Autos and the European Union: Another Crash?

In Europe, imbalances in the structure of the automotive sector – themselves the result of the liberalization of capital movements and companies – and a lack of industrial policies risk creating a deadly cocktail for millions of European workers just as the auto sector is undergoing decisive changes.

Changes in mobility styles, environmental and transport forms, and the transformation of propulsion systems require strong political intervention, capable of combining industrial, social, and environmental objectives. Letting the market decide how, when and at what cost this transition occurs will guarantee disastrous outcomes for many workers and, indeed, entire countries.

In recent decades, Europe has experienced a dramatic redistribution of car production volumes between countries. Volumes in general have declined, as have jobs, albeit at different intensities: While Germany has maintained its role as the main manufacturing country, Italy has seen its car production fall to the levels of countries such as Romania and Hungary. By contrast, central and eastern European countries, together with Turkey, saw very substantial increases in production volumes. In these countries, the location and investment strategies have all been decided and implemented by the major car manufacturers, in particular German and French producers.

The European Union has been characterized by the total absence of industrial policies in the car sector; or rather, its policy choices have been aimed at ensuring that car manufacturers can reorganize their production on the basis of their economic advantages (low labor costs, low level of social legislation, etc.). Such interventions as it does make do nothing to shape the industry’s development trajectories: there are plenty of public resources earmarked for R&D, worker training, and business competitiveness, but without establishing either objectives or the public instruments through which to achieve them. In short, everything important is left to the logic of the market as detailed in our new INET Working paper.

In the absence of concerted action, several countries have introduced national plans that include measures both on the demand side (incentives for the purchase of "green" cars, incentives for the renewal of public fleets, etc.) and on the supply side (support for investments, the industrial chain, etc.).

These national plans have at least two worrying aspects. Firstly, only a few countries have them – Germany, France, and Spain), while the others have not equipped themselves with any instruments for action. Secondly, the plans have exclusively national horizons, with the risk of increasing competition between EU member states instead of cooperation.

This lack of European industrial policies is showing all its fragility in the field of batteries for future electric cars: in order to catch up with Asian producers, new investments are planned in Europe to build up production capacity. But decisions on new battery plants for electric cars are the exclusive prerogative of private companies, without any planning or steering role on the part of the European public authorities.

Thus, a fierce new competition is about to be unleashed between European countries, as shown by the location choices for these investments described in our Working Paper.

When it comes to electric vehicles, although the generic term 'electric' is used to refer to these drives, there are in fact major differences: battery electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, series-hybrid, parallel-hybrid, complex-hybrid – all are models with significant differences between them. Within the large family of electrified vehicles, there are many different models; most of which continue to maintain the internal combustion engine. Only the Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) is propelled solely by electric motors, with battery packs sourcing the power (battery packs are recharged on the electricity grid).

This clarification is important both to correctly read the data on the market shares of the various propulsion technologies and to frame the issue of components with its corollary of employment levels.

The number of components needed for a battery-electric vehicle is much lower than vehicles with an internal combustion engine, but at the same time, the hybrid vehicle needs the most parts and components. Consequently, the hybrid vehicle seems to be the one that can best reconcile environmental and social-employment objectives.

But even in this case, the EU has not adopted any guidelines other than on emission levels, leaving all decisions on industrial and investment choices to the market.

The absence of European policies also risks leaving unresolved the problem of the supply chain necessary for battery production, keeping Europe in a condition of high dependence on foreign countries.

The issue here is not simply dependence on raw materials, which obviously rests on their availability in various geographical areas, but also and above all on the industrial phases: for example, the refining of cobalt, lithium, nickel, and manganese; the production of anodes and cathodes; the production of cells for batteries, etc.

In all these industrial stages, Europe is dependent on production by companies in other geographical areas, particularly in Asia.

With the development of electric cars, without an adequate European industrial structure, this dependence will increase further. Yet here again the European Commission has confined itself to launching initiatives relating only to research & innovation and the industrial dissemination of innovative solutions; in short, no direct investment.

In Italy, the automotive sector is in danger of being further compromised by the creation of Stellantis, the result of the merger between the French company PSA and the Italian company FCA.

The choices made by the French component of Stellantis will determine the company's future: for example, the technological architecture of PSA is being adopted for the production of mass-market vehicles, with important consequences for all components. The same can be said about powertrain choices.

For Italian suppliers, therefore, a very worrying future lies ahead, and the Italian Government is not taking any form of action to protect employment levels and the national industrial structure. Unfortunately, not even the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, adopted by the Italian Government to make use of funding from the Next Generation EU plan, provides for any public sector intervention capable of directing and guiding such an important sector as the automotive industry. It is not hard to foresee what is going to happen: a further deepening of the European south’s dependence on the north with further migration of value added from the periphery to the core of Europe.

