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Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, our parent company, has opened this years GZERO Summit with a provocative speech on the near future of international politics. Here are the highlights.

Are the United States and China now locked in a new form of Cold War? Their governments behave as if they are.

But Bremmer isnt buying it. Hes not predicting that Washington and Beijing will become more cooperative with one another, but that both will be too preoccupied with historic challenges at home in coming years to wage a full-time international struggle.

In Washington, the main worry will be for Americas broken political system. US politics is becoming even more tribalized as TV and online media target politically like-minded consumers with hyperpartisan news coverage. Widening wealth inequality fuels the fire by separating white and non-white, urban and rural, and the more educated from the less educated. Deepening public mistrust of political institutions will fuel future fights over the legitimacy of US elections.

Beijings burden centers on how to extend decades of economic gains while moving away from a growth model that no longer works, as higher wages in China and more automation in factories elsewhere cut deeply into Chinas manufacturing advantages. China is still a middle-income country. To reach the prosperity level of wealthy nations, it needs 6-7 percent growth for another 20 years.

But China must spend less in coming years to keep giant, deeply indebted companies afloat and more to care for the largest population of elderly people in history. And its leaders must accomplish this at a time when Chinas people expect ever-rising levels of prosperity from their government.

The domestic distraction of US and Chinese leaders will create new opportunities for European, Japanese, Canadian, Indian and other political and business leaders to contribute toward international problem-solving. But other governments arent the only new players stepping into this power vacuum.

Technology companies are fast becoming important geopolitical actors. Were entering a world in which economic winners and losers, election outcomes, and national security will depend on choices made by both governments and by the worlds big tech firms.

Bremmer calls this a techno-polar moment.

The idea is simple but transformative: Just as governments make the laws that determine what can happen in the physical world, tech companies have final authority in a digital world thats becoming both more expansive and more immersive.

The biggest tech companies will establish sovereignty by defining the digital space and its boundaries, the algorithms that determine what happens within that space, and the terms and conditions that decide who gets to operate in this world.

For skeptics, Bremmer poses this question: Who will do more to influence the outcome of next years US midterm congressional elections: The President of the United States or the CEO of Meta? According to Bremmer, since the vote will be influenced by both real-world rules changes and the online flow of information, the answer isnt obvious.

How will tech companies try to expand their power? Some will behave as globalists by trying to reach consumers and influence politics everywhere.

Others will act as national champions by aligning with individual governments and their goals.

Still, others will behave as techno-utopians, companies that expect historical forces and tech innovations to help them replace governments in important ways.

The relative success of these models over the next decade will decide how government and tech companies share power over the longer-term and whether democracy or autocracy will have the upper hand.

Whats to be done? Think adaptation, not surrender, says Bremmer. Steps can be taken to limit the sometimes negative influence of tech companies in the political lives of democracies. But just as climate change can be limited but not avoided, so we must understand and adapt to a world in which governments and tech companies compete for influence over our lives.

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Taliban 2.0: Afghanistan on the Brink (US AWOL) - GZERO Media

At just short of 20 years, the now-ending U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan was Americas longest war. Ordinary Americans tended to forget about it, and it received measurably less oversight from Congress than the Vietnam War did. But its death toll is in the many tens of thousands. And because the U.S. borrowed most of the money to pay for it, generations of Americans will be burdened by the cost of paying it off.

Heres a look at the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, by the numbers, as the Taliban in a lightning offensive take over much of the country before the United States Aug. 31 deadline for ending its combat role and as the U.S. speeds up American and Afghan evacuations.

Much of the data below is from Linda Bilmes of Harvard Universitys Kennedy School and from the Brown University Costs of War project. Because the United States between 2003 and 2011 fought the Afghanistan and Iraq wars simultaneously, and many American troops served tours in both wars, some figures as noted cover both post-9/11 U.S. wars.

THE LONGEST WAR:

Percentage of U.S. population born since the 2001 attacks plotted by al-Qaida leaders who were sheltering in Afghanistan: Roughly one out of every four.

THE HUMAN COST:

American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448.

U.S. contractors: 3,846.

Afghan national military and police: 66,000.

Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144.

Afghan civilians: 47,245.

Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191.

Aid workers: 444.

Journalists: 72.

AFGHANISTAN AFTER NEARLY 20 YEARS OF U.S. OCCUPATION:

Percentage drop in infant mortality rate since U.S., Afghan and other allied forces overthrew the Taliban government, which had sought to restrict women and girls to the home: About 50.

Percentage of Afghan teenage girls able to read today: 37.

OVERSIGHT BY CONGRESS:

Date Congress authorized U.S. forces to go after culprits in Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Sept. 18, 2001.

Number of times U.S. lawmakers have voted to declare war in Afghanistan: 0.

Number of times lawmakers on Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee addressed costs of Vietnam War, during that conflict: 42

Number of times lawmakers in same subcommittee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars, through mid-summer 2021: 5.

Number of times lawmakers on Senate Finance Committee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars since Sept. 11, 2001, through mid-summer 2021: 1.

PAYING FOR A WAR ON CREDIT, NOT IN CASH:

Amount President Harry Truman temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Korean War: 92%.

Amount President Lyndon Johnson temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Vietnam War: 77%.

Amount President George W. Bush cut tax rates for the wealthiest, rather than raise them, at outset of Afghanistan and Iraq wars: At least 8%.

Estimated amount of direct Afghanistan and Iraq war costs that the United States has debt-financed as of 2020: $2 trillion.

Estimated interest costs by 2050: Up to $6.5 trillion.

THE WARS END. THE COSTS DONT:

Amount Bilmes estimates the United States has committed to pay in health care, disability, burial and other costs for roughly 4 million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans: more than $2 trillion.

Period those costs will peak: after 2048.

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Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars | AP News

Sharbat Gula, who became an international symbol of war-torn Afghanistan after her portrait at a refugee camp was published on the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985, was evacuated to Rome after her country fell to the Taliban, the Italian government said Thursday.

Ever since the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in August, nonprofit organizations had appealed for help in evacuating Ms. Gula, the Italian government said in a statement.

The prime ministers office has brought about and organized her transfer to Italy, the statement said. It did not say when she arrived, and the foreign ministry later said it did not know whether she would remain in Italy or go elsewhere.

Ms. Gula, now in her late 40s and the mother of several children, was believed to be 12 when Steve McCurry photographed her, with a piercing, green-eyed stare, in 1984 in a refugee camp in Pakistan. He did not learn her name until 2002, when he found her in the mountains of Afghanistan and was able to verify her identity.

A 2002 National Geographic article about Mr. McCurrys search for her described the adult Ms. Gula: Time and hardship had erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened.

In 2016, Ms. Gula was deported from Pakistan after being arrested on charges of obtaining false identity documents, a common practice among Afghans in Pakistan. Human rights groups condemned the Pakistani government for sending her back to Afghanistan. On her arrival, the Afghan president at the time, Ashraf Ghani, gave her a warm welcome and provided her with a government-funded apartment.

In August, Taliban leaders moved into the presidential palace that had been occupied by Mr. Ghani. Their takeover once again displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans. Pakistan braced for as many as 700,000 refugees. Italy has evacuated more than 5,000 people from Kabul, the government said.

In the United States, more than 22,500 Afghan refugees have been resettled as of Nov. 19, including 3,500 in one week in October. About 42,500 more remain in temporary housing on eight military bases around the country while they wait for housing.

Until the Taliban takeover, the rights of Afghan women had been expanding. Afghan girls were going to school and getting college degrees, and more were participating in civic life. But under the first few months of the Talibans conservative rule, women have already faced new restrictions, like not being allowed to play sports. The Taliban have severely restricted education for women, and Taliban gunmen have gone door-to-door in some neighborhoods looking for anyone who supported the American efforts in the country.

Heather Barr, the associate director for womens rights at Human Rights Watch, said that it was a particularly dangerous time to be a high-profile woman in Afghanistan. She said there had been cases of prominent women being threatened or intimidated, or feeling like they had no choice but to stay in hiding or change locations constantly to avoid attention.

The Taliban dont want women to be visible, and shes an extremely visible Afghan woman, Ms. Barr said of Ms. Gula.

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

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Afghan Girl From 1985 National Geographic Cover Takes Refuge in Italy - The New York Times

When the Taliban captured the city of Herat on August 12, Yasin and his colleagues speculated that it wouldnt be long before the Talibans invading forces took over their own city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Things were more tense in Mazar, too, so me and other computer kars of Mazar who work together held a secret meeting to decide what to do to protect all our content, he says. Among them, the informal union of computer kars had several hundred terabytes of data collected over several years, and much of it would be considered controversialeven criminalby the Taliban.

We all agreed to not delete, but rather hide the more nefarious content, he says. We reasoned that in Afghanistan, these regimes come and go frequently, but our business should not be disrupted.

He isnt too worried about being discovered.

People are hiding guns, money, jewelry, and whatnot, so I am not scared of hiding my hard drives. They will never be able to find [them], he says. I am a 21st-century boy, and most Taliban are living in the past.

Less than 20 years after former president Hamid Karzai made Afghanistans first mobile phone call, there are nearly 23 million mobile phone users in a country of fewer than 39 million people. But internet access is a different matter: by early 2021, there were fewer than 9 million internet users, a lag that has been largely attributed to widespread physical security problems, high costs, and a lack of infrastructural development across the countrys mountainous terrain.

Thats why computer kars like Yasin can now be found all across Afghanistan. Although they sometimes download their information from the internet when theyre able to get a connection, they physically transport much of it on hard drives from neighboring countrieswhat is known as the sneakernet.

I use the Wi-Fi at home to download some of the music and applications; I also have five SIM cards for internet, says Mohibullah, another kar who asked not to be identified by his real name. But the connection here is not reliable, so every month I send a 4 terabyte hard drive to Jalalabad, and they fill it with content and return it in a weeks time with the latest Indian movies or Turkish TV dramas, music, and applications, for which he says he pays between 800 and 1,000 afghanis ($8.75 to $11).

"People are hiding guns, money, jewelry, and whatnot, so I am not scared of hiding my hard drives. I am a 21st-century boy, and most Taliban are living in the past."

Mohibullah says he can install more than 5 gigabytes of data on a phoneincluding movies, songs, music videos, and even course lessonsfor just 100 afghanis, or $1.09. I have the latest Hollywood and Bollywood movies dubbed in Dari and Pashto [Afghan national languages], music from across the globe, games, applications, he told me in early August, days before the Taliban took over.

For just a little more, Mohibullah helps customers create social media accounts, sets up their phones and laptops, and even writes emails for them. I sell everythingA to Z of contents. Everything except 100% films, he said, referring to pornography. (Later he admitted that he did have some free videos, another nickname for porn, but that he only sells them to trusted customers.)

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Can Afghanistans underground sneakernet survive the Taliban? - MIT Technology Review

Editors Note: As the Taliban tightens its grip on Afghanistan, veteran foreign affairs correspondent and Only Cry for the Living: Memos from Inside the ISIS Battlefield author Hollie McKay, who has remained in the country almost continuously since the U.S. withdrawal at the end of August, spotlights both the necessity and difficulty of talking to members of the Islamic fundamentalist group as part of her role as a journalist.

He stares menacingly fingers clasped around his long, grey-tinged beard never talking to me, only through me.

I have to tell you, says the high-ranking Taliban official, smears of spring sunlight contorting across his cheeks like scars as the Talibans white-and-black flag languishes dead still behind him. I was part of an operation shooting down Americans.

I examine his body language for a moment straight back, proud, lost in his own boneyard of memories.

I think of the many U.S. military families who lost loved ones at the hand of him and his cohorts, the families who will never find real answers or closure, who will forever question the impetus of the U.S. invasion and the two decades of warfare in a nation some 7500 miles away.

How would you feel if I went to your homeland and started recruiting your countrymen to fight its own people? Wouldnt you want to fight us back? he asks, somewhat rhetorically.

I say very little.

But late that night, tucked into a strange and dirty hotel room in the once Taliban stronghold of Ghazni province, I am forced to reflect upon such painful propositions. Was any of this war worth the lost lives, the lost limbs or the thousands of children who would grow old without a mother or father?

Throughout my many years of reporting from scores of war-torn and blood-stained countries, I am routinely confronted with insurgents, terrorists, criminals and killers who have boastfully taken the lives of Americans and are devoted to taking more should the opportunity arise. And yet, such a significant portion of my job is to sit with them, sip tea, dig deep into their psyche and understand why they do what they do.

It is easy to turn a blind eye, to view those against us as two-dimensional beings in a good versus bad dynamic. Yet as journalists, our job is not to give these often brutal individuals a platform or a voice, but instead to be a vehicle that helps initiate communication from the other. The contender who seems so far away, so adverse to our way of thinking, and so removed from my perception of what it means to value a human life.

Only our jobs are not to stick it to them nor interrogate.

Nonetheless, there is a fine line of building a rapport in which the interviewee opens up and coming across as though the conversation is anything in the realm of normal. I remember on one occasion in Iraq interviewing an ISIS bombmaker. My interpreter at the time, a local who had lost many friends and family members, got visibly enraged to the point where the subject was not opening up. After a short conversation outside, he managed to cool down, bury the hatred, and do what needed to be done.

Such interviews require a sense of both compassion and compartmentalization. As a war reporter, I always seek to write from a place of humanity. Still, knowing you must sit with checkered individuals sometimes for hours or days on end induces a strong sense of moral injury.

It doesnt get easier.

So much of my career and time spent in the theater of conflict is also passed alongside our uniformed men and women, far from home, and wanting only to improve the lives of beleaguered, oppressed people.

As a naturalized American citizen, I have long possessed a profound sense of patriotism and love for my country. Through all her flaws and fallibilities, she shines a light in the darkest places like no other. She gives us the soil to arguably reach the highest echelons, whether in education, business, sports, arts or pushing back against injustices.

In my Afghanistan work life, almost every day is spent roaming streets and observing Taliban fighters hoisting weapons paid for by hardworking U.S. taxpayers. I am constantly reminded of the broken families left behind in the wake of bullets I inadvertently funded.

I automatically shudder when a Taliban gets into our car on a journey into an arbitrary area under the guise of security. They then proceed to play their religious Nasheed music Islamic songs without vocals and often peppered with battlefield cries and the intense sounds of bullets being fired and bombs exploding.

Generally, the fighters are respectful and polite yet hate where I hail from and the values the U.S. instills.

But on the same token, as I watch Taliban heavyweights sit in the gardens of Kabuls vibrant caf scene with their wives and children, one cannot help but examine the costs of entering foreign lands and what we would do if the situation was reversed.

For the sake of one man Saudi billionaire and al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden thousands of Americans and many more Afghans paid the ultimate price. It is often lost that Afghans themselves were not part of the September 11 attacks. It was Saudi operatives who drove planes into the twin towers more than two decades ago, and it was the financier himself who was found and killed on Pakistani turf almost a decade later.

Usama, one 21-year-old university student forced to flee his home amid the scourge of fighting pondered quizzically to me just months ago. Who is that?

In the immediate aftermath of the spring attacks all those years ago, the Bush administration gave Mullah Mohammad Omar the founder and leader of the Taliban an ultimatum: hand over bin Laden or face a blistering onslaught. Yet many Afghans hold deeply the concept of Pashtunwali a traditional code of hospitality and the safekeeping of guests as the most critical of cultural tenants. For that, Omar refused to concede and alas, the devastating invasion ignited.

Strangely, that same ethical edict allows me to work unharmed in the country that the former insurgency has since taken back as a journalist and verified visitor inside the embattled land.

Occasionally, a more sinister sentiment of the fragile situation arises.

If you were an American, one elite Taliban fighter who runs a suicide bombing training school on the fringes of Kabul, not aware of my homeland (concealed by my Australian accent) cautions half-heartedly, I would shoot you.

Indeed, the 28-year-old commander has gunned down many and instigated endless attacks on Americans. My blood boils. I think of the hours spent wandering the quiet, heart-rendering fields of Arlington National Cemetery or the neatly kept graveyard inside the Veterans Administration in Westwood, a mile from my former apartment in Los Angeles. I have to let it pass.

I am confronted constantly with Taliban operatives from the highest and lowest levels who have their own battlefield tales to tell.

We dont have to give all sides an equal podium, and I attest that the concept of neutrality is mythical in a battle zone, but we should at least give multiple players a hearing. That is how we learn, grow and (hopefully) avoid the mistakes of times passed.

Everywhere I go, every place I visit, my mind instantly drifts back to massive U.S. battles that took place to the numbers of American soldiers who took their last breath and I feel a sense of guilt that those who loved them most in the world cant be in my shoes to say that final goodbye. Every patch of Afghanistan brings with it an overflowing cadre of scarring stories and emotional memories.

War is typically framed from afar as us vs. them. And although the art of conflict journalism can feel like a decaying breed in a world of clickbait and 280 characters, I believe that communication from as many lenses as possible is the only way to truly understand how to carve a better path forward.

What is war? War is remembering what we thought we knew about the enemy and simultaneously letting go.

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Talking To Terrorists & The Consequences Of Reporting On A War: Afghanistan Special Report - Deadline