On a crisp early winter day in late 2003, Afghan President Hamid Karzai took a pair of scissors from a tray offered by a schoolgirl – she was dressed for the ceremonial occasion in a purple velvet brocade dress with a reddish orange headscarf – and cut a ribbon to officially inaugurate the resurfaced Kabul-Kandahar highway.

On hand was then-U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, who recalled in his speech how President George W. Bush had phoned him every other day to push for the first layer of asphalt to be laid on this flagship nation-building enterprise before winter snows set in. Even today, local Afghans call this vital 300-mile stretch of highway the “Mr. Bush Project.” 

“There were some problems that we pointed out, but they were ignored, because President Bush would say, ‘Before the snow falls, the black line should be connected to Kandahar,’” recalls an Afghan engineer who worked on the project for an American company. “The black line was the first priority; the second actually was quality,” the engineer says, noting how U.S. politics had driven the rebuilding timeline. “But in the next year, too many problems came out ... because of the speed. They pushed too fast.”

AIJAZ RAHI/AP/FILE

Then-President Hamid Karzai (center, in brown robe) inaugurates the Kabul-Kandahar highway in 2003. The road was central to U.S. nation-building efforts but has been wracked by problems.

The highway was portrayed as the symbol of the American commitment to rebuild Afghanistan after decades of war and after U.S. forces orchestrated the ousting of the archconservative Taliban and Al Qaeda in November 2001, following the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush promised the United States would succeed as nation builders. He noted the history of military conflicts in Afghanistan was “one of initial success followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure,” but vowed in April 2002 that America was “not going to repeat that mistake.” It would instead create a nation “free from this evil [that] is a better place in which to live.”

Yet the Kabul-Kandahar highway is emblematic of how America’s immense ambition in Afghanistan has yielded a mixed result of victories and defeats. The cumulative effect of the U.S. presence here does not reflect the fortune spent, but it clearly has changed the nation – often for the better. 

Despite the ribbon-cutting fanfare, this highway would eventually be crushed under the heavy weight of traffic it was not designed to carry. It would split with micro-cracks caused by explosions of roadside bombs and blown-up bridges and culverts. Insecurity also restricted maintenance, as it would hobble the entire U.S. effort.

Indeed, 18 years after they first arrived, U.S. troops remain locked in the longest war in American history, and the cost in blood and treasure has been high. More than 2,400 U.S. military personnel have died since 2001. And in the first nine months of 2019 alone, the United Nations counts 2,563 Afghan civilians killed.

The Taliban insurgency now controls or has influence across more than half of Afghanistan and is advancing. Yet the price of reconstruction paid by the U.S. has now topped $132 billion – never mind the far higher cost of the war itself, which is at least six times greater, official figures show. By comparison, the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild 16 European countries after World War II took some $100 billion in today’s dollars.

Despite the huge investment, Afghanistan’s streets are not paved with gold. There is little here, in fact, that looks like Western Europe: Poverty remains endemic, corruption is chronic, and much of the money poured into rebuilding has been lost, mismanaged, or spent on dubious projects. Persistent insecurity only highlights how the authority of the U.S.-backed government is diminishing.

JIM HUYLEBROEK/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

A man sits at the top of Bibi Mahru Hill looking out at the commercial and residential buildings of Kabul, Afghanistan, which has modernized considerably after 18 years of U.S. reconstruction efforts.

Yet Afghans note that other, less quantifiable metrics of progress give more reason for optimism. Their nation and society have been irreversibly transformed by the American effort here. Once-unthinkable strides have been made in women’s rights, education for girls, and the creation of a middle class with high expectations for a civil society.

The U.S. presence and money, to be sure, did create a sense of dependency among Afghans. It enabled not only corruption, but also the “thinking that somebody else is going to do your job for you: The Americans are going to come, they are going to build my army, they are going to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they are going to fix my country,” says Masood Karokhail, director of The Liaison Office, a Kabul-based group that facilitates peace and rebuilding.

At the same time, however, he says that efforts by the U.S. and other donors instilled an Afghan version of the American dream. Afghans now demand more political rights and to live better lives. 

“Those thousands of workshops that happened across the country on women’s rights, on youth, freedom ... each of those have left something in our minds,” says Mr. Karokhail. “For a country that had been a very traditional, closed society, suddenly it was exploding not only with cash but also information.”

