One year ago, the Taliban told women they couldn’t study medicine. Now, some are doing it in secret.

This fall, on a hike in Washington’s Olympic National Park, I found wildfire—or it found me. As I labored up a switchback trail, the air hung acrid with smoke from the half dozen fires that smoldered around the park. My windpipe burned and my head ached. The sun was a feeble orange disk; the mountains disappeared behind pale haze.

That the damp Olympic Peninsula—a region blanketed by temperate rainforest—was ablaze seemed telling. As the world has become hotter and drier, it has also become more flammable. This year Canada ignited, smothering the eastern seaboard in smoke; in 2019, Australia’s “Black Summer” released more carbon than many countries’ annual emissions; in 2018, California’s Camp Fire killed 85 people in the town of Paradise. “Fifteen years ago, a 100,000-acre fire would be the largest fire of your career,” one California firefighter told The New York Times in 2021. “Now, we have one-million-acre fires.”

[Read: A clear indication that climate change is burning up California]

Considering all of this, one could be forgiven for assuming that forests are burning more frequently than ever. In fact, the opposite is true: The United States, like Australia and many other countries, is operating at a fire deficit. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, nearly 4 million acres of forest burned between 1984 and 2015, which sounds substantial until you consider that, based on precolonial fire rates, about 10 times that area should have burned. The U.S., observes the journalist M. R. O’Connor in her important new book, Ignition, is “both burning and fire starved.”

These conditions—the fire deficit and our susceptibility to megafires—are connected. A principal reason megafires have become common and destructive is that the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies have quelled minor fires for a century, thus allowing fuel—brush, shrubs, dense clusters of skinny saplings—to accumulate on the landscape. By routinely stamping out smaller, beneficial fires, land managers have inadvertently spawned gargantuan infernos that threaten lives and property, a disastrous loop that climate change only exacerbates. This, O’Connor writes, is the fire paradox: “Putting out fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes.”  

Ignition investigates both sides of the paradox; its primary focus is on the side that gets less attention, the U.S.’s “missing fire.” Once, O’Connor explains, Homo sapiens inhabited a world of flame. Many fires were ignited by lightning, but most were anthropogenic, set by Indigenous “pyrotechnicians” to stimulate the growth of food plants and enhance habitat for game animals like deer. In New York’s Catskills, up to 95 percent of fires were once Native-set, producing a “nut orchard” rife with walnuts, chestnuts, and hickories. European colonists approaching North America reported that they could smell the “sweet perfume” of forest fires before they glimpsed land.

The preponderance of fire honed nature. Plants and animals evolved to exploit the low-intensity blazes that regularly swept through forests and grasslands. Lodgepole pines developed serotinous cones, which require fire’s heat to free their seeds; sequoia saplings thrived after fires opened canopies and permitted the ingress of sunlight. In the 20th century, however, fire became ignis non grata on American landscapes. In 1935 the Forest Service adopted its infamous 10 a.m. policy, which, as O’Connor writes, meant that any new fire, whether sparked by humans or lightning, “should be under control by ten the following morning.” In her telling, America’s fixation on fire suppression stems largely from its bias against Indigenous practices. Forest Service scientists dismissed traditional burning as “Paiute forestry” unbefitting an enlightened society. Later, environmentalists advocated for preserving forests as “untouched wilderness,” heedless of the Native people who had artfully managed them for millennia.

Although O’Connor persuasively argues that fire suppression has roots in racism, she might have spent more ink implicating capitalism. As the journalist Timothy Egan notes in The Big Burn, his comprehensive history of a legendary 1910 fire that seared the Inland Northwest, commercial logging interests and their political toadies first pushed the Forest Service to stamp out wildfire. After 1910, Egan writes, “the Forest Service became the fire service, protecting trees so industry could cut them down later.” Wilderness advocates may have contributed to the culture of fire suppression, as O’Connor claims, yet timber companies and their lobbyists are even more culpable.

O’Connor is an intrepid reporter whose journalism has taken her to Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Afghanistan; her previous books include immersive explorations of the science of de-extinction and the history of human navigation. In Ignition, she’s likewise disinclined to her desk. She travels to Nebraska to participate in an intentional, or “prescribed,” burn. She learns to wield fusees—“basically dynamite-sized matches”—and drip torches, canisters that “pour out fuel and flame.” She falls quickly for fire: its scent, its aliveness, its “intense aesthetic pleasure.” “Other than when I have given birth,” she writes, “I had never felt so integral to a life-giving process as I did lighting a fire.”

