I looked at what some of the FITS are saying. Subsequently, I saw Richard Hanania’s take.
Why leaving had to go this poorly, and why Biden made the right decision.
I think that the Afghanistan withdrawal would have been a political disaster a few months before an election. But Biden has plenty of time to recover. The short attention span of the media works in his favor.
In fact, by the time this post goes up, Afghanistan may no longer be front-page news, and Internet pundits will have moved on.
I have read takes of all sorts about Afghanistan, and most seem to agree that the mission of turning that country into a liberal state was hopeless. We cannot create a liberal culture where none existed before, and we cannot save a culture that is not liberal.
So what about Hong Kong? Did the British create a liberal culture there, and if so, how? And what might we have tried in order to keep Hong Kong’s liberal culture from being destroyed by an illiberal regime?
To be sure, I never believed that liberal culture would grow in Afghan or Iraqi soil. Instead, I thought in terms of North, Weingast, and Wallis. Those countries were not ready to move beyond what NWW call a limited-access order, with key violent groups dividing up power and resources.
But I would like to hear the 20-20 hindsight pundits on Afghanistan say more about Hong Kong. I feel much more regret about our inability/unwillingness to prevent the conquest of Hong Kong than about “losing” Afghanistan.
I also worry about possible demoralization of our military. President Reagan’s otherwise frivolous invasion of Grenada was somehow necessary and sufficient to restore morale after Vietnam.
One problem is Afghanistan is that out “liberal” state consisted of paying murderous and unpopular pedophile warlords to pretend they were a government while we boded hundreds of thousands of people to death from the air, many of them civilians.
Eventually the populace got tired of our puppets using US provided viagra to stay up all night raping little boys. They chose what is likely a more superior and just government, though there will be no PRIDE flag tweets from the embassy in Kabul.
Hong Kong is going to be fine. If the people of Hong Kong felt as strongly about keeping out the CCP as the Taliban did about getting rid of us they would have started an armed insurrection and made it happen. In reality they don’t expect the CCP to make that much of a difference in their day to day lives as you make it out to be.
Here’s a hot take. I think people in Hong Kong have more liberty than I do in America.
The news I’ve been seeing out of Hong Kong has been grimmer. Lots of arbitrary arrests, democratic activists being jailed, etc. The loss of Hong Kong was a tragedy.
OTOH, it was inevitable. It’s across a bridge from China and on the other side of the world from us. We could no more protect Hong Kong from China than China could protect Manhattan from the US.
Democratic activists is so vague. I don’t care about “democracy” for its own sake. I care whether a country provides a good life for its citizens.
You can get fired for not calling a boy a girl over here. A fire fighter got fired because someone saw a photo of him with an 👌 sign, which even if it was on purpose stands for “it’s ok to be white”. These things happened in a democracy. What good is it.
“[Hong Kong]’s across a bridge from China and on the other side of the world from us. We could no more protect Hong Kong from China than China could protect Manhattan from the US.”
We were able to protect West Berlin, completely surrounded by East Germany, from the Soviet Bloc for the entirety of the Cold War, and the USSR was far more formidable than China, especially at the time of the Hong Kong handover. (Google “Berlin airlift” for those that don’t know the history of the USSR’s attempt to cutoff W. Berlin from the West.) What do you think was the difference in the defensibility of these two NATO territories? (Two-thirds of Hong Kong was ceded to the UK in perpetuity; only one-third was on 99-yr lease.)
Berlin was only 100 miles away by land from massed NATO land forces of multiple nations including the US. Even so, we were only able to really protect Berlin by essentially promising to start WW3 over it.
How would the US/UK have defended a city literally on the periphery of China from being taken over, if China wanted to do it? Would we have started launching nukes over who rules a single city?
Update from Freedomstan!
So here is how “just elect your school boards” are going.
We are near getting all of the signatures needed to initiate a “recall” of a majority of the school board. But wait…what does a recall mean? People in Reston just got a “recall hearing” with the judge…who decided that the recall would be dismissed because the school board is doing a fine job. Next elections in 2023…be sure to keep your passions inflamed till then. And 2025 to…the school board has decided to stagger elections to reduce the chance of a “wave” election that would endanger “stability”.
The school board passed the new transgender policies in a vote remotely. Even though they had barred the public from making comments the board members felt safer pushing sex changes on kids from their own homes.
Meanwhile, the state has decided that all school kids regardless of vaccination status have to wear masks all day. And PRIVATE schools too. Don’t you dare try to avoid muzzling your children by paying for your own school. Any private school that refuses loses their accreditation, which I believe makes it really hard to meet state homeschooling requirements, and the kids can’t participate in any extracurricular activities.
BTW, look at this map of MD.
https://scotteblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-17-at-6.23.07-AM.png
Harford County was like 60-35 Trump, school board does not give two shits. What are you going to do plebs!
Meanwhile in “Red” America, local school boards float state mask mandate bans. President Biden has said that he will both 1) Provide funding to them 2) Use the office of civil rights to impose mask mandates on any schools districts that refuse
My muzzled children can go to school to learn they don’t have a gender and they are white supremicists, even if I send them to private school. It’s CIVIL RIGHTS.
You want me to try and invade mainland China to defend this???
“And 2025 to…the school board has decided to stagger elections to reduce the chance of a “wave” election that would endanger “stability”.”
I’m not sure how to feel about this. If elections were staggered, it is harder to get a majority when opinions sharply change. But it is easier to get an election closer to when a big mistake happens. Electing all 10 board members every 5 years or 2 every year, the latter at least would, in the present circumstances, make those two up for reelection fully accountable and potentially change their behavior as a result.