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“We Are Running a Giant Experiment on Children”: Covid Deniers Put Kids at Risk

Back in January 2021, Phillip Alvelda issued a warning. Alvelda is a former NASA & DARPA technologist-turned-entrepreneur who runs Brain Works Foundry Inc. and Medio Labs, U.S.-based developers of A.I. enhanced health care technologies and services. He said that a new variant of COVID-19 would spell disaster without a change in mindset and a rapid, robust response. Today, as several U.S. states experience some of the worst outbreaks on the planet due to the delta variant, Dr. Alvelda sounds the alarm that the calculations for beating the pandemic have changed and we need to catch up. He explains to Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking that while vaccines must be the foundation of our response, additional measures are required to prevent ongoing – and unnecessary -- suffering and death.

Lynn Parramore: Why is it wrong to think of the delta situation as “just another surge”?

Philip Alvelda: We have quite a lot of information from all of the countries that have been beset by the delta variant before us. It began in India and was transmitted very quickly to India’s close trading and tourism partners. The U.K., of course, was one of the first affected by the new wave, but it hit broader Europe – France, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain, and so on. Israel was hard hit as well. So, we have data on the expected course of the disease, the number of people an infected person transmits the virus to, and so on. We have laboratory data that show how even a completely vaccinated person – someone with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine – sheds as much virus for the first six days as someone that hasn’t been vaccinated. We can see that with delta, the disease ramps up substantially faster in the body when you’re infected than the original Wuhan strain, where it used to be four days before you would become infectious and could spread the disease to others. With delta, you can ramp up from the point where we can just barely detect the virus with our best PCR test all the way to full infectiousness within one day.

If you take all of those things together, you realize that this strain is quite a bit more problematic to contain. We’ve watched these other countries go through the process of realizing exponential growth in the disease -- faster than we’ve ever seen it before. We also see that the old abatement measures worked up to a point and then just started to fail. These countries have had to do more than they were doing before to contain the virus. So it’s definitely not “just another surge.”

LP: In the U.K., many have felt hopeful that the pandemic is under control after a rapid rise in delta infections was followed by a significant drop. Others note that the virus is unpredictable and cite indications that case numbers are ticking back up. What’s your view?

PA: When we look at the reasons for the change in the trajectory of delta in the U.K., we see two really big changes that heralded the peak. One was the end of the Euro soccer tournament, which we know was a whole series of superspreader events. We know how many young men had caught the virus by the end of the matches and so on. That tournament ended just prior to the decline in cases. The other thing that happened right before the decline was that school was let out, so no more in-person classes. The schools were a huge spreading agent. We’ve now tracked the variants and the disease prevalence by age, and it’s clear that the school-bound cohorts spread the virus like crazy before school ended, and then when school ended, cases in that cohort starting to decline rapidly. So we know that the Euro games and the school closings were the big things that had an immediate effect. But school is coming back into session and they’re continuing to have additional soccer games, although not to the same extent as the Euro finals.

Unfortunately, we can actually see in the numbers over the last week that the U.K. is back to exponential growth of the delta variant. So far, it’s relatively modest exponential growth, but still exponential. This is not speculative. It’s happening.

LP: So we can say with certainty that the U.K. is not out of the woods?

PA: No, it isn’t out of the woods. Looking at the different age cohorts and looking at the different regions in the U.K., you can see that the decline was not universal. There were some demographics where you had broad decline like the schools, and others which were flat, and now we’ve got a whole set of them that are increasing once again.

LP: You note that vaccines are currently working very well for personal protection, with far less hospitalization and death for vaccinated people who contract the delta variant than those who are unvaccinated. But you warn that current vaccines no longer work well enough for public health suppression of delta. What exactly does that mean?

PA: With a pandemic, if you allow the virus to continue breeding in meaningful amounts, you’ve got big problems. If you let the disease kind of run its course through a large part of the population, and there’s this churning aspect of many, many people carrying the virus and allowing it to breed and mutate, then just by selective pressure, the virus is developing new generations that can potentially survive the vaccine. We are running a giant experiment. Some epidemiologists will say that if you wanted to design a super-virus, you’d do exactly what we’re doing right now – you’d vaccinate half the population to apply the selective pressure, and then otherwise let the thing keep growing and mutating so it learns to avoid the vaccine.

LP: What do you say to the pervasive view that delta is really just a problem for the unvaccinated, or for people in red states. Is that accurate?

PA: The new delta variant really changes the equation. Two things are coming into play simultaneously. The vaccines were designed to target the original Wuhan strain from over a year ago, and they don’t work as well against delta. Although we have high vaccine efficacy for hospitalization and mortality, and this is very good news, the vaccine efficacy for catching the virus and carrying it and retransmitting is not as good, like 80%. In fact, Israel claims it’s as low as 60% for their mix of vaccines.

LP: So even if we live in a blue state with large vaccinated populations, we still have a problem because delta is still spreading and getting a chance to mutate into possibly even more dangerous variants?