Over the course of a year, O’Connor pursues her “pyrowanderlust” to prescribed burns around the country and meets a growing “fire counterculture”—environmentalists, scientists, Native practitioners—seeking to restore fire to its rightful place. Just as every ecosystem contains its own flora and fauna, it has its own flavor of blaze, and O’Connor excels at describing these regional varietals. In the pine forests near Albany, New York, lapping flames turn “flaky bark into purple rosettes that glittered with charred reflectance”; in North Carolina’s lowlands, the “smoke smelled of caramel and hog fat and citrus.” In New Mexico, as night settles after a day of burning, she shuts off her headlamp and stares, mesmerized, at the sizzling ground: “The floor gently flickered with thousands of points of white light like a galaxy of stars had draped across the earth.”

O’Connor also explores the megafire side of the paradox, enlisting on a crew battling California’s 2021 Dixie Fire, a nearly million-acre inferno. There, she spends her days pulling hose, unearthing smoldering roots, chipping wood, and performing other mundane tasks, only occasionally glimpsing the fire front itself. The fight against the Dixie consumed significant resources with dubious gain: The operation cost more than $600 million, yet the fire raged for more than three months. Later, one fire-crew leader compares fire suppression to the Vietnam and Korean Wars: “Who are we fighting? And why?”

What we’re fighting is, in large measure, the U.S. government’s sordid history of delegitimizing and criminalizing “good fire.” In Ignition’s final act, O’Connor travels to California’s Klamath Mountains, where the Yurok Tribe singed the forest for thousands of years to improve elk habitat and cultivate hazel stems for basket-weaving—until the practice was classified as arson. There she joins a mixed crew of Indigenous people and wildland firefighters that, with the Yurok’s blessing and guidance, sets the mountains ablaze, rekindling timber and tradition alike.

To O’Connor’s delight, a third of her teammates are women, a high proportion in the hypermasculine world of wildland firefighting. For generations, one female captain says, the firefighting industry, with its flame-retardant-spraying airplanes, heavy machinery, and legions of troops, has taken a “militaristic view of wildfire as a war to be won,” a chauvinistic approach that, O’Connor writes, led “to a permissiveness around abuse of land.” In the Klamath, O’Connor glimpses a future in which people collaborate with nature rather than dominate it.

Although O’Connor doesn’t say it, wildfire literature, too, has historically been the domain of men. To name but a few books, there’s Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean’s meditation on a fatal Montana fire; On the Burning Edge, Kyle Dickman’s harrowing account of the deaths of 19 firefighters in Arizona; and John Valliant’s recent Fire Weather, which chronicles the 2016 blaze that virtually obliterated the Canadian city of Fort McMurray. These excellent works treat fire as a fearsome adversary against which humans must battle; Ignition is an invaluable addition to the canon precisely because it considers fire an ally.

[Read: We’re in an age of fire]

But does humanity still have time to heal its broken relationship with fire? As O’Connor notes, climate change has made it harder to keep burns under control. In California and many other places, the viable “burn window”—the period in which crews can apply prescribed fire without undue danger—shrinks each year. In the future, O’Connor writes, burning “will depend on people who are ready to exploit any and every opportunity as windows open and close with less and less predictability.”

It will also depend on people’s tolerance for smoke and risk. Although fewer than 1 percent of prescribed fires break containment, those rare mishaps can sour the public. Last spring, the skies over my home in Colorado blurred with smoke from a 340,000-acre megafire in neighboring New Mexico that sprung from a planned burn that had escaped human control. The Forest Service responded by issuing a 90-day suspension on prescribed fire until the agency could investigate the debacle—an understandable reaction, perhaps, but one that also perpetuated the notion that burning is inherently perilous. As Ignition ably demonstrates, though, the far more dangerous proposition is not letting forests burn at all.

Some Afghans are giving their children sedatives as they struggle to feed them following huge aid cuts.

Several wounded in shooting in province of Sistan-Baluchestan which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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American legislators demand scenarios for war termination that neither Ukraine nor the Biden administration can provide, because critics of Ukraine aid are asking the wrong questions.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The most consequential act of sabotage in modern times The new face of the “Great Replacement” Why this math professor objects to diversity statements

Survival Is the Only Strategy

In my previous career, when I was teaching strategy and national-security affairs to U.S. military officers, we used historical case studies to analyze the decisions—some good, some disastrous—made by leaders in the United States and other nations. The specter of Vietnam and the still-painful wounds of Afghanistan and Iraq played a large role in the curriculum.

These open-ended conflicts in Asia and the Middle East convinced generations of American strategists that planning in every war, no matter how the conflict began, should include an “exit strategy.” I was required to teach this concept, but I have always vehemently disagreed with it, and I wish I could ban the term itself from the strategic lexicon. Exit strategies are the kind of thing that appeal to American hubris: Only very powerful countries, captured by the delusion that planning and firepower grant near-complete control of events, can afford to think about how to “exit” a war before it’s even been won.

For data-driven Americans who have internalized the middle-management tropes of business schools, the concept is pure catnip. Tell us what you need, how long this will last, and explain our return on investment—as if war were just another spreadsheet exercise. (“Return on investment” is another sensible business concept that too many in the defense community have clumsily tried to apply to national-security strategies.)

None of this is to say that nations should merely plunge ahead with military action on a whim. Especially for relatively small operations, “How will we know when we’re done?” is a crucial question. Sometimes the answer is clear, such as in the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, when the goals were to rescue American citizens, depose a Marxist-Leninist regime, flush Cuban forces from the country, and hand the government over to new leaders. All of these objectives were achieved after combat operations that lasted approximately four days, with 19 Americans killed in action.

Only days earlier in 1983, however, the inability to answer the question of “Why are we here and when should we leave?” led to disaster in Lebanon. American military personnel, sent with unclear goals into a chaotic situation, ended up sitting around in a camp at the Beirut airport. A suicide bomber drove into the base and killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers. The operation was such a mess that it has been taught as a case study at the Naval War College for years.

In an all-out war, when the stakes are much higher, questions about exit strategies become nonsensical, even inane. Imagine an American telling Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain: “Prime Minister, if we’re going to send aid, we really need to know your exit strategy here.” Imagine calling Golda Meir in 1973, as Israel was reeling under a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria, and waffling about how we’d have to get back to her unless she could be just a smidge clearer on how the conflict might end.

That’s essentially what many critics of aid to Ukraine—especially in the Republican Party—are asking of President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

I will leave aside the obvious bad faith involved in many of the GOP complaints about Ukraine. Some Republican legislators oppose aid purely to give Biden a public black eye. Others, as I wrote recently, are sucking up to the extreme wing of their own party, including more than a few who actually admire Russian President Vladimir Putin as some sort of white-Christian champion.

Other objections appear to be more grounded, but in the end make little sense. What does it mean, for example, to say that aid to Ukraine needs more “oversight”? The United States—in a policy I think wise—has placed limits on how American weapons can be used, but the Ukrainians are not going to be able to account for every shell and missile. Even the hyper-bureaucratized U.S. military doesn’t do that in the heat of battle, because war never works that way. In a note widely attributed to Britain’s Duke of Wellington (the man who would eventually defeat Napoleon), the famed general bristled at penny-pinching from his superiors back home while he was fighting on the Iberian Peninsula. “We are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall,” he wrote in 1812.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both: 1.To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance. 2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.

More than two centuries later, Republicans such as Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio seem to think it’s clever to haul off zingers about Ukrainian officials buying bigger yachts while America sends aid. (Senator Thom Tillis, Vance’s Republican colleague from North Carolina, described Vance’s accusation directly and fragrantly: “Total and unmitigated bullshit.”) But if we’re really going to obsess about return on investment, aid to Ukraine might count as one of the most devastatingly efficient and effective defense expenditures of American treasure in the history of the republic.

The U.S. intelligence community, in a newly declassified report to Congress, estimates that Russia has lost 87 percent of the total number of active-duty ground troops that it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine—and note that this does not mean “men sent into battle” but nearly nine-tenths of its entire army—and two-thirds of its preinvasion inventory of tanks.

The United States has so far provided military aid to Ukraine that amounts to roughly a tenth of its total annual defense budget. In return, one of America’s most dangerous enemies has sacrificed almost all of its existing soldiers and the bulk of its armor. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the valor of their armed forces have accomplished all of this without a single American soldier being ordered into battle. And yet Republicans want to depict this astonishing achievement as a budgetary strain that makes America less safe.

Despite the clear impact of American aid, critics continue to ask: How does it all end? For Ukraine, the only exit strategy is survival, just as it was for Britain in 1940 or Israel in 1973. The Ukrainians will keep fighting, because the alternative is the enslavement and butchery of the Ukrainian people, and the end of Ukraine as a nation. The Russians are the people who need an exit strategy. But as long as some in the GOP keep giving Putin the hope that he can outlast the West—and as long as Russian parents keep handing Putin their sons to burn on the pyre of his ego and delusions—this war will go on.

The Kremlin will stay the course. So should we, for as long as it takes to ensure the survival of Ukraine and the security of Europe, the United States, and the world.

Related:

Will America abandon Ukraine? Why the GOP doesn’t really want a deal on Ukraine and the border

Today’s News

In an effort led by Republican lawmakers, the House voted to officially launch an impeachment inquiry into the Biden family’s business dealings. Hunter Biden refused to appear for a closed-door deposition in the Republican-led impeachment inquiry into his father, but offered to testify publicly instead. The Supreme Court agreed to take up a case regarding the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone, which can be acquired by mail.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Anxiety is content now, Derek Thompson writes. The way we commonly discuss mental-health issues—especially on the internet—isn’t helping us.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Hulton Archive / Getty; Gamma-Keystone / Getty.

The Rise and Fall of the ‘IBM Way’

By Deborah Cohen

IBM is one of the oldest technology companies in the world, with a raft of innovations to its credit, including mainframe computing, computer-programming languages, and AI-powered tools. But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best. “Something to do with computers, right?” was the best the Gen Zers I queried could come up with. If a Millennial knows anything about IBM, it’s Watson, the company’s prototype AI system that prevailed on Jeopardy in 2011 …

Today, as we hurtle toward a future in which AI threatens to obliterate the individual both as employee and creator, much of the IBM story reads like a tale from a faraway world. The company’s technological accomplishments are still recognizable as the forerunners of the digital era, yet its culture of social responsibility—a focus on employees rather than shareholders, restraint in executive compensation, and investment in anti-poverty programs—proved a dead end. A mashup of progressivism and paternalism, communalism and cutthroat competition, the once ballyhooed “IBM Way” was, for better and worse, inextricably intertwined with the family at the top.

Read the full article.

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Violent political turmoil in Myanmar in years since 2021 coup has contributed to production increase, new report says.

A Taliban ban led to a 95% drop in Afghan poppy cultivation, a UN report finds.

Migrants from as far afield as China, Cameroon and Afghanistan walk into a US political quagmire.

Manzoor Pashteen missing after his arrest for speaking at protest to demand free cross-border movement with Afghanistan.

Ever since a terror attack by Hamas triggered a war in Israel and Gaza in October, many commentators have presumed that the United States can in some way manage the course of the crisis—either by supporting Israel emphatically or by demanding greater restraint from that country’s leaders. Successive American administrations, including Joe Biden’s, have encouraged this belief in American control of events in the Middle East and around the world. Just days before the Hamas attack, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted in an article in a Foreign Affairs article that the Biden administration had “de-escalated crises in Gaza.” The Middle East, he wrote, is “quieter than it has been for decades,” echoing comments he made at tThe Atlantic Festival in late September. (The online version of the article was subsequently edited to omit those statements.) In essence, the United States had mistaken a temporary lull in the Middle East for a more enduring period of relative peace—and ascribed the apparent boon to American influence.

The lesson the United States should be drawing is that it generally cannot enforce its will—however benevolent Americans believe it to be—in every area of the world. In region after region, the United States engages with movements and governments that are powerful actors themselves. Some will at least outwardly genuflect to the U.S., but all of them will pursue their own interests. In overestimating their own power, American presidents risk worse outcomes, both for the United States and for the causes it is trying to promote.

As I have previously argued, U.S. policy toward Ukraine has been bedeviled by indecision, poor calculation, and the presumption that the war will abide by American plans and expectations. Intimidated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats of nuclear war, the U.S. has delivered mostly short-range battlefield aid to Ukraine, in the hope that such weaponry will be sufficient—while still denying the Ukrainians the ability to make supposedly rash moves, such as liberating Crimea from Russian rule. Although the United States has gradually agreed to provide more modern equipment with greater capabilities, the delays have given Russia time to rebuild its forces and strengthen its defenses against Ukrainian counterattack.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Stop micromanaging the war in Ukraine]

Supposedly great powers are usually anything but, as some of the world’s mightiest, most resource-rich nations have demonstrated in a series of stumbles, failures, and even outright humiliations over the past few years. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is the most obvious example: Even with months to prepare for combat against a supposedly outgunned opponent, the Russians failed in a military operation of enormous interest to Putin. Nearly two years later, Ukraine remains independent. Although the invaders occupy significant territory, they lose personnel and equipment on a daily basis to a Ukrainian military armed with mostly older or limited-range weaponry from its NATO allies.

China—the state that has transformed the global order more than any other in recent decades—is stumbling badly too. Only a few years ago, it seemed fully ascendant as it staked claims around its borders, expanded its influence through its Belt and Road Initiative, built the world’s second-most-advanced military, and seemed poised to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. Today, the Chinese economy is in a significant slump, and the regime faces hostile and worried neighbors along a crescent that runs for thousands of miles—from India through the South China Sea, to Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Italy has signaled it will pull out of the Belt and Road Initiative; Sri Lanka, which is struggling to pay back Chinese loans that have yielded precious little economic benefit, is a cautionary tale for other nations about the potential dangers of Beijing’s largess. Recently, the Chinese government has been trying to patch up its relationship with the United States and persuade Americans to once again invest in China, to allow the latter some time to recover.

This rapprochement is not a sign that the U.S. has fared any better in great-power politics. The extraordinary debacle in Afghanistan in 2021 suggests otherwise. After conducting the longest overseas military operation in American history, spending more than $2 trillion to fund the war and military occupation of Afghanistan since 2001, and suffering the deaths of thousands of American service members, the United States pulled out with what looked like little preparation. The U.S.-backed Afghan government collapsed far faster than the regime that the Soviet Union left behind when it pulled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s; in seemingly no time, the Taliban, the regime that the U.S. had invaded to overthrow in 2001, was back in charge.

After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the U.S. seemed to regain its footing. Putin’s invasion was so ill-considered and bloodthirsty—and Ukrainian resistance so fierce, adept, and determined—that Western nations felt energized and steadfast in their support for the invaded country. Yet in retrospect, the short-term boost to NATO’s effectiveness seems like a lucky accident. American hesitation in the past year has helped make the war bloodier, longer, and potentially more escalatory than if Washington had simply picked a side and given it all the support necessary to win.

Events in the Middle East are demonstrating the limits of Washington’s power in other ways. The Biden administration is seeking to manage the Israeli response to the Hamas terror attacks of October 7. Israel has shown a willingness to conduct an extensive bombing campaign in Gaza because the country’s leaders perceive that to be in their country’s interest, even though the U.S. is publicly urging it to act with greater military restraint.  

To preserve, even maximize, its influence, a major power must understand what it can and cannot do—and, in moments of uncertainty, err on the side of thinking that achieving its goals will be hard, not easy. The more assertive and interventionist a power becomes, the more likely it is to reveal the limits of its influence. The collapse of European colonial empires after World War II, America’s defeat in Vietnam, and the fragmenting of the U.S.S.R. in 1990–91 all show how even powers that seem strong and permanent can wither or disappear in a remarkably short amount of time.

The U.S. should never be isolationist. Nor should it define its global role, as it has so frequently done since the beginning of the Cold War, in terms of simply countering its perceived enemies. Instead, it should proceed cautiously in regions, such as the Middle East, where its record of recent interventions offers ample reason for humility. It should work to strengthen states—such as democracies in the Pacific Rim and in Europe—that emphatically want the U.S. to assist in their defense and security. Ukraine clearly wants to be in this group. American involvement should be seen as a prize, not a threat, and Ukraine’s example helps clarify what kind of countries would most benefit from—and deserve—that help: Are they willing to fight for themselves? And are they governed based on the consent of their residents?

The U.S. can engage in dialogue and seek areas of common interest with a variety of parties around the world. But it should use its power more judiciously than it has. By perpetuating the fiction that Washington can shape other countries’ destiny on its own terms, the U.S. is undercutting its own global position.