Exit Strategy in Afghanistan – The Wrongologist

Afghanistan Defeat May Energize Military

The Daily Escape:

Fall foliage begins with Swamp Maples, Westborough MA – September 2021 photo by Juergen Roth Photography

For Americans, our pull-out from Afghanistan was a roller coaster of emotion. Many felt anger at our failure to win against the Taliban. Some felt we should have stayed for an indefinite time until some indefinite goal was reached. Many were just sad we stayed as long as we did.

Jeff Groom, a former Marine officer, asked in Responsible Statecraft whether the failure in Afghanistan will touch off a “revolution from below” by more junior military members. He says that lower levels of the military blame their top leadership for problems with veteran’s health. And they also blame their leadership and the politicians for sending them to fight without clear goals or purpose.

The front-line military understands that the top brass was, at least in part, in the business of obfuscation and deception of America’s politicians and the public. Senior military leaders have often presented overly optimistic views, while insisting on ever-more resources for warfighting.

The front-line knew that US airstrikes and raids often killed women and children. From Groom:

“To expend human life for a cause you believed in but didn’t win is one thing, to break human beings and their families forever because of lies and deceit is another. Is it any wonder then, that our veterans are disgusted and angry? They were treated, as Kurt Vonnegut said in 2004, like “toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

Pew found that 64% of Iraq veterans said that war was not worth fighting. For Afghanistan, the number was 58%. Some of these angry and disappointed veterans are now running for office on both sides of the political aisle. More from Groom:

“Lucas Kunce, a former Marine officer and now Democratic Senate candidate for Missouri, has taken a stand against the lies. And Joe Kent, a former Green Beret and Gold Star husband running for a Republican congressional seat in Washington state, has suggested establishing an “Afghan War Commission” with his sights set on “the blob.” “

The term “Blob” describes members of the mainstream foreign-policy establishment: Government officials, academics, Council on Foreign Relations panelists, and television talking heads — who share a collective belief that it’s the obligation of the US to pursue an aggressive, interventionist policy in the post-9/11 world.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen in this context as Blob-approved.

The anger at the military’s top brass and at Congress is leading more veterans to now run for political office. In 2020, 182 US military veterans ran for a seat in the House or Senate, and there are now 91 US veterans serving in Congress (17% of the Congressional total). Of these, 36 served in Afghanistan and Iraq; 27 are Republicans and 9 are Democrats.

At least 11 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are running for the US Senate in 2022, along with at least 33 seeking 2022 House seats. The majority are Republicans. These numbers will likely increase as both Parties are actively recruiting veterans who are willing to stand for election in the mid-terms.

Like our Congress, most American voters haven’t served. But voters have had a front row seat for decades of failed policies. It wouldn’t be unrealistic to assume the next decade will see a retrenchment of the US empire due to voters’ disillusionment with the Blob’s foreign policy consensus in Washington.

As for the future of the all-volunteer military, problems with the quality and quantity of service members loom on the horizon. The length of our recent wars has forced the armed services to cut corners to achieve service targets.

In 2003 94% of enlisted Army personnel had a high school diploma. In 2007 it had dropped to 71%. In World War II, the cut-off for the IQ test in the Marine Corps was a score of 120. In 1980, 85% of officers achieved that score but only 59% did in 2014.

In addition, concerns about the motivations for volunteering exist as well. America’s military relies upon citizens who willingly decide to sacrifice. Traditionally this was because the volunteers felt a strong connection to the nation and to its government. The failures of the war on terrorism coupled with our current cultural divide, indicate that this connection could be weakening.

Consider that the majority of the military is drawn from the South and Midwest. It may only be a matter of time before those volunteers stop raising their hands. If our all-volunteer system becomes a de-facto mercenary army, motivated only by a paycheck or college tuition, it will be devoid of real loyalty to country, a necessary condition for effectiveness.

We could be about to face both declining standards, and declining volunteerism.

Who will want to fight for us the next time? How hard will they fight?

Monday Wake Up Call – September 13, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde NP, CO – September 2021 photo by David Milley Johnson

Daniel Byman of Georgetown University has the cover article in the WSJ’s Weekend Review: “Why There Hasn’t Been Another 9/11”. He says that while jihadism remains strong globally, the US has been spared a repeat of 9/11:

“Twenty years ago, the 9/11 attacks killed almost 3,000 Americans. Since then, the US homeland hasn’t suffered any comparable terrorist assault, nor even one a tenth of the size. The total death toll from jihadist attacks inside the US over these last two decades stands at 107…”

Byman’s point is that despite losing in Afghanistan, the US has become skilled at limited interventions: a drone strike to kill a terrorist leader here, a raid by special operations forces there, including the killing of Osama bin Laden and ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, among others. This has forced the terrorist leaders to hide constantly and has eliminated their ability to run large terrorist training facilities.

Our abilities to intercept terrorist phone and internet communications, monitor activity from the skies and coordinate in real time with our allies, allows us to be on top of most large-scale attacks that might be planned against us. From Byman:

“A jihadist arrested in Morocco may have made phone calls to an operative in France, who received money from a funder in Kuwait, who is tied to cells in Indonesia and Kenya and operates under the instructions of a leader in Pakistan…”

All of this is tracked. And the US then assembles this giant jigsaw puzzle, encouraging the arrests of suspects, while using drone strikes where arrests are difficult. Byman implies that we’re being kept safe because of our investment in anti-terrorist assets and technology.

He’s planting a stake in the ground for additional funding for America’s successor to the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

Adam Tooze reminds us that US military spending was driven to new heights by the GWOT. Overall spending peaked in 2010 at $840 billion. You might expect that America’s defense budget would have decreased when we got out of full-scale Iraq and Afghanistan operations, and it did. Tooze says that overall DOD spending fell to $629 billion in 2015.

With Trump in charge, the Pentagon’s budget was pushed back over $700 billion. So far, Biden is staying the course. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan in no way signals a retreat from global ambition, as the budgetary request for National Defense in 2022 is $752 billion, a 7.4% increase.

And the amazing part is that the military doesn’t seem to have an articulated strategy to combat future threats. That may explain why it took 20 years, four presidents and $ trillions for America to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan. As the think tank CSIS points out:

“It has been about 15 years since DoD explained, even roughly, how it calculated the force levels that it was proposing….”

Tooze says: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In other words, America’s grand strategists formulate goals, the Pentagon draws up lists of things it wants…but it is unclear how each of these decisions relates to the other.”

The US military is a giant professional organization run by leaders with postgraduate degrees. Like most large organizations, it is hierarchical and thrives on amassing internal power. The battle for resources between the branches of the military is intense.

The National Defense Strategy of 2018 redefined America’s future security challenge as great-power competition with China, not counterterrorism. The main arena isn’t the Middle East, but the Indo-Pacific. And Biden is doubling down on this strategic blueprint.

This requires transformative technologies: AI, robotics, cyber weapons, and new space technology. The technology will come from Silicon Valley, even though they have somewhat conflicting technological partnerships with China.

We’re no longer training military in Afghan villages in California, we’re planning on building robot submarines. All of this shows that the withdrawal from Afghanistan in no way signals a retreat from our military’s global ambitions, despite our historically mediocre military leadership.

Time to wake up America! The war hawks in each Party along with the defense contractors have no intention of taking their collective feet off the gas pedal of military spending. What animates the alliance between them are buzzwords and money.

Despite what you think, social programs will always need to be paid for by new revenue, while defense spending is always “on the house”.

To help you wake up, listen to “New York Minute” by Don Henley. While it has some deep relevance to 9/11, it was recorded in 1989 for Henley’s solo album, “The End of the Innocence”. It was one of the songs radio stations in NYC played frequently in the weeks after 9/11. The track features Toto members David Paich on piano and Jeff Porcaro on drums:

Lyrics:
Harry got up
Dressed all in black
Went down to the station
And he never came back
They found his clothing
Scattered somewhere down the track
And he won’t be down on Wall Street in the morning

Our Troops Exit Afghanistan

The Daily Escape:

Controlled burn, Yosemite NP, CA – Early Summer 2021 photo by mrcnzajac

(Note: The Wrongologist is taking an end of summer break. Our next column will appear on September 7)

Yesterday brought the final evacuation of Kabul airport by US forces. The actual deadline for all US troops to be out of Afghanistan was 3:29 pm EST Tuesday, which is Tuesday 11:59 pm local time in Kabul. But we exited a day early. This was the time of greatest risk to our troops, since fewer and fewer of them were available to maintain security at the airport for those getting on planes.

A report by Southpaw quotes General McKenzie:

Several other news outlets are confirming Southpaw’s report. Here’s Natasha Bertrand of CNN:

3:29 pm EST is 11:59pm on Aug 30 Kabul time. A day early.

The Biden administration’s end game relied on the Taliban acting in good faith as the last of our troops departed, including protecting the final American evacuees. Reuters had reported that the Taliban were waiting for “the final nod” from US forces before securing full control of the Kabul airport.

It seems like Biden’s faith was well-placed.

What follows is Wrongo’s thinking written before hearing that the US had successfully left Afghanistan and turned over the airport to the Taliban.

Let’s pull back and get some historical perspective on our decision to go to Afghanistan. Michael Krepon of the Arms Control Wonk blog makes a great observation about what was called the “unipolar moment” in 1990, after the Soviet Union had collapsed.

The concept held that the US, as the world’s sole superpower, didn’t need to respect weakness, limit NATO expansion, or pay allegiance to international norms. Washington could and should throw its weight around. The sole superpower could play by its own rules.

That idea may have caused the downfall of the US in the Middle East. GW Bush subscribed to the unipolar moment. Before 9/11, he wanted to exit the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ATBM) Treaty with Russia, even though Putin was willing to accommodate some changes. Putin indicated that if he and Bush couldn’t make a deal, Russia would exit the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (SALT II), which prohibited land-based missiles carrying multiple warheads.

Bush didn’t care about the prohibition and walked from both. That meant that Bush dispensed with limitations on national missile defenses and the abolition of land-based missiles carrying multiple warheads, two central tenets of our hard-won nuclear arms control strategy.

Bush then reacted to the 9/11 strikes with a “never again” impulse that was also fueled by unipolar moment hubris. Krepon reminds us that Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy declared:

“It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

From Michael Krepon:

“These sentiments fueled the ill-fated war and institution building project in Afghanistan….The end of the unipolar moment was hastened by these wars… For those harboring any doubt, the unipolar moment definitively crashed and burned with the fall of Kabul.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

”The finest hours of US expeditionary forces in Afghanistan came at the front and back ends of this two-decade-long saga. The routing of al-Qaeda was essential….The final act of leaving Afghanistan was suffused with grace even in the midst of chaos and terror. Evacuation efforts at Kabul airport were truly heroic, reflecting a nobility of purpose that had previously been buried by US counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies.”

As the sun sets on our physical military presence in Afghanistan, we can be happy that we’ve gotten all of our remaining troops out safely. Krepon reminds us that John Kerry began his career in public life as a young veteran, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry asked them:

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Where will we go from here? Air strikes by the US won’t end with Afghanistan. Krepon also reminds us that going forward, we really need “More Think, Less Tank.”

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 29, 2021

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:

“There 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,”

Epstein was raised in a Jewish household and has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with a God.

This month, when religious fundamentalism has taken over the government of Afghanistan, it’s 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 doesn’t 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 “real” threat:

RIP Charlie Watts:

Saturday Soother – August 28, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Acadia NP – 2021 photo by Rick Berk Fine Art Photography

America will dissect its failed adventure in Afghanistan for decades. From Heather Cox Richardson:

“In the past, when American troops were targeted by terrorists, Americans came together to condemn those attackers. Apparently, no longer. While world leaders—including even those of the Taliban—condemned the attacks on US troops, Republican leaders instead attacked President Biden.”

What’s ahead of us now is seeing how the Biden administration manages defeat. There will be serious political fallout after Biden’s 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 won’t respond forcefully enough.

The media will play their “I Told You So” and “Biden is Damaged” narratives. They will continue giving airtime to the same retired military hacks who brought us Afghanistan in the first place.

The WaPo’s Eugene Robinson asks the relevant question:

“How, exactly, did the Biden administration’s critics think US military involvement in Afghanistan was ever going to end? “Certainly not like this” 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 country’s 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.”

That’s the problem, zero precedents.

There’s press and political criticism about Biden working with the Taliban. It’s at least ironic that we’re cooperating with them after 20 years of fighting them, but this is just both players being practical in an end game. In Biden’s press conference on Thursday, he rejected critics who said we shouldn’t be cooperating with the Taliban to defend the airport perimeter:

“No one trusts them…It’s a matter of mutual self-interest. They’re not good guys, the Taliban. But they have keen interests,”

That’s 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 president’s 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.

“We can’t trust the Taliban with Americans’ security,”

Thank you Captain Obvious. The silliest response came from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN):

“It’s 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,”

Under Blackburn’s scenario, Nancy Pelosi would become president! It’s doubtful that she thought that through.

Democrats didn’t demand GW Bush II’s resignation after 9/11. Nobody clamored for St. Ronnie’s 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 JFK’s resignation.

It’s 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. It’s also hard to believe that Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan was granted parole on Friday after two of RFK’s sons spoke in favor of his release.

In the Northeast, we’ve 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 & Spearhead’s 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:

Like most Franti tunes, this is upbeat and fun.

The Kabul Airport Bombings

The Daily Escape:

19th century schooner wreckage at Race Point, Cape Cod, MA

The seaweed-covered wreck above is an appropriate meme for our disastrous Middle East policy that today led to even more deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan. ISIS in Afghanistan has claimed responsibility for the attack.

The latest news is that 11 American Marines and a Navy Medic were killed in a suicide bombing at a checkpoint at the gates of the Kabul airport. It also appears that at least 15 US military were injured. The deaths marked the first US military fatalities in Afghanistan since February 2020, when two American soldiers were killed in an insider attack by an Afghan soldier.

Imagine that you are a Marine guarding the entrance to Kabul airport. Imagine that the day before, you had been briefed about the potential of a suicide vest detonating near your position. Imagine doing your job, checking individuals who want to get past you into the airport, when you know you might get suicide-bombed.

They’re close enough to touch. You can smell their breath, but all you can do is stand there are be hyper-vigilant.

At least when someone shoots at you, you can shoot back. But there’s nobody to shoot at after the bomb goes off. Just take the dead and wounded to the medic and write up the after-action report. They knew they’d be targeted by ISIS bombers. And, yet, they went ahead and did their duty, processing evacuees and trying to assist in winding down this terrible war.

But pundits gotta spin. Here’s former Ambassador Ryan Crocker with his latest at MSNBC:

“Strategically and for a long, short and medium-term interest, is the decision to completely withdraw from Afghanistan, was a very bad one. That said, the decision having been made the execution of it has been pretty bad.”

It’s a viewpoint, but consider HR McMaster, former Trump National Security Adviser who said on MSNBC:

“Kabul blasts are what happen ‘when you surrender to a terrorist organization’”

Reprehensible. Matt Yglesias gives us a little history on terror attacks in Kabul, just in 2020:

Yglesias also provided a little history on similar bombings at Kabul airport:

“On 8 September 2009, at around 8:22 AM, a suicide bombing took place near the entrance of the airport’s military base

On 3 July 2014, Taliban fighters fired two rockets into the airport, destroying four helicopters. One of the four helicopters belongs to Afghan President Hamid Karzai

On 29 July 2015, three American defense contractors and one Afghan national were killed by a gunman outside the airport in the late evening

On 17 May 2015, a suicide bombing by the Taliban near the entrance of the airport occurred, killing three and injuring eighteen.”

The point is that we have been dealing with violence at the very location where this violence took place for a very long time, without pundits or members of Congress paying any attention to it.

So, as we sit at home, watching the drama unfold in Kabul, let’s salute the courage of our service members who died trying to rescue Americans and others from Afghanistan.

Let’s also give the single finger salute to the media, the pundits and the politicians trying to prove that they are tough enough to put more American soldiers in harm’s way in order to minimize the “optics” of our humiliating loss in Afghanistan.

Expect the “Benghazification” of the end of our time in Afghanistan, particularly if Republicans gain control of the House in 2022. There’s way too much shit to throw at Biden for that not to happen.

And regardless of your politics, spare some sympathy for Biden as well. He’s now under titanic pressure to avenge these deaths. Perhaps he should remember Ronald Reagan, who withdrew the Marines from Lebanon after 241 of them were killed in a bombing of their Beirut barracks in 1983.

Ezra Klein at the NYT quotes Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“There’s no denying America is the most powerful country in the world, but what we’ve seen over and over in recent decades is we cannot turn that into the outcomes we want. Whether it’s Afghanistan or Libya or sanctions on Russia and Venezuela, we don’t get the policy outcomes we want, and I think that’s because we overreach — we assume that because we are very powerful, we can achieve things that are unachievable.”

Sometimes, you just have to cut bait.

The Afghan Refugee Problem

The Daily Escape:

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 there’s already a 50,000-person backlog for US visas for non-governmental organization workers.

Today, let’s 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.

Let’s 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. That’s untrue. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduces some reality into the discussion of the SIV backlog:

“Over 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 applications…In 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.”

Sen. Murphy continues: (parenthesis and emphasis by Wrongo)

“Obama 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: ‘Resettling [Afghans] in America is not about solving a humanitarian crisis; it’s about accomplishing an ideological objective to change America.’”

Is anyone more repellent than Steven Miller?

Any reporting by the media about the “chaos” in Afghanistan that doesn’t include these facts, isn’t worth your time. Also, let’s differentiate between what’s happening within US control, from what’s happening beyond our control: All the chaos is happening outside of the Kabul airport gates.

Inside, we’re 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.

GZero has an illuminating report on Afghan refugees. They say that the Afghan refugee problem will mushroom into a global crisis this year:

“More 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.”

Here’s 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:

“This 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.”

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, GZero’s prediction of a large internally displaced population will come to pass.

Biden’s decision is certain to spark criticism at home and abroad. Those faulting Biden should answer: Weren’t 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 McMurtry’s new tune, “Operation Never Mind“, from his new album out this week, “The Horses and the Hounds”. The song is about how Americans think about our soldiers:

Sample lyric:

we got an operation goin’ on
it don’t have to trouble me and you
the country boys will do the fighting
now that fighting’s all a country boy can do
we got a handle on it this time
no one’s gonna tell us we were wrong
we won’t let the cameras near the fighting
that way we won’t have another Vietnam

(chorus) no one knows,
‘cause no one sees no one cares,
‘cause no one knows no one knows,
‘cause no one sees it on TV

don’t they look just like on “SEAL Team”
Lord don’t 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 don’t know

More Thoughts on Afghanistan

The Daily Escape:

Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, Death Valley, California photo by Gerold Guggenbheul

Wrongo is as tired of writing about Afghanistan as you are reading about it, but the time to say what needs to be said is when people are paying attention. So, let’s talk about the media’s response to Afghanistan.

Yesterday, Wrongo pointed out that out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC in 2020, the year Trump made his deal with the Taliban, a total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan. Now, many more minutes are focused on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and much of that is critical of Biden. From Eric Boehlert:

“Led by the New York Times’ and CNN’s frenzied reporting and analysis, the media have gone all in with the narrative that Biden’s presidency sits on the precipice of ruin in the wake of US’s long-expected troop departure from Afghanistan. (Fact: It does not.)”

Various Biden critics are engaging in fantasies about Kabul’s collapse: if only we’d used more force, demonstrated more will, stayed a few months longer, then the Taliban would have adopted a different strategy. Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, was sharply critical of the withdrawal of the last 3,500 troops. Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, argued that “keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely” would be “worth it.”

Another NYT column recently said that Biden should “save his presidency” in the wake of the Afghanistan controversy. Biden’s ending an extremely unpopular war and is bringing the troops home, at least so far, without a single US casualty. But he must “save his presidency”?

It is a huge relief to find out America has been filled all along with people who know, with 100% certainty, how to properly extract the US from Afghanistan.

From Cheryl Rofer: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“As we try to look past the abysmal reporting on the evacuation from Afghanistan, one of the things that strikes me is the inability or unwillingness of reporters to visualize what is required to make things happen in the real world.”

“An evacuation takes coordination among an enormous number of entities – getting the right people in the right place at the right time, along with the airplanes and their fuel, which involves other airports, air controllers, logistics people keeping track of where the planes are, and the military personnel helping out….And then there are the State Department people who are checking identities and preparing paperwork to get refugees into the US.”

Rofer closes with: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The first inclination of too many reporters seems to be to find someone to backbite someone else. It should be to understand the [physical] situation…”

The criticisms downplay the impact of the deal with the Taliban. Once the Taliban had secured an agreement that the US would be pulling out, and that forces would be reduced to minimal numbers BEFORE Biden’s presidency began, they merely had to wait. Trump’s special skill as president was that he accomplished nothing, or he made things much, much worse, in every way.

So far, the airlift from Afghanistan is performing better than the news media’s record over the past four years, when they were reporting on everything Trump said. Now they’re saying that Biden can’t eat the shit sandwich Trump prepared so well.

But here’s a subject that has gone unnoticed by the media: the cost of caring for our veterans. The Watson Institute researches the cost of the Afghan war. They just released an update on the ongoing costs of caring for the military who were injured in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“Between 2001 and 2050, the total costs of caring for veterans of the post-9/11 wars are estimated to reach between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion….This estimate is double the author’s previous projections in 2011 and 2013.”

They say that most of the costs associated with caring for post-9/11 veterans have yet to be paid and will continue to accrue long into the future. The costs are $1 trillion higher than earlier estimates for two primary reasons. First, the number of post-9/11 veterans with disabilities is far higher than originally projected. More than 40% of the troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have already been approved to receive lifetime disability benefits.

Second, the VA has ramped up their levels of responsiveness. They have expanded the geographical footprint of VA health care, hired thousands of additional medical and support personnel, and expanded clinical specialties in areas such as women’s health, traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD).

These expenditures are already baked into the system. We should be focusing on the fact that these costs will DOUBLE America’s projected military expenses of $2 trillion for Afghanistan.

The post-9/11 wars were the first major test of our all-volunteer military. On September 11, 2001, roughly one in every four American men were military veterans, but over the past two decades, the number of veterans in the population has declined to fewer than one in eight.

Barring reinstituting the draft, the number of military in our population will continue declining. The Census Bureau projects that the number of veterans will be just 1 in 14 by 2040. By 2050, when the costs of providing medical care and benefits for veterans of the post-9/11 wars reach their peak, few living Americans will have direct relatives who were involved in these wars.

So, two hidden costs of the Afghanistan war: A lazy media, and a 40+% casualty rate which is what happens when you continually redeploy the same soldiers into a 20-year long battle.

Monday Wake Up Call – August 23, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Chaco Canyon, NM – 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. They’re blaming the Biden administration’s execution of the withdrawal, but that agreement has a lot to do with why things are so chaotic.

Here is a Twitter thread by Joel Cawley about the agreement: (emphasis by Wrongo)

1/ There’s 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 “settlements” 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 Afghan’s new ruling party, development aid, UN recognition, and immunity from any future US military incursion or even threat.

5/ This wasn’t 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 Trump’s failure to agree to an orderly transition may have delayed Biden’s team’s full understanding of their agreement with the Taliban. Michael Semple of the Irish Times writes about the consequences of the agreement:

“The 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 – ‘the Americans have handed us the keys of the presidential palace’ was a frequently repeated phrase.”

Semple adds: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“Critically, 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.”

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:

“Two 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.”

She notes that the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan:

“The 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. “Taliban” worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders.”

About Hamid Karzai, America’s first puppet president, she says: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government’s role in the Taliban’s 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 Taliban’s initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994….Karzai may [also] have been a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994,”

She also wonders about the role of Trump’s chief negotiator for the agreement, US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. He’s an old friend of Karzai’s. She asks:

“Could…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?”

Chayes concludes: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I hold US civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s 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. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — 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.”

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 Biden’s decision to abide by Trump’s 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 shouldn’t be a surprise that Americans are shocked at what the media are now feeding them. And isn’t 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 what’s happening now?

Time to wake up America! We need to acknowledge the errors by giving them a true perspective, even if it doesn’t fit the Blue vs. Red agenda.

To help you wake up, listen to this new tune by The Killers, “Quiet Town”, about the good and bad in small town life:

The animated video is very nice.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 22, 2021

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: