By Telos Press · Friday, September 24, 2021 Today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast features our recent panel discussion on the causes and consequences of the U.S. failure in Afghanistan. With presentations from Telos editors Mark Kelly, Adrian Pabst, Marcia Pally, David Pan, and David Westbrook, the discussion covered various aspects of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as well as its implications for the future of the region, the promotion of liberal democracy and human rights, and the influence of the United States and the West more generally. We were also delighted to be joined by our listeners from around the globe, who posed thoughtful and provocative questions to the panel following the presentations.
The discussion picked up on a number of arguments addressed at greater length in the “Forum on Afghanistan” featured in Telos 196 (Fall 2021), our new issue, which is now available in the Telos Press store. Links to the individual articles are also provided here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the articles at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, August 12, 2021 Renaud Girard is an American-born French journalist, the author of several books on world affairs, especially the Middle East. In this trenchant commentary on the Afghan debacle, he recognizes the defeat for what it is, bluntly invoking the collapse of the imperial German army at the end of the First World War. Is that an overstatement or an unflinching naming of the collapse of an order? Girard brings a realist eye to the factors that have contributed to the current situation, asking us to understand them and their consequences, as the Taliban proceed from city to city, heading toward Kabul.
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By Renaud Girard · Thursday, August 12, 2021 The following essay was published in Le Figaro on August 9, 2021, and appears here in translation with the permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
On Sunday, August 8, 2021, the Afghan Taliban took three provincial capitals, including Kunduz, the large city in the north of Afghanistan, close to the frontier with Tajikistan on the road that leads from Kabul to Dushanbe. Kunduz was previously the general quarter of the German forces intervening within the NATO framework. [First Quartermaster General Erich] Ludendorff once called August 8, 1918, a “day of mourning for the German army.” August 8, 2021, will certainly remain a “day of mourning” for the Afghan army that the Americans have been training and equipping for twenty years. As panic feeds panic, and debacle leads to debacle, one cannot see how the Afghan army will be able to prevent the imminent fall of Kandahar, Mezar, Herat, and Jalalabad, before facing definitive defeat at Kabul.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, June 13, 2016  Critical theory inherited the mission of philosophy to know the world and to pursue the good life. Careful examination should shed light on the cosmos and our place within it and contribute to a beneficial ordering of human concerns, when wisdom informs governance. Yet that aspiration to know the world encountered the limits of intelligibility, beyond which reason could not proceed. Meanwhile, the efforts to remake the world in the spirit of reason elicited processes of rationalization, as deleterious to the world around us, the natural environment, as to the world within us, the ongoing cultural crisis of modernity and its social corollaries. That is Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment at the foundation of the critical theoretical tradition that continues to provide a framework with which to articulate a critique of the contemporary in its many heterogeneous facets: the disruption of all forms of solidarity, the pressures on family structures, the erosion of educational opportunities, the growing gap between rich and poor. Add to this the ominous shifts in the international order, including the breakdown of state structures from North Africa through the Middle East, the strains on the European Union, and the return of a repressive semi-dictatorship in Russia, while—at this point in the presidential election season—the United States seems to be tumbling dangerously toward Weimar conditions.
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By Lukas Szrot · Tuesday, July 7, 2015 The aftermath of the War on Terror rages on despite bipartisan assurances that “major combat operations are over” and that “the war is coming to a close.” This ongoing conflict has produced, and continues to produce, prodigious human casualties and economic hemorrhaging. Tim Luke’s words regarding September 11, 2001, are in many ways as timely today as they were nearly fourteen years ago.
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By David Pan · Thursday, April 9, 2015  The worldwide reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks can be seen as a welcome indication of a global consensus concerning freedom of speech, individual rights, and opposition to Islamic fundamentalism. However, left-wing critics such as Noam Chomsky have criticized the worldwide demonstrations against the attacks as hypocritical because they ignore the more serious massacres that have been conducted by Americans with drone strikes and in military activities in Iraq, Serbia, and Syria. As Chomsky writes, “[a]lso ignored in the ‘war against terrorism’ is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times—Barack Obama’s global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians reportedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported.” Such an equation of “their terror” with “our terror” is based on an image of a universal history in which all of mankind lives within a unified natural community and there is a single standard of measure that could be the basis of criminal behavior. We see this same approach in a more moderate form in Jack Miles’s similar exhortation that the proper response to ISIS and Al Qaeda is that “[y]ou are criminals and we send criminals to jail” rather than declaring a “war on radical Islam.” For both Chomsky and Miles, terrorist attacks count as criminal activity and should be equally condemned from the universal viewpoint of a peace-loving humanity. By diminishing the difference between criminal violence and war, they illustrate the basic tenet of a version of universal history—that all humans are linked together into a common set of natural laws and that such laws transcend historical and political differences. Every war in this perspective would be just as senseless and unjustified as any other form of murder. Teju Cole and Slavoj Žižek make a similar move when they indicate that there is something hypocritical about the support for Charlie Hebdo when other massacres, such as the one by Boko Haram in Baga, Nigeria, go unnoticed and unmourned.
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