PA: Right. And there’s also the problem of long-haul Covid, which you can get even if you are vaccinated and have a breakthrough case. Even if your case was asymptomatic.

LP: A lot of people still seem dismissive of long-haul Covid, even though recent reports say that one in four Americans who contract the coronavirus get long-haul symptoms, like shortness of breath, debilitating fatigue, brain fog, and memory loss. Keeping in mind that the delta variant is still relatively new, so much remains to be seen about its long-term health effects, what do we know so far?

PA: Fortunately, we’ve got data from the U.K., which is much better than anything we’ve generated in the U.S. The challenge in the U.S. is that we’ve failed to get a large-scale testing program that tests everyone regardless of whether they volunteer, have symptoms, or not. The data that we have from the U.K. includes everyone. It’s a good random sample of the population of people that have Covid and know it, those that have Covid and don’t know it, and the people that don’t have Covid but might have other health issues.

In the U.K. there has been amazing statistical analysis of that data, which show a couple of really important things that are very different from what the sparse data that we have in the U.S. show. In the U.S., you see these tweets from physicians that say that fewer than 1% of the population shows any long-haul Covid issues. Well, the problem is that people are not being identified as having long Covid issues because they aren’t being tested -- so they don’t understand that the issues they are having are related to Covid. But in the U.K., where they’ve done these massive surveys with hundreds of thousands of people, they actually can show that yes, long-haul Covid is a serious issue, and not just for the unvaccinated. It’s affecting everyone. Anyone who has the disease, whether they have symptoms or not, actually has a reasonably high likelihood of having one of the symptoms that persists long after the infection.

LP: So just to be clear, even if I’m vaccinated and my infection was asymptomatic, I could end up with problems that last for months if not longer?

PA: That’s correct. The challenge is that these issues are so hard to identify. When you get Covid, it attacks the ACE2 receptor, which happens to be all over your body. So when you get a Covid infection, it could establish itself anywhere – your brain, your lungs, your intestines, your stomach, your joints, your muscles, and depending on where it really takes hold in different peoples’ bodies, you can have a vast array of different symptoms that are a result of the damage that the virus does to that part of your body. The effects can be muscle pain, indigestion, brain fog, cognitive difficulties, muscle spasms, all kinds of things that we now know are due to Covid. And it’s only when you do these broad survey questions that you can catch them and realize, oh, your muscle pain isn’t because you’ve been playing football, it’s actually because you had Covid.

LP: What concerns you the most with long-haul Covid?

PA: Unfortunately, we have to deflate the false sense of security that we’re going a good job with the pandemic and we are protecting people who are vulnerable. Right now, we don’t have the proper measures in place. The real menace is the people who are promoting “just learn to live with it” policies and really turning our children into an experiment for a systemic disease that we know does serious damage and can have effects that last a long time.

We’re gathering more and more data, and it’s most painful for me to see it in the children. In places like the U.K., Canada, and Florida, unvaccinated children are being sent to school with poor abatement protections. In Florida, something like 7,000 children contracted the disease within the last four days last week. That means that there are going to be 700 or so of them that have long-haul Covid symptoms that could keep them out of school for months. And keep in mind that with delta, you can get Covid even if you’ve been vaccinated. You can still have massive viral loads and you can still have long-haul Covid.

LP: And yet we still have people out there saying that Covid is just like another flu. How does the delta variant compare to the flu?

PA: At a stretch, you might have been able to compare the flu to the Wuhan variant, but delta is so much worse. It has a thousand times the viral load and twice the ramp-up speed – meaning that when you contract the virus, you become infectious to others much more quickly than you do with the older variant. Delta has higher mortality and morbidity. We need more data on long-haul Covid with delta, as you say, because it hasn’t been around long enough. But anyone who says that delta is not a long-haul Covid threat is fantasizing, I’m afraid. You take something that is as transmissible as chickenpox, where you can expect one infected person to infect between seven and nine other people, something more than ten times deadlier and nine times more infectious than the earlier strains -- it’s a big deal.

LP: Why do you say that vaccines alone can’t stop the pandemic? What else do we need?

PA: For you personally, vaccines offer strong protection from delta for both hospitalization or death, but as we’ve just discussed, you may not have protection from long-haul Covid. And in terms of getting the virus and passing it on, the effectiveness is not so good. It’s important to understand that the vaccines were very good and effective to start, it’s just that they were targeting an older variant. We’ve been too slow on vaccine distribution and we’ve got too many antivax influencers. We just haven’t vaccinated enough people. The combination of not getting to a decent vaccination threshold and having the vaccine efficacy drop as the new variants emerge means that right now we’re not going to get enough suppressive effects of the vaccine alone to slow and stop the transmission.

LP: Let’s talk about herd immunity. There seem to be more and more scientists saying that we may have trouble getting to herd immunity with delta. What’s your take?

PA: Well, we never got to herd immunity with polio or smallpox. We had to learn how to eradicate them with aggressive and universal vaccine campaigns. I do think that herd immunity is similarly possible to achieve with Covid and that there are nations that are going to do a decent job of it. But they require a few things to happen. The vaccines need to be administered quickly enough that you vaccinate enough people to suppress the virus before it has a chance to mutate out from under that vaccine’s protection. To really suppress the virus quickly, you need to use additional means so that it stops mutating into new variants. The whole effort of designing the vaccine, having it approved by the regulatory bodies, distributing it, and getting the population to start taking it -- that all has to be faster than what we’re doing. It turns out that the speed of response against these viruses is really critical. I think many people don’t fully understand how high the immunity threshold needs to be when you have a virus that’s so infectious.

Scientists talk about something called the R number. The R number is a way of rating a disease's ability to spread. R really tells you how many people you expect an infected person to infect. When R starts somewhere between 7 and 9, as it has for this delta variant, we need to be having about 95 to 97% of the population immune in order to achieve herd immunity. Once you’ve been vaccinated, you have pretty good immunity for the first six months, but then it starts to drop at about 3% per month. The longer you wait to kill the new variants, the less you’re protected from the last time you had it. We have this problem of declining efficacy both in having it and being vaccinated. That’s why the CDC is now talking about giving everyone boosters.

LP: So herd immunity is a race.

PA: That’s exactly right. What makes it particularly hard is that these waves of the new variant come and go exponentially. The problem with our vaccine responses is that they’re linear. I can add a fixed number of new hospital beds. I can ship a fixed number of new masks. But the delta variant is doubling every ten days. When the prevalence is limited, you can mount a good response early. You can ship the masks, have the mandates, and distribute the vaccine, but once you’ve got a reasonable spread and exponential growth really kicks in, everything becomes a real struggle.

LP: What tools do policymakers need?

PA: There’s a whole set of states that need to apply science-based policy to combat the virus rather than just letting it go. The truth is that they will inevitably learn to do so when it gets bad enough, because if you don’t stop the exponential spread, eventually your hospitals will be overwhelmed. Sadly we’re seeing that now in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and many more states are on track to do the same. So this narrative that it’s a red state pandemic is not true. Cases are growing in 48 states and are on their way to overwhelming their hospitals – Republican and Democratic-led states alike.

We need to realize that when we haven’t vaccinated enough people and we’ve waited too long, where the vaccines are less effective than they could have been on the older strains, the vaccines alone are not going to be enough on their own to slow this disease. We have to reinstitute abatement measures on a national scale. That means masking, distancing, limits on capacity in bars and restaurants, and large-scale surveillance testing. Doing those things in combination with the vaccines, we could actually slow the thing down. But trying to rely on the vaccine alone or, even worse, avoiding the vaccine, means that the virus is going to continue breeding new variants that get more contagious and more infectious.

LP: Do you see more lockdowns in our future?

PA: I empathize with people who say that we don’t want to have a lockdown. I don’t want to be in a lockdown, either. But there are things you have to do if you want to avoid it. You’ve got to stop the exponential growth by other means.

The most important policy tool in that regard is fast action. You’ll see the difference between California and New York, for example. Though they waited longer than I would’ve liked, they acted in the first four to five weeks of the exponential growth of delta. Other states have waited until the pandemic has gotten as bad or worse than it ever was before to take any extra action. Then you have some states, like Florida and the Texas governor, who are actually preventing other measures. These people who say they want to avoid masks and social distancing mandates, and they aren’t going to do a lockdown, well, they’re guaranteeing that they’re going to have to do lockdowns because they’re not addressing the virus early enough where milder measures could have prevented a more severe situation with hospitals being overrun.

LP: Is it fair to say that the anti-vaxxers and Covid-deniers, despite their rhetoric about not wanting to be vaccine guinea pigs and their vociferous objection to lockdowns, are actually turning us, particularly our children, into guinea pigs for this mutating virus and creating the conditions for lockdowns?

PA: Yes, it is. We have a few really important challenges in the U.S., but there’s a lesson that’s going to sink in at some point: the idea of divide and conquer. That means when you get an area clean, you keep it clean. And that means border controls. We haven’t really had border controls between the states until this pandemic. The CDC just added France to the “Do Not Travel” list for U.S. travelers due to Covid. Well, guess what? It’s worse in Florida than in France. It’s worse in Texas. It’s worse in Louisiana. Probably in 15 or 20 states already. So shouldn’t the CDC add the “Do Not Travel” recommendations to those states?

LP: How do you enforce that?

