Taylor Luck

Ali Al Muntaser ladled Yemeni honey at a specialty food store in Amman, Jordan, March 24. Thanks to his knowledge of Yemeni coffee, honey, and herbal remedies, Mr. Al Muntaser is one of the few Yemeni refugees able to obtain a work permit in Jordan.

Mohammed Qassem, his parents, wife, and two children receive no aid and no food handouts.

Refugees who have fled war, they registered with the United Nations three years ago. They have no hopes of resettlement or of returning home.

Even the dozens of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and aid agencies working with refugees in Jordan close their doors to them on a daily basis.

There is one reason for their plight: They are Yemenis.

“Every time we say we are Yemenis, they close the door in our faces,” says Mr. Qassem, a trained professional who works illegally as an unskilled laborer to survive. “It is always the same response: Syrian yes, Iraqi maybe, but Yemenis, no – always no.”

In cash-strapped Jordan, one of the top host countries for refugees in the world, the combination of high demand and donor fatigue that has limited aid agencies’ budgets is starkly evident. The ongoing war in Syria consumes the vast majority of agencies’ resources, leaving little for refugees from other wars.

Yemenis are the latest population in the Arab world to be displaced by war and violence, but their plight has gained little attention and is without an international response to find a permanent or even temporary solution for Yemeni refugees.

The war in Yemen, which entered its fourth year this month, has displaced more than 60,000 people across the region, including 38,000 to Djibouti and 5,000 in Somaliland, according to the UN Refugee Agency, or UNHCR.

According to the UN, some 10,400 Yemenis have registered as refugees in Jordan – already burdened with 1.3 million Syrians – with 500 additional Yemenis requesting asylum in the kingdom each month.

Some Yemenis were already residing in Jordan when the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen began in March 2015, studying, working or receiving medical care. But many arrived after the war began, with Jordan one of the few countries in the world to open its borders to Yemeni refugees.

As registered asylum-seekers, Yemeni nationals in Jordan receive free access to Jordan’s public schools, international protection under the UN, and are eligible for winter cash assistance from the UNHCR to pay for heating – but not much else.

Yemenis must pay the higher foreigner rates when seeking medical assistance or care at public hospitals and health centers. They are largely barred from working. Work permits for Yemenis are few and their requirements steep. Yemenis must prove they have skills not available in the Jordanian market, have a Jordanian sponsor and legal guarantor, a valid work contract, and can afford the $800 annual work permit.

Running out of cash

For the thousands of Yemenis that have lost everything to make it to Jordan, they are running out of funds.

Qassem and his family sold their ancestral home in Sanaa, his car, and most of their possessions to pay for airfare to Amman – $1,000 per person – and for cash on hand when they arrived in 2015. Within the first year of their stay they had spent most of their savings.

Qassem, who worked as an accountant for Yemen’s Ministry of Electricity and Energy, now works odd-jobs illegally, washing dishes, mopping floors, and polishing cars to try to cover their $350 monthly rent, groceries, and infant formula for his young son. It is an uphill battle.

One small twist can push Yemenis into extreme poverty.

After one year in Jordan, Qassem’s mother developed cancer of the lymph nodes. Unable to qualify for specialized medical care, which is only reserved by the UN for selected and the most urgent refugee cases, Qassem was forced to borrow from relatives, friends, and generous Jordanians to pay for her $42,000 cancer treatment. He now owes $20,000 in loans.

“All we think about is how to find a way to meet rent this month, how to stretch pennies into dollars,” he says. “It’s a losing game.”

Many of the Yemenis fleeing to Jordan do not even have family support. Many are either widows, minors sent by their families to avoid being conscripted into militias, or unaccompanied women whose families have been killed in the fighting.

'Begging just to be noticed'

Fatima Saeed and her two sisters fled to Jordan in 2015 after their father died, fearing that they would be vulnerable to kidnapping or violence from militias in the now lawless country.

Having arrived with little money, the sisters were dismayed to find that not only did the UNHCR not have funding set aside for Yemeni refugees, but that the international aid agencies and NGOs did not have the mandate to provide assistance for Yemenis.

It was a particularly cruel twist of fate for Ms. Saeed, who once worked for the UNHCR in Yemen providing assistance to the tens of thousands of African nationals who once sought asylum in the Arab country. She now finds herself on the other side, asking for assistance as a recipient of the UN agency.

“We have gone from living a full life to begging just to be noticed,” Saeed says.

She and her two sisters have worked on and off again selling clothes and accessories in malls in Amman for $400 a month, but often get caught by police for working without a permit.

Often unable to make rent, the three sisters sign off on IOUs to landlords. Owing to late payments, they have been kicked out of their apartment six times over the past three years. They now owe thousands of dollars in back rent.

“We can barely survive,” Saeed says.

It is little easier for the few “lucky” Yemenis who have been able secure work permits and jobs at the dozens of Yemeni honey, coffee, sweets, and herbalist shops that have been opened across Amman by Yemeni investors since the war.