In September, President Donald Trump ended nearly a year of controversial negotiations for a U.S. military pullout with the Taliban, as the talks were on the cusp of agreement. Last week, however, he announced during his first visit to the country that talks would resume. Whatever U.S. presence remains from here, questions persist about one of the most ambitious nation-building efforts in the post-World War II era: Just how fragile is the change to Afghan society, especially in Kabul and other urban centers, and what has all that American taxpayer cash left behind?

In 2001, Afghanistan was certainly a different place. The country was coming out of five years of austere Taliban rule that forbade women from working outside the home, forbade schooling for girls, and even forbade photographic images of a human face. Taliban checkpoints were strewn with confiscated videotapes and music CDs.

Afghans describe their society then as a “desert” – hopeless and lost in time.

“Just the level of human flourishing since the arrival of American troops – you can actually talk about an influx of resources creating babies that don’t die, and kids that get educated,” says Graeme Smith, an Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.

The statistics charting such upward trends are impressive. But they are tempered by “waste, fraud and abuse” that U.S. auditors in 2017 said had tarnished 29% of the $52.7 billion in spending they examined.

“We can’t rebuild it into a little America,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, whose office produces voluminous quarterly reports and audits for Congress, told The Hill, a U.S. political website, in June 2018. “I think that was one of the problems. We wanted to turn this into Kansas.”

“We designed and funded a lot of programs that the Afghans didn’t even know about until we turned it over to them,” Mr. Sopko said. “Basically, dollar bills were falling from the sky.” 

The contradictions of progress in Afghanistan – and a lack of it – are evident at the Ariana Kabul Private High School in north Kabul, which teaches 350 students on a shoestring budget. It offers a 50% discount for girls, to encourage their attendance, and also takes in a number of street kids for free.

“Most women in our community are illiterate, so if a mother is educated, it will have a direct effect,” says Laila Dost, the school’s director. “Our policy is to pave the way for poor urban boys and girls.”

SCOTT PETERSON/GETTY IMAGES/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

“The important things that changed are in people's minds. Those who prevented me, now they are proud of me and say, ‘your work is great.’” – Shogofa Sediqi, chief executive officer of Zan TV, an Afghan

They share the same classrooms and same desks up to the sixth grade. Boys and girls are separated at higher grades. Such a mixed school was impossible under the Taliban in the late 1990s, when one teacher here organized secret classes for girls.

“Officially it was a holy Quran course,” recalls Homira Kohi. “Every student carried a holy Quran in their hand, and their [regular] books in their backpack. If the Taliban came, they were to immediately take hold of the Quran.”

The official Taliban curriculum “was all about conflict, guns, and bombs,” she says. Students recited sentences like, “My father has a gun, and with his gun he goes on jihad.” Ms. Kohi was excited when the Taliban fell because Afghans thought the militants would be in the country “forever.”

“Every human is struggling for their desire; we struggled so much for education,” she says. “Now there is a huge difference in the desire of the people.”

SCOTT PETERSON/GETTY IMAGES/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Afghan boys and girls attend mixed classes at the Ariana Kabul Private School in Kabul. The school is one of many changes to Afghan society since the U.S. ousted the Taliban in 2001.

But the continuing challenges of the Ariana school are evident in the deeply rutted dirt road in front of the school. A local member of Parliament lives on this street and – even though his son goes to the school – has prevented neighbors from taking up a collection to pave it. He worries that a better road will only make it easier for a suicide car bomber to attack. Ms. Dost herself has paid for gravel to be spread in front of the school when it rains and snows, because politicians “build big buildings, but only “think about themselves.”

In the school’s basement, no lighting exists in two classrooms, the library, and a science area where a large periodic table hangs from the wall along with models of the human body – their sexual organs modestly covered with tape.

The rooms are dark because Kabul and 16 provinces, nearly half of the country, were without power in mid-September for the third time in two years. The Taliban sabotaged transmission lines bringing electricity from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Power should be available from the vast $335 million Tarakhil Power Plant built by the U.S. to provide the capital city with energy. But the project, completed in 2010 and labeled the “white elephant of Kabul,” has proved unsustainable because it requires far more diesel fuel to operate than Afghanistan can afford.

