Fareed’s Global Briefing
Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good
October 11, 2022 ... 7:04 PM (2 hours ago)
Russia Retaliates, but to What End?
After an explosion on Saturday damaged a key bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean Peninsula, a part of Ukraine that Russia has occupied since 2014, Russia has struck back with a series of missile and drone strikes across Ukraine targeting infrastructure and causing civilian deaths. But as for the strategic and tactical impact of this response, The Economist writes that “more punitive attacks will not salvage” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “faltering war.”
Amid that faltering, Ukraine “has a window of opportunity at least for the next month, maybe a bit longer” to press for more gains before winter sets in and before Putin’s mobilization has a chance to reinforce the invading Russian army, according to analysis offered on the latest episode of the War on the Rocks podcast by Michael Kofman of the US defense think tanks Center for Naval Analyses and Center for a New American Security.
If Putin Lost Power, War Might Still Rage
Of Ukraine’s battlefield gains, Russia’s mobilization and an expected economic downturn in Russia, The Economist wrote last week, “The cumulative effect of all this is to call into question Mr Putin’s popular support.”
Amid such speculation about Putin’s political standing in Russia, author and King’s College London emeritus war-studies professor Lawrence Freedman writes on Substack that while he can envision certain Russian elites vying to replace Putin, depending on how the war unfolds, a successor in the Kremlin may not be any more peaceful.
“Even if something does break in Moscow,” Freedman writes, “the risk is that it won’t be clean. Instead of Putin being replaced by a new leader who appreciates the situation and wishes to negotiate the withdrawal of Russian forces it as likely that there will be a messier situation, with different groups jockeying for position and possibly clashing with each other.”
At War on the Rocks Shawn Cochran writes, based on his review of wartime leaders in the middle of the 20th century and onward, that “even if leadership change is often a necessary condition for war termination, it is rarely a sufficient condition.”
A Country Submerged
After heavy monsoon rains left more than one third of Pakistan flooded, the country now faces an aftermath of waterborne diseases, Deutsche Welle reports.
Commentators have voiced frustration with government water-management policies and the disaster response, the injustice of a developing country like Pakistan suffering a climate catastrophe when rich countries emit far more greenhouse gases, and the seeming inevitability that weather disasters will get more frequent and worse as the planet warms.
“We experienced similar conditions in 2010, when serious flooding overwhelmed my country,” Ibrahim Buriro writes in a New York Times opinion essay. “Since then, the elders in my community have been warning that the next one would be even more severe, and that we would be less resilient in withstanding it. They watched how feudal elites and bad government planning interfered with the natural courses of our waterways. They predicted the calamity. It came.”
At The Atlantic, Nazish Brohi writes critically of government “contingency plans,” evacuation protocols and more. At The New Yorker, Mira Sethi observes desperate relief efforts and families crowded along roadsides to escape “the festering water.”
In Afghanistan, Past Is Present
Speaking with Afghan women in her home country, refugee and magazine fellow Bushra Seddique writes for The Atlantic that the Taliban have sent women back in time.
“Our mothers and grandmothers refer to these times as the ‘unblessed years,’” Seddique writes of the Taliban’s first reign, beginning in the 1990s. Today, women are experiencing it again. (Since she can no longer attend school, one 14-year-old girl Seddique spoke with “stays home all day, doing nothing, looking at her old books.”)
“Now that the time of unblessing has returned,” Seddique writes, “it has become clear that as we grew up, my generation was witnessing not the beginning of a new future, but an anomalous moment in our country’s sad history. We had been enthusiastic, energetic, happy, and hopeful. On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan returned to zero. Or even less than zero, because the path to freedom feels even longer and more dangerous now, and Afghan women are so very tired.”
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