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Bombshell

War on the Rocks

News, Politics, Military, War, History

4.8 • 691 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2020

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week Erin, Loren, and Radha reunite after a midwinter break to talk pandemics. They then turn to the Afghanistan “peace” deal, Israeli elections (third time’s the charm?), and recent developments in Syria. As always, there’s plenty of White House mayhem with a new chief of staff, and vacancies as far as the eye can see in Pentagon civilian leadership. Thankfully, Hilary Mantel books and Love is Blind provide a pop culture escape to soothe (or at least distract) the soul.

Links

Coronavirus

Matthew Herper, “Susan Desmond-Hellmann: The Coronavirus is Alarming. Here’s Why You Should Not Panic,” Stat, March 6, 2020
“Covid-19 is Now In 50 Countries, and Things Will Get Worse,” The Economist, February 2020

Afghanistan

Diaa Hadid and Scott Neuman, “US, Afghanistan and Taliban Announce 7-Day Reduction in Violence,” NPR Morning Edition, February 21, 2020
Shereen Qazi, “Will the Ghani-Abdullah Rivalry Undermine Afghan Peace Process?” Aljazeera, March 9, 2020
Kathy Gilsinan, “The US Once Wanted Peace in Afghanistan,” Atlantic, February 29, 2020
David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “A Secret Accord With the Taliban: When and How the US Would Leave Afghanistan,” New York Times, March 8, 2020
Susannah George, “Thrown Under the Bus: Some Afghans View US-Taliban Peace Deal with Mix of Disbelief and Anger,” Washington Post, March 7, 2020
Courtney Kube, Ken Dilanian, and Dan De Luce, “US Has Persuasive Intel Taliban Do Not Intend to Abide by Terms of Peal Deal, Officials Say,” NBC New, March 6, 2020
Elizabeth Threlkeld, “Reading Between the Lines of Afghan Agreement,” Lawfare, March 8, 2020

Pop Culture

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On, (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007)
Wolf Hall, PBS

Syria

Jen Kirby, “Turkey and Russia Reached a Ceasefire in Syria. Will it Hold?” Vox, March 6, 2020
“Water Cannon and Tear Gas at Turkish-Greek Border,” BBC, March 7, 2020

OSD

Lara Seligman and Daniel Lippman, “Civilian Vacancies at Trump’s Pentagon Hit New High,” Politico, March 6, 2020

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Bombshell. I'm Erin Simpson.
0:12.2	I'm Lauren DeYoung Schulman and I'm Rada Aangar.
0:15.7	And we have a pretty full plate. Thanks for indulging us for kind of a midwinter break two weeks ago.
0:23.3	Rada was in a very sunny and warm place, also known as the greatest place on Earth in Hawaii.
0:28.6	So welcome back, Rada.
0:30.2	Thank you, mostly.
0:32.0	Sadness a little.
0:33.0	You made the mistake we've all made, which is coming back.
0:35.6	That's right.
0:35.9	It's not really the way it's done.
0:38.5	Lauren and I are back to normal cells, and I will, I think, have the distinct joy of flying out
0:45.8	of our local airport after most of our recordings for the next few weeks. So this is always a
0:50.9	welcome respite from my day job. But we have a lot to talk about this week.
0:57.2	And we're going to, I think, go ahead and dive right in with our guest.
1:01.3	So we are joined this week by Sarah Charles, a former colleague of Rada and I at the National
1:07.3	Security Council, where she was the director of strategic planning and also director of humanitarian affairs.
1:12.5	She previously worked at USAID.
1:15.6	And we brought her on today because she was involved heavily in the Ebola response in, I guess
1:21.6	this was in 2014, 2015, in the Obama administration.
1:25.4	And we wanted to chat with her about how lessons from that experience is applied right now to coronavirus and other hot and less hot takes of the pandemic disease topics today.
1:41.3	But first, of course, we need to start with our bombshell questions. So welcome,
1:46.1	Sarah. Thank you. Long time listener, first time caller. Fabulous. I think you get to
	...

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