All that said, in the corporate governance literature, staggered boards are considered to be a policy that entrenches management. Bebchuk and Cohen (2004) show staggered boards typically reduce shareholder value. But board terms vary a lot, 2-6 years, and if you have shorter terms that might be more principal-agent aligning than staggering.
Before the pandemic and George Floyd, school boards mostly did boring shit nobody cared about, and most people didn’t know who was on their school board. Ii didn’t at the time I bought a house because the local schools were good. It’s precisely when these people do something worthwhile noticing that parents should be able to take swift action to change course.
– Spotted Toad
https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1429124736655691777
Any private school that refuses loses their accreditation…
I’d say that’s a place to start, also for public schools: don’t worry about accreditation. Give them your own diploma. It will probably carry more weight than what passes for one now.
No it will mean you run afoul of your state schooling laws and face penalties.
What sort of penalties?
Let me state more directly.
Nobody has a right to choose their kids school. It’s not just about the money. Each state has laws saying whether you or a private school you choose is doing the job the state says you should do. It has regulators that interpret those laws. Those laws can be changed and interpreted differently at any point.
And keep in mind the picture I just gave is actually freer then several western countries on the matter.
Yes, yes, that’s the ticket, “Slow Joe is doing a great job.” And let’s change the subject.
Hong Kong is decamping on a massive scale to the UK and Canada. The Never-Trumpers and Bidenistas won’t take in refugees from Hong Kong for the same reason they won’t take in Cuban refugees: insufficiently hostile and resentful to the white working class. Any group that might help disrupt the fragile alliance of hate that keeps the incompetent kleptocrats running the US in power is public enemy #1.
Probably my biggest disappointment with Trump was that he didn’t just flat out accept all Hong Kong immigrants when China started getting nuts. That would have been a really easy thumb in the eye of the CCP, and would it have been great for the US to have all those people here.
Then again, I am biased; my wife’s family emigrated to the US just before the UK gave HK back to China.
Leaving Afghanistan was always going to me a mess. But this is far, far worse than it had to be. It literally seems as though we gave it essentially no thought.
Right, I don’t understand why we didn’t keep enough boots on the ground to hold several key evacuation points (Kabul Airport, various airbases) and to withdraw the security forces once civilians were out. It would have certainly avoided the spectacle of all of those people hanging on to that C-17.
Right. Contra Hanania, there have been a lot of specific suggestions on how the withdrawal was botched in essentially every respect. The second image at https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/468798/ is optimistic in implying that a highly sequenced plan would go off without a glitch, but there are a lot more failures in Afghanistan than just (as Hanania’s Twitter thread on “why it had to be this bad” focuses on) evacuating Afghans who helped us.
As I wrote this, the top stories at the NYTimes are still about Afghanistan. You have to go further left to find media outlets that are trying to distract people with other (openly partisan) stories. I think the enduring attention reflects the common understanding that the Biden administration effectively planned to fail.
I think they thought this out a lot more than people believe. I don’t think they were really that surprised by how fast the Taliban advanced either. I think there was basically two scenarios that were probably argued out: 1) Draw this out to prevent a Saigon catastrophe or 2) Rip the band aid off at the last minute and let the Saigon catastrophe happen (hopefully quickly). I think that option #1 lost, because once you signal that you are leaving, then a LOT of Afghans will want to leave too (not just people that worked for the West). Then it would turn into a bigger mess that might keep us there. A mess big enough that we wouldn’t have the capability to vet who gets to leave. Cuban boat lift anyone? Infiltrators that could cause a far worse embarrassment close to an election campaign perhaps?
But Biden has more than tripled the number of American soldiers from the 2,500 figure that he felt was outrageous.
So on his own terms, he failed. The proverbial Band-Aid didn’t come off in an instant. Biden, in his panic, put extra Band-Aids on.
Which is what happens if you leave Bagram Airbase for no reason when it’s not under threat but you require an airfield after having done this. What happens, as a consequence, is a self-inflicted wound and also a lot of extra Band-Aids.
There are 2,500 American soldiers in Iraq these days because Obama and Biden felt that even a small number of American soldiers in Iraq was an outrageous figure.
So first they left Iraq, and then they went back in. On his own terms, in 2014, in Iraq, he failed. Obama and Biden made a mess of leaving Iraq and the result was they went back in.
But this time the mess is instant. Taking the soldiers out means sending them back in already, even in the middle of taking them out.
Bagram, btw, is 60km from Kabul. Not sure how this would help with the evacuation. It would just create 60km of moveable targets.
+1
Leaving Bagram at dead of night was Biden’s choice, and he gets 100% of the blame (buck/ blame stops with him.)
US losing would always be “bad” – but bad is not the same as terrible, shameful, hypocritical, disgusting, lying-thru-your-teeth (July presser 90 days).
Why weren’t Afghan soldiers paid??? Because Biden didn’t care enough.
As of this writing on the morning of 8/21, Afghanistan exit and consequences for USA are still front page news at the WSJ, NY times, and USA today.
I’m willing to bet that in ten whole days, 9 out of 10 of the most read / promoted articles at the typical progressive media outlet will have moved on from Afghanistan. There’s a few reasons for that, but one is that they don’t want to keep dumping on the Biden administration and have to get back on track to being the PR operation for the Democrats, and second there is the urge to settle back to its recent obsessions, which lately has been the “Blacks or Covid” (BoC) business model.
