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Via Middle East Eye

Five years after the Taliban’s return to power on August 15, 2021, Afghanistan has transformed from a chaotic battlefield into a functioning but deeply authoritarian state. Foreign troops are gone, and fragmented opponents have failed to mount a significant challenge to Kabul’s centralized control. The movement has established a degree of internal security unimaginable under the previous government. 

However, this stability rests on systematic exclusion, most notably of women, leaving the nation economically fragile and politically isolated. While the Taliban have proven they can govern without western support, they remain an international pariah managing a historic humanitarian crisis.

Afghanistan today is quieter than before 2021, but it is also poorer, more isolated, and severely repressive towards half its population.  The regime's primary achievement in its first five years was territorial consolidation. The next five will test whether it can survive mounting internal and external pressures. 

Criminalization of Public Criticism

The central story of the last five years is the patient, quiet accumulation of power by the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, who operates from Kandahar. Since his appointment in 2016, Akhundzada has transitioned the movement from an insurgency to a rigid governing authority. 

Akhundzada has built a powerful network, ensuring key state positions, including the premiership, the central bank, and the chief justiceship, sit in Kandahari hands. This is reinforced by a massive patronage system of roughly 15,000 registered madrassas, in which students receive stipends and teachers receive graded salaries. This network secures the loyalty of the provincial clergy, the movement’s core constituency, by granting them both status and sustainable resources. 

In Kabul, high-profile figures such as Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Sirajuddin Haqqani, Maulvi Yaqoob, and Amir Khan Muttaqi manage daily governance, economic policy, and foreign diplomacy. However, real power resides in Kandahar, where a 119-article criminal procedure code was quietly approved in early 2026 to cement absolute obedience and criminalize public criticism. 

“Hibatullah’s influence reaches far beyond religious affairs: major political, judicial, and administrative decisions increasingly reflect the preferences of the Kandahar leadership,” Muhammad Israr Madani, an Islamabad-based analyst and co-author of a book on state-building in the Taliban-led Afghanistan, told Middle East Eye.  

This centralization of power in Kandahar has “strengthened the Taliban’s ability to prevent internal fragmentation” while creating “resentment among commanders who believe that power is becoming excessively concentrated in one faction”, a mid-level Taliban leader who oversaw Khost told MEE in early 2024.  

Yet he emphasized that internal disagreement should not be mistaken for imminent collapse; top leaders recognize that unchecked conflict could cause the regime to crumble.

Ultimately, the Taliban have learned a crucial state-building lesson: durable control requires more than military force - it depends on patronage, financial leverage, ideological alignment, and the institutional capacity to systematically reward loyalty.

Economic void

Afghanistan faces a multifaceted economic crisis defined by structural dependency and extreme isolation. 

Following the 2021 takeover, Afghanistan lost international grants that previously covered 75 percent of public expenditure. The financial void was exacerbated by the freezing of $7bn in central bank assets and the suspension of US humanitarian funding in early 2025, which previously accounted for about 45 percent of the country’s aid lifeline.

While the Taliban have managed the economy better than many observers expected, expanding revenue collection through more effective customs duties and mining royalties, this has not translated into recovery for ordinary Afghans. Today, about 75 percent of Afghans cannot meet their basic needs. 

Economic expansion slowed from 2.3 percent in fiscal year 2023/2024 to 1.9 percent in 2024/2025, according to a May report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 

Rapid population growth, fuelled by the expulsion of over five million Afghans from Iran and Pakistan since 2023, has outpaced these minimal gains. Consequently, real GDP per capita fell by an estimated 2.1 percent in 2025/2026, straining communities with scarce jobs and overstretched infrastructure, the UNDP added.  

Compounded by natural disasters, particularly earthquakes, diplomatic isolation, and severe international banking restrictions, Kabul remains cut off from World Bank and IMF support, locking the nation into an unsustainable cycle of forced self-reliance. 

Even the regime’s most touted achievement, an opium ban that reduced poppy cultivation by 95 percent, has functioned as economic self-immolation for the poor. While landowning farmers reaped capital gains from soaring prices on existing stockpiles, the ban decimated the livelihoods of land-poor rural households who relied on opium for their income. 

Women: the defining cost of Taliban rule 

The suppression of women and girls remains the most globally condemned aspect of Taliban rule, with international organizations such as Human Rights Watch framing the system as “gender apartheid”.

A relentless succession of decrees from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice has stripped women of fundamental freedoms, such as restrictions on movement, employment, and public life. Girls remain barred from secondary education, and women are prohibited from attending or teaching at universities. Enforcement has intensified sharply, with authorities detaining women for “improper hijab” or travelling without a male guardian. 

Reflecting this crisis, the International Criminal Court issued secret arrest warrants for Supreme Leader Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, citing gender-based persecution as a crime against humanity.

Taliban staged a simulated bomb attack on a US military convoy during fifth-anniversary events in Paktia, with footage showing an upside-down US flag on an armored vehicle before an explosion.

In Kandahar, Taliban and their supporters also paraded an effigy of President Trump… pic.twitter.com/NneauF56rU

— Amu TV (@AmuTelevision) August 15, 2026

Beyond its human toll, this policy represents severe economic self-sabotage. Barring women from the workforce deprives the nation of vital human capital while accelerating brain drain. The United Nations estimates that restricting female labor force participation costs Afghanistan up to $1bn annually, or nearly 6 percent of its GDP.

The structural fallout, particularly acute shortages of female healthcare workers, teachers, and civil servants, has been “crippling basic health and education delivery for a generation,” said a Kabul-based humanitarian expert working for a UN body.

By sacrificing half its population to enforce ideological purity, the regime is “dismantling the country’s prospects for sustainable economic recovery and long-term development”, he told MEE. 

The bitter divorce with Pakistan

The relationship between the Taliban and their historical sponsor, Pakistan, has undergone a catastrophic collapse, shifting from strategic partnership to “open war” by early 2026. 

Initially, Islamabad celebrated the Taliban’s August 2021 return to power as a major geopolitical victory that would secure Pakistan’s western border and eliminate Indian influence. Then-Prime Minister Imran Khan declared that Afghans had broken “the shackles of slavery”, while current Defence Minister Khawaja Asif posted a photograph of a Taliban leader with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, captioned, “God is great.”

However, that initial optimism quickly unraveled. The Taliban administration’s refusal to suppress the militant group, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), known colloquially as the "Pakistani Taliban", transformed the border between the countries into an active flashpoint. 

Islamabad accused the Taliban administration of granting the TTP safe havens and access to abandoned US weaponry, driving a sharp escalation in cross-border attacks. 

A recent UN Security Council report reinforced these concerns, reiterating that the “terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan remained largely unchanged”, and warning that militant sanctuaries pose an enduring risk to neighboring states and Central Asia. 

In response, Islamabad deployed aggressive coercive measures, deporting around 2.6 million Afghans since late 2023, repeatedly closing vital border crossings, and launching retaliatory air strikes inside Afghan territory. 

Publicly, Taliban officials reject allegations that they harbor TTP fighters, dismissing the violence as an internal Pakistani security crisis. Privately, however, managing the TTP has exposed deep ideological fractures within the regime. 

“Hardline elements within Taliban ranks view Pakistani militants as historical comrades-in-arms, making any forcible disarming politically unthinkable,” said a Taliban mid-level official now working with the interior ministry. 

He said that shielding the TTP is deepening Afghanistan’s international isolation, while taking aggressive action against it risks driving disaffected fighters directly into the ranks of Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). 

Minority marginalization

The fifth year of Taliban rule has accelerated the systematic exclusion of Afghanistan’s religious and ethnic minorities, particularly Shia and Hazara populations, who comprise 15 percent of the country.

Despite early promises of inclusivity, Shia jurisprudence has been erased from legal systems, universities, and schools, stripping away protections won under the former republic. 

Local Shia leaders highlighted a recent Taliban decree shuttering two vital cultural institutions, the Khatam al-Nabieen Educational Centre and Tamadon TV. Furthermore, Supreme Leader Akhundzada has excluded Shia scholars from new provincial ulema councils, even in Shia-majority provinces like Bamiyan and Daykundi.

The Taliban "are systematically working to remove our sect from the country’s legal and educational landscape,” warned a Quetta-based Hazara Shia cleric connected to the Afghan Shia community, who chose to remain anonymous for safety concerns. 

Beyond the Shia population, the Taliban launched a sweeping crackdown on the Salafi minority under the guise of severing ISKP’s ideological pipeline, severely restricting access to mosques and seminaries. Analysts warn this heavy-handed repression risks alienating local communities and driving radicalized youth directly into ISKP’s ranks, exacerbating national instability.

Outlook

Five years after returning to power, the Taliban regime appears militarily entrenched yet structurally fragile. No organized opposition possesses the foreign backing, territory, or unified leadership needed to threaten Kabul. 

Armed groups like the National Resistance Front remain fragmented, incapable of challenging the regime’s centralized security apparatus. 

However, the regime’s greatest threat lies within its political architecture. Internal rifts continue to widen, prompting rare warnings from Akhundzada that discord could dismantle the government from within. While these political failures have not yet triggered a power crisis, an outright collapse would likely plunge Afghanistan into a civil war, devastating civilians and destabilising its neighbours. 

Demographics present an equally existential hurdle. With a stagnant economy and a population projected to double by 2050, long-term survival hinges on delivering livelihoods, food, and employment - a mandate current policies fail to meet. 

Internationally, pragmatic ties with Russia, China, and Central Asian neighbors provide economic lifelines without western recognition. Yet by governing through an extreme ideological police state, the leadership risks complete public alienation. 

The coming years will test whether the Taliban can transition from ruling through coercion to sustainable governance. Given their trajectory, this evolution remains improbable. Instead, persistent economic despair, social repression, and regional friction threaten to reignite systemic instability, preserving Afghanistan as an enduring catalyst for regional crises. 

While many countries have their own special days to celebrate beer, one of the oldest alcoholic beverages known to humankind, International Beer Day is aimed at beer drinkers everywhere.

Every first Friday in August, special events are held in bars and pubs around the world.

As Statista's Katharina Buchholz details below, some countries' inhabitants might be more prone to celebrate than others.

You will find more infographics at Statista

A recent Statista Consumer Insight survey shows that some Latin American countries exhibit a share of between 35 and 44 percent of regular beer drinkers. Brazil tops the list with 44 percent of survey participants between legal drinking age and 64 years old regularly consuming the alcoholic drink usually made with malted barley, hops, water and yeast. Coming in first is Spain, however, with 45 percent of respondents saying the same.

Another Southern European country, Italy, also ranks high with 42 percent regular beer consumers.

Asia is also home to some of the biggest beer lovers, with 44 percent in Vietnam and 40 percent in Thailand saying they were regular beer drinkers. Muslim countries Malaysia and Indonesia see much fewer people drink beer on the regular, at just 15 percent and 6 percent, respectively. In China, the world's largest beer market, only a third of respondents say they are regular consumers. Overall, developing countries with younger populations are more likely to see higher beer consumption and production, while those with aging or shrinking populations typically see fewer beer drinkers.

Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom, countries associated with many popular beer brands and varieties, are closer to the 31-country average of around a third of respondents being regular beer drinkers.

In the United States, this figure was even lower at around a quarter of respondents between the ages of 21 and 64 years old.

While the Chinese may not be the biggest drinkers in the worlds, they are the world’s leading producer of beer, according to the latest BarthHaas Report. In 2025, the country’s output stood at 354 million hectoliters of beer. A hectoliter is equivalent to one hundred liters.

As the following chart shows, the United States is the second biggest producer of beer with an output of 175 million hectoliters last year. However, both countries have seen production decline over the past two years, as have a number of other nations, mostly in the developed world.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As the beer market struggles with changing consumption patterns and stagnating real incomes, countries with aging or declining populations have yet another factor weighing on the alcoholic beverage market.

Germany, Spain and Japan all saw their production fall over the course of the past two years.

Rounding off the top 5 countries are Brazil, Mexico and Russia, which all saw production increases since 2023. Asia showed more of a mixed picture with production increasing in Vietnam as well as India, Thailand and the Philippines, while it was down in China, Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile, the African continent saw a significant 16 million hectoliter increase in output since 2023.

Authored by Spyridon Andrews via the Abstract Truth Substack,

I lived in Massachusetts for a number of years and even at one time owned a home there. The home was in a town called Cotuit, on the Cape, a small, pretty town that recalled the atmosphere of the television show Lost or the novel Lord of the Flies. There was an equivalent feeling of desolation and desperation and the strange notion that cannibal zombies ran the town. We determined that it was not the place we wanted to spend our free time, even though I have to say that the clam strips were delicious.

When I was a student, I lived in the Boston area, and that was a different feel, more of what we can find in our Blue American cities today. I have to say that Cambridge was ahead of its time. When I worked on the student janitorial crew, my boss, one of the wisest men in Boston—a dyed-in-the-wool Bruins, Red Sox, and Patriots fan and Vietnam vet—comforted me one day as we sat together on the steps in Radcliffe Yard. Bob said to me, “Donnie, the thing you need to know about this place is that it’s basically an insane asylum where the inmates would never think of leaving.” It is a fact of my life that the best advice I have ever received has not come from professors or academics, and certainly not lawyers, but working people.

As effed up as Massachusetts is, even I was stunned to see the spectacle of the governor signing what, in my view, amounts to infanticide into law while a bunch of cackling celebrants stood around her clapping. This finally even got a rise from the local Catholic bishops, not a frequent event because God forbid they should lose parishioners. Clearly, I have more fieldwork to do in Massachusetts to understand the delirious reaction of women to removing legal restrictions on aborting their own children at an advanced stage of pregnancy. But I suppose we can take solace in knowing that this lunacy—which was once largely confined to university campuses—is now active throughout the country, and especially in America’s major cities.

So, I think it is time we took a tour of some of our major cities and important organizations so we can show the fecundity of choices that we have in terms of where to live in the relevant blue states.

I believe that it’s only fitting that we begin in the “Big Apple,” where a thirty-something, self-declared democratic socialist with no experience running anything is currently mayor of the world’s leading financial center.

New York City

Mamdani’s rhetoric and positions have struck many people, including many Jews, as openly hostile to Israel and even antisemitic, so it only makes sense that Jewish people would line up to vote for him. I’ve written about this before, and we are always reminded of the heartwarming stories of German Jewish and Hungarian leaders urging Jews not to panic and to work together with the Nazis. But the difference is that the Jews who support Mamdani today have university degrees, so they know better. And just because they elect a guy who has been reluctant to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada”—a phrase many Jews understand as a call for violence—or the destruction of the Jewish state doesn’t mean he’s not a swell guy. He cares.

He caps this off nicely with a piss-poor understanding of economics. Since we have unlimited money—don’t we?—we can have fare-free buses and city-supported grocery stores because the government runs everything so efficiently, and frozen rents because I suppose we want to make it completely undesirable for developers to build new housing structures. But the best part is that Mamdani wants to finance all this with higher taxes on corporations and wealthy people who actually provide jobs and fuel the development of the city. He appears to be shocked by the fact that rich people might leave New York City and take their jobs and development plans elsewhere.

Mamdani’s dream city is rounded off by his history of supporting the “defund the police” movement. Of the many super-dumb ideas that American socialists and communists have put forward, this may be the dumbest. It is, in fact, so dumb that it has been repeated in blue cities like Boston, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It is usually accompanied by dim-witted announcements from social scientists that there are “social causes” for crime and no real criminals, and then followed up with an appeal to shut down the jails.

Boston

But let’s continue our tour and mosey on up the East Coast to the city of Boston. The socialist mayor, Michelle Wu, has called for the abolition of ICE, a mantra repeated in many blue states and cities, and does not seem all that concerned about drug trafficking and human trafficking associated with illegal immigration. After all, she needs every last vote to stay in power. Logically, she has supported noncitizens voting in local elections, along with many similar lunatics in the Boston City Council. She is also a big backer of rent control, something the state eliminated in 1994. But bad ideas, like cockroaches, don’t go away, and she seems determined to employ fallacious economic theory in the laboratory she calls Boston.

But before we leave Boston, we should say a word about the Massachusetts governor. Governor Maura Healey has now signed legislation removing the state’s previous set of specified conditions for abortion after twenty-four weeks and replacing them with the “best medical judgment” of the physician. The law no longer supplies a clear gestational boundary of its own. Not being stupid, let’s understand that this makes it possible to forum-shop for a doctor willing to supply the necessary medical judgment to terminate a pregnancy very late in the process. In Rome and Sparta, they were courageous enough to call this infanticide. Here we refer to this as “health care.” Although I’m not sure that unborn children, if they could express an opinion, would agree with that assessment. And I’m not sure that female unborn children would find this as liberating for women as Governor Healey does.

Seattle

Let’s continue our journey and take a 3,000-mile journey across the country and visit Seattle’s Mayor Katie Wilson. Mayor Katie is hardly an economic success story, but then that doesn’t matter if you are a socialist. One of the controversies during the campaign involved financial assistance from her parents, including more than $10,000 in campaign-related childcare expenses that were not properly reported, for which her campaign paid a fine. But this fits nicely with all the other socialists living in their parents’ basements. In America these days, it’s not necessary to have a job, know anything about American history or the Constitution, or even believe there is such a thing as right or wrong in order to vote. Katie tapped heavily into this voter base in winning her election.

Katie has also demonstrated a command of economics sufficient to out-Mamdani Mamdani. When she was confronted with the very real scenario of wealthy people leaving Washington because of the state’s aggressive taxation proposals, she famously said, “Bye.” This is the same woman who left college in her final year six weeks before final exams because she wanted to “burn a bridge to the conventional professional world.” Now, if she had perhaps crossed the bridge, she would have seen that even socialist utopian projects like the ones dancing in her head require tax revenue. And tax revenue comes from people who make money—some of whom are millionaires. She is a perfect fit for Seattle, whose residents have gone out of their way to turn one of America’s most beautiful cities into a trash heap.

Katie didn’t just talk the talk; she also walked the walk. She campaigned on a citywide capital-gains tax designed to target wealthy residents. All of her favorite programs—subsidized transit and universal childcare—need to be paid for, and so she expected to be able to ask wealthy residents for money the same way she asked Mom and Dad. It never occurred to her that these are not her parents and they don’t have to stay around Seattle and give her money.

Katie has also fallen in line with the sanctuary-city rhetoric of not distinguishing between American citizens and people who are here illegally and making use of our resources. She has courageously directed her law-enforcement authorities not to cooperate with ICE, because why would you ever want to alienate future voters? Illegal gangs, drug and human trafficking be damned.

Chicago

But we really need to go to the Midwest to enjoy the full panoply of socialist woke delights. In one sense, we have to hand it to Chicago’s Brandon Johnson in that he not only stuck around for final exams but went on to get a master’s degree from Aurora University. The bad news is that he taught social studies and not economics. This was obvious from his support for reviving a “head tax” per employee on large businesses as part of his effort to close the enormous budget gap in Chicago. Brandon helped create that budget gap by spending outrageous sums of money on newly arrived migrants, to the detriment of actual legal residents. This created waves of outrage amongst residents who were not even receiving basic services. So, perhaps being contrite over destroying the economic infrastructure of the city, he felt that he could offer a solution by chasing businesses out of the city. Like other socialist geniuses, he made it his goal to bleed high-income earners and businesses to fund his sanctuary-city resistance.

Well, he may not have wanted to do much about drug and human trafficking carried out by Central American gangs, but at least he made up for it by reducing portions of the police budget and calling for the abolition of ICE. See how smart that is? Brandon’s rhetoric about white people and “white supremacy” has also been inflammatory. He does not consider this to be much of a problem in a city where white people happen to live, because he seems to see them mostly as an endless tax base to fund his permanent revolution.

Brandon doesn’t seem to have won over the nonwhite voters either. Polls have placed his approval rating between 23 and 30 percent, and one survey found that fewer than one in seven voters wanted him to run for reelection. He has accomplished nearly the impossible in making himself even less popular than his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, currently of Harvard University.

Los Angeles

I would be remiss if I did not include my hometown mayor, Los Angeles’ Karen Bass, in this whirlwind tour. Karen, after deploying the usual defund-the-police rhetoric, actually discovered that police do play an important function in restoring order, and her later budgets called for hiring more of them. But she has displayed the same fiscal prowess as her fellow blue mayors and governors. Her budget shortfall is only about $1 billion. In her first couple of years, Los Angeles spent billions on programs to combat homelessness. Homelessness didn’t meaningfully improve, the money disappeared into a network of agencies and contractors, and questions were buried. But Mayor Bass has a distinction that her fellow progressive mayors do not share. On her watch, her own city burned down.

Mayor Bass has a tremendous record of placing incompetent wokesters into key positions. The Santa Ynez Reservoir serving Pacific Palisades was empty and offline when the fire began, and hydrants lost pressure during the emergency. Her fire-prevention leadership included committed wokesters who seemed to make up in woke rhetoric what they lacked in practical preparation. Her fire chief was on camera after the Pacific Palisades Fire had eaten half of the oceanfront communities, complaining about not having resources. One of the fire chief’s senior officials had previously made strange comments suggesting that someone needing rescue might object to being carried out of a fire by a woman who looked like her. But this was better than Mayor Karen, who was in Ghana at a presidential inauguration. And she was better than Governor Brylcreem, who had taken to disappearing altogether—when he wasn’t falsely assuring residents that he was working with President Trump to resolve the problem.

Bass had plenty of warnings and can be blamed for presiding over a government that was catastrophically unprepared for it. The empty reservoir, loss of hydrant pressure, inadequate pre-deployment, and later controversy over the after-action report all belong to the government she led. It may be hyperbole to say she burned her own city down. But, in the eyes of many who lost their homes, it doesn’t seem like it.

Like all her pals on the blue team, Mayor Karen is also soft on crime, anti-ICE, and, as a bonus, seemingly anti-fire prevention. This is hardly surprising given her history on the radical Left and her work in her youth with a pro-Castro organization. Like her socialist and communist pals, she is also an unwavering supporter of abortion, earning a 100 percent score from NARAL Pro-Choice America. So, we need to ask, if we burn the homes down of all the wealthy residents, chase all of the Hollywood studios out of Los Angeles, and make it unreasonable for anyone with a business to stay or relocate to Los Angeles, where are you going to get your tax revenue? And she seems to also want to take care of the next generation by joining in the effort that has resulted in nearly 1/3 of Generation Z disappearing through abortion.

As we take our tour of American hellholes, we cannot help but think of Margaret Thatcher’s words: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Between scaring off job providers and denying any rights to unborn children, there is not going to be a lot of money—or many people—around to fund the Leftist utopias of the future. Some of these Leftists may even have to do the unthinkable and get real jobs working construction, digging holes, building shelters, and growing crops, rather than dictating to the rest of us how we should live our lives. But for the moment, as they celebrate chaos in the streets and cheer on infanticide, this is their shining moment. Let them enjoy it, because it won’t last much longer.

Authored by James Gorrie via The Epoch Times,

Is Beijing hoping to turn other authoritarian societies into digital Chinas?

China’s rise as the world’s leading exporter of surveillance technology is yielding some disturbing results. Beijing’s surveillance export packages comprise an entire technological architecture that can give governments an unprecedented ability to see, identify, and track their populations.

Those technologies include cameras, artificial intelligence, telecommunications networks, cloud computing, facial recognition, license-plate recognition, and centralized command systems. Many mid-sized countries are becoming or are already customers.

Turning Other Nations Into ‘Little Chinas’

Turkey is an important case study.

To be clear, Turkey has not yet become a Chinese-style surveillance state. Its political system and institutions remain different from China’s. That said, Chinese technology companies have established a significant presence in Turkey’s digital infrastructure, and they’re not shy about it. In fact, Huawei has explicitly marketed its AI-powered CCTV and “Safe City,” i.e. surveillance technologies, in the Turkish market.

It’s no mystery that China wants to sell as much merchandise to as many trading partners as possible. But is it also possible that China wants as many partners as possible to use and become dependent upon its surveillance technology so that their societies turn into “little Chinas” by deploying Smart City tech?

AI Camera Surveillance

The first building block is the camera.

Chinese companies such as Hikvision and Dahua have become global leaders in video-surveillance equipment. Meanwhile, Huawei has developed AI-powered cameras capable of performing sophisticated image recognition and analysis. CSIS notes that Chinese firms can provide technologies ranging from cameras to AI analytics and centralized deployment.

Huawei’s AI-enabled technology is in Turkey, using cameras with embedded AI chips and deep learning capabilities to perform recognition and identification while feeding information into cloud-based big-data systems. Such systems could operate across enormous numbers of cameras.

That represents a fundamental shift in surveillance capability for nations such as Turkey. A conventional camera records what happened. An AI camera can begin answering who, when, where, and what.

A screen shows visitors being filmed by AI (Artificial Intelligence) security cameras with facial recognition technology at the 14th China International Exhibition on Public Safety and Security at the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing on Oct. 24, 2018. Nicolas Asfouri /AFP via Getty Images

The difference is enormous.

‘Smart Cities’ Can Become Surveillance Networks

The second technological piece is the smart-city platform.

Huawei’s smart-city operation combines 5G, artificial intelligence, Internet-of-Things devices, cloud computing, and big-data analytics. The company describes an integrated “digital brain” capable of connecting multiple government functions and data sources.

None of those technologies is inherently authoritarian.

Smart traffic systems, energy management, and connected public services are all examples of how technology can make cities more efficient.

The problem begins when these systems become interconnected with security databases.

A camera produces an image. A telecommunications network produces location and communications data. A smart-city sensor produces movement information. AI can combine those streams instantly.

The result is no longer simply a collection of cameras. It’s an urban information and surveillance system.

This technology isn’t new, but the worry is about its widespread adoption. CSIS has documented Huawei “Safe City” agreements involving CCTV, intelligent video surveillance, facial and license-plate recognition, crowd monitoring, command centers, and other security technologies in dozens of countries over the years.

Huawei’s Digital Footprint

Another factor is telecommunications. Amplifying on the Turkish case, Huawei has operated in Turkey (and other nations) for decades and has established a substantial local research and technology presence. Employing roughly 1,500 people in the country and operating an R&D center in Istanbul, Huawei has its own people running the technology, providing additional opportunity for data gathering.

That matters because telecommunications infrastructure is the nervous system of the modern surveillance state. It’s a powerful technological information loop where cameras and sensors collect information, telephones generate it, networks transfer it, cloud systems store and analyze it, while AI interprets it.

The more deeply those systems become integrated, the greater the potential for governments to build a comprehensive picture of their citizens.

Huawei’s smart-city model explicitly combines those technologies.

Scalable Surveillance Technology

Why do governments buy it?

The answer is not necessarily ideology, although that may be part of it, but it is often simple economics.

China’s surveillance companies can offer governments a complete technological package at competitive prices. Huawei’s Safe City partners are disproportionately middle-income countries, noting that affordability and commercial promises can be important drivers of adoption.

That alone gives Beijing an enormous commercial opportunity. Why build surveillance infrastructure from scratch when you can just buy it off the shelf?

What’s more, such systems may well help illegitimate governments remain in power. But also, once a country has invested heavily in a particular technological ecosystem, replacing it can become expensive.

A woman stands at the booth of Huawei featuring 5G technology at the PT Expo in Beijing on Sept. 28, 2018. Reuters

CSIS has warned that countries adopting Huawei equipment could become effectively “locked in” through high replacement costs, while Chinese companies gain market share and establish technical standards.

That doesn’t mean that Huawei’s clients aren’t authoritarian regimes, many are.

Data as Strategic Assets

Another consequential factor is data.

China’s surveillance exports potentially provide Beijing with more than equipment sales. They can help Chinese companies expand their technological standards, gain experience in foreign markets, and deepen commercial relationships.

The strategic concern is that if Chinese companies become the suppliers of the world’s cameras, networks, cloud systems, and AI platforms, they would become deeply embedded in the digital infrastructure of other nations.

That creates influence even without direct access to every byte of data.

What Does it Mean?

Turkey, among others, is therefore a warning sign—not necessarily because it is becoming China, but because it demonstrates how surveillance capabilities can enter a country through ordinary commercial infrastructure.

Thus, the struggle between China and the West is increasingly a contest over technological models adopted by a growing number of nations.

China’s model emphasizes scale, integration, and centralized control.

Western democracies generally place greater emphasis on privacy, transparency, and legal restrictions, although Western governments also use facial recognition, AI surveillance, and other monitoring technologies.

The Chinese advantage is that Beijing’s companies can offer much of the infrastructure as a package. That makes the technology easy to export and, once deployed, difficult and expensive to replace.

The United States and the West, therefore, face a challenge that goes beyond Huawei, Hikvision, or Dahua. They must compete with an entire technological ecosystem.

The real question is not necessarily whether every Chinese camera is secretly spying on foreign citizens. But rather, it’s whether countries like Turkey and many others with a growing exposure to China’s digital infrastructure could become digital dictatorships because of it.

Authored by Matthew Andersson via AmericanThinker.com,

There is growing interest in whether an “ai” or, artificial intelligence judge can make better rulings than a human one.  

This is understandable as many legal decisions are either wrong or flawed in some critical way.  

Partisan politics and “lawfare" also continue to corrupt the legal system to a degree that has undermined its fundamental credibility, including public trust.

No one knows better than President Trump who was maliciously prosecuted as a civilian. 

Down in the trial courts where legal arguments start, many of the facts of a case get ignored by the court, or never get a fair hearing because they are denied on technical grounds, or from favoritism, or corruption.  

Critical facts are also not discovered or recognized due to human error, or lack of relevant subject competence.

When a case then gets bumped up to an appeal, the appellate courts are even more removed from facts. They may reverse on procedural mistakes, or if a particular statute or law was thought to be seriously misinterpreted, but appellate courts are notorious for affirming lower court rulings because sending a case back to the trial court implicates their judicial colleagues and hurts their record.

In law school, the judges, moreover, were originally trained almost entirely by reference to these abstract appellate cases, and usually don’t get their hands dirty on the nitty gritty of trial court facts.  

This is a mistake, and often produces judges with a sense of the law as a separate, rarified intellectual exercise.  This also lets personal bias creep into their method of thinking because bias can hide behind obscure law language that often appears little more than a legal “magic spell.”  

The term “legal reasoning” is an old concept, but it comes with costs: it rests on interpretations of prior rulings, or precedent — and the majority of those have problems.  The errors therefore keep compounding. Those errors are rarely caught by subsequent judges who assume the facts are settled.   

But another factor that is slowly bringing the use of AI into the legal system, involves the widespread corruption, and human abuse, of the law itself.  Partisan judges can rule based on political party allegiance, and sometimes without recognizing it. That’s how the human mind works.  AI doesn’t. 

The term “lawfare” also didn’t come out of thin air: it is the human manipulation of the normal legal system by lawyers or prosecutors who bring malicious charges, and then rely on judges who are not difficult to persuade.  That is partly because most judges have limited if any experience in business, technology and even work: they came out of law school, went straight into law or worked as law clerks, and their entire frame of reference is the internal culture of the system they are in. The charges have all the appearances of legal formalities that they are used to, so they get processed as if they were legitimate. 

Judges are also under pressure to manually process their caseloads, consisting of mountains of paperwork that clog up the system, most of which is never carefully studied, or read. Their own careers, and retirement interests, can short-circuit their willingness to think hard about the arguments before them. Judges are also risk-averse, especially when cases and facts may be controversial. AI doesn’t worry about controversy.

Law professor and federal appellate judge, Frank Easterbrook, in his increasingly criticized ruling in Klaassen, is an example. It concerned Indiana University student appeal over constitutional violations of their medical privacy. The court ruled against them by relying on an antiquated, irrelevant case from the year 1906. The court used “precedent” not to reason, but to simply process a decision, and ignored medical evidence, political facts, and law itself. At the time, judges were “all in” on the Dr. Fauci fraud, which was also reinforced by institutions including the CDC and NIH, which made any doubts, in their minds, beyond the necessity of critical thinking. 

What would an AI judge have ruled?  It would have been more capable, theoretically, of making a massive sweep, and test, of statistical data concerning documented COVID medical risk, the chemical analysis of vaccines, the regulatory lapses, and corporate profit accounting, including from medical providers.  

The constitutional law interpretations of the First Amendment, and the Establishment Clause of religious rights, were also clear, but ignored by the court. Judges on the bench, and in the Bar, can be motivated to protect their own closed system: legal precedent, even if utterly irrelevant to new facts, is a method of reinforcing that system.  AI has no culture to protect. 

Some elite law schools, such as the University of Chicago, are claiming that they are providing a “template for law schools around the world” by the way AI is simply added into their curriculum.  In some cases they are providing public presentations that report on how AI compares with human judges in case decisions. Their larger teaching posture, however, is that AI is just an elective, and creates no underlying disruption to the traditional law degree. It is still business as usual.  They're likely wrong.

What schools like UChicago are really representing, is an AI policy for the ABA law school system, asserting their legacy institutional domain over technology which threatens to replace them.  Apparently, doing things the way they’ve always been done is their template for the future. 

The entire legal system from schools to firms to courts, don’t have a firm grasp on what the larger AI strategic implications are. Few are acquainted with, or understand, the AI data centers that are being built across the U.S.  The number of such centers already reaches into the thousands. 

So, what are they for?  

Some observers point to them as being modern high-tech replacements of an older industrial, mechanical system, and a “21st century” infrastructure backbone in a new vision of the future.  Certainly in logistics, commercial order fulfillment, customer data, government records and other uses, it is powerful.  But there’s much more to it: networked data centers that blanket the country, represent a strategy to replace many human systems. 

In law, this strategy is seductive, especially if you look back on the way the DNC and its progressive donors abused the legal system by human intervention and political corruption -- and got away with it.  Illegally changing voting rules under pandemic pretext is an example. The targeting of a former U.S. president with malicious prosecution, fully enabled by corrupt judges, is another prominent example, and a powerful rationale for current legal system modification.

The federal courts operate under congressional authority, and Congress can remove them.  That, combined with the use of AI threatens the status quo. AI can more efficiently find and gather facts, while filtering or exposing legal mistakes and procedural irregularities, including tracking the affiliations and records of judges.

AI also puts legal education on trial, and may signal significant changes.

JPMorgan is the latest institutional research desk to warn that the next global food crisis may already be taking shape, driven by what its analysts describe as the "Five Ws": War, Weather, Warehousing, Water, and Waste.

In a new report titled Food Security Is National Security: A Compounding Storm, a team led by London-based senior global economist Nora Szentivanyi warned that disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz and the emergence of a potentially historic El Niño could weaken crop yields, constrain agricultural production, and keep food inflation elevated through the first half of 2027.

"Successive shocks since COVID have compounded, eroding food production capacity and keeping food price pressures elevated into 2027," Szentivanyi said, warning that "this is not a short-lived shock; it has reduced the likelihood of near-term disinflation, and the food inflation cycle is likely to exert pressure through 1H27."

She expects global food inflation to accelerate from 2.8% in the first half of 2026 to 5% in the first half of next year.

The warning comes despite a modest improvement in hunger statistics. About 645 million people faced hunger in 2025, down roughly 43 million from 2022. Yet 2.1 billion people, or 25.8% of the global population, still experienced moderate or severe food insecurity.

Szentivanyi outlined the most immediate vulnerability: fertilizer. She noted, "Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and the coming super El Niño are adding to fertilizer and food price pressures." 

She said that "crop and price effects are still building and agricultural impacts lag the oceanic peak by 6 to 12 months."

Szentivanyi warned that this year's energy shock could roughly double the inflationary impact of a super El Niño, lifting global food CPI by about 1.5 percentage points, compared with the historical .7-point increase. Food inflation is projected to reach a 5% annualized rate in the first half of 2027, adding .6 percentage points to headline inflation and slowing full-year disinflation by .3 points.

"Exposure is concentrated in South and Southeast Asia, including rice, sugar, and coffee; West Africa, including cocoa; and parts of East and Southern Africa," the analyst said, adding, "EM bears the brunt of El Niño. The largest food inflation responses are concentrated in EM Asia and Latin America, where weather-sensitive agriculture plays a larger role in economic activity, and food carries a higher weight in consumption baskets. India, Colombia, Indonesia, Brazil, Taiwan, and Korea emerge as among the most sensitive economies"”

Furthermore, China has been stockpiling food, fertilizer, energy, and industrial metals. While the West has strategic oil reserves (quickly draining to offset the loss of Gulf supplies), it lacks a meaningful fertilizer buffer. With the Hormuz chokepoint still disrupted, crop conditions deteriorating, and export controls spreading, Szentivanyi suggests that the next inflation shock may emerge not at the gas pump, as seen earlier this year, but potentially in the grocery aisle next year.

Szentivanyi's note should not be surprising to readers, as we've cited numerous institutional desks, including Goldman, HSBC (read here), and others, warning of mounting food inflation risks that could materialize from the confluence of drivers mentioned above.

This comes as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's global food price index climbed to a three-year high in July.

Bank of America analyst Robert Ohmes recently warned that another food price spike could arrive in supermarkets this fall. He said that grocery inflation "may be on the way," citing a blended index of wages, diesel, and commodity costs.

For readers, reducing exposure to increasingly fragile food supply chains may require building some resilience in the backyard. That could mean putting unused space to work with chickens, a garden, or both. While this year's growing season has largely passed its peak, now is the time to plan for next spring. Establishing relationships with nearby ranchers, farmers, and local food producers can also provide an alternative supply network when national distribution networks come under pressure.

Professional subscribers can read more on El Niño, Food Supply, and other critical topics at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.