While over 100 Palestinians now die of hunger every day in Gaza, Congress remains peculiarly silent.
Members of antiwar group Code Pink asked lawmakers in the halls of Congress Tuesday about how they will help, repeatedly mentioning that Gazan children are now reportedly succumbing to malnutrition in greater numbers. But the lawmakers they managed to approach in their “Stop Starving Gaza Now” emergency action seemed uninterested, or otherwise suggested Hamas should address the crisis, either by releasing hostages or negotiating with Israel.
“Release the hostages,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said when asked what could be done. Fine is a staunch Israel supporter who’s been accused of “unhinged, racist and Islamophobic” rhetoric by Congressional colleagues and was ratioed on X yesterday for saying “starve away” in regards to Gazan civilians. He also called reports of starvation “a lie” and "Muslim terror propaganda."
“Get in touch with my office,” said Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), a member of the House Armed Service and House Foreign Affairs committees, when asked about how the U.S. could get adequate food to dying Gazan children. “Thank you for coming by.”
“I’m talking on the phone,” another lawmaker quipped, brushing off questions altogether.
Members of Congress are in a unique position to change or otherwise challenge the current situation by leveraging the $3.3 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel per year.
But their efforts to do this have often gone belly up. Last week, for example, the House of Representatives voted 6-422 to shoot down Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's 2026 Department of Defense Appropriations Act amendment to block $500 million in additional military assistance to Israel.
The State Department supports the Israel- and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as a way to provide Palestinians meals, giving it $30 million toward its operations. But the IDF is accused of shooting Gazans at these centers almost every day, and humanitarian organizations say the food distributed is not nearly enough to keep 2 million people alive in this crisis situation. They are calling on the GHF to cease operations and allow the UN or other traditional NGOs to go in to do the work.
Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said, “I see people starving… on purpose” when asked by one lawmaker to acknowledge that the situation takes “two sides” to negotiate.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce announced yesterday that Trump envoy Steve Witkoff will go to the Middle East to work on negotiations toward a Gaza ceasefire, and for an aid corridor to open in Gaza. Israel broke a previously negotiated ceasefire earlier this spring.
Afghan nationals, who were deported from Iran, wait to board a bus upon their arrival at the Islam Qala border crossing in Herat province, Afghanistan, July 22, 2025. REUTERS/Sayed Hassib
It’s been a dark summer for Afghans. When Israel launched the 12-day war with Iran on June 13, Tehran used it as a pretext to scapegoat some of its most vulnerable residents.
In its latest wave of deportations, an estimated 700,000 Afghans have returned to Afghanistan since Iran began expulsions that month. Then on July 31, Pakistan launched the third phase of its “Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan,” announced in 2023, arresting and detaining Afghans across the country.
According to the International Organization for Migration, over four million people have returned from Iran and Pakistan to Afghanistan since 2023, with over two million returning just this year. The fourth anniversary of the Taliban takeover on August 15 came and went as Afghans return to a country where the human rights situation has deteriorated over the past four years.
Hunger looms. About half the population, or 23 million people, are estimated to depend on food aid before the end of the year. Among them are 3.5 million children, some of whom were born abroad and have never before set foot in Afghanistan.
And what do they return to?
With a central banking system disconnected by Western sanctions from the international SWIFT banking system and frozen assets, Afghanistan finds itself in a permanent economic crisis.
The country’s humanitarian sector and health system are collapsing. Thousands of public-sector jobs have been cut. Kabul is facing a major housing crisis. And some returnees are vulnerable to being targeted by Taliban fighters. Former government officials, Afghan National Defense and Security Forces soldiers, intelligence officers, police officers, and interpreters who collaborated with NATO forces, journalists, and activists are being abducted, detained, and, in some cases, subject to torture by the Taliban authorities, the United Nations reports.
“Sending people back to a country in which they are at risk of persecution, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or other irreparable harm, violates the core international law principle of non-refoulement,” U.N. Human Rights spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said.
And while fewer Afghans have migrated to other Central Asian countries, they haven’t been welcome there either.
Tajikistan has routinely deported Afghans en masse for several years, a process that escalated again in June despite acceding to the 1951 Refugee Convention on the legal rights of refugees, including protections against refoulement when they are at risk of persecution.
The Taliban has publicly denounced the repatriations, Deputy Minister for Refugees and Repatriation Abdul Rahman Rashid calling them a “serious violation of international norms, humanitarian principles, and Islamic values.”
As for Iran, where persistent economic crises had fueled anti-immigrant sentiment, it had already announced before its war with Israel its intention to forcibly repatriate undocumented Afghans if they failed to leave voluntarily by July 6. Unsubstantiated accusations that Afghans were collaborating with Israel’s Mossad offered a convenient excuse for the regime’s security failures during the 12-day war.
“At the height of the war with Israel there was a lot of anger at the security failures of the [Iranian] state apparatus,” Ibraheem Bahiss, a Kabul-based expert for the International Crisis Group, told RS. “[I]t needs to somehow find a red herring to take the blame off.”
The Iranian authorities “used this popular discontent to carry out the [repatriation] policy,” Bahiss said. “It’s made it more difficult to plead with the Iranians to temper their approach.”
For Pakistan, in turn, rounding up Afghans for deportation has been used to pressure the Taliban, Bahiss explained, to halt its alleged support for the resurgence of the Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP), a Pakistan-based insurgency that escalated drone attacks over the summer. The Afghan Taliban has provided the TTP refuge, but Islamabad’s deportation program appears designed primarily to distract its public from its own homegrown extremism problem and security failures.
Last month, Russia became the first country to normalize diplomatic ties with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, an act that Afghanistan Foreign Minister Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi referred to as an “unprecedented step towards Afghanistan’s integration into the international community.” Keen on extending the Belt and Road Initiative into Afghanistan, China stepped up economic diplomacy at the first trilateral meeting with Afghanistan and Pakistan in Kabul last week. Qatar, and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia have exerted a type of humanitarian diplomacy, with Qatar newly striking a deal to employ thousands of Afghans in the wake of Iran’s crackdowns.
Russia has tried to forge a “Grand Bargain” with the Taliban, Bahiss explained, referring to Moscow’s pressure on the predominantly Pashtun Taliban for an ethnically more inclusive government, and trade in the agricultural and fossil fuels sectors. Since the Taliban takeover, Russian presidential envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov expressed a desire for the Taliban to improve the human rights situation, including for women and girls, while insisting that Russia does not intend to interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Nine countries surrounding Afghanistan are likely to meet in Moscow this fall to discuss relations with Kabul.
A key priority for Russia aligns with that of the Taliban: to defeat the Islamic State and latent insurgencies, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, that have Central Asian countries on alert. The Taliban’s campaigns against Islamic State — Khorasan Province have been lauded by the Muslim World League.
Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry and the Russian Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
“The Taliban leadership need to take responsibility for the ongoing and worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan,” Fereshta Abbasi, Asia researcher with Human Rights Watch, said at a press briefing earlier this month. “We have called on states to ensure that human rights are a priority and a core point on the agenda every time that they are meeting with the Taliban.”
A coalition of 90 Afghan and international organizations that have been lobbying the U.N. Human Rights Council to create an independent mechanism to investigate, and if called for, prosecute rights abuses in Afghanistan before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice.
The ICC has already issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, Haibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, based on the crime against humanity of persecution on gender and political grounds. All eyes are now on the EU to address the proposal at the next Human Rights Council session in September.
“It’s a sad thing, but access to countries to do human rights monitoring and documentation is becoming the exception rather than the rule,” Richard Bennett, the Human Rights Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan, said at this month’s briefing. The special rapporteur was barred from Afghanistan last year. “Maybe the Taliban don’t realize the political credit they had been getting by allowing me to visit, which they now lost,” he added.
“It’s a responsibility of all states, not only Western states,” Bennett said. “What’s happening in Afghanistan are crimes against humanity, crimes against the whole of humanity, which should shock our conscience and provoke action by all.”
In the meantime, millions of Afghans are returning to a country that is under repressive rule, where their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and occupations put them at grave risk of becoming another statistic in a report denouncing crimes against humanity. Deportees with criminal records are subject to the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia law, which legalized public flogging, amputations, stoning, and executions.
“The international community needs to distinguish between the de facto authorities and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the people of Afghanistan,” Abbasi said. “They need to ensure that they are not punishing the people of Afghanistan for the Taliban’s acts.”
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Top image credit: U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and U.S. special envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack speaks after meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon August 26, 2025. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
A tale of two envoys recently unfolded in Beirut, encapsulating the crossroads at which Lebanon now stands. Tanned and sporting a pink tie, the U.S. Envoy Tom Barrack arrived with Deputy Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus in mid-August. Their meetings with top Lebanese officials underscored Washington’s insistence that lasting stability in Lebanon depends on consolidating state authority, and disarming Hezbollah.
Days earlier, Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s National Security Council, had departed, leaving a message equally blunt but diametrically opposed: Hezbollah’s arms are a red line and are necessary tools for its “resistance” to Israel. These visits represent the opposing magnetic poles pulling at the country.
Lebanon is reeling from a confluence of catastrophes. A devastating scuffle with Israel last year decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership and ravaged its strongholds. Compounding this military blow was a strategic amputation: the swift collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, which severed the critical land bridge that for decades funneled Iranian arms and support to Iran’s most prized regional proxy. Into this vortex has stepped Barrack, a 40-year friend of Donald Trump and a businessman by trade, embodying a U.S. strategy that is quintessentially Trumpian in its DNA.
The American proposal, relentlessly pushed by Barrack in marathon meetings from Jerusalem to Beirut, eschews ideology for incentives. It is a carefully sequenced, "step-by-step" plan designed to untie the Gordian knot of southern Lebanon.The Lebanese government, led by former army chief President Joseph Aoun, must take concrete actions to implement its own historic cabinet decision to disarm Hezbollah. As Beirut makes progress, Israel is expected to reciprocate, beginning with a phased withdrawal from the five military outposts it still occupies inside Lebanon and a reduction in its routine airstrikes within Lebanese territory, actions that have continued despite a November 2024 ceasefire.
Yet, true to the spirit of a purported dealmaker president, the core of the strategy is a buyout of Hezbollah’s economy of resistance, replacing it with an economy of reconstruction. The plan's centerpiece is the proposed "economic zone" in southern Lebanon.
Recognizing that Hezbollah’s power is rooted as much in patronage as in piety, the plan aims to substitute Iranian funding and Hezbollah’s shadow economy with a surge of Saudi and Qatari investment, specifically designed to offer new livelihoods to tens of thousands of Hezbollah fighters. Barrack articulated this vision bluntly. "What are you going to do with them?" he asked. "Take their weapon and say ‘by the way, good luck planting olive trees’? It can’t happen. We have to help them."
The plan is designed to achieve two goals at once: to dismantle the group's arsenal in the near-term, and to re-engineer the conditions of state neglect and economic grievance that allowed Hezbollah to flourish in the first place.
This political-commercial nexus is especially evident in the second, quieter dimension of Barrack’s mission: the business of borders and energy. The demarcation of Lebanon’s maritime boundaries, first with Israel and now with Syria, is the essential legal groundwork required to de-risk the Eastern Mediterranean for major American and European energy corporations.
As energy experts have noted, Big Oil firms like Chevron and ExxonMobil will not invest in exploration and extraction in blocks adjacent to a war zone. The American “green light” for investment is conditional on a stable, predictable security environment — one in which a non-state actor like Hezbollah cannot trigger a regional conflagration.
Thus, border demarcation, disarmament, and investment (on land and sea) form an unbreakable chain. A stable border with Syria is necessary for Damascus to begin its own offshore licensing rounds. A stable border with Israel is necessary for Lebanon to attract the capital it desperately needs. And for both to be stable, Hezbollah’s autonomous military capability must be neutralized. Barrack’s plan is a comprehensive effort to establish the political and security prerequisites for a new energy-driven economy in the region, with Lebanon and a post-Assad Syria as junior partners.
The Lebanese cabinet’s approval in early August of a Lebanese army-led disarmament plan was an unprecedented defiance of the state-within-a-state that Hezbollah has operated for decades. However, to expect a simple capitulation is to fundamentally misunderstand the organization.
For generations, Hezbollah has been more than a fighting force, it has been a provider of social services for Lebanon's Shiites and the purveyor of a potent narrative of dignity and resistance against Israeli aggression. The new American-led proposal offers jobs and investment, but it demands the surrender of the very weapons that many in the community believe guarantee their security and political relevance.
This re-engineering extends beyond economics to the entire security architecture of Lebanon’s south. The long-standing U.N. peacekeeping force, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), is recast through Barrack’s unforgiving business lens as a failed investment — a billion-dollar-a-year venture that has left Lebanon, in his words, "in a swamp." The true answer, he insists, is the Lebanese Armed Forces. Washington’s backing for a final one-year extension of UNIFIL’s mandate is therefore a deadline to operationalize Hezbollah’s disarmament.
This existential fear animates the defiant rhetoric of Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem. His threats — "whoever wants to take this weapon means they want to take our soul from us…then the world will see our might" — and his framing of disarmament as a humiliating submission to "U.S.-Israeli dictates" are aimed directly at this constituency.
But money talks. The sales pitch at the core of the American-led strategy is to make an offer that Hezbollah's constituents, crippled by Lebanon's economic collapse, cannot refuse. The goal is a hostile takeover of sorts: a buyout of Hezbollah's entire political economy of resistance and its substitution with a new marketplace of reconstruction. The re-engagement of Gulf powers is what puts the capital on the table for this deal, with Saudi Arabia leading the diplomatic charge. After years of frustrated withdrawal, Riyadh has returned with a new policy of "engaged conditionality" — offering the financial support crucial for Lebanon's survival, but strictly conditioned on following Washington’s lead to end Hezbollah’s paramilitary existence.
Where, then, is this heading? The convergence of pressures — military, political, regional, and now economic — on Hezbollah is unprecedented. The path of least resistance, and perhaps the only one that ensures its long-term survival, is for the group to consolidate its immense political gains by sacrificing the military wing that made them possible. This path would compel Hezbollah to finally choose between its two identities: relinquishing its role as a revolutionary vanguard to fully embrace its reality as a powerful, but conventional, parliamentary bloc operating within the confines of the state.
But the underpinnings of this deal are fragile. If the promised economic relief fails to materialize, or if Israel’s reciprocal steps go unfulfilled, the entire enterprise could be exposed as the "U.S.-Israeli dictate" Qassem claims it to be. In that scenario, the Shiite community's fear of being politically neutered will become validated, and Qassem’s threat to “fight” disarmament could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indeed, the deal being brokered by Tom Barrack offers a potential pathway out of decades of conflict, but the approach is seen by some, not as good-faith problem-solving, but as an imposition based on a premature sense of victory. For example, Kim Ghattas, a distinguished fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics and an FT contributing editor, argues that the belief Hezbollah would simply capitulate is "sorely deluded.” Hezbollah's identity, Ghattas argues, is transnational, its ultimate loyalty lies not with the Lebanese state but with Iran's Supreme Leader, making a purely national settlement a far more complex proposition.
The sense of an external, top-down imposition was personified by the Barrack himself. His controversial warning to Lebanese journalists to ‘act civilized” and not be “animalistic” was seen by many as deeply offensive. This attitude aligns with the critique from Lebanese academic Hussam Matar, who frames the plan as an attempt at "complete subjugation" rather than a respect for Lebanese sovereignty.
At its heart, the U.S.-led plan to defang Hezbollah demands that a once disenfranchised, now powerful community trade its arms — the very symbol of its identity and security — for a promise. Whether that promise is perceived as an opportunity or a trap will be the deciding factor between a nascent peace and a new civil war..
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Lloyd Austin, Kenneth McKenzie, and Mark Milley in 2021. (MSNBC screengrab)
It will be four years since the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, ending a nearly 20-year occupation that could serve as a poster child for mission creep.
What began in October 2001 as a narrow intervention to destroy al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and topple the Taliban government for refusing to hand over al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, morphed into an open-ended nation-building operation that killed 2,334 U.S. military personnel and wounded over 20,000 more.
But the failure of the war to deliver on its maximalist platitudes of bringing peace, democracy, and women’s rights to a nation that rejected them has obscured two of the most important lessons from the conflict and its end: first, the U.S. need not occupy a country indefinitely to prevent terrorism against the U.S. homeland. Second, the United States will severely punish any government that allows terrorist groups to attack U.S. targets from its territory, and the threat of U.S. punishment is a highly credible deterrent against state-sponsored terrorism.
Those two facts should be shouted from the rooftops of the nation’s capital any time members of the foreign policy establishment claim that the U.S. must deploy troops to far-off locales to prevent terrorist “safe havens” from emerging.
