No-sanctuary cities: the Taliban’s latest surge

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Singapore is an ethnically diverse city-state, mostly Chinese, but also Malay and Indian. Long ago, laws aimed at racial harmony have kept tension at bay. Mostly. But recent events have put some persistent inequalities under the spotlight. And for centuries, humans have been chewing gum. For decades, it was a hallmark of the rebellious, of the cool. It seems that Gen Z doesn't see the appeal, though. They've got different distractions and environmental priorities and different ideas about rebellion.

Afghanistan.

The American government has been attempting to draw attention to its evacuation of translators and others who helped in its two decades of war in Afghanistan. Since the first of this year, our consular staff in Kabul has issued over 5,000 special immigrant visas and interviewed thousands more. What the administration would doubtless prefer to draw attention away from is this. [GUNFIRE] Over the weekend, Taliban insurgents made inroads in the cities of Herat, Lashkar Gah, and Kandahar. As American forces have withdrawn in the past couple of months, Taliban has surged, taking district after district, setting up parallel governments in much of the country's rural expanse. What they seem determined to do next would put the country right back where it was two decades ago.

The Taliban are advancing on the streets of three big Afghan cities, provincial capitals.

Edward McBride is The Economist's deputy foreign editor.

It's really a sign that the momentum in the Afghan civil war is with the Taliban. It's a fight far bigger than we've seen over the past couple of months. It'll be tremendously worrying to the Afghan security forces. Can they hold on and can they hold back this Taliban assault?

And this comes clearly as American forces are almost completely withdrawn now. What resistance against the Taliban is left in Afghanistan?

So America announced its sort of final withdrawal from Afghanistan. It's due to be completed by the middle of August. Those troops are really already gone. There's a tiny number remaining. In fact, American ground forces hadn't been playing a big part in the war for some time now, but American air support played a critical role in fighting, has done for the past 20 years. But those planes are no longer in Afghanistan. They do still sometimes come to the aid of the Afghan security forces, but they're now much further away. There is the Afghan Air Force, although it's not near the strength of the US Air Force. In particular, there's battle-hardened special forces who were always brought in when the Afghan Army's regular troops are sort of crumbling, they're leading a fight back in these 3 provincial capitals. And so far, they seem to have managed to have held on.

And in those cities that are now under attack, what is the likelihood that the resistance that is there will succeed, do you think?

The 3 cities are all provincial capitals. They include some big cities, Kandahar and Herat, and then the one that seems the most embattled, a place called Lashkar Gah, which is the capital of Helmand Province. The Taliban has mounted incursions into cities before. Usually, with air support and with the special forces, the Afghan forces prevail and they push the Taliban out in a situation like this. But the fact that 3 cities at least, and there's reports of some others as well, are under attack, that'll be stretching the special forces very thin. The Taliban will be looking, I imagine, for a symbolic victory. The The only problem for the Taliban is even if they do succeed in capturing one of these cities, they then have to hold it, and that presents sort of physical targets, things that planes can bomb. So it may be that even if the Taliban do overrun one of these places, they then withdraw, and it's really just an attack designed to show that they're capable of conquering a city.

And how are the Afghan people responding to that show of capability?

Well, it's an extraordinarily alarming situation for ordinary Afghans. We have reports from the UN that civilian casualties from the increased fighting around the country have risen dramatically in the first part of the year, and especially in the last couple of months. People are trying to flee naturally from the places where fighting is intense. They're fleeing within the country to the biggest, safest cities, Kabul most obviously. And they're also fleeing across the border to Pakistan or to Iran. People want to get to somewhere that's safe, and not much of Afghanistan is safe at the moment.

But clearly people are in regions that are already under Taliban control. What's life like for them?

Well, at the moment, the Taliban control only rural areas, and one of the reasons the Taliban is so successful in their insurgency is that their administration of those rural areas is quite sound. They're incredibly conservative, of course, but so are the people who live there. But they allow the government to continue to operate schools and clinics So to the extent the government provides services, they continue in the areas under Taliban control. And the Taliban is more disciplined and less corrupt than the national government. So ordinary life proceeds reasonably calmly in areas under Taliban control. Whether that will apply in a city is questionable. For one thing, city people are different from rural people, and they do things that the Taliban don't like. They listen to strange music and they have odd taste in clothes, and the sexes mix, and women do work outside the house, all kinds of things that the Taliban, at least when they were previously in control of Afghanistan, didn't really tolerate. So there's a question about how quickly they would try and impose those incredibly conservative tribal and Islamic mores. But also, at a certain point, if the Taliban really looks like overrunning the country, this odd arrangement whereby the government continues to provide services even in places that the Taliban control, that will surely break down. So if the Taliban do capture a city, it's a very open question, you know, what will happen then.

So what's your guess then on the likelihood that the Taliban will take a big city? Is it just a matter of time?

I think it is a matter of time before a big city is overrun. Once or twice before, with smaller cities admittedly, they have overrun the city and then withdrawn. So I think the thing to look for is whether they overrun a city and then attempt to hold on to it permanently. If that happens, then it seems inevitable that they would make an assault on the capital and try and completely topple the Afghan government. I don't think we're there yet. We don't quite know whether that's happening.

And looking more deeply into your crystal ball, Ed, I mean, what would happen then? Would the rest of the world just simply let Afghanistan fall to the Taliban and return to before the war?

Well, I certainly don't think the US administration shows any inclination to send troops back. They knew when they announced the withdrawal that things could go this way and indeed worse. They've said in effect that that's not their problem, that the civil war in Afghanistan is not something they can fix. So I suspect no other country would try and intervene if America won't, the world will sit back and watch.

Edward, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

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In June, a video posted to Facebook went viral in Singapore.

Charlie McCann is The Economist's Southeast Asia correspondent and is based in Singapore.

The video shows a young man named Dave Parkash getting into an argument with another man, Tan Boon Lee.

This is so racist!

Do you know what you're saying, sir? Mr. Tan, who is Chinese-Singaporean, accosted Mr. Parkash and his girlfriend as they were walking down the street. Mr. Tan was upset that Mr. Parkash, who is brown-skinned and of Indian and Filipino Heritage was dating a woman who appeared to be Chinese. All the while, Mr. Parkash's girlfriend was filming this interaction.

There's a Chinese Singaporean man here who's upset with the person behind the phone who's recording, saying that she being a Chinese shouldn't be with a person like me. Yeah, correct, correct. And then I'm not like you, I'm not just saying you, okay? I'm saying Indian race. I got nothing against you personally, but I think it's racist that the Indian pray on Chinese girl. Pray? Yeah, pray, pray, pray. It's a predatory. Are you mental?

Mr. Tan felt that Singaporeans should only date people of their own race.

There is a race and you guys should not come in and disturb the race. So should I go back to India? I'm not even from India. Fine, you're not from India. I got nothing against you staying in Singapore. I got nothing against you. The only thing is, you're preying on Chinese girl. I tell you, the Chinese don't like it. The Chinese don't like it.

And you say that the video went viral. I mean, what was the reaction to it?

Total shock. It made Singaporeans extremely uneasy.

Welcome to Singapore. Well, what can I say, you know?

Singapore is a diverse country. A majority of its residents, 3/4 to be precise, are ethnic Chinese, but 13.5% are Malay, and 9% are Indian. And it really prides itself on that diversity. It's something it celebrates. It has 4 official languages, and it even has a public holiday called Racial Harmony Day, which is dedicated to celebrating its diversity.

And yet this racist incident paints a very different picture of race relations in Singapore. I mean, what's the history of racial harmony, or otherwise?

Back in the 1960s, there were deadly riots that pitted Chinese against Malays. This happened when Singapore was just a few years old, had been ejected from Malaysia, and its very survival was in doubt. So for the country's founding fathers to see the country almost being torn apart by these racial issues, it really worried them greatly. And they decided that they had to proactively manage race relations in the country. So they did a number of things. They criminalized racism. And anything that would stir up hatred between races. They were really worried about racial enclaves forming in public housing estates where most Singaporeans live, so they set ethnic quotas. And they began calibrating the racial makeup of Parliament. I mean, the ruling party, which is still in charge of Singapore today, really sees itself as the guardian of racial harmony in the country.

And so those early moves in Singapore's history kind of helped to put these questions to bed?

It didn't put those questions to bed. What it did mean, though, was that racial violence is rare, as is overt discrimination. But tensions between the races have continued to simmer all along. Chinese chauvinism has deep roots in Singapore. The country's first prime minister believed that Chinese were physically and mentally superior to Indians and Malays, and even tried to make Chinese Singaporeans more Chinese, at least as he understood that, by encouraging people to speak Mandarin and insisting all ethnic Chinese study at school. While his program of sinicization was intended for ethnic Chinese, minorities also felt pressure to espouse so-called Chinese values too. There was a moment a few decades ago when the then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew actually criticized an opposition politician of Indian heritage for being, as he put it, un-Chinese.

And have more recent leaders taken a similar kind of tone?

No, they definitely tread a lot more carefully, but in some important ways they have sustained Chinese privilege. So for instance, all three prime ministers since independence have been Chinese, and a couple of years back the deputy prime minister said that that was unlikely to change because older generations are not ready for an ethnic minority prime minister. The government also regulates immigration to ensure that the racial makeup remains stable, and that has the effect of maintaining ethnic Chinese dominance. Students at elite Chinese-speaking schools continue to receive more government funding than average, and there are no comparable schools dedicated to the Malay and Indian minorities. Given all the ways that the government has been telling Chinese that they're special, it's no wonder that those priorities have filtered down to the population at large. Large minorities of Indians and Malays consistently say in surveys that they feel discriminated against, and Malays have for decades been poor and less well-educated than Indians and Chinese.

So in a lot of ways then, the government's efforts to create some racial harmony seem to have failed.

Yeah, I mean, I think in some respects the government has actually exacerbated rather than soothed these racial inflammations. It's not just they've put Chinese people on a pedestal or have actively discriminated against Malays in certain respects. They have this racial classification system in which they funnel Singaporeans into 4 categories: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and other. They categorize Singaporeans based on the race of their parents, and this system influences where Singaporeans live, what languages they learn at school, who they can get welfare assistance from. It even determines some political rights. That may encourage Singaporeans to think along communitarian lines. I think Singaporeans can take heart by the response to the sort of flurry of racist incidents that we've seen over the last few months. There's been a national bout of of soul-searching, which may not have happened even a few years ago. And that shows that a lot of Singaporeans are aware that pretending their country is free from racial conflict is not a solution.

Because, you know, sometimes when people ask, does racism exist in Singapore? I want to say no, but there's literally a dude and he's upset with the fact that I'm brown-skinned or Indian. Being together with a person who is lighter-skinned than me and is Chinese, we are the walking examples of love is love, color don't matter.

Charlie, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondents, take out a subscription to The Economist. Get a great introductory deal at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. For decades, it was the sound of rebellion, of youthful angst. Gum was used by everyone from soldiers to Hollywood heroes.

I have come here to chew bubble gum.

And kick ass.

It even got its own pop song. Now though, it seems the bubble may have burst.

All the situations that usually lead people to chew gum— going out, clubbing, bars, restaurants with smelly food, dates— all these things have just been canceled.

Will Caldwell is a digital and culture writer for The Economist.

And as a result, sales of gum have fallen by around 14%.

So it's broadly a pandemic-driven decline?

Well, actually, it's been going on for much longer. Gum's been struggling for way over a decade. Sales started falling in the late noughties, and people have various theories for why this is. Some people think it's smartphones that are responsible. You know, people have something to distract them at the supermarket checkout, and that's the kind of place where people make impulse buys of chewing gum. And other people have blamed alternative breath fresheners, which have been proving popular, such as mints. But I think there's been a cultural change as well.

How so?

People have chewed gum for centuries. It's a pretty innate human habit. The thing is with gum is that it doesn't really have much to it in a way as a product. It's pointless as it gets. And William Wrigley Jr., who was the founder of Wrigley's, once said, anyone can make gum, selling it is the problem.

Chewing gum is good for you. Now, which brand is the best to chew?

These manufacturers threw everything into advertising. Wrigley in particular spent millions and millions on advertising.

Double your fun with Double Good, Double Good, Doublemint Gum.

They came up with all these gimmicks to sell gum, so people would put cards in with gum that depicted different famous military battles and victories, which made them patriotic. And likewise, when gum became part of the ration packs during World War II, that made it proud and patriotic too. So, you know, chewing gum was what you did if you were a proud American. But what really made gum stick in the 20th century was this fact that it became a bit of a challenge to authority.

How does it make that jump from a patriotic buy to a cultural nose-thumbing?

Ever since gum took off, there's been people trying to stop people chewing it. It was always criticized as a bad habit. As a result, chewing gum inherently came with a bit of attitude. And young women who were told at the time that chewing gum was unladylike chewed as an act of defiance. And young kids in schools would chew gum to wind up the teacher. And gum became something you could describe as cool throughout the kind of '50s, '60s, '70s. Gum and then bubble gum too became synonymous with rock and roll, youth culture. <LYRICS>Summer lovin' had me a blast.</LYRICS> The use of gum in the film Grease was particularly iconic. <LYRICS>I met a girl crazy for me.</LYRICS> There's reports that suggest that the crew got through 100,000 pieces of gum on set. <LYRICS>Over summer nights, well-o, well-o, well-o-hoo.</LYRICS> This carried on through the '90s too, and Singapore even outlawed gum in 1992 to protect its pavements. It got kind of crazier still in 2004. A piece of gum spat out by Britney Spears was auctioned on eBay for $14,000.

And yet all that you're saying is falling away. People are getting away from gum pretty fast, and not just because of the pandemic. Is this the end of gum's run in the culture?

Well, it does seem that way. I mean, after such a long period of time with gum having all these pop culture and cultural references throughout the 20th century, there seems to be a lack of those. But there are other kind of shifts in our behavior, and another big shift is our relationship with the environment. Since the 1950s, chewing gum has been manufactured effectively using plastic, and that's why it sticks on the street and lasts forever. And in an age when sustainability and eco-consciousness is forefront in people's minds, the idea of literally chomping on plastic or popping that all over your face and then spitting it into the ocean doesn't really chime with kids these days. We're seeing a number of new brands now that are trying to take this on— plastic-free, eco-friendly chewing gum brands. There's lots of these popping up now that are using the original ingredient that chewing gum came from, which is chicle. I think what we're seeing is that it used to be cool not to care, but now the opposite is true.

Will, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review, and we'll see you back here tomorrow.