WILD OLIVES, France — Whether on battlefields or in backwoods Provence, reality bites up close. “Over the horizon,” America’s catchphrase du jour, smacks of the over-the-rainbow fantasia that little Dorothy imagined on a bad day in Kansas. Red shoes won’t save us.

Timeless groves here face new pests and pestilence, and so do the struggling families who live among them. Olives and people have fed one another around here since Romans built an empire meant to last. This is not breaking news, but it is heartbreaking.

During six decades of reporting, I’ve found the proverbial cup is always part full and part empty. What counts is whether it is being replenished or drained. Because boundless human ingenuity is so seldom matched with human empathy, we are fast nearing the dregs.

In truth, today is glorious. I feel like that New Yorker cartoon guy who ignores a flower-flecked hillside meadow and mutters that the world is crap. Yet CNN drones on in the background, and the Afghan rug by my desk is a map of warring provinces with a tank motif.

Climate collapse and runaway pandemics demand a cohesive global response. Yet reaction to the Afghanistan debacle suggests that America is too wrapped up in itself and misguided by partisan truth-twisting to be of much help. What we don’t know is killing us.

Firsthand facts and ground truth matter less these days when journalists can cover news the way modern armies prefer to fight wars — from a safe distance over the horizon. With new technology, they can get things wrong at the speed of light.

The new tools help. From a distance, smart reporters sensed something suspicious about the Aug. 29 drone strike that killed an aid worker and nine others, including young kids playing around his car. Without leaving their desks, they revealed an accidental tragedy. But still.

A young New York Times tech-equipped sleuth asserts that new methods allow her team to expose travesties that would otherwise go unnoticed. Not really. Reporters on the spot cover “collateral damage” and add in crucial elements about its impact. If they are there.

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PARIS — European newscasts have focused for weeks on a violent nation cursed by a pandemic, where armed fundamentalists hostile to Western values want one-party rule, a cowed press and kangaroo courts. And besides America, they also talk about Afghanistan.

In fact, Joe Biden is building back — often better — despite a deadlocked Congress and a predecessor intent on sabotage. But “United States” is a misnomer. Adversaries muscle in where its leadership falters; allies hedge bets on the future as it tears itself further apart.

A world facing climatic endgame and authoritarian takeover needs an America with a functioning democracy, run by enlightened leaders who rise above narrow interests to work together. Instead, Republican zealots wage an Afghan-style war at home.

H.R. McMaster, who as national security adviser failed to housebreak Donald Trump, foresees “an endless jihad that enemies of all civilized people are waging against us all.” If Americans don’t unite against that, he told an interviewer, “we are all at enormous risk.”

He says Trump’s clueless hubris produced hands-down surrender. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020,” he said. “The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.” He expects tighter links to Al Qaeda and others, even ISIS-K, to export a twisted view of Islam helped by intelligence and sophisticated weaponry Americans left behind.

Generals can be dubious analysts, prone to seeing lights at the end of tunnels. But McMaster is a military scholar who saw in Vietnam how a swift turn of events sends panicked people scrambling toward the exits. After covering war since the 1960s, I think he’s right.

Yet when Americans badly need to close ranks, faithless politicians howl for impeachment. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, with so much blood on their own hands, excoriate Biden. Others who want his job – with neither integrity nor sense of the real world – pile on.

A traditional Fourth Estate should be our safeguard. But it no longer works that way. Many in the “news media” tower of babble that Trump did so much to create choose to fault Biden for the inevitable finale of a needless war he has tried to end since 2009.

Biden’s failings will be clear when the war fog lifts. He infuriated NATO allies by not consulting before a sudden chaotic airlift. He says he had to act fast when President Ashraf Ghani fled in secret after pledging to negotiate a stable peace. The Taliban juggernaut caught most everyone by surprise.

Unsurprisingly, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal immediately editorialized that Biden was responsible for a debacle it called “one of the most shameful in history” and berated him for laying his guilt on Trump. And that was echoed widely in “news” reporting.

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FLAYOSC, France — Here we go again. Americans clamor for the exits, leaving behind innocent blood and sophisticated weapons for jubilant irregulars who humiliated them with antiquated guns and makeshift bombs.

I've seen this, over and over, from Vietnam in the 1970s to Iraq not long ago. Players differ, but not the plot. Societies react badly to uninvited foreign saviors. However noble your intentions, you can't deliver democracy at gunpoint.

Imperial déjà vu dates back millennia. A raging flood not long ago in this Provence backwater exposed paving stones on the route from Brittania to Rome, where all roads once led. Every empire eventually fades by military overreach or internal rot — or both.

By Roman ruins east of here in Frejús, a memorial cemetery recalls France's centuries-long mission civilisatrice. A mission to civilize. JFK brushed off Charles de Gaulle's warnings about trying to reshape an ancient culture. The United States, he said, had nobler intentions.

Most Americans, not imperialists, want to do the right thing and come home. But few know what the right thing is. Generals loath to admit defeat by a ragtag rabble see lights at the end of tunnels. One president passes stalemate on to the next. And people keep dying.

Reporters who get close enough to see and smell the story are shouted down by a different sort of journalist who speculates about what is happening from a safe distance. When reality bites, they can only grumble with an unhelpful refrain: We tried to tell you.

Afghanistan especially. News anchors stumble at such names as Lashkar Gah, the Helmand Province capital. Yet anyone who bothered to notice would have watched the endless Helmand meat grinder. Brits, then Americans, died to take square meters they later lost.

Despite risk and hardship, experienced pros were ready to go - and to train young tyros to join their ranks. But bosses balked at high expense and responsibility if employees ran into trouble. America mostly saw distant reality skewed through the looking glass.

I hurried to Pakistan after 9/11, trying to reach Kandahar when the story was simply a SWAT team job. The Taliban, busy at home, was not the enemy. U.S. forces only needed to capture Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda encourage, sheltered by Mullah Omar's Taliban faction.

Pentagon generals knew how Bin Laden operated. He was among warlords and volunteer foreign Islamists America armed to beat back Soviet troops. With Stinger missiles to blast helicopters, Afghans chased the mighty Red Army back across their northern border.

That should have been a clue. Russians rumbled to war by road. Americans were not likely to subdue Afghanistan from half a world away. Vietnam showed that bombs and scorched earth tactics, with “collateral damage,” only harden an adversary's resolve.

History from Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great to Britain's Lord Elfinstone was no comfort. Teaching students, I made this simple: Plunge a knife into a bucket of water. Hold it in one place, and you're in control. Move it, and it is as if you were never there.

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PARIS — Breakfast with Michel Lavollay at Café Flore, pleasant under any circumstance, was beyond joyful this time. He is nearly back to himself after seven weeks in a coma. Several times, doctors told his daughter he was about to die.

As a pioneer in the global fight against AIDS, he knew that unless a cure is found for a deadly new disease, the only option is not to catch it. But global mechanisms he helped build to halt runaway pathogens no longer work. Even he caught Covid-19.

“My God,” he said, looking at a happy snap I made with my phone. “I can’t recognize myself.” He lost 30 kilos – 66 pounds. After months of laborious one-day-at-a-time rehab, he is a lanky shadow of his formerly substantial self.

Lavollay, mellow at 72, is a soft-spoken doctor-diplomat who hobnobs with heads of state and captains of industry. He chooses his words carefully. Here is an unvarnished upshot of our conversation:

• Narrow thinking, feckless self-focused leaders, cruel greed, blame-shifting, mixed media messaging, disorganization and sheer stupidity let a pandemic run wild. Despite vaccines, worse is on the way, with other new scourges to follow.

• Xi Jinping tried to hide the virus but shared data after noble doctors defied his orders. Rather than work with China, Trump scapegoated Xi to cover his own willful negligence. Michel believes America’s actual death toll surpassed a million by 2021.

• The overall lesson is hair-raising: If governments, private enterprise and the rest of us who share an imperiled planet cannot unite against a single preventable threat, we can expect mass die-offs, sooner rather than later, as ecosystems collapse.

Michel sees hope in the science. “There is so much we don’t know, so much uncertainty on the evolution of the virus and the next variants,” he said, “and yet tremendous progress has been made very rapidly on vaccines. It’s a mix.”

But he worries about what doctors call long Covid. “Not everyone recovers fully,” he said. “There are a whole set of persisting symptoms.” Researchers are working fast, yet initial lost time led to far-worse mutations that do not stop at borders.

In the end, the threat is much more political than medical. Leaders fearing economic impact and public reaction that might cost them their jobs did too little, too late, and relaxed vigilance too soon. Now harsh measures spark violent pushback.

Reporters are seldom experts in what they cover, but they learn to find those who are. As it happens, I’ve known Michel since he coaxed his Citroën 2CV up the Alps in the 1970s to ski with friends. He is the real deal, a gentle soul with a scientist’s mind.

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TUCSON — A migrant I just visited has finally found a permanent home across the border behind a minuscule door labeled, “Arizona.” Gaily painted with cactus in bloom, it opens to a small box of unidentified ashes in a scruffy remote corner of Evergreen Cemetery.

Odds are 89 percent that he, or she, was Mexican. If not, almost surely from farther south in Central America. The notion that terrorists from distant lands brave a hostile desert frontier is one of the fallacies that distort a callous politically manipulated immigration debate.

The remains of “John Doe” — really Juan or Juanita Doe — are in a columbarium, a cluster of urns set among pauper’s graves a short walk away from where Martin and Mary Rosenblum are buried in a greener part of Evergreen. Their stories are essentially similar.

My parents’ families fled persecution and poverty, one from what is now Belarus and the other from Ukraine. They sold everything to lead terrified children on perilous voyages. In an earlier time, both of their stories had happy endings.

Greg Hess, Pima County medical examiner, knows the overall numbers. But he sees each casualty as an individual, likely with a spouse and probably kids, loved ones desperate for news — or closure. His sleuths spend up to a decade trying to link human remains to families.

“We deal in people, not politics,” he told me at his compound in Tucson’s industrial zone. The “fully fleshed,” he said, usually can be identified. But decomposition is quick in the heat, with circling buzzards and scavenging animals. His team keeps trying, year after year, to find DNA matches or a relative to provide a name.

In one room, plastic sleeves hold migrants’ last possessions: love letters, photos, rosaries, phone numbers scrawled on bits of paper and tattered wads of pesos that would barely buy a decent meal. In another, he has skeletons in the closet, more than 100, each labeled with the place and time they were found.

Across the world, people who fear for their lives or can’t feed their families spend their last savings in desperate flight. America’s “border crisis” is a small part of an inexorable human tide. Because of conflict, despotic regimes and climate collapse, it is rising by the year.

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