We start the week by noting that Harvard has picked a new chief chaplain. He’s Greg Epstein, an atheist. The NYT quotes Mr. Epstein:
âThere is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life,â
Epstein was raised in a Jewish household and has been Harvardâs humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the movement that centers peopleâs relationships with one another instead of with a God.
This month, when religious fundamentalism has taken over the government of Afghanistan, itâs nice to see that a secular humanist has a role in steering discussions about faith. Religion may serve to bring some people together, but it divides many more. The lessons about doing good and being a good person are too often pushed aside in the service of doctrine.
Any step in the direction of people taking personal responsibility for their humanity is welcome. For many, religion doesnât assist with that. On to cartoons.
Politicians should compare the meaningful deaths of thirteen US servicemen this week with the meaningless deaths of 600,000 Americans for no good reason at all:
Difficult to escape the hell hole:
Our military brain trust:
A few GOP politicians want to protect us from the ârealâ threat:
America will dissect its failed adventure in Afghanistan for decades. From Heather Cox Richardson:
âIn the past, when American troops were targeted by terrorists, Americans came together to condemn those attackers. Apparently, no longer. While world leadersâincluding even those of the Talibanâcondemned the attacks on US troops, Republican leaders instead attacked President Biden.â
Whatâs ahead of us now is seeing how the Biden administration manages defeat. There will be serious political fallout after Bidenâs end game in Afghanistan is finished.
The Republicans are going to try to mix fact with fiction, scoring points to take advantage of what they perceive as a Biden weakness.
Democrats may be ambivalent enough about what they think Biden should have done with the Kabul end game that they wonât respond forcefully enough.
The media will play their âI Told You Soâ and âBiden is Damagedâ narratives. They will continue giving airtime to the same retired military hacks who brought us Afghanistan in the first place.
âHow, exactly, did the Biden administrationâs critics think US military involvement in Afghanistan was ever going to end? âCertainly not like thisâ is not a valid answer…
Please be specific. Did you envision a formal ceremony at the US Embassy with the American flag being lowered and the Taliban flag raised? Did you see the Taliban waiting patiently while the US-trained Afghan army escorted US citizens, other NATO nationals and our Afghan collaborators to the airport for evacuation? Did you imagine that the countryâs branch of the Islamic State would watch peacefully from the sidelines, or that regional warlords would renounce any hope of regaining their power, or that a nation with a centuries-old tradition of rejecting central authority would suddenly embrace it?
If there is a graceful, orderly way to abandon involvement in a brutal, unresolved civil war on the other side of the world, please cite historical precedents.â
Thatâs the problem, zero precedents.
Thereâs press and political criticism about Biden working with the Taliban. Itâs at least ironic that weâre cooperating with them after 20 years of fighting them, but this is just both players being practical in an end game. In Bidenâs press conference on Thursday, he rejected critics who said we shouldnât be cooperating with the Taliban to defend the airport perimeter:
âNo one trusts them…Itâs a matter of mutual self-interest. Theyâre not good guys, the Taliban. But they have keen interests,â
Thatâs realpolitik pragmatism at work, something we rarely see. But Republicans are neither pragmatic nor calm. Some Republicans said Biden should resign, while most focused on demanding that the withdrawal timeline, set for Tuesday, be lifted to allow a forceful counterattack against the Islamic State. Saner Republicans in Congress cited the attack as another indication of the presidentâs poorly executed withdrawal strategy.
The most vocal Democratic criticism came from Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who questioned whether Taliban guards had failed by letting the ISIS bombers get so close to the Kabul airport.
âWe canât trust the Taliban with Americansâ security,â
Thank you Captain Obvious. The silliest response came from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN):
âItâs time for accountability, starting with those whose failed planning allowed these attacks to occur. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, and Mark Milley should all resign or face impeachment and removal from office,â
Under Blackburnâs scenario, Nancy Pelosi would become president! Itâs doubtful that she thought that through.
Democrats didnât demand GW Bush IIâs resignation after 9/11. Nobody clamored for St. Ronnieâs head the day after 241 Marines were killed in Lebanon. There was fierce criticism of Reagan, but no one tried to invoke the 25th Amendment. The Bay of Pigs was an epic disaster, but Republicans did not immediately demand JFKâs resignation.
Itâs time to move on. We need to end the evacuation on time. There is no question that we will leave some worthy immigrants behind. They will be a bargaining chip when the Talibs want US foreign aid or recognition.
Take a moment and try if you can, to settle into our Saturday Soother. Hard to believe it’s already the final weekend in August. Itâs also hard to believe that Senator Robert F. Kennedyâs assassin, Sirhan Sirhan was granted parole on Friday after two of RFKâs sons spoke in favor of his release.
