This week's podcast looks at the departure of western countries from Afghanistan as the capital Kabul falls into the hands of the Taliban.
Former peacekeeper Elli Flén said that she disagreed with the US view of the Afghan mission, which had a narrow focus on anti-terrorism operations.
"The American president says now that America was not there for nation-building. Well I was. And that was pretty clear for us, that we were helping the Afghan army and the Afghan police to take more responsibility for security. And we were there to build a safer and more secure Afghanistan."
You can listen to the full podcast using the embedded player here, via Yle Areena, Spotify or Apple Podcasts or on your usual podcast player using the RSS feed.
Article continues after audio.
Flén said these policy debates were 'semantics' in the end, and there was a more pressing humanitarian need right now.
"For me, the main worry is the real people who are still stuck there," said Flén. "And they feel betrayed. Whatever we do, whatever we decide, whatever our policy lines are, we shouldn't make such swift moves as we do now."
Charly Salonius Pasternak, a leading researcher at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, said, "engaging in politics and society can be dangerous, and maybe that's just a notice you give to people," said Salonius-Pasternak. "We'll keep supporting you rhetorically at least, maybe financially in other words, but we cannot guarantee your security. That would be laying the cards on the table."
Climate action needed, focus on farmers
Last week's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made for grim reading. In the first podcast back after the summer we looked at the Finnish context, with the emphasis on upcoming budget negotiations and pressure from the Green Party for more action from agriculture to mitigate and limit climate change.
Liisa Pietola, Director for Environment, Climate and Nature issues at farmers' union MTK, said her members are not delighted about the current pressure on them to do more to combat climate change.
"I must say that our farmers were quite hurt," said Pietola. "They couldn't understand this because we have gone out of our way for at least two decades because we have tried to protect our waters by reducing tillage, by having more green cabbor on our fields so we have already adapted quite a lot of measures which we can see that they are climate measures because these are also sequestrating carbon into the soil."
Till Sawala from climate activist group Extinction rebellion, meanwhile, told us that even if Finland's agriculture sector is not quite the same as other countries, farmers need to do more.
"Even if there are other sectors that we need to perhaps cut even more drastically, in order to get to net zero we also need to address animal agriculture," said Sawala. "Methane is a very important greenhouse gas and it also stays in the atmosphere for a long time so the only way to reduce greenhouse gasses to a sustainable level, is to reduce the amount of meat we consume and the cattle that we raise that cause these methane emissions."
Join the conversation!
This week's show was presented by Egan Richardson and Zena Iovino with reporting from Veronica Kontopoulou. The producer and was Mark B. Odom and the audio engineer was Pasi Ilkka.
If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts, just contact us via WhatsApp on +358 44 421 0909, on our Facebook or Twitter accounts, or at [email protected] and [email protected].
