US Politics

AfghanistanThe UK must answer for a litany of strategic failings in AfghanistanThe UK should never have joined the US invasion, writes Dr Taj Hargey, and its reputation is being stained by America’s unilateral retreat. Plus letters from Jonathan Worthington and Sandra Khadhouri L More

Fight to voteUS newsThe data proves it: 2020 US election was a remarkable successDespite pandemic, election ‘report card’ shows record high turnout, embrace of mail and early voting and relatively few ballot rejections Sam Levine in New YorkThu 19 Aug 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 19 Aug 2021 10.23 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,A few months after every federal election, a little-known federal agency called the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) releases a trove of data it collects from all 50 states on what happened in the election. The survey offers one of the clearest pictures of the nuts and bolts of the election: things like how people voted and registered, the demographics of poll workers, and provisional and mail-in ballot rejection rates. It’s a report card of sorts, and for the people who study how elections are run, it’s a bible of useful data.The survey for the 2020 election came out on Monday, and it provides unambiguous evidence of what a remarkable success the presidential election was, against all odds. Nearly every state recorded an increase in voter turnout. Overall, more than 67% of America’s citizen voting age population voted in the election – a record high. Despite fears that the surge in mail-in balloting would lead to an increase in ballot rejections, the overall rejection rate remained the same.“It is basically an indicator of the success of the election,” said Barry Burden, the director of the elections research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Election administrators managed to pull it off and support a record number of voters.”Now Burden and other experts are poring over the data to see which trends might stick in future elections and which might have been a quirk of the pandemic and other unusual circumstances of voting in 2020.The survey shows, for example, that Americans dramatically shifted the way they voted. Only about a third of voters cast their ballots on election day, choosing instead to cast their vote either by mail (43.1%) or early in person (30.6%). That’s a sharp change from previous years, when the majority of voters cast their ballots on election day.“I don’t know if that’s going to be the way future elections are defined,” Burden said. “Some surveys of voters have indicated that quite a few of them who voted by mail want to go back to voting in person. But lots who voted by mail for the first time became fond of it, became aware of it, frankly.”“We’re likely to have this multi-modal system in place for years to come,” he added.An election system in which there are significant numbers of people voting three different ways (in person, early, and by mail) has significant political and administrative consequences. Election administrators will have to figure out how to run essentially three different elections for voters.It also makes running campaigns more complicated, Burden noted. Traditionally, campaigns run a heavy persuasion effort right until voting begins, and then invest in get-out-the-vote efforts. But more voting by mail means that people are casting their ballots earlier.“Now they need to be running both of those efforts kind of simultaneously from about mid-September, when the first absentee ballots go out, 90 days in advance to military and domestic absentees. That’s just complex, and I think some research has showed it’s more expensive to run campaigns in this way.”Charles Stewart, an election administration expert at MIT, said he plans to dig deeper into ballot rejection rates. Among rejected ballots, about a third went uncounted because of signature matching problems. Around 12% were rejected because the voter missed the deadline to return the ballot.“There was great concern about new people not following instructions and having a lot of rejections,” he said. But despite the fact that there were double the number of absentee ballots this year, “the percentage of absentee ballots rejected was about what it was in the past”.“Although, the way I think about these things is that since we doubled the number of absentee ballots, that means there was double the number of people whose votes didn’t get counted because of something wrong. But nonetheless, from this other perspective, it wasn’t all that bad,” he added.Even so, Stewart and Burden both want to investigate why a handful of states had rejection rates that appeared to far exceed the national rejection rate of 0.8%. Those states include Arkansas (6.4%), New Mexico (5.0%), New York (3.6%) and Mississippi (2.3%). Burden cautioned against drawing quick conclusions from the data:“I do have a concern that the data are still a little hinky. Not all of the states reported what share of absentee ballots were rejected, and a couple of them reported data that was not complete,” he said.Stewart also said he also wanted to better understand why Washington, Oregon and Colorado – states that long have had universal vote by mail – continued to have rejection rates around the national average, despite their expertise and experience in the area.“1% is a pretty high rejection rate,” he noted.Overall, Burden said, the survey should be used as hard evidence to help build trust in American elections.“I think what the average American hears about in the press is partisan disagreements over whether there was fraud or whether there’s going to be another audit in some state,” he said. “One way to rebuild the confidence of some voters is to remind them of how wonderful the election was.”Also worth watching…
House Democrats introduced a fresh bill that would update the Voting Rights Act. It would put states back under federal supervision if they repeatedly discriminate against voters and strengthens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, overriding a recent supreme court decision that made it more difficult to challenge discriminatory voting laws. Democrats plan a quick vote on the bill in the US House next week, but it still faces the obstacle of the filibuster in the Senate.
The Republican-controlled state election board in Georgia voted to authorize a review of the board of elections in Fulton county, home to Atlanta and the most populous in the state. The review could lead to the state board taking over the county elections board under a controversial provision in Georgia’s new voting law.
The FBI is now helping investigate whether a local clerk in Colorado illegally divulged election information to conspiracy theorists. The state’s top election official this week said that Tina Peters, the clerk in Mesa county, accessed a secure room in late May and copied election management software.
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OpinionAfghanistanWhy did we ignore the lessons of history in Afghanistan? We need a public inquiry Jonathan SteeleThe US and Britain’s dogged pursuit of reform and regime change made the return of the Taliban almost inevitable Wed 18 Aug 2021 12.30 EDTLast modified on Wed 18 Aug 2021 12.32 EDTWhen rising British casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq started to raise public doubts 15 years ago, a new mantra began to be heard: Iraq was a war of choice, Afghanistan a war of necessity. The argument was that the US and its faithful ally, Britain, had launched an invasion in Iraq that was unjustified as it was based on a false premise: the hollow claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.Fear of refugees must not shape the response to Afghanistan’s crisis | Daniel TrillingRead moreThe intervention in Afghanistan was different, it was said, even by many who opposed the Iraq war. Al-Qaida had organised the atrocities of 9/11 and its leader, Osama bin Laden, was based on Afghan soil. George W Bush was right to give the Taliban an ultimatum to hand him over or face invasion.But here, too, there was a false premise, or indeed several. Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership were as surprised to see the twin towers crash to the ground in New York as everyone else. They had never been consulted by Bin Laden on his strategy, let alone his targets. Anticipating US reprisals, Bin Laden and his large entourage of Arab fighters left Kandahar and hid in the Tora Bora mountains. Bush’s call on the Taliban to arrest him was unrealistic. So going after the Taliban was just as unnecessary as bringing regime change in Iraq.It was also equally dubious from the standpoint of international law. There was no UN security council resolution authorising the US assault on Afghanistan. It was clear that Bush would want to punish al-Qaida for 9/11, but international law does not permit armed force for revenge or retaliation. The US claimed that al-Qaida had declared war on the US and it was entitled to respond with force in self-defence. International law only allows this if an enemy attack is imminent. In the autumn of 2001, imminence was hardly a relevant concept. None of the 19 9/11 hijackers was Afghan and they had mainly trained in Germany and the US. It had taken two years to prepare the attack, so there was no way al-Qaida could have mounted another similar atrocity imminently.After 9/11, a few analysts argued that if the US was determined to use force it should have limited it to a search-and-destroy operation against al-Qaida in Tora Bora. Their view was ignored and Bush added a new war aim: the building of a modern democracy in Afghanistan. Joe Biden repudiated that in his speech on Monday when he stressed that US policy should be based on security from terrorism rather than any humanitarian reforms. His remarks are sparking a furious debate, but they are correct.Britain, too, needs to re-examine its Afghan policies. It should hold an inquiry along the same lines as the Chilcot report into Iraq (except that it should report much faster). The first item on its agenda must be whether the decision to go for regime change in 2001 was wise or foolish. The events of the past two decades, culminating in the triumphant return of the Taliban that we have just witnessed, flows from that decision.It is true that Kabul and other major Afghan cities have enjoyed 20 years of patchy progress. Women in particular have benefited and a generation of young people has grown up with the expectation of secure and free life choices. If the Taliban had not been ousted from power in 2001, none of this would have happened. But the country would have been spared the ravages and killing of the civil war that resumed in 2003 once the Taliban recovered from the shock of defeat. Like the Ashraf Ghani administration, it also just gave up in 2001 under the weight of US bombing with barely a shot fired. It was bound to seek ways to reverse it, however long it took.In the century since Afghanistan gained independence from Britain in 1919, the country’s tragedy has been the constantly repeated cycle of defeat for the minority of Afghan modernisers who have sought to break the hold of conservative rural patriarchy. It happened with the first post-independence leader, Amanullah Khan, who took power on a wave of popularity but lost it after he introduced co-educational schools and stopped women wearing hijab, let alone the full burqa. Conservatives marched on Kabul in 1929, the army deserted and Amanullah abdicated.Resistance to a new wave of reform arose again in the 1980s when Afghanistan’s communists, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), expanded education for girls and increased opportunities for women to work outside the home. When they took Soviet support, they opened the door for an alliance of religious and tribal leaders (helped by western governments at the height of the cold war) to rise up as mujahideen warriors and brand the PDPA as atheists and lackeys of the Kremlin. When Moscow withdrew its aid in 1992 (like Trump and Biden today), the modernising regime quickly fell. Now we are seeing a third turn of the wheel of conservatives ousting reformers.Observers wonder how the Taliban managed to achieve so sweeping a victory. The sad fact is that its patriarchal views are popular in rural and small-town Afghanistan and it could never have made its stunning military advances without local support. People had also lost faith in a corrupt central government and an army that the Pentagon was well aware was ineffective and unmotivated – as revealed in the “Afghanistan Papers”, hundreds of confidential interviews with US military and diplomatic leaders obtained by the Washington Post.Many Afghans felt the Taliban produced quicker and more honest justice in village disputes between families. The UK government should have known this. Surveys commissioned for the Department for International Development in Helmand in 2010 showed that people preferred Taliban courts to the Kabul-appointed ones, where they had to bribe prosecutors and judges.Afghans do not like invaders, whatever their motives, and the Taliban were able to exploit the narrative of patriotic resistance. Why did Britain ignore the lessons of history and follow the unhappy experience of the Soviet invasion and occupation? That must be the central issue in the public inquiry we need.
Jonathan Steele is a former Guardian correspondent and author of Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground
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Biden administrationUS to offer Covid vaccine booster shots in SeptemberBoosters will initially be given to healthcare workers, nursing home residents and older people, starting 20 September R More

BooksTed Cruz’s campaign may have spent $150,000 on copies of his bookFollowing One Vote Away’s publication, the Republican senator’s campaign spent large sums of money at US chain Books-A-Million Alison FloodWed 18 Aug 2021 10.17 EDTLast modified on Wed 18 Aug 2021 10.25 EDTTed Cruz’s campaign spent more than $150,000 at US book chain Books-A-Million in the months after the Texas senator’s book was published, Forbes has reported.Cruz, who was prominent among the Republicans trying to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election, published One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History in September. A financial disclosure he filed on Monday, reported on by Forbes, shows he received almost $320,000 as an advance in 2020 from the book’s publisher Regnery Publishing.Ted Cruz threatens to burn John Boehner’s book over criticismsRead more“With a simple majority on the Supreme Court, the left will have the power to curtail or even abolish the freedoms that have made our country a beacon to the world. We are one vote away from losing the Republic that the Founders handed down to us. Our most precious constitutional rights hang by a thread,” says Regnery of the title. “In One Vote Away, you will discover how often the high court decisions that affect your life have been decided by just one vote.”The end-of-year report from Cruz’s committee, filed with the Federal Election Commission, reveals that two weeks after One Vote Away was published, his campaign spent $40,000 at Books-A-Million. Shortly afterwards, it spent a further $1,500, and in December, another $111,900. All of the purchases are described by the campaign as “books”, and Forbes speculated that they may have been used to boost his book sales, quoting Brett Kappel, a lawyer specialising in campaign finance, who said that “the FEC has issued a long series of advisory opinions allowing members to use campaign funds to buy copies of their own books at a discount from the publisher, provided that the royalties they would normally receive on those sales are given to charity”.Forbes previously reported what three other US senators had made from book deals in 2020: Elizabeth Warren earned $278,000, Tom Cotton $202,000, and Tammy Duckworth $382,000. All three used campaign funds to buy books, but Forbes said that their purchases were all under $20,000.A spokesperson for Cruz’s campaign told the magazine that the senator “has not received one cent of royalties in connection with any One Vote Away book sales”, but declined to reveal which books the campaign had spent more than $150,000 on.When Donald Trump Jr published Triggered in 2019, it made the New York Times bestseller list, but the newspaper’s charts included a dagger beside the book to indicate that “some retailers report receiving bulk orders”. The Republican National Committee denied making bulk orders at the time, and Trump Jr was angered by the suggestion that his sales had been artificially boosted, retweeting Republican strategist Andrew Surabian’s claim that “Don did multiple book signings where he sold 1,000+ books apiece. BookScan data will show he sold more books than the #2 and #3 books combined. Media/Dems want to pretend otherwise, but he was #1 on merit.”TopicsBooksUS politicsTed CruzTexasPublishingnewsReuse this content More

OpinionBernie SandersThe planet is in peril. We’re building Congress’s strongest-ever climate billBernie SandersMore than any other legislation in US history it will transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into sustainable energy Wed 18 Aug 2021 08.46 EDTLast modified on Wed 18 Aug 2021 10.14 EDTThe latest International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is clear and foreboding. If the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions, the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage. The world that we will be leaving our children and future generations will be increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable.But we didn’t really need the IPCC to tell us that. Just take a look at what’s happening right now: A huge fire in Siberia is casting smoke for 3,000 miles. Greece: burning. California: burning. Oregon: burning. Historic flooding in Germany and Belgium. Italy just experienced the hottest European day ever. July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded. Drought and extreme weather disturbances are cutting food production, increasing hunger and raising food prices worldwide. Rising sea levels threaten Miami, New York, Charleston and countless coastal cities around the world in the not-so-distant future.In the past, these disasters might have seemed like an absurd plot in some apocalypse movie. Unfortunately, this is now reality, and it will only get much worse in years to come if we do not act boldly – now.The good news is that the $3.5tn budget resolution that was recently passed in the Senate lays the groundwork for a historic reconciliation bill that will not only substantially improve the lives of working people, elderly people, the sick and the poor, but also, in an unprecedented way, address the existential threat of climate change. More than any other legislation in American history it will transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy.This legislation will be a long-overdue step forward in the fight for economic, racial, social and environmental justice. It will also create millions of well-paying jobs. As chair of the Senate budget committee my hope is that the various committees will soon finish their work and that the bill will be on the floor and adopted by Congress in late September.Let me be honest in telling you that this reconciliation bill, the final details of which are still being written, will not do everything that needs to be done to combat climate change. But by investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the reduction of carbon emissions it will be a significant step forward and will set an example for what other countries should be doing.Here are some of the proposals that are currently in the bill:Massive investments in retrofitting homes and buildings to save energy.Massive investment in the production of wind, solar and other forms of sustainable energy.A major move toward the electrification of transportation, including generous rebates to enable working families to buy electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances.Major investments in greener agriculture.Major investments in climate resiliency and ecosystem recovery projects.Major investments in water and environmental justice.Major investments in research and development for sustainable energy and battery storage.Billions to address the warming and acidification of oceans and the needs of coastal communities.The creation of a Civilian Climate Corps which will put hundreds of thousands of young people to work transforming our energy system and protecting our most vulnerable communities.The Budget Resolution that allows us to move forward on this ambitious legislation was passed last Wednesday at 4am, by a vote of 50-49 after 14 hours of debate. No Republican supported it, and no Republican will support the reconciliation bill. In fact, Republicans have been shamefully absent from serious discussions about the climate emergency.That means that we must demand that every Democrat supports a reconciliation bill that is strong on solutions to the climate crisis. No wavering. No watering down. This is the moment. Our children and grandchildren are depending upon us. The future of the planet is at stake.
Bernie Sanders is a US senator and the chair of the Senate budget committee
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The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday, after weeks spent banning local mask requirements and meeting maskless crowds. The Republican is fully vaccinated against the virus and is not experiencing symptoms, his office said. 
Texas has once again emerged as a hotspot for coronavirus, with only 314 available intensive care unit beds statewide. Paediatric ICUs are running out of space while children head back to class.

Texas governor Abbott, who fought mask mandates, tests positive for Covid More