Tuesday 31 August 2021
Monday 30 August 2021
Sunday 29 August 2021
Friday 27 August 2021
Thursday 26 August 2021
Wednesday 25 August 2021
Who’s to blame for the Afghanistan chaos? Remember the war’s cheerleaders
Today the media are looking for scapegoats, but 20 years ago they helped facilitate the disastrous intervention writes George Monbiot in The Guardian
‘Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable.’ A US marine with evacuees at Kabul airport. Photograph: U.S. Central Command Public Affairs vis Getty Images
Everyone is to blame for the catastrophe in Afghanistan, except the people who started it. Yes, Joe Biden screwed up by rushing out so chaotically. Yes, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab failed to make adequate and timely provisions for the evacuation of vulnerable people. But there is a frantic determination in the media to ensure that none of the blame is attached to those who began this open-ended war without realistic aims or an exit plan, then waged it with little concern for the lives and rights of the Afghan people: the then US president, George W Bush, the British prime minister Tony Blair and their entourages.
Indeed, Blair’s self-exoneration and transfer of blame to Biden last weekend was front-page news, while those who opposed his disastrous war 20 years ago remain cancelled across most of the media. Why? Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it.
Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.”
The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”.
Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul.
The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.
So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? Why do they love bombs and bullets so much, and diplomacy so little? Why do they take such evident delight in striking a pose atop a heap of bodies, before quietly shuffling away when things go wrong?
An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment I began to hate the industry I work for. In 1987, I was producing a current affairs programme for the BBC World Service. It was a slow news day, and none of the stories gave us a strong lead for the programme. Ten minutes before transmission, the studio door flew open and the editor strode in. He clapped his hands and shouted: “Great! 110 dead in Sri Lanka!” News is spectacle, and nothing delivers spectacle like war.
Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.
For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.
But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity. The Sun was running photos of topless teenagers on Page 3; the Daily Mail ruined women’s lives with its Sidebar of Shame; extreme sexism, body shaming and attacks on feminism were endemic.
Those of us who argued against the war possessed no prophetic powers. I asked the following questions in the Guardian not because I had any special information or insight, but because they were bleeding obvious. “At what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?” But even asking such things puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion.
You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.
‘Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable.’ A US marine with evacuees at Kabul airport. Photograph: U.S. Central Command Public Affairs vis Getty ImagesEveryone is to blame for the catastrophe in Afghanistan, except the people who started it. Yes, Joe Biden screwed up by rushing out so chaotically. Yes, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab failed to make adequate and timely provisions for the evacuation of vulnerable people. But there is a frantic determination in the media to ensure that none of the blame is attached to those who began this open-ended war without realistic aims or an exit plan, then waged it with little concern for the lives and rights of the Afghan people: the then US president, George W Bush, the British prime minister Tony Blair and their entourages.
Indeed, Blair’s self-exoneration and transfer of blame to Biden last weekend was front-page news, while those who opposed his disastrous war 20 years ago remain cancelled across most of the media. Why? Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it.
Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.”
The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”.
Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul.
The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.
So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? Why do they love bombs and bullets so much, and diplomacy so little? Why do they take such evident delight in striking a pose atop a heap of bodies, before quietly shuffling away when things go wrong?
An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment I began to hate the industry I work for. In 1987, I was producing a current affairs programme for the BBC World Service. It was a slow news day, and none of the stories gave us a strong lead for the programme. Ten minutes before transmission, the studio door flew open and the editor strode in. He clapped his hands and shouted: “Great! 110 dead in Sri Lanka!” News is spectacle, and nothing delivers spectacle like war.
Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.
For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.
But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity. The Sun was running photos of topless teenagers on Page 3; the Daily Mail ruined women’s lives with its Sidebar of Shame; extreme sexism, body shaming and attacks on feminism were endemic.
Those of us who argued against the war possessed no prophetic powers. I asked the following questions in the Guardian not because I had any special information or insight, but because they were bleeding obvious. “At what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?” But even asking such things puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion.
You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.
Tuesday 24 August 2021
IMF chief: how the world can make the most of new special drawing rights
Kristalina Georgieva in The FT
On Monday, IMF member countries start receiving their shares of the new $650bn special drawing rights allocation — the largest in the fund’s history. This injection of fresh international reserve assets marks a milestone in our collective ability to combat an unprecedented crisis.
In 2009, during the global financial crisis, a $250bn SDR allocation helped to restore market confidence. This time around, as the world continues to grapple with the Covid-19 pandemic, SDRs are even more important. The additional liquidity will bolster confidence and global economic resilience.
SDRs can help countries with weak reserves reduce their reliance on more expensive domestic or external debt. And for states hard pressed to increase social spending, invest in recovery and deal with climate threats, they offer a precious additional resource.
It is crucial, however, that these SDRs are used as effectively as possible — with accountability and transparency, and with as much as possible going to countries most in need.
So how can we make the most of the new allocation?
First, by making SDRs available to member countries quickly. With SDRs distributed in proportion to IMF quota shares, closely related to a country’s economic size, about $275bn is going to emerging and developing countries. Low-income countries are receiving about $21bn — over 6 per cent of gross domestic product in some cases.
Vulnerable countries will be able to use the new SDRs to support their economies and step up the fight against the virus and its variants. Combined with grants and other essential support from the international community, this will help achieve the goal of vaccinating at least 40 per cent of the population in every country by the end of 2021, and at least 60 per cent by the first half of 2022.
Second, every effort should be made to ensure SDRs are used for the benefit of member countries and the global economy. The decision on how best to utilise them rests with member countries of the IMF. They can hold them as part of their official reserves, or use them by converting them into US dollars, euros or other reserve currencies.
But while this is a sovereign decision, it must be prudent and well-informed. The fund will work with its members to help ensure accountability and transparency.
We are providing a framework for assessing the macroeconomic implications of the new allocation, its statistical treatment and governance, and how it might affect debt sustainability. The fund will provide regular updates on all SDR transactions, plus a follow-up report on their use in two years’ time.
Third, with increasingly divergent economic fortunes due to the pandemic, we need to go further to ensure more SDRs go to those who need them most. That is why the IMF is encouraging voluntary channelling of SDRs from countries with strong external positions to the poorest and most vulnerable nations.
By magnifying the impact of the new allocation, redirecting SDRs could help those most in need, while reducing the risk of social and economic instability that could affect us all.
The good news is that we can build on progress achieved so far. Over the past 16 months, some better off member countries have pledged to lend a total of $24bn, including $15bn from existing SDRs, to the IMF’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust, which provides concessional loans to low-income countries. We hope to see further support to the PRGT from the new SDRs.
The IMF is also engaging with its members on a possible new Resilience and Sustainability Trust that could use SDRs to help poor and vulnerable countries with structural transformation, including climate-related challenges. Another possibility could be channelling SDRs to support lending by multilateral development banks.
Of course, SDRs are not a silver bullet. They must be part of a broader programme of collective action by countries and international institutions. Since the pandemic began, the IMF has played its part, providing about $117bn in new IMF financing to 85 countries — and debt service relief to 29 low-income nations. The fund also joined forces with the World Bank, World Health Organization and World Trade Organization to promote the urgent task of vaccinating the world.
The poet Robert Frost wrote of the “road not taken”. We now have a unique opportunity to take the right road as the world strives for a more resilient future. We at the IMF pledge to do our best to ensure that this historic SDR allocation, used wisely, plays its part in promoting a strong and sustainable global recovery.
Sunday 22 August 2021
Friday 20 August 2021
Ten days that shook the world: The latest Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
Najam Sethi in The Friday Times
The Afghan Taliban talked and fought. They won. The Americans talked and ran. They lost. The end was foretold in 2020 when President Donald Trump announced an exit from Afghanistan without installing a broad-based, inclusive interim government in Kabul. But few – certainly not President Biden who actually gave an unconditional cut-off date in September for full withdrawal but believed that the Afghan National Army could fight on for another year at least — expected the ANA to fold and President Ashraf Ghani to flee in ten days. This followed the last round of talks among the internal and external stakeholders in Doha, August 10-11.