PA: It is difficult to enforce, but at least you could slow things down, preventing planes and trains from coming in, and so on. But it’s pretty clear that some states are going to continue sustaining the virus while others continue to try to fight it. Some are fighting it effectively and others aren’t. Just watch over the next couple of weeks the difference between Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, and New York and California. The surges in the faster-acting states will be shorter and cost less. The others will take longer to deal with, cost more, and kill more people.

LP: Between vaccines alone not being enough to halt the spread of the virus and Long-haul COVID, what does this mean for all the schools that are rushing to open for in-person instruction, some with no vaccine or mask mandates at all?

PA: Remember what happened last year, when the schools rushed to open without the proper mitigation measures in place for the Wuhan strain. Those schools that made the attempt when the virus was even at moderate local prevalence immediately had outbreaks in the school and accelerated the growth of the virus in their communities. When the exponential growth wouldn’t abate on its own, they had to shut down in-person instruction and go virtual.

Before they had the vaccines, those schools that were successful in remaining open used masks, distancing, and improved ventilation along with regular surveillance testing to keep the virus out of the schools and minimize the number and duration of outbreaks.

But now, the stats and risks with delta are much worse. So much so, that students are in a worse situation now, even with about 50% of the U.S. vaccinated, than they were with Wuhan last year. With the delta variant and no abatement whatsoever, an infected student or teacher would, on average, infect nine other people!

Even if your school community was vaccinated at the average U.S. rate of about 50% with a 60% vaccine efficiency versus sickness and retransmission, that just means that an infected person would infect at least five other people instead of nine, and the virus will continue to grow exponentially.

The good news is that if you throw in regular surveillance tests, masks, and improved ventilation and HEPPA filters, you can take the number all the way below one and suppress the virus.

Schools essentially need a multi-layered defense strategy or risk mass outbreaks worse than in 2020. Sadly, early reports from the first partial weeks of school are already sounding dire, especially in those states eschewing any meaningful measures. One Tampa, Florida district reported 5,599 students and 316 staff quarantined after the first four days of school.

LP: What can parents do?

PA: Enough of the states are having problems that it really doesn’t matter where you are at this point. The number one thing is to get kids double vaccinated with one of the mRNA vaccines. With the younger ones, take them the moment the vaccine is approved for them. And keep in mind that because vaccines are not an ultimate protection as they once were, look for a school that is going to take abatement measures seriously and recognize the fact that asymptomatic people can spread the virus and that having a vaccine doesn’t prevent you from spreading it.

Besides the masks and the distancing, the schools really have to have proper ventilation, filtering, and air exchanges. We know that the virus is airborne and that the primary path to infection is through aerosolized droplets. We’d like to see much more attention and understanding from the CDC, OSHA, and anyone who writes policy for the schools, that the virus behaves like cigarette smoke. It’s not really about droplets or contracting the virus through contact. If you’re indoors and the windows are closed, six feet and masking won’t work. The room gets filled with the virus. Plexiglass can even trap the virus and increase your chance of getting it! You want the air exchanged rapidly and you want particle filtration that will use a HEPA filter to capture the virus particles.

Fortunately, there are easy ways to test how well you’re doing. You can get a $200 CO2 meter which you can place in a room and track how much CO2 is gathering. That’s a measure of how much air has been exhaled by other people. If the CO2 level goes up, your risk goes up. This is very low cost. Any school can afford a gadget to take through the classes through the course of the day and measure how they’re doing.

Bottom line, if you don’t feel like the school is protecting your children, find another school or keep them at home.

LP: Your company has been working on low-cost, high-sensitivity Covid tests. If the delta variant ramps up faster in the body, becoming infectious to other people more quickly, does it mean we need more than the once-a-week testing that has become common in schools and workplaces?

PA: Once a week is the bare minimum of what you could do for the Wuhan strain. That’s when the virus took four days to ramp up to infectiousness in your body. Now, with the faster-acting virus, you need to be tested two or three times a week. Ideally, you would have a three-times-a-week test with very high sensitivity to detect the virus as early as possible. You have very little time to detect it before people start spreading it. You need to catch it when the virus is still at a low concentration in the body. Unfortunately, a lot of the rapid tests and antigen tests in use now are not that sensitive, in which case you really need to do daily testing.

LP: Is there some good news to leave us with?

PA: The good news is that the new mRNA vaccines really are scientific wonders and are the single most powerful protection anyone can muster. So go get that and feel 80 times safer from death or hospitalization. Also know that we’ve seen places like New Zealand, Germany, and Singapore manage to get delta under control with diligence in applying new measures in addition to the vaccines. They instituted strong mask policies, distancing, capacity limits, and so on. This is doable. We should absolutely be able to do it ourselves if we can get ourselves a little more science-aligned and a little more unified and cooperative in battling the virus instead of each other.

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Why Did the Taliban Take Over Afghanistan So Fast?