DAVID GOLDMAN/AP/FILE

Sayed Rasoul, an engineer, works in the power station at the Kajaki Dam in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Large parts of the country are periodically without power because of disruptions caused by Taliban fighters and poor project choices made by U.S. and Afghan officials.

“Each hour, that plant uses 40,000 liters” of diesel, says an electrical engineer with a detailed understanding of the project, who asked not to be named. That would cost $35,000 or $40,000 per hour, and multiplied by 24 hours, “it’s a huge amount,” he says.

The Tarakhil plant, he adds, “was better for Dubai or Saudi Arabia, not for Afghanistan. Because of that, people ask: Why didn’t they build three dams with this money?” Indeed, the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in 2015 found that Tarakhil was severely underutilized, operated at less than 1% capacity, and risked becoming a “catastrophic failure.”

The U.S. should have known about the difficulty of finding a steady supply of diesel fuel. Soon after the American arrival, another U.S. program sought to bring diesel generators to every village in the country to provide electricity. But most of them were idle within months.

If half the families in a village don’t have “10 afghanis [13 cents] to buy bread, how do they pay 20 afghanis every night for fuel?” asks the Afghan road engineer. “Actually, 20 afghanis is very little. But for local village people they have no work, no resources, nothing.”

Stories abound of war profiteering. Afghan contractors and businesspeople have shipped ill-gotten gains to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and beyond, while ordinary people scratch for bread or risk their lives on the migrant routes to Europe. But such realities mask real positive change in Afghanistan.

“Donor countries have put blood and treasure into this country, and they have made a lot of sacrifice,” says Abdallah al-Dardari, the country representative of the United Nations Development Program in Kabul. “Afghanistan today is not the Afghanistan of 2001.”

One result, says Mr. al-Dardari, is that the country “has done a paradigm shift on the road to democracy,” which includes political and media freedom.

Another is the “resilience” of the society and its institutions. Even though illiteracy and poverty are high, he says, people are much more sophisticated about understanding the importance of development and aid. 

Still, U.S. nation builders “were very ambitious for a very long time,” says a veteran Western official in Kabul. “For the amount of money, they got very little. ... Their return on investment is very low, but they did achieve something.”

On the positive side, the official notes that without the money put into rebuilding the Afghan security forces – despite high casualty rates and corruption – “we would be worse off, and the Taliban would probably have taken over again by force.”

U.S. and other donor funding has been instrumental, too, in helping groups such as the Afghan Midwives Association (AMA). Since 2001, it has helped expand the number of trained Afghan midwives from 467 to 15,000. It has reduced maternal mortality from 1,600 deaths per 100,000 live births to between 800 and 1,200 deaths.

The improvement is evident in the “stories” quilted on 3-by-4-foot cloth, presented by midwives from each province to the AMA, as part of an annual competition. One narrative depicts a woman pregnant with triplets who experienced abnormal bleeding. But she gets the care she needs – and all survive. Two decades ago, the mother and babies would likely have perished, says Farzana Darkhani, AMA’s executive director.

“Fortunately, these cases are [today] very easily managed by midwives,” says Ms. Darkhani. “Because community awareness has also been improved, they know about the danger signs and can bring mothers to health facilities to take care of them.”

SCOTT PETERSON/GETTY IMAGES/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

“If you go to the same community now, even much more remote areas, people come and ask me to build schools for their girls. That is a transformation in the mindset of people, in society.” – Fawzia Koofi, a former lawmaker from Badakhshan province, speaking from her office in Kabul about changes in the country

Fawzia Koofi, a former lawmaker from the province of Badakhshan, has witnessed positive change in the country as well. When her father set up a local school four decades ago, girls had no chance to attend and families were even reluctant to send boys: The fear was they would be forced to serve in the army and learn something that contradicted their values.

“This is not something you can see because it’s not a building, it is not something measurable,” says Ms. Koofi. “But if you go to the same community now, even much more remote areas, people come and ask me to build schools for their girls. That is a transformation in the mindset of people, in society.”

Improving the status of women extends beyond the classroom. Zan TV, or “Women’s TV,” is a channel that broadcasts shows about women’s issues, with the aim of empowering Afghan women. “If there were still a Taliban regime, it’s clear: There would be no Zan TV, no freedom,” says Shogofa Sediqi, chief executive officer of Zan TV. She also points out that boys forced to wear turbans during the Taliban era are now professors and advisers to the president.