In fact, there have been zero terrorist attacks directly linked to Afghanistan against U.S. targets at home or abroad in the four years since the U.S. departed. Zero. The 2025 Bourbon Street attack, which killed 14 people, was perpetrated by a lone-wolf U.S. citizen who was “inspired” by ISIS ideology but acted alone, with no known contacts to the original ISIS or its Afghan affiliate, ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K).
That’s despite fevered warnings of worst-case scenarios that would supposedly result if the U.S.-backed Afghan government crumbled in the wake of our military withdrawal. That government did fall, rapidly, and the Taliban regained control as feared. Yet we have not seen a resurgence of jihadist terrorism targeting the United States.
There are two big reasons why. First, effective counterterrorism does not require boots on the ground, so leaving Afghanistan has not hampered U.S. efforts in that security space. The United States is extraordinarily capable of detecting and disrupting international terrorist threats with over-the-horizon intelligence and targeting capabilities.
In the nearly 25 years since 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism capabilities have grown so sophisticated that there are no “safe havens” from U.S. reach, even in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. The U.S. didn’t need troops on the ground to locate and kill al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul with a drone strike on his safe house in July 2022, for example.
Nor has a presence been necessary for authorities to foil the handful of plots tenuously linked to ISIS or ISIS-K against the U.S. in the past few years, including the 2024 Election Day plot in Oklahoma and a potential assault on a U.S. Army base in Michigan in 2025. Neither plot was well-advanced, and while the suspects believed they were conspiring with foreign terrorists, it’s not even clear those contacts were real. The would-be assailant in Michigan, a teenager, was actually communicating with undercover F.B.I. agents posing as ISIS members all along.
U.S. and allied intelligence services have also foiledmultipleplots in Europe linked to international terrorist groups since the U.S. left Afghanistan and were able to alertIran and Russia of the looming ISIS-K attacks on those countries in 2024 – warnings that were tragically disregarded by local authorities, resulting in the loss of nearly 250 lives.
Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan has actually made the U.S. less vulnerable to terrorism by depriving local groups of U.S. targets to attack. The last – and only – mass casualty attack ISIS-K perpetrated against the U.S. occurred during the chaotic withdrawal itself, when 13 U.S. troops providing crowd control at the Kabul airport were killed alongside 170 Afghan civilians by a lone suicide bomber.
With U.S. troops gone, hurting the U.S. is much more difficult. In fact, ISIS-K has never managed to strike U.S. targets outside of Afghanistan.
The second reason Afghanistan hasn’t devolved into a launching pad for anti-U.S. terrorism is that the Taliban government knows that the United States will not tolerate it — from Afghanistan or anywhere else. If the 20-year Afghanistan War proved anything, it’s that the threat of massive U.S. retaliation for state-sponsored terrorism is both deadly serious and a powerful deterrent against allowing terrorists to operate freely.
It's ironic that U.S. policymakers worry so much about establishing credibility in marginal situations but can’t recognize overwhelming U.S. credibility where it does exist.
It should be unsurprising, then, that the Taliban have largely upheld their pledge from the 2020 Doha peace deal to never again allow armed groups to menace the U.S. homeland from Afghan territory. That assurance was credible, not because of any trustworthiness or altruism on the Taliban’s part, but because it served the regime’s own interest in political survival. Permitting a repeat of 9/11 would be regime suicide, and since returning to power, the Taliban have fought a protracted campaign to weaken ISIS-K.
Moreover the Taliban has not allowed al-Qaeda to revive itself, despite friendly ties to the group. Al-Qaeda “is all but destroyed” in Afghanistan, according to Bruce Riedel, a former U.S. counterterrorism official, and U.S. intelligence believes the group is unlikely to reconstitute.
Realizing that boots on the ground are unnecessary to disrupt foreign plots and deter state-sponsored terrorism should be enormously consequential for security efforts going forward. It means the U.S. can safely end its anti-ISIS mission in Iraq next month, as planned, and withdraw all 2,500 U.S. troops from the country by the end of 2026.
It also reinforces the wisdom of the ongoing U.S. drawdown from Syria and suggests the U.S. footprint there should be completely removed. And it undercuts any rationale for deploying U.S. forces across more than 10 countries in Africa — or anywhere else — that purported “sanctuaries” could arise.
The U.S. must implement the lessons learned from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Those lessons came at a steep price. Let’s do what we can to not pay it ever again.
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