The Taliban’s brilliant strategy was based on the basic principles of guerilla warfare — gain Time to capture Space and use Space to erode the Will of the enemy to fight. This theory was first successfully enunciated by Mao Tse Tung in China in the 1930s and then by Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in the 1960s. For a decade after their rout in 2001, the Taliban regrouped and reorganized on both sides of the Pakistan border, becoming bolder and more aggressive after 2010. But after signing the Agreement with the US in 2020, they dragged Time to forestall any US-selected “inclusive” government in Kabul while focusing on capturing Space in north Afghanistan – ethnically hostile regions led by warlords who had challenged and undermined their power in 1997-2001. Their tactics of talking and fighting on the front lines – “the Americans are leaving, lay down your weapons, surrender and go home, we won’t exact revenge or hurt you” – paid huge dividends. In the last stage, when the Americans began to progressively pull air support, commanders, trainers, contractors, and air supply lines to distant front lines were severely disrupted, the ANA lost critical elements of the war machine manufactured by the Americans, and crumbled. It didn’t help that massive corruption in the Ghani regime, including in the ANA, was a core demotivating factor, no less than the frequent shuffling of military commanders from the Presidency. The Taliban encirclement of Kabul was complete after the provincial garrison towns surrendered one after another and American soldiers caught their last flights home.
The biggest strategic mistake Ashraf Ghani made was fighting with Pakistan, a key stakeholder, and flirting with India, a distant spoiler. Pakistan’s stake in Afghanistan, for various reasons right or wrong, is forty years old. If Kabul couldn’t be overtly friendly with Islamabad, it should not have been overly hostile to it. Thus Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban became natural covert allies. The Americans, too, lost sight of the ball when they signed the 2020 Agreement by rejecting the Taliban’s demand to replace Ghani with an acceptable transitional option. What next?
In America, President Biden – who was banking on popular goodwill for “bringing the boys home” by ending “America’s longest war” – is besieged with a popular backlash at another “Saigon moment”. Approval for his exit strategy has fallen radically among Democrats and Republicans from over 70% to under 50%. This implies that America might scapegoat Pakistan for its defeat. The anti-Pakistan narrative of “safe havens”, “Haqqani network is a veritable arm of the ISI”, “double-crossing”, etc, is already well established. If pushed, it could estrange Islamabad and derail international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan under an inclusive regime with regard for core human rights.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban 2.0 can be expected to establish only a minimally acceptable inclusive regime with substantive levers of policy and power in their own hands. Initially they will try and run the country with an Amir ul Momineen or Supreme Leader at the helm of a handpicked Council of Ministers along the lines of Iran immediately after the Islamic Revolution. They will also crave international recognition and legitimacy by assuaging the fears of the regional powers – Russia, China, Iran, Central Asian States and Pakistan – by pledging economic cooperation and ending safe havens for regional militants, insurgents and separatists based in Afghanistan. For the international community, they will try to square their idea of human rights in an Islamic regime with Western notions of freedom and democracy.
These factors are going to make or break the Taliban 2.0 regime. Al-Qaeda, TTP, ETM, IS, Daesh, Baloch separatists, etc., will not be easy to knock out or neutralize quickly. Their ranks have been swelled by the thousands of prisoners who have been released. If they continue to spill over across borders, tensions with neighbours will arise. If any Al-Qaeda attack on US soil is uncovered with footsteps going back to Afghanistan, America will come under pressure to exact revenge again.
There is also the factor of Afghanistan 2.0. In the last two decades a new generation of Afghans has grown up in the light of secularism, media freedoms, women’s rights and information revolution. If the Taliban try to scuttle these in any brutal or swift manner, there will be a definite reaction at home and abroad with blowback consequences. Afghanistan 2.0’s economy — its financial system, education, administration and infrastructure , forex reserves, etc — are totally dependent on American largesse and aid.
Finally, much will depend on the experience and wisdom of the three top Taliban leaders who will guide Afghanistan into a new age. Their reputations and credentials precede them. The Supreme Leader, Haibatullah Akhunzada, was “an enthusiastic proponent of suicide bombings” who ordered his own son to blow himself up in an attack in Helmand province. He is also the strategist who fashioned the “talk talk, fight fight” strategy which proved so successful in the end. Sirajuddin Haqqani, number two, has been the “most dogged opponent” of the US who concentrated on “complex suicide attacks and targeted assassinations”. Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is the leading Presidential candidate, has served a decade in Pakistani prison on the say-so of the Americans.
Pakistan is poised to win or lose big time. If Taliban 2.0 neutralize anti-Pakistan elements based in Afghanistan and facilitate the Pak-China CPEC corridor to Central Asia and the Central Asian rail, road, gas and oil corridor to South Asia, it will reap enormous dividends. But if the Taliban victory and American defeat raise the spectre of Islamic radicalism inside Pakistan either by emboldening disgruntled religious elements like the TLP or TTP or by triggering an anti-American populist wave that isolates Pakistan in the international community, the outlook will be bleak. Pakistan’s economy is totally dependent on the goodwill of the West and its civil society is sufficiently developed to resist any radical “Islamist” encroachments on their democratic freedoms.
If the road to a Taliban victory in Afghanistan has been long and hard and bloody, the road ahead is neither secure nor assured. The predominantly Pashtun Taliban constitute only a small percentage of the 45-50% Pashtuns of Afghanistan. The other Pashtuns and ethnic regions may have surrendered to the Taliban military juggernaut but if they are not made real stakeholders in an inclusive broad based political and administrative state system, tribal revolts and foreign interventionists will start brewing once again in the bowels of Afghanistan.
The Afghan Taliban talked and fought. They won. The Americans talked and ran. They lost. The end was foretold in 2020 when President Donald Trump announced an exit from Afghanistan without installing a broad-based, inclusive interim government in Kabul. But few – certainly not President Biden who actually gave an unconditional cut-off date in September for full withdrawal but believed that the Afghan National Army could fight on for another year at least — expected the ANA to fold and President Ashraf Ghani to flee in ten days. This followed the last round of talks among the internal and external stakeholders in Doha, August 10-11.
The Taliban’s brilliant strategy was based on the basic principles of guerilla warfare — gain Time to capture Space and use Space to erode the Will of the enemy to fight. This theory was first successfully enunciated by Mao Tse Tung in China in the 1930s and then by Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in the 1960s. For a decade after their rout in 2001, the Taliban regrouped and reorganized on both sides of the Pakistan border, becoming bolder and more aggressive after 2010. But after signing the Agreement with the US in 2020, they dragged Time to forestall any US-selected “inclusive” government in Kabul while focusing on capturing Space in north Afghanistan – ethnically hostile regions led by warlords who had challenged and undermined their power in 1997-2001. Their tactics of talking and fighting on the front lines – “the Americans are leaving, lay down your weapons, surrender and go home, we won’t exact revenge or hurt you” – paid huge dividends. In the last stage, when the Americans began to progressively pull air support, commanders, trainers, contractors, and air supply lines to distant front lines were severely disrupted, the ANA lost critical elements of the war machine manufactured by the Americans, and crumbled. It didn’t help that massive corruption in the Ghani regime, including in the ANA, was a core demotivating factor, no less than the frequent shuffling of military commanders from the Presidency. The Taliban encirclement of Kabul was complete after the provincial garrison towns surrendered one after another and American soldiers caught their last flights home.
The biggest strategic mistake Ashraf Ghani made was fighting with Pakistan, a key stakeholder, and flirting with India, a distant spoiler. Pakistan’s stake in Afghanistan, for various reasons right or wrong, is forty years old. If Kabul couldn’t be overtly friendly with Islamabad, it should not have been overly hostile to it. Thus Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban became natural covert allies. The Americans, too, lost sight of the ball when they signed the 2020 Agreement by rejecting the Taliban’s demand to replace Ghani with an acceptable transitional option. What next?
In America, President Biden – who was banking on popular goodwill for “bringing the boys home” by ending “America’s longest war” – is besieged with a popular backlash at another “Saigon moment”. Approval for his exit strategy has fallen radically among Democrats and Republicans from over 70% to under 50%. This implies that America might scapegoat Pakistan for its defeat. The anti-Pakistan narrative of “safe havens”, “Haqqani network is a veritable arm of the ISI”, “double-crossing”, etc, is already well established. If pushed, it could estrange Islamabad and derail international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan under an inclusive regime with regard for core human rights.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban 2.0 can be expected to establish only a minimally acceptable inclusive regime with substantive levers of policy and power in their own hands. Initially they will try and run the country with an Amir ul Momineen or Supreme Leader at the helm of a handpicked Council of Ministers along the lines of Iran immediately after the Islamic Revolution. They will also crave international recognition and legitimacy by assuaging the fears of the regional powers – Russia, China, Iran, Central Asian States and Pakistan – by pledging economic cooperation and ending safe havens for regional militants, insurgents and separatists based in Afghanistan. For the international community, they will try to square their idea of human rights in an Islamic regime with Western notions of freedom and democracy.
These factors are going to make or break the Taliban 2.0 regime. Al-Qaeda, TTP, ETM, IS, Daesh, Baloch separatists, etc., will not be easy to knock out or neutralize quickly. Their ranks have been swelled by the thousands of prisoners who have been released. If they continue to spill over across borders, tensions with neighbours will arise. If any Al-Qaeda attack on US soil is uncovered with footsteps going back to Afghanistan, America will come under pressure to exact revenge again.
There is also the factor of Afghanistan 2.0. In the last two decades a new generation of Afghans has grown up in the light of secularism, media freedoms, women’s rights and information revolution. If the Taliban try to scuttle these in any brutal or swift manner, there will be a definite reaction at home and abroad with blowback consequences. Afghanistan 2.0’s economy — its financial system, education, administration and infrastructure , forex reserves, etc — are totally dependent on American largesse and aid.
Finally, much will depend on the experience and wisdom of the three top Taliban leaders who will guide Afghanistan into a new age. Their reputations and credentials precede them. The Supreme Leader, Haibatullah Akhunzada, was “an enthusiastic proponent of suicide bombings” who ordered his own son to blow himself up in an attack in Helmand province. He is also the strategist who fashioned the “talk talk, fight fight” strategy which proved so successful in the end. Sirajuddin Haqqani, number two, has been the “most dogged opponent” of the US who concentrated on “complex suicide attacks and targeted assassinations”. Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is the leading Presidential candidate, has served a decade in Pakistani prison on the say-so of the Americans.
Pakistan is poised to win or lose big time. If Taliban 2.0 neutralize anti-Pakistan elements based in Afghanistan and facilitate the Pak-China CPEC corridor to Central Asia and the Central Asian rail, road, gas and oil corridor to South Asia, it will reap enormous dividends. But if the Taliban victory and American defeat raise the spectre of Islamic radicalism inside Pakistan either by emboldening disgruntled religious elements like the TLP or TTP or by triggering an anti-American populist wave that isolates Pakistan in the international community, the outlook will be bleak. Pakistan’s economy is totally dependent on the goodwill of the West and its civil society is sufficiently developed to resist any radical “Islamist” encroachments on their democratic freedoms.
If the road to a Taliban victory in Afghanistan has been long and hard and bloody, the road ahead is neither secure nor assured. The predominantly Pashtun Taliban constitute only a small percentage of the 45-50% Pashtuns of Afghanistan. The other Pashtuns and ethnic regions may have surrendered to the Taliban military juggernaut but if they are not made real stakeholders in an inclusive broad based political and administrative state system, tribal revolts and foreign interventionists will start brewing once again in the bowels of Afghanistan.
Thursday 19 August 2021
No surprise Leeds lost to Manchester United, just look at the wage bills
Although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult
The easy thing is to blame the manager. It has become football’s default response to any crisis. A team hits a poor run or loses a big game: get rid of the manager. As Alex Ferguson said as many as 14 years ago, we live in “a mocking culture” and reality television has fostered the idea people should be voted off with great regularity (that he was trying to defend Steve McClaren’s reign as England manager should not undermine the wider point).
Managers are expendable. Rejigging squads takes time and money and huge amounts of effort in terms of research and recruitment, whereas anybody can look at who is doing well in Portugal or Greece or the Championship and spy a potential messiah. Then there are the structural factors, the underlying economic issues it is often preferable to ignore because to acknowledge them is to accept how little agency the people we shout about every week really have in football.
That point reared its head after Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds on Saturday. There was plenty to discuss: are Leeds overreliant on Kalvin Phillips, who was absent? Why does Marcelo Bielsa’s version of pressing so often lead to heavy defeats? Can Mason Greenwood’s movement allow Ole Gunnar Solskjær to field Paul Pogba and Bruno Fernandes without sacrificing a holding midfielder and, if it does, what does that mean for Marcus Rashford?
Yet there was a weird strand of coverage that insisted Solskjær had somehow outwitted Bielsa, even in some quarters that Bielsa needed to be replaced if Leeds are to kick on. (They finished ninth last season with 59 points, the highest points total by a promoted club for two decades). A Bielsa meltdown is possible; they do happen and he has never managed a fourth season at a club. There should be some concern that, like last season, Leeds lost by four goals at Old Trafford, insufficient lessons were learned, even if Bielsa said this was a better performance. But fundamentally, Manchester United’s wage bill is five times that of Leeds.
Everton, who finished a place below Leeds last season, had a wage bill three times bigger. Of last season’s Premier League, only West Brom and Sheffield United had wage bills lower than that of Leeds. To have finished ninth is an extraordinary achievement and nobody should think to slip back three or four places this season would be a failure. Modern football is starkly stratified and although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult.
There is still a tendency to talk of a Big Six in English football and while it is true six clubs last season had a weekly wage bill in excess of £2.5m, it is also true that within that grouping there are three with clear advantages: Manchester City (who had kept their wage bill relatively low, although if they do add Harry Kane to Jack Grealish that would clearly change) and Chelsea because their funding is not reliant on footballing success, and Manchester United because of the legacy that has allowed them to attach their name to a preposterous range of products across the globe.
Mikel Arteta is struggling to revive Arsenal. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Liverpool can perhaps challenge for the title this season, but their wage spending is 74% of that of United. That they were as good as they were in the two seasons before last was remarkable, but last season showed how vulnerable a team like Liverpool can be to a couple of injuries. Similarly, Leicester’s two fifth-place finishes with the eighth-highest wage bill are a striking achievement, their decline towards the end of the past two seasons less the result of them bottling it or any sort of psychological failure than of the limitations of their squad being exposed.
Which brings us to the other two members of the Big Six: Arsenal and Tottenham. Spurs’ last game at White Hart Lane, in 2017, brought a 2-1 win over Manchester United that guaranteed they finished second. Since when Spurs have bought Davinson Sánchez, Lucas Moura, Serge Aurier, Fernando Llorente, Juan Foyth, Tanguy Ndombele, Steven Bergwijn, Ryan Sessegnon, Giovani Lo Celso, Cristian Romero and Bryan Gil, while United have bought, among others, Alexis Sánchez, Victor Lindelöf, Nemanja Matic, Romelu Lukaku, Fred, Daniel James, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire, Donny van de Beek, Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho. Money may not be everything in football, but it does help.
The irony of the situation is that it was investment in the infrastructure that should allow Spurs to generate additional revenues and better develop their own talent (much cheaper than buying it) that led to the lack of investment in players largely responsible for the staleness resulting in Mauricio Pochettino’s departure. That Daniel Levy compounded the problem by appointing José Mourinho – acting like a big club as though to jolt them to the next level – should not obscure the fact that until that point he had pursued a ruthless and successful economic logic.
Arsenal had gone through a similar process the previous decade, investing heavily in a new stadium at the expense of the squad, only to discover that by the time it was ready the financial environment had changed and the petro-fuelled era had begun. It was easy after the timid performance against Brentford on Friday to blame Mikel Arteta and ask why he gets such an easy ride. For all that Arsenal have finished the past two seasons relatively well, that criticism will only increase if there are not signs the tanker is being turned round. But the gulf to the top of the table is vast and a desperation to bridge that has contributed to a bizarre transfer policy.
That does not mean managers are beyond reproach and limp displays like Arsenal’s deserve criticism. But equally we should probably remember that where a side finishes in the league has far more to do with economic strata than any of the individuals involved.
Manchester United’s Fred celebrates celebrates after completing Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds. Photograph: Jon Super/AP
Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian
Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian
The easy thing is to blame the manager. It has become football’s default response to any crisis. A team hits a poor run or loses a big game: get rid of the manager. As Alex Ferguson said as many as 14 years ago, we live in “a mocking culture” and reality television has fostered the idea people should be voted off with great regularity (that he was trying to defend Steve McClaren’s reign as England manager should not undermine the wider point).
Managers are expendable. Rejigging squads takes time and money and huge amounts of effort in terms of research and recruitment, whereas anybody can look at who is doing well in Portugal or Greece or the Championship and spy a potential messiah. Then there are the structural factors, the underlying economic issues it is often preferable to ignore because to acknowledge them is to accept how little agency the people we shout about every week really have in football.
That point reared its head after Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds on Saturday. There was plenty to discuss: are Leeds overreliant on Kalvin Phillips, who was absent? Why does Marcelo Bielsa’s version of pressing so often lead to heavy defeats? Can Mason Greenwood’s movement allow Ole Gunnar Solskjær to field Paul Pogba and Bruno Fernandes without sacrificing a holding midfielder and, if it does, what does that mean for Marcus Rashford?
Yet there was a weird strand of coverage that insisted Solskjær had somehow outwitted Bielsa, even in some quarters that Bielsa needed to be replaced if Leeds are to kick on. (They finished ninth last season with 59 points, the highest points total by a promoted club for two decades). A Bielsa meltdown is possible; they do happen and he has never managed a fourth season at a club. There should be some concern that, like last season, Leeds lost by four goals at Old Trafford, insufficient lessons were learned, even if Bielsa said this was a better performance. But fundamentally, Manchester United’s wage bill is five times that of Leeds.
Everton, who finished a place below Leeds last season, had a wage bill three times bigger. Of last season’s Premier League, only West Brom and Sheffield United had wage bills lower than that of Leeds. To have finished ninth is an extraordinary achievement and nobody should think to slip back three or four places this season would be a failure. Modern football is starkly stratified and although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult.
There is still a tendency to talk of a Big Six in English football and while it is true six clubs last season had a weekly wage bill in excess of £2.5m, it is also true that within that grouping there are three with clear advantages: Manchester City (who had kept their wage bill relatively low, although if they do add Harry Kane to Jack Grealish that would clearly change) and Chelsea because their funding is not reliant on footballing success, and Manchester United because of the legacy that has allowed them to attach their name to a preposterous range of products across the globe.
Mikel Arteta is struggling to revive Arsenal. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The GuardianLiverpool can perhaps challenge for the title this season, but their wage spending is 74% of that of United. That they were as good as they were in the two seasons before last was remarkable, but last season showed how vulnerable a team like Liverpool can be to a couple of injuries. Similarly, Leicester’s two fifth-place finishes with the eighth-highest wage bill are a striking achievement, their decline towards the end of the past two seasons less the result of them bottling it or any sort of psychological failure than of the limitations of their squad being exposed.
Which brings us to the other two members of the Big Six: Arsenal and Tottenham. Spurs’ last game at White Hart Lane, in 2017, brought a 2-1 win over Manchester United that guaranteed they finished second. Since when Spurs have bought Davinson Sánchez, Lucas Moura, Serge Aurier, Fernando Llorente, Juan Foyth, Tanguy Ndombele, Steven Bergwijn, Ryan Sessegnon, Giovani Lo Celso, Cristian Romero and Bryan Gil, while United have bought, among others, Alexis Sánchez, Victor Lindelöf, Nemanja Matic, Romelu Lukaku, Fred, Daniel James, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire, Donny van de Beek, Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho. Money may not be everything in football, but it does help.
The irony of the situation is that it was investment in the infrastructure that should allow Spurs to generate additional revenues and better develop their own talent (much cheaper than buying it) that led to the lack of investment in players largely responsible for the staleness resulting in Mauricio Pochettino’s departure. That Daniel Levy compounded the problem by appointing José Mourinho – acting like a big club as though to jolt them to the next level – should not obscure the fact that until that point he had pursued a ruthless and successful economic logic.
Arsenal had gone through a similar process the previous decade, investing heavily in a new stadium at the expense of the squad, only to discover that by the time it was ready the financial environment had changed and the petro-fuelled era had begun. It was easy after the timid performance against Brentford on Friday to blame Mikel Arteta and ask why he gets such an easy ride. For all that Arsenal have finished the past two seasons relatively well, that criticism will only increase if there are not signs the tanker is being turned round. But the gulf to the top of the table is vast and a desperation to bridge that has contributed to a bizarre transfer policy.
That does not mean managers are beyond reproach and limp displays like Arsenal’s deserve criticism. But equally we should probably remember that where a side finishes in the league has far more to do with economic strata than any of the individuals involved.
Wednesday 18 August 2021
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Olympic gold is all about doing little things
Anindya Dutta in The Print
The Olympics come around once every four years. Theoretically. During a pandemic, the wait could be five years, and when there is war, well, it could be twelve, or may just have to be skipped. And at the end of those four, five or even twelve years, it all comes down to that hour, that fraction of a minute, or the split second that it takes a propelled bullet to find its 0.5mm-wide mark, at least ten metres away.
Every minute of every Olympian’s life is spent preparing to peak at that exact moment when the opportunity presents itself. And if you do all that perfectly on a perfect day, and your forty-nine other near-perfect opponents don’t, then you win a gold medal. It is that difficult.
Until 2008 in Beijing, India, a country of a billion people, had not won a single gold medal in an individual Olympic event. Then Abhinav Bindra came along. Rohit Brijnath, who co-wrote Bindra’s autobiography A Shot at History, in the book’s preface writes about the time he spent with the shooter:
“I was taken aback by how far he will go to get better, this extremity not merely of pain but of perseverance that he was willing to travel to. Small things. The meticulous way he examines his pellets, the dissatisfaction even with a perfect score, the altering of the soles of his shoes by 1 millimeter, the willingness to try commando training. Anything, everything, that could help him win.”
There is a good reason for this approach. As Bindra explains: “William Tell with his crossbow had to hit the apple, I have to hit the seed inside the core of that apple. All the time, every shot, that’s my job.” He then goes on to explain exactly why the Olympics is so important to him and to every other athlete in the world who aspires to immortality in their sport:
“The pressure of the Olympics is that right then, at that precise two-hour period every four years, I have to be perfect. Or just more perfect than everyone else in the world. This is what the Olympics’ appeal is, for it is the ultimate proof of readiness. There is no higher achievement in my sport, no finer examination of sporting worth, no more excruciating confirmation of skill produced under the suffocation of tension.”
Abhinav Bindra’s road to Beijing had been a long one. At Athens, four years before, the glitter of the disc had seduced, only to deceive. Bindra was third in qualifying, a medal in his sights. Then he was seventh out of eight shooters in the final, dealing with shattered dreams.
Bindra had felt then that in terms of process, he had done everything right. But balancing sound logic and bitter disappointment is a difficult thing. At the age of 20, coming out of the Olympic shooting range, he had contemplated retirement.
Saurabh Chowdhary and Manu Bhaker, India’s talented 19-year old shooters at Tokyo went through the very same experience. They came in with the weight of expectations and a string of tournament victories behind them, followed the process, and yet melted from the heat of the Olympic altar. A deep dive, once they are back home, into what Bindra did in the four years after his own Waterloo at Athens, that turned shattered dreams into a golden disc, might well be worth their while. It could even change the story their own biographers will someday write.
Between 2004 and 2008, Bindra chased perfection. He tried everything to get that half percent improvement that would give him a 600/600 at the Olympic finals. He broke every part of his process into tiny parts and looked at how to make those parts more efficient. He even had laser surgery done to remove his love handles because he felt the love handle had a trampoline effect when his left elbow rested on his left hip. He lost his love handles but it didn’t give him a 600 every time he picked up a rifle. But he did do a few things that made the difference.
Bindra always used a German rifle, made by the Walther company (the fact that they also famously supplied Ian Fleming’s James Bond always appealed to the young marksman’s dry sense of humour). The German gun used German bullets. To his surprise, Bindra found that a particular brand of Chinese bullets were even more accurate when used in the same gun. Unsurprisingly, they happened to be the bullets the world beating Chinese shooters were using. Bindra had to have them.
There was, however, a problem with acquiring the bullets. The Chinese government wouldn’t allow the manufacturer to sell the bullets to foreigners before the Beijing Olympics were over. So Bindra had a friend in Hong Kong order 10,000 rounds for him. Those were the bullets that he brought with him to the shooting range at Beijing.
Television viewers at the recent Tokyo games would have noticed the heart rates of shooters being displayed on their screens, as they took their shots at the target. The Indian marksman had realised this even as he had first prepared for the biggest stage at Athens. But he had not internalised it until his post-Athens analysis of what he could do better.
Perfection in shooting, Bindra now knew, would come from controlling his heart rate through breathing. If he could do this, he would shoot 10’s not 9’s. So, he practised this. Day after day, month after month, he strove to bring himself to what he describes as “a more parasympathetic state, a more placid frame of mind”.
His respiratory rate prior to the Olympics was 14 to 15 cycles per minute, but by the time he got to Beijing it was down to four-five. It made him stable, allowed him to hold his breath, stay calm, and depress the trigger. He won. It has also been India’s only individual gold to date.
There wasn’t one single isolated element that Bindra did better. It was a sum total of little things that added up to be bigger than the parts. He had followed Kaizen, the Japanese method of continuous improvement. Zen philosophy doesn’t believe in perfectness. It does believe however in striving for it as the only way to be better. Abhinav Bindra is living proof of the fact that it works.
Will it make the boat go faster?
In 2018, Sir Steve Redgrave, winner of five gold medals across five Olympics, was approached by both the British and Chinese rowing authorities to work as high performance director with their respective teams. Their offer was understandable, given Redgrave’s preeminence and respect in the sport. His acceptance of the Chinese one was perhaps less obvious.
Redgrave’s remark a year later — “The Olympic Games in Tokyo are, of course, an important step in our strategy and China wants to win a gold Olympic medal there,” —was treated by the British establishment as wishful thinking. When China struck Gold at the Women’s Quadruple Sculls event in Tokyo last week, and Great Britain failed to get on the podium, the world sat up and took notice.
China didn’t just win, but the team of Chen Yunxia, Zhang Ling, Lyu Yang and Cui Xiaotong made a world record time of 6:05.13 at the Sea Forest Waterway, more than five seconds ahead of France in second position. It is not unusual that when rowing teams win gold at an Olympic event, their time would be about 10 per cent faster than the previous winners four years before. It is simply stunning to have this margin between the gold and silver medalists in the same race.
A pleased Redgrave had his trademark smile on as he told the press: “[This is] just a stepping stone to Paris.” With those words, the world had just been put on notice that he and the Chinese team are just setting out on their journey to greatness.
Before we look at what the Chinese Quadruple Sculls team did differently, we need to go back a number of years to when British rowing did something unusual in the early 1990’s. They recruited Jürgen Gröbler, a man who had moved from the former East Germany. Behind the Iron Curtain through the 1970s and 80s, Gröbler had trained some of the most successful rowers in the world and created winning teams.
Redgrave’s winning time in the coxed four in 1984 wouldn’t have qualified him for the final of the coxed fours in Seoul in 1988, Gröbler told the British. “His gold-medal winning time in Seoul in the coxless pair wouldn’t have even won him a medal in Barcelona in 1992, and so on and on.” At every four-year turn of the Olympic wheel, the bar was set higher. “You have to find more every time,” Gröbler said. He insisted that in order to win Olympic gold, every crew must increase the intensity of their training by 10 per cent compared to the previous Olympics.
Gröbler first brought in the concept of using data to improve the ‘measurables’. He insisted that it was now possible to summarise your every move against the question: ‘Will it make the boat go faster?’ Once you were convinced it would, those are the changes that rowers needed to make.
Gröbler worked with a whole host of successful British rowers in his time, but perhaps the most famous were the coxless four that won the gold medal at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Steve Redgrave was a part of that team. When Gröbler asked him to do weight training, Redgrave baulked: “If I wanted to lift weights, I would have chosen to be a weightlifter.”
Slowly, Gröbler convinced him with evidence that Redgrave’s increased power from lifting weights would help make the boat go faster. Eventually, the British legend accepted the argument, and it propelled Redgrave to his fifth gold medal, sporting immortality and a knighthood.
Redgrave may not have had the benefit of Gröbler’s insights when he raced in the first part of his Olympics career, but he did not get his previous four gold medals without developing constantly evolving strategies over the years that had made the boat go faster.
At Tokyo, the sum total of that experience evolved into a strategy for his Chinese wards that was simple in conception, stunning in execution: “When they came together four months ago, they always showed good pace and good middle pace. What they were lacking was to change the pace in the closing stages, and that’s what we’ve been working on for the last two months after the qualifying event,” Redgrave said after the race.
Sure enough, it made the boat go faster.
The one percent formula
Until 2002, British cycling had won one Olympic gold medal in 76-years. In 2008, they won 7 of the 10 golds up for grabs in track cycling and repeated the feat four years later in London. Sir David Brailsford, who took over in 2002 and is largely credited with this turnaround, became head of Britain’s first professional cycling team. His boys won the next three of the four Tour de France races that they entered.
So how did the bike go faster?
The approach, it turned out, wasn’t so different from the ‘marginal gains’ Gröbler had adopted for the rowing team more than a decade before. Brailsford decided that everything a cyclist did during the race could be broken down into little parts, and a cyclist needed to do every little part 1 per cent quicker. The sum total of these little efforts would make the bike go fast enough to climb the podium. In essence, like Abhinav Bindra, he was following Kaizen, or continuous improvement.
But this was only one of the three pillars in Brailsford’s quest for a podium finish.
The second was human performance. It was not about cycling but what went before the cyclist got on the bike — the diet, the method of training, the mental conditioning.
And finally, there were the strategies that drove the faster bike and more efficient human to ultimate victory.
An example was cyclists asking themselves what was the power needed off the line to get the start required to achieve a winning time? Once this was answered, they looked at how capable the best cyclists on the team were at generating that power. They identified the gaps between where they were and where they needed to be. If it was a bridgeable gap, they put a plan in place, and if it wasn’t, they replaced the cyclist with one who had the ability to get that start.
The British bikes went faster than that of any other nation— a total of 20 times over the next three Olympics.
Go so fast that your opponents forget you exist
If the Chinese rowers made headlines with their win at Tokyo last week, it was nothing compared to the worldwide sensation that a Ph.D. in Mathematics caused in the sport of road race cycling. She won an Olympic Gold apparently without the knowledge of her competitors.
Austrian mathematician Anna Kiesenhofer came into the race unknown and unheralded. She didn’t have a coach or support team. What she had was a strategy, and the lessons of Kaizen. She is neither Chinese nor British, but to get to gold she used the very methods they adopted. And then put a twist on it.
The road race at the Olympics is unlike any other cycling event in the world. There are no race radios, no formal teams to work with to formulate and execute a team strategy. You are on your own, often for tens of kilometres through varied terrain. This is why cyclists have pelotons. Peloton refers to the main group of cyclists who ride closely to each other. The idea is to save energy by staying close to a well-developed group and minimise chances of the drag to 5–10 per cent and make the bike go faster.
There is of course the obvious problem – the best and most experienced riders can keep their opponents in sight and make their move to race away to glory at a time that gives them the most advantage.
A few strong riders will always attempt to break away from the main peloton, trying to build such a commanding lead early in the race that the peloton cannot catch up before the finish. The riders who are in the lead, having broken away from the peloton are referred to as Tête de la Course (French for ‘Head of the Race’).
The mathematician and thinker in Kiesenhofer knew these obvious strategies, and as an outsider to the regulars, she knew she was unlikely to succeed using the same methods. She therefore had to think differently.
The road race in Tokyo is over 147 km from Musashinonomori Park to the Fuji International Speedway and involves a climb of 2,692 meters in the blistering heat of the peak Japanese summer.
The early breakaway was by a five-woman group formed by Kiesenhofer, South Africa’s Carla Oberholzer, Namibia’s Vera Looser, Poland’s Anna Plichta, and Israel’s Omer Shapira. With 50km to go, Dutch racer Demi Vollering attacked up the road, forcing the peloton in front to speed up through the pain of the uphill climb. Another Dutch rider Van Vleuten followed Vollering’s lead and attacked immediately after the gap closed. She then went ahead of the peloton and extended her lead to over a minute.
With 40km to go, what no one realised was that Kiesenhofer was not in the peloton anymore. She was actually ahead of Van Vleuten, riding solo and steadily increasing her lead. This was when her unconventional move kicked in.
One of the strategies that Tour de France cyclists in the French Alps adopt time and again, is speeding ahead of the peloton between 10 to 20km at a time to gain decisive leads. The researcher in Kiesenhofer knew, however, that there have been exceptions, notably France’s Albert Bourlon who made a 253km breakaway in 1947. So it was possible to take longer leads.
But there was a crucial element to consider. The Tour de France is a 3,414km long race. So what the topical individual or groups do at a time is for less than 0.3 per cent of the distance. Even Bourlon achieved it for about 7 per cent of the total distance.
The strategy the Austrian mathematician adopted was bold, imaginative, and utterly unconventional in its execution. With 40km to go, she knew she was ahead of Van Vleuten and out of sight among the mountain bends. So she speeded up. She knew 27 per cent of the race was yet to be run, but if she went far enough ahead and then increased her speed on the downhill stretch to the Fuji International Speedway, she would be too far away to be caught by the time the rest of the field made the move.
The strategy succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The peloton that pursued Van Vleuten had simply forgotten that Kiesenhofer was ahead of them.
As the Dutch winner of the UCI Women’s World Tour in 2018 and the Women’s Road World Cup in 2011 triumphantly crossed the finish line in 3:54.00 arms up in the air and broke into tears, she saw Kiesenhofer standing in front holding the Austrian flag. The mirage of gold had turned into the reality of silver. She would say later: “Yes, I thought I had won. I’m gutted about this, of course. At first I felt really stupid, but then the others (her teammates) also did not know who had won.”
Let’s think about this – not even Kiesenhofer’s teammates knew that she had finished a minute and fifteen seconds ahead of Van Vluten.
The Austrian with a Master’s degree in Mathematics from University of Cambridge, and a PhD in applied mathematics from Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, had outwitted and physically overwhelmed the greatest road racers of her time. And they hadn’t even realised it.
As human beings strive for the Olympic ideals of faster, stronger, higher, their quest for that crucial edge will continue unabated – the bullet that finishes 0.5mm closer, the oar that comes down just a bit straighter, the bike that goes one per cent faster.
Bindra. Redgrave. Gröbler. Kiesenhofer. These are not geniuses, just human beings in the quest for perfection. They have not reinvented the wheel in their sport, merely made it go faster. Through determination, hard work, self-belief, and an ability to visualise the unimagined, they have lowered the horizons of possibility. In doing that, they have converted their dreams into gold. We can too.
The Olympics come around once every four years. Theoretically. During a pandemic, the wait could be five years, and when there is war, well, it could be twelve, or may just have to be skipped. And at the end of those four, five or even twelve years, it all comes down to that hour, that fraction of a minute, or the split second that it takes a propelled bullet to find its 0.5mm-wide mark, at least ten metres away.
Every minute of every Olympian’s life is spent preparing to peak at that exact moment when the opportunity presents itself. And if you do all that perfectly on a perfect day, and your forty-nine other near-perfect opponents don’t, then you win a gold medal. It is that difficult.
Until 2008 in Beijing, India, a country of a billion people, had not won a single gold medal in an individual Olympic event. Then Abhinav Bindra came along. Rohit Brijnath, who co-wrote Bindra’s autobiography A Shot at History, in the book’s preface writes about the time he spent with the shooter:
“I was taken aback by how far he will go to get better, this extremity not merely of pain but of perseverance that he was willing to travel to. Small things. The meticulous way he examines his pellets, the dissatisfaction even with a perfect score, the altering of the soles of his shoes by 1 millimeter, the willingness to try commando training. Anything, everything, that could help him win.”
There is a good reason for this approach. As Bindra explains: “William Tell with his crossbow had to hit the apple, I have to hit the seed inside the core of that apple. All the time, every shot, that’s my job.” He then goes on to explain exactly why the Olympics is so important to him and to every other athlete in the world who aspires to immortality in their sport:
“The pressure of the Olympics is that right then, at that precise two-hour period every four years, I have to be perfect. Or just more perfect than everyone else in the world. This is what the Olympics’ appeal is, for it is the ultimate proof of readiness. There is no higher achievement in my sport, no finer examination of sporting worth, no more excruciating confirmation of skill produced under the suffocation of tension.”
Abhinav Bindra’s road to Beijing had been a long one. At Athens, four years before, the glitter of the disc had seduced, only to deceive. Bindra was third in qualifying, a medal in his sights. Then he was seventh out of eight shooters in the final, dealing with shattered dreams.
Bindra had felt then that in terms of process, he had done everything right. But balancing sound logic and bitter disappointment is a difficult thing. At the age of 20, coming out of the Olympic shooting range, he had contemplated retirement.
Saurabh Chowdhary and Manu Bhaker, India’s talented 19-year old shooters at Tokyo went through the very same experience. They came in with the weight of expectations and a string of tournament victories behind them, followed the process, and yet melted from the heat of the Olympic altar. A deep dive, once they are back home, into what Bindra did in the four years after his own Waterloo at Athens, that turned shattered dreams into a golden disc, might well be worth their while. It could even change the story their own biographers will someday write.
Between 2004 and 2008, Bindra chased perfection. He tried everything to get that half percent improvement that would give him a 600/600 at the Olympic finals. He broke every part of his process into tiny parts and looked at how to make those parts more efficient. He even had laser surgery done to remove his love handles because he felt the love handle had a trampoline effect when his left elbow rested on his left hip. He lost his love handles but it didn’t give him a 600 every time he picked up a rifle. But he did do a few things that made the difference.
Bindra always used a German rifle, made by the Walther company (the fact that they also famously supplied Ian Fleming’s James Bond always appealed to the young marksman’s dry sense of humour). The German gun used German bullets. To his surprise, Bindra found that a particular brand of Chinese bullets were even more accurate when used in the same gun. Unsurprisingly, they happened to be the bullets the world beating Chinese shooters were using. Bindra had to have them.
There was, however, a problem with acquiring the bullets. The Chinese government wouldn’t allow the manufacturer to sell the bullets to foreigners before the Beijing Olympics were over. So Bindra had a friend in Hong Kong order 10,000 rounds for him. Those were the bullets that he brought with him to the shooting range at Beijing.
Television viewers at the recent Tokyo games would have noticed the heart rates of shooters being displayed on their screens, as they took their shots at the target. The Indian marksman had realised this even as he had first prepared for the biggest stage at Athens. But he had not internalised it until his post-Athens analysis of what he could do better.
Perfection in shooting, Bindra now knew, would come from controlling his heart rate through breathing. If he could do this, he would shoot 10’s not 9’s. So, he practised this. Day after day, month after month, he strove to bring himself to what he describes as “a more parasympathetic state, a more placid frame of mind”.
His respiratory rate prior to the Olympics was 14 to 15 cycles per minute, but by the time he got to Beijing it was down to four-five. It made him stable, allowed him to hold his breath, stay calm, and depress the trigger. He won. It has also been India’s only individual gold to date.
There wasn’t one single isolated element that Bindra did better. It was a sum total of little things that added up to be bigger than the parts. He had followed Kaizen, the Japanese method of continuous improvement. Zen philosophy doesn’t believe in perfectness. It does believe however in striving for it as the only way to be better. Abhinav Bindra is living proof of the fact that it works.
Will it make the boat go faster?
In 2018, Sir Steve Redgrave, winner of five gold medals across five Olympics, was approached by both the British and Chinese rowing authorities to work as high performance director with their respective teams. Their offer was understandable, given Redgrave’s preeminence and respect in the sport. His acceptance of the Chinese one was perhaps less obvious.
Redgrave’s remark a year later — “The Olympic Games in Tokyo are, of course, an important step in our strategy and China wants to win a gold Olympic medal there,” —was treated by the British establishment as wishful thinking. When China struck Gold at the Women’s Quadruple Sculls event in Tokyo last week, and Great Britain failed to get on the podium, the world sat up and took notice.
China didn’t just win, but the team of Chen Yunxia, Zhang Ling, Lyu Yang and Cui Xiaotong made a world record time of 6:05.13 at the Sea Forest Waterway, more than five seconds ahead of France in second position. It is not unusual that when rowing teams win gold at an Olympic event, their time would be about 10 per cent faster than the previous winners four years before. It is simply stunning to have this margin between the gold and silver medalists in the same race.
A pleased Redgrave had his trademark smile on as he told the press: “[This is] just a stepping stone to Paris.” With those words, the world had just been put on notice that he and the Chinese team are just setting out on their journey to greatness.
Before we look at what the Chinese Quadruple Sculls team did differently, we need to go back a number of years to when British rowing did something unusual in the early 1990’s. They recruited Jürgen Gröbler, a man who had moved from the former East Germany. Behind the Iron Curtain through the 1970s and 80s, Gröbler had trained some of the most successful rowers in the world and created winning teams.
Redgrave’s winning time in the coxed four in 1984 wouldn’t have qualified him for the final of the coxed fours in Seoul in 1988, Gröbler told the British. “His gold-medal winning time in Seoul in the coxless pair wouldn’t have even won him a medal in Barcelona in 1992, and so on and on.” At every four-year turn of the Olympic wheel, the bar was set higher. “You have to find more every time,” Gröbler said. He insisted that in order to win Olympic gold, every crew must increase the intensity of their training by 10 per cent compared to the previous Olympics.
Gröbler first brought in the concept of using data to improve the ‘measurables’. He insisted that it was now possible to summarise your every move against the question: ‘Will it make the boat go faster?’ Once you were convinced it would, those are the changes that rowers needed to make.
Gröbler worked with a whole host of successful British rowers in his time, but perhaps the most famous were the coxless four that won the gold medal at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Steve Redgrave was a part of that team. When Gröbler asked him to do weight training, Redgrave baulked: “If I wanted to lift weights, I would have chosen to be a weightlifter.”
Slowly, Gröbler convinced him with evidence that Redgrave’s increased power from lifting weights would help make the boat go faster. Eventually, the British legend accepted the argument, and it propelled Redgrave to his fifth gold medal, sporting immortality and a knighthood.
Redgrave may not have had the benefit of Gröbler’s insights when he raced in the first part of his Olympics career, but he did not get his previous four gold medals without developing constantly evolving strategies over the years that had made the boat go faster.
At Tokyo, the sum total of that experience evolved into a strategy for his Chinese wards that was simple in conception, stunning in execution: “When they came together four months ago, they always showed good pace and good middle pace. What they were lacking was to change the pace in the closing stages, and that’s what we’ve been working on for the last two months after the qualifying event,” Redgrave said after the race.
Sure enough, it made the boat go faster.
The one percent formula
Until 2002, British cycling had won one Olympic gold medal in 76-years. In 2008, they won 7 of the 10 golds up for grabs in track cycling and repeated the feat four years later in London. Sir David Brailsford, who took over in 2002 and is largely credited with this turnaround, became head of Britain’s first professional cycling team. His boys won the next three of the four Tour de France races that they entered.
So how did the bike go faster?
The approach, it turned out, wasn’t so different from the ‘marginal gains’ Gröbler had adopted for the rowing team more than a decade before. Brailsford decided that everything a cyclist did during the race could be broken down into little parts, and a cyclist needed to do every little part 1 per cent quicker. The sum total of these little efforts would make the bike go fast enough to climb the podium. In essence, like Abhinav Bindra, he was following Kaizen, or continuous improvement.
But this was only one of the three pillars in Brailsford’s quest for a podium finish.
The second was human performance. It was not about cycling but what went before the cyclist got on the bike — the diet, the method of training, the mental conditioning.
And finally, there were the strategies that drove the faster bike and more efficient human to ultimate victory.
An example was cyclists asking themselves what was the power needed off the line to get the start required to achieve a winning time? Once this was answered, they looked at how capable the best cyclists on the team were at generating that power. They identified the gaps between where they were and where they needed to be. If it was a bridgeable gap, they put a plan in place, and if it wasn’t, they replaced the cyclist with one who had the ability to get that start.
The British bikes went faster than that of any other nation— a total of 20 times over the next three Olympics.
Go so fast that your opponents forget you exist
If the Chinese rowers made headlines with their win at Tokyo last week, it was nothing compared to the worldwide sensation that a Ph.D. in Mathematics caused in the sport of road race cycling. She won an Olympic Gold apparently without the knowledge of her competitors.
Austrian mathematician Anna Kiesenhofer came into the race unknown and unheralded. She didn’t have a coach or support team. What she had was a strategy, and the lessons of Kaizen. She is neither Chinese nor British, but to get to gold she used the very methods they adopted. And then put a twist on it.
The road race at the Olympics is unlike any other cycling event in the world. There are no race radios, no formal teams to work with to formulate and execute a team strategy. You are on your own, often for tens of kilometres through varied terrain. This is why cyclists have pelotons. Peloton refers to the main group of cyclists who ride closely to each other. The idea is to save energy by staying close to a well-developed group and minimise chances of the drag to 5–10 per cent and make the bike go faster.
There is of course the obvious problem – the best and most experienced riders can keep their opponents in sight and make their move to race away to glory at a time that gives them the most advantage.
A few strong riders will always attempt to break away from the main peloton, trying to build such a commanding lead early in the race that the peloton cannot catch up before the finish. The riders who are in the lead, having broken away from the peloton are referred to as Tête de la Course (French for ‘Head of the Race’).
The mathematician and thinker in Kiesenhofer knew these obvious strategies, and as an outsider to the regulars, she knew she was unlikely to succeed using the same methods. She therefore had to think differently.
The road race in Tokyo is over 147 km from Musashinonomori Park to the Fuji International Speedway and involves a climb of 2,692 meters in the blistering heat of the peak Japanese summer.
The early breakaway was by a five-woman group formed by Kiesenhofer, South Africa’s Carla Oberholzer, Namibia’s Vera Looser, Poland’s Anna Plichta, and Israel’s Omer Shapira. With 50km to go, Dutch racer Demi Vollering attacked up the road, forcing the peloton in front to speed up through the pain of the uphill climb. Another Dutch rider Van Vleuten followed Vollering’s lead and attacked immediately after the gap closed. She then went ahead of the peloton and extended her lead to over a minute.
With 40km to go, what no one realised was that Kiesenhofer was not in the peloton anymore. She was actually ahead of Van Vleuten, riding solo and steadily increasing her lead. This was when her unconventional move kicked in.
One of the strategies that Tour de France cyclists in the French Alps adopt time and again, is speeding ahead of the peloton between 10 to 20km at a time to gain decisive leads. The researcher in Kiesenhofer knew, however, that there have been exceptions, notably France’s Albert Bourlon who made a 253km breakaway in 1947. So it was possible to take longer leads.
But there was a crucial element to consider. The Tour de France is a 3,414km long race. So what the topical individual or groups do at a time is for less than 0.3 per cent of the distance. Even Bourlon achieved it for about 7 per cent of the total distance.
The strategy the Austrian mathematician adopted was bold, imaginative, and utterly unconventional in its execution. With 40km to go, she knew she was ahead of Van Vleuten and out of sight among the mountain bends. So she speeded up. She knew 27 per cent of the race was yet to be run, but if she went far enough ahead and then increased her speed on the downhill stretch to the Fuji International Speedway, she would be too far away to be caught by the time the rest of the field made the move.
The strategy succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The peloton that pursued Van Vleuten had simply forgotten that Kiesenhofer was ahead of them.
As the Dutch winner of the UCI Women’s World Tour in 2018 and the Women’s Road World Cup in 2011 triumphantly crossed the finish line in 3:54.00 arms up in the air and broke into tears, she saw Kiesenhofer standing in front holding the Austrian flag. The mirage of gold had turned into the reality of silver. She would say later: “Yes, I thought I had won. I’m gutted about this, of course. At first I felt really stupid, but then the others (her teammates) also did not know who had won.”
Let’s think about this – not even Kiesenhofer’s teammates knew that she had finished a minute and fifteen seconds ahead of Van Vluten.
The Austrian with a Master’s degree in Mathematics from University of Cambridge, and a PhD in applied mathematics from Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, had outwitted and physically overwhelmed the greatest road racers of her time. And they hadn’t even realised it.
As human beings strive for the Olympic ideals of faster, stronger, higher, their quest for that crucial edge will continue unabated – the bullet that finishes 0.5mm closer, the oar that comes down just a bit straighter, the bike that goes one per cent faster.
Bindra. Redgrave. Gröbler. Kiesenhofer. These are not geniuses, just human beings in the quest for perfection. They have not reinvented the wheel in their sport, merely made it go faster. Through determination, hard work, self-belief, and an ability to visualise the unimagined, they have lowered the horizons of possibility. In doing that, they have converted their dreams into gold. We can too.
On Ambition: Necessary but Corrosive?
Lucy Kellaway in The FT
Not long ago I had lunch with a friend who told me that his father, who had been a moderately well-known politician, had just died.
How sad, I said.
What was sad, he replied, was less his death than his life. From a young man he had set his heart on being in the cabinet but never made it beyond junior minister — and never got over it. For the past three decades of his life, he had been bitter, envious, bad company to others and a liability to himself. What had killed him in the end, his son told me, was not the organ failure reported on his death certificate, but thwarted ambition.
A few days later I was doing a podcast with Dame Jenni Murray, the veteran broadcaster. We were discussing our careers post separation from our life-long employers, the BBC for her and the Financial Times for me.
She said she was loving her new freelance existence and felt more carefree than she ever had. The reason: she had not one shred of ambition left. Freed from the monkey on her shoulder driving her on to succeed, she could enjoy the work she did for its own sake.
I said that on the contrary I was entering my seventh decade more ambitious than I had ever been. I was starting a new school in September, would be teaching A-level economics for the first time, and was hell bent on doing well.
These two conversations have got me thinking about both the corrosiveness and the necessity of ambition and wondering how much of it we need, how to turn it off when it’s no longer useful — and how to stop it from doing us in.
Striving for power, position or money
I was brought up to despise ambition. My parents had that snobby suspicion of overt success common in Britain in the middle of last century and disapproved of striving for power, position or money. I would hear them say “He’s very ambitious” — implying that the person in question was only a hop, skip and a jump away from turning into Macbeth.
When it came to my own early career as a journalist I would have sworn black and blue that I had no ambition whatsoever — any advancement was simply due to luck.
I changed my mind about 15 years ago when I went around asking all the most successful journalists at the FT if they considered themselves ambitious. The older, posher Brits mostly said no, but everyone else, all the Americans and all younger journalists said yes.
Suddenly I saw how pathetic the old-fashioned British aversion to visible striving was. All successful people are ambitious. If you want to achieve anything, especially in anything competitive, you won’t get anywhere at all without ambition.
Now as a teacher, I find myself not only pro-ambition, but being forced to teach it to children. “High expectations” are one of the government’s eight teacher standards each trainee teacher must provide evidence of to qualify — the idea is that teachers expect great things from every student so that they can expect great things of themselves.
Just before the end of term I asked my year 11 students to write down what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money in the City and then start their own businesses. Others wanted to be neurosurgeons, professional footballers, astronauts, forensic scientists. One said he wanted to return to the country his parents were from and become a politician and help to resolve the civil war there.
As they started to discuss their ambitions I wanted to cheer. What a great job the school and their parents had done to make them all aim so high. What a great job I was doing as their economics teacher!
Aim high, but within reason
But as this roll call of ambition continued, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. I wanted to say: come off it Tommy, you have struggled for three years to see the difference between fixed and variable costs so I’m not sure that the ambition of being Elon Musk is realistic for you.
What comes out of this are three thoughts.
Ambition is a good thing but it must be proportionate. This is true not only of Tommy but of all of us — we should aim as high as we can, but within reason. If my friend’s father had had the more reasonable (but still high) ambition of becoming an MP, he might have died a very happy man.
The second is that if you do not get the success you want, you need to let go quickly, before the wanting destroys you. My brother had the ambition of being a professional oboist. From the age of about 15, this was all he wanted in life and for a decade he did everything to make it happen. But when, in his mid 20s, he realised he was probably not going to get snapped up by the London Symphony Orchestra — or any orchestra at all — he sadly put his oboe away, cancelled his ambition and joined a stockbroker instead.
Lastly, I now see I’m wrong about myself again. Contrary to what I told Murray, I’m not ambitious any more. I’ve looked it up and it means a “strong desire for success, achievement, power or wealth”. I don’t even have a weak desire for three of those and while I do want to achieve as an A-level teacher, that is because I’ll be no use to my students if I don’t know what I’m doing, and I won’t have any fun myself.
Now mine is gone, I see more clearly the trouble with ambition. It is not that it turns you into a ruthless, driven version of Macbeth, but that the striving, by definition, makes you dissatisfied with your life at present. Worse still, all the really ambitious people I have known have never been satisfied by achieving the thing of their dreams, they merely concocted an even bigger dream. I daresay that if my friend’s father had made it to the cabinet, he would still have died embittered by dint of not having made it as prime minister.
In the end he was unusual and unlucky to die still holding on to ambition. One of the greatest joys of getting older is the corrosive side of the striving, the wanting, the envy tends to recede. Whether it is because the charms of success, power and money fade as you get older or whether it is because of the diminishing probability of achieving those things — it doesn’t matter. Murray was right: life without the monkey is a good deal nicer.
Sunday 8 August 2021
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