In the Northeast, weâve ended a hot spell, but since we had plenty of rain from hurricane Henri, everything on the fields of Wrong is green and growing.
If you can, shed the noise of the world and take a few moments to clear your head. Then, grab a seat outside and listen to Michael Franti & Spearheadâs new tune, “Good Day For A Good Day“.
The band says the inspiration for the new song – waking up every day and wondering what terrible thing is coming: hate, pandemic, pollution, or disaster, and how we could replace that with a little bit of love, good vibes, and joy:
Cathedral Valley, Capitol Reef NP – photo by Richard Strange
The White House reported that 21,600 people have been evacuated from Kabul in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 58,700 persons evacuated. But thereâs already a 50,000-person backlog for US visas for non-governmental organization workers.
Today, letâs talk about 1) Where these Afghan refugees are headed, and 2) The Special Immigration Visa (SIV) program in the US that has come under criticism from politicians and the media.
Letâs start with the SIV program. The State Department has allocated 50,000 SIVs for Afghanistan. PBS reported yesterday that 34,500 of them are already allocated, while about 300,000 Afghans have some history of working with the US, and therefore, may be at risk of reprisal from the Taliban.
Wrongo listened to Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) who is trying to assist a few Afghans with US visas, say that the reason for the backlog is lack of planning by the Biden administration. Thatâs untrue. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduces some reality into the discussion of the SIV backlog:
âOver the last decade, Republicans have pushed to intentionally create a massive backlog in the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program – the one we use to bring Afghan partners to America, by putting onerous conditions on the applicationsâŠIn 2016, Obama asked to increase the cap for the SIV program. Senate Republicans objected. Then, the Trump Admin started slowing down SIV processing. When Biden took over, there were 10,000 unfilled visas, despite 17,000 applications in the pipeline.â
Sen. Murphy continues: (parenthesis and emphasis by Wrongo)
âObama admitted over 2,700 Afghan refugees. Trump admitted 400, bc (because) he had dismantled the refugee system. Biden had to rebuild it. And today Trump Republicans are making it clear they will oppose bringing more Afghan refugees to the US. Steven Miller: âResettling [Afghans] in America is not about solving a humanitarian crisis; itâs about accomplishing an ideological objective to change America.ââ
Is anyone more repellent than Steven Miller?
Any reporting by the media about the âchaosâ in Afghanistan that doesnât include these facts, isnât worth your time. Also, letâs differentiate between whatâs happening within US control, from whatâs happening beyond our control: All the chaos is happening outside of the Kabul airport gates.
Inside, weâre moving thousands of people in a largely orderly fashion to intermediate countries, where the process of their immigration can begin.
This is by far the biggest military evacuation in US history, and it’s being handled surprisingly well. That might change in an instant, anything could happen. But so far, the US media has been suckered into a chaos narrative that’s almost precisely the opposite of the truth.
âMore than half a million Afghans had already fled violence and instability in their country this year alone, even before the Taliban swept back to power a week ago. But an equal number of new refugees could very well hit the road in the next few months, despite Taliban efforts to stop people from leaving.â
Hereâs a chart showing where Afghan refugees are located. Pakistan has nearly 1.5 million while Iran has about 800k:
GZero reports that Europe currently hosts 780,000 Afghan refugees, second only to Pakistan, along with another two million undocumented Afghans. Iran is worried that the Taliban, who are Sunni extremists, may intensify a long history of persecution of Afghanistan’s Shia minorities, pushing even more refugees across the Iranian border. GZero asks:
âThis all raises the question: What happens if possibly millions of people who fear persecution get trapped inside their own country? They will probably join the ranks of the 3.5 million vulnerable Afghans who are already internally displaced.â
Since the White House just announced that the US will stick to August 31 as the end date for the airlift of refuges and the complete withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan, no one knows what will happen to those people left in Afghanistan who have expressed a desire to leave.
Other countries could work to repatriate their citizens by negotiating directly with the Taliban. Most likely, GZeroâs prediction of a large internally displaced population will come to pass.
Bidenâs decision is certain to spark criticism at home and abroad. Those faulting Biden should answer: Werenât they originally all for ending this war and taking our troops out? What is the US supposed to do when not even $2 trillion over 20 years was enough?
