Convenience Big Store: From Orthodox wife to Netflix star 🌟

7 August, 2021

Hello,

Here are a few more highlights from this week's issue of The Knowledge, which is now available on the website and the app. If you'd like to have full access and read all our stories, you just need to register here.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Afghanistan

A pro-government militia force in Herat. Hoshang Hashimi/AFP/Getty Images

What the West should do

After nearly 20 years, $2 trillion and thousands of lives, America will leave Afghanistan by the end of August, says Daniel Rey in The Spectator. The Taliban is at the gates of key cities and may well topple the government in Kabul. The group's links to al-Qaeda – the reason for the US invasion – remain strong. President Biden justifies the withdrawal on the grounds that China and climate change are far bigger problems. He says he can't keep throwing away the lives of "America's daughters and sons". Scarpering may be the "least bad option", but what exactly was the invasion for?

For freedom, says William Hague in The Times. I remember visiting the "beautiful and prosperous" city of Herat a decade ago, and meeting young Afghan women finally able to go to university. Even a "modest" number of soldiers from the US and other Nato nations would bolster the fighting confidence of the Afghan army and make the Taliban take the "interminable peace talks" seriously. The West's long-term contest with China is "about ideas, not territory", so what legitimacy would we have if we refuse to defend the freedom we once dangled in front of those students in Herat?

But it's not all up to the West, says Bloomberg. Afghanistan's neighbours, like China and India, are negotiating with the Taliban as if its victory is assured. They need to "wake up": a Taliban victory would make regional drug networks "explode" in size. "A river of refugees will become a flood." Besides, the Taliban wants international legitimacy and investment, rather than being "isolated and beholden to Pakistan", as it was during its last period in government. If Asia's big players apply that leverage, they can make the Islamists share power.

The "tragedy" could have been avoided if the US had stuck to its initial strategy, says Toby Harnden in The Wall Street Journal. In 2001 it sent in a handful of CIA teams to co-ordinate local warlords and "hunt down the perpetrators of 9/11", al-Qaeda. But then it blocked the new president, Hamid Karzai, from striking a deal with the Taliban, "a practice consistent with Afghan tradition". As American troop numbers surged from hundreds to 100,000 by 2010, they went from "advisers and allies" to "invaders and occupiers". Biden needs to return to that "middle course" to stop Afghanistan becoming a space "where terrorists can plot with impunity". As it is, we're "lurching from all to nothing".

"They're trying to wash their hands of us"

As many as 50,000 interpreters have worked with the US military in Afghanistan, say Holly Honderich and Bernd Debusmann Jr in BBC News. Among them was Zia Ghafoori, who signed up in 2002, when he was 18. After 12 years of service, he, his pregnant wife and their three small children were given US visas. But when they arrived in America in 2014, they were sent to a homeless shelter. "After what I had done for both countries, I was asking myself, 'Is this what I deserve?'," he says. He called the army captain under whom he had served on the front line, who invited the Ghafooris to stay at his home in North Carolina.

The family are now US citizens and live "in a modest clapboard home in a quiet cul-de-sac. A large American flag hangs from a pole outside." The children are fluent in English and tease the former interpreter for his language mistakes. Zia runs a charity helping other interpreters to negotiate the byzantine paperwork needed to come to America. His brother was once beaten and jailed by the Taliban, and he sees the US withdrawal as abandonment" "They're trying to wash their hands of us."

Life

Julia Haart/Instagram

From Orthodox wife to Netflix star

Julia Haart broke free from her Orthodox Jewish community aged 42 – and reinvented herself as a high-powered fashionista. "I literally had to time-travel a couple of hundred years," she tells Elle magazine. She grew up in a Yiddish-speaking community in New York state, with virtually no internet and newspapers, where women's "sole job" was "to be good mothers and wives". At 19, forbidden to go to university, Haart entered an arranged marriage. She was miserable being a housewife, and once tried to starve herself to death.

After that she decided to "walk out the door". It took her eight years to prepare herself for the outside world: she read books and sold life insurance to fund her escape. She went on to become a fashion mogul and marry Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia, who owns the La Perla lingerie brand. Now she runs a $1bn modelling agency and has a glitzy new Netflix series, My Unorthodox Life. She remains close to her first husband and four children, although "we all have very different opinions" on religion. Aron, 15, lives with his father and won't talk to girls; Miriam, 21, is a bisexual atheist who studies at Stanford. Schlomo, a 25-year-old student, and Batsheva, a 28-year-old fashion influencer, both keep Shabbat, but are not strictly Orthodox.

Zeitgeist

Whatever happened to forgiveness, says Malcolm Gladwell in his newsletter, Oh MG. Cancel culture has made it impossible to denounce someone's actions without casting them out for eternity. Forgiveness no longer seems to be an option. We should be wary. All this echoes the grim days of 1950s McCarthyism and cases such as that of Helen Levitt, a Stalinist who was blacklisted by Hollywood. Her views were deplorable, but her punishment was unrelenting – she was permanently snubbed by society, her friends and family. "I was lonely, lonely, lonely," said Levitt of her blacklisting. "It was so sad. We were so lonely." Humans are cavalier about exclusionary punishments, but cancellations hurt. "I do not understand why any of us would wish that kind of suffering on anyone else."

Property

THE COTTAGE Robin Green is a four-bedroom thatched cottage surrounded by beautiful gardens in Barton-on-Sea, a village on the Hampshire coast. It has two receptions, a garage and a heated pool. Trains to London from nearby New Milton take just under two hours. £1.25m.

Inside politics

As America grapples with the Delta variant, Barack Obama has scaled back his 675-person 60th birthday bash, which was to be held at his mansion in Martha's Vineyard, with George Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey in attendance. It'll now just be a "family and close friends" affair. Maybe all those disinvited guests should "host a rival rager of their own down the street", says Jenny Zhang in Gawker.

Long read shortened

A migrant entering the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco. Antonio Sempere/AFP/Getty Images

Europe is pulling up the drawbridge

Angela Merkel opened Germany's doors to refugees in 2015, declaring "Wir schaffen das" ("We can do this"). The Europe of 2021 looks very different, says Aris Roussinos in UnHerd. The "hard line on migration" pioneered by Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, once "lambasted" by liberals, has entered the political mainstream. Austria has sent troops to meet migrants on its eastern border, and centre-left Denmark is returning refugees to Syria. The EU's Frontex corps of border guards uses drones to monitor the "impassable border wall" between Greece and Turkey. When Estonia donated 100km of barbed wire to Lithuania to help repel the migrants Belarus is trying to push into the bloc, it was "presented as a heartening symbol of EU solidarity".

Beyond the barbed wire are "border guard states" such as Turkey, where leaders will be "lavishly bribed" to stop migrants from landing on European shores. Europe's only interest in the turmoil in Libya and Tunisia will be making sure this arrangement continues. And Britain will benefit in the short term: "Fortress Europe" pulling up the drawbridge will stem the flow of migrants landing on Kent's shingle beaches. But this is all just a "dry run" for the coming decades, when climate change will spark "vast population movements" from Africa and southern Asia. "The walls are going up across Europe: we will not see them coming down again in our lifetimes."

Read the full article here.