Vox Sentences: It’s official: the Afghanistan war won’t end under Obama

Obama delays troop withdrawal in Afghanistan (again); a breakthrough in a 27-year-old terrorist attack; and why tipping might finally be on its way out.

TOP NEWS

War in Afghanistan, 2001-??

Ron Sachs-Pool via Getty Images

• President Obama announced today that plans to fully withdraw troops from Afghanistan will be delayed at least another year — and that the ultimate withdrawal decision will be left up to his successor in 2017.

  [Reuters / Roberta Rampson and Jeff Mason]

• As Max Fisher explains for Vox, this isn't a massive operational change. It's the difference between having 1,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2017 (to guard the US embassy), and having 5,500 troops there.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• The delay matters because Obama has promised, repeatedly, that the war in Afghanistan will end on his watch — a series of promises that this FiveThirtyEight graphic dramatizes well.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Ritchie King and Andrew Flowers]

• "Ending a war" can be a tricky thing to define — the US symbolically ended combat operations in 2014, only to replace them with "counterterrorism" operations.

  [Christian Science Monitor / Anna Mulrine]

• And defining a war by troop presence ignores the role drone strikes have played in Afghanistan. A new feature from The Intercept lays out the failures of one effort to combine on-the-ground troops with drone strikes from 2011 to 2013.

  [The Intercept / Ryan Devereaux]

• If anything, all this is a good reason not to promise bluntly that you'll "end wars" when you're running for president. You might come into office promising to end two (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and leave it fighting three (in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria).

  [NPR / Greg Myre]

Lockerbie breakthrough

Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images

• One of the biggest unsolved mysteries in terrorism — the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie — may have reached a major breakthrough. US and UK officials announced that they want to question two Libyan men over their possible involvement.

  [Washington Post / Karla Adam and Adam Goldman]

• The Lockerbie bombing killed 270 people, a majority of whom were American. It's long been suspected that the government of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi was behind the attacks, but only one man, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was ever convicted. (He was released in 2012.)

  [History.com / Jesse Greenspan]

• It certainly looks like this breakthrough is, at least in part, the product of research done by a Lockerbie obsessive named Ken Dornstein. The brother of a Lockerbie victim, Dornstein has spent the past few years tracking down potential Lockerbie suspects; his documentary on the topic has aired on Frontline for the last few weeks (the last episode aired Tuesday night).

  [Frontline]

• Dornstein's quest was also the subject of this truly excellent New Yorker feature by Patrick Radden Keefe, which you should definitely read if you want to learn more about all this.

  [The New Yorker / Patrick Radden Keefe]

• During his investigation, Dornstein uncovered new information tying two men to convicted bomber Megrahi: a Libyan bomb expert and Qaddafi's then-head of intelligence. (Dornstein's findings are detailed here.)

  [Frontline / Priyanka Boghani]

• While the two men called in for questioning haven't been formally identified, a US official confirmed to the Washington Post that they are, in fact, the two Libyans Dornstein tracked down.

  [Washington Post / Karla Adam and Adam Goldman]

Tipping over?

Fred Dufour/Getty

• One of New York's biggest restaurant moguls, Danny Meyer, has announced that he's going to phase out tipping at all 13 of his restaurants over the next year (and raise prices to compensate).

  [Eater / Ryan Sutton]

• Momentum against tipping has been building for a while now (by some measures, a whole century). But Meyer is the biggest, most influential restaurateur to ban the practice.

  [Esquire / Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn]

• What's wrong with tipping? For one thing, it ends up discriminating against nonwhite (and less-than-gorgeous female) servers.

  [Vox / Brandon Ambrosino]

• For another thing, the evidence that it actually works — that tipping incentivizes better service — is....sketchy.

  [Washington Post / Maura Judkis]

• But the immediate cause behind the change is that, in tip-based restaurants, cooks end up making a lot less than servers. And with unemployment low, restaurants are really struggling to find and keep cooks.

  [Washington Post / Roberto A. Ferdman]

• Ironically, a forthcoming minimum-wage hike in New York, which will force fast-food restaurants to pay all workers $15 an hour, could result in cooks at high-end restaurants heading to McDonald's for better pay.

  [New York Times / Patrick McGeehan]

• Meyer wants to avoid that. But in addition to hiking prices, he will essentially be giving servers a huge pay cut. It's going to be an interesting experiment.

  [Eater / Ryan Sutton]

MISCELLANEOUS

Artists hired to write Arabic graffiti for the show "Homeland" snuck the phrase "Homeland is racist" into a scene. [Washington Post / Elahe Izadi]

• More Americans die in attacks from domestic extremists like Dylann Roof than in attacks from international terrorists — and the Justice Department is starting to realize it.

  [Huffington Post / Ryan Reilly]

• A black teenager in DC held a door open for a woman with a baby stroller. She responded to his generosity by calling the cops, who forcibly detained him.

  [DCist / Rachel Sadon]

• SHOCKER: a mysterious company that came to be worth billions overnight due to special super-secret technologies that no one is allowed to know about just MIGHT be too good to be true.

  [WSJ / John Carreyrou]

• Ann Rule wrote a devastating book about her friendship with Ted Bundy. But she never came clean on why it took her so long to acknowledge he was a serial killer.

  [New Yorker / Victoria Beale]

VERBATIM

"Man tries to put out garbage fire by driving over it in a van loaded with ammunition." [Kansas City Star / Ian Cummings]

• "I knew some people would hear ‘Blank Space’ and say, See, we were right about her. And at that point, I just figure if you don’t get the joke, you don’t deserve to get the joke."

  [Taylor Swift to GQ / Chuck Klosterman]

• "Conservationists ask him not to speak of the fact that lions kill a hundred Tanzanians a year, many of them children sent out to tend the cattle; it hurts donations and, presumably, online petitions."

  [New Yorker / Kerry Howley]

• "He tries to help a small electronics store that has been losing business to a Best Buy. His plan involves exploiting Best Buy’s price guarantee — it claims it will match any competitor’s prices — a solution that ultimately involves an alligator, a door so tiny customers have to crawl through it, a fake dating show and a salsa lesson.

  [NYT / Neil Genzlinger]

• "Like sommeliers of poop, the pint-sized marsupials can smell what species left it behind and what that creature last had for dinner."

  [Smithsonian / Rachel Nuwer]

WATCH THIS

What's the smallest thing the human eye can see? [YouTube / Joss Fong]

Vox / Joss Fong and Joe Posner