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afghan war
Who Wants to Kill and Die for the American Empire?
Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Sep 06, 2024
The Associated Pressreports that many of the recruits drafted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination required to actually aim their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire... That is why our men are dying,” said a frustrated battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade. “When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”
This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of U.S. Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a First World War veteran and the chief combat historian of the U.S. Army in the Second World War. Marshall conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. troops in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.
One of Slam Marshall’s most startling and controversial findings was that only about 15% of U.S. troops in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In no case did that ever rise above 25%, even when failing to fire placed the soldiers’ own lives in greater danger.
We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
Marshall concluded that most human beings have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by our upbringing and religious beliefs, and that turning civilians into effective combat soldiers therefore requires training and indoctrination expressly designed to override our natural respect for fellow human life. This dichotomy between human nature and killing in war is now understood to lie at the root of much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.
Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, with the introduction of firing range targets that looked like enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted similar research in the Korean War, Marshall found that changes in infantry training based on his work in World War II had already led to higher firing ratios.
That trend continued in Vietnam and more recent U.S. wars. Part of the shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq stemmed directly from the dehumanizing indoctrination of the U.S. occupation forces, which included falsely linking Iraq to the September 11th terrorist crimes in the U.S. and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”
A Zogby poll of U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2006 found that 85% of U.S. troops believed their mission was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed that the primary reason for the war was to “stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This was all pure fiction, cut from whole cloth by propagandists in Washington, and yet, three years into the U.S. occupation, the Pentagon was still misleading U.S. troops to falsely link Iraq with 9/11.
The impact of this dehumanization was also borne out by court martial testimony in the rare cases when U.S. troops were prosecuted for killing Iraqi civilians. In a court martial at Camp Pendleton in California in July 2007, a corporal testifying for the defense told the court he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution. “I see it as killing the enemy,” he told the court, adding, “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.”
U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan (5,429 killed) were only a fraction of the U.S. combat death toll in Vietnam (47,434) or Korea (33,739), and an even smaller fraction of the nearly 300,000 Americans killed in the Second World War. In every case, other countries suffered much heavier death tolls.
And yet, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan provoked waves of political blowback in the U.S., leading to military recruitment problems that persist today. The U.S. government responded by shifting away from wars involving large deployments of U.S. ground troops to a greater reliance on proxy wars and aerial bombardment.
After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military-industrial complex and political class thought they had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” and that, freed from the danger of provoking World War III with the Soviet Union, they could now use military force without restraint to consolidate and expand U.S. global power. These ambitions crossed party lines, from Republican “neoconservatives” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in October 2000, a month before winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton echoed her mentor Albright’s infamous rejection of the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.
“There is a refrain…,” Clinton declared, “that we should intervene with force only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should not ever shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.”
During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton on that statement. “I wonder if you think that every foreign country—the majority of countries—would actually welcome this new assertiveness, including the 1 billion Muslims that are out there,” he asked, “and whether or not there isn’t some grave risk to the United States in this—what I would say, not new internationalism, but new imperialism?”
When the aggressive war policy promoted by the neocons and Democratic hawks crashed and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should have prompted a serious rethink of their wrongheaded assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal uses of U.S. military force.
Instead, the response of the U.S. political class to the blowback from its catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was simply to avoid large deployments of U.S. ground forces or “boots on the ground.” They instead embraced the use of devastating bombing and artillery campaigns in Afghanistan, Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria, and wars fought by proxies, with full, “ironclad” U.S. support, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and now Ukraine and Palestine.
The absence of large numbers of U.S. casualties in these wars kept them off the front pages back home and avoided the kind of political blowback generated by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The lack of media coverage and public debate meant that most Americans knew very little about these more recent wars, until the shocking atrocity of the genocide in Gaza finally started to crack the wall of silence and indifference.
The results of these U.S. proxy wars are, predictably, no less catastrophic than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. domestic political impacts have been mitigated, but the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved are as deadly, destructive, and destabilizing as ever, undermining U.S. “soft power” and pretensions to global leadership in the eyes of much of the world.
In fact, these policies have widened the yawning gulf between the worldview of ill-informed Americans who cling to the view of their country as a country at peace and a force for good in the world, and people in other countries, especially in the Global South, who are ever more outraged by the violence, chaos, and poverty caused by the aggressive projection of U.S. military and economic power, whether by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups, or economic sanctions.
Now the U.S.-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are provoking growing public dissent among America’s partners in these wars. Israel’s recovery of six more dead hostages in Rafah led Israeli labor unions to call widespread strikes, insisting that the Netanyahu government must prioritize the lives of the Israeli hostages over its desire to keep killing Palestinians and destroying Gaza.
In Ukraine, an expanded military draft has failed to overcome the reality that most young Ukrainians do not want to kill and die in an endless, unwinnable war. Hardened veterans see new recruits much as Siegfried Sassoon described the British conscripts he was training in November 1916 in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer: “The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.”
Several months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sassoon wrote Finished With War: a Soldier’s Declaration, an open letter accusing the political leaders who had the power to end the war of deliberately prolonging it, which was published in newspapers and read aloud in Parliament. The letter ended:
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.
As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are taking increasingly desperate risks, all the while insisting that the U.S. must come to their rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have surrendered the initiative to these foreign leaders, who will keep pushing the United States to make good on its promises of unconditional support, which will sooner or later include sending young American troops to kill and die alongside their own.
Proxy war has failed to resolve the problem it was intended to solve. Instead of acting as an alternative to ground wars involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have spawned ever-escalating crises that are now making U.S. wars with Iran and Russia increasingly likely.
Neither the changes to U.S. military training since the Second World War nor the current U.S. strategy of proxy war have resolved the age-old contradiction that Slam Marshall described in Men Against Fire, between killing in war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historic crossroads, where we must once again make the fateful, unambiguous choice between the path of war and the path of peace.
If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be ready, as military experts tell us, to once more send tens of thousands of young Americans to their deaths, while also risking escalation to a nuclear war that would kill us all.
If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist our political leaders’ schemes to repeatedly manipulate us into war. We must refuse to volunteer our bodies and those of our children and grandchildren as their cannon fodder, or allow them to shift that fate onto our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
We must insist that our mis-leaders instead recommit to diplomacy, negotiation, and other peaceful means of resolving disputes with other countries, as the United Nations Charter, the real “rules-based order,” in fact requires.
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It Doesn't Take a Prophet to Know How Horrific a Trump Return Would Be
Neither Cassandra in Troy nor those of us predicting the obvious outcomes of America’s follies today really need divine gifts to see the future; all it takes is a little attention to history and the present moment.
Jun 12, 2024
A few days ago, my partner and I went in search of packing tape. Our sojourn on an idyllic (if tick-infested) Cape Cod island was ending, and it was time to ship some stuff home. We stopped at a little odds-and-ends shop and found ourselves in conversation with the woman behind the counter.
She was born in Panama, where her father had served as chief engineer operating tugboats in the Panama Canal. As a child, she remembered celebrating her birthday with a trip on a tug from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, sailing under an arch of water produced by fireboats on either side.
“But that all ended,” she said, “with the invasion. It was terrifying. They were bombing Panama City. The Army sent my family back to the U.S. so we wouldn’t be killed. I’ve never been back.” She was talking, of course, about the 1989 invasion of Panama ordered by President George H.W. Bush to arrest Manuel Noriega, that country’s president. For years, Noriega had been a CIA asset, siding with Washington as the Cold War played out in Central America. He’d worked to sabotage the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN guerillas in El Salvador who opposed a U.S.-supported dictatorship there. And he’d worked with Washington’s Drug Enforcement Agency while simultaneously taking money from drug gangs.
You could say that we predicted the obvious before it happened, but no one in power seemed to believe us and, after it happened, no one seemed to care.
That a CIA asset was involved in the drug trade could hardly have come as a surprise to that agency, given its own long history of cooperating with drug merchants, but when journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of Noriega’s drug connections, the U.S. decided to cut him loose and hardline neoconservatives like Elliot Abrams, one of the architects of the Contra war in Nicaragua, began pushing for an invasion. Abrams himself would resurface in the second Bush administration, where he would become a cheerleader for some of the worst crimes of the Global War on Terror. He would bob up yet again like some kind of malevolent cork in Donald Trump’s administration. And then, in July 2023, perhaps in a fit of bipartisan amnesia, President Joe Biden would nominate him to serve on his Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.
My partner and I told this woman that we remembered the invasion all too well. In fact, we’d joined a group of demonstrators occupying Market Street in San Francisco to protest it. But, I added, “Lots of people in this country don’t even know that there was an invasion, or that hundreds of civilians died.”
She nodded. “Nobody here knows about that. I’ve never met anyone who does. It was just one crook fighting another and Panama got in the way.” As we prepared to leave, she asked us, “Do you mind if I give you a hug?” We didn’t mind. We were honored.
The Curses of Cassandra
Speaking with that woman reminded me that those of us paying attention had a pretty good idea what the invasion of Panama would look like. After all, we’d followed the 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada. We knew civilians would die. You could say that we predicted the obvious before it happened, but no one in power seemed to believe us and, after it happened, no one seemed to care.
Reflecting on those moments brought to mind the Trojan prophet Cassandra, doubly cursed by the god Apollo both in her ability to foresee the future and in the fact that no one would believe her. She predicted the bloody and ultimately pointless Trojan War, but no one listened to her. The truth is that neither Cassandra in Troy nor those of us predicting the obvious outcomes of America’s follies today really need divine gifts to see the future. All it takes is a little attention to history and the present moment.
As I started to write this piece, however, something bothered me, like a student raising an insistent hand in the back row of the classroom of my mind. Wait, I thought, haven’t I written this before? And it turns out that, in a way, I did—back in 2021 on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. At the time, I focused on the rehabilitation of Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), who had made a lonely run for president in 1968 on a platform opposing the American war in Vietnam. In those days, opposing that war was considered naïve at best, treasonous at worst. Today, almost everyone in this country who even remembers Vietnam considers it a historic mistake, if not a moral catastrophe.
In that piece, I also pointed to editorials 20 years after 9/11 celebrating R. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, in the wake of those attacks. That AUMF authorized the use of “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” It permitted the 2001 invasion and disastrous 20-year occupation of Afghanistan and served as legal cover for the equally disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2021, press outlets that had once excoriated Lee for her vote were praising her for her courage and foresight. I imagine that, 20 years later, that praise was small comfort to her or any of the thousands of Cassandras who predicted that the U.S. would fail in Afghanistan—as it once had in Vietnam—or to the millions who knew (because the evidence was all around us) that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and so filled the streets of the world to protest that illegal and ill-judged war.
I ended the piece with a meditation on three young “Cassandras”—climate activists Greta Thunberg of Sweden, Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, and Martina Comparelli of Italy, who had traveled to Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. “Your pressure, frankly, is very welcome,” Italy’s then-prime minister Mario Draghi told them. “We need to be whipped into action. Your mobilization has been powerful, and rest assured, we are listening.”
“For the sake of the world,” I wrote then, “let us hope that this time Cassandra will be believed.”
You’re probably not surprised that the world has not acted to forestall the future foreseen by those young Cassandras. Today, Italy has a far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who complains to other European right-wingers about the “ultra-ecological fanaticism” she considers a threat to her country’s economy. Meanwhile, just like the 10 months before it, April 2024 was globally the hottest on record, a trend that shows no sign of abating. In fact, as I write this, temperatures topping 127°F (another record) present a threat to human life in India and Pakistan.
Nor have our own right-wing politicians been willing to recognize the truth of the crisis humanity faces. Consider, for example, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas—two states recently ravaged by heat and extreme weather—who not only have refused to recognize the climate reality in front of them, but have actively prevented measures that could mitigate global warming’s effects on working people in their states. Both governors have, in fact, signed laws prohibiting local governments from requiring employers to implement heat-safety measures for their workers. Not to mention the brazen “quid-pro-quo” meeting Donald Trump had with top oil executives where he demanded a billion-dollar bribe for his election campaign, in return for wiping out Biden-era climate regulations.
What Else Did We Know?
Well, there’sPalestine.
I’ll admit to having felt a surge of hope when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. That long-ago agreement between then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat began a lengthy, ultimately fruitless series of negotiations over the fate of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, areas seized by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
I remained hopeful, but I should have known better.
Hanan Ashrawi (long one of my personal heroes) did know better. In 1991, she’d been part of the Palestinian delegation to what came to be known as the Madrid Conference, convened by Spain at the behest of American President George H.W. Bush to try to find a way forward for the Palestinians and Israel. Other attendees represented the governments of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. What Ashrawi, a brilliant politician, scholar, and activist, didn’t know was that the process would also spawn secret talks between Israel and the PLO from which she and other Palestinian leaders would be excluded. Those talks culminated in the Oslo Accords (named for the city where they were negotiated).
Ashrawi immediately spotted a fundamental problem with those Accords, embodied in their first product, a letter of “mutual recognition” between the state of Israel and the PLO. “When I saw the letter, I was furious,” she told+972 Magazine in September 2023. Why? Because while the PLO formally recognized the state of Israel, and Israel, in turn, recognized the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinian people, the letter said nothing about the establishment of an actual Palestinian state. It did, however, allow the PLO’s leadership to return from exile, something they had long desired.
In that interview, Ashrawi also said:
I told Yasser Arafat that this agreement does not give him the basis for sovereignty or genuine access to the right to self-determination, that this is a functional administrative agreement… He was furious: “What, do you want an alternative leadership? Do you want the PLO not to return? That’s the whole point.” I said the goal is for you to return freely, as a sovereign leadership.
“One hates to be a Cassandra,” she added, “but unfortunately, I was 100 percent right.”
Unlike Arafat, Ashrawi had been living under the Israeli occupation and understood how it worked. Not having experienced the occupation in person, the exiled PLO leadership, she understood, simply couldn’t imagine Israel’s true intentions.
In truth, it took no Cassandra-like clairvoyance to see what would come of the Oslo agreements. Twenty years earlier, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made Israeli intentions perfectly clear, explaining his plans for the occupied territories this way: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement in between the Palestinians and another strip of Jewish settlement right across the West Bank so that in 25 years’ time neither the U.N. nor the U.S., nobody will be able to tear it apart.”
Another major feature of Oslo was the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the entity empowered (and funded) by Israel to administer the occupied territories alongside the Israeli Defense Forces. This, too, Ashrawi had resisted when, “way back in the 1980s,” the Israelis offered a similar arrangement “and we refused; we said we are not collaborators. I remember telling the military governor at the time that we are quite capable of running our lives, but we will not work under you.” When the PLO agreed to the formation of the Palestinian Authority in 1993, Ashrawi understood all too well that the new entity’s institutional survival, and (not incidentally) the jobs of its many employees would eventually come to depend on how well it served the occupation.
It’s not surprising then that, drawing on the insights of people like Ashrawi, some of us predicted a version of Israel’s endgame for Gaza back in 2005 when Ariel Sharon’s government announced its plan to “disengage” from that strip of land, granting to the Palestinian Authority the duty to run what has since come to be known as the world’s largest open-air prison.
And When Did We Know It?
This capacity to predict the future is beginning to feel a bit déjà-vu-ish. Right now, it’s not too hard to foresee the approaching catastrophe in Gaza. Indeed, at my own university and across the country and the world, even in Israel, students are desperately trying to prevent a genocide already in progress. While the “grownups” debate the legal definition of genocide, those young people continue to point to the murderous reality still unfolding in Gaza and demand that it be stopped before it’s too late.
There are enough dangers looming right in front of us that you don’t need second sight to realize how bad it is. In addition to the clear and present dangers of climate change, not to mention the potential for a new global pandemic, there’s another foreseeable horror looming over this country, which, despite blaring sirens and flashing lights, the mainstream media seems unable to quite believe is real. Ignoring the clanging alarms, many media outlets continue to treat the 2024 election season as just another contest between two equally legitimate political parties.
The reality is entirely different. In this year’s presidential election, we are facing the potential elevation of a genuine instrument of fascism. I think it’s appropriate to characterize Donald Trump as an “instrument” of other people’s ideology, because I suspect that he personally has neither the knowledge nor the attention span to elaborate any political theory or coherent plan for the future. His previous presidency was, in fact, marked by chaotic, instinctive stabs in the direction of whatever target presented itself—or was presented to him by those seeking to influence his decisions. The world is probably lucky that the people surrounding Trump then were a greedy, self-serving lot.
We wouldn’t be that lucky in a second Trump presidency. It doesn’t take a prophet to imagine what such a regime might look like. All you have to do is dip into the 887-page Mandate for Leadershipthe Heritage Foundation has prepared for his future presidency. It lays out an explicit vision of an authoritarian government serving the interests of the wealthy, one likely to unfold under the auspices of Project 2025, a step-by-step plan to replace our democratic government apparatus with Heritage-vetted-and-trained political functionaries.
We don’t need Cassandra to predict that future. All we need to do is pay attention to what’s right in front of us right now.
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Extreme Flooding Kills Hundreds in Climate-Vulnerable Afghanistan
"This is a subsistence agriculture community and society. So, they're bearing the brunt of it, without having necessarily contributed to the issue very much," one aid worker said.
May 14, 2024
Severe flooding in Afghanistan over the weekend has killed more than 300 people and destroyed thousands of homes in rural villages.
The flash floods—prompted by heavy rainfall—came on the heels of an extreme drought in one of the nations that is most vulnerable to the climate emergency, yet has done little to contribute to it.
"They're not net emitters of carbon," Timothy Anderson, head of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in Afghanistan, toldCNN. "This is a subsistence agriculture community and society. So, they're bearing the brunt of it, without having necessarily contributed to the issue very much."
"How many more tragedies must happen for the world to prioritize climate action?"
The rain and flooding inundated 21 districts in the northeastern provinces of Badakhshan, Baghlan, Takhar on Friday and Saturday, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The extent of the flooding caught many villagers by surprise.
In Folo in Bulka district of Baghlan province, the rain began during Friday prayers, softly at first, and then quickly building in intensity.
Resident Barakatullah told CNN that it does not often rain so high up in the mountains and that villagers had to scramble as the situation "turned dire."
"People fled to higher ground, seeking refuge in mountains and hills," he said. "Unfortunately, some individuals who were unable to leave their homes fell victim to the floodwaters."
The WFP toldThe Associated Press that more than 300 were killed, and the U.N. Children's Fund reported that at least 51 of them were children. The government said Sunday that the storms killed 315 and injured more than 1,600.
The survivors were left to bury the dead and tally their losses. All told, the disaster destroyed or damaged 8,975 homes, according to OCHA. In Baghlan province alone, the floods washed away at least six public schools, 10,200 acres of orchards, and 2,260 livestock and damaged 50 bridges and 30 hydroelectric dams.
"Lives and livelihoods have been washed away," Arshad Malik, the Afghanistan director for Save the Children, told Reuters. "The flash floods tore through villages, sweeping away homes, and killing livestock."
Farmer Abdul Ghani told the AP that he was visiting family in another province when he learned of the floods. Rushing home to the Nahrin district in Baghlan province, he found the road he usually took to his village erased, his wife and three of his children dead, and another child missing.
"My life has turned into a disaster," he said.
Muhammad Yahqoob, who lives in the same district and lost 13 family members, told Reuters, "We have no food, no drinking water, no shelter, no blankets, nothing at all, floods have destroyed everything."
He added that out of 42 houses that used to stand in his village, only two or three were left.
"It has destroyed the entire valley," Yahqoob said.
Anderson of the WFP told CNN that losing livestock for many villagers meant losing all or part of their livelihoods. Further, the flooding disrupted the lives of people who were already struggling due to drought and destroyed measures they had taken to adapt, such as dams for rainwater and irrigation canals.
"It was already pretty grim. And now it's catastrophic," he told CNN.
The current disaster also follows rains and flooding in April that killed 70 and destroyed around 2,000 homes in southern and western provinces, according to AP.
The U.N. lists Afghanistan as one of the countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis, and it also lost a signficant amount of foreign aid when the Taliban took control in 2021. The aid has only decreased in the years since.
While decades of war means that Afghanistan faces unique challenges, it's not the only country that has been inundated with severe rain since the start of 2024. Extreme flooding this spring has displaced nearly a quarter million people in East Africa and half a million in southern Brazil.
"The climate crisis continues to rear its ugly head," Teresa Anderson, the global climate justice lead at ActionAid International, said in a statement. "With the latest incident, Afghanistan joins a long list of Global South countries grappling with floods this year. And this is as the world continues funding the climate crisis by expanding fossil fuels and industrial agriculture."
"How many more tragedies must happen for the world to prioritize climate action?" Anderson asked. "It's time to back climate action with the necessary climate funding. Communities, like those in Afghanistan, need this money to build resilience to climate impacts and pay for the losses and damages already caused by the climate crisis."
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