News From Barbaria: "What We Can Learn From Afghanistan's Fearless Girls," Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times

Holly Pickett for The New York Times

"What We Can Learn From Fearless Girls"

Opinion Columnist, The New York Times

Lying in her hospital bed in Kabul, Afghanistan, injured by an extremist group’s triple-bombing at her school this month that killed more than 80 of her classmates, a 17-year-old girl named Arifa was as determined as she was frightened.

“I will continue my education, even if I’m afraid,” Arifa, who hopes to become a doctor, vowed to Richard Engel of NBC News.

My column today argues that the world has much to learn from fearless girls like Arifa. Since 9/11, America has tried to use its military toolbox to overcome extremism, but as our withdrawal from Afghanistan suggests, military power has limits. Even after 20 years and $2 trillion, we haven’t been able to reshape Afghanistan or beat the Taliban. So I argue that we should rely more on other tools — especially education. Please read!

Pushing Back on Reader Pushback …

Many readers were indignant at my recent column about Israel. Some objected that I was equating an allied leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, with Hamas terrorists. Others said that Hamas started it all. Still others protested that the aid we provide Israel actually goes to American companies that sell weapons, so it is really aid to American corporations rather than to Israel.

Let me focus on that last point, about aid to Israel. It’s true that the money goes mostly to U.S. companies, but wouldn’t the money be better spent, say, buying vaccine from U.S. pharma companies to provide Covid-19 vaccinations for people in poor countries? Seems to me a higher-return investment than bombs to blow up Palestinians.

More broadly, Israel is a rich country. If it wants to buy armaments from us, why shouldn’t it pay for them? Israel, for example, can afford universal health care for its citizens, which the United States lacks (that’s one reason Israel has a longer life expectancy than the United States). So why should the median taxpayer in America pay for weapons for Israel that Israeli taxpayers are unwilling to fund?

Whenever one criticizes Israel, the canard about anti-Semitism also comes up. This cheapens the discussion and devalues anti-Semitism, which is a real problem around the world. It’s no more anti-Semitic to oppose Netanyahu than it is Islamophobic to oppose the Taliban.

Don’t Blame Automation. Blame Policymakers.

One of the most devastating statistics in the United States is that the weekly wages for production workers were lower in January of this year, after adjusting for inflation, than they had been in December 1972. I’ve written in “Tightrope” about the disintegration of working-class America — and the toll on my old friends, dying from drugs, alcohol and suicide — and much of that is a result of falling blue collar wages.

Americans sometimes think this is a consequence just of automation and globalization, but it’s not (although those were factors). A new economics paper makes clear how much of this was deliberate policy that weakened workers and limited their bargaining power. In a perverse sense, this is somewhat encouraging. If all this was policy driven, we can reverse those policies and begin to recover from self-inflicted damage

Lessons From Afghanistan

There’s one story that I learned on a reporting trip in Afghanistan that I didn’t put in my new column. Entrepreneurial Afghans were setting up tents and campfires on hilltops and then telling U.S. forces that these were Taliban camps. The U.S. would drop millions of dollars worth of bombs on the “camps,” and then the next day the Afghans would go and pick up the remnants of the bombs and sell them as scrap metal.

That’s not sustainable, and neither is the toll in lives and wealth. So I think President Biden is right to end the war and bring troops home — along with translators and others who would be at risk if we left them behind. But if war in Afghanistan is not sustainable, what is sustainable is education, especially girls’ education of the kind that has empowered Arifa. Please read my column!

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