Australia: All Non-Vaccinated Will Be Locked Out of Economy, Freedom Only Permitted to Vaccinated

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse

Apparently the internet has been turned off for people in Australia.  That is the only reasonable explanation for how their political leadership can keep claiming that vaccinated people cannot contract the COVID virus.

{Press Conference Video}.

This claim is empirically refuted by every other nation who is seeing vaccinated people contracting COVID and “some” being hospitalized regardless of their vaccine status.

On a weirdly positive note it appears they have abandoned the regional Australian plan of “COVID-ZERO,” which was a plan to lock-down the entire nation, on a state-by-state basis, until they never had a single case of COVID and then re-open society.

They have abandoned that plan because it was abject nonsense from the outset; and reality showed the virus spreading despite their complete lock-down and quarantine protocols.  However, the latest COVID plan within the regional states is to use the enforcement of total vaccinated status before they will allow freedom.

In a press conference yesterday from Victoria, Premier Daniel Andrews proclaimed that vaccinated citizens in the state of Victoria will be allowed out of lockdown in the near future.  However, freedom as defined by access to medical treatment, the ability to work, shopping, attending events and engagement in the economy writ large, will not be permitted for any non-vaccinated citizen. Anyone who is not vaccinated will remain in locked-down isolation as enforced by the state.

Watch this segment to get a taste of the totalitarian propaganda.

The justification for withholding access to life in Victoria is based on a premise that vaccinated people do not contract COVID, therefore the coronavirus is a “virus of the unvaccinated.”  That statement is a completely false position.  As seen in the U.S., and all other nations around the world, the vaccinated population contracts COVID in the same way as the non-vaccinated.  Some studies have even shown the vaccinated population are susceptible to carrying higher loads of the virus than non-vaccinated individuals.

The vaccine provides zero-benefit from avoidance of the virus.  Any claim to the contrary is totally devoid of reality, science or empirical evidence.

In some nations -like Israel- there is more than a 90% vaccinated status, and yet the COVID virus is still infecting, spiking and creating large issues with hospitalization for those at greatest risk. A large percentage of that Israeli population is now triple-vaxxed; and yet the issues continue.   Conversely, in Sweeden and parts of the U.S, the economy and society is largely open and the variant viruses are running through the vaccinated and non-vaccinated population without a significantly disparate outcome.

Keep in mind the survival rate from infection is stunningly disconnected from the severity of these mitigation efforts.  The overall risks are very small except for those with pre-existing conditions that make them vulnerable to a respiratory virus.

Several weeks ago I would have dismissed opinion that Australia and New Zealand were some sort of testing ground for the ability of a government to control the activity of the population.  However, as I have watched the two nations conduct their COVID mitigation efforts; and contrast their claims against the reality of what is happening on the remaining parts of planet earth; I can no longer dismiss that theory…. in fact, I am becoming increasingly convinced that is exactly what is going on.

There is just no other way to explain the disconnect between: (1) what Australian political officials and state run health offices are saying; (2) the scale and scope of the totalitarian COVID mitigation efforts -writ large- they are executing; and (3) the reality of experiences in the rest of the civilized world.

The Australian government is not in an isolation bubble with the incapacity to see the world around them and communicate with other nations.  They know what is happening around the world and those worldwide events are completely contradictory from the decisions being made by the government officials down under.

What in happening in Australia and New Zealand for COVID mitigation is being done with intent and purpose; yet it is devoid of sense when contrast against the rest of the world.

Therefore, if we accept these officials are not literally stupid people; and if we accept they possess a reasonable constitution; the only reconciliation of their conduct is that some guiding element is instructing them to conduct their national affairs as if the experiences of the rest of the world are non-existent.  That would seem to affirm there is some sort of wide-spread social test happening down-under.

The most bizarre part of accepting the premise that Australia and New Zealand are testing grounds for government control in the 21st century, is then asking yourself how a nation of 25.5 million people cannot see their fishbowl of crazy.   Surely they still have access to the world-wide internet, or do they?  Are the Aussies and Kiwis able to use social media that connects them to other nations, or are there filters from Big Tech intended to support the government test?   Are journalists in Australia not capable of seeing the rest of the world?

I am not asking these questions out of some intent to be provocative or snarky; I genuinely cannot fathom how 25 million people cannot see the disconnect between the rules and regulations put upon them by their government and then contrast those restrictions against the visible outcomes in the rest of the world.

Australia seems to have become this weirdly antonymous state like North Korea.

Here’s the full press conference from Premier Daniel Andrews of Victoria.  He is quite passionate about following through with the rules he outlines.

If you have the time to watch this it is well worth it to gain a perspective on how the government is messaging to society with points about COVID that are completely and utterly false.  Perhaps it’s not a lie if they convince themselves to believe it….

Tell me if what Daniel Andrews is describing is not exactly THIS PICTURE:

(Mega-Resolution)

More than a decade ago, CTH predicted this outcome for our nation if we did not wake up.

X22, Red Pill news, and more-Sept 6

 

Hope you've had a great Labor Day, everyone! Here's tonight's news:

It's a Movement: Chanting Against Biden and They're Not Holding Back

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

Joe Biden was having difficulty in the polls prior to his failures in Afghanistan. But after that debacle hit — when it was so obvious to the general public how much he had screwed up not getting Americans and Afghan allies out before pulling the troops out — his numbers really hit the skids.

People have had enough. Not only is he underwater in the polls, he’s underwater by a lot — at last check, by four points a huge drop, and 51% disapproval, very bad numbers for Biden.

As we reported, most thought he should resign in a Rasmussen poll. Sixty percent even agreed that he should be impeached.

Demented grandpa is not a good look when it gets Americans killed. The veil that the media had placed over Biden suddenly got ripped off for a lot of people and they saw what a deficient leader and human being he truly was — for a lot of people who may not have been looking closely before. The media may try to spin for him in the future but it’s going to be hard to stuff that genie back in the bottle, especially when he continues to fail to address the ongoing issues.

One of the groups of people you would think he might still have a hold on would be the young, 18-25 year old age group, which group tends to be more liberal.

But the anecdotal evidence of this weekend indicates that even there, there may be a movement against Joe Biden.

We showed you some of the joy of the football games this weekend, of people coming together by the thousands, dispensing with COVID fear porn. It was quite something to see.

But there was something else in evidence, too, at some of these games – disgust at Joe Biden. People actually chanting “F**k you, Joe Biden.”

Warning for graphic language.

The Aggies student section let him have it as they wore red, white, and blue.

It’s even hitting sports bars and concerts.

Is it a movement? It may just be. It surely isn’t a good sign for Biden, but it’s a good sign for America that these folks have his number and they aren’t afraid to show it.

Abolition Fantasyland

 Abolition Fantasyland

A new book distills the problem with the Left’s anti-police imaginings.

Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

A World Without Police, by Geo Maher (Verso, 288 pp., $27)

It is hard to think of a slogan as dramatically unpopular as “defund the police.” As of March, just 18 percent of Americans supported the movement. Some House Democrats have blamed their party’s flirtation with it for their underperformance in the 2020 congressional election. And while some cities have slashed police budgets, more have resisted the urge; others attempting to make cuts have met with resistance from communities that don’t want violent crime in their backyards.

Geo Maher’s A World Without Police, released 15 months after the “defund” movement began, is thus best read not as a call to arms but as an epitaph. The book is a strangled cry for attention—a demand that we return to the fantasy world a few activists inhabited ever so briefly last summer, before rioting and violence snapped us back to reality.

Why get rid of the police? Much of Maher’s answer is standard-issue babble: policing’s sole purpose is to enforce “white supremacist capitalism” by harassing and murdering anyone who is not white, male, and straight, particularly black people. Maher recapitulates long-debunked claims that policing emerges out of slave patrols, and argues that even majority-black-run criminal-justice systems are obviously white supremacist.

As evidence for this argument, Maher leans heavily on various unpleasant anecdotes about the worst police brutality of the past century. Such arguments are a prime example of “sampling on the dependent variable,” using only outcomes selected on a criterion to prove the universality of that criterion. For example, if I wanted to prove that all leftists were lunatics, I can’t just use as evidence one leftist who was forced to resignhis academic job after tweeting “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” Lots of leftists have not written that “when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed,” and it would be poor reasoning to infer a general principle from this.

Where Maher does rely on something besides anecdote, he is reliably misleading or inaccurate. To prove that police “protect and serve” only white people, he cites relative rates of police killings of white and black people—neglecting to mention that an unarmed black man is about as likely to be killed by the police as he is to die in a bicycle accident. And he supports his claim that police do not reduce crime by citing “dozens” of studies that compare numbers of police to crime rates in and between cities. Such analyses are hopelessly compromised by simultaneity bias; three decades of better-quality research reliably finds that cops reduce crime.

This is all so slapdash, one suspects, because Maher is not actually all that interested in the world as it is, but in the fairytale world of police abolitionism. There, criminals are just poor victims of circumstance, while the real bad guys are the police and the evil system they uphold.

This becomes apparent in Maher’s discussion of what, exactly, will replace the police once we abolish them. After much hemming and hawing about “transformative justice” and “radical change,” he finally admits it: the burden of public safety will fall on you. “[A]lternatives begin to emerge when we choose to call friends, family, and neighbors instead of the cops, and build outwards in concentric circles,” he writes. “When there is a conflict among family members or between neighbors, this broader fabric can provide a critical alternative to bringing in the armed guardians of the state, because community members have more of a stake than the cops do in treating others like they matter.”

Maher offers additional proposals, ranging from “violence interrupters” and “preventative programming” to forming defense organizations modeled on the Black Panthers. (He approvingly cites the emergence of such militias in the breakdown of law and order in Minneapolis, conspicuously failing to note the city’s spiking homicide and shooting rate.) But at its core, the argument is this: the provision of protective services by the state should be replaced entirely by the initiative of individual communities, working together in accord with leftist visions of justice.

What makes A World Without Police worth reading is this distillation of an argument often made implicitly by people ostensibly far less radical than Maher. The New York Times’s Ezra Klein, for example, recently lamentedthat the police were still a necessary evil, at least so long as the “criminogenic conditions” in many communities had not been erased. This is also the core conceit of sociologist Patrick Sharkey’s Uneasy Peace—policing dramatically reduced crime, but now we need to move away from it and toward a more community-oriented crime control strategy.

What all these views have in common—though Maher is the most explicit about it—is the belief that there is something basically unnatural or alien about the institution of policing, and that its existence is a necessary evil until society returns to or attains some purer state. Public safety ought to be a collective responsibility, but for now at least, we have the police instead.

This notion gets policing all wrong. It is not that we have an institution of policing instead of community self-management; it is that community self-management is not possible without an agreed-upon set of social norms, which are enforced at last resort by an institutionalized system in the form of police and criminal justice. Communities can work their problems out insofar as people operate within the terms of a social contract. But antisocial behavior—whether it be public indecency or homicide—is characterized by an unwillingness to abide by those terms. Policing both manages such instances and reduces their frequency by creating the credible threat that backstops compliance.

This is the grim reality beneath the abolitionist fantasy. Drawing down the police will weaken communities, not empower them. It is no accident that the militias that Maher seems to prefer spring up in failed states—they are not a triumphant fulfilment of social order but an evil made necessary by its collapse.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank.

Biden and the Left-wing Standard of Attacking Presidents - VDH

In just a few months Joe Biden has wrought a series of disasters 

that will invoke outrage that dwarfs the concocted anger 

directed at Donald Trump.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

As Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, there still roared a left-wing revolution, a woke madness spreading through popular culture and Congress, much of which he indirectly has aided and abetted. It has redefined not just politics but the rules of the presidency. And the eventual casualty of these radical shifts in protocols and customs will be—Joe Biden.

Take impeachment, which heretofore had been rare and has still never led to a Senate conviction. Prior to Trump, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were the only presidents to have been impeached (Richard Nixon resigned to avoid it), and both were acquitted in the Senate. 

Yet leftist congressional representatives introduced articles of impeachment the very first week Trump was in office, on the absurd allegation of profiting from his office (the presidency cost the Trump corporations hundreds of millions). The House later went on to impeach him twice, without writs of “treason” and “bribery” or even “high crimes and misdemeanors” as set out by the Constitution. Instead, Trump was, first, successfully impeached for supposedly abusing his power and obstructing Congress. I don’t think the average American has ever been pulled over by the police for the high crime “of obstructing Congress” (historically a presidential pastime) or has been charged with “abuse of power” (said of every president from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama). 

Trump’s second impeachment was even flimsier. He was accused of “incitement of insurrection” concerning disturbances on January 6 that supposedly led to the violent death of Officer Brian Sicknick, the fatal shooting of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt, and the entire fable of an “armed insurrection.” Post-impeachment, we would learn that Sicknick died of natural causes. Strangely, for months no information about the shooter of Ashli Babbitt or the inquiry into that fatal act was ever fully released to the public. No one was charged with armed insurrection, largely because none of the buffoonish rioters were found either to have carried or used a firearm that day or were exposed as master plotters with plans to destroy the U.S. government. They may well have been guilty of felonies, but armed insurrectionary conspiracy was not one of them.

No matter, the precedent had been set that serial impeachments now will be normative when a president in his first term loses party control of the House. Charges may not follow constitutional definitions. There will be no need to appoint a special counsel, to build a case on evidence, or to hold a formal hearing where witnesses present testimonies and are subject to cross-examination. There will be no expectation that the Senate will even come close to convicting an impeached president. Impeachment is simply now a political gambit to embarrass a party or a president before a reelection. Biden and future presidents as private citizens could be hounded after exiting office with a Senate impeachment trial.

Joe Biden by such new standards would then be in jeopardy should the Democrats lose the House in 2022, on the precedent that the Republicans could bring up anything they wished—unwillingness to enforce existing federal immigration law, deliberately misleading the American public on the growing catastrophe in Afghanistan, leveraging a foreign leader to lie with threats of withholding U.S. airpower to enhance his own political agenda, or empowerment of and collusion with his son Hunter Biden in past efforts to massage foreign governments for cash on the expectation of future advantageous U.S. government treatment. These may be flimsy charges for traditional impeachment; they are certainly not under the new Democratic model.

When Donald Trump’s confidential phone calls with foreign leaders were leaked to the press it was celebrated by the media and the Left as a sort of blood sport. Now are we to think the same of the embarrassing leaked phone call between Biden and the Afghan president? 

Donald Trump was impeached over a phone call with the Ukrainian president for supposedly pressuring Ukraine, by the threat of holding up foreign aid, to conduct an investigation of the Biden family syndicate’s shenanigans. So, what are we to make then of Biden’s demand that the Afghan president lie to the world so that his fragile government did not appear in jeopardy, even if, Biden acknowledged, it, of course, was—with the added insinuation that Biden’s commitment to support the Afghan government with U.S. military power was predicated on his compliance with parroting such lies?

We saw from 2017 to 2021 the precedent that both active and retired top Pentagon brass would either leak derogatory assessments of the commander-in-chief to the press, or overtly declare him to be morally unfit to hold office—all in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. What then is the country to do, amid the Afghanistan catastrophe, when lots of retired generals are now going public with calls for their president’s key military and civilian office holders to resign for culpability for a series of foreign policy disasters? Is it a good thing for our generals and admirals to become editorialists and critics of an elected president’s administration or ill-conceived, both, neither—or sometimes, depending on who is president? 

In the Trump years, the Left institutionalized the new idea that threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment was a casual affair, a strategy appropriate to harming or removing a president. So the acting heads of the FBI and Justice Department apparently discussed plots to wear eavesdropping equipment to entrap Trump in recorded conversations that might reveal his alleged dementia. An Ivy League psychiatrist was called to Congress to swear that the president was non compos mentis and in need of a forced intervention. The media demanded proof of Trump’s sanity to the point he took—and aced—the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. 

Joe Biden is obviously suffering from some sort of organic illness that has reduced his mental faculties to the point he is often dazed. When he is rarely able to craft complete sentences, he says things that are incoherent, offensive, and occasionally racist. He seems to have no knowledge of current events and so reassures trapped Americans in Kabul that they can simply go to the besieged airport, show their passports, and waltz on in. 

Under the new protocols, are we to expect high Justice Department officials to record stealthily Biden’s private conversations, to subpoena an appropriate ivy league psychiatrist, or to ask the president to take a simple cognitive assessment test? 

Under Joe Biden, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, sought to ingratiate himself to the woke movement, to his woke Secretary of Defense, and to Joe Biden by assuring Congress he would get to the root of “white rage” and in general recommend to his troops the relevant woke texts such as those of Professor Ibram X. Kendi.

Milley produced no evidence that there were lots of insurrectionary white supremacists in the military. He cared little in his virtue signaling that “white” male soldiers had died in Iraq and Afghanistan at twice their numbers in the general population—a cardinal sin under woke disparate impact and proportional representation canons.

Again, fine. But given the sometimes violent nature of Black Lives Matter, and its apparently proud Marxist origins, is it now equally OK for some future chairman to testify that he will go through the ranks to understand black rage as his Pentagon roots out would-be BLM extremists?

These hypocrisies are endless, given the pernicious precedents that so casually have now been embraced for cheap political advantage. 

Will the next Speaker of the House ritually tear up Biden’s State of the Union address, as he hands the text to him on national television? 

Will the Congress appoint a special counsel, allot him 22 months and $40 million to scour the Biden team to find the causes, origins, and those culpable of the greatest foreign policy debacle since the last days of Vietnam—with occasional side trips along the tortured family money trail and indifference to the IRS of Hunter Biden’s international grifting? 

Will retired Trump-era CIA and high-ranking intelligence officials go on cable television to wink and nod about their privileged security clearance information to accuse Biden of treasonous behavior?

Will they tweet that he and his policies are similar to those of the German death camps, or stamp him as Mussolini or Hitler-like? 

And will some “brave” disillusioned Democratic “loyalist” be canonized in the media as he falsely reassures the nation, as “Anonymous II,” that he is both high-ranking and representative of a large, dissident, and grassroots resistance to Biden within his own administration and party? Will the New York Times print his warning that an army of idealists is ready and willing to resist any Biden presidential order that it finds distasteful? Is that the political culture that Biden should now operate under? 

Did the NATO allies find Trump’s brashness—which resulted in a considerable increase in alliance military funding and readiness—as bad as Biden’s soothing words that betrayed our European partners and have all but ruined the alliance?

Was all this hypocrisy predicated on the idea that the Left will never lose power, or that its atrocious behavior was defensible for the moment given the accident of Donald Trump? Or do Democrats really believe there must be one standard for leftist moralists and another for their supposed inferiors, on their blinkered assumption that there would never be a Democratic president as controversial and disliked by the Right as Donald Trump was by the Left?

The truth is that in just a few months Joe Biden has wrought a series of disasters that will invoke outrage that dwarfs the concocted anger directed at Donald Trump. And it may be vented through the very protocols that the Left invented for its own short-term advantage.

Biden and Newsom Urgently Need The Politics of COVID as a Tool For Distraction

Biden’s inflation is crushing the middle-class.  Gas prices are intentionally skyrocketing.  Obama Term-3 policies are destroying jobs and the working class.   The southern border is in crisis; widespread illegal immigration is alarming.

Biden’s Afghanistan strategy was/is a total FUBAR (by design).  Thirteen U.S. service members were killed by JoeBama policy.  Leftist promoted wokeism as a social engineering tool is running amok.  Schools are a battleground between parents and Obama’s union orcs.  Joe Biden himself is a hot mess of incompetence and dementia on a scale they can no longer keep hidden.  And the poll numbers for Biden overall are showing it.

The JoeBama crew must bury all of it by weaponizing the use of COVID-19 fear.  There is no other issue large enough to protect the JoeBama agenda without using COVID.

COVID-19 is the only political tool with the outcome to keep all other purposeful crises under control.

That urgent narrative is what’s behind this little soundbite segment from the professional media proletariat.  WATCH:

More cowbell = More COVID.  They really need more pandemic-centric focus.  Without it, they are very worried….

And at precisely this moment, more Americans everyday are waking up to the hoax behind the COVID narrative.

The MSNBC panel of narrative engineers has a major case of sad….

 

Fauci: Vaccine Booster Coming Soon and Mu Variant Showing Increased Avoidance of High-Level Antibodies, Making Way For Booster Two

During a CBS interview earlier this morning NIH Director Anthony Fauci, explains the future of the world healthcare through the eyes of the U.S. FDA and the pharmacy companies who control it.

For those who have taken the immune system altering “vaccine”, the booster shots will be coming soon; hopefully by September 20th, if not shortly thereafter.  The booster is needed to stem the impacts from the strength of the Delta variant created by the vaccine designed for the original COVID-19 virus.  The Delta booster will address the mutation of the virus, created by the vaccine.

Additionally, preliminary data on the “Mu variant” indicates it has a higher level of antibody resistance than the Delta variant; which Fauci infers could mean another booster, a “Mu booster” to supplement the booster for the first variant, Delta, which is needed as a result of COVID-19 virus resistance to the first round of vaccines….  WATCH:

The original “vaccine” creates the virus variant…. which now requires a booster… which will then create a variant…. that will later require a booster.

Once you get in the carnival car, you cannot get off ’til the ride is over.   It’s a great business model.

Note: No questions during the interview about the senior FDA and health officials who have quit because they no longer wish to participate in narrative distribution.  Still no mandatory vaccines for FDA employees.

The Lessons of Defeat in Afghanistan

 The Lessons of Defeat in Afghanistan

After twenty years, it hardly needs saying that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disastrous to U.S. interests and standing.

By Steve Coll New Yorker September 

5, 2021

Early in 2001, scurvy broke out in western Afghanistan. Typhoid and, possibly, cholera spread, along with malnutrition, a crisis exacerbated by three years of drought and five years of Taliban misrule. That May, Ruud Lubbers, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, visited the country and warned of a “humanitarian disaster.” Then Osama bin Laden unleashed the September 11th attacks, and, during the counterstrike, American warplanes dropped almost eighteen thousand bombs. At year’s end, the Taliban fell, but Afghanistan lay destitute; the average life expectancy there, the U.N. estimated, was forty-three years.

Illustration by João Fazenda

It seemed intuitive that fixing Afghanistan’s broken state should be part of the response to 9/11. Yet ambitious reconstruction and humanitarian aid did not figure initially in President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.” His Administration pivoted to invading Iraq, and it was only in 2006, after the Taliban’s comeback became highly visible, that the United States ramped up aid to strengthen Afghan state institutions and to fight the opium trade. President Barack Obama also made large investments, in Afghanistan’s military and civil society, yet the escalating scale of Western assistance exacerbated corruption, undermining the Kabul government’s credibility. By the time Joe Biden arrived at the White House, achieving Afghan self-sufficiency seemed likely to require many more years, if it was possible at all.

Nation-building in Afghanistan “never made any sense to me,” Biden told ABC News last month, explaining why, in April, he had announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the country. His decision precipitated a Taliban takeover of Afghan cities that culminated in the return of their white banners over Kabul. Last week, as Americans prepared to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, Biden delivered a televised address in which he sought to present his choices as a forward-looking doctrine of national security. His decision to withdraw “is not just about Afghanistan,” he said. “It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”

It hardly needs saying by now that America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disastrous to U.S. interests and standing. They radicalized jihadists and claimed the lives of nearly seven thousand American service members, and of at least two hundred thousand Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Yet Biden’s decision to withdraw the roughly twenty-five hundred remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan seems to have been heavily influenced by, in addition to his disdain for state-building, the terms of a deal with the Taliban that he inherited from the Trump Administration, which had committed U.S. forces to depart by May of this year. As Biden assessed it, if he did not pull out the troops as Trump had promised, he would have had to escalate combat against the Taliban, a course he rejected. Even as he ordered the pullout, he promised billions of dollars in additional aid to the Kabul government of President Ashraf Ghani.

Biden’s announcement tipped the balance of the war, however. Ghani’s security forces could foresee defeat, and many flipped to the Taliban’s side. Ghani fled into exile on August 15th. The Biden Administration was plainly unprepared for the Taliban’s entry into Kabul. The scenes that followed—such as those of Afghans falling to their deaths after trying to cling to the wheels of a C-17 transport jet ascending out of the capital—present an iconography of American defeat even more searing than the photos of helicopters evacuating staff from the U.S. Embassy rooftop in Saigon, in 1975. On August 26th, a suicide bomber struck at a crowded airport gate and killed thirteen U.S. service members and at least ninety Afghans. The airlift carried more than a hundred thousand people to safety before it ended, on August 30th, but, by the Administration’s admission, some two hundred American citizens who wanted to leave were left behind, as were, according to refugee advocates, tens of thousands of Afghans eligible for special visas to the U.S. Many thousands of others vulnerable to Taliban reprisals—journalists, activists, judges, and translators—were also left behind.

The collapse of Ghani’s government orphaned a generation of globalized, smartphone-using, urban Afghans, who had been protected for two decades by NATO security. Some of those who squeezed onto flights out barely had time to consider their sudden transformation into refugees. “I fought my family, my community and my society to get to where I was a month ago,” Fatima Faizi, a reporter for the Times, tweeted from exile. “Now I live out of a backpack. It feels like you fall off a cliff, all your bones are shattered. But you have no energy to say you are in pain.”

At the end of last week, all of Afghanistan’s airports remained closed to commercial flights. Neighboring countries had shut their borders. Long after the world’s attention turns away, the great majority of the population will “remain inside Afghanistan,” Filippo Grandi, the current U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said. “They need us.” Drought, economic collapse, and COVID have left millions of Afghans “marching towards starvation,” David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Programme, warned.

On 9/11, Americans discovered that their security was inseparable from that of Afghans suffering in a distant, shattered country ruled by the Taliban and adopted by bin Laden, the Taliban’s guest. Al Qaeda is still there, although intelligence agencies judge that it is now far less capable of striking the continental United States. Still, the presence of a branch of the Islamic State and the Taliban’s return to power can hardly be comforting. Fawzia Koofi, a women’s-rights activist who escaped to Qatar last week, after earlier surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban, told the BBC, “If the world thinks that this is not their business . . . trust me, sooner or later this will actually go to their borders again.”

It would be unfortunate if the lesson America draws from its Afghan debacle is that it should forswear large investments in human dignity and health in very poor countries. The climate crisis and the pandemic make plain that we face new border-hopping threats to our collective security. For both moral and practical reasons, the United States has cause to provide substantial humanitarian aid to troubled nations and even, in a supporting role, to strengthen their security—perhaps having fashioned a foreign policy, if it is not too much to hope, informed by a measure of humility and a capacity for self-reflection. ♦

It was a good thing I had nothing in my system, while reading the last paragraph, or it would have spewed onto my screen. In case Mr. Coll missed it, we already attempted the “large investments in human dignity” in multiple countries. It is time to make those investments in our country.