3 things to think about today (August 13th)
1) Following two decades of hapless US efforts at nation-building, Afghanistan continues to predictably collapse. Yesterday, the Taliban seized Herat, the country’s third largest city, and a strategically pivotal regional capital. In addition, they took control of Kandahar, the country’s second largest city and the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban movement. The insurgents have, with lightning speed, taken control of 13 provincial capitals in just the past week. The astonishing pace of their advance has altered the timetable for the Taliban’s full takeover of the country; it is now measured in days (at best, weeks), rather than months.
2) Reflecting the benefits of its once derided strategy of opening up, the UK economy grew by a robust 4.8 percent in the 2nd Quarter of 2021, the fastest pace of any of the G7 advanced industrialised countries. The advantage of being quick off the mark with vaccinations is directly responsible for this economic good news, as the easing of Covid restrictions which followed in turn fuelled a surge in pent-up consumer spending. While still lagging behind the US (significantly) and the EU (slightly) as to where its GDP is now, relative to economic life before the virus, the UK’s good number put in the shade its decrease in GDP of 1.6 percent that occurred in the first quarter of this year.
3) More confirmation of my recent podcast on China being the villain of the Covid pandemic. Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO expert who led the organisation’s investigation into the origins of the pandemic, is having second thoughts, saying in a new documentary that Chinese colleagues involved with the investigation influenced the presentation and even the content of the team’s findings. Specifically, Chinese researchers in the group, echoing their political masters, strenuously fought against connecting the origins of the pandemic with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The March 2021 WHO report states that the lab leak theory is ‘extremely unlikely,’ not meriting further investigation (even the WHO has since walked back from this blanket statement). Embarek, significantly backtracking, goes on to speculate that a lab employee could well have been infected while studying bats in the field.