The fall of Kabul on Sunday 15 August was the culmination of an unexpected offensive by the Taliban, in which they had seized most districts and all major cities — along with Afghanistan's main border crossings. The rapid progression was in part due to coordinated peace agreements which were struck with local leaders, while Afghan troops exchanged U.S. vehicles and weapons for safe passage.

The swift collapse came as a shock to most observers. Just two days earlier, the Pentagon had claimed Kabul was “not right now in an imminent threat environment”. Two weeks earlier, the Pentagon’s assessment was that Kabul could fall within six months. When, just a month earlier, a journalist asked Joe Biden whether he saw any parallels with the end of the Vietnam war, his answer was: “None whatsoever. Zero.” The President added that the Taliban were not “remotely comparable in terms of capability” to the North Vietnamese Army.

It seems that even the grimmest predictions got the real balance of power between the Taliban and the Afghan government wrong. What explains the systematic underestimation of the Taliban’s capabilities? Our research on NATO’s withdrawal from combat operations in Afghanistan suggests the Taliban have been strategic in their use of violence, using restraint to influence military assessments of their capabilities in order to encourage more rapid withdrawals. The recent events in Afghanistan offer a replay of this strategy, at an even bigger scale and to dramatic effect.

Here’s how we did our research

In a recent article, we study the large-scale security transition from international troops to local government forces in Afghanistan, between 2011 and 2014. This transition consisted of two distinct phases. The first phase of withdrawal included transferring military authority to local forces. The second phase involved the physical departure of international troops, as the number of foreign forces decreased from 140,000 to 12,000, along with the closure, retrograde, or transfer of nearly 800 military bases.

Our study used exceptionally granular geo-tagged and time-stamped data on different types of insurgent and security operations — we used data collected since the start of NATO activity in Afghanistan in 2001. This data is otherwise known as SIGACTS and has been used widely to study combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. We combined the data with survey records of 370,000 civilians gathered between 2008 and 2016 (called ANQAR), which detail perceptions of security transitions, perceptions of territorial control, and the extent of local security provision. Our article provides further details on the methodology we used.

In our analysis, we estimate the impact of each phase of the transition on measures of conflict intensity. First, we identify the impact of the transfer of control from foreign troops (ISAF) to Afghan forces (ANSF). As the transition process was completed in five tranches, we are able to exploit the temporal variation generated by the transition process. Panel A of Figure 1 shows the territorial distribution of conflict intensity and Panel B shows the assignment of Afghan districts to one of the five transition tranches.

Comparing districts in which the security transition has been implemented to other districts, before and after the transition, we find that the security transition was associated with both decreases in actual violence outcomes and increases in perception of security as reported by the SIGACTS and ANQAR survey data respectively. Figure 2 depicts the drop in various violence outcomes once security responsibility had been formally handed over to ANSF.

Next, we turn to gauge the effect of physical withdrawal of NATO troops on the security levels. The closure of bases was more haphazard, and also less well documented. To study this second phase, we leveraged a simple but important fact about the timing of physical exit: the geographic location of bases — their distance to military air hubs used to transport supplies out of Afghanistan — partially determined when bases were shut down. We use these logistical constraints to estimate the causal impact of the physical withdrawal of troops. Panel A of Figure 3 demonstrates the variation of timing of the base closure dates relative to the transition onset announcements. Panel B of Figure 3 shows the least-cost, shortest distance from a district centroid to the nearest logistic hub mapping well into the timing of base closure. We find that the physical withdrawal and base closure is associated with a drastic worsening of the conflict situation with both violence and security perceptions worsening drastically. We also confirm that our results are not driven by displacement effects between districts.

What explains the initial drop in violence in the first phase of the transition, and its subsequent rise in the second phase? We do not find evidence suggesting that the withdrawal announcement weakened the ability of the Taliban to mobilize; similarly, we do not find evidence suggesting that the ANSF ability improves with the handover. Rather, we argue that the mechanism that could account for our findings is a strategic decision by the Taliban to scale back violence during the transition period. Local security transfers created an “overwatch” period, in which the relative capacity of the Taliban and the ANSF was signaled to ISAF forces. As such, the Taliban had an incentive to understate its capacity in a manner that was both difficult to detect, and that confirmed NATO forces’ biases (i.e., that Afghan security forces were ably trained and capable of delivering security on their own). In our article, we formalize this logic in a simple game in which violence serves as a signal about the relative capacities of the Taliban and the ANSF.

The Taliban’s strategy during the 2011-2014 transition facilitated the withdrawal, by giving a false impression of the capabilities of local actors to take on the security challenges of fighting alone. The Afghanistan Papers, released by the Washington Post in 2019, give us an opportunity to explore these decisions through internal assessments. SIGAR, reflecting on these exit interviews, came to the conclusion that various military benchmarks had failed to correctly measure the capabilities of local Afghan forces, masking their fundamental weaknesses. In the end, these forces were “ill-prepared to deal with deteriorating security after the drawdown of U.S. combat forces.”

Of course, a wide range of factors contributed to the implosion of the Afghan government in recent days. But, our research brings to light two elements that are crucial. First of all, our study underlines that the Taliban’s surge to power started in 2014. Following the withdrawal of NATO troops from (most) combat operations, the Taliban stepped up its offensive and gained effective control over large swathes of rural Afghanistan. This is the context in which President Trump negotiated the definitive US exit from Afghanistan – an agreement that President Biden followed when he committed to withdrawing all troops by August 31, 2021. Constructing historical counterfactuals comes with obvious caveats, but it is possible that a correct assessment of the Taliban’s capacity during the 2011-2014 transition could have informed a different withdrawal strategy and could have thwarted the rise of the Taliban we have seen since 2014.

The second reason why our research is relevant is that the Taliban’s strategic restraint strategy was not new. Military planners and policymakers should have learned from the first transition not to underestimate the Taliban. In 2011-2014, the Taliban stepped up its offensive in rural areas only after major bases were closed. The same happened in the last few weeks. The movement’s swift conquest of provincial capitals and border crossings followed the hand-over of the largest base and logistical hub of the US mission, Bagram airport, on July 2, 2021. At that point, the US had effectively deconstructed its military capabilities in the country. The Taliban could then start an offensive that would quickly reveal its full military and political strength, leading to the fall of Kabul.

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Libertarians And the Vaccine: Give Me Liberty and Give Them Death

As the super-contagious Delta variant of Covid rips across the country, in no small part due to the behavior of the millions of Americans who have so far chosen to remain unvaccinated, the question of whether to make jabs mandatory is becoming urgent. A lot of libertarians are still voicing opposition. What gives?

An expanding list of employers, universities, and businesses are now requiring vaccines and stipulating that those who remain unvaccinated undergo testing and other protocols, such as masking. As many as seven million federal workers have to show proof of vaccination or be tested weekly and wear masks. Defense Secretary Austin is indicating that will soon hold for the armed forces and military employees. North Carolina, New York, and California are asking the same of their state employees.

As of August 9, United Airlines, Tyson Foods, and Microsoft have mandated vaccines for workers, as have 1,500 health systems. The largest U.S. teachers’ union has also indicated that all teachers should be vaccinated to protect children. If you’re a student wanting to attend classes in-person this fall, you’ll need to roll up your sleeve and get vaccinated at over 500 colleges and universities, including several large state systems.

On August 3, New York City became the first big city in the country to require proof of vaccination at restaurants, gyms, and other businesses – though the verification system has proven buggy and easy to manipulate.

All this has many libertarians in a tizzy.

Libertarians, known for their free-market ideology and promotion of an idiosyncratic concept of individual liberty, are split badly on the issues. Some, especially in academia, are unwilling to ride on theoretical magic carpets that don’t go very far in the real world when it comes to Covid. This group supports mandatory vaccines, admitting that it’s not really okay to infringe upon the freedom of others to remain alive and healthy. But many, especially the activist anti-vaxxers and their enablers in the political sphere, argue vociferously against vaccine requirements no matter what the consequences to others. Even if that consequence is death.

These zealots shout: “My body, my decision!” But when it comes to your body and your risks, apparently that’s your problem. People like babies and kids, vulnerable to Covid because they aren’t eligible for vaccines (currently filling up children’s hospitals in many parts of the country), and the immunocompromised, which includes cancer patients, people with diabetes, and pregnant women, are supposed to take all risks of exposure on the chin, including those created by recalcitrant caregivers. At hospitals still without mandates, a person undergoing chemotherapy is expected to accept being surrounded by unvaccinated medical workers whose choices put them in constant mortal danger.

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican, just signed one of the “medical freedom” bills currently circulating, which grandly asserts that people have a “natural, essential and inherent right to bodily integrity, free from any threat or compulsion by government to accept an immunization.” Tellingly, it doesn’t address state laws compelling children to receive various vaccines in order to attend school. That’s because the citizens of New Hampshire are unwilling to let deadly diseases like measles and polio tear through their classrooms and disable or kill their kids. Some states allow controversial exceptions to this mandate, such as religious objections, but you don’t get out of the requirement by making speeches about bodily integrity.

Let’s be clear: Americans have all kinds of awesome rights as individuals. In the majority of cases, you get to decide what risks to take with your own life and property. If you’d like to win the Darwin Award and try to jet ski off Niagra Falls, you can do that.

But you aren’t free to subject others to deadly harm. You’re not allowed to drive your Corvette at 100 mph and spin donuts on the freeway, because you might hurt somebody. You don’t get to fire your AK 47 into the air at a Fourth of July picnic. And you won’t be lighting up a Marlboro on an airplane. Your personal liberty, in such cases, is curtailed in order to ensure the safety of others.

You may not like it, but the Supreme Court has supported intrusions on your body in a number of cases in the name of public and individual safety. These include things like blood alcohol testing and strip and body cavity searches. If you are having a psychotic breakdown and you are a criminal defendant, the state can force you to take medication to make you competent to stand trial.

For quite some time, American law has been clear that the bodily intrusion of mandatory vaccinations is necessary in order to shield citizens from harm.

In 1905, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court explained that people living in a civil society have obligations to protect one another from dangerous diseases: “In every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

In that particular case, Cambridge pastor Henning Jacobson had argued that he and his kids had experienced bad a reaction to prior vaccines and so should be given an exemption, but the Court said that he had no proof and would not be getting a pass. As a citizen and a parent, he wasn’t permitted to expose anyone, including his own kid or anybody else’s, to smallpox, which was raging at the time. The Court sent the message that your individual liberty is never absolute and can be subject to the police power of the state.

There is a teeny tiny risk in taking a vaccine for a disease like Covid, though it is far less of a risk than contracting the disease itself. But there are vastly more risky things a citizen can be required to do for what is determined to be the greater good.

Take national defense. Libertarians get uncomfortable on this subject, and many like to pretend that you can rely on volunteers to get the job done. Reality check: Though it’s been almost a half-century since Americans were drafted into military service, the fact is that conscription has been necessary for every major war. Yes, it’s often possible to find enough people to volunteer for military service during peacetime, at least if you pay them, but people are generally unenthusiastic about getting maimed or killed during wartime.

During the U.S. Civil War, trying to get anyone to fight was a nightmare. Wealthy people were paying poor people to be cannon fodder in their place. In 1863, New York City erupted in a 4-day deadly riot because people opposed the Civil War draft law which allowed rich men like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie to pay off substitutes. That racially charged riot, which saw whites attacking blacks throughout the city, was one of the bloodiest in U.S. history.

Certainly, you can argue that the U.S. conscription system is sexist and arbitrary because it only pertains to young men. But the fact is, when American men turn 18, the federal government requires them to register for the Selective Service. Doing so is a prerequisite for things like obtaining student loans or being hired for a federal job, and 41 states make it part of getting a driver’s license. Failure to register is a felony offense.

In a 1918 opinion, the Supreme Court equated Congress’s constitutional power to “raise and support armies” with the authority to force citizens into service.

The government appeals to fairness in stating why registration is necessary: “Selective Service’s mission is to register virtually all men residing in the United States. If a draft is ever needed, the process must be fair, and that fairness depends on having all eligible men register. In the event of a draft, for every man who fails to register, another man would be required to take his place in service to his country.”

Recently, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins, who presumably has registered for Selective Service, decided to refuse to be vaccinated for Covid. He states that he is willing surround himself with plexiglass in the team's quarterback room in order to avoid getting jabbed. Unfortunately, there’s not much evidence that plexiglass barriers prevent the spread of Covid, because the aerosol particles move through the air like cigarette smoke. Therein lies the problem. There’s really no way to seal yourself off from your fellow citizens unless you live alone in quarantine. And the frequency of asymptomatic transmission means you can’t tell whether many people near you have the disease or not.

Even when the unvaccinated receive weekly testing, it’s still not enough to protect other people, because the virus spreads exponentially, which means that it proliferates in much shorter periods of time. This is particularly concerning in medical facilities, where testing unvaccinated workers once a week risks exposing immunocompromised people to life-threatening conditions. The same goes for nursing homes.

The issue of twice-a-week testing opens yet another can of libertarian worms. Who is expected to pay the hundreds of dollars a week that multiple tests of the unvaccinated will cost in the case, say, of government workers or state university students? The taxpayers? Oh really? Among some libertarians, taxation is regarded as theft. Would they agree that the cancer patient can be taxed to support the constant testing of medical workers whose behavior threatens her life? Let’s ask Senator Rand Paul about that.

According to Larry Brilliant, a prominent epidemiologist and part of the WHO team that helped eradicate smallpox, the Covid pandemic is nowhere near over, and the Delta variant may be “the most contagious virus ever seen.” He believes that the likelihood of more variants arising due to lack of vaccinations is high, and there is even a possibility of a “super variant” emerging that vaccines don’t work against. This possibility is currently low, he explains, but we must do everything possible to prevent it now. That means jabs for the unvaccinated ASAP.

John Stuart Mill, a philosopher oft cited by libertarians, wrote in 1859 about the “harm principle,” which holds that the state can restrict the actions of individuals to prevent harm to others: “The liberty of the individual must be . . . limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people . . . the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant, and . . . in the part, which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Clearly, people electing to remain unvaccinated are violating Mill’s harm principle.

Committing suicide by virus is one thing, but inflicting mortal harm on others is another. If libertarians wish to maintain their self-centered fixation on their own freedoms without considering how their behavior injures others, let them do so -- in indefinite quarantine from the rest of us.

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