Trump in April: âGetting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.â https://t.co/RzbLQePTMDpic.twitter.com/KEs5x3zAJQ
Mike Pompeo a month ago, with a Biden-level prediction: "It's time for them to step forward& actually deliver on security for themselves. I am confident that they can do that. It's a matter of will. Do they have the will to actually stand up for things they say they care about?"
How quickly can the politics around Afghanistan change? Here’s a section on the RNC’s website in June; click it now and you get a 404 error. (Rest of page was about Kosovo/Israel-Arab deals.) gop.com/president-trumâŠ
Don’t even look at the drivel Trump is putting out about this. He is the one who gave the Taliban political legitimacy and made the deal that would have required a full blown escalation if Biden tried to renege. Not that Biden wanted to. He ran on withdrawal and was determined not to fall into the previous traps of “just a few more months” or the “we need to escalate before we can withdraw” fallacy. He’s kept his word, working with the conditions on the ground he inherited, which was 2500 troops and a Taliban enemy that had been on the move for months.
A young Afghan Nuristani girl at a Kabul, Afghanistan orphanage in January 2002. Alexander the Great’s army left behind DNA on its trek through Afghanistan on the way to India in the 4th century B.C. Photo by Barbara Millucci via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
As anyone could predict, the GOP will reflexively wash its hands of any responsibility for the 20-year Afghan adventure begun by Pres. George W. Bush. They’d do the same if somehow their avatar of presidentiality had reclaimed his throne last week. But he didn’t. Joe Biden sits at the Resolute Desk.
Over the decades, conservatives have been enormously successful at selling a parody of liberalism. Liberals are cast as dreamy idealists who think âthrowing money at problemsâ is the way to solve them. Theyâre painted as hostile to a tough-minded examination of their programs and indifferent to whether they work.
This parody has things exactly backward. In 2021, itâs liberals who want citizens, politicians included, to look rigorously at the evidence.
The evidence against making a nation-state out of Afghanistan was visible to anyone with any sense of history.
Eric Boehlert remarks on the “blame Biden” impulse of the press:
Treating the Talibanâs seizure of Afghanistanâs capitol over the weekend as a shocking event in the wake of U.S. troops withdrawing from the war-torn country, the press eagerly jumped into the blame game. In the process, they diligently did the GOPâs bidding by omitting key context in its rush to pin the blame for a 20-year, extraordinarily complex and heartbreaking military and foreign policy failure on a single man who took office just seven months ago.
Turning over their platforms to partisan Republicans and pro-war military experts, the media seemed eager to portray President Joe Biden as one being swallowed up in âcrisis,â even as his call to withdraw troops has drawn overwhelming, bipartisan support at home.
Axios laid it on thick. Doubling as a GOP springboard, the news outlet made sweeping factual declarations in its news coverage: âRarely has an American president’s predictions been so wrong, so fast, so convincingly as Biden on Afghanistan.â
Etc., etc.
“Raise your hand if you remember the predictions President George W. Bush made about invading Iraq, long before the U.S. spent $2 trillion and more than 500,000 people died,” Boehlert writes.
The Washington Post editorial board, which in 2002 and 2003 published nearly 30 endorsements advocating for the invasion of Iraq, howled that the troop withdrawal had been âprecipitous.â
That drew a sharp rebuke from Rajan Menon, a professor of international relations at the Powell School, City College of New York:
Precipitous? Is this really an accurate characterization of a military campaign that has lasted close to 20 years and that cost close to $90 billion just to train the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces â and almost $2.3 trillion if all other costs are added in, including $815.7 billion in war-related and reconstruction expenses
A large chunk of Sundayâs coverage simply consisted of journalists recording Republicansâ completely predictable attacks on Biden. âRepublican lawmakers are denouncing President Biden’s admin. for the Taliban’s aggressive takeover of Afghanistan,â NBC News excitedly announced on Twitter. What Bidenâs Republican critics would do in Afghanistan in terms of ending the United Statesâ presence was never addressed, nor was any historical context offered.
[…]
When Biden announced earlier this year that all U.S. troops were coming home from Afghanistan, 70 percent of Americans supported the move, including 56 percent support from Republicans.
But now everyone is shocked, shocked that intelligence Biden relied on was so bad and that there was so little time to evacuate allies because Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban so quickly. No one could have seen that coming, right? Much less do anything to stop it.
Everybody remembers we didn’t go into Afghanistan in Oct. 2001 to fight the Taliban and a civil war, right? Just so we’re clear.
Because a lot of people who were sure of that just a short time ago will suddenly behave as if the Earth’s magnetic pole has flipped. They will insist Joe Biden owns the chaos on the ground in Afghanistan this morning. I touched on our short memories yesterday.
Balloon Juice collected just a sampling. I’ve added some others:
Mike Pompeo a month ago, with a Biden-level prediction: "It's time for them to step forward& actually deliver on security for themselves. I am confident that they can do that. It's a matter of will. Do they have the will to actually stand up for things they say they care about?"
— soonergrunt đșđž A Capybara Appreciation Account (@soonergrunt) August 16, 2021
How quickly can the politics around Afghanistan change? Here's a section on the RNC's website in June; click it now and you get a 404 error. (Rest of page was about Kosovo/Israel-Arab deals.) https://t.co/kDJo95QfiFpic.twitter.com/HkZok9mgJW
100 W 1st Street in LA if you want to check it out for yourself on streetview
A fight didnât just âbreak outâ and the reporters plural werenât attacked by nameless phantoms. The Proud Boysâa fascist street gang that tried to overthrow the republic earlier this yearâassembled and deliberately assaulted journalists and others.
A man was stabbed and a reporter was attacked at a protest against vaccine mandates on the south lawn of Los Angeles' City Hall after a fight broke out between the protesters and counter-protesters, the LA Police Department and local media said. https://t.co/4HLbhza6Pg
Tony Moon, the proud boy seen assaulting a reporter and screaming âunmask them allâ in front of LAPD headquarters, thanks the department for allowing his mayhem. Previously, Moon acknowledged that he participated in storming the US Capitol on January 6th. He hasnât been arrested.
It appears that LAPD was openly on the side of the Proud Boys. They tweeted that the altercation was incited by Antifa with no mention of the PBs. They later “edited” their tweet but as you can see below, the NAACP legal defense caught the original tweet and want an explanation. We all should. Reporters were assaulted by the Proud Boys yesterday right outside LAPD headquarters. And LAPD blamed Antifa.
The following from Andy Slavitt is very informative. I don’t think we’ve wrapped our minds around the permanent changes that are going to be required. They aren’t onerous but they are different in some small ways (mask wearing as something common during outbreaks) that seem to be turning some people in our country into raving lunatics.
Anyway:
COVID Update: Iâve had dozens of people ask me with Delta here, what is the COVID end game.
Because I donât know, I interviewed 6 experts on various elementsâ variants, vaccines, global, policy, ev biology & historical precedence.
Will break it down here.
First of all, one truism is that when cases are rising, more say the virus is here forever. When cases are dropping, people tend to believe itâs over.
Weâre all caught up in that still which makes objectivity harder to find.
Still, we have learned a lot with Deltaâs emergence that seems to change the game.
Some theories seem more right than wrong to meâŠ.
1- The virus & science will continue to have a long battle with a virus continually mutating for survival.
How long? We are still seeing mutations from the 1918 flu 103 years later.
2- Given Deltaâs contagiousness & the fitness of future mutations in order to beat it, this means SARS-CoV-2 will be contagious enough that everyone will get the virus.
The aim is simply that more people get it be vaccinated when they do so fewer get COVID.
3- The virus & the disease are not the safe thing.
The mRNA vaccines are a godsend & will help us minimize COVID-19 even while there remains an abundance of SARS-CoV-2.
I will explain that further.
The vaccines donât work like sunscreen, stopping the virus from entering your body. They fight for our cells.
What they do is train our immune system to recognize the virus, attack it, & fight it to a state where it minimizes damage.
This is why there are many harmless breakthrough cases. Stick a swab in your nose while your immune system is waging the fight & you will test positive.
This also explains a few things we see in Delta: -immunosuppressed people need more vaccine -higher Delta viral loads cause symptoms by making the fight harder -while the immune system reacts, Delta can live in your nose for a short period & infect others
3- Can the vaccines keep up with future variants? Most experts appear confident in the mRNA platformâ even when a variant potentially beats a current vaccine.
Hereâs how & why from my understandingâŠ
The science of the virus itself makes it a good target with the spike protein. And so long as the virus creates an immune response, mRNA can be adapted to simulate it.
Itâs one reason why there isnât an HIV vaccine. The body canât mount a response on its own. Not so for SC2.
mRNA is also most easily scaled & manufactured & can react to new mutants in 90 days. Regulations from FDA & other bodies are being adapted to keep up. We need nimble manufacturing & distribution as well.
4- All of this means likely waves of COVIDâ regionally & seasonallyâ depending on community vax status. It means some less safe periods of timeâ when vaccines are catching up to mutations, when prevalence is high. And safer times.
Here are some implications & immediate priorities.
1- Accelerate global vax effort. Instead of 70% by Dec 2022, we need 70% by March 22. The difference in giving the virus less time as we attack it is critical. A slow attack means more time for it to find ways to adapt.
2- US pockets of low vaccination are a critical priority. We are rapidly falling behind the ROW in vax levels due to hesitancy.
Vax requirements will eventually be fairly common place. The difference between this happening this year & next could be profound.
3- The development of an oral anti-viral is an essential tool. Along with better ventilated buildings, we can keep transmission low & make infections shorter & milder.
4- Research & development of treatments for long COVID must begin now & there is reason for hope that we will find both symptom relief & clues to better treatment quickly if we put our minds to it.
So if the picture I pieced together from experts is close to right. And we execute against these 4 priorities, what does our new normal look like?
In many ways it looks like the old normal for much of the world that we have so far largely avoided in the US & parallels how we deal with other challenges.
These are things we should be willing to tolerate:
-Masks when we travel & in heavy seasons -Staying home when weâre sickâ always -Weather reports as there on for smog or allergy seasons -Periodic outbreaks -Caution around key populations -Showing we are vaccinated/tested
But there is something we can decide not to tolerate:
Preventable deaths.
100 people die every day from the flu in a bad season, mostly elderly & kids. We should not accept this. And we should not accept even more from COVID.
We can science our way through most of it. But we have to manage our way there as wellâ and thatâs where the challenge lies.
Our ability to have a productive debate on these issues will need to get better.
Domestically one can imagine 2 political partiesâ one for protecting the public, one for âliberty.â
The global cooperation & leadership needed for this is profound. Protectionism would lead us down a predictably more difficult path.
Investments in basic research, in providing support for people with jobs which expose them to risks & for accessibility for people at risk or sick will expensive. But necessary.
But if I think about what matters, itâs thisâ to create a future where we all of us get to have as bright a future as possible.
Small sacrifices & winning some big arguments are part of building that future.
I too am on vacation this week, so I’m really just sharing some of the more interesting commentary about this Afghanistan situation today. Here’s one from the Boston Globe’s Michel Cohen:
Though Iâm supposed to be on vacation this week, I had a few thoughts I wanted to pass along on the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan. Earlier today, the countryâs president, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country, making the Talibanâs takeover a mere formality at this point.
The speed of the Talibanâs military conquest is astonishing. A week ago, the insurgents didnât control a single one of Afghanistanâs 34 provincial capitals. By the end of the day, they will likely rule the country.
Now the United States is feverishly helicoptering its diplomats from the American embassy in Kabul to the airport for departure from the country. The images are reminiscent of Saigon 1975, and the retreat of US diplomats from Saigon as the North Vietnamese military approached the city.
While itâs always dangerous to make direct historical analogies, one similarity is apparent in both conflicts: the US propped up corrupt governments that lacked broad popular support and collapsed when forced to fight on their own. The US ignored the unique cultural and political dynamics in both places and instead tried to create and sustain governments and militaries styled after an American model. Riven by corruption and incompetent leadership, neither government could elicit the popular support necessary to keep them in power without direct US support.
The US spent years and billions of dollars building up and training the South Vietnamese army. By 1974, it had the sixth-largest air force in the world. Yet, it was little match for a rival military with better leadership and a cause for which rank-and-file soldiers were willing to fight and die. In Afghanistan, the US spent $83 billion on training and arming a supposedly 300,000 man army. Unlike the South Vietnamese, which tried to stop the North Vietnamese offensive in 1975, the Afghan security forces barely bothered to fight.
For those who inveighed against the US war in Vietnam â and those of us who railed against US policy in Afghanistan â the outcome in both conflicts was not surprising. It always felt inevitable. Indeed, I wrote this nearly 11 years ago after traveling to Afghanistan as an election monitor. Iâm just surprised it took this long to come to fruition:
It seems clear that President Obama and General Petraeus ought to devise an alternative strategy for Afghanistan centered less on ‘winning’ and more on doing everything possible to stabilize Afghanistan, preparing for a turnover of power to Afghan security forces and preventing a full national meltdown, before an eventual and certain U.S. withdrawal. And yet from every indication the sheer bleakness of the situation isnât reflected at all in U.S. military operations and strategy.
âŠ. Two days after the election I sat down with an Afghan TV journalist who said that while it was moving to see Afghans risking their lives to vote, the sight ought not to conceal the worsening insecurity and despair that defines his country nearly nine years after the Americans first arrived.
In an apt description of Afghanistan’s predicament and the shrinking set of options facing U.S. policymakers, he said to me, “Afghanistan is a very dark house with only a single flickering candle lighting the inside.”
The Afghanistan die was cast years ago. It began in 2001 when Western policymakers and a handful of Afghans gathered in Bonn, Germany, and drafted a new constitution creating a highly centralized central government. The decision was spectacularly ill-attuned to Afghan history and culture, which has long rejected direct rule from Kabul and prized local autonomy. It continued for the next several years as the US rejected pleas from the Taliban to be allowed back in the country if they laid down their arms.
It became more entrenched as President George W. Bush ignored the signs of worsening security and a rising Taliban threat to focus instead on another misbegotten conflict in Iraq.
President Obama picked up the baton in 2009 when he agreed to send another nearly 50,000 troops to fight in Afghanistan, with no clear political strategy for stabilizing the country or ending the civil war and an 18-month timetable for withdrawal that the Taliban could â and did â wait out. Rather than preparing Afghanistan for an eventual US retreat, the US military (supported by much of the DC foreign policy elite) convinced itself that it could wage a successful counterinsurgency against the Taliban. American troops were sent to fight and die in locales like Helmand province, even though it was evident, at the time, that the Afghan government could likely never hold the territory after the US departed. Even until this week, the Afghan government continued to try and maintain its presence in every corner of the country, long after it became clear that it could not sustain such an effort.
President Trump inherited the mess that Obama and Bush had created and made it worse, signing away the last remnants of US leverage with the Doha agreement and cutting the Afghan government off at the knees by leaving them out of the negotiations. But, in fairness, by the time Trump took office, there werenât many good options left for US policymakers.
When Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he had two choices in Afghanistan: renege on Doha and maintain a US troop presence or finally end Americaâs longest war. If he had done the former, he would have put US troops directly in harmâs way since one of the key provisions of the Doha agreement is a pledge by the Taliban not to target American soldiers (a promise the insurgent group kept).
Indeed, every armchair pundit arguing today that Joe Biden should not have withdrawn from Afghanistan (whether they realize it or not) is saying they are comfortable with renewed Taliban attacks on US troops. How many more US soldiers needed to die for an ally that didn’t want to fight and had little popular support? Considering how quickly the Afghan government has collapsed over the past week, they are also basically asserting that US troops should have never left the country. After all, does anyone think that after 20 years of fighting, another six weeks, six months, or six years would have produced a different outcome than what we see today? Short of a US pledge to never leave Afghanistan, this day was almost certainly coming.
But then again, when has the foreign policy elite ever cared about what the American people think?
Bidenâs decision â even if it was the right one â is leading to a tragic and awful outcome. But, make no mistake, the capturing of Kabul and the Talibanâs return to power didnât just happen. It was years in the making, informed by a military leadership that kept claiming, against all evidence on the ground, that the US was âturning the cornerâ in Afghanistan; by a US political leadership that treated the war like a proverbial red-headed stepchild; and by a public that stopped caring about Afghanistan a long time ago.
I grieve for the Afghan people and those who signed up to work with US forces and whose lives are now in danger. They deserved a better fate. However, if there is any silver lining from this weekâs events, itâs that the Afghan governmentâs quick collapse will spare the country more deadly fighting. One can only hope now that the Taliban learned a lesson from their disastrous earlier rule and, this time, will adopt a more moderate approach toward leading the country.
I seethe with anger at those who argued against history, culture, and common sense more than a decade ago in claiming that the US military could âoutgovernâ the Taliban and sway the Afghan people toward their side. They should publicly apologize. And I feel immense sympathy for the families of those American soldiers who gave their last full measure of devotion for a war that its political leaders never believed in and its military leaders were never honest about. They deserved better leadership.
As IÂ wrote earlier this month, the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan âis a quintessentially American failure â a collective one 20 years in the making, the result of American hubris and a misguided belief in what U.S. power can achieve.â
Rather than recriminations, weâd all be better off learning that lesson on this truly awful day.
On September 11, 2001, I knew the following were true:
1. The atrocities were directly due to the negligence and incompetence of the Bush administration 2. War with Afghanistan was both inevitable and a disastrous mistake, strategically and morally 3. It would end exactly the way the Vietnam war ended
My prescience was not that special. That’s what’s so frightening. Millions of others felt the same way, but no one in a position of influence or power did. Or if they did, none thought it was politically astute to condemn Bush for his criminal stupidity or loudly oppose the sheer madness of invading Afghanistan.
There is indeed a world climate crisis. And a world health crisis. But not coincidentally, there is a world intellectual crisis among leaders.
but general miller could do a muscle up. general mcchrystal woke early to run. general mattis read books. general petraeus could do pushups and talk about tribes. and all the other bullshit youâve been fed for years that distracted you from the shitshow fantasies on the ground.
Sky News reports this from the Taliban today as they take over Kabul. Pray that they are actually going to be as restrained as they are saying, (if those forms of punishment can be called “restrained.”) It’s very hard to believe:
Taliban spokesman: We seek an inclusive government that includes all Afghan parties â Sky News
Taliban spokesman: We will allow women to educate and work, wearing the hijab â Sky News
Taliban spokesman: We will allow women to leave the house alone
Taliban: We will allow the media to criticize as long as it does not turn into a “moral assassination” â As Sharq
Taliban spokesman: Punishments such as execution, stoning and amputation will depend on court ruling
Meanwhile Kabul: People are painting the women pictures
This piece by Greg Jaffe in the Washington Post struck me as a thoughtful reflection on this mess:
Twenty years ago, when the twin towers and the Pentagon were still smoldering, there was a sense among Americaâs warrior and diplomatic class that history was starting anew for the people of Afghanistan and much of the Muslim world.
âEvery nation has a choice to make,â President George W. Bush saidon the day that bombs began falling on Oct. 7, 2001. In private, senior U.S. diplomats were even more explicit. âFor you and us, history starts today,â then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told his Pakistani counterparts.
This was the original sin. This swaggering hubris. Anyone could have seen that it was complete bullshit if they could see past the primitive desire for revenge.
âWe assumed the rest of the world saw us as we saw ourselves,â he said. âAnd we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.â Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong.
The near-collapse of the Afghan army in the space of just a few stunning weeks is prompting the military and Washingtonâs policymakers to reflect on their failures over the course of nearly two decades. To many, the roots of the disaster go back to the warâs earliest days, when the Taliban was first driven from power and the United States, still reeling from the shock of the 9/11 attacks, set about building a government in Kabul.
Some two dozen prominent Afghans met in Bonn, Germany, with officials from the U.S. government, NATO and the United Nations to form a new Afghan government crafted in the image of the United States and its European allies.
âYou look at the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and it was trying to create a Western democracy,â said MichĂšle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obamaâs troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010. âIn retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.â
Flournoy acknowledged in hindsight that the mistake was compounded across Republican and Democratic administrations, which continued with almost equal fervor to pursue goals that ran counter to decades â if not centuries â of the Afghan experience.
By 2009, when Obama took office, it was clear to just about everyone that the United States was losing the war.
To reverse Taliban momentum and give U.S. officials a chance to build up the Afghan government and security forces, Obama signed off on a surge of troops that more than doubled the size of the American force in Afghanistan.
Flournoy said she was initially hopeful that the plan could work. On trips to Afghanistan, she met frequently with young Afghans, including womenâs groups, who shared Americaâs vision for the country. They wanted to send their daughters to school, serve in government, start businesses and nonprofits. They wanted women to be full participants in society and craved a predictable political and legal system. âWe found all kinds of allies,â she said.
But those individuals were no match for the rot that had permeated the Afghan government. She and other U.S. officials understood that with all the U.S. money floating around in Afghanistan, there would be âpetty corruption,â she said. What U.S. officials discovered in 2010, after the surge was already underway, was a corruption that ran far deeper than they had previously understood and that jeopardized their strategy, which depended on building the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
âWe realized that this is not going to work,â Flournoy said. âWe had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten.â
Now, as Taliban fighters race toward Kabul and the Afghan military crumbles, Flournoy said her thoughts often turn to the Americans who sacrificed for the mission and to those âwonderful alliesâ who shared the U.S. hopes for a democratic Afghanistan. âThatâs what makes me so sick to my stomach,â she said. âWe invested in this whole generation that is about to suffer through this very horrible chapter.â
Meanwhile, current and former U.S. officials are trying to make sense of why a government and security forces built over two decades at a cost of more than $100 billion dollars are collapsing so quickly.
Carter Malkasian, a longtime adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, has pegged the weakness of the Afghan forces on their lack of a unifying cause that resonates with Afghans, as well as their heavy dependence on the United States. By contrast, Taliban members were fighting for their culture and Islam. They âexemplified something that inspired, something that made them powerful in battle, something closely tied to what it meant to be an Afghan,â Malkasian writes in his new book, âThe American War in Afghanistan.â
Itâs an observation that speaks to