George Packer

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We are living in an authoritarian state.
It didn’t feel that way this morning, when I took my dog for his usual walk in the park and dew from the grass glittered on my boots in the rising sunlight. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re ordering an iced mocha latte at Starbucks or watching the Patriots lose to the Steelers. The persistent normality of daily life is disorienting, even paralyzing.

In December 2023, I spent half a minute with Charlie Kirk in the bowels of the Phoenix Convention Center. Turning Point USA, the youth organization that he founded in 2012 and built into a right-wing juggernaut, was holding its annual convention in the city that the Chicago-born Kirk had made his home. Tall and dark-haired, he was moving quickly with a group of aides through a crowd of admirers.

Every month or so I get a desperate message from a 25-year-old Afghan refugee in Pakistan. Another came just last week. I’ve written about Saman in the past. Because my intent today is to write about her place in the moral universe of Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, I’ll compress her story to its basic details: During the Afghan War, Saman and her husband, Farhad (they requested pseudonyms for their own safety), served in the Afghan special forces alongside American troops.

Later this week, the Trump administration may impose travel restrictions on citizens from dozens of countries, supposedly because of security concerns. According to early reports, one of the countries on the “red” list, from which all travel would be banned, is Afghanistan.

On Sunday afternoon, I stood for three hours in a block of Midtown Manhattan—33rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues—surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. Every half hour or so, the herd shuffled forward 15 or 20 feet before the police barriers up ahead closed again. Whenever we moved, a chant of “USA! USA!” broke out, only to die as soon as progress stopped.

Salman Rushdie tells us that he wrote Knife, his account of his near-murder at the hands of a 24-year-old Shia Muslim man from New Jersey, for two reasons: because he had to deal with “the elephant-in-the-room” before he could return to writing about anything else, and to understand what the attack was about. The first reason suggests something admirable, even remarkable, in Rushdie’s character, a determination to persist as a novelist and a man in the face of terror.

In the summer of 1940, when Great Britain was fighting Nazi Germany alone, Winston Churchill asked to borrow a few dozen aging American destroyers to defend the English coast from imminent invasion. Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Mr. President, with great respect, I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”Today Ukraine is fighting Russia alone.

If 10/7 was Israel’s 9/11, as many of the country’s leaders have said, the meaning of the comparison is not self-evident. Its implications still have to be worked out, and they might lead to unexpected places.The horror is comparable, but the scale isn’t.

Last spring in Kyiv, in the spartan second-floor office of the Center for Civil Liberties—which has just received the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize—I met the organization’s leader, Oleksandra Matviychuk. I didn’t know much about her then, and she was pressed between appointments, and the interview threatened to become the kind whose purpose neither side understands. But within a few minutes I realized that she was a remarkable person doing remarkable work.

I wish my friend Anne Garrels could have lived just a few days longer. She died early last Wednesday, but if she’d held on a few more hours, I like to imagine that she would have been able to enjoy (even while pretending to dismiss) the torrent of admiration from colleagues and listeners for her work as a foreign correspondent with National Public Radio. I wish she’d been able to read the glowing obituary that The New York Times had prepared for her.

The man who was about to interview Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution last Friday when a would-be murderer ran onstage with a knife is a 73-year-old former telemarketing entrepreneur from Pittsburgh named Henry Reese. He wears bow ties and speaks with a low-key, husky voice and shuns attention. But Reese and his wife, Diane Samuels, are two of the more remarkable ordinary people in America.

Every organization devoted to mass death needs a charmless, bespectacled, blank-eyed chief operating officer who inspires no one but keeps the gears of murder turning. Ayman al-Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden’s Himmler. President Biden and most Americans will see his death as just revenge for the three thousand innocents killed by Al Qaeda in the United States on September 11, 2001—and so it is. But I have to admit that Zawahiri’s end leaves me cold.

“Don’t forget about Ukraine,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said last Sunday at the end of an interview with CBS. “We have the same values, we have the same color of blood, and we are fighting for freedom and we will win.”Less than two months ago, democracy in America and elsewhere seemed to be drifting toward its own expiration. Then the Russian invasion and unbending Ukrainian resistance delivered a shock to the democratic world that restored its heartbeat.

It’s striking how many stories and pictures from the war in Ukraine involve animals. One of the first Ukrainian civilian victims was a woman killed by Russian shelling as she tried to bring shelter dogs to safety near Kyiv. During the evacuation of the city, railway platforms and trains were crowded with pets of all kinds. A woman carried her infirm German shepherd a dozen miles on foot to cross the Polish border.

Perhaps you missed the Taliban’s statement on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The Islamic Emirate calls for restraint by both parties,” Afghanistan’s new rulers announced on February 25. They emphasized “diplomatic neutrality,” while urging “dialogue” and demanding that “all sides need to desist from taking positions that could intensify violence.

“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs,” Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire part owner of the Golden State Warriors, said last month on a podcast. “I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay. Of all the things I care about, yes, it is below my line.” Supply chains are above this venture capitalist’s line, but any concern for human rights abroad is a “luxury belief.

For the past 10 days, thousands of private citizens have been working around the clock, through informal networks of friends and colleagues, to organize evacuation flights from Afghanistan to countries like Albania and Kyrgyzstan, and to help Afghans get their name on passenger manifests and safely reach the Kabul airport. This effort, which is largely taking place on WhatsApp and Signal, has been called a “digital Dunkirk.”
At this point the phrase is too generous.

“This is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on CNN on Sunday—and he was right. By the time helicopters took off from Saigon rooftops in April 1975, the evacuation of endangered South Vietnamese had been going on for several weeks.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan—enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided.

In 2006, soon after I returned from my fifth reporting trip to Iraq for The New Yorker, a pair of top aides in the George W. Bush White House invited me to lunch to discuss the war. This was a first; until then, no one close to the president would talk to me, probably because my writing had not been friendly and the administration listened only to what it wanted to hear.

If the purpose of the Afghan War was to prevent terrorists from using Afghanistan to stage attacks on the United States, America could have declared victory and gone home years ago. But if the purpose was also to help build a durable state—to prevent the Taliban from taking power again, destroying the hard-won progress made by millions of Afghan citizens, and perhaps allowing radical Islamists to regain a base on Afghan soil—then the longest war in U.S. history is ending in defeat.

In 1966, a young American journalist named Frances FitzGerald began publishing articles from South Vietnam in leading magazines, including this one. She was the unlikeliest of war correspondents—born into immense privilege, a daughter of the high-WASP ascendancy. Her father, Desmond FitzGerald, was a top CIA official; her mother, Marietta Tree, a socialite and liberal activist.

Autobiographies of famous people are almost always disappointing. The demands of public life degrade literary prose: the euphemisms, evasions, forced optimism, and name-checking; the pressure to please different constituencies; the need to project one’s personality onto a huge stage; the relentless schedule, the lack of time alone. Living with one eye on popular opinion and the other on history kills the inwardness without which writing turns into making statements.

Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth. For example, how often do you reflect on the fact that the Trump administration has all but ended the tradition of accepting refugees into this country? In the decades between the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who signed the Refugee Act of 1980, and that of Barack Obama, the United States admitted an average of about 80,000 refugees annually.

“We’re not a democracy,” Republican Senator Mike Lee tweeted in the middle of Wednesday night’s vice-presidential debate. He was reacting to something he’d heard onstage there, in his home state of Utah. Another tweet: “The word ‘democracy’ appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic. To me it matters.

Andrew Weissmann was one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the special counsel’s investigation of the 2016 election, and he’s about to publish the first insider account, called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. The title comes from an adapted quote by the philosopher John Locke that’s inscribed on the façade of the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C.: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.

By the time Attorney General William Barr tried to fire Geoffrey Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, over the weekend, the Department of Justice had become an extension of the financial and political interests of President Donald Trump. No act of politicization was too blatant for the country’s top law-enforcement officer.