2021
July
08
Thursday

Monitor Daily Podcast

July 08, 2021
Error loading media: File could not be played
 
00:0000:0000:00
00:00
Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

Haiti and Afghanistan. If you wanted to pick two places on earth that convey chronic hopelessness and dysfunction, you’d be hard-pressed to find better examples. Yet here we are, with articles about them in today’s issue.

Most often, these countries are ignored, cast in terminal woe, or looked at through the distant lens of geopolitics. In short, they easily recede from our attention. That’s understandable. For most of us, their stories will not affect our morning commute. By most definitions of “relevance,” they are not high on our list.

But the Monitor has a different view. Our common humanity is relevant. Progress for every corner of the world is relevant. The values we share and hope to uphold are relevant. Not just for historians or foreign-policy buffs. For everyone. Our global story teaches us, deepens us, enriches us.

What does the manner of the United States’ departure from Afghanistan say about its sense of responsibility? We examine three key perspectives. And must we view the assassination of Haiti’s president as another chapter in a story of unrelenting despair? There are seeds of hope buried deep, says writer Kathie Klarreich. Can they flourish? That is relevant to all of us.

“When I heard about the assassination, I had a list of people I wanted to call to see how they were doing, but I didn’t because I knew they’d be busy figuring out next steps about how to make their country better,” Kathie tells me. “Everyone in their own way is trying to figure this out, and because they haven’t lost hope, I haven’t lost hope.”


You've read 3 of 3 free articles. Subscribe to continue.

Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Mohammad Ismail/Reuters
An Afghan soldier strums a guitar left by U.S. troops at Bagram air base. American troops vacated the base, in Parwan province, Afghanistan, overnight on July 2, 2021.

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

Patrick Semansky/AP
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas prepares to administer the constitutional oath to Amy Coney Barrett at the White House in Washington on Oct. 26, 2020.

This last Supreme Court term didn’t take shape as many expected. But the key to understanding how the court might evolve could lie in its most conservative member.

Joseph Odelyn/AP
The Creole expression “lari a blanch” – literally, “the street is white,” but figuratively, the street is empty – is how Haitians describe the sudden quiet after coups and violence. Indeed, the usually energized streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, were drained of activity yesterday following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Some children walked in front of the cathedral destroyed by the 2010 earthquake.

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

Graphic

Ann Hermes/Staff
From left, Nicole Solis and Corelle Nakamura hold hands outside the Hennepin County Government Center as they wait for the verdict in Derek Chauvin's trial on April 20, 2021, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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

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

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

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

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

“Worldwide, we’re living in a time where we’ve seen more revolutionary movements using protest and nonviolent action more generally as their primary method than we’ve seen at any other time in the past 120 years,” says Erica Chenoweth, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the CCC.

Inaccurately labeling a protest group as violent can be a political tool to delegitimize a movement’s claims. A protest movement deemed violent by the media or political officials can lose momentum, depressing public interest and support, says Dr. Chenoweth.  “Far more people are willing to participate in a movement that they perceive to be nonviolent. [Because of the] political salience of these terms ... we have to be really careful when we’re using them.”  

SOURCE:

Crowd Counting Consortium

|
Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Points of Progress

What's going right

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


The Monitor's View

Reuters
A female Afghan athlete, sprinter Kimia Yousofi, trains in Kabul ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

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

“There were some women who just wanted to inspire security forces, just symbolic, but many more [are] ready to go to the battlefields,” Halima Parastish, the head of the women’s directorate in Ghor province, told The Guardian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

​​Every day offers the opportunity to commune with God in prayer that opens our eyes to Christ’s powerful, healing presence.


A message of love

Kin Cheung/AP
Mike Lam, one of 47 pro-democracy defendants, arrives at court in Hong Kong on July 8, 2021. All 47 people are charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the security law over their involvement in an unofficial primary election last year that authorities said was a plot to paralyze Hong Kong's government.

A look ahead

Thank you for joining us today. Please come back tomorrow when Linda Feldmann looks at why border politics are coming back to the fore.

More issues

2021
July
08
Thursday
CSM logo

Why is Christian Science in our name?

Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that.

The Church publishes the Monitor because it sees good journalism as vital to progress in the world. Since 1908, we’ve aimed “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind,” as our founder, Mary Baker Eddy, put it.

Here, you’ll find award-winning journalism not driven by commercial influences – a news organization that takes seriously its mission to uplift the world by seeking solutions and finding reasons for credible hope.

Explore values journalism About us