Shortly before the Taliban victory, I took a look at The Atlantic’s Most Popular articles, and BoC was fully 21/25, which, there’s no other way to put it, is simply incredible, depressing, and frankly alarming. That number is so crazy high that is shows us the intense gravitational pull these subjects have on the typical audience of these outlets, and so I predict their Afghanistan flight will end shortly and they will crash back on earth quite soon.
The Founding Fathers wanted a citizen-soldier military and to avoid foreign entanglements. Many loathed, detested and reviled the idea of a standing army.
What really is the purpose of a mercenary, permanently mobilized and globalized military? No even posits anymore that the US military’s primary job is to prevent foreign military invasion of the US.
The US military appears to be a global guard service for multinationals, as well as a self-serving and self-perpetuating federal bureaucracy.
There is a premise that the US “should” be involved in any number of spots around the world. But why?
Any system that perpetuates an Afghanistan for 20 years…well, it is probably hopeless. Please, no “tonics” like Grenada.
A standing military in modern times is essential, given that large numbers of men with small arms cannot provide an adequate defense against a modern well equipped military. There also has to be an adequate procurement of heavy weapons, as these cannot be quickly manufactured in the event of war.
As much as Iraq and Afghanistan show how painful it is to hold territories against a determined force of insurgents, both countries were rapidly conquered initially by comparatively small portions of the US military, and if we had the desire to do so, we could have stayed in both countries indefinitely.
That all being said, true American defense requirements don’t require a military anywhere near as large as ours is. This is what I’d consider prudent:
1) Ensure that we have sufficient land combat forces to prevent Guam, Alaska, and Hawaii from being conquered. This would require a sufficient size garrison and a small enough expeditionary force that could reinforce/recapture these territories. Granting Guam the option for independence would also help, as the biggest risk to Guam is the fact that it is a useful staging area for the U.S. against China.
2) Sufficient air power to make any air campaign against the U.S. and its territories too costly to contemplate. Don’t ask me for hard numbers, but it seems like cutting our existing fighter fleet by 60-70%, perhaps with some augmentation from a more robust SAM network, would still allow for sufficient air power.
3) Sufficient naval power to prevent a blockade of U.S. ports and allowing the U.S. to defend critical trade routes. Long-term, this would probably lead to an increased investment in submarines and ASW capabilities, with a substantially smaller emphasis on costly carrier battle groups.
4) Maintain some nuclear forces because the logic of MAD is still a thing, but these can be reduced further. MIRV missiles with a large number of decoys should help keep even a smallish deterrent viable even with advancing anti-missile capabilities.
5) Have a multi-year period before we phase in these cuts, allowing former allies who relied on us to have several years to build up their forces in response to an American disarmament.
I agree with much of what you have outlined.
Another option is an even more-limited military than you suggest, but with lots of quiet “hunter-killer” and ballistic subs.
The hunter-killer subs could sink any invasion fleet, or interdict shipping of all kinds. The ballistic, or missile carrying subs ensure the ability to inflict a strike too horrific to even contemplate.
So who would invade the US? The costs would be prohibitive, to put it mildly.
Again, is the purpose to the US military to keep the world open for multinational commerce…or to defend US shores?
The US will spend about $13-$16 trillion in the next 10 years on DoD, VA, black budget and pro-rated debt.
The “huge” infrastructure plan is what…$1 trillion over the next eight years?
–“The US will spend about $13-$16 trillion in the next 10 years on DoD, VA, black budget and pro-rated debt.
The “huge” infrastructure plan is what…$1 trillion over the next eight years?”–
Status quo bias sure is a thing, isn’t it?
Imagine if we were only going to spend $3 trillion on defense over the next decade, and some politician wanted to increase it to $13 trillion. I can’t imagine that it would ever fly. But if empire is all you know, that level of military spending is just normal.
I’m not worried about the demoralizing effect on the military. I’m much more worried about the demoralizing effect on the American people as regards their military.
When this all stared, most Americans were justly proud of their military. Today, most Americans are justly dubious of their military. The number of lies it was required and encouraged to tell had a deeply and, I think, irreversibly corrupting and corrosive effect on the whole institutions.
This isn’t looking good for Levin-ism, because the military was the most trusted, most formative, least performative institution in the country. Except for a few you can count on one hand, no one knows the names of the hundreds of anonmyous flag officers who did nothing but lie and lie some more about Afghanistan. It just goes to show that institutions can go bad and then use their formative power to make people terrible, and so there are matters of cultural capital that one must address and have confidence in before it becomes rational to advocate for more ‘institutionalism’.
Like Cowen said, it doesn’t do any good to be righteously and correctly hawkish if you don’t have the kind of people and institutions able and willing to pick their battles wisely and stick with them for the long haul. And, we don’t. If we ever did, not anymore, not for a long while.
Have you seen that excellent Chernobyl miniseries? “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
There is a great scene – loosely based on the real story – of the ‘Joker’ robot fiasco. The problem was how to clear all the radioactive graphite and other debris off the roof of the reactor building. They didn’t want to send humans there because it was too dangerous. But they heard about a new German remotely-operated robot to deal with just such situation, and went to great expense and extremely diplomatically-sensitive lengths to get it. They waste some precious time too, since they aren’t doing anything to remove the debris while waiting to get the robot. But it filled everyone with great hope of a solution. And when they finally get the robot on the roof and see the video feed, there is a great sense of jubilant relief – here is the answer, how impressive!
And then the video cuts out in a few seconds and the great Joker is dead before moving a single piece of debris, because the radiation fried its circuits. Indeed, it is now a giant additional piece of increasingly radioactive debris, one that is even harder to remove.
Turns out that “that robot was never going to work” – Joker wasn’t sufficiently shielded to be rated for the level of radiation on the roof. The German engineers could have told them that at the first inquiry.
But … ‘they lied’. There was the real level of radiation, and then there was the much lower propaganda number for the level of radiation. And since the official position of the USSR was that incidents with levels of radiation high enough to have potentially ‘global significance’ were impossible in the Soviet Union, they gave them the propaganda number. So the whole thing degenerated into a tragic farce which was hopeless from the very beginning.
About a dozen times a day for the last twenty years, analogous ‘propaganda numbers’ have been encouraged, fabricated, and pushed up the chain about Afghanistan. However many lies you imagine were told about it, you are off by at least two orders of magnitude.
Now, like Chernobyl, the actual extent of the disaster is being wildly exaggerated. Also like Chernobyl, the Afghanistan fiasco reveals a deeply embedded culture of lying and unaccountability for rampant incompetency, the public of perception of which is now quickly catching up to the ugly reality, further eroding the patriotic loyalty and legitimacy people place in our regime, especially the martial elements of it, even among those who would be predisposed to such views, to say nothing of those who already hold the country in contempt.
Chernobyl didn’t bring down the Soviet Union, but it’s small contribution to the general bitterness and distrust and evaporation of any genuine and sincere belief in the system was one of the many straws that broke the camel’s back.
The Afghanistan withdrawal was indeed bound to go this way, which was exactly the argument DoD used for a decade and a half to argue against it. “If we leave now, the Taliban take over quick.” Some people say “we didn’t see this coming,” but that’s also a lie. *That* was the assessment at the heart of the argument! The argument was nevertheless irrational because it failed to explain how things would ever change and how the cost was worth the benefit, but the assessment was widely known and accurate. It was wrong in just one way – The Big Lie – which is that it promised “there’s a good chance things will get better soon, doing more or less what we’re doing now.” There was always zero chance.
Biden absolutely did the right thing, and kudos to him for sticking with it. It was trying to avoid the storm of mushy-brained criticisms like the kind Biden is getting that encouraged former Presidents to keep America there – dying and going bankrupt there – for at least 15 years too long.
Not like any of these critics has an individual incentive to care – gotta get clicks! – but this is pretty dumb, as you *want* Presidents to make hard choices and cut loose from wasteful, no-win situations instead of doubling-down over and over on stupid forever wars. You would think that’s something people would have picked up from the experience in Vietnam, but apparently, being before the internet, that was too long ago for anyone to remember or know about anymore. So many stupid “Saigon embassy roof helicopter” memes, but the alternative was to keep the war going and to throw away more blood and treasure by pumping more sewage into a great ocean of pointless misery.
I thought Biden’s speech was so good that it’s the first one I’ve watched in many years. I told my parents I was proud of him and watched it with my wife at my request.
I mentioned on Facebook that I what he did was the most presidential thing I’ve seen in a long time, only to scolded by friends from across the political spectrum, including deep Trump supporters.
The next day Biden said that he would use the office of civil rights to force school districts to muzzle children against their will. Proving again he still is an evil person whose done more damage to my life then Afghanistan ever has. “Character” just doesn’t matter compared to ideology I guess. Even if someone’s got some of it, doesn’t stop them from being evil.
“I’m much more worried about the demoralizing effect on the American people as regards their military.”
Why? The American people are fully justified in having grave reservations about the US military. Your argument that this has been the best possible withdrawal and could not have gone any better is palpably absurd and laughable. And the US public sees where the US military is succeeding- screening out service members who are insufficiently fervent in bowing to woke dogma and in waging PR propaganda wars with Tucker Carlson.
The biggest problem with the US military is that the generals are not under any real civilian control and were able to openly defy Trump’s efforts to end US involvement inAfghanistan, going so far as to lie about troop numbers and run to the committees on the Hill to get Cheney and her ilk to pass NDAA language obstructing Trump’s efforts.
As Kling might observe if he were not trying to save face, the US military lacks a feedback, corrective function. The only thing that will change this is radical reorganization. Axe the DOD in its entirety now and transfer the national defense function to the governors. If the President wants to go to war, let him ask the governors to volunteer the troops. This would restore checks and balances as well as restore a small semblance of the federalism that was so important to the US scheme but which has been allowed to whither away due to unrestrained courts and administrativism.
That’s arguably an anti-federalist proposal, in the 18th century sense of the term. A few years ago I’d be all concerned about free riding Governors leaving us with a collectively weak military, preventing the US from serving as a bulwark against China, but lately that just doesn’t seem to matter.
The United States is not a material nation, consisting of a certain people, but an ideal nation, with national identity being based on a common civic creed.
That common creed now seems to be gone. We have two large tribes, red and blue, with many smaller tribes also in existence, who tend to align with the red or blue teams only due to the winner take all nature of US politics.
Perhaps the answer goes deeper: rather than devolve the military to the states, devolve nationality to smaller units in which perhaps people can once again (more or less) align under a common creed. The real challenge is that most states and metropolitan areas are a mix of people adhering to different creeds, so even this option would require some sorting mechanism, and it’s very easy to see how that could go wrong. There’s also the issue of what happens to people dependent on the federal welfare state.
Thank you for that comment. I concur.
I was using “federalism” in a contemporary Wikipedia sense:
“Federalism is a mixed or compound mode of government that combines a general government (the central or “federal” government) with regional governments (provincial, state, cantonal, territorial or other sub-unit governments) in a single political system. Its distinctive feature, first embodied in the Constitution of the United States of 1789, is a relationship of parity between the two levels of government established. It can thus be defined as a form of government in which powers are divided between two levels of government of equal status.
Federalism differs from confederalism, in which the general level of government is subordinate to the regional level, and from devolution within a unitary state, in which the regional level of government is subordinate to the general level.” I would argue that the states are no longer at parity with the federal government and have not been for a long time and the US is more accurately described as confederalism.
In my opinion this is largely due to the Burkean “The Declaration of Independence is meaningless and irrelevant “ conservatives who feteshize The Federalist Papers written after the fact of the constitutional convention in large measure by Publius Alexander “Presidents For Life” Hamilton and who would erase Jefferson and Madison from the history books.
Restoring state parity is a major and radical undertaking. Fear of others’ political liberty will impede progress in that direction. In a proportional representation the current plurality and in some polls majority of currently unrepresented citizens who reject both major parties would be able to organize a meaningful alternative. A parliamentary system would help a lot as well. The potential reformation of redistributionist programs may prove less of an obstacle as the federal government grows ever more bankrupt and Zimbabwean levels of inflation become necessary to meet commitments. I also hope that many in the US would look to the example of Chile as its constitutional rewrite process unfolds. I suspect that many in the US will be envious of what they eventually adopt.
“Your argument that this has been the best possible withdrawal and could not have gone any better is palpably absurd and laughable.”
It was absolutely the best possible withdrawal. Biden was absolutely right and this is perhaps the most admirably heroic and statemanslike thing he’s ever done in his life. You are so manipulated by a few uncomfortable media images – welcome to the real world – that you aren’t thinking straight about optimizing subject to constraints. It’s precisely this kind of inability to think seriously about hard, difficult choices in a no-win situation that led to the kind of wishful-thinking avoidance and the evil waste of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
Understand this: the constraint in reality was that the Taliban was always going to take back Afghanistan and re-impose Sharia, and, upon doing so, the place would be inhospitable for anyone who was on the other side. This is exactly what everyone at DoD and in the IC knew and said forever, when they were being honest.
The question was always how ugly the transition from GIROA to Taliban was going to be, and – this is key – every assessment of what it would be like *if it was an actual fight* was an incredibly bloody slaughter. That’s why it was essential to make a deal with the Taliban to do it peacefully, which, duh, the indescribably corrupt Afghan political leaders were never going to do, no matter how much you nudged them. That’s what Pompeo understood that an entire generation of DoD leaders refused to grasp.
So American made the deal with Taliban on its own, and – one can only infer from what happened – at least tacitly encouraged the “surrender for amnesty” lightning-triumph to circumvent the intransigency of the American-coddled Afghan political class, which is very much not the Taliban’s usual style of doing things, but which worked *incredibly well* in this situation. Yes, almost as well as a transition to Taliban rule could possibly go! Think!
Question, in this purportedly terrible withdrawal, how many ANA / GIROA forces were killed? Practically none! How many US officials and troops were killed or even seriously injured? Zero! Tens of thousands of lives saved, at least. Best of all possible withdrawals!
Except for the troops who are still on the ground, everyone has been evacuated safely, with the vast majority of the so-called exceptions being not actual Americans but mostly “Presumptive Americans”, that is, only in a legally technical manner, and in the sense of having been unwisely issued some kind of in-process provisional paperwork by the immigration bureaucracy, but not, say, “naturalized citizens and holders of US passports”, which, if they had them, would have entitled and enabled these people to get to the airport early and get out.
At any rate, most of them will still probably eventually get out safely anyway. That’s not how it went in Vietnam, and again, if we took the “terrible withdrawal” argument seriously, how bad things went down in Saigon would have been an argument to keep fighting the Vietnam war, which would have been profoundly stupid and deeply wicked. The way the US was approaching the war, the Vietcong were always going to take over, and that takeover being messy was tragic but not a good reason not to face reality and get the heck out of there.
“Except for the troops who are still on the ground, everyone has been evacuated safely”
??? It’s my understanding that there are still thousands (probably over 10,000) Americans there.
Well I will certainly grant that no US troops killed is a powerful and persuasive data point. On the other hand, would you use the same measure with respect to the military occupation? Best year of occupation ever when no troops were killed? https://www.stripes.com/theaters/middle_east/us-goes-one-year-without-a-combat-death-in-afghanistan-as-taliban-warn-against-reneging-on-peace-deal-1.661464
Getting everyone out safely is the point of a withdrawal. It’s not the point of an occupation.
Why were there no deaths? Because the US agreed to withdraw completely in May 2021 and even set free 5,000 Taliban POWs to demonstrate their seriousness. This agreement was signed with the Taliban, not the GoA.
This excuse has the guise of “washing one’s hands” but the reality of “splattering feces on oneself”.
Not buying it, and nobody else is either. Armies and foreign policies have strategies, but ultimately these strategies have to be carried out by people. Macro policies have to have micro-foundations.
The world sees us cowardly and needlessly abandoning many thousands of Afghans who we vetted and who fought alongside us, and who are now being rounded up and killed. It’s evident to everyone that we could have made the effort, we just didn’t.
That’s not a stain on the United States, not the US Military, though it’s certainly and rightfully demoralizing for the latter.
The Afghans we vetted were literal child molesting warlords. They also didn’t fight along side us, they ran at the first opportunity. Reports I read from Afghanistan indicate that the Taliban won so quickly in great part because they were considered to be better people then our allies and better at running the country.
Nope.
https://www.wartimeallies.co/
Inevitable: Fully operational but abandoned American helicopters, M24 sniper rifles and M18 assault weapons.
Inevitable: Gifting Humvees and other U.S.-made military trucks to the Taliban.
Biden had no choice but to abandon Bagram as one of the initial steps in the process. It was impossible to put that item any further down the list. Not in the real world, where it’s just a fact that you are required to abandon Bagram and then, having left in the middle of the night, not place a call to anyone in the Afghan government to mention that you’ve done this.
Inevitable: Biden blindsides Britain and Germany and every ally with an embassy in Afghanistan. Australia has an embassy. Norway has an embassy. Biden never had any choice but to stiff his allies.
And yet somehow it’s not inevitable that French soldiers should ape America’s lead and go into hiding from the French citizens in Afghanistan. French soldiers venture out from the commercial airport.
Handle, I really enjoy your comments, and I think this is the first one I’ve ever disagreed with. I want your opinion on my viewpoint.
You say this was absolutely the best possible withdrawal. I think that’s demonstrably false. The best possible withdrawal is one in which we get all of our equipment out and leave a stable government behind that can effectively deal with the Taliban.
If we had managed to accomplish that, there wouldn’t be an issue getting people evacuated. They wouldn’t even need to be evacuated. That’s what people picture when they hear the word “withdrawal”. It’s certainly the bill of goods that Biden sold the public back in July.
I’m very open to the idea that getting Afghanistan to that point may not have been possible. But we’d spent 20 years there. South Korea was a basket case much like Afghanistan after the Korean War. Lots of instability and a few ruthless dictators. The democratic South Korea we see today only came into existence in the early 1990’s.
I think we were wiser back then and didn’t expect a people with no historical experience with democracy to embrace it immediately. It takes a generation or two to get people on board with the idea. But if you use South Korea as a yardstick, we were halfway there in Afghanistan. And look at how prosperous a free South Korea is today.
The lofty goals in Afghanistan were clearly a mistake. I always disagreed with the concept of nation building and creating democracy out of thin air. We should have been more sober minded about our presence in Afghanistan. It was utilitarian in nature.
We got a huge airbase in central Asia from which we could project influence. And we could keep a lid on Islamic extremism in the region. For a deployment of 5,000 troops and $50 billion a year, that’s not a horrible deal. It’s basically the deal we continue to make with South Korea, except with a bigger price tag.
On top of that, you get a lottery ticket that maybe 40 years from now, Afghanistan starts to look like South Korea. I know asdf will disagree with me on that, but the Koreans of 40 years ago looked a lot like the Afghans of today. Poor, impoverished, low IQ peasants.
The only way that transformation occurs though is if we present a united front where we unwaveringly commit to stay for decades. There must be major strategic incentives to stay, too. Just like in South Korea. When people know you’re not leaving for decades, perhaps ever, they quickly start to adjust to the new reality of occupation.
The Taliban survived for 20 years because there has always been a real possibility that we’d be leaving five minutes later. I disagree that withdrawing is the most patriotic thing Biden has done in his life. Withdrawing is in line with his typical inept, politically opportunistic nature.
At a minimum, the truly patriotic thing would have been for Biden to have campaigned on staying in Afghanistan longer, until the government could clean up the corruption and legitimately fight and defeat the Taliban, so he could have the withdrawal that he said he wanted.
Ideally, he would have explained the costs and benefits of staying, and then make a reasoned argument about why staying makes the most sense for our strategic goals. Invading was a mistake, but it’s a sunk cost, we’re already there, and the cost of staying is very low compared to the benefits. I know that’s a tall order for a guy with dementia, but it would have been the most patriotic thing to do, in my opinion. The voters can decide after that.
It wouldn’t have even been that hard. Trump was running on stopping the “endless wars.” The only reason Biden won the election was because he ran as the anti-Trump. I’m actually surprised he didn’t oppose Trump on the issue. I don’t recall it being discussed much during the election though.
The choice was never between endless war and what we’re watching unfold in Afghanistan currently. A third option existed: commit to staying until the strategic calculus changes. For the record, there’s still and endless war in the Korean peninsula. Someday if China and North Korea ever decide to become liberal democracies, that might change. But until then, you play the hand you’re dealt.
I think you hit the nail on the head though, the whole fiasco is indicative of our moral bankruptcy as a country. To stay for the long haul, you have to have not only incentives to do so, but a clear, well-articulated vision of the objectives, and the moral fortitude that comes from knowing that the mission is righteous. Two of those three things have been missing from the Afghanistan situation for a while, and that’s how we got here.
Forget Hong Kong. It is a lost cause and the US never really had a role to play there anyway. The real question is what happens when China completes a conquest of Taiwan sometime in the coming year. The generals have already signaled that they will resist any presidential order to engage militarily with all their leaked reports of “disastrous” war game simulations. What should be on everyone’s minds is whether Wall Street and The Tech Titans will permit Biden to issue a strongly worded letter pleading with China to be “inclusive” in installing a new government.
Turning Afghanistan into a liberal state was not the real US goal over the prior 10 years. Instead it was maintaining the status quo of having a highly strategic military zone in the Middle East and limiting the rise of a terrorist organization incubator. Narrowing the mission to that permanent goal with a massive US military base similar to what we have in Guam and Germany was a much more strategic solution. But Biden wanted a political win and he should reap the fallout from this mess. I think it will hurt him more than you predict – to protect his legacy the Dems (with libertarian help) are seeking to re-characterize a just war into some warped form of colonialism.
Biden wanted? Two weeks ago Trump was bragging at a rally that his agreement with the Taliban locked Biden into withdrawal.
It’d be a good start if everyone could agree that the Americans haven’t actually been trying to convert Afghans into staging drag queen story hour at the Kabul library. It seems like an obvious point but apparently it needs repeating: Stalemate became the goal a long time ago.
The mission was the status quo. The mission was the holding pattern. The mission was not actually very ambitious.
If people still want to call it a war in the absence of any American casualties, then that’s a bit of rhetoric for the “forever war” people. But that’s just bluster, pretending that starry-eyed, idealistic, utopian, revolutionary imperialists were running amok. Saying something emphatically doesn’t make it less ludicrous.
Hong Kong was liberal because it was rich. And it was rich because it had a perfectly situated sea port and airport, a sort of gateway between China and the rest of the world. Plus they didn’t have any rural population which generally skews conservative in every country. If you look a the richest Muslim countries, they’re all relatively liberal in practice – i.e. Saudi Arabia sponsored education abroad for female students and there’s plenty of reports on homosexuality happening without issues behind closed doors there.
On the other hand Afghanistan was dirt poor even before Soviet/American invasions and primarily consisted of rural farmers. They have no interest in liberal values.
Please don’t impugn farmers categorically.
“The officers of both the Continental Army and the state militias were typically yeoman farmers with a sense of honor and status and an ideological commitment to oppose the policies of the British Crown.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Army
Hanania says the military leaders have a long history of leaking stories to the press to shape opinion and pressure the POTUS. I presume the US military was spending effort into pressuring the POTUS to abandon the withdrawal, not planning to go through with the withdrawal in a competent fashion. That does make me more sympathetic to Biden and less sympathetic to the military.
I’m curious why a President can’t fire the heads of the military and replace them with more reasonable leaders that are committed to serving the will of the POTUS and the American People, not doing their own thing.
A President can – in the formal legal sense – fire any General or Admiral. The trouble is replacing them.
Not only does this require Senate confirmation, but you’ve got to get your replacement from the ranks, and all the other flag officers are going to do things more or less the same way. They’ve all had the same training and made it through the same series of gauntlets, and the deep trouble is that those gauntlets select for lots more of the same of what you’re trying to get rid of.
Imagine being dissatisfied with how woke the President of Oberlin is, and trying to replace her with one of the Deans instead. If anything, things get worse the further down the hierarchy you go, as people are even younger and more radical.
Also, these military leaders will all say they were just following the orders of the civilian leadership, and to be fair, that’s mostly true.
Still, even if replacement is hard and unlikely to produce better strategies or tactics, it isn’t futile, because it *will* produce better advice.
A minimum qualification to be an effective political leader is to recognize when the military (or any part of the bureaucracy) is BS’ing him, and to be absolutely and unhesitatingly ruthless towards anyone willing to repeat that BS. For military officers, that would include Relief for Cause, General Court-Martial under UCMJ Article 107, Dishonorable Discharge, stripping of all rank and benefits, and a nominal period of confinement, just to show you mean business. This is what should have happened to anyone who, for example, knowingly and consciously lied to Trump about the number of troops in particular areas of operation.
Things are somewhat easier with regards to firing and replacing people on the civilian side of things, but not as much as you might think as you still need the Senate, and most of these are “””civilians””” in the sense of being cut from the same cloth, as they tend disproportionately to be former high-ranking military officers collecting ‘retirement’ pensions on top of their current salaries.
You are right. If you fire the leaders, all the people next in line are similar. I don’t know enough about organizational dynamics but it seems building better organizations is possible.
The time to prevent Hong Kong from being integrated would’ve been before it was turned back over by the British in 97. Maybe the US could’ve put its support behind a plebiscite in which Hong Kong could vote for independence (in which case it might be similar to Taiwan today). But at the time China was liberalizing and the US was on increasingly friendly terms, so I don’t think the will existed to do push for that. Maybe had we anticipated China’s direction, we would’ve pushed for an independent Hong Kong.
The way the withdrawal had to be done properly was to actually increase the footprint of the military long enough to get out the foreign nationals and the Afghanis who were going to be executed by the Taliban on the Taliban’s resumption of control. It was done exactly the opposite of the proper way, and this disaster is the result- hoping the Taliban are both smart enough to let the civilians out, and thaty they have enough control over their men to actually allow this to occur. Both are betting the lives of 10s of thousands of people. So, the question is, why wasn’t this done? The answer is obvious- to do so is admitting the Taliban would rapidly take over the major cities (they already controlled the hinterlands), undercutting all the lies that had been told about the Afghan puppet government’s competency and legitimacy.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the foreign nationals trapped right now- not leaving the moment the truce with the Taliban was signed is, in my opinion, utter stupidity- people that stupid aren’t worth saving in my darker moments. Believing the assurances of people like Joe Biden that all will be well until months after we left marks one as an idiot.
As for Hong Kong, well f**k that, too. Maybe the British made a mistake in not encouraging more to leave before 1997 (yes, it has been that long), but there is nothing we can really do about how the Chinese treat their own territory and citizens other than yap about it. The same situation we are now in with regards to the Taliban. We don’t police the world. I for one do applaud Biden for sticking out the withdrawal, but I will point out that we aren’t actually out yet. We are still stuck there at the moment. Will Biden have the courage (or whoever is actually making the decisions) to finally leave at the end of the month? I don’t know.
I don’t think turning Afghanistan into a liberal democracy was ever a goal–at least not since the opening days of the W. Bush administration. Our goal in Afghanistan was to prevent the resurgence of Jihadi groups such as al Qaeda. We have done this now for many years with only minimal commitment in personnel–recently we only had 2500 soldiers in the country, and no combat casualties in over a year. More, we had Bagram airbase, which was our only military base in all of Central Asia–a region inaccessible to aircraft carriers.
The costs of staying were low. The benefits of staying were large. The humanitarian cost of our humiliating departure is beyond reckoning.
The Taliban now has about 10,000 American hostages, the most photogenic of which will be gracing your TV screen for the next many years. Do not think that the American public will soon forget about Afghanistan. Indeed, I predict that the next president will have to invade the country all over again.
We killed hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, including at least 71,000 confirmed civilians. We supported a wildly unpopular and corrupt regime that molested boys with viagra we provided. All of that was still going on even after we gave up most of the country except the airbase, in fact the airborne strikes increased. None of that helps to prevent a resurgence of potential terrorists that might attack us.
I’m not sure why we need an airbase in Central Asia. To start some future war. We had to kill all those people and spend all that money for that.
As I see it, what made Hong Kong different was the issue of standing (in the legal sense).
Once Hong Kong (all of it, not just the leased New Territories) was turned over to China under the treaty agreed in 1986, Hong Kong ceased to be a sovereign territory. Thus, (1) HK has no allies, per se, and (2) China’s agreed obligation to follow “one country, two systems” can now be asserted only by a nation-state party to the treaty, that is, by Great Britain. In theory, Britain now has cause to revoke the treaty and take back Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. In practice, I’m not at all sure such a war would be worthwhile even if Britain and her allies were sure to win.
An almost-parallel can be drawn here with the Texas annexation treaty of 1845, which said among other things that Texas had the right to secede at will or to divide itself into up to five states. This turned out to make no difference in the Civil War. But unlike the HK situation that treaty involved no third-party country.
Where’s the Afghan gov’t?
Hanania tweets a news report: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1427319150326652938
“Afghan police surrendered to the Taliban, who would offer them $150 after their government did not pay them for six months. After the US had spent an order of magnitude more than the moon landing and the Marshall Plan combined.”
So, as soon as Biden gets elected, the Afghan elite thieves stop paying the soldiers? Why wasn’t this known, and publicized, earlier?
The corrupt but “successful” boot-lickers who were the Afghan elite, whether all, most, or merely many were avid boy-raping pederasts, are mostly to blame for failing to create an Afghan force both willing and able to fight against the Taliban.
Some 69,000 Afghans have died fighting along side of the USA, with nearly 2,500 American soldiers killed. Trump’s biggest failure, like Obama’s, was failure to kick Afghan elitist butt on getting them to fight. For “their side”. This was also a Biden failure, but it’s too soon to say it’s his biggest.
But in the notes and comments, no mention of poppies and heroin, and how their is a never ending flow of illegal drug money going to buy Taliban weapons. With constant fighting between tribal local warlords, which allows the leaders to find out who are the successful fighting lieutenants.
Where is the capitalist investment of new companies and new manufacturing near Kabul? FDI is pathetic
https://www.lloydsbanktrade.com/en/market-potential/afghanistan/investment
“The country was ranked 173rd out of 190 economies on the 2020 edition of the Doing Business report of the World Bank,”
I’m sad about the pederasty, but corruption is worse for business, for development, and for promoting good feelings (hearts!) in the workers. The USA AID and it’s Mil-Ind Complex company gov’t cash gravy train has all too often rewarded corrupt boot-lickers over real development.
Handle and others are right that leaving AF would always be a mess, but it didn’t have to be this bad. Biden should have thrown MORE soldiers in, in Feb (before the May 1 date of Trump which was not followed anyway), and said the Taliban weren’t following their agreement. But also told all the Americans that the USA would be leaving, and so all the aid-workers should pack up and go.
Biden’s army should have been talking with more AF soldiers, to confirm they were getting paid and supplies and that they were willing and able to fight – and add cash/ supplies where needed while cutting out corrupt top AF elites.
Maybe promising to allow more AF daughters to emigrate to the US would get more AF soldiers fighting? Maybe more cash, direct from USA to soldiers on the line? Maybe more BIG million $ rewards for winning battles against the Taliban?
I get the feeling nothing of these were tried by Biden – and I’m sure there are lots of other possible incentives for the AF army to be better fighters.
It’s total BS to say “nothing would work”, unless there are many clear examples of “things we tried”.
OK, maybe the US flying the PRIDE flag in June was actually counter-productive, and most AF soldiers became ashamed of fighting for the anti-male gay agenda. That trial was was a terrible failure.
But if the US is unwilling to do the things that “work”, including supporting soldiers that kill others that might but might not be Taliban, then such Rules of Engagement ensure failure.
If the Taliban do allow most real Americans to leave by Aug 31, still 7 days away, the “horror” will be hugely minimized by the anti-Rep press.
It’s a sad truth that the death, torture, and rape of Afghans, either pro- or anti- American, will weigh lightly on the minds of most voters. Tho it’s also likely to remain talked about by anti-Biden folk. Both Reps and Dems.
And there might well be far more anti-Biden Dems in Sep. than there were in July.
See good summary of reasonable plan vs Biden plan:
https://www.bookwormroom.com/2021/08/20/bookworm-beat-8-20-21-the-biden-the-destroyer-illustrated-edition/afghanistan-04/
It is likely that evacuating civilians first leads to similar drop in AF fighting against the Taliban – but that’s why US forces need to be larger during the withdrawal.
It’s also likely that Biden’s way means far far fewer Afghan civilians/ US supporters/ boot-lickers, thieving elites, and connected incompetents make it to America.
I’m not going to argue about Afghanistan. I have a different opinion but I’ll just leave it there.
However, you left out the biggest negative of Biden’s handling of this. The effects of this on our rivals’ (notably Russia and China) beliefs about the willpower and competence of our political and military leaders. That kind of view always leads to bad outcomes — from WW2 to 9/11.