demoralization basically started at least since the Doha agreement, where the US basically bypassed the Afghan government. Reading articles back to the beginning of the year man already predicted that this is going to weaken the Afghan government and embolden the Taliban. Leadership of the Afghan forces also saw the writing on the wall. At the same time, the Taliban basically got legitimacy, not only from the US but also Russia, China and Iran, which probably further weakened the position of the Afghan government. So if I take your comments together you seem to suggest that the plan should have been to turn half of Afghanistan into radioactive wasteland and then stay there until things become better? I think you are aware that the bases in Japan and Germany serve very different purposes and that due to the economic boosts of reconstruction as well as global post-war economy resulted in economic benefits and stabilization in less than two decades. But I do agree that building up Afghanistan would have been a much more complex and expensive endeavor and it clearly was not part of the plan (assuming there was on in the first place). Yet most of the money was spend on the military rather than building a country.

What should have happened is to process all the visas and relocate folks concurrent with the withdrawal deadline.

Except they did not pull out quickly out of Afghanistan...?