On October 19, 2001, 38 days after the WTC was bombed, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Missouri’s Whiteman AFB as they prepared to fly across the world to inflict American vengeance on Afghanistan. He told them:
“We 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.”
And here we are: After dropping over 81,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years, we’ve 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 “war is the answer” reflexes. Maybe that would be an appropriate response to our defeat in Afghanistan. Maybe we should do this before we’re dragged into more wars. On to cartoons.
There’s 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 you’re walking an infinite loop:
Sunset, Mt. Hood, OR – August 2021 photo by CampsG. Note the haze from wildfires.
Biden’s effort to reframe the Afghanistan conversation to a decision-to-withdraw narrative rather than an execution-of-the-withdrawal narrative – at least for now – hasn’t controlled the narrative. But it’s still early days of media spinning about our failure in Afghanistan.
“Withdrawing from Afghanistan was always going to be a bloody, chaotic affair no matter what. That’s why no one wanted to do it: It was pretty obvious how it would go down, and no one with any sense wants that as part of their presidential legacy. But the bloodshed was inevitable once the decision to leave was made.”
But are the events of the past few days horrific? Maybe you should re-think that – they haven’t been. Remembering how the Taliban operated when they were in control in the 1990s, we should have expected much worse. The Taliban’s takeover has been far smoother and less vicious than at least Wrongo expected.
That isn’t a pro-Taliban comment. But maybe 20 years of being hit by US bombs and drone attacks has moderated them, at least temporarily. Things could change rapidly. And the chaos we’re seeing, and that the media are complaining about, is simply what happens when a military must withdraw under armed pressure.
A harsh truth is that any US evacuation from Kabul airport requires the concurrence of the Taliban. The US controls the military side of the one runway airport. Here’s what the Kabul airport looks like:
The plan, as articulated by the Biden administration, is that evacuations will continue at least until August 31 at roughly 5000 a day, or 70,000 people in total by then. That of course, depends on the continued cooperation of the Taliban.
This once again calls into question the competence of the US military’s contingency planning. We have a supposed agreement with the Taliban that allows the US to continue to control the airspace and the Taliban to cooperate in allowing foreigners and Afghans who want to depart, safe passage to the airport.
Again, we should question General Milley’s decision to shut down Bagram airbase in July, apparently without ensuring Kabul would be defensible in a worst-case scenario. As Wrongo stated, Bagram is more easily defended and has longer runways and greater capacity than Kabul. Planning of this type is Milley’s job. Early indications so far are that it wasn’t done competently.
Think about how we plan to evacuate our ± 5,000 soldiers protecting the Kabul airport once all of the people we’re trying to evacuate leave. Who protects their exit? Has Milley planned for that?
However, for fiscal year 2021, the US Congress appropriated only $3 billion for Afghanistan’s fighting forces, the lowest amount since 2008. Remember that the fiscal year started on October 1, 2020. This diminution of US support came after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said his government cannot support its army for even six months without US financial aid. This practically guaranteed that the front-line Afghan troops wouldn’t be paid. What was the Trump administration thinking?
Link that to comments by Afghanistan’s Central Bank head, Ajmal Ahmady, who said that the country’s supply of physical US dollars is “close to zero.” Afghanistan has some $9 billion in reserves, mostly held outside the country, with some $7 billion held in the US. These funds are now frozen.
“On Friday, the central banker received a call saying the country wouldn’t get further shipments of US dollars, though the next one was supposed to arrive on Sunday. The next shipment never arrived…Seems like our partners had good intelligence as to what was going to happen.”
Facts don’t lie: the US believed things were heading south and didn’t send the usual cash infusion. So, the administration can’t say they were completely surprised by the speed of the Taliban takeover, somebody high up had figured it out.
A key question that politicians and the media are asking is: “When did we know that the government would fall?” Some would say they knew it from the early days of the war. This from Laura Jedeed:
“I remember Afghanistan well. I deployed there twice — once in 2008, and again in 2009–2010. It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left. And here we are today.”
There are many, many military who deployed there who share that view.
For Wrongo, it was clear in 2020 when Trump and Pompeo negotiated a deal with the Taliban, without the Afghan government in the room. That insured that their government would fall.