One extra day in a war zone

For many of these Yemenis, these jobs are lifelines for hundreds back home.

Mohammed, 21, earns $600 a month serving up Yemeni sweets such as harissa and peanut-infused blocks of red fudge-like adani for 12 hours a day in a Yemeni desserts shop that opened recently in Amman.

Living in a two-room apartment with four other young men, he skips meals and walks miles to work and to the UN office – all to save $500 to send home each month. His family in Sanaa is using the income to live off of for now, but they hope to one day raise the $8,000 needed to fly his six family members to Jordan.

“If I don’t work for a single day, that is one extra day they live in a war-zone, 24 more hours that their life will be at risk and I might lose them,” says Mohammed, who did not wish to use his real name for fear that speaking to the press may affect his employment and endanger his refugee status and his family back home.

Ali Al Muntaser, 35, fled to Jordan prior to the 2015 war, escaping tribal warfare in his home province of Marib.

In 2014, as the crisis in his country deepened and war loomed, he applied for asylum with the UNCHR, but like most Yemenis, he has not received a final decision on his refugee status.

Mr. Al Muntaser has married and had three children in Jordan and has been able to get a Jordanian work permit at a Yemeni honey and coffee shop in Amman. His unique expertise? Being able to differentiate the types of Yemeni honey, their regions of origin and curative properties.

Keeping his file open

Despite receiving a decent salary, $675 per month, Al Muntaser spends a large portion of his salary on his work permit and residency fees and struggles to afford the $42 to cover his children’s’ transportation to school and his infant daughter’s milk formula and diapers each month.

Al Muntaser must work 8 a.m.-to-midnight shifts six days a week in order to keep afloat any hope that one day his asylum status – and resettlement in another country – will come through. Like many refugees, he is called into the UNHCR office each year for interviews to obtain refugee status in case one day his file is chosen by Canada or European countries for resettlement. Only six Yemenis were resettled from Jordan in 2017.

Yemeni nationals are subject to the latest iteration of the Trump administration’s travel ban, making resettlement to the US – previously one of the word’s largest takers of refugees – impossible.

“We wait for weeks, months, and years for our status to be resolved and for us to have a chance at a new life and hear nothing,” Al Muntaser says.

“The UNHCR tells us to wait for a phone-call,” he says. “It never comes.”

Faith Ninivaggi/Reuters

FBI Director Christopher Wray leaves the stage after speaking at the 2018 Boston Conference on Cyber Security at Boston College in Boston, Mass., March 7, 2018.

The chief of staff was blunt. “The FBI is not under control,” he said.

The president agreed that they would have to pressure the bureau to stop its ongoing investigation. Otherwise agents might turn up information detailing White House involvement – a link that could be embarrassing for the administration, or worse.

“Play it tough,” the nation’s chief executive said. “That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

No, this isn’t Chief of Staff John Kelly and President Trump talking in 2018 about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election hacking. (Or as Mr. Trump calls it, the “witch hunt.”) It’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972, trying to figure out how to shut the FBI’s Watergate investigation down.

The point here is not to compare today’s Russia probe with Watergate, per se. They’re entirely different in many ways. There’s no public evidence that Trump is connected to any collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 vote. There’s no proof, as yet, that he knew about any illegal activity on the part of his campaign or governing staff.

The point is that presidents have long wanted to put the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the nation’s top US cop, “under control.” Nixon was far from the first. Trump, with recent Twitter-fueled allegations of FBI malfeasance, is not likely to be the last.

But the modern FBI is a maddeningly independent entity, as Nixon, Trump, and numerous other presidents have discovered.

On paper, the president may be its boss. In reality, cabinet secretaries, congressional committees, and the permanent bureaucracy have a big say in its actions. And since the era of the controversial J. Edgar Hoover, Bureau directors have become much more guarded against possible political interference.

Since the Hoover years, with the FBI “we expect the distance, we expect a little independence,” says Douglas M. Charles, an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who specializes in writing about the bureau.

A little FBI independence may not have been what Trump expected when he took office. At a dinner shortly after his inauguration, Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey for “loyalty,” Mr. Comey said in a June 2017 appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Trump later requested that the FBI go easy on Michael Flynn after the latter’s dismissal as national security adviser, according to Comey.

Trump has disputed Comey’s description of these conversations, saying they are “lies.”

The New York Times has also reported that in March 2017 Trump erupted in front of a number of White House officials, saying that he expected his top law enforcement official, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, to protect him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy had protected John F. Kennedy, and Eric Holder had protected Barack Obama.

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump reportedly asked, referring to the legendarily aggressive attorney who helped Sen. Joe McCarthy in his hunt for alleged communists in government. Cohn later served Trump as a mentor and legal representative.

Since then the president has continued to publicly attack the FBI. Comey, fired as FBI chief on May 9, 2017, is now “lying James Comey” on Trump’s Twitter feed. The dismissal of deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe for alleged lack of candor in an Inspector General investigation was “a great day for Democracy,” according to a Trump tweet.

A cabal of corrupt FBI officials concocted the investigation into Russian meddling in the US electoral process as a way to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, claim the president and some congressional allies. That was the theme underlying much of the so-called Nunes memo, produced by Rep. Devin Nunes (R) of California, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, earlier this year.

The FBI has said it has “grave concerns” about the accuracy of the Nunes memo and its bias charges. House Democrats have claimed that the memo cherry picks bits of evidence and is misleading to the point of bad faith. The top Democrat on the Intelligence panel, Rep. Adam Schiff (D) of California, drew up his own lengthy paper meant to rebut the chairman’s charges.

That has not stopped the president and his legal team from insisting that the Russia probe should be shut down due to the taint of its allegedly fraudulent origins. That is now one of Trump’s main lines of rhetorical defense against Special Counsel Mueller, a former FBI director hired by the Justice Department to run a probe staffed with federal prosecutors and FBI agents.

“As many are now finding out ... there was tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, Justice, & State,” tweeted Trump on March 17, shortly after sending the nation an image of a green fountain at the White House and “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” greetings.

'They're all big boys and girls'

For FBI agents this situation can’t be comfortable. The bureau has long had a workaday, just-the-facts-please image – albeit an image polished by adroit internal PR. Now the president is charging that they’re the heart of some kind of “Deep State” conspiracy that’s trying to control national politics.

Given the type of people who work at the FBI and what they do, though, the impact here can be overstated, says one 16-year veteran of federal law enforcement. Agents are mostly interested in spending their 10-hour workday trying to solve their own cases, he says.

 “They don’t worry that much about the drama that is going on in D.C.... They’re all big boys and girls,” says Michael German, who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations at the FBI.

“They realize they are involved in important matters that are newsworthy and can be used by politicians to either raise them up or lower them down,” Mr. German says.

What about the broader voting public? That’s likely the real target for the president and his allies, after all. By denigrating Mueller and the FBI and Justice Department, experts say Trump is likely attempting to soften the impact of eventual Russia probe findings, while pushing to cut the probe short. Continued assertions that the investigation is a “witch hunt” might even prepare the way for firing Mueller himself.

In a general sense, it appears the effort to undercut the Russia probe per se is not working. Overall public confidence in Mueller’s work has remained steady for the past year. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the special counsel will conduct a very fair or somewhat fair investigation, according to a Pew Research poll from March 2018. That’s actually an increase of six percentage points since December.

A USA Today/Suffolk University survey from late February reached a similar conclusion. A 58 percent majority said they had a lot or some trust in Mueller’s work, according to this poll. Trump fared less well – a 57 percent majority said they had little or no trust in the president’s Russia denials.

What's behind a partisan shift

But beneath the top line numbers something else is going on: Partisan opinion about the FBI itself has shifted dramatically. Conservative Republicans used to strongly back the law-and-order FBI; now they oppose it. For decades Democrats were more suspicious of FBI activities. Now they’re the bureau’s biggest fans.

Only three years ago, 62 percent of Republican voters said the FBI did a good or excellent job, according to Gallup poll data. The comparable figure from December 2017? Forty-nine percent, representing a drop of 13 percentage points.

Democratic numbers point in the opposite direction. Sixty percent of Democrats rated the FBI as good or excellent in 2014. That’s now jumped nine percentage points, to 69 percent.

Loop back to the Russia probe, and the divide is even bigger. A recent YouGov survey found that 64 percent of Republicans (and 79 percent of Trump voters) believe the FBI is biased against Trump. The percentage of Democrats who agree with this is ... 7 percent. Fifty-three percent of Democrats think the bureau is not biased either way.

Partly this is simply an automatic response to the political environment. Democratic support for the FBI, for instance, began to rise with the election of Barack Obama, and continued upward throughout his presidency. But the specifics of the Russia investigation – particularly Trump’s insistence that it is rooted in bias and illegality – are a big driver here as well, particularly for GOP opinion. In that sense the president’s attacks on the FBI are having an effect.

Support from GOP voters has a very practical effect for the president. It makes Republicans in Congress less likely to break with Trump in the wake of any Mueller indictments or revelations.

“I see this as a political effort,” says Dr. Charles of the administration attacks on the FBI and Mueller effort. “It’s a political effort to undermine an investigation.”

J. Edgar Hoover's role

Of course, in the past politics and the FBI were well acquainted. J. Edgar Hoover, who served as FBI director from 1924 to 1972, was an adroit Washington player who sometimes used the careful dissemination of secrets to curry favor with presidents and congressional leaders.

“That’s where the FBI’s power came from, doing favors for powerful people,” says Kenneth O’Reilly, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Alaska and author of three books about the FBI’s investigations of civil rights leaders and support for the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities.

For instance, Hoover worked hard to curry favor with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, providing the White House with tidbits about political opponents and foreign leaders and writing fawning notes praising FDR’s “sterling, sincere, and altogether human qualities.”

During FDR’s time in office the bureau expanded greatly, from a small organization focused on John Dillinger and other notorious criminals to a larger agency capable of extensive counterintelligence operations.

Harry S. Truman was less fond of the FBI. On May 12, 1945, he scribbled a note on White House stationary complaining that the bureau was tending in the direction of becoming a US “Gestapo or Secret Police.”

“They are dabbling in sex life [scandals] and plain blackmail when they should be catching criminals,” Truman wrote.

Dwight Eisenhower looked more favorably on the bureau and allowed it to expand use of wiretaps, the original means of electronic surveillance. In contrast, John Kennedy and the FBI had an uneasy relationship. Hoover knew all about JFK’s then-secret womanizing – a wiretap on Mafia boss Sam Giancana turned up evidence of Kennedy’s relationship with Judith Campbell Exner, a California socialite with mob ties.

Lyndon Johnson and Hoover got along fine. LBJ appreciated Hoover’s willingness to provide him with political intelligence, while Hoover appreciated Johnson’s willingness to exempt him from federal retirement age rules.

Nixon appreciated – some might say feared – Hoover’s power. In 1971, Nixon chose to not remove the FBI director from his position in part because he worried that Hoover might “bring down the temple” by releasing damaging information about him, according to a conversation recorded by the White House taping system.

Nixon also found, to his frustration, that there were limits to what the FBI would do for him. Hoover resisted requests for activities he deemed, conveniently, to be extra-legal. The result: Nixon established his in-house “Plumbers” to try and stop news leaks. They ended up doing much more than that, leading to the excesses that produced the Watergate scandal.

The 'smoking gun' tape

The Watergate break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee occurred on June 17, 1972. The FBI was quickly on the case, and began running down clues that seemed to connect some of the burglars to White House officials.

Nixon wanted the FBI to back off. That was the purpose of the June 23, 1972, Oval Office meeting. The idea discussed was getting the CIA to call the FBI and claim national security was involved, and the bureau needed to stay out of it. It didn’t work. The FBI kept going. Ultimately, the meeting was Nixon’s undoing. When the tape of the meeting became public, on Aug. 5, 1974, the president’s remaining support vanished. He announced his resignation on Aug. 8. That’s why today, it’s called the “smoking gun” White House tape.

When Nixon and his aides had their “smoking gun” discussion the bureau was dealing with its own internal upheaval. Hoover died on May 2, 1972. The FBI was about to enter a modern era.

Congressional investigations were the spur. In 1975, both the House and Senate launched broad committee probes that revealed widespread illegal spying on Americans by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other federal agencies.

Anti-war protesters, government employees suspected of being gay, and civil rights leaders were among the FBI’s targets. In one of the most notorious incidents discovered by congressional investigators, in 1964 a top Hoover deputy wrote the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. an anonymous letter threatening to make public King’s extramarital affairs. It ended with the statement, “There is only one thing left for you to do.” King said he took that as a reference urging suicide.

“Things were changed after the abuses became public ... guidelines were put into place and this distance was established,” says Charles.

In 1976, Congress passed a law limiting FBI directors to a 10-year term. This was meant to block the rise of another Hoover – a director whose accumulated power, derived from accumulated secrets, made him almost unaccountable.

Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, a series of attorneys general issued various guidelines establishing rules for FBI investigations and for dealing with the White House. These included outlines of procedures to be followed for official communications between executive branch officials, including the president and the FBI command.

The FBI became somewhat independent of the Department of Justice, of which it is a part.

“The FBI director and its director and [the Attorney General] would operate closely or not, mainly based on personality,” says Charles.

Now Trump wants to upend those arrangements. Citing such evidence as anti-Trump texts between a leader of the original FBI Russia probe and a colleague, the fact that fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife ran for state office as a Democrat, and the Nunes memo’s charge of impropriety in obtaining a search warrant against a Trump associate, Trump charges that the bureau is in thrall to an anti-Trump cabal.

“The FBI, its reputation is in tatters – worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness,” Trump tweeted last December.

One result has been a deepening partisan divide. As noted above, the vast majority of Republicans support Trump against the FBI, while virtually all Democrats now support the bureau. That’s a head-spinning reverse from the public opinion of the Watergate era.

That divide may soon get worse, or at least more obvious. Comey’s book will be released in early April. Meanwhile, the Russia investigation keeps grinding away, perhaps heading toward some sort of showdown between the president and the special counsel. It appears an end to Mueller’s probe remains months away.

“I’m concerned that the length of time it is taking is moving people further into their corners,” says former FBI agent Michael German, who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. “Whatever comes out will already be divisive, because it will likely support one side more than the other.”

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Participants in a Harvard-sponsored cyberattack simulation work under extreme time pressure to develop a plan for thwarting cyberattacks on 'Election Day' as organizers throw one curve ball after the next. More than 160 officials from 38 states attended the event, hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as part of the Defending Digital Democracy project launched in 2017.

For all the concern that Russian hackers sought to exploit US political divides, they have done quite the opposite in at least one instance. Their interference in the 2016 election has united two prominent political rivals who – as partisan as they have been – care even more about safeguarding American elections.

Campaign manager Robby Mook poured heart and soul into trying to get Hillary Clinton elected. Matt Rhoades, who managed Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, went on to establish one of the most prominent groups working against Mrs. Clinton – the political action committee America Rising.

They couldn’t be a more unusual pair – yet both of their campaigns were hacked. Determined to prevent such attacks in the future, they joined former Pentagon cyber czar Eric Rosenbach last summer in launching the Defending Digital Democracy (DDD) project – a bold move, considering how politically radioactive the topic was at the time. The initiative is run out of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which has brought together everyone from Google managers to Marines to politicos to shore up state electoral systems against cyberattacks.

“I didn’t think I’d be here today partnering with Robby Mook,” says Mr. Rhoades, sitting with Mr. Mook after helping to kick off a DDD cyberattack simulation in Cambridge, Mass.

“Matt has been making my life hard for awhile,” says Mook, laughing. “You guys were a huge thorn in my side.”

A central concern surrounding Russian interference was that by agitating existing divisions in America, it would undermine the country’s capacity to identify and unite against foreign threats. Mook’s and Rhoades’s partnership, and the involvement of more than three dozen states from across the political spectrum in the DDD project, proves it is possible to surmount such division and discord in pursuit of a higher goal: preserving the integrity of America’s electoral system, and the public’s trust in it.

“There’s a lot that Matt and I don’t agree on at all. We all have a partisan affiliation but when you’re in this space, that’s not evident,” says Mook. “So this has been inspiring to me, that we can get together and get things done.”

The front-line defenders

While Mook was experiencing the effects of Russian hackers, Mr. Rosenbach was watching with dismay from the Pentagon. “It was something that really shook me up,” he told the participants Tuesday in a speech kicking off the cyberattack simulation. “I just left with the feeling that I didn’t do enough, that we as an administration didn’t do enough, and that we still are very vulnerable. And so my nightmare was that ... someone like Kim Jong-un would rub his grubby little hands and say, ‘Now I’m going after the Americans.’ ”

The more than 160 participants gathered here would be the kind of folks to take the brunt of any such attacks. They come from 38 states and range from secretaries of State to county IT directors, some at the forefront of election security efforts and others still trying to wrap their heads around the challenges they face.

“You are all front-line defenders in the democratic process,” Caitlin Conley tells them. She is a commander of US Army special forces who is pursuing dual master’s degrees in business and public policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, respectively. “It’s not like you have all the resources in the world, both financially or through personnel, to do everything you can and want to. We understand you have real-world constraints.”

So over the past six months, she has marshaled a team of more than three dozen graduate students with backgrounds in the Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army, National Security Agency, and elsewhere to visit with state and county election officials, hear their concerns, and develop playbooks for safeguarding campaigns and elections against cybersecurity threats.

“Those are gold. You can take those back with confidence,” says Mac Warner, secretary of State for West Virginia, which has provided the guidebooks to all county clerks and to the nearly 600 candidates registered to run in the 2018 elections. The resources and credibility Harvard has provided, he adds, enables him to “go back with confidence to the people of West Virginia, knowing that I’ve been working with the best in the world.”

The ‘Apocalypse’

Since 2000, when the results of the presidential contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush came down to the Florida recount and the US Supreme Court, states have moved to digitize much or even all of their voting process. That may have largely eliminated human error, but it has opened the door wide toward exploitation by hackers.

At one of the nation’s top hacking conferences, DEFCON, in July 2017, hackers were given the opportunity to bang away at 25 pieces of voting equipment, including voting machines. By the end of the weekend, all 25 machines had been hacked – some in as little as an hour and a half. Even hackers with no experience on voting machines were successful.

“These are bored teenagers between parties,” said security technologist Bruce Schneier in a series of expert discussions before the Belfer simulation began.

Participants were then divided into four states of the Nation of Belfer, and given detailed descriptions of their electoral domain – from the number of registered voters to the number of iPads and optical scanners to how the precinct results would be relayed to the county and on to the state. States were given a budget of $7,000, counties $3,000. But what they were not told – and journalists were not allowed to observe – were the series of challenges that would be thrown their way once the simulation began.

“We have created what we think is the Armageddon or Apocalypse of Election Day,” Jen Nam, an Army intel officer turned Kennedy School graduate student, tells the State of Davis. “In the US Army, we do scenarios like this quite frequently to ... prepare us for a no-fail mission.”

On a blustery April morning in 2007, a University of Michigan senior named Abdulrahman El-Sayed stepped onto a podium inside the famous Ann Arbor stadium and delivered a six-minute commencement speech to tens of thousands, punctuating his remarks with an emphatic “Go Blue!”

A few minutes later Bill Clinton, the keynote speaker, took the same microphone: “I don’t want to embarrass your senior speaker,” the 42nd president said, “but I wish every person in the world who believes that we are fated to have a clash of civilizations, and cannot reach across the religious divides, could have heard you speak today.”

After the ceremony, Dr. El-Sayed says in an interview, the former president approached him in the football stadium’s locker room. “I hope someday you’ll consider running for office,” he says Mr. Clinton told him. “I really appreciate that,” El-Sayed responded. “But I don’t know if you saw my first name?”

Eleven years later, El-Sayed is in the middle of a potentially historic gubernatorial campaign. If elected, he would become the first Muslim governor in US history. At 33, he would also be among the youngest in decades. Campaigning on an ambitious plan to revitalize Michigan’s struggling cities, he’s emerged as a legitimate challenger for Michigan’s Democratic nomination in August, behind former Michigan Senate minority leader Gretchen Whitmer.

“It’s not a surprise that he’s generated a very strong and passionate following,” says Michigan Democratic Party chairman Brandon Dillon. “When you meet him and hear him speak, you can’t help but be impressed.”

El-Sayed grew up in Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy Detroit suburb, in a blended Arab-American family. Both of his parents immigrated to Michigan from Egypt, although El-Sayed grew up mostly with his father and his stepmother, a white woman from rural Michigan, both of whom worked as engineers. His childhood amounted to a very American cultural mash-up: His father was a part-time imam and one of his grandmothers was a Presbyterian deacon; he played high school football and spent summer holidays with relatives in Egypt.

It’s a background, El-Sayed says, that translates particularly well into connecting with a wide cross-section of voters. “One of the things that I’m very thankful for is my upbringing,” he says, and “[the] ability to traverse and move through different worlds.” 

After completing two years at the University of Michigan’s medical school, he won a Rhodes Scholarship, then went on to earn a doctorate in public health from Oxford University and an M.D. from Columbia University, where he became an associate professor of epidemiology.

In 2015, with Detroit a year or so out of bankruptcy and reeling from a burgeoning water shutoff crisis, El-Sayed moved back to Michigan to lead a turnaround of the city’s public health department. He was 30 – the youngest-ever top health official of a major US city. He would go on to implement programs to curb infant mortality, give thousands of students eyeglasses, and test lead levels in hundreds of schools.

Inspired by Flint, travel ban 

In February 2017, El-Sayed announced he was quitting the post to run for governor. Weeks earlier, a newly inaugurated President Trump had signed the first version of a travel ban for residents of seven predominantly Muslim countries. El-Sayed, as a Muslim and a public health expert, says he was motivated to enter the race partly in response to both Trump-era policies and the Flint water crisis – a preventable public health disaster that investigators have linked to state government cost-cutting efforts. Thus far, 15 current or former state and City of Flint employees have been charged with crimes from misdemeanors to involuntary manslaughter after lead leached into the city’s water when the supply was switched to the Flint River. A second criminal investigation examining crimes of fraud and greed is also under way.

“The ways in which government has failed people [are] myriad and diverse,” he says, “but no matter where you go people are just so frustrated.”

El-Sayed is a progressive Democrat whose campaign is inspired by that of Vermont’s Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (who won Michigan’s Democratic primary). Central to El-Sayed’s message is the idea that government has been hijacked by corporate influences, and he emphasizes that he’s not accepting corporate PAC donations. He says he’s not worried about angering “a bunch of very powerful, very rich people who usually buy elections against people like me.”

He also promises a comprehensive approach to improving government. Earlier this year, El-Sayed released a detailed “Urban Agenda”: The 45-page document, presented as a holistic approach to improving the difficult circumstances of an urban three-year-old child in Michigan, includes a push for tuition-free higher education for qualifying families and a statewide single-payer health care system, but also specific initiatives to address Detroit’s tax foreclosure epidemic, improve adult education, and upgrade the state’s drinking-water infrastructure.

Michigan has been dominated by a Republican legislature for years, and in November 2016 elected a Republican president for the first time in nearly two decades. But the state’s political climate, analysts say, could be ripe for a drastic change of course after Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, whose tenure was tarnished by the Flint water crisis. “After eight years of Snyder, everyone’s looking for a change,” says Michigan Democratic strategist Joe DiSano, referring to the incumbent governor. “[El-Sayed] is visceral change.”

He began as a relatively unknown longshot, but over the past year El-Sayed’s campaign has gained momentum. He now counts a team of some 2,500 volunteers across the state, including Sanders campaign veterans, and a war chest of more than $2 million, mostly raised from small donations.

His name recognition and support among the Muslim community is “almost unanimous,” says Fatina Abdrabboh, executive director of the American Muslim & Minority Advocacy League.

For a community that feels targeted, the success of El-Sayed serves as a tremendously powerful counternarrative, she says: “It’s not your name that matters. It’s not what level of religiosity [you have] or your adherence to a group. It’s credentials. It’s vision. It’s platform and policy.”

Campaign controversy

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the campaign has also inspired Islamophobic backlash. In one viral meme, traced to the pro-Trump Facebook page Patriots For America USA, El-Sayed is pictured straightening his tie while all-caps letters warn that “Abdul El-Sayed is running to be the first Muslim governor ... to turn all of Michigan into Dearborn!” That's a reference to the largely-Arab Michigan city that’s often the target of false claims of Sharia law and racist attacks.

In late January, the campaign hit its first major controversy, when questions about El-Sayed’s eligibility surfaced in a Bridge Magazine story. Michigan’s constitution dictates that a governor has to have been a registered voter in the state at least four years before the general election. He had previously registered in Michigan as a teenager and re-registered in 2016 with a New York driver’s license. A spokesman for the Michigan Secretary of State has previously said that, although El-Sayed did not vote in Michigan between 2013 and 2016, he never lost his registration in the state. Although El-Sayed’s eligibility would have to be officially challenged in court, the election lawyers Bridge consulted “raised serious questions about his legal qualifications to be on the 2018 state ballot.”

In an interview, El-Sayed called the controversy a politically-motivated attempt to add an asterisk to his name. His campaign says that he’s maintained an apartment in Michigan since 2008. The state’s Democratic Party called on the campaign to clear up the issue in court to prevent last-minute chaos, and last week, the campaign filed a request for a judgment in Wayne County Circuit Court. 

Notwithstanding eligibility questions, El-Sayed is considered the biggest challenger to Ms. Whitmer, a former state senator, although analysts say the race remains open. “It’s very early,” says Mr. Dillon, the Democratic Party chairman. “We expect it to be a competitive primary.”

The Afghan man with the long beard, white turban, and worn farmer’s hands led his wife, draped all in a flowing dark blue burka, into a small office booth in Kabul.

They had traveled far, some 350 miles from their snow-blanketed home village of Spin Boldak on the Pakistani border, to use the white phone in the room to speak to their imprisoned son.

The phone is a direct connection to the prison at Bagram, north of Kabul, organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to connect Afghan families to thousands of detainees.

Families are allowed four 20-minute calls each year, and two face-to-face visits – brief connections that are deeply meaningful to tight-knit Afghan families whose sons are held on charges of terrorism or being Taliban insurgents.

In a war that has barely eased since US troops first arrived in 2001 – adding America’s longest-ever war to the decades of conflict that have torn at Afghanistan’s social fabric – the family ties are a brief ray of light in a world of incarceration and uncertainty.

The phone rings, and Amir-jan – a prisoner arrested in 2014 after returning from religious studies in Pakistan – is on the line. Father Ahmad-jan anxiously picks up the handset and speaks to his son.

Mother Bibi-shirina leans close to listen too, before taking the handset herself and speaking to her beloved son.

Such calls are strictly monitored by Afghan officials, who cut them off if they stray beyond family news. But in its brief time, this call yields only furrowed concern, a few smiles, and, inevitably, tears for the gaping hole left by a prisoner in a family.

“I have only one hope for his release, to see his face. My only hope is to see him,” says Bibi-shirina, wiping away tears with fingers dyed orange-brown by henna, then pulling back her burka to reveal her face.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Afghan father Mohammed Issa Khan and his younger son speak on a direct telephone line to Abdul Ali, imprisoned miles away in Bagram prison on terrorism charges, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Jan. 11, 2018. Mr. Khan journeyed for 14 hours from northwestern Faryab province to use the ICRC phone to speak to his son.

They have visited Amir-jan three times at Bagram prison, but there is always thick glass between them during the hour-long visits, and prison guards standing watch. Five days a week, the ICRC organizes six buses to the prison complex carrying 42 families, and 400 such calls a week from call centers like this one.

The ICRC reimburses travel expenses, often from distant rural areas, for these six contacts per year. 

“This is our condition,” says Ahmad-jan, after the call. “He asked about us, the village, how things are. He can’t tell all the facts about himself.”

The family lives in a Taliban stronghold, not far from the southern city of Kandahar. They say Amir-jan was pursuing religious studies when the Taliban tried to recruit him, asking him to join their jihad. He refused, they say, and they sent him to Chaman, 10 miles away across the Pakistan border, to continue his studies.

When Amir-jan returned, he was arrested the moment he stepped out of the car by Afghan intelligence officials. He was carrying 100 books and accused of being a Taliban member – a charge the family denies.

“It’s too difficult for me,” says Ahmad-jan, tearfully. “It’s like I am on fire.”

Human rights activists say Afghan security forces often make spurious charges, or use torture to exact confessions. Corruption in the system also means that sentences can be reduced or charges dropped for cash – a solution usually out of the reach of poor families like those in the waiting room of this call center.

Calming effect

The ICRC says it will “drastically reduce” its footprint in Afghanistan, after three separate shooting and kidnapping incidents in 2017.

But one program that won’t be cut, among a string of others deemed essential, are visits to detainees to “ensure they are treated humanely and with dignity,” according to ICRC statements. In 2017, 26,000 detainees were being held, and of those, more than 5,000 kept in touch with their families through the ICRC’s phone call and family visits program.

“They really calm down, especially when they see their families [and] they exchange the news,” says Mir Afghan Afzali, the ICRC officer in charge of this Kabul call center, who himself joined the ICRC in 1996 in Kandahar.

“They are aware of what is going on with their families, and the families know exactly what is going on with their detainee – I think that relaxes both,” he says.

“We are supporting security detainees wherever they are,” says Mr. Afzali. But families have no direct access to them without going through the ICRC, which finances the program. These days the prison adjacent to the US airbase at Bagram is officially called the Parwan Detention Facility, an attempt at rebranding after its notorious history as a post-9/11 holding site for Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, two of whom were beaten to death in 2002. 

Families could never directly see their detained sons when the Americans were first in charge up to 2008, and the ICRC facilitated handwritten messages between them, usually once every five or six months. The call program and then family visits were negotiated by the ICRC in 2008, and then with Afghan authorities after they took full control of detainees in 2014.

Calls are rare, but they exist

Today there are hotlines where families can register and are given a time and date for calls or visits.

To the families, those moments are rare enough, but at least they happen. Mohammed Issa Khan journeyed for 14 hours from northwestern Faryab province with a younger son, for example, to use one of the ICRC’s phones to speak to his imprisoned son, Abdul Ali. He has made three face-to-face visits, and – with a dark blue hat to ward off winter cold, a thick beard and no moustache – he picks up the phone handset hungrily.

After sharing news, he hands the phone to his younger son, who smiles broadly as he cradles the handset and catches up with his older brother. Abdul Ali is serving an 18-year sentence for fighting for the Taliban, though Mr. Khan claims his son is “100 percent not Taliban.”

Abdul Ali was 18 when he was arrested, a student of religion who his father says was caught in crossfire during a gun battle between the Taliban and Afghan police. He was shot in the foot, which had to be amputated.

“Maybe the Taliban brought him to fight under pressure,” suggests Khan. “Yes, he was fighting.”

Still, the personal connection could not be more valuable to this Afghan family, as it is to so many others.

“It’s too important to me, because he is my son, and you know the corrupt government prepared a strong file against him – if I paid, the file would not be so strong against him,” says the father. “We are very poor.”

AP Photo

President Cyril Ramaphosa, right, of South Africa and the Minister of International Affairs, Lindiwe Sisulu, during the signing of the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) Agreement during an African Union meeting in Kigali, Rwanda March 21. The pact is being called the largest free trade agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organization.

A longtime dream in Africa has been the creation of a free-trade zone from Cairo to Cape Town. Last week the dream found some reality. Most of the continent’s 55 countries signed two pacts to reduce tariffs and allow the free movement of people. The agreements not only blow against current global winds of protectionism. If fully implemented, they could create the world’s largest free market – and liberate Africa from many historic dependencies.

The continent’s 1.2 billion people have much in common, including past colonization and a high reliance on foreign aid. Trade, however, is not widely shared. Only 16 percent of Africa’s exports and imports are with itself. That compares with 70 percent for Europe. If Africa is ever to end its dependence on commodity exports to wealthy nations and unlock its potential to become a manufacturing powerhouse, it must integrate its economies.

The two pacts are a milestone not only in the potential to boost trade (which is estimated to grow $35 billion by 2020). They are also a step in establishing trust and equality between Africans. When groups of nations open their borders to goods and services, they erode notions of business as a zero-sum transaction. They see the long-term benefits of expanded markets rather than simply the short-term losses and costs of adjustment. A greater flow of goods is seen as a greater good.

Still, the fear of more intra-Africa trade led 11 countries to put off signing the main pact, the Continental Free Trade Agreement. Two of them, Nigeria and South Africa, worry about competition to their industries or the possibility that some countries will slap “Made in Africa” labels on imports from elsewhere.

Such concerns can be fairly resolved as negotiations continue to put the agreements into practice. The momentum to see Africa as one market is too strong. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa even suggests creating a single currency as within the European Union.

The continent has a larger middle class than the American population. Its people are digitally connected, especially in financial transactions. And while it still struggles to plant democracies, a continent with a median age of 27 faces strong demands to create greater opportunities. The new pacts could be Africa’s second historic moment of emancipation.