All this means that, as costly as the U.S. support of Afghanistan has been in the 18 years since the toppling of the Taliban, it has wrought significant change in a society gripped by war for decades.

“The important things that changed are in people’s minds,” says Ms. Sediqi, who notes that when she first chose to be a journalist, her uncles and other relatives were opposed. “Those who prevented me, now they are proud of me and say, ‘Your work is great,’” she says. “Changes start from my own family. From this, so many minds are changed.”

Brennan Linsley/AP/File

Colorado Chief Supreme Court Justice Nancy Rice, right, swears in new state alternate elector Celeste Landry at the Capitol in Denver, Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. Colorado's nine Democratic electors cast their votes for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton after one elector, Micheal Baca, was removed from the panel for voting for another candidate.

Micheal Baca was working at Jamba Juice and driving for Uber and Lyft, just trying to get by. He didn't plan on becoming a central figure in a test of one of America’s foundational political institutions.

But then he was chosen as a member of the Electoral College, the creaky mechanism, established by the Constitution, that actually names the nation’s chief executive. 

As an official elector for Colorado in the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Baca tried to cast his ballot for someone other than Hillary Clinton, who won the state’s popular vote. Election officials replaced him, citing state law.

So he became party to a federal lawsuit meant to establish the bounds of electors’ freedom. An appeals court ruled in his favor last August. The issue could soon land in the Supreme Court, as 22 states have joined Colorado in urging high court justices to review the 10^th Circuit appeals court decision.

The issue arises at a time when the Electoral College is already under scrutiny. In two of the past five elections, the candidate who lost the national popular vote has won the presidency, due to unequal distribution of electors among the states.

With a likely contentious 2020 election looming, states now want clarity on the so-called “faithless elector” question. Can individual electors vote for whomever they think best, or must they vote for the candidate state voters choose? The answer could affect the stability of the U.S. system in a close election – and perhaps the perceived legitimacy of the Electoral College itself.

“The basic situation is that the Supreme Court has never ruled about whether states can restrain the freedom of electors,” says Alexander Keyssar, the author of the forthcoming book, “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?” and a Harvard University history professor.

Origins and first crisis

From the beginning, the Electoral College was not a meticulously crafted plan. At the Constitutional Convention the Founders of the U.S. appointed a special committee to deal with a thorny problem: how to select a president.

“It was called the Committee on Unfinished Parts,” says Professor Keyssar. “The committee came up with the design of the Electoral College kind of at the last minute, just before they were adjourning.”

The design was, in essence, a midpoint between direct election of the nation’s chief executive by eligible voters, and selection by Congress. Voters would pick elite citizens, known as electors, who in turn would actually choose the person they thought best for the job.

It was the system that best preserved the compromises that had already been made about representation and power in Congress, says Professor Keyssar.

And while the Founders came to a solution in the summer of 1787, after the retirement of President George Washington, the creation of parties caused dissension in the original Electoral College system.

“Not long after it was created,” says Professor Keyssar, “the system malfunctioned.”

Under the original system, the top two electoral vote recipients were elected president and vice president. This created problems. In 1796, members of different parties became president and vice president. In the next election, in 1800, members of the same party received the same number of electoral votes.

“The 12th Amendment emerged out of that crisis,” says Professor Keyssar, of the election of 1800. Passed by Congress in 1803, the amendment modified the original system by separating the elections of president and vice president, and created the Electoral College system in place today – a system increasingly under pressure.

Brennan Linsley/AP/File

Colorado elector Micheal Baca, second from left, talks with legal counsel after he was removed from the panel for voting for a different candidate than the one who won the popular vote, during the Electoral College vote at the Capitol in Denver, Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. Colorado's nine Democratic electors cast their votes for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton after Baca was replaced with an alternate elector. Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, front right, looks on.

Colorado electors and the 2016 presidential election

Today Mr. Baca teaches U.S. government. Last year, he taught U.S. history.

But in 2016, when he was selected as a Democratic elector from Colorado after participating in the state’s county conventions, that was still in his future. At the time he was not a member of the state's political elite.

Mr. Baca did not even meet the age requirement of 25 to serve in the House of Representatives when he was selected by the state’s Democratic Party to serve as an elector. He’d filled out paperwork applying for the position after representing his House district in Colorado’s 2016 Democratic caucuses.

In order to be seated as an elector, Mr. Baca pledged to the state that he would vote for Mrs. Clinton. But he also felt that the election of Donald Trump would be dangerous for the country.

When Colorado’s electors gathered to cast their Electoral College votes on December 19, 2016 – normally a ceremonial, rubber-stamp process – Mr. Baca acted. He scratched “Hillary Clinton” off his pre-printed ballot and wrote in “John Kasich,” the Republican former governor of Ohio, who he viewed as a compromise to then-President-elect Trump.

His ballot was removed by a state elections official and he was replaced as an elector in a chaotic scene in the state capitol. After the election, Mr. Baca and two other electors filed suit, but the U.S. District Court in Colorado ruled that the other two electors lacked standing to sue.

Only Mr. Baca, who tried to cast his ballot and was removed as an elector, had standing, the court ruled in August of this year.

“The state’s removal of Mr. Baca and nullification of his vote were unconstitutional,” read the court’s ruling.

On Oct. 16, Colorado asked the Supreme Court to overturn the case.

A Washington state court judge in May upheld the state’s $1,000 fines on three Democratic electors who voted for Colin Powell despite their original pledge to vote for the state’s winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton.

This discrepancy in rulings makes it more likely the Supreme Court will step in to give a final legal answer. It also comes at a time when people are already calling for Electoral College reform.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, explained

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement between 15 states and the District of Columbia to require, by state law, electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of the state’s outcome. The 16 jurisdictions currently in the compact comprise 196 electoral votes.

It is intended to ensure that the winner of the national popular vote also wins in the Electoral College. The Electoral College has picked a president who did not win the national popular vote in two of the last five elections – President George W. Bush in 2000, and President Donald Trump in 2016.

The compact does not take effect until enough states join to pass the 270 electoral vote threshold of victory. Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill to join the compact in March of this year.

“The Compact ensures that every vote, in every state, will matter in every presidential election,” claims the website of the nonprofit National Popular Vote organization.

But not every expert is comfortable with a mechanism that is in essence designed to skirt the way the Founders set up the electoral system.

Because the Electoral College is written into the Constitution, changing the system without a constitutional amendment is “in principle problematic,” says Amel Ahmed, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

“Democracy is an agreement to play the game by a certain set of rules and changing those rules has to go hand in hand with changing the agreement,” says Professor Ahmed. “How you get reform actually matters a lot.”

What comes next?

On Sunday, at a campaign rally in Iowa, Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren called for the abolition of the Electoral College. 

“I want to get rid of it,” Ms. Warren said. “My goal is to get elected and then be the last American president elected by the Electoral College.” 

Other Democratic hopefuls, such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and businessman Tom Steyer also have said they favor abolishing the Electoral College.

For now, in the United States, the 538 individuals that make up the Electoral College pick the president. Envisioned as elite intermediaries, over the centuries they have evolved into a rubber-stamp formality. For Mr. Baca, he says he was not trying to change the system, the Constitution, or go to the Supreme Court.

“I was trying to prevent someone dangerous taking office,” he says. “This is just a byproduct of the initial intent.”

Like the man at the center of the case, the Supreme Court might have to navigate the subtle distinction between U.S. history and government.

“You have a history which says that that electors are just messengers, they’re not supposed to use their own judgment,” says Professor Keyssar. “But I think the Constitution makes it pretty clear that they can use their own judgment.”

“The system hasn’t worked that way in more than 200 years,” says Professor Keyssar.

Mr. Baca says, “It’s important that the courts address what electors can and cannot do,” acknowledging that he disregarded state law.

“I felt it was in violation of the supremacy clause in the Constitution,” he says.

But the question remains: If electors are permitted to vote their conscience, do the people have a say? If an election produces an Electoral College tie, or a margin of a few votes, so-called “faithless” electors could swing the result, pushing the nation into unexplored legal and political territory.

For 46 years, Africa’s tallest building, the Carlton Centre, cut a blocky silhouette in the skyline of downtown Johannesburg. 

The 50-story concrete tower stood like an anchor as the city around it churned. On the streets below, apartheid rose and fell. The European immigrants who once set up shop across the city center, selling tiny Italian coffees and handmade leather shoes, were replaced by immigrants from across Africa, selling tiny Ethiopian coffees and boldly printed African dress shirts. The city center emptied and filled, crumbled and gentrified. 

And through it all, like a hangover from another era, the Carlton stood unchallenged as Africa’s tallest building. 

Not that no one else tried. Every year or two for the past decade or so, another developer somewhere on the continent has promised that they were preparing to build something taller than the Carlton. Would it be the 70-story glass tower in Nairobi? The glowing orb at the center of a private city in Ghana? The “Dubai-style mega-project” near Cairo? 

Ultimately, the first successful challenge to the Carlton’s reign came from much closer to home. In September, a developer announced that Africa officially had a new tallest building, a luxury tower called the Leonardo, just 11 miles to the Carlton’s north. At 234 meters, the Leonardo stands 11 meters taller than its rival downtown – enough to squeak into the record books (though technically, that record is still pending).

All around the world, skyscrapers have a way of holding a mirror to a society’s ambitions. They show a place as it wants to be seen, a projection of its dreams literally stretching toward the sky. 

“A very tall skyscraper is a brand of optimism,” says Melinda Silverman, an architectural historian at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Building one is an announcement of stature, she says, a way of saying this city has arrived. Think New York and Chicago in the 20^th century; Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, and Dubai in the 21^st . For Johannesburg, a scrappy gold mining camp that grew into a metropolis of millions, a place still self-conscious about its place in the global pecking order, skyscrapers have also been a way of announcing that it too belongs among the world’s powers.

“This building is proof of our faith in this country,” says Jamie Hendry, development director for the Legacy Group, which built the Leonardo. “We see it as a huge beacon of hope for South Africa.”

It is no coincidence, Dr. Silverman says, that both the Carlton and the Leonardo took shape at moments when South Africa had a lot to prove.

Building through boycotts 

The Carlton – along with a host of other bleak concrete skyscrapers built around the same time – was part of a distinctive moment in the history of both South Africa and its architecture. As the 1970s crested on a continent of newly independent black nations, South Africa’s brutal white government was increasingly out of sync.

But it was a rich outcast – the world’s leading gold producer with cash to spare. And the more backward its politics appeared to the outside world, the more imposing and audacious the country’s architecture became.

Themba Hadebe/AP/File

For more than four decades, the Carlton Centre (far right) in downtown Johannesburg was the tallest building in Africa.

Between 1965 and 1977, more than 60 tall buildings crowded their way onto Johannesburg’s skyline. Wilfrid Mallows, a prominent city planning scholar, announced that the Carlton, with its five-star hotel and glittering shopping mall, projected on Johannesburg “the image of an international city” for the first time. 

Ironically, however, even as the final slabs were being laid on those skyscrapers, the city around them was splintering apart. In June 1976, visitors facing southwest from Carlton’s observation deck could probably see smoke rising from behind the yellow mine dumps that marked the edge of the city. Just beyond, the townships of Soweto, home to much of the city’s black population, had erupted in protest.

By the 1980s, frustrated by the apartheid government’s refusal to reform, major global businesses pulled out of the country in droves. And as they did, the inner city around them buckled. The Carlton, once surrounded by the opulent optimism of apartheid’s best years, was soon encased in the rot of the same system’s decay.

Turning the page

Fast forward 30 years and South Africa has once again got a lot to prove. The country’s economy is struggling to come out from under the shadow of repeated corruption scandals, which have emptied government coffers and spooked international investment. Its currency, the rand, has lost half its value against the U.S. dollar over the past seven years.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Jamie Hendry, development director for the Legacy Group, stands in the Leonardo skyscraper his company constructed, September 2019. The building is "a huge beacon of hope for South Africa," he says.

The Leonardo, with its infinity pools and marble floors, sends a message, Mr. Hendry says.

“We must put our stamp on the continent, and tell everyone that this is still the strongest economy in Africa,” he says. “The Leonardo is the jewel in our crown.” 

On a recent afternoon, he stood on the building’s unfinished viewing deck, looking out over the smog-glazed district of glass-faced office blocks and shopping malls below. The Leonardo sits in the center of Sandton, a sleek and sterile business district dubbed the “richest square mile in Africa,” which sprung up as downtown’s fortunes began to buckle. 

Below, construction whirred on the building’s sleek angular apartments, its luxury hotel, and its spas, restaurants, nursery, and shops. Most of the building’s 250-odd apartments are already sold, with prices ranging from R5 million ($340,000) for a boxy one bedroom to R250 million ($17,200,000) for the triple-floor penthouse with a private pool and outdoor garden.

Across town at the Carlton meanwhile, visitors queued to pay R30 ($2) to catch a lift to the 50^th floor viewing deck, which still describes itself as the “Top of Africa.” It was just possible to make out the Leonardo’s outline through the scuffed windows. Nearby, displays faded to sepia-tone droned about the Carlton’s construction. Meanwhile, two teenage boys scratched their names into the wood walls, covered in the names of rule-breaking visitors. 

Outside, the Carlton and the Leonardo faced each other across the skyline, bookends to a city and its history.

Michael Brook/Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind

Carla Curran works with a student at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, May 2019. Dr. Curran has designed multisensory exercises aimed at making scientific concepts more interactive and accessible.

During a classroom visit at the Perkins School for the Blind here in Watertown, Carla Curran shares 3D models of microscopic phytoplankton, 5,000 times their original size, with a lively group of teenagers.

“Did you know that the tiniest organism can influence an entire food web?” she says.

The students consider this as they run their hands over the grooves and crevices of the small white models, learning the parts of a dinoflagellate Alexandrium cyst, which creates harmful algae blooms. Dr. Curran asks the teens to describe what they feel.

“Like a mouth that never opens,” says one student, smiling.

The observations lead to conversations about how the ocean affects people, from the availability of seafood to the government’s role in preserving healthy ecosystems.

For more than 22 years, Dr. Curran has taught hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students, most recently as a professor in marine science at Savannah State University in Georgia. But over the past six years, her role as a regular guest educator at Perkins has led to her most influential work.

She has engaged more than 100 Perkins students in multisensory exercises designed to make difficult scientific concepts more interactive and accessible. It’s an approach aimed at boosting inclusivity and retention among students when it comes to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects.

“Carla’s work definitely has had a positive influence on our students,” says Kate Fraser, a longtime science teacher in the secondary program at Perkins. “I’ve seen an increased interest in science by all [Perkins] students ... hoping to find jobs after high school in science-related fields ... and [I] know of former students who went on to college and now work in technology-related fields.”

Ms. Fraser considers this a “win ... as there is still hesitancy by employers to hire persons with disabilities.”

About 70% of working-age adults in the United States who are completely or partially blind do not have full-time employment, reports the National Federation of the Blind. There’s a significant lack of representation in STEM-related fields.

For Izzy Primeau, a recent Perkins graduate, the gradual loss of her peripheral vision hasn’t stopped her from pursuing a career in science, thanks in part to Dr. Curran’s teaching methods. Ms. Primeau recently won the Young Conservationist Award from Zoo New England and is now studying animal care at Becker College in Leicester, Massachusetts. She credits Dr. Curran’s activities with building her confidence and knowledge.

“Learning science through other senses means you don’t have to rely solely on vision,” she says. “It helps you remember and understand concepts better if you can feel models and build graphs.”

In a review of educational practices conducted by Stanford University, one highlight was a study from New York, which found that the “hands on aspect [of environmental education] is an equalizer [for K-12] students with a variety of learning styles and learning abilities.” In that study, students who engaged in hands-on activities demonstrated higher achievement levels.

An invitation, then inspiration

Dr. Curran became involved with Perkins after an invitation from a colleague to participate in a project focused on science accessibility for visually impaired people. Working with Perkins students furthered her interest in taking a more inclusive and creative approach to teaching.

“Their desire to learn and engage me when I presented the science, despite numerous obstacles and often a lack of technology, is deeply inspiring,” says Dr. Curran, who visits Perkins several times during the academic year. “I continue to learn so much from them.”

Her passion for fostering diversity and inclusivity stems from her own experiences facing discrimination as a woman in science.

“During my entire university experience, I only had two female science professors,” she says. “People would occasionally make dumb blonde jokes or comments like, ‘That’s a pretty good idea for a girl.’ These are things I don’t want my students to experience.”

Her work is motivated by a fierce desire to inspire and encourage young people “to stay in science. ... I saw how hard students struggled with reading graphs and tables because a lot of the technology that translates this information doesn’t do so effectively,” she says.

Dr. Curran’s innovative approach extends beyond the classroom. Working in tandem with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Amy Bower, a physical oceanographer who is visually impaired, she facilitates whale watching and trawling trips out of Gloucester as part of a Perkins outreach program. Students help dredge up ocean creatures, such as sea urchins and crabs, which they observe through touch in a seawater-filled tank and then carefully release back into the sea.

The students also participate in activities involving “sonification,” which translates data points into sound instead of visual graphs. Listening to the audio recordings of numerical charts, they detect patterns in fluctuating fish populations, ocean currents, and seasonal effects.

Perkins students are well positioned for such studies. “You can’t see very far underwater,” Dr. Curran notes. Instead, she says, “Science uses sound to study the ocean. Through sonification, Perkins students can hear the data speak. Some didn’t know this was an option.”

She also points out that students “heard things that I didn’t hear.”

Such educational opportunities are also deeply valuable to Dr. Bower. “As a visually impaired scientist myself, I know how quickly blind students can be left out altogether in school science labs,” she says. The kinds of sensory experiences offered by these ocean expeditions “bring science alive for all students, sighted or not.”

A life-changing lesson on whales

Isabella Scott, another recent Perkins graduate, says her Woods Hole experience was life-changing, since she “didn’t really think about pursuing a career in science as a possibility before meeting Dr. Curran.”

Now a biology major at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, Ms. Scott recalls a fateful boat trip involving a lesson on whales. After placing an underwater microphone into the ocean, Ms. Scott and her peers could hear only ship engines. Dr. Curran explained that the whales’ ability to hear each other – which is how they communicate and hunt together – was negatively affected by the noise of human activity.

“Being on a boat and doing this activity reminded me of just how important it is to become a scientist and help animals,” Ms. Scott says. “Everyone should experience science the way Dr. Curran taught us.”

In the past year, Dr. Curran has traveled to the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind multiple times, presenting her multisensory activities in science classes. She also led a marsh expedition for 30 visually impaired eighth and ninth graders.

“Just because people have different ways of learning doesn’t mean they aren’t hungry to learn,” says Dr. Curran, who notes, “My teaching at the university level now incorporates these sensory-based activities. Students from all backgrounds enjoy using 3D models and learning through touch and sound.”

Embracing inclusive approaches that connect more students to science is also crucial in addressing global challenges like climate change.

“Diversity in science benefits everyone,” Dr. Curran says. “Including people who think differently will actually accelerate the process of coming up with solutions to serious concerns like climate change. We must bring them to the table first.”

Netblocks.org/via REUTERS

The graphic shows the shutdown of internet access in Iran during protests in mid-November.

For five days in mid-November, during one of the largest protests in Iran’s history, the regime in Tehran blocked access to almost the entire internet for the first time. In effect, it imposed an information blackout to the rest of the world. Now we know why. Videos and other reports sent out since then show police on a killing spree against peaceful protesters. At least 208 people were killed, estimates Amnesty International.

Yet the crackdown is not a big surprise, especially for a regime with declining popularity at home and a rising tendency for violence abroad. What’s new is the degree to which Iran’s leaders tried to shield their atrocities from the world’s eyes.

It is as if they know global norms favoring the protection of innocent civilians are getting stronger and the stakes for breaking those norms are getting higher. Iran clearly did not want a repeat of the iconic image from a 2009 protest that showed the killing of a young female student by security forces. Its attempt to hide the truth about last month’s violence failed.

Yet Iran is hardly alone in the way it indirectly honors global standards by hiding its actions against protesters. In August, India shut down electronic communications in Kashmir after it changed the territory’s legal status in order to prevent the world from seeing a crackdown on thousands of dissidents. China, too, has tried to block information about its human rights abuses against millions of minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In fact, China’s concern about international opinion may be a big reason it has not massacred pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong the way it did during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Since 2009, as global access to the internet has increased by 27%, the use of disinformation by governments has increased by 10%, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, a nonprofit think tank. Yet the free flow of information is a main reason a majority of countries are more at peace than in the past, finds the institute.

As democracy has spread, and with it prosperity and literacy, so has the sunlight on nondemocratic actors who still see state violence as legitimate. And as more tyrants act in ways to avoid shame, the more they admit they live within humanity’s moral circles. Their attempts at darkness are a sign of light.