While you ponder what to do, listen to James McMurtryâs new tune, Â “Operation Never Mind“, from his new album out this week, âThe Horses and the Houndsâ. The song is about how Americans think about our soldiers:
Sample lyric:
we got an operation goinâ on
it donât have to trouble me and you
the country boys will do the fighting
now that fightingâs all a country boy can do
we got a handle on it this time
no oneâs gonna tell us we were wrong
we wonât let the cameras near the fighting
that way we wonât have another Vietnam
(chorus) no one knows, âcause no one sees no one cares, âcause no one knows no one knows, âcause no one sees it on TV
donât they look just like on âSEAL Teamâ
Lord donât they look the best
when we trot them out at halftime
or the seventh inning stretch
they stand up in their uniforms and help us sell the show
dying by their own hands for reasons we donât know
Chaco Canyon, NM â 2021 photo by Freek Bouw. This is the best collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico.
On February 29th, 2020, the US signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha that provided for a full US and international troop withdrawal on a 15-month timetable. The Taliban promised to take measures to restrict the activities of other terrorist groups (like al-Qaeda) and to negotiate a ceasefire and a political settlement with the Afghan government. (Read the full text of the agreement here.)
Many in the media are asking how the Taliban succeeded so quickly. Theyâre blaming the Biden administrationâs execution of the withdrawal, but that agreement has a lot to do with why things are so chaotic.
1/ Thereâs a lot of disinformation floating around on what exactly was agreed in Doha. The more you read this, the more you realize how amazingly out of touch our current commentary has become.
2/ This document specifically spells out a mutual understanding that the Taliban will negotiate a settlement with the Afghan government, just as they did. Less clear, but 100% tacitly implied throughout, is that the Taliban will be the new rulers.
3/ In other words, we knew those âsettlementsâ were surrender agreements. All the Taliban had to do was show this document to each Afghan provincial leader and they could see we were now backing the Taliban.
4/ We even spell out our intent to then provide the Taliban, as Afghanâs new ruling party, development aid, UN recognition, and immunity from any future US military incursion or even threat.
5/ This wasnât an intelligence failure. We agreed with them in advance on what they would do. This is a failure to properly advise and inform the incoming administration of a critical foreign policy agreement.
It’s clear that Trumpâs failure to agree to an orderly transition may have delayed Bidenâs teamâs full understanding of their agreement with the Taliban. Michael Semple of the Irish Times writes about the consequences of the agreement:
âThe US talked up the prospects of a…settlement and the hopes that it would hand over to a power-sharing administration including the Taliban. But throughout the 2018-2021 peace initiative, the Taliban leadership gave their fighters an entirely different narrative. Unambiguously….Taliban fighters were told that they had defeated the US in the war and that the US had agreed to hand over power to them as they left â âthe Americans have handed us the keys of the presidential palaceâ was a frequently repeated phrase.â
Semple adds: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)
âCritically, the 2020 deal between the US and Taliban severely curtailed the use of American air power against the Taliban, although [it allowed] the Taliban…to fight on against the Afghan government.â
The US basically quit the battlefield a year before our troops actually left. In the last year, when the US should have been building the resilience of Afghan forces, we reduced our financial support for the Afghan government, weakening a key military advantage which Afghan forces had enjoyed over the Taliban. And after the agreement was signed, the Taliban enjoyed full freedom of movement across the country and started to build their military pressure.
Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001, subsequently ran two non-profits in Kandahar for 10 years. She speaks Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two NATO commanders, and later for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Her blog post about the fall of Afghanistan is well worth your time:
âTwo decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with US fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints….I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince US decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were.â
She notes that the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan:
âThe Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. âTalibanâ worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders.â
About Hamid Karzai, Americaâs first puppet president, she says: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)
âDuring my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani governmentâs role in the Talibanâs initial rise, I learned….[that] Hamid Karzai, the US choice to pilot Afghanistan after we ousted their regime, was in fact the go-between who negotiated those very Talibanâs initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994….Karzai may [also] have been a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994,â
She also wonders about the role of Trumpâs chief negotiator for the agreement, US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Heâs an old friend of Karzai’s. She asks:
âCould…Biden truly have found no one else for that job, to replace an Afghan-American with obvious conflicts of interest, who was close to former Vice President Dick Cheney and who lobbied in favor of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan when the Taliban were last in power?â
Chayes concludes: (emphasis by Wrongo)
âI hold US civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for todayâs outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can…find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the US military is subject to civilian control. Andthe two primary problems identified above â corruption and Pakistan â are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But…no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.â
When you read all of this, you realize that America’s end game in Afghanistan was bound to be a clusterfuck!
Wrongo has a problem with those who are treating the instantaneous collapse of the Afghani government and army as some sort of argument against Bidenâs decision to abide by Trumpâs negotiated agreement. The media has now decided to cover the withdrawal, but out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC in 2020, a total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan.
Those five minutes covered the February agreement between the US and the Taliban.
It shouldnât be a surprise that Americans are shocked at what the media are now feeding them. And isnât it astounding how the people who were totally wrong about Afghanistan keep being invited back on TV to tell us what we should be thinking about whatâs happening now?
Time to wake up America! We need to acknowledge the errors by giving them a true perspective, even if it doesnât fit the Blue vs. Red agenda.
To help you wake up, listen to this new tune by The Killers, âQuiet Townâ, about the good and bad in small town life:
On October 19, 2001, 38 days after the WTC was bombed, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Missouriâs Whiteman AFB as they prepared to fly across the world to inflict American vengeance on Afghanistan. He told them:
âWe have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.â
And here we are: After dropping over 81,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years, weâve failed to change the way they live. So maybe, as Rumsfeld said, we should change the way we live. Maybe we start with less military meddling.
Maybe start by reining in our Exceptionalism and our âwar is the answerâ reflexes. Maybe that would be an appropriate response to our defeat in Afghanistan. Maybe we should do this before weâre dragged into more wars. On to cartoons.
Thereâs more than one withdrawal going on:
Sadly true:
Sam gives his usual exit advice, gets it back:
The real strategic mistake:
Old vs new Talibs:
Bush famously painted us in the corner of both Iraq and Afghanistan:
Nothing changes when youâre walking an infinite loop:
Portage Glacier, outside Whittier, AK – August 2021 photo by nowake
Yesterday, Wrongo finished Michael Lewisâs book âThe Premonitionâ, that tells the story of our failure to contain COVID-19. It is told through the eyes of a cast of compelling characters, including a California public health officer, a couple of idiosyncratic MDs who are White House advisers and a brilliant academic scientist whose lab revolutionized the identification of viral pathogens.
We learn how the pandemic exploited the gaps in the public health system of the worldâs most advanced country that Lewis shows to be fragmented and weak politically. Moreover, he shows that the CDCâs response was almost inert when it came to reports from the states that were seeing the first Covid cases.
Early on, the CDC basically had two positions on the pandemic. First, that it wasnât a big deal, it was overblown. And later, they made a quick pivot when it started spreading in the US. That change came far too late to contain the spread of the virus.
Lewis says little in The Premonition about the US official pandemic response. The organization that comes off the worst is the CDC and its leadership. The White House and Trump are mentioned in passing. Dr. Fauci is mentioned only a few times, while Deborah Birx is entirely absent. The White House COVID task force is seldom mentioned.
The bookâs takeaway is mostly about how we have built organizations that are excellent for studying “what happened” and publishing papers about past problems. But are incapable of real time response in a true public health emergency. This is because the top CDC job has been a political appointee since the Carter administration. Lewis told NPR how the institutional failure at the CDC came about:
âThe brave ones have all got their heads chopped off. So, it’s sort of institutionalized a cowardice that we’re going to need to face up to so that this business of punishing people who are doing their damnedest to try to save us from ourselves has got to stop.”
The characters in Lewisâs book have fascinating life stories: A thirteen-year-old girlâs school science project on how airborne pathogens spread, morphs with her scientist fatherâs help, into an important model of how Covid spreads.
A California public-health officer uses her skills and experience to see what the CDC misses and reveals important truths about our public health system. An informal group of doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, have the skills needed to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the bird and swine flus  ̶  everything except official permission to implement their findings on behalf of the American people.
One series of facts that floored Wrongo was how important children are to spreading a virus in our population. These insights started with the kidâs model mentioned above. From pages 90-91:
â…there were more than 100,000 K-12 [public] schools in the country, with 50 million children in them. Twenty-five million ride a bus to school….There were 70,000 buses in the entire US public transportation system, but 500,000 school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire US public transportation system.â
Moreover, school bus aisles are narrower than normal buses, and better for spreading disease. They observed that when kids stand at the bus stop, they crowd together, unlike adults who give each other personal space. In the halls at school, kids also crowd together. The conclusion was that kidsâ different sense of personal space has a key role in the spread of viral disease. More:
â…each elementary school child spent the day in a space with a radius of just 3.5 feet, which when they reached high school, expanded to four.â
The discoverer of this insight is one of the Wolverines, Carter Mecher, an MD who worked at the Atlanta VA hospital system. His conclusion?
âI couldnât have designed a better system for transmitting disease than our school systemâ
Wrongo didnât know that school closure was the most effective strategy to contain the spread of Covid before reading this book. We all know that few families wanted their kids to stay home from school. We know how politicized the issue of school closure became, even in states where it was mandated. There are 130,930 schools in America, all individually and locally managed. And itâs impossible to enforce a mandate on them from afar.
Between a weak public health system, an ossified CDC, and an inability to control the disease transmission in the 130k+ schools in America, Lewisâs book is a devastating look at our ability to deal with Covid and with whatever the next pandemic brings.
With Afghanistan, the delta variant and a looming hurricane hitting the northeast this weekend, it will be difficult to settle down for a Saturday Soother. But letâs give it a try.
Take a seat by a window and listen to “The Last Rose of Summer” by Leroy Anderson. It is part of his Irish Suite, and was arranged in 1947:
Sunrise, Atlantic Beach, FL August 2021 photo by Razvan Balotescu
The finger pointing has already begun, but it was always going to end badly. Should we be surprised? Sure, Biden has made mistakes, the same kind as those of his predecessors. He believed what he was told by the CIA and the military, neither of which should be trusted about anything they say regarding Afghanistan.
The foreign policy and military establishment are now doing everything they can to blame Biden, but the bottom line remains that Afghanistan is a massive failure on their part. They continued telling him the same bullshit they told Bush II, Obama, and Trump.
The images coming from Afghanistan are disturbing, and thereâs plenty of blame to go around. We spent $2 trillion to prop up the government that failed, and to train and equip the Afghan military over the past 20 years. And they fell in a week. (Full disclosure: Wrongo owns shares in a defense contractor that trained the Afghan military.)
âThe spectacular collapse of Afghanistanâs military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into {Kabul]… Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan governmentâs lowest-ranking officials.
The deals…were…described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a US official.
Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.â
Itâs almost like the Taliban were familiar with Afghan culture and society! Itâs clear that the US Military and Government sure as hell were not. Former Vice-President Cheney of Halliburton will probably need yet another heart transplant when he hears that Kabul fell without a shot fired.
Itâs difficult to know whether the CIA, military, and neo-con foreign policy types involved in criticizing Biden are liars or are deluded. Do they think that America just needed a little more time on the ground in Afghanistan? Or do they know the only real alternative here was an indefinite, colonial occupation, something they know shouldnât be politically or morally acceptable?
Inside the beltway, there are people who have devoted most of their adult lives to war in the greater Middle East. Obviously, they are going to oppose pulling out. It’s like setting their entire life’s work on fire. No one willingly admits their life’s work is a failure.
The idea that we need to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely has nothing to do with a coherent policy. It’s the neo-con ideology of American Exceptionalism: America is awesome, America kicks ass, America canât fail, it can only be failed by Biden.
In this case, our âExceptionalismâ as practiced by neo-cons like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Fred Kagan, has two parts: First, our mission is to save the world. Second, the Afghans are the reason we couldn’t save the world. Both are opposite sides of the same imperialistic coin of exceptionalism. Why are the Afghans responsible for the unraveling of our illusions? And, isn’t Afghanistan a part of our illusion?
âNone of those people have produced an adequate answer to the question of what the hell we were doing there, and what the hell we would do there for the next 10, 20, or 50 years. Sooner or later, we have to learn the lessons of history, because weâve been deaf to them for so long. In Vietnam, we shouldâve learned that the only people who really want the places in which we choose to make war are the people who live there.â
Weâve made a long series of bad decisions. First, we should have left Afghanistan after we helped the Northern Alliance beat the (then unpopular) Taliban. Instead, Bush II experimented with nation-building, drafting a constitution that created a strong central government in a country that is ruled locally. We then installed a puppet regime.
Now, weâre surprised that most people donât like being told what to do by outsiders.
We should have seen that the Afghan government we created would collapse if we left. The particulars, especially just how quickly it ended may be a surprise, but the error can be measured in weeks, not months. And thatâs not a big estimation error in a 20-year war.
There’s a lot of hindsight bias among the neo-cons and some Republicans who are saying Biden âlost Afghanistanâ. It was lost years ago. The same scenario could have played out whether Bush, Obama or Trump were leading the withdrawal.
What does it say about Afghanistan, if the government and the civilian military we supported with $ trillions would only stay in place if we kept our military there as an occupying force?
The faux outrage at Biden losing Afghanistan needs to be prioritized on the list of what really matters in America today (in no order):
Afghanistan
Our mediocre education system
The Covid pandemic
Fraying social cohesion
Climate change: forest fires/drought
Vote suppression
Domestic terrorism
Economic inequality
Media lies/disinformation
White supremacy and racism
Wrongo knows which one is his lowest priority. What priority is Afghanistan for you?
Now, our mission is clear: hold the Kabul airport as long as possible and get ALL US citizens and as many Afghan partners out as we can. Along with getting out the thousands of troops we sent in the last few days to secure the airport.
The scenes of chaos at the Kabul airport raises a question of whether we should have abandoned the Bagram Air Base on July 1. Itâs farther from Kabul and more difficult to defend, but we probably wouldnât be seeing its runways swarming with Afghans if we were departing from there.
We can debate the rest later.
Lost in the discussion is the pointless tragedy of our soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for what? Listen to Eric B. & Rakim, a hip-hop duo from NYC, perform their 1992 rap, âCasualties Of Warâ. They were rapping about Desert Storm, but Rakim was also predicting the future:
Sample lyric:
Cause I got a family that waits for my return To get back home is my main concern I’ma get back to New York in one piece but I’m bent in the sand that is hot as the city streets Sky lights up like fireworks blind me Bullets, whistlin over my head remind me… President Bush said attack Flashback to Nam, I might not make it back Half of my platoon came home in coffins…buried in the Storm In bits and pieces…ain’t no way I’m going back to war When I don’t know who or what I’m fighting for
Low tide, Wellfleet, Cape Cod, MA â July 2021 photo by Jennifer O’Leary
Ever since Biden decided to pull out of Afghanistan, the media are filled with stories about how the Taliban are on the march, and how the Afghan government is giving way before them. From the Guardian:
âThe Taliban have now overrun six provincial capitals in mere days. On Sunday the group claimed a huge symbolic victory when its fighters seized Kunduz, a strategic city close to the border with Tajikistan and an important political and military hub.â
âThe recent developments and gains in Afghanistan mark a sharp escalation in the pace of Taliban gains across Afghanistan, which for months had been focused on taking control of districts and increasing pressure on urban areas.â
âThe response from the US military to the Taliban gains was muted, showing clearly that the USâs 20-year war in Afghanistan is over and that it is for the Afghan forces to retake the cities overrun by the Taliban.â
Many politicians and former military have crawled back in front of microphones to pronounce the final withdrawal of US troops a strategic mistake. One retired UK general raised the specter of Afghanistan becoming once again, a base for international terrorism.
The thing these people arenât saying is that the US had only 2500 troops in Afghanistan just before announcing the pull-out, a number that wasnât going to provide significant resistance to the Taliban. And it wasnât sufficient to blunt a return of terrorists.
What we had was a token force with a primary responsibility to protect the US embassy.
Many media outlets are opining on how the Afghan conflict has entered a new, deadlier, and more destructive phase. Foreign Policy reports that the Talibanâs military tactics may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The NYT is saying that the situation on the ground lays bare a difficult predicament for Biden.
Itâs clear that for years, most of the fighting with the Taliban happened in the countryâs rural areas. Now, the Taliban are pushing into cities, and many more civilians will be injured or killed. The first thing the Taliban do in each city they capture is free Taliban prisoners and seize truckloads of weapons from police and military headquarters before the US can bomb them.
This allows them to increase their numbers, and arm them, despite taking casualties.
All of this, and the looming end of the role of women as near-equal members of Afghan society, has caused a paroxysm of regret in the media for ending our 20-year effort at nation-building in Afghanistan.
But whatâs wrong with Biden staying the course, doing what he said he was going to do? He needs to hold firm, even though there will likely be a âfall of Saigonâ moment sometime soon.
In less than 20 years after WWII, the US helped to create functioning democracies in Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Each of those successes involved nations with cohesive populations.
Thatâs not the case in Afghanistan: The Hazara, the Uzbek, the Pashtun, the Tajik all (more or less) detest each other. The Shiite and Sunni factions feel the same. This was never going to be a unified and functioning democracy. That wouldnât be cured by 20 more years of American occupation.
Adam Tooze, economist at Columbia University, reminds us that our 20-year intervention in Afghanistan has cost the US over $2.2 trillion dollars. In his blog post, âAfghanistan’s economy on the eve of the American exitâ he tells us that despite Afghanistanâs huge economic needs, the ratio of military to civilian development spending was in the order of ten to one. But in many years, Western aid spending exceeded the Afghan GDP.
He asks: Where did the money go?
The answer is that tens of $ billions were swallowed by corruption. Wealthy Afghans became large property owners in the Gulf states. Today, Afghanistanâs most valuable crop is opium, which isnât part of their GDP statistics. And since the early 2000s, opium cultivation has progressively increased.
Tooze points out the two successes: Afghan life expectancy has increased, driven by a rapid fall in infant mortality and big life expectancy gains for women. Women now outlive the men. Second, university enrollment: the number of students enrolled in universities has risen from 30,000 in 2003, to more than 180,000. In 2018, there were 49,000 female students vs. 7,200 in 2003.
Despite the good news, as per capita income increased, so has the poverty rate. Today, over half of Afghanistanâs population are officially counted as poor.
The widespread corruption and failed economic development only make rural Afghanistan a prime recruiting ground for the Taliban. The country is most likely on the verge of civil war. OTOH, itâs been a long time since the Taliban tried to manage a city. Kabul now has about 4 million residents. Letâs leave the closing thought to Tooze:
âWhat kind of regime could be established by the Taliban over such a city? What kind of future can they deliver for Afghanistan and for their constituency in the countryside? Little wonder that the Taliban have been assiduously courting Beijing. Afghanistan needs all the friends it can get.â
Wrongo has written 48 columns about US policy in Afghanistan. Itâs doubtful that this is the last, but letâs hope weâre nearly there.
Leaving Afghanistan should prompt us to rethink our countryâs place in the world: Should our military always be the first tool out of the toolbox? What did the US gain from being enmeshed in the Greater Middle East for the past 50 years?
Leaving Afghanistan should lead to a reckoning about these questions, and a consideration about what a more modest and realistic future US foreign policy would look like.
Gabriel Zucman and Gus Wezerek had an opinion piece in the NYT about the divergence between personal and corporate tax rates:
âIn the decades after World War II, close to 50% of American companiesâ earnings went to state and federal taxes. Economically, it was a golden period. Middle-class incomes grew at roughly the same rate as those of the richest Americans.
But as globalization gave companies the ability to choose where they recorded profits, Congress scrambled to keep their business by lowering corporate taxes. In 2018, American companies were taxed at an average effective rate of less than 14%, by our calculations.â
For the past 30 years, corporate tax breaks have helped business owners amass huge amounts of money, much of which is kept offshore. Their gain has been the loss for middle-class Americans, who have footed the bill, as Congress has supported our federal budgets by raising taxes on wages:
This chart shows the result of Republican policies. Corporate taxes are at an all-time low, while many profitable corporations pay no tax at all, and workersâ taxes on wages have risen. This has caused a huge and still growing gap in income and wealth between the rich who lead Americaâs corporations and the rest of us.
Letâs spend a minute on some tax arcana. There used to be a tax regulation that kept income out of tax havens. It is called unitary taxation, a method of allocating corporate profit to a particular state (or country) where that corporation has a taxable presence. It attributes the corporation’s total worldwide profit (or loss) to each jurisdiction, based on factors such as the proportion of sales, assets, or payroll in that jurisdiction.
If this were in effect, it would slow the parking of profits in tax havens by multinationals. California and other states used to use unitary taxation. It was the subject of two US Supreme Court cases: Mobil Oil v. Vermont and Exxon v. Wisconsin, both decided in 1980 in favor of the unitary tax principle. In other words, in favor of the states.
Thatâs when St. Ronnie pressured California and other states to adopt a restricted version known as the water’s edge method that excludes the profits of foreign affiliates from a state’s pre-apportionment tax base. This allowed profit-shifting to tax haven affiliates to mushroom to what we see today.
Biden is trying to end the race to the bottom on corporate tax rates. But even if Congress approves the 15% global minimum corporate tax, it wonât be sufficient to close the growing economic gap between Americaâs corporations and its workers. Taxing multinationals at 15% would still leave them facing a lower rate than the average American pays in state and federal income tax.
Whatâs really needed is a 25% percent minimum corporate tax. That would bring in about $200 billion in additional revenue annually. Over 10 years, that would be enough to pay for nationwide high-speed internet, free community college and universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.
All are worthy uses of tax dollars, but itâs doubtful that all Senate Democrats, much less enough Senate Republicans would support a 25% floor for corporations.
A Republican Congress took a shot at reforming the hiding of offshore profits with their 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which failed. Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis suggest profits booked in foreign tax havens have not declined since the law was passed.
In 2018, US corporations reported more profit in Ireland than in Mexico, China, Germany and France combined. For example, in 2018, Facebook made $15 billion in profit in Ireland, about $10 million for each of its Irish employees, while Bristol Myers Squibbâs reported profit in Ireland worked out to about $7.5 million per employee.
For decades, Congress tried unsuccessfully to play catch-up as business owners and a handful of tax havens have driven our tax policy. The result is that weâre a nation where working-class Americans are left with underfunded public schools while the wealthiest Americans are boarding rocket ships in some ego-fueled game.
Time for a post-tropical storm Elsa break! Just when you think all is lost, you discover it isnât. For the first time, Queen Elizabeth has decided that you can now have a picnic on the front lawn of Buckingham Palace. Donât get too excited, there are rules: No knives to slice your cheese, no dogs, no prosecco. Besides, 78,000 people are already on the waiting list:
Now take a moment, and listen to Czech composer BedĆich Smetanaâs String Quartet No.1 In E Minor “From My Life“, the Largo movement by the Amadeus Quartet, recorded in 2013:
Pew Research Center just published a new analysis of validated 2020 voters thatâs worth your time. Pew surveyed adults it could identify as definitely having voted last November, based on voting records, a methodology considered more accurate than exit polls.
Suburban voters were a major factor helping Biden win. While Trump won the suburbs by 2 points in 2016, Biden won them by 11 points in 2020, a 13-point swing. Considering that the suburbs accounted for just over half of all voters, that was a big win for Biden.
Biden improved on Clintonâs share of suburban voters: 45% supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54% for Biden in 2020. Trumpâs share of the rural vote grew: In 2016, he won 59% of rural voters, but tallied 65% in 2020.
Trump gained in both rural and urban areas. He won 65% of rural voters, a 6-point increase from 2016. And while cities remained majority-Democratic, Trumpâs support there jumped by 9 points, to 33%.
According to Pew, Biden made larger gains among married men than with any other demographic group. Thatâs an even larger gain for Biden than Trump made among Latino voters.
Trump won married men only by a 54% to 44% margin, a 20-point decline from his 62% to 32% victory in 2016. He won veteran households by a 55% to 43% margin, down by 14 points from 2016.
Bidenâs winning electoral coalition looked like Hillary Clintonâs losing one: Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters and those of other races cast about 40% of all Biden votes. Black voters remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Democratic Party, voting 92%-8% for Biden.
The gender gap in 2020 was narrower than in 2016, both because of gains that Biden made among men, and because of gains Trump made among women.
In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points.
Trump won a significantly larger share of womenâs votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Bidenâs share among women was nearly identical to Clintonâs (55% vs. 54%).
Trump won a majority of White women: 53% of White women chose Trump, up by 6 points from 2016.
Biden improved among White non-college voters:
White voters without a college degree were critical to Trumpâs victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64% to 28% over Clinton. In 2018, Democrats won 36% of the White, non-college vote, and in 2020, Biden maintained the Democratsâ 2018 share with the group, improving upon Clintonâs 2016 performance by 5 percentage points, to 33%.
Even though voter turnout rose by 7 percentage points over 2016, the turnout battle wasnât decisive. Democrats thought they would overwhelm Trump with a surge in turnout among young and nonwhite voters, but Pew shows that neither candidate held a decisive advantage in the highest turnout election since 1900.
Instead, Trump turned out his base, while Biden lost ground among nearly every Democratic base constituency. The data show that Trump turned out 5% more of his base (73%) Â than Biden turned out of his (68%).
This was an improvement for Trump, who had a 2% turnout margin over Clinton in 2016. Bottom line, there was a far deeper support and enthusiasm for Trump than Democrats had imagined: 13 million more people voted for Trump in 2020 than did in 2016.
It was Bidenâs gains among more moderate voting groups that carried him over the goal line.
From a demographic perspective, for the first time, the silent and boomer generations were a minority of voters. Gen X, Millennials, and Generation Z accounted for a majority. Generation Z (18 to 23 in 2020) and the Millennial generation (24 to 39 in 2020) favored Biden over Trump by a margin of 20 percentage points, though Trump gained 8 points among Millennials compared with his 2016 performance.
This is the clearest view weâre gotten on how different groups voted in 2020, and crucially, how those votes had shifted since 2016. It shows that Biden failed to improve his margins among virtually every voting group that Clinton won in 2016, whether it was young voters, women, Black voters, unmarried voters or voters in urban areas.
What about 2022? Hispanic voters, along with suburban Whites, will remain major focuses for both Parties. Both will be trying to cement their gains while working to improve in the other areas. The 2018 mid-terms were a referendum on Trump. The GOP will be making the 2022 mid-terms a referendum on the Democratic Party. As Wrongo said here, Democrats need to stop focusing solely on the issues, when the opponent is focusing on killing democracy.
The headline is that we should brace for more years of grueling trench warfare between the two Parties. And to top it off? The Parties seem to be evenly matched.
Bush famously painted us in the corner of both Iraq and Afghanistan:
