As Afghan provincial capitals fell at blitzkrieg pace last week, with the national capital, Kabul, the ultimate prize in the insurgent Taliban’s sights, the White House chose the moment to inform the world that President Joe Biden would host a “leaders’ summit for democracy” at year’s end.

With America’s 20-year effort to bring democratic governance, universal education, and human rights to Afghanistan crashing down, the timing and pomp of a statement proclaiming that U.S. leadership would “galvanize” efforts to defend against authoritarianism, fight corruption, and promote respect for human rights globally, seemed darkly risible.

And yet the evidence is just as glaring that the universal values that underpin the tattered and retreating – some even say finished – seven-decade-old Pax Americana remain inexorable motivators of the human spirit. It can be seen in the 70% of Afghan girls attending school before the government fell, or in the fearless local human rights groups that emerged and in the political pluralism that very imperfect democratic rule fostered.

With America’s “longest war” in Afghanistan lost and its democratization project there a shambles, where does that leave American leadership – with allies and adversaries – going forward? And whither the core American interest in the effort to spread and fortify Western values?

Among foreign policy and international affairs analysts, the judgment is unusually uniform – that American leadership and prestige as the preeminent global power have suffered a severe setback.

“For a world where the U.S. remains the last great power with enormous material and value interests going on in tandem, the idea of enlightened U.S. leadership has been dealt a tremendous body blow,” says Robert Lieber, professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown University and the author of several books on U.S. leadership.

“There’s no getting around it: The chaos and incompetence we’re seeing in Kabul badly undercuts American credibility, it is devastating to our allies, and it emboldens our adversaries of every kind – including terrorists,” Professor Lieber says.

Noting that the original post-9/11 reason for the war was to end Afghanistan’s use by Al Qaeda as a safe haven, he adds, “Afghanistan under the Taliban will once again become a magnet for terrorists of every stripe. But it will also give tremendous inspiration to lone wolves in other countries – and that will be a problem particularly for our European allies.”

Broad geopolitical impact

The geopolitical repercussions not just of the U.S. retreat, but of the conditions under which it is taking place, will stretch around the globe, others say. Some are zeroing in on the Indo-Pacific region, where U.S. presidents since Barack Obama have turned their attention as China has pursued its global rise.

India over the past decade has been strengthening its ties with the United States as a hedge against China, for example. But how will the U.S. departure from the neighborhood affect New Delhi’s calculus?

Another area of concern: NATO, which joined the U.S. in Afghanistan and undertook its most significant out-of-area mission since its post-World War II founding. Under what conditions would NATO allies accompany the U.S. outside Europe in the future?

For some analysts, it is not so much the U.S. departure from Afghanistan as it is the botched pullout that will affect perceptions of U.S. leadership and allies’ trust in it.

“There’s a pretty wide understanding that the U.S. is leaving because Afghanistan is not a core national interest, that what is in the national interest will be Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. I don’t think allies are really going to worry about that all that much,” says Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

“What is more disturbing is that this all happened in a way that took the Biden administration by surprise, and seems to have been addressed with very little consultation with allies,” he says. “In that sense it’s Biden’s version of ‘America First,’ and the impact of that is something the administration is going to have to tend to with our allies.”

Some European leaders are not waiting for consultations with the U.S. to express their dismay at how the allied withdrawal from Afghanistan is unfolding. The U.S. withdrawal is “the greatest debacle that NATO has experienced since its foundation,” Armin Laschet – widely expected to become Germany’s next chancellor after September elections – said Monday.

Evan Vucci/AP

President Joe Biden walks from the podium after speaking about Afghanistan from the East Room of the White House, Aug. 16, 2021, in Washington.

The White House is already being bombarded with questions about what the chaotic departure from Afghanistan might signal to worried allies. At a press conference Tuesday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan contrasted the 20-year U.S. presence in Afghanistan with enduring U.S. commitments in Europe and South Korea.

“We gave 20 years of American blood, treasure, sweat, and tears in Afghanistan,” Mr. Sullivan said, but he drew a distinction between that kind of commitment and “our commitments to allies and partners [that] are sacrosanct.” He cited Taiwan and Israel – or South Korea and Europe – “where we have sustained troop presences for a very long time ... to deal with the potential of an external enemy and to protect our ally against that external enemy.”

Biden’s vision of leadership

At the same time, it is President Biden who has placed democracy and human rights at the center of his vision of American leadership. With the end of the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan coming on his watch, there will be no separating what becomes of the values the U.S. sought to instill there from Mr. Biden’s broader credibility and the fortunes of U.S. efforts to nurture those values globally.

The world will be watching to what extent the U.S., now the defeated opponent to a Taliban-governed Afghanistan, can encourage moderation on the part of the country’s new rulers.

The real challenge will be, “What can be done – if anything – to moderate the way in which the Taliban governs ... and enforces its interpretation of Islamic law and customs,” as well as “to limit repression ... and the tolerance of terrorism,” says Anthony Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, in comments on the center’s website.

Some are seeing signs of an evolved Taliban in the initial public statements coming out of Afghanistan’s new leaders.

In a statement Tuesday, Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, said the new government is offering amnesty to Afghans who worked with and assisted the U.S.-led coalition. In addition, he said the Taliban are “ready to provide women with environment to work and study, and the presence of women in different structures according to Islamic law and in accordance with our cultural values.”

U.S. experts with experience in promoting civil society and in particular women’s participation in governance say they will be watching both how the Taliban proceed and what the U.S. does to rally international pressure to preserve some part of the gains made by Afghan society over two decades.

“Right now we see the Taliban trying to attenuate the concerns the world has as they move to govern the country, but obviously the course they take remains to be seen,” says Wardah Khalid, a Washington-based foreign policy analyst who also works to increase Muslim Americans’ political engagement.

Noting that President Biden said this week that the U.S. would aim to lead with diplomacy rather than with the military, Ms. Khalid says she will be “watching for signs that U.S. leadership is indeed moving in that direction and can be effective” in influencing Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Encouraged by women

Moreover, she says she is encouraged by signs that women in Congress are not leaving the question of Afghan women’s prospects to the administration but are already proposing legislation to mold any future diplomacy with the Taliban government based on treatment of women.

“I really think it’s the direction that American young people especially want to see the country taking” in terms of global engagement, Ms. Khalid says.

The Fletcher School’s Professor Drezner says it’s easy in the shock of the moment to conclude that the 20-year commitment in Afghanistan was a “waste,” or that the disastrous withdrawal means an era of American leadership is closing. But he cautions against such conclusions.

“You just can’t generalize, especially in the heat of the moment, that we didn’t accomplish everything we set out to do in Afghanistan, therefore we can’t do anything anywhere anymore,” he says.

Moreover, he says he is counting on what he says history has shown to be America’s ability to learn from its mistakes – as he says America did after the 1975 departure from Vietnam.

As signs that America still possesses this ability to “heal itself” in the wake of an international disaster, Professor Drezner says he will be watching for two things in particular: the effort the U.S. makes to “embrace all of the Afghans who assisted us [and] to send the signal that those who help us aren’t going to be abandoned,” and then a “9/11-type bipartisan commission” that will look deeply at answering why and where a policy initially supported by virtually everyone went wrong.

“This is a moment for something I always say, which is, ‘Never underestimate America’s ability to shoot itself in the foot.’ But the second part of that,” he adds, “is, ‘Never underestimate America’s ability to heal itself from shooting itself in the foot.’”

AP

Taliban fighters stand guard at a checkpoint near the U.S. Embassy that was previously manned by American troops, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 17, 2021. Wary Afghans, desperate to flee, struggled to reach the airport, with reports of beatings and live fire used on protesters, despite an “amnesty” declared by the Taliban across the country.

While the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces this week produced image after image of heartbreak as Afghans clung to cargo planes and women tried to lift babies over airport barriers in an effort to save them, it was also a baffling theater of the absurd: How could a bunch of guys in flip-flops, with no body armor and nary a fighter jet in sight, have defeated an Afghan army that the United States gave billions upon billions of dollars and thousands of lives to help build?

If the war’s end was a choice between throwing good money after bad and risking more lives lost, or staying longer before the inevitable happened – as the Biden administration and many before it have argued – the speed with which the collapse came seemed, even so, to take everyone’s breath away. 

The Pentagon has said that the next two weeks will be focused on evacuating the 10,000 to 15,000 Americans still in the country as well as former Afghan comrades in arms and their families. But honestly assessing what was going on in the field over the past 20 years is crucial to future military efforts, as well as U.S. global leadership. Amid the finger-pointing and blame-dodging for the shocking final week of the war, the initial temptation has been to heap fault on allies left behind. That, some analysts say, ignores U.S. failures of training, lack of understanding about the nation it was trying to build, and wasted resources that ultimately encouraged corruption, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Afghan lives lost fighting the Taliban.

When one reporter asked Monday if it was a failure of intelligence not to have predicted the quick fall of Kabul, Maj. Gen. William “Hank” Taylor, director of current operations for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could say only that he had no answer to that question.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby endeavored to come to his aid. “It would certainly be wrong to conclude that the United States military did not view as a distinct possibility that the Taliban could overrun the country.” Still, he added, “One of the things we couldn’t anticipate – and didn’t anticipate – was the degree to which Afghan forces capitulated, sometimes without a fight.” 

On this last point, many U.S. veterans beg to differ. There have long been signs that the military training effort wasn’t working, says Jason Dempsey, a former infantryman with two deployments to Afghanistan who is now an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He recalls, while working with Afghan troops years ago in command and control, “posturing that felt like play-acting.” Behind the scenes, however, “our intel had been cleaning up car bombs sent from Pakistan, and they had 24/7 air support. We declared it a success – but really it was theater, to present the illusion of competence.” 

Alex Brandon/AP

Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby (right) listens to a question accompanied by U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William "Hank" Taylor, Joint Staff Operations, during a media briefing at the Pentagon, Aug. 17, 2021, in Washington.

This was a common experience among U.S. and NATO troops, says Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “I know many ground-level U.S. commanders who were training the kandaks [Afghan battalions], who would honestly report the very poor state of the kandak and would be told to give them a higher grade, or it would reflect badly” on the U.S. commander.

“Guys on the ground saw that the training wasn’t working,” says Dr. Dempsey. The one-year tours of duty, however, meant that it was easy to pass the problem along to the next unit. “It’s your incentive to show progress, so you do some small-arms training, some map reading and decide, ‘OK, I did the best I could’; then you leave. What you don’t realize is that the guy before you did the exact same thing, and the guy after you did the exact same thing.” 

He has since watched Afghan troops he trained “fold as soon as anyone else.” But it’s hard to blame them, he adds. Troops were isolated and supplies were often snapped up by commanders who sold them for their own gain or survival. “Put yourself in the shoes of an Afghan soldier. There are five to 10 of you sitting in an outpost hours away from resupply, not getting ammunition, not even getting fed consistently,” Dr. Dempsey says. “It doesn’t take much for a local elder to say you’re all alone out here” and convince them to look the other way – or desert. 

It also comes after 20 years of warfare in which by far the vast majority of deaths were suffered by the Afghan people. More than 66,000 Afghan National Army and police were killed, in addition to more than 47,000 Afghan civilians, according to Associated Press numbers. And tens of thousands of Afghans supported the U.S. military and NATO allies, with most of them still trapped and waiting for long-promised help.

This week’s debacle was fueled by the absence of solid Afghan leadership from the top down, says Stephen Biddle, who was senior adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Kabul in 2009 and is now professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. “There’s a strong tendency in the U.S. and the military to see war as a material enterprise: If you provide enough weapons and field enough soldiers and equipment, then you’ll succeed. But war isn’t engineering and physics – it’s social science.” 

In a developing state without a functioning judiciary system to impose consequences for bad behavior, for example, the first order of business for any president or prime minister is to establish a balance of power. “The armed elites, otherwise known as warlords, are pretty satisfied when they are extracting resources roughly equal to their armed following,” says Dr. Biddle. For Afghan presidents, cronyism gave them some measure of control. “The problem is that while it’s good at its primary purpose of maintaining internal political stability, it’s really lousy at defeating an insurgency.”

Rahmat Gul/AP/File

Afghan National Army soldiers attend their graduation ceremony after a three-month training program at the Afghan Military Academy in Kabul, Afghanistan, Jan. 5, 2020. The Pentagon has said it was stunned by the Afghan National Army’s failure to fight to keep Kabul in the wake of U.S. withdrawal this month.

It’s also detrimental to building an army. “When the boots and equipment you’ve been given are shoddy because of sweetheart contracts, and when you don’t have enough water because it’s been sold on the black market by your commander, it’s much smarter to sit at a checkpoint than to go out and get killed.”

This lack of combat motivation also leads to what’s known in social science circles as “contagion dynamics.” “The U.S. announces it’s getting out, and now it’s a signal to the entire Afghan army and police simultaneously that it’s every man for himself,” Dr. Biddle adds. “When the first units start negotiating with the Taliban, it spreads like wildfire, getting bigger and bigger because every surrender is a signal to the next unit down the line.”

The U.S. fueled the corruption by never turning off the spigot to the massive money flood into the country – the funds kept flowing, and the corruption growing, Dr. Felbab-Brown notes.

As the Taliban stormed into Kabul, they tweeted out photos of the gilded compounds of politically connected warlords – the gaudy excess of the elites reinforcing Taliban talking points among Afghans whose income averages less than $600 a year.  

“We were attempting to overcome a core flaw, which was that the Afghan government was seen as predatory,” says Dr. Dempsey. “So us pouring more money into the country means that the Afghan government is more and more seen as a tool of foreign occupiers – the Taliban used that framing to great effect: The Afghan government is seen as less legitimate, and no amount of body armor and weapons can overcome that.” 

During Monday’s Pentagon briefing, an Afghan journalist struggled aloud with the loss. “Everybody’s upset – especially women. I forgot my question,” she said. In the midst of tragedy of this scale, “What do you ask?” 

She took a stab at a query. Women had “a lot of achievements in Afghanistan. I had a lot of achievements. I [escaped] from the Taliban like 20 years ago; now we go back to the first step again. Do you have any comments regarding our President Ghani,” who fled the country this week for the United Arab Emirates.

Press secretary Kirby said he did not, but he offered that the defeat “is personal for everybody here at the Pentagon. We, too, have invested greatly in Afghanistan and the progress that women and girls have made politically, economically, and socially,” he added. “We do feel that pain that you’re feeling – probably not to the same extent.”

In the weeks ahead, analysts will be grappling with the question of whether there is any good to have come out of America’s longest war. There may be, even if many Americans will not think it was worth the price, says Dr. Biddle. “For starters, we bought 20 years of development for Afghans who wanted a better life. I don’t know how to cost out the benefit of 20 years of opportunity, but Afghanistan is a different place now than it was 20 years ago – and that’s something.” 

Going forward, the war must also be a lesson in accountability, say analysts who stress that U.S. commanders were given the “loudest voice” by a Congress much too deferential to military leaders. “We need to get over this idea of water-walking generals,” says Dr. Dempsey, who would like to see hearings on Capitol Hill in which each commander is called to testify in chronological order to answer: “Did you know this was going to fail? When did you know? Were you deluding yourself, or did you actually believe it?” 

“What I grapple with is, when does delusion become a lie?” says Dr. Dempsey. “I do believe most of our senior commanders merely deluded themselves, but when you’re driving the war maybe the line between a lie and a delusion is irrelevant – if you’re failing, you’re failing.” 

And as the U.S. continues state-building efforts in other countries, it must take Afghanistan as an epic lesson in the damage of too large a spigot of funds with too little accountability among partners “that we’re still not holding to minimal standards of good governance,” Dr. Felbab-Brown says.

Today, however, as the Taliban solidify their control over the country and U.S. troops prepare to pull out for good, “The worst we can do now would be to forget about Afghanistan,” she says. “There is no chance of making them into democratic and women-supporting actors, but we need sustained and painstaking engagement.” 

That may look like, “We’ll release this amount of money if you do X and Y, and impose these sanctions if you do Y and Z,” she adds. “We reduce our leverage if they know there’s no chance they’ll get money – no matter how they behave.”

During the summers, Tyler Couch and his crew don’t have a whole lot to do except watch the sky. Sometimes they step outside to scan the pale horizon. Sometimes they huddle with meteorologists at North Dakota’s Bowman Regional Airport to look at radar reports.

When a storm does develop – the right kind of storm, with good size and clouds with enough moisture – Mr. Couch and the other pilots jump into action. They do what most pilots are trained not to do: fly toward a thunderstorm.

They position their aircraft on the fringes of the storm, consult by radio with the radar operators on the ground, and fire off flares burning silver iodide. The hope is that the water in the cloud will adhere to the iodide’s icelike molecular structure and, when it gets heavy enough, fall as precipitation to the parched ground below.

These missions are part of a “cloud seeding” effort – a controversial practice that has been thrust into a brighter spotlight by the grinding drought of the West. Eight U.S. states and parts of Canada undertake similar projects, though mostly in the winter to try to increase their snowpack. Locations in North Dakota, Texas, and Alberta use cloud seeding in the summer to try to wring rain or small, quickly melting hail from often-stingy storms.

A summer of storm chasing

The effort in North Dakota is hotly contested – and banned in some areas – by opponents who object to what they say is an effort to play God, or to the cost of something they say is unproved. Advocates say the science is in; it can increase precipitation marginally and is worth the cost.

Mr. Couch and the three other pilots avoid the public fray. They are young, from the University of North Dakota aviation program. Mr. Couch, at 24, is the oldest and the pilot in command, a veteran of three summers at Bowman.

“We go fly when the weather’s bad. And when it’s nice out, we can just relax and kick back,” says Alex Bestul, from Lester Prairie, Minnesota. “We get the best of both worlds.”

“We like to sit on the hay bales and watch the sunset over the fields,” says Mr. Couch.

But the flying is what they are here for, and flying next to thunderstorms is an exceptional – and sometimes stomach-dropping – experience.

“My first night here – it was probably one of the bigger storms that we had,” recalls Hanna Anderson, an intern who flies co-pilot with Mr. Couch. Both twin-engine planes based in Bowman went aloft.

“It was pretty late,” recalls fellow intern Izzy Adams. Flying in the dark, they had no visual gauge. “We got up there,” Ms. Adams says. “We had enough lightning. Can we see the storm? Can we be close enough to it without being in a threatening spot?” 

“It was quite intimidating,” Ms. Anderson says. “I didn’t go to bed for a while because the adrenaline was still running. It was fun.”

Ms. Adams agrees: “I’ve seen some of the coolest things sitting right next to those storms.”

Jody Fischer, director of flight operations for Weather Modification International, the company that contracts the pilots and planes, says his crews are told to put safety first.

“You have to have a respect for Mother Nature, or she will win,” he says by phone from Fargo. The planes typically flirt with the edges of the storm, and the pilots are taught always to have an escape route and never to get between clouds that could close on them.

Mr. Fisher has been cloud seeding for 21 years, and he says none of his 18 pilots has been hurt. Many of them are itinerant, moving from cloud seeding in one town in the summer to another in the winter.

Doug Struck

Alex Bestul (left) and Tyler Couch, both pilots with the North Dakota Weather Modification Project, examine the flares mounted on wings of one of their planes, one method of delivering silver iodide to "seed" rainfall in clouds.

“Why don’t other counties do it?”

Not everyone is thrilled to see them. Roger Neshem is a farmer who grows grains and row crops in Berthold. He organized the North Dakotans Against Weather Modification campaign, which persuaded voters last year to end the cloud-seeding program in Ward County. 

Mr. Neshem, who has taken his campaign to other counties, mainly argues that the program does not work – and if it does, it takes water away from farmers downwind of the effort.

“It’s property rights,” he says by phone. “You do what you do on your side of the fence, but don’t start to affect what falls on my property.” And, he notes, “If this works so well, why don’t other counties do it?”

Darin Langerud, who runs the North Dakota Cloud Modification Project, says by phone from Bismarck that the program, run by the state for 46 years, has produced results. “Numbers fall between the 5% to 10% range in terms of increasing rainfall. And crop damage from hail reduced 45%.”

When clouds seem to be building hail, the pilots attempt to urge the hail to form quicker and smaller, thus reducing serious damage. “I can see it with my own eyes,” says Bowman rancher Wayne Mrnak. “My crop insurance has gone down on hail damage. When I was a kid, we would lose all or part of our crop to hail every year.” But Mr. Mrnak, who sits on the local cloud seeding board and helped defeat a proposal in Bowman County to end the program, admits the ability of the program to produce more rain is “a bit iffy.”

Indeed, Mr. Neshem argues that the studies showing the success of cloud seeding are mostly on winter seeding. The two sides offer dueling studies.

“The only way we would be doing this, is if we were sure it’s successful,” contends Julie Gondzar, project manager of cloud seeding for the Water Development Office in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Her state, like most of the others, does only wintertime cloud seeding.

Sarah Tessendorf, a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, helped carry out influential wintertime experiments in Idaho. She says the research, dubbed the Snowie study, “unambiguously” showed an increase in snowfall from cloud seeding. But she says there is less proof to support summertime cloud seeding, which deals with fast-moving, fast-rising “popcorn convection” clouds, while snow clouds are low and slow to develop.

“The scientists are divided,” says Adnan Akyüz, North Dakota’s climatologist. “Some are true believers, and some think seeding doesn’t add anything. I am right in the middle.”

Whatever the benefits of cloud seeding, there is agreement on one point: Without clouds, there can be no seeding. “You can’t seed your way out of a drought,” says Mr. Akyüz. Unless the sky offers up clouds, there is nothing to seed.

Which leaves Mr. Couch and the other pilots sitting on haystacks scanning the blank horizon. Waiting for the clouds.

Ryan Minor, Courtesy of Melanie Redd

Laila Redd, a 12-year-old, enjoys playing a variety of sports. Her athleticism and natural talents have drawn the eye of travel coaches and parents, who are pressing hard for her to choose one sport and train year-round in pursuit of a college scholarship.

Melanie Redd is feeling the heat as coaches and other parents set their eyes on her daughter Laila, an athletically gifted 12-year-old. From basketball, touch football, and volleyball, to family ski and snowboarding vacations, Laila loves sports – and seems to excel at most everything she tries. 

But the world of youth sports has become a pressure cooker – one that, for now, the Redds have managed to resist. “All we ask when she comes home,” says Ms. Redd, “is how was practice and did you have fun?”

Others around the Redds aren’t so laid back. When Laila was 10 years old and shooting baskets at a local gym, she was approached by a male coach who gave Laila his card and told her he wanted her on his travel team.

That experience unsettled Ms. Redd. She didn’t appreciate a male stranger approaching her daughter and giving her his number – and she was angry that an adult would bypass the parents about a decision that potentially could involve thousands of dollars.

Ms. Redd is also feeling the heat from other parents and coaches who want to know when Laila is going to “commit” to a “principle” sport, and the year-round training that comes with it. It’s necessary, she’s told by others, to help Laila earn a college scholarship.

The Redds are among thousands of families facing a system built on endless pressures to “reach the next level,” feeding an industry that rakes in billions of dollars a year. They also represent a growing movement to push back on a system that expects children and their parents to treat game time like a career with adult demands and expectations.

Laila is one of the fortunate ones. That’s because Ms. Redd knows better. She’s the strength coach at Chaminade Julienne Catholic High School in Dayton, Ohio, and over the years she has seen firsthand how recruiters and travel coaches use the allure of college scholarships to draw parents into paying for expensive, high-end, year-round training.

“At this point,” says Ms. Redd, “the situation is out of control.” Parents are paying people to train their kids, and these folks are telling the parents their kids’ ceiling is the professional level.” In fact, she says, “the vast majority of these kids’ ceilings is doing well in high school.”

It’s just not fun

The Redds’ knowledge of the sports landscape and their desire to keep sports fun for Laila has, for now, kept her in the games.

About two-thirds of kids in Laila’s age group, however, leave sports. Travis Dorsch, a scholar at Utah State University’s Families in Sport Lab, has been carefully tracking youth sport participation. He says kids make it clear in surveys that one big reason they quit is that sports are no longer “fun.”

The pandemic has exacerbated this problem, says Jon Solomon, editorial director for the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program. “One in four parents say their kids have lost interest in sports during the pandemic. This suggests they weren’t having a good experience before the pandemic started.”

Though parents often get the blame for bringing too much pressure to bear on their kids, Mr. Dorsch believes the reality is more complex.

The issue around young people quitting sports “is more systemic than parents,” he says. There’s the pressure brought to bear by other families, coaches, and pay-to-play organizations. And then there’s the reality that society has turned its back on public parks and recreation programs that historically delivered youth-sports experiences.

Pay-to-play groups have been around for years, but after the Great Recession of 2008, says John Engh of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, they totally took control. Municipal governments forced to find money in their budgets at the height of the recession found it, Mr. Engh says, by “defunding parks and recreation departments.” Since then, he continues, cities have been “more than … happy to pass off sports to private groups.”

This has fueled a surge in spending on pay-to-play sports. The youth sports industry, says Mr. Dorsch, “is now a $19 billion annual business. That’s larger than the NBA, NFL, or NHL. And a lot of that is built on selling hope.”

Putting a price on hope

How much does this hope cost? When Colin William and his wife, both professors at Purdue University, sat down five years ago to tally how much they were spending annually to keep their then-12-year-old son playing tennis, they were shocked to learn the total topped $10,000.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Mr. William. “We were doing no more than traveling around the Midwest and paying for training. He isn’t playing in national tournaments in California.”

It’s not that he is ready to write off highly competitive sports at the youth level. “I’ve seen a lot of positive things for him over the years,” Mr. William says. But as a parent he sees the pressure that builds and understands that parents have a key role to play.

“Parents have to be very attentive to what their kids are saying about competition. If they’re really excited about this, then it’s great. If they’re reluctant, then it’s important for parents to listen to that.”

Fortunately, some organizations are starting to listen to kids, too. Really listen.

Let them lead the way

At Tuscarora High School in Frederick, Maryland, an awareness that so many kids were quitting sports in middle school got physical education teachers thinking about how to help students be more active. The motivation wasn’t to shake up the sports industry. They just wanted to get adolescents moving.

Courtesy of Howard Putterman

Howard "Howie" Putterman, seen here with his daughter, is the athletic director at Tuscarora High School in Frederick, Maryland. Mr. Putterman and his colleagues are bringing fun back to sports and creating more opportunities for high school students to play.

PE teachers used an existing 30-minute flex-time period each day to offer a 3-on-3 basketball tournament for kids who couldn’t commit to the varsity team or lacked the skill to make a squad.

The idea proved so popular that teachers decided to see how far they could push it. The program is guided by three principles, says Athletic Director Howard “Howie” Putterman: “Inclusivity, access, and free choice.”

“We had badminton for a while,” says Mr. Putterman. “We created archery. We created ice hockey.” Whatever a kid wants to try, “we are willing to try,” he adds.

This inclusive approach has upped the number of students active and playing sports at Tuscarora. It’s also having an effect on what are traditionally highly competitive, high-intensity varsity sports.

Everyone makes the team

Mr. Putterman instituted a no-cut policy in a pandemic-shortened 2020-21 sports season. As a result, the boys soccer team had 41 varsity players. An unheard of number.

The biggest issues the policy created for coaches? “Playing time and parent perception,” says Mr. Putterman.

The coach created a system that guaranteed every player significant time in at least two games of the nine-game season. To make sure everyone knew the rules, he created a graph to explain how decisions were made and how players could earn more time.

“Upfront honesty, continued conversations throughout the season with players, and good record-keeping were his best tools,” says Mr. Putterman, “and the parents and players for the most part jumped at the chance to be a part of this.”

Not only did more students play, but they also had a number of first-timers – many of them English-language learners. And parents supported the whole team, not just their kids.

Parents hold the key

Ms. Redd, Mr. William, and Mr. Putterman know what too many parents and coaches fail to understand: “There aren’t more opportunities available today [in sports] than there were 30 years ago,” says Mr. Dorsch. “But there’s a lot more people making a living off that process.”

At the end of the day, says Ms. Redd, “The people most in charge of these kids are the parents, so there has to be something in place to educate them about protecting their kids without getting in their way.”

Mr. William may well have the best guide to striking a proper balance. “Sports and parenting can’t be separated,” he says. But it helps to remember that your first job is “raising a child into an adult. ... [Developing] an athlete is secondary.” 

Shortly before the grand opening of the animated “Immersive Van Gogh” exhibit in Los Angeles, I visited the Getty Museum to connect with the real thing. I got up close to “Irises,” awestruck at just how much energy and expression he could pack into such a small space.

The brilliantly colored painting spilled over with life, and brought me back to my 20s, when I traveled to New York for a one-time blockbuster exhibit, “Van Gogh at Arles.” Put on by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984, the show featured more than 140 paintings and drawings centered on the nearly 15 months the post-impressionist spent in that small city in southern France. It was the zenith of his short life.

To walk through the Met’s galleries of sun-drenched wheat fields and haystacks, to see how larded the Dutch painter’s brush strokes actually are, to meet the brightly colored and stylized townspeople, was to directly experience the artistic genius of Vincent van Gogh. A collection of self-portraits, including the depiction of himself with his bandaged ear, stirred my emotions. Such intensity. Such courage. And sadness, too, at his mental struggles and eventual suicide.

As I stood before those marvelous irises at the Getty, I thought forward to the immersive exhibit I was about to experience in Hollywood: How could giant video projections possibly compare with a face-to-face encounter with the authentic works? But after I watched the show and talked with visitors, I realized I was asking the wrong question. This isn’t about a comparison with “the real thing.” It’s a variation on a theme, a building on what’s come before. Writers, artists, and composers are influenced by others. Van Gogh himself did interpretations and translations of other artists’ work and found inspiration in Japanese prints, which he recreated.

“This all comes together in what I see as a new genre, a new way of encountering art,” combining art imagery, film, and a walk-through experience, said Corey Ross, the show’s co-producer, at the grand opening on Aug. 4.

It’s also a business.

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Guests walk through the exhibit "Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience" ahead of its opening to the general public at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California, July 19, 2021. No fewer than five companies are producing “experiences” of the artist in dozens of cities across North America.

Art for all ages – and for profit

The show, playing in the former home of the iconic Amoeba Music store on Sunset Boulevard, is part of a hugely popular global trend in projected art produced by mostly non-museum, for-profit companies. Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt, and Frida Kahlo have all made it to the gigantic-projection format. Like his sky in “The Starry Night,” Van Gogh shows are blanketing the universe, with no fewer than five companies producing “experiences” of the artist in dozens of cities across North America.

“Immersive Van Gogh,” produced by Lighthouse Immersive and Impact Museums, was designed and created by Italian film producer Massimiliano Siccardi and includes music by Italian multimedia composer Luca Longobardi. It stole a scene in the Netflix series “Emily in Paris,” and has sold nearly 3 million tickets since its premiere in Toronto last summer, with basic, timed-entry tickets in Los Angeles going for $49.99 ($29.99 for children). According to its producers, that makes it “the most popular attraction currently in North America.” It’s opened in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco and is scheduled for 16 more cities, including Phoenix and Dallas.

The Los Angeles version, which bears the mark of creative director David Korins (of Broadway’s “Hamilton” and “Dear Evan Hansen”), starts with a darkened purple-framed tunnel leading to Van Gogh’s “Starry Night Over the Rhône,” presented as a kind of massive diorama. It then flows into a lobby with a night sky of illuminated neon globes and swirls on the ceiling.

A refreshment bar lines a wall covered with silk sunflowers, while the opposite wall presents some biographical material and a giant, sculpted, color portrait of the artist made of plaster and foam, giving visitors a feel for his thick brush strokes, or impasto. A spiraling sculpture of Van Gogh’s voluminous letters to his younger brother, the art dealer Theo, features a QR code visitors can use to download an app and ask the artist a question. Through artificial intelligence based on the letters, Van Gogh sends a “personalized” response.

The main event is a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, surround showing of Van Gogh images produced from 64 projectors that run on a continuous loop. Visitors, themselves splashed with the images, sit on socially distanced cubes to watch a mashup of masterpieces, morphing from one to the next, in which crows fly, windmills turn, clouds shift, and irises grow.

The soundtrack is integral to the production. When summer bursts onto Van Gogh’s glowing landscapes, Edith Piaf is belting out “Non, je ne regrette rien.” When his bedroom progresses from line drawing to full color, choral music creates an almost holy atmosphere. Dark clanging tones accompany his hospitalization and later self-commitment to an asylum in Saint Rémy, while his creativity during this period is marked by triumphant cymbal crashes from Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” At the show’s end, visitors applauded with enthusiasm – and even whooped.

Has Alexandra

The main event at "Immersive Van Gogh" in Los Angeles is a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, surround showing of Van Gogh images. Visitors sit on socially distanced cubes to watch a mashup of masterpieces, morphing from one to the next, in which crows fly, windmills turn, clouds shift, and irises grow.

“A feast”

“It’s so moving to see all these artists come together to bring his paintings to life,” says Roxy Shih, adding that the art seemed to breathe. Checking out the Van Gogh almond blossom bedding in the gift shop, Ms. Shih, a filmmaker in Los Angeles, recalled seeing only one Van Gogh in person – his bedroom – and that was long ago when she was traveling in Europe. Her companion, Jakuta Ptah, said he had never seen a real Van Gogh. But he described the immersive show as “a feast,” with one delicious course following another. 

Thomas Garbrecht, also browsing in the strategically placed gift shop, commented that he had not been a fan of Van Gogh until he saw his work face-to-face at a gallery. The actual paintings are so much better than the prints, he says. But he also loved the immersive show. It’s “apples and oranges” from a traditional art exhibit – an “extension” of the artist’s work. “I felt put into the art,” he said.

It struck me that the authenticity question can be a red herring, distracting from the idea itself and limiting the number of people who can enjoy that idea. 

Just months before that unforgettable New York exhibit decades ago, I was traveling in France and visited Arles. I looked for Van Gogh’s eye-popping colors in real life, but all I saw was pastel and came away rather disappointed. A decade later, my husband and I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. We both fell in love with a painting of a crab on its back, its orange and black legs a beautiful color contrast against a field of malachite. There was no postcard, so I bought the catalog. For Christmas, I took a mat knife to the crab page and framed it for my husband. It brings us so much joy, even though it’s “only” a print.

When Mr. Garbrecht turned the tables on me and asked what I thought of the immersive show, I didn’t tell him that the bigness and animation didn’t really do much for me – though a 14-year-old boy visiting with his mom told me he thought it was “pretty cool” to see art move.

Instead I shared that I was genuinely touched by the show’s ending, in which self-portraits of the artist – reflected in the water of “Starry Night Over the Rhône” – gradually rise into his magnificent night sky, becoming stars of their own. They speak to the immortality of his art, however presented, that is still reaching millions of people. Combined with the gentle, ascending music of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” the scene worked like a Hollywood ending, and I found my eyes misting up. Manipulative? Yes, and even a bit kitschy. But meaningful, nonetheless.

Before I went to this show, I emailed the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I wondered what they thought of this immersion craze. It turns out, they have an interactive, multimedia exhibit of their own, the official “Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience.” The traveling exhibit was recently in Lisbon and will open in Madrid in September.

The museum has no objections to these other shows; in fact, it welcomes them.

“It’s nice to see how the works by Vincent van Gogh still inspire makers and creatives up to the present day. We therefore look at these initiatives as worthwhile additions. Not everyone is able to travel to our museum in Amsterdam,” a spokesman replied. And yet, the museum hopes these shows will inspire a visit, because “there is nothing more powerful than getting in touch with the real works of art.”

Pajhwok Afghan News/Handout via REUTERS

People in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, carry Afghan flags as they take part in an anti-Taliban protest Aug.18, 2021.

Is this a new Taliban?

On Tuesday, the Islamist group that now controls Afghanistan announced that women need not wear burqas (full body covering) but must wear hijabs (headscarves). Women and girls could receive an education and be allowed to attend university. Women would be welcomed to serve in government.

These few details, if actually implemented, would suggest the Taliban might have changed from their previous rule between 1996 and 2001, when they relied on harsh violence to impose their vision of a social Utopia.

What has not changed, according to Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, is that women’s rights would be respected only “within Islamic law.” In other words, the Taliban, by force of their weapons and self-defined authority, would remain the interpreter of Islamic scripture and would define the moral behavior for Afghans.

These initial pronouncements, even if merely an insincere move to prevent a strong backlash, show the Taliban are aware of shifts among the world’s Muslims, as well as Afghans, since they last ruled. Here are just a few examples of those shifts:

In 2018, Saudi Arabia allowed women to drive. Also in that year, Iraqis united in helping to overthrow the Islamic State’s ruthless caliphate. In 2020, Sudan’s leaders agreed to enshrine the principle of “separation of religion and state” in the constitution.

In 2016, Tunisia’s largest Islamic party, Ennahda, took a remarkable step and separated its religious and political work. During pro-democracy protests in Iraq and Sudan in 2019, women were in the forefront demanding basic rights. In Egypt, women are using Islamic law (sharia) to expand their rights to divorce. And in a few Middle Eastern countries, democracy is being tried for the first time at the local level, including the right of women to vote or hold office. In Afghanistan itself, about 40% of girls have been in school and 27% of the seats in the nation’s parliament were held by women.

The issue of how the Taliban treat women is important beyond itself. The group’s apparent concessions toward women are a window into how Muslims in general are gaining new political freedoms to participate in governance and live under rule of law in which citizens are equal in determining the law.

For almost every society with religious communities, the debate is rarely easy in deciding the source of sovereignty – the basis of governing – especially societies with diverse views and practices. Does sovereignty lie with God or with religious authorities? Or do individuals have the agency to understand religious texts and express their political views through a pluralistic democracy?

In recent years, the Muslim world has accepted more individual agency and consensus politics rather than ruler-centered governance.

For a quarter century, Taliban leaders have had to operate outside Afghanistan. They once banned television; now they rely on it. They once shunned women in governance, but have learned to sit down with Afghan women during recent peace negotiations. They, like the rest of us, are being served up constant reminders of where sovereignty lies. It’s a tough lesson for any society. But a necessary one.