Reeling and dealing: how to engage the Taliban

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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. Two years ago, the biggest virus story in China was one that affected the country's enormous pork industry. African swine fever is still ravaging farms and officials efforts to keep a huge market stable don't look sustainable. And for a long while, the activist artist Judy Chicago gave up trying to gain the acceptance of the mainstream art world. It eventually caught up with her vision. We take a look at the first full retrospective of her art, from needlework to fireworks. But first, In Afghanistan, Taliban fighters have been parading through the city of Kandahar in celebration, some of them aboard captured American armored vehicles. Western allies have all departed as of this week, and apart from a few pockets of resistance, the Taliban are now in total control. At the airport in the capital, Kabul, a spokesperson for the group addressed the departed enemies. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, he said, wants strong diplomatic relations with the world, including America. In the chaos of recent weeks, American forces have in fact worked alongside the Taliban. What cooperation lies ahead is a far trickier business, a fact noted by America's highest ranking military official, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley.

This is a ruthless group from the past, and whether or not they change remains to be seen. And as far as our dealings with them at that airfield or in the past year or so, in war, you do what you must in order to reduce risk to mission and force, not what you necessarily want to do.

Over the course of 20 years, a coalition of military forces has failed to bring the Taliban to heel. Now those forces are gone, the calculus has changed on how to protect Afghanistan's citizens and to keep it from breeding far worse, terrorist organizations.

Many people make the argument that America and its allies should now have nothing whatsoever to do with the Taliban.

Ed McBride is the Economist's deputy foreign editor.

They say it's such a despicable regime. It's so violent, it's so repressive, it's so puritanical. It's that it is better to not give it any support of any kind, not give it aid, not give it diplomatic recognition or other sort of niceties like that. Just hope that by not providing anything that could be construed as support or acknowledgment, they might even hasten its demise or at least leave it to stew in its own juices and hope it collapses.

And so what do you make of that hands off argument?

I'm very sympathetic to that argument that America should have nothing to do with the Taliban, but in practice, first of all, America has already been negotiating with the Taliban, not very successfully, as it happens. And second, there are things America wants from the Taliban. Not a great deal, but it wants Afghanistan not to be used as a base for international terrorism. And the Biden administration professes to want, it certainly should want the Taliban not to treat its own people too horribly. And in order to bring any kind of pressure to bear, in order to try and encourage those two goals, America and its allies will have to have some kind of contact with the Taliban. So I think the absolutist argument that they should be completely cold shouldered just doesn't apply.

But now that they're out the door, what leverage do the Americans and their allies have?

Ironically, their leverage is greater now than it was a few weeks ago. America and the Taliban have been negotiating for several years, but the problem was America didn't really have much leverage in those negotiations because both the Trump administration and then the Biden administration made clear that they were leaving Afghanistan willy nilly. And therefore what incentive did the Taliban have to make any concessions? Right. They knew they could just wait out the American departure. Now America has a little bit more leverage, mainly financial. So the US and its allies provided something like three quarters of the national budget of the now fallen Afghan government. Foreign aid made up something like almost 50% of the Afghan economy. Without that money, and most of it has been suspended, the government will be broke and the economy will be in a tailspin. So the US and its allies can dangle those kind of economic incentives in front of the Taliban. And then there's also the, to my mind, less consequential incentive to offer formal diplomatic recognition, the sort of niceties of how the Taliban are treated when they go abroad and where they can open embassies and so on. They can have some sort of leverage over that. And we do have an inkling that that is important to at least some members of the Taliban. So that may also be another way of bringing pressure to bear.

But the Taliban might get a warmer reception diplomatically and indeed some cash from other sources from not America and its allies.

Sure, sure. I mean, it almost certainly will. We've seen China put out feelers to the Taliban even before the fall of Kabul. Russia, Iran, they've kept their embassies open, they've been meeting with the new regime. Pakistan has always had very strong ties to the Taliban. So they're not going to be left out in the cold, even if most Western countries cold shoulder the Taliban. The thing is, those countries that are probably disposed to be friendly just couldn't possibly make up for the sort of sums that NATO countries, other American allies have been providing. Even China, which obviously does provide a lot of aid in the form of infrastructure around the world. You know, even China has no country to which it provides that scale of aid. So the idea that the Taliban could replace all the money that has been coming from the west with these other countries seems to me completely fanciful.

So that is to say that all of the hand wringing about countries such as China, Iran, Pakistan kind of getting inroads into Afghanistan under the new regime is not much to worry about.

I don't think so. I mean, even to the extent that they do become friendly with the new regime, the stakes just aren't that high. Afghanistan is a small landlocked country, not of huge geopolitical significance with a small economy. If Iran and China become bigger players in Afghanistan than America, it's not clear that America's interests are gravely injured.

So that being the case, America's goals for Afghanistan remain pretty much the same. Preventing terror bases, popping back up, and looking after ordinary Afghans. How can it go about that?

I think the key for America when it's trying to get the Taliban to do some of the things it wants, is first of all to move in small steps, make sure those steps are reversible. You know, if it's handing out money, hand it out in small dollops and turn off the taps if necessary, and tie whatever aid or help it's giving to specific ends. Ideally the ends that would help ordinary Afghans the most. Keeping schools open, especially for girls, keeping clinics open, allowing access for aid agencies, keeping the borders open so that people who are unhappy with Taliban rule can leave. And of course, the one thing that should be an absolute non negotiable, which the Taliban have, in theory, already agreed to is to make sure that terrorists don't operate from within Afghanistan. And that's one area where America and its allies should be absolutely ruthless if there's any sign that the Taliban is reneging on that.

But what if the Taliban simply doesn't want to play ball?

Look, it is quite possible that the Taliban would rather sort of suffer in penury, not accept any aid, not have anything to do with America, NATO, Western countries, even potentially friendlier countries like China and Iran. Maybe the Taliban would rather just be pure and isolationist and keep themselves to themselves in spite of what will inevitably be an enormous cost to the Afghan economy. So the whole strategy I've laid out might not work. But it's clear that the Taliban is not monolithic. Certainly there seem to be some relative moderates and some more extreme voices. It doesn't seem like the new regime has decided for itself quite how puritanical it wants to be, quite how repressive. And that implies there is sort of scope to prod the Taliban in a less awful direction than its previous stint in power.

Ed, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks for having me.

Two years ago, Chinese officials warned that the spread of a deadly and highly transmissible virus was threatening the country. It may sound like a familiar story, but this wasn't the tale of the coronavirus. Back in early 2019, leaders within the Communist Party weren't concerned with a pandemic, but rather with what's called a panzoot. African swine fever tore through the country's pig farms. Covid drew all attention away from a crisis that's since continued to ravage pig populations. The disease is harmless to humans, but deadly to the animals, threatening the supply of the country's staple meat.

The pork industry is hugely important in China. It employs 40 million people, perhaps more.

Ted Plafker is a China correspondent for.

The China consumes massive amounts of pork, almost three times the world average per person per year. It's people's favorite food, especially important around the holiday time. And so when a disease like this comes along and threatens the good mood of everyone in the country and the livelihood of tens of millions of people, it's a big problem.

And it's one we talked about before. When this swine fever first broke out in 2019, how have things gone since then?

It's very hard to tell. And that's part of the problem. China claims to have restored herds to virtually the previous size. They claim to have recovered breeding stock, sows and piglets back to pre2018 levels before it struck. But no one takes them very seriously. Their numbers tend not to add up. And at the same time, they've cracked down on independent sources of information. They've ordered media and businesses to only cite official statistics that come out of the Agriculture Ministry. But anecdotally, we hear from everyone involved in the industry that I've spoken to and all the reporting I've seen, the disease is very widespread, it's just about everywhere. And the idea that they report 11 cases here or there strikes everyone as absolutely absurd.

And so clearly the numbers are far worse than the Communist Party would like to admit. How has it got so bad?

It's a very difficult disease to control. It survives in food that is given to pigs. Unfortunately, a lot of infected pork makes its way into the human food supply and from there into the swill that gets fed back to pigs. There's a massive industry in China where restaurant waste and household waste is collected and brought back to be turned into pig swill. Another vector is surfaces, shoes, the bottom of a truck that's carrying pigs, place to place. The virus is very sturdy, very transmissible. And Chinese pig farms are not isolated, they're just about everywhere. There are pig farms 30 miles from downtown Beijing and every province in the country, pretty much. So they're not often one corner of the country where you could quarantine the place and limit the spread.

Well, we've seen Chinese officials intervene aggressively to suppress the coronavirus. Have they not done something similarly aggressive with this wine fever?

No, they haven't been quite as aggressive or draconian. The equivalent would be more or less, to call the entire national herd and tell the country it has to go without pork for a year or more. They're working to manage the price with stockpiling measures. They're buying up pork and releasing it, but they're not willing to take the most extreme step that would actually lead to eradication and a solution. Other countries who have called most, if not all, of their entire national herd waited months, if not a year or two in some cases, before repopulating with healthy pigs. People here, if they don't have pork or if it's too expensive, will really become very unhappy in a way that the party does not want to see.

So really, it's a concern about the public reaction that's putting authorities off radical measures.

It's important to understand how psychologically important the pork price is here. It's almost petrol prices in the us. The way they're a key indicator in terms of how people are feeling about the general trend of the economy, how they're feeling about the government. When petrol prices get high in the us, everyone gets inordinately upset. And there's something like that at work with pork prices in China. And it affects everybody. It's not urban or rural, it's not young or old, it's not middle class or poor. And it's a very important political right direction, wrong direction kind of indicator in China.

So the present plan of stockpiling, of obfuscating information doesn't sound sustainable. And an out and out cull would be calamitous psychologically and perhaps also financially. What is the solution here?

In the longer term, there are hopes that a magic bullet appears in the form of a vaccine. It's probably a year or more away, no certainty at all that an effective one comes through. And in the meantime, they're hoping that the industry will consolidate. The smaller farmers who are unable to farm hygienically are going out of business one way or the other. And the larger farms are taking over more of the production and doing it with greater attention to biosafety and and better disease control. So it's a mixed patchwork of intervening to control prices, consolidating the industry, keeping the disease at a bearable level and waiting for a vaccine to really solve the problem.

What's going to happen if China simply doesn't get on top of this? If a vaccine doesn't come soon, how will this play out?

Domestically, it will lead to a greater consolidation of the pork industry internationally. China's battle with swine fever is the single dominant driver of global protein markets. Meat products from all around the world and feed grains are all experiencing a big impact from this. And long term, if China really never gets on top of it, it will start importing more. We've already seen some of it. In the last two and three years since this disease appeared here, imports have surged. There's no way the world can meet on short notice China's demand. But it should lead to opportunities for the rest of the world to step in and become a much bigger supplier of meat to a China that can't produce its own.

Ted, thank you very much for your time.

Always a pleasure, Jason, thank you.

The Dinner Party is, if nothing else, a big piece.

First unveiled in 1979, the modern artwork, the Dinner Party consists of a large triangular table and 39 place settings, each named after a woman.

The idea was to create a kind of last supper for those who did the cooking and serving throughout history.

News reports at the time Raised a few eyebrows.

There's nothing particularly coy about the female nature of the symbolism.

That symbolism. The piece is filled with giant ceramic vulvas.

The whole project was dreamt up by an American artist and feminist, Judy Chicago. Although born in Chicago, she now hails, rather confusingly, from Los Angeles.

The Dinner Party has since defined Ms. Chicago's career. But now, for the first time, a retrospective explores the rest of the work she's made over the past six decades.

Judy Chicago is a remarkably prolific artist who came to notoriety in the mid-70s.

Alex Christie writes about art and culture for the Economist.

She started working in the early 60s and really encountered so much pushback for her female oriented imagery that she decided very early on that she needed to create her own feminist alternative art infrastructure and really dive into creating an alternative art history for women.

And what does that alternative history look like?

Well, that alternative history basically involved her researching women, both mythical and real, who had been somewhat cut out or minimized in history. And this formed the big of her notorious installation of 1979, the Dinner Party. The plates were made of ceramic and featured female vulvas for the most part. I talked to her about this.

I made transformed images to make the point that the only thing that connected all these women of different centuries, religions, races, ethnicities, professions, was that they had been erased, marginalized, or minimized by history because they had vaginas. That was the reason, wasn't complicated.

And she spent five years with hundreds of artisans developing this really very postmodern installation that was hugely popular. But then it was so shocking, the art world absolutely freaked out. No one would touch it. It was called kitsch, it was called portographic. And, you know, she faced so much criticism that her career basically stalled right there. And so now, 60 years later, she's emerging from that shadow with a fabulous and long overdue retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Long overdue, as you say. Why has it taken so long to get this retrospective?

Well, it's partly because of the absolute calumny that attended this very, at the time, feminist and shocking exhibition. But it's also partly the nature of her art itself. She's very activist. She believes very much in infusing her work with meaning, which is not typically and traditionally what the contemporary art scene has been about. Her work is very subject based.

I don't actually see my work as, quote, political. I very much try to avoid making work that is so of its time that it doesn't survive.

She instead sees it as having to do with social justice. So for example, right after the Dinner Party, she did a fabulous body of work called the Birth Project, which is also tapestry and quilting and textile work that is about the female body as generative of the universe. And then she looked at violent masculinity in a series of gigantic, beautiful paintings called Power Play. And then she actually, her third husband spent seven years working on a series of works about the Holocaust called the Holocaust Project. So her aim is to convey a very distinct and clear message to the public and not just art connoisseurs.

And having seen the exhibition, what's your take?

It's a really interesting exhibition. Unusually, the curator Claudia Schmuckley has started it going from back to front. So we start with Judy's most recent work, done as she turned 80. It's very haunting. It's called the End, and it's a meditation on her own death, but also the death of the planet, the species. So it's quite grim, but also very beautiful.

So, you know, now that I'm having my deep wish come true that the body of my work will finally emerge from the shadow of the Dinner Party and to be on the brink of discovering what kind of impact it's going to have, you know, like, will the Extinction series actually open people's eyes and break their hearts the way it broke my heart to the point that we actually do something about it?

She's really trying to push that envelope and make us think. The thing about Judy is that she just never stops being an activist. And as the years go by, she just continually pushes us to think about the subjects that she's portraying in her art.

Alex, thanks very much for joining us.

It's a pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow. Sam.