The military loss of Afghanistan isn’t the end of the world. It’s awful, but there’s a difference. So everyone should calm down. Afghanistan is gone. We’re out of there, and the Taliban are back.
But stop the anger. That’s only a reflex. Think about what country this describes:
“A fractious country comprised of warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; unable to wade beyond shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, and so they perish—in the span of a breath—without ever reaching the promised shore.”
Today, it describes Afghanistan. Tomorrow, is it us?
Sand Beach, Stonington ME – 2021 Photo by Erin Hutchinson Via Maine Nature Lovers
Billions of words will be written about America’s spectacular and embarrassing failure in Afghanistan. Today, let’s focus on a few of the failures in Afghanistan by our military. For context, America along with our western allies, have failed badly in the four Middle East wars we’ve engaged in over the past 20 years: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and ISIS in Iraq (again), and Syria.
We’ve had 20 years to think about our goals, and to refine our military strategy and tactics. In each case, we fought an enemy that had no air or naval power, who largely had light weapons (rifles, machine guns and rocket grenades), light truck-type vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns, and the ever-present Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).
In Afghanistan, the Taliban enemy favored using speed and maneuver tactics over guerilla warfare.
The Guardian offers background on our military’s training in Afghanistan:
“It started its multibillion-dollar training of Afghan forces in 2002 and three years later took control of training both the police and military, so US military trainers have had nearly two decades to ready the Afghan forces for the Taliban insurgency.”
And when we took over standing up a national Afghan army, we began by transforming it from a mobile light-infantry force that was the equivalent of the Taliban’s, into a combined-arms service with army, air force, and special forces elements.
That is, we remade them in our military’s image and likeness.
This decision meant that the costs of training, equipping, and maintaining the Afghan National Army would be ruinous, but the US taxpayer was paying for it, so not a problem. We had to teach them map reading because our way of fighting is coordinates-based. We taught them to fly helicopters, and to maintain them. We taught them the logistics necessary to get spare parts and aviation gas to remote bases.
This created the self-licking ice cream cone, a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. Our military’s task required advanced military weapons, supplies and training that could only be provided by our glorious military-industrial complex defense contractors.
It worked for 20 years.
There’s a US military agency called the “Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Redevelopment” (SIGAR) that monitors and audits our spending in Afghanistan. SIGAR found that since 2005, the US military had been attempting to evaluate the battle-readiness of the Afghan troops they had been training, but by 2010, acknowledged that its monitoring and evaluation procedures:
“…failed to measure…factors such as leadership, corruption and motivation – all factors that could affect a unit’s ability to put its staffing and equipment to use during actual war-fighting”.
By 2014, it was decided that those assessment reports should be classified, presumably to hide the poor results. SIGAR also found the US military was persistently over-optimistic about Afghan military capability, even though it had no reliable evidence to justify that assessment.
Know that the Generals in charge of Afghanistan through these many years weren’t dumb enough to think that they were building an Afghan army that could win a war with the Taliban. But they said just that. And according to the WaPo, they lied their asses off the whole time:
“In the summer of 2011, Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV made a round of public appearances to boast that he had finally solved a problem that had kept US troops bogged down in Afghanistan….Under his watch…US military advisers and trainers had transformed the ragtag Afghan army and police into a professional fighting force that could defend the country and keep the Taliban at bay.”
More:
“…later….Caldwell said….the Obama administration’s decision to spend $6 billion a year to train and equip the Afghan security forces had produced a remarkable turnaround. He predicted that the Taliban-led insurgency would subside and that the Afghans would take over responsibility for securing their country by the end of 2014, enabling US combat troops to leave.”
Now we see the reality: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“…according to documents obtained for the forthcoming Washington Post book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” US military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on US money and firepower…..Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces…”
The US military leaders lied – to Congress, and to the American people. They classified the data that their lies were based on, so oversight was mostly impossible. If you need to lie for 10 years about the progress you’re making on the job, it’s likely that you’re bad at your job, the project is simply wrong on its face, or both.
And this week, despite Biden and others saying it was a complete surprise that Kabul fell without a shot, US intelligence officials admitted to NBC on the condition of anonymity, that there was in fact intelligence indicating a Taliban takeover could happen as quickly as it did. A Western intelligence official said:
“…there absolutely was intelligence reporting that it could happen this fast. This was not a surprise.”
A US official said: “we knew the Taliban would take over….We knew most Afghans wouldn’t fight. It was faster than expected, but not that much.”
Now they tell us. What they told us for 10+ years was a pipe dream. That’s why it’s folly to listen to former generals and politicians who suggest that things would have been any different if we waited another six months before withdrawing.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the bulk of it falls on the military. They were on the ground.
They were the ones who built an Afghan military that was completely unsuitable for the battle at hand.
They apparently never grasped the full extent of the Afghan corruption that was undermining the mission.
They advised four US presidents that things would work out if they could just have a little more time and a few more troops.
No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. No one wants to admit they can’t do the job they’ve been tasked with. These things also happened to the generals in Vietnam, and the Pentagon swore at the time it would never happen again.
But it did, once they found themselves in a similar situation.
We shouldn’t forget that the Afghan military did fight. They’ve been fighting for years, taking many more casualties than we did. According to Brown University, about 70,000 of them died during the same period that the US military lost 2,442. Many in the Afghan military hadn’t been paid in months. Some were sent to remote bases to fight without food and other basic supplies. No wonder they surrendered their weapons without a shot.
As a former US Army officer, Wrongo is sad to say that Afghanistan will be remembered as a great shining military disaster, a head-on collision of the neo-con nation-building fantasy with reality.
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 there’s 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.)
“The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s 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 government’s 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.”
It’s almost like the Taliban were familiar with Afghan culture and society! It’s 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.
It’s 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 shouldn’t 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 can’t fail, it can only be failed by Biden.
In this case, our “Exceptionalism” 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?
“None 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 we’ve been deaf to them for so long. In Vietnam, we should’ve learned that the only people who really want the places in which we choose to make war are the people who live there.”
We’ve 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, we’re surprised that most people don’t 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 that’s 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 “lost Afghanistan”. 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. It’s farther from Kabul and more difficult to defend, but we probably wouldn’t 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, “Casualties Of War”. 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 – 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:
“The 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.”
“The 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.“
“The response from the US military to the Taliban gains was muted, showing clearly that the US’s 20-year war in Afghanistan is over and that it is for the Afghan forces to retake the cities overrun by the Taliban.”
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 aren’t saying is that the US had only 2500 troops in Afghanistan just before announcing the pull-out, a number that wasn’t going to provide significant resistance to the Taliban. And it wasn’t 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 Taliban’s 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.
It’s clear that for years, most of the fighting with the Taliban happened in the country’s 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 what’s 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 “fall of Saigon” 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.
That’s 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 wouldn’t 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, “Afghanistan’s economy on the eve of the American exit” he tells us that despite Afghanistan’s 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, Afghanistan’s most valuable crop is opium, which isn’t 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 Afghanistan’s 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, it’s been a long time since the Taliban tried to manage a city. Kabul now has about 4 million residents. Let’s leave the closing thought to Tooze:
“What 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.”
Wrongo has written 48 columns about US policy in Afghanistan. It’s doubtful that this is the last, but let’s hope we’re nearly there.
Leaving Afghanistan should prompt us to rethink our country’s 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.
The WaPo and every other outlet reported that Biden has committed to ending US troop involvement in Afghanistan by September 11, 2021:
“The goal is to move to “zero” troops by September….This is not conditions-based. The president has judged that a conditions-based approach…is a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever.”
We’ve been in Afghanistan for 20 years, and leaving means that the Taliban have won. It also means that they will wind up ruling the country for a second time, since the Kabul government will not survive without US and NATO support.
That’s unfortunate, but it’s just reality. Mistakes have been made in Afghanistan by every president since Carter, who in 1979, supported the mujaheddin rebels, Islamic hardliners against the Russians.
But there is some concern that withdrawal of our troops doesn’t end our efforts on the ground. The NYT has reported:
“Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the US will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats…”
Stars and Stripes says that, according to a Defense Department report, more than 18,000 contractors remain in Afghanistan, while official troop totals had been reduced to 2,500. In essence, Biden isn’t ending the Afghanistan War, he’s privatizing it:
“About 4,700 of the contractors are Afghans hired locally, but nearly three-quarters come from outside the country, including about a third who are US citizens…”
This amounts to roughly seven contractors for every US soldier on the ground in Afghanistan. The US has announced intentions to retain at least two military bases in Afghanistan after the official troop drawdown. Staying in-country will help protect the profits of the US military-industrial complex.
We also covet the Afghans’ mineral wealth. A 2007 US Geological Service survey discovered nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits, including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium, which is used in the manufacture of batteries. The Grey Zone reports that an internal Pentagon memo stated that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”
The Afghan government is largely a creation of the US. Its military is funded by us at a cost of around $4 billion per year. Unless Congress cuts it off, this support will continue alongside large-scale US foreign aid programs that amount to another $1 billion per year.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. The US doesn’t want to “lose” Afghanistan to Russia and China, which makes today’s calculation not very different from the 19th-century “great game” between Great Britain and Czarist Russia.
All presidents after Carter were involved to a greater or lesser extent in trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern democratic state. And all have failed. This should have been knowable to these presidents and to their military advisors.
The NYT had an Op-Ed by Timothy Kudo, a former Marine Captain who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kudo remembered:
“…I once asked a village elder whether he knew why I was there. He responded that we’d always been there. Confused, I asked him about the attacks on America. He said, “But you are Russians, no?” After 30 years of war, it didn’t matter to him who was fighting but only that there was still fighting.”
We should have left Afghanistan after the death of bin Laden. Staying when there could be no defeat of the Taliban made the war the same as Vietnam. We’ve been down this road before: The Taliban want a medieval society, an “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” and they have time on their side.
Like the American withdrawal from Vietnam, Biden’s decision will be seen as a sign of weakness, encouraging Russia, China, Iran, and others to challenge US interests elsewhere. But Russia left Afghanistan in 1989. Who remembers? Is Russia considered a patsy on the world stage?
Afghanistan has been the “graveyard of empires” since Alexander the Great, for long enough that the phrase’s origins are unclear. We should accept that an intervention-first mentality has failed here and will fail elsewhere.
Will leaving Afghanistan prompt us to rethink our country’s place in the world? Could it be the end of the era of our nation-building fantasies? 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 as it has been for the past 50 years?
Biden’s decision should lead to a reckoning about these questions, and a consideration about what a more modest and realistic US foreign policy would look like.
But Biden will remain under pressure from the military, the Beltway Bandits, and many politicians not to withdraw.
He needs to hold firm.
And yes, this means there will be a “fall of Saigon” moment sometime soon.
First to politics: Joe Biden rolled to a big win in South Carolina, and billionaire Tom Steyer and former mayor Pete Buttigieg both folded their tents. Some in the media say that Biden is once again the front runner, but Sanders’s win in Nevada remains significant, and he remains on track to pick up a lot of delegates in California and Texas.
The real news from South Carolina is that Biden has become the Not-Sanders candidate. For Super Tuesday, Bloomberg essentially replaces Steyer as the billionaire in the race. Super Tuesday results are less than 48 hours away, and after that, we’ll have a real idea of who really remains a viable candidate.
Second, peace in Afghanistan: After 18 years of war, we signed an agreement with the Taliban. The deal does not end the civil war, but it has placed the outcome of the conflict in the hands of the Afghan people. Heather Cox Richardson quotes Laurel Miller, the former deputy and then acting Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2013 to 2017 for the State Department: (emphasis by Wrongo)
 “There’s nothing new in the Joint Declaration signed in Kabul today. It reaffirms existing commitments and it re-states some of US-Taliban agreement. Its purpose is evidently political symbolism.”
She explained: It includes the Afghan government and its opposition in future discussions. It draws down US troops to 8600 people—the number who were there when Trump took office, and promises “all” will be gone within 14 months. The 8600 drawdown has long been planned. In exchange, the Taliban will “not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qa’ida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”
Miller’s conclusion:
“The Taliban got a lot. It got its main goal—a clear timeline for US withdrawal—and fast removal of sanctions and prisoner releases. The US got the power to decide whether “vaguely-stated conditions are met, so that in reality can withdraw when it chooses—will be political not military decision.” The Afghan government didn’t get much, but “this deal wasn’t really about the Afghan government.”
Trump, America’s Man of Peace. This looks a lot like what he did in North Korea, a PR moment that resembles a deal, but turns out not to be much of a deal.
Finally, the WaPo features a new report published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, that clearly demonstrates the disconnect between the “great” economy described by economists, and the economy experienced by regular people. This chart shows the problem:
From the article (emphasis by Wrongo)
“In 1985, the typical male worker could cover a family of four’s major expenditures (housing, health care, transportation, education) on 30 weeks of salary….By 2018 it took 53 weeks. Which is a problem, there being 52 weeks in a year.”
Lead study author Oren Cass (formerly Mitt Romney’s domestic policy director) calls this calculation the Cost-of-Thriving Index. It measures the median male annual salary against four major household expenditures:
Housing: the annual rent for a three-bedroom house in the 40th percentile of the local housing market
Health care: the annual premium on a typical family health insurance policy
Transportation: the average cost of owning and operating a car driven 15,000 miles per year
Education: the average cost of tuition, fees, and room and board at a four-year public college
In 1985, the typical male breadwinner could cover those costs, and still have 22 weeks of pay left for other family needs, such as food, clothing, entertainment and savings. Today, the typical salary doesn’t even cover the four basics.
They also looked at female earners. The typical woman needed to work 45 weeks to cover the four big annual expenses in 1985. Today she needs 66 weeks. The most astonishing conclusion is that it was easier for a female breadwinner to provide for her family in 1985 than it is for a lone male earner today.
Remember that the study comes from a conservative-leaning institute. Here’s Cass:
“You can have a rising GDP….but if it’s in the context of collapsing families and people no longer getting married and declining fertility rates and so on and so forth, you haven’t necessarily enhanced well-being.”
Wake up America! The GOP has undone 50 years of economic gains that produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice than the country had ever known before, or since.
They have chosen candidates whose real agenda was to assist the corporatocracy in fleecing the very people who voted for them. Their candidates ran on issues like the Second Amendment, abortion, gay marriage and immigration. And then, the GOP shifted the tax burden onto the middle class. They deregulated industry and socialized corporate losses, eliminating any downside risk for banks.
We can begin undoing these things by electing Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in November.
Light snow and morning fog, Yosemite NP CA – December 2019 photo by worldpins
Wrongo and Ms. Right visited the WWII museum in New Orleans last week. In most ways, it was the last war that engaged all of America. At the start of the war, we were woefully under resourced, our army had more horses than tanks. People became deeply involved in the war effort.
During the war, Wrongo as a very young boy, managed to lose our family’s sugar ration card. Businesses gave their production capacity over to the country’s war needs. President Roosevelt was on the radio each week, keeping support for the war effort high. WWII lasted for six years, from 1939-1945.
You know where this is going: Last week, we learned that our government has covered up the reality of how we were doing in Afghanistan, much like our government covered up the truth during the Vietnam War.
We learned this due to work by WaPo reporter Craig Whitlock who has given us an indispensable look into our continuing failure in Afghanistan. The documents include transcripts of interviews with soldiers, diplomats, and others with direct experience in the war effort. Excerpts:
The WaPo documents contradict years of public statements from US presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that we were making progress in Afghanistan and that the war was worth fighting:
Bush, Obama and so far, Trump, have all failed us miserably for the past 18+ years. The war has cost America $975 billion-plus tens of $ billions spent by the VA on the wounds of Afghanistan veterans, a price that will rise for the next six decades. The most serious costs are the 2,434 US deaths and 20,646 wounded in action.
The Afghan mess was made worse by piling lie upon lie. We now know that the top brass in the military knew all along that we were losing, and that three successive White Houses also knew.
The greatest tragedy is that the losing is still ongoing.
These revelations are an indictment of our senior military leaders. We had advantages in resources and technology in Afghanistan (we often outnumbered the insurgents on the battlefield) and still lost. But beyond that, it indicts our political leaders, who need to understand our strategy, and be a check on our military.
Time to wake up America! This is also an indictment of all of us, for not paying attention. For not insisting on ending it years ago!
We’ve managed to blow through vast resources that were desperately needed at home. We’ve stood by while our government fruitlessly sacrificed the lives of many of our men and women. We grew our National Debt beyond what we needed to do, and got stuck in another foreign quagmire.
When we finally feel either shame or anger about Afghanistan and that we were lied to, we can take the first steps to political reform.
Man standing in rubble of the North Tower late on 9/11/2001, calls out in vain to possible WTC survivors – Photo by Doug Kanter
People say that they will never forget 9/11, but what Wrongo remembers is that it was the proximate cause of the war in Afghanistan, starting with our invasion on October 7th, 2001.
And now, we’ve been there for 18 years. The war in Afghanistan has led to the deaths of over 2,400 US soldiers, with another 1,100 coalition troops killed. Over 62,000 Afghan security forces personnel have died. Tens of thousands of Taliban fighters and thousands of Afghan civilians have also died. We’ve spent Trillions of dollars that could have been used here at home to make the lives of Americans better.
Eighteen years after the 9/11 attacks, it is still “wartime” in America. The War on Terror has been the primary driver for our government’s weakening the Bill of Rights. In the panic after 9/11, the GW Bush administration pushed through the Patriot Act, along with measures that permit torture, illegal surveillance, and indefinite detention without charges or trial. Our whistle-blower protections were weakened.
If these attacks on the Bill of Rights continue, we’ll have gone full-circle: back to a post-Constitutional America, sharing much with how colonial America was governed by the British King.
With this 9/11 Afghanistan meditation as background, after 18 years of fighting, what are we to make of Trump’s botched Afghan peace talks?
He was right to try. It’s past time that we exit Afghanistan. Much like when we left Vietnam, talks with the Taliban are not about ending the war, they’re about limiting US future military participation in Afghanistan.
In 1973, Nixon tried to create the appearance that we were exiting Vietnam on our own terms. We settled for the flawed “Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam.” Under that pact, American prisoners of war were freed by North Vietnam, and the last US combat troops in the south left for home, completing a withdrawal begun several years earlier.
Primary responsibility for defending South Vietnam fell to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam who we knew were incapable of holding the country. Our message to both North and South was: We’re outta here; you guys sort this out. And within two years, the Republic of Vietnam was gone.
Now, our military wants to shift its focus to China and Russia. So, here we go again, looking for a pretext that makes it seem that we’re leaving on our own terms, only this time, from Afghanistan.
In return, the US would withdraw 5,000 of our 14,000 troops. We had no assurance that the Afghan government would agree to the deal, since the Taliban had refused to negotiate with them. Trump now says the deal is dead. Republicans think Trump’s move is an opportunity to reset the terms of the peace deal, which faced bipartisan criticism here, along with rejection by the Afghans.
Maybe.
Was much lost by walking away? Trump had planned on making a splashy announcement about bringing troops home on 9/11. He must have been channeling Camp David, where Jimmy Carter negotiated a peace agreement with Egypt and Israel in 1978, and where Bill Clinton did the same with the PLO and Israel in 2000. So, Trump’s lost something.
But he realized the meeting wasn’t going to happen. The Taliban wasn’t going to visit the US unless the deal was signed, but Trump wanted more deal-making, followed by a signing at Camp David. The Taliban aren’t fools. Getting on a plane without a signed deal could have landed them in Guantanamo, not in Washington DC.
Peace isn’t obtained by photo-op. It requires sound planning, the participation of all parties, and exacting negotiations. Offering to host the Taliban during 9/11 also shows tone-deafness. These are the very people who gave cover to Osama Bin Laden!
However and whenever the US leaves, much like in Vietnam, the Taliban will become the government of Afghanistan, despite our 18-year effort. We now seem unwilling to say: “you guys sort this out”, so our longest war will continue. It will be accompanied by more death, and more money flushed down the rat hole.
We should also expect most Republicans and quite a few Democrats will remain silent.
Have all of these lives lost, and the trillions of dollars spent, taught us anything?
London street art by Bambi  – 2017 photo by Wrongo. Since then, she has done another version, where the bag says: “I love Meghan”.
On October 7, 2001 The US military with British support, began a bombing campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. That mission was called Operation Enduring Freedom. So, what has endured in the 18 years since we started bombing the Taliban? Mostly corruption. The Economist has a damning report: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“Last year was the deadliest on record for civilians, according to the United Nations. America’s air force dropped more bombs in 2018 than at any other point in the war. Despite that support, the government is slowly losing ground. It now controls barely half the country’s territory, albeit two-thirds of its people.”
US forces have shifted their strategy to trying to inflict maximum casualties on the Taliban, who now control more territory than at any time since its ouster from power in 2001. This is the same as the “body count” strategy that we tried in Vietnam. But the Taliban are winning, despite America’s best efforts. We’ve backed a corrupt government that the Afghan people do not trust. The Economist illustrates that point:
“A group of middle-aged drivers explain the difference between the Taliban and the government. Both groups take money from drivers on the road, says Muhammad Akram…both are violent. But when the Taliban stop him at a checkpoint, they write him a receipt. Waving a fistful of green papers, he explains how they ensure he won’t be charged twice: after he pays one group of Talibs, his receipt gets him through subsequent stops. Government soldiers, in contrast, rob him over and over.”
We started down a path of nation-building in Afghanistan 18 years ago, but the government in Kabul doesn’t provide basic services. It has a huge security apparatus, and a big bureaucracy, but where it matters, the State, in the words of the US DOJ, is “largely lawless, weak and dysfunctional”.
No place in the country is completely safe. At boozy parties in Kabul, rich Afghans share gallows humor about the impending arrival of the jihadists at their gates.
The Taliban are no prize. Their brutal attacks make them deeply unpopular, especially in Afghan cities. But The Economist says that in rural areas, they are seen as efficient and willing to challenge arbitrary government power. According to a UN study, Afghan land disputes account for 70% of violent crimes. In government-controlled areas, well-connected figures often grab land for themselves. The Taliban, in contrast, have judges who deal with such cases brutally, but with less corruption.
The Taliban expects poppy-farmers to pay taxes on their crop, but they also provide seed capital and other support. In many areas, they help to police water use, managing disputes and limiting the over-exploitation of groundwater. Over the past few years the size of the opium crop has grown remarkably—especially in Taliban-controlled areas.
Another Economist article shows that solar panels are transforming the landscape of southern Afghanistan. Farmers used to run their pumps with diesel generators, but fuel was very expensive. Now they can pump water all day using solar.
Only 12% of the country is suitable for growing permanent crops, but since 2018, 3,600 square kilometers in south-western Afghanistan were reclaimed for cultivation from the desert by using solar power to pump water to the fields. From the Economist:
“As many as 2.5 million people…now live in what used to be desert. The price of desert land has soared, from as little as $35 for a jereb (about 2,000 square meters) to over $1,000 now. That has made landowners rich, not to mention politicians and senior police officers.”
The reclaimed territory is mostly beyond government control: Many of the settlers are hostile to the State.
This has also brought a big cost for the environment. Drinking wells are increasingly contaminated with nitrates from fertilizers, which farmers have spread near the water pumps. Shallow wells have gone completely dry. If the groundwater is exhausted, millions of Afghans will have to move.
The US and the Taliban have been negotiating directly since October over a possible American withdrawal in exchange for a commitment from the Taliban not to harbor terrorists. The Afghan government has been excluded from these talks, and they are concerned that they may be forced into a coalition government with the Taliban.
The Trump administration wants out of Afghanistan, and may not care much about who in the current government survives. The latest round of talks concluded on May 9th, with what the Taliban described as “some progress”, but the pace is glacial, and may not lead to anything.
Wrongo has been saying for years that we need to leave Afghanistan. Why are we still there? Vietnam proved we could win all the battles, get higher body counts, and still lose the war.
Will we “win” in Afghanistan? No, it’s unwinnable. You can’t win when you’re on the side that’s even more hated and corrupt than our “enemy.”
Bush famously painted us in the corner of both Iraq and Afghanistan:
