Khwaja Tawfiq Sediqi/AP

Taliban fighters hold the movement's flags in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 30, 2021. Many Afghans anxious about a return to Taliban rule are confronting mixed messaging, and a possible disconnect between leadership and fighters.

When gun-toting Taliban fighters stormed the compound of her small community aid organization on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, Marnie Gustavson feared the worst.

Ms. Gustavson, who had followed U.S. Embassy guidelines to evacuate, learned from her security personnel when she landed in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, that fighters had overwhelmed the organization’s unarmed security guards, stolen trucks, and kidnapped her head manager.

“Things moved so fast,” says Ms. Gustavson, executive director of PARSA, a grassroots nongovernmental organization in Afghanistan since 1996. “I wasn’t prepared for the Taliban to come to the gates of Kabul and for the Afghan government to simply melt away and disappear, leaving the population unprotected.”

Then, almost as quickly, the crisis gave way to a tense calm. Taliban leaders freed PARSA’s manager from the armed foot soldiers, and the next morning sent guards to protect the compound.

Days later they granted PARSA the authorization to continue operations.

The Taliban’s mixed signals left Ms. Gustavson and her staff wondering, “What’s coming at us next?” she says in an interview in Seattle.

With the completion this week of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, Taliban fighters in Kabul fired automatic rifles into the air to celebrate their military victory and seizure of power. But Afghans and foreigners alike are now watching and waiting anxiously to see how the militant Islamic group will govern.

Despite toned-down rhetoric coming from Taliban officials in Kabul, actions on the ground signal that the Taliban remain fully committed to their conservative version of Islamic law and will work to impose that on the Afghan people, experts say.

Yet the Taliban face major challenges. They lack the plans, expertise, and control needed to run the country – especially an Afghanistan radically different than it was when the Taliban first took power in 1996.

Shaped by the crucible of war and exile overseas, the Taliban may show greater pragmatism, bending to political necessity even while holding to core, hard-line values, the experts say.

“Their ideological makeup may not have changed, but the generational change and the experience has made them more realists,” says Hassan Abbas, professor of International Relations at the National Defense University in Washington, and author of “The Prophet’s Heir.”

Savvier leadership

Wearing a black turban and wire-rimmed glasses, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen sat calmly next to the white flag of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate for a mid-August interview with CNN and assured Afghans they would be safe under Taliban rule. Afghans “should not be terrified,” he said.

Now a ubiquitous media figure, despite the Taliban’s banning of television during their 1996-2001 rule, Mr. Shaheen tweets cheerful messages such as “Time to roll up sleeves and build Afghanistan,” along with a video of road construction. Another video shows Afghan girls entering a school, with the tweet “back to school in a new Afghanistan.”

Former Taliban diplomats such as Mr. Shaheen, a fluent English speaker with a university degree, are the relatively polished, political face of today’s Taliban, aiming to assure Afghans and the world that they do not seek violent retribution.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP/File

Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen gestures during a news conference in Moscow, March 19, 2021. Now a ubiquitous media figure, Mr. Shaheen, a fluent English speaker, tweets cheerful messages such as “Time to roll up sleeves and build Afghanistan,” along with a video of road construction.

Yet many Afghans and outside experts view this as a cosmetic change, aimed at cleaning up the movement’s image.

“They’ve gotten savvier in their public relations. They’re so on message, compared to the 1990s when they were all over the place,” says Ashley Jackson, author of “Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan.”

“The leadership core is more worldly,” in contrast with the 1990s when “they were very naive about the consequences of their actions and the global perception of them,” says Ms. Jackson, co-director of the Centre for Study of Armed Groups at the Overseas Development Institute, an independent think tank based in London.

Reports of executions

Yet across Afghanistan, the Taliban have continued to prove themselves capable of harsh, arbitrary punishments, assassinations, and other human rights abuses reminiscent of their prior regime.

Just days after Kabul fell, Taliban fighters opened fire on a crowd of protesters waving the black, red, and green flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in the eastern city of Jalalabad, killing three people, Reuters reported.

The United Nations’ human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, last week cited credible reports of the Taliban executing civilians and Afghan security forces who were surrendering, among other “serious” violations. She warned that thousands of people were at risk of Taliban retribution, including civil society members, journalists, professionals, and former security personnel.

On Aug. 27, the Taliban reportedly executed a popular Afghan folk singer, Fawad Andarabi, days after a Taliban spokesman said music was forbidden in Islam – echoing a prior ban on music. In an interview with The New York Times, spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the Taliban sought to “persuade” Afghans to forgo music in public.

And in a chilling reminder of past Taliban massacres of ethnic minorities, Taliban fighters tortured and killed nine ethnic Hazara men after seizing control of the southeastern province of Ghazni in July, according to an Amnesty International investigation.

Afghan women in particular are facing major setbacks.

A Taliban spokesman urged women last week to stay home lest Taliban fighters “mistreat” them. This followed Taliban pledges to protect the rights of women “according to Islamic principles” – the same formula espoused for women’s rights from 1996 to 2001, when women were barred from school, had to wear head-to-toe coverings called burqas, and could only work in the medical profession.

“They have their own framework of Islam, and it’s way out of the mainstream,” says Heather Barr, associate director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch.

Afghan women “don’t believe anything” the Taliban say, says Ms. Barr, noting that many women – including prominent female Afghan politicians, journalists, and others – are fleeing the country.

“I left the country because, like millions of people, I fear the Taliban,” female anchor Beheshta Arghand told CNN.

Different reception this time

In 1996, the Taliban took power in much of Afghanistan without firing a shot. Afghans exhausted and impoverished by civil war welcomed the Islamic fighters for overcoming warlords and lawlessness and restoring a modicum of order.

“The people of Jalalabad threw flowers, food, and money at the militia, praying that peace might at last be restored,” wrote the Monitor’s John Zubrzycki on Sept. 20, 1996.

Today, the Taliban’s arrival in what are relatively modern, open cities with vibrant civil societies has had the opposite impact. It has created a political power vacuum, thrown the economy into free fall, and sent people into hiding.

Afghans dread the Taliban, a group surveys consistently find is unpopular. In a 2019 poll by the Asia Foundation, for example, 85% of Afghans expressed no sympathy for the Taliban. As a result, thousands of Afghans – many of them professionals – have fled or are attempting to flee.

For their part, the Taliban are aware they badly need expertise to govern, and have attempted to stop people from leaving – setting up checkpoints and whipping and beating Afghans trying to enter the airport.

“I don’t think the Taliban stepped into Kabul with a … blueprint for governance,” says Ms. Jackson at the Overseas Development Institute. “I think they’re really scrambling to figure out how to keep this whole [country] going.”

The Taliban are “like an octopus,” she says, with different political factions and power centers run with a loose consensus. Leaders lack absolute control over fighters.

A key question going forward is to what extent the Taliban will be willing to share power and compromise to create the “broad-based” government Taliban leaders say they want. Or, alternatively, experts say, will the Taliban revert to more repression, which would impact urban populations most heavily?

“Kabul will not be the kind of open place it was, and that is a reality,” says Professor Abbas at the National Defense University. “Even if we have moderate Taliban … who try to create stability and peace … that educated urban elite will find it very difficult to coexist with the Taliban,” he says. “That can lead to a strong crackdown.”

Alvaro Barrientos/Reuters/File

French President Emmanuel Macron pays tribute to French soldiers who died in a 2020 helicopter crash in Mali. He has promised that the military operation against Islamist militants in the Sahel will not be a "forever" war.

Afghanistan 2.0.

That’s the phrase haunting Western governments – and galvanizing jihadi insurgents – in the wake of America’s exit from Kabul. It refers to a region few Americans have heard of, but which threatens to become the next major focus in the battle against Al Qaeda, the Islamic State group, and other allied groups.

It’s the Sahel, a semiarid band of grassland stretching across northern Africa just below the Sahara. And after nearly 10 years of inconclusive fighting, the key outside military players – led by former colonial power France and including other European states and the U.S. – are actively reassessing their options.

The parallels aren’t exact between Afghanistan and the affected Sahel countries – Mali, Niger, Chad, and Burkina Faso. But the similarities are powerful, and so are the potential lessons.

In the Sahel, as in Afghanistan, Western governments have adopted a three-pronged strategy; 5,000 French troops run counterterror operations, with logistic, intelligence, and Special Forces backup from the United States; local armies undergo training and equipment upgrades; and Europe pours in large-scale financial and development aid.

There are other, sobering parallels. The number of attacks by jihadi groups, against both soldiers from local armies and civilians, has been rising. One raid in Mali last year took the lives of some 100 villagers. This year, more than a hundred were killed in an attack in Niger. Three months ago, Islamist insurgents killed at least 160 villagers in the north of Burkina Faso.

And there’s the same sort of disenchantment with governments and government armies as there was in Afghanistan. Corruption and economic hardship feed political grievances in rural areas. So do atrocities. Human Rights Watch recently documented hundreds of “unlawful killings” carried out in counterterror operations by troops from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

The final parallel? Like U.S. President Joe Biden in Afghanistan, France’s Emmanuel Macron recently ordered a drawdown of French troops early next year, looking for a more sustainable way of containing the Islamist forces and stabilizing the region. He said France would not fight a "forever" war, and warned that “we cannot secure areas that relapse into lawlessness because states decide not to take responsibility.”

The question now is what the new approach will look like; Afghanistan could offer important lessons.

Benoit Tessier/Reuters/File

A French soldier carries his gear during a military operation against Islamist militants in Mali in 2019. France is drawing down its troops in the country and learning lessons from Afghanistan about fighting insurgencies.

One option Mr. Macron has so far ruled out is a U.S.-style rapid, wholesale end to the Sahel mission. He won’t have missed the terse, bullish response to the Taliban victory in Afghanistan from a top Islamist leader in Mali, Iyad Ag Ghaly: “Two decades of patience. …”

So he’ll be leaving some 2,500 French troops. But the aim is to make them the backbone of a newly created force, called Takuba, incorporating soldiers from other European countries as well.

And in an approach that he hopes will prove more successful than it proved in Afghanistan, the focus will shift to targeted anti-terror operations and intensified military training programs for Sahel countries’ troops.

Mr. Macron hasn’t hidden his frustration over the domestic turmoil engulfing key Sahel partners – two military coups in Mali, and the assassination of the longtime president of Chad, in the past year. And he is not in the nation-building business. Yet he still feels that long-term stability hinges on the Sahel governments using the billions of dollars they are receiving in European development aid to win the hearts-and-minds battle against the jihadists.

One contrast with Afghanistan is that he, and other European leaders, remain convinced they have a continued interest in trying to make that strategy work. A key reason may be that, while Kabul is some 7,000 miles away from the United States, the Sahel is on Europe’s southern flank. With hundreds of thousands of people already displaced by the fighting, it’s a potential source of a new surge of refugees.

The French leader also clearly believes that the way American troops pulled out of Kabul last month – with almost no warning to their allies – lent further justification to his recent calls for Europe to assert “strategic autonomy” from Washington on challenges near its own borders.

And not just in the Sahel, either. Just this week, at a summit in Baghdad, he declared pointedly that “no matter what choices the Americans make, we will maintain our presence in Iraq to fight terrorism.”

There’s a final, potentially critical lesson Mr. Macron appears to have taken from the final stages of the Afghan war, one that could lead to a delicate diplomatic dance in the months ahead with President Biden.

Washington shares French concerns in the Sahel; defending the Afghan pullout, Mr. Biden has cited jihadi threats elsewhere in the world, explicitly mentioning Africa.

And both presidents recognize the importance of a continued American military role in the Sahel.

But the Americans have signaled that they may be open to the possibility of negotiating with Sahel insurgents, at least those not directly involved in terror attacks.

For Mr. Macron, that has long been a red line. And it will not have escaped his notice that U.S. negotiations with the Taliban paved the way for the Islamists’ victory in Afghanistan. That will almost certainly have hardened his resolve.

Kathy Willens/AP/File

Volunteer Matthew Tiggs (left) helps Newark resident Mack Mayton load cases of bottled water into the trunk of his car​ at the Boylan Street Recreation Center​ on​ Aug. 12, 2019. New Jersey's most populous city has been ​an epicenter of ​concern about lead in drinking water, but ​has made major efforts to replace old pipes.

Yvette Jordan remembers the day she learned the water fountains at her school were dangerous. 

It was in March 2016, and Ms. Jordan was teaching history at Barringer High School in Newark, New Jersey. At a gathering in the school’s gymnasium, she recalls, city officials told the crowd that high levels of lead had been discovered in the school’s drinking water, which public health officials say is harmful to both children and adults.

The officials insisted that Newark did not have a Flint, Michigan, situation – a reference to the lead-laced drinking water crisis that had made national headlines earlier that year. They would just need to shut down the water fountains. But additional tests revealed high lead levels elsewhere in the city’s water system, and community members began to mobilize. 

“Water is a right,” says Ms. Jordan, who is also the chair of an educators’ social justice group called the Newark Education Workers Caucus. “This is something folks have to really, really push.” 

For the next five years, city lawmakers and advocates fought about the extent of the lead pipe problem in Newark, and about what to do about it. There were protests, angry citizens, defiant officials and a lawsuit. But eventually, there was also something else: progress. 

Today, Newark has replaced almost all of its approximately 20,000 lead service lines – a remarkable feat given the logistical and financial challenges in digging up and retrofitting pipes that connect private residences to the city’s main water lines. Ms. Jordan’s group, which had sued the city, agreed earlier this year to settle without collecting damages, saying it was satisfied with officials’ efforts to ameliorate the situation. Now, Ms. Jordan consults with other community groups that are part of a new movement across the country – from urban centers to rural towns – to fight for clean drinking water and fix America’s crumbling water infrastructure. 

“Flint helped awaken a lot of people to the problem,” says Erik Olson, an advocate for drinking water protection at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in Washington. “I’ve been working on this for 35 years, and I’ve not seen this kind of movement on water infrastructure in my career.”

Enormous work lies ahead. Yet the rising grassroots efforts are seen by many as an important sign of hope.

“More and more people are talking about this,” Ms. Jordan says. “More and more people are understanding the concept of environmental justice.”

“It’s been out of sight, out of mind”

For years, advocates have been trying to sound the alarm about the degraded state of the water system in the United States. Tens of millions of Americans still get water through lead pipes, while tens of millions more drink water that does not meet state and federal safety standards, according to NRDC research. Century-old treatment plants are ill-equipped to remove modern-day chemicals. 

Meanwhile, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported last year that water systems across the country were both chronically underfunded and “aging and deteriorating.” It identified a spending gap of some $81 billion between current funding levels and needed capital investment.

“There has been so much deferred maintenance,” says Mr. Olson. “It’s not like roads and bridges, where you can see the rust and the potholes. With water infrastructure it’s buried; it’s been out of sight, out of mind.”

While this neglect is spread across the country, it has fallen disproportionately on communities of color. A recent NRDC analysis, sifting U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data based on various demographic indicators, found that race, ethnicity, and language had “the strongest relationship with slow and inadequate enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act.” That federal law is supposed to ensure clean drinking water for all Americans. Drinking water systems with regular violations over the course of years were 40% more likely to occur in places where residents were nonwhite, researchers found.

Shafkat Anowar/AP

Troy Hernandez, ​an ​environmental justice activist with Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization​,​ navigates through one of his presentation slides highlighting the lead in Chicago's water supply on April 9, 2021. ​As President Joe Biden ​seeks upgrades to get rid of every lead water pipe in the country, the problem disproportionately affects Black, Latino, and low-income Americans.

Lead pipes are no exception. In Illinois, the state with the highest concentration of lead pipes, Black and Latino residents are twice as likely to have a lead service line as are white residents. For a host of reasons, including long-standing housing discrimination, Black children are also disproportionately exposed to other sources of lead, such as old paint, which compounds the health effects of contaminated drinking water, officials say.

Much of the current focus on lead water pipes began in roughly the past half decade, when thousands of children in Flint, Michigan, were exposed to elevated lead levels after officials switched the city’s water source – an attempt to save money that ended up corroding existing pipes and allowing lead to leach into drinking water. But only more recently, advocates say, has there been a growing recognition that lead pipes are a problem everywhere.

“It’s a huge issue in every state,” says Mr. Olson. Lead pipes are “in red states as well as blue states. They’re in small communities as well as big cities.”

This may be one reason why there is such widespread and bipartisan support for fixing the problem. A national poll this spring, conducted by Morning Consult for the Environmental Defense Fund and other advocacy groups, found that 80% of voters support funding the replacement of lead pipes. That included 74% of those who voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election and 85% who voted Democratic. 

Progress on replacing old pipes

The $1 trillion infrastructure plan that passed the Senate last month includes $15 billion to replace lead service lines – a total well down from President Joe Biden’s originally proposed $45 billion, but a number that some supporters have called “historic.” 

The challenge is massive. Many municipalities don’t even know where lead service lines are buried; others estimate that it could take decades to replace them. Often local governments struggle with the cost of replacing the lines. 

But as Newark and a collection of other communities show, success stories are growing.

Bennington, Vermont, with a population of around 15,000, may be one of the first towns in the United States to replace all of its lead service lines, according to officials there. 

Town officials had long recognized that lead pipes could pose a risk to residents, says Bennington Town Manager Stuart Hurd. They had spent decades adding anticorrosive chemicals to the water supply in an attempt to prevent leaching and were gradually replacing pipes they found in the course of other municipal work. But after Flint, Mr. Hurd says, the federal government started providing more funding to remove private lead service lines – and Bennington officials saw an opportunity to get rid of the town’s lead pipes completely. 

Indeed, part of the difficulty in wide-scale lead pipe removal projects is that much of the at-risk infrastructure is considered private property. These service lines connect homes to a central water main and have traditionally been considered homeowners’ financial responsibility. 

Who has to pay?

But asking residents to pay to remove lead service lines regularly ends in disparities. After officials in Washington, D.C., created a policy of sharing the cost of lead service line replacement with homeowners, whiter, wealthier residents were twice as likely to end up with lead-free water as Black and lower-income residents, researchers at American University found last year. The city later began paying for the entire removal process; in June it announced a goal to have all lead service lines in the city removed by 2030, with a priority on underserved communities.

“In our minds, the only way to equitably and, frankly, just effectively deal with this issue is to have funding available to pay for the entire process without cost to homeowners,” says Maureo Fernández y Mora, associate state director for Massachusetts at Clean Water Action, who has been working with residents in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to replace lead service lines. 

In Bennington, officials applied for and received $11 million to pay for the entire removal process. Now, Mr. Hurd says he expects the town to be free of lead pipes within two years.

This is quick compared with other municipalities, many of which estimate it will take years, if not decades, to replace their lead service lines. Part of that rapid timeline is because of Bennington’s relatively small size. But it is also because the town has worked for years to identify where the lead service lines are located, Mr. Hurd says.

The town also contracted with an engineering company that manages all the removals occurring on private property where city employees don’t work. This has simplified coordination with property owners, he says. 

Clean Water Action has taken similar steps in Chelsea, but with a different lens. In that city, most of the residents are renters, and many are wary of any government officials because of their immigration status, advocates say. So Clean Water Action, along with a local environmental group called GreenRoots, worked as a go-between, talking to residents and then communicating with city officials and utilities. By December of last year, Chelsea had replaced hundreds of lead service lines.

“I’ve seen a big change in the last few years,” says Lynn Thorp, the national campaigns director for Clean Water Action. “I think it has a lot to do with water systems and governments realizing that they do need to be concerned about equity.” 

What Henry Esquivel likes most about his new house is the blast of cold air it delivers when he walks in.

It’s a big change from the Ford F-150 he used to sleep in, where temperatures would sometimes reach 110 degrees. It’s more spacious too, despite his new house being just one room. And it comes with neighbors – all of whom, like him, recently experienced homelessness.

A few doors down is Mark Larusch. The father of three has potted plants and an Adirondack chair on his patio. A few doors further away is the woman whose large, black Labrador, Dottie, greets Mr. Esquivel excitedly every day.

“It’s not big, but I don’t need big,” he says. “It keeps me sane, it keeps me safe.”

The Tiny Home Village (THV) in Albuquerque opened in February, and he was one of the first people to move in. A pilot program funded by the local Bernalillo County, the THV hopes to provide Mr. Esquivel and his neighbors with the shelter and resources to help them complete the often bewildering transition from life on the streets to permanent housing. 

The number of people experiencing homelessness has increased – and become increasingly visible – in cities around the country in recent years. Albuquerque is no exception. 

In January 2020, before the pandemic, the ranks of the unhoused nationwide had grown 2.2% over 2019, the fourth consecutive year of increases. (The count includes the unsheltered, those living on the street, in cars, etc.; and the sheltered, those in shelters or transitional housing.) Due to COVID-19 complications, the January 2021 count of those experiencing homelessness was incomplete, but there’s no doubt homelessness increased during the pandemic. As a result, cities have been exploring new ways to provide shelter and services.

SOURCE:

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development point-in-time count reports, New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness

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Henry Gass and Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“We see the level of visible homelessness in a completely different state than we have” in the past, says Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “That’s really pushing people to look for new options, that are really old options.” 

Albuquerque is relatively late in adopting tiny home villages, which have been established around the country over the past decade. Villages vary in size, amenities, and philosophies, but they all provide four walls and a door that locks (and the peace of mind that comes with that) in the short term, and in the long term a small, structured community that can equip residents to find – and keep – permanent homes. 

Building on earlier examples

Albuquerque has looked to other tiny home villages for both inspiration and lessons learned. 

Denver’s Beloved Community Village provided something of a cautionary tale: It had to relocate after two years because it had only a temporary permit for its original site. With that in mind and despite having trouble finding a location, the founders of the Albuquerque THV secured a 30-year lease on a lot owned by the Albuquerque Indian Center. 

The main source of inspiration for Albuquerque is the Opportunity Village Eugene (OVE), in Oregon. Opened in 2013, it combines accommodations with access to social services and work opportunities. 

“They already had so much in place to help us,” says Ilse Biel, resource manager for the Albuquerque THV.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Henry Esquivel, a resident of Tiny Home Village, stands outside the community center on Aug.17, 2021. Mr. Esquivel was one of the first residents to move into the village.

What Albuquerque most wants to mimic is OVE’s self-governance model. The residents themselves are key players in deciding how the village runs day-to-day. That responsibility, dignity, and sense of community are invaluable in helping them make a sustainable transition from the streets, says Ms. Biel.

“We’re trying to give the villagers some tools that would stand them in really good stead once they do move out,” she adds.

Tent City to Tiny Home

Albuquerque’s THV occupies one acre on a sleepy block on the city’s southeast side. There are 30 stand-alone houses in the village, each with the same layout: bed, desk, two chairs, shelves, and closet space, as well as a front patio. 

But villagers aren’t supposed to spend too much time in their new homes. 

The real center of the community is meant to be the “Village House” at the heart of the campus, where residents can cook, do laundry, hold meetings, go to the library, and watch television. Nearby is a small community garden – with tomatoes, chilis, onions, and squash – as well as a picnic area, where trees are slowly growing to provide some natural shade.

The relatively spartan nature of the homes compared to the array of gathering spaces and chores – doing dishes, weeding, watering the garden, and cleaning the bathrooms, among other things – is intentional, says Ms. Biel. 

When people experiencing homelessness move off the street, “they lose [their] community from the street,” says Ms. Biel. “It takes forever to forge a new community.” 

“With this model we’re almost trying to force the issue,” she adds.

Nowhere was that street community more visible in Albuquerque than in “Tent City” six years ago. The informal homeless encampment sprang up by a rail yard near downtown. Campers chalked addresses for their tents on the curb, as if to declare it a community. 

But tensions with neighbors and law enforcement arose, and Tent City lasted only a matter of months. Yet it sparked a debate that eventually led Debbie O’Malley, a Bernalillo County commissioner, and some of her colleagues to propose a tiny home village.

The public loved the idea and voted for two bond programs that provided nearly $3 million for the village. (Roughly $2 million more came in from other sources.) But then the pushback started. “When it came down to location,” says Commissioner O’Malley, “the message was: not in my back yard.” 

Three years on, the criticism has not disappeared – particularly given how many tiny homes remain empty. Taxpayers paying $5 million to house so few “is a cost-prohibitive monument to poor use of public money,” the Albuquerque Journal editorial board wrote in late July.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Ilse Biel, resource manager for Tiny Home Village, stands inside a tiny home filled with donated clothing available to the residents, Aug. 17, 2021. Ms. Biel says she looks for signs that the residents are “house-proud,” like “getting upset about seeing a counter not wiped, a cigarette butt somewhere.”

But for the THV to be successful, it needs to be more than just a place where people can sleep in safety. It needs to be a functioning community so villagers can hold each other accountable and develop the physical, emotional, and financial stability they need to stay off the streets for good. Achieving that means starting with a fairly high bar.

Applicants are tested for drugs, must have been sober for 10 days, must be committed to recovery from any addiction or substance abuse issues, and must participate in maintaining the village. Of the eight people approved to live in the THV since February, two were asked to leave due to disruptive behavior. 

The public are “overwhelmed with the amount of people experiencing homelessness ... not just as a city, as a country,” says Commissioner O’Malley. They “want to see more people off the street.”

“That’s understandable.” she adds. “But we have criteria. It’s not just ‘open the doors.’” 

“They’re not alone”

Mr. Larusch used to run businesses and build houses, he says. But for the best part of two decades, he’s battled with depression, anxiety, and physical injuries as he bounced between shelters, rehab facilities, and the streets.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Mark Larusch stands on his front porch at Tiny Home Village, a transitional housing community, on Aug. 17, 2021, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He hopes that sharing his story will help others in the village feel less alone.

At the THV, he values both his independence and the community. He does his chores – as well as some other people's. “I hate to see messes,” he says.

Indeed, among the measures of success Ms. Biel looks for are signs that “they’re house-proud” – villagers “really getting upset about seeing a counter not wiped, a cigarette butt somewhere.” 

It shows that they’re settled into the village, and at the midpoint of what she describes as a “stability curve.” 

To help villagers move toward the endpoint of that curve – permanent housing – the THV provides access to an occupational therapist and psychiatric nurse, as well as volunteers who help residents with computer skills, résumé building, and mock interviews. Future plans include bringing micro-industries into the village so residents can start de facto small businesses in pottery, carpentry, and stonemasonry.

But patience is key for tiny home villages, advocates say. 

“In many cases it’s not just about their lack of a home. There’s so many other issues involved,” says Mr. Whitehead from the National Coalition for the Homeless.

“It takes a village to help people overcome long-term homelessness,” he adds. 

Those who eventually move on from the THV to permanent housing will continue to have access to the village and its services, but Ms. Biel hopes they’ll also become “navigators” to help current residents.

Mr. Larusch doesn’t know when he’ll be ready to leave, but he’s already begun to assume some “navigator” responsibilities.

“I try to help people out as much as I can. Mostly by sharing my story,” he says. “It maybe helps somebody out, and makes them feel like they’re not alone.”

At the beginning of her utterly captivating book “Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship,” Catherine Raven is talking with a scientist acquaintance about a wild fox that has taken to visiting her at her remote cabin on a regular basis. The acquaintance tells her, with the gentle condescension that female naturalists have been hearing from men for well over two centuries, that her fox experience is just fine “as long as you’re not anthropomorphizing.”

Spiegel and Grau

Raven, a former park ranger and experienced teacher of natural history, is well aware of the stigma associated with imparting human traits to wild animals. “You don’t need much imagination to see that society has bulldozed a gorge between humans and wild, unboxed animals,” she writes, “and it’s far too wide and deep for anyone who isn’t foolhardy to risk the crossing.” 

In “Fox & I,” Raven risks that crossing. The resulting book is beautiful and wise without ever being sappy or manipulative. 

Soon after sequestering herself out in the Montana wilderness (teaching classes online, but otherwise keeping a wide distance from her nearest human neighbors), Raven realizes that the fox is arriving at the same time every day. He seems more curious than cautious. “He thrust his face at me,” Raven notes at one of their first meetings. “A normal fox would have run away when the door opened. His boldness suggested that I was in his territory, instead of the other way around.” 

They come to know each other, and it’s impossible to avoid concluding that they also come to like each other. Raven hauls a chair outside and reads in Fox’s company; he pretends to sleep only a few feet from her and stores his fresh kills on her doorstep for safekeeping before bringing them home to his den. In the best tradition of popular natural history writing, readers learn a good deal about wild foxes as they’re learning about this particular fox. 

Raven is a natural teacher and an easy, digressive storyteller. The seasons, the wildflowers, the rhythms of the natural world fill these pages and pull the reader in. She mentions at one point, for instance, that her default hiking gaze is permanently set at 1 meter (3 feet) above the ground – bear height – because she’s had encounters with bears and doesn’t want to repeat the experience. “If you cannot spot a bear within thirty meters,” she writes, “neither your running ability nor the sidearm in your shoulder holster will save you from injury.”  

But Fox is the star of the show, and there’s nothing more important to Raven than his wildness. Although he grows more comfortable over time, he’s never anything but self-possessed. When a student muses about how close Raven is to Fox (“I was sure you were going to call the little fellow ‘Foxie’”), it already feels odd to the reader. “Foxie? As if he were a pet,” Raven thinks. “As if hanging around a fox was tantamount to decorating a terrier in tartans or teaching a parrot to solicit crackers.” 

It’s the essential strangeness of Fox that makes him so compelling. He chases prey and is chased as prey; he dens and raises kits. And yet he seems to enjoy her company, and she finds herself asking human-sounding questions: “Did he have a personality? Did he care about me? Had he wanted to be my friend?” 

Fox’s exit from the narrative (the one stark caution of natural history books like this one is that the exit is preordained) is as unfathomable as his arrival. This, too, evokes no sentimentality in Raven. She will go on – the book ends with plans for the future – but there will now be the before and after. As Raven puts it, the time before was “impoverished by foxlessness.” 

Finishing this book, readers will feel the same. And they’ll be happy to have made his acquaintance.

Reuters

President Joe Biden gestures as he meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House Sept. 1.

In an Aug. 31 speech justifying the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden cited corruption in the Afghan government and a need to stop the “era” of American military support “to remake other countries,” or nation building. Indeed, before the Taliban took over, Afghanistan was one of the world’s most corrupt countries, ranking 165 out of 183 in a global index.

Yet how honest must a country’s government be to gain U.S. military support, even an implied assurance of American defense? On Sept. 1, a day after his speech, Mr. Biden gave a clue.

At the White House, he hosted President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, a country that also ranks low on the corruption index, or 117 compared with Afghanistan’s 165 on Transparency International’s rankings. The president promised $60 million in new security assistance to Ukraine beyond the more than $400 million pledged this year. 

Why the different treatment for Ukraine? One reason is that defending the former Soviet state from Russian aggression fits a strategic U.S. interest of protecting Europe and the West’s democratic values. Yet a big reason is that Ukraine has seriously tackled its corrupt political culture since a democratic revolution seven years ago, improving its corruption ranking more than Afghanistan’s.

“There’s a recognition that Ukraine has already made tremendous progress on governance, rule of law, and anti-corruption reforms since 2014,” said a Biden administration official.

For countries either supported militarily by the U.S. or seeking support, one lesson from the withdrawal from Afghanistan is this: Honest governance pays off. If a country’s citizens don’t rally against corruption, the U.S. has a difficult time defending it.

In June, President Biden announced that the battle against corruption was a “core” U.S. interest in the world. One place that knows this well is Taiwan, an island nation increasingly under threat of a takeover by China.

Since becoming democratic more than three decades ago, it has tackled corruption by fits and starts but especially since the 2016 election of its first female president, Tsai Ing-wen. While corruption still exists in Taiwan, such as the sway of organized crime on influential families, the country ranks a high 28 on the global index, or close to the U.S. ranking and far better than China’s 78. Its clean governance was a big reason for its relative success against the COVID-19 pandemic.

As with Ukraine, Taiwan does not have a formal defense treaty with the U.S. But as a model of democracy in a Confucian culture – a counternarrative to communist-led China – it has wide bipartisan support in Washington. And in a July poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 52% of Americans support U.S. defense of Taiwan against a Chinese invasion – the highest support ever. That figure is up from 19% in 1982 when the question was first asked and Taiwan was a corrupt dictatorship.

Ukraine may soon join Taiwan in gaining strong U.S. support while Afghanistan has now lost support. The U.S. can do only so much in nudging a country toward clean governance. Integrity at home invites support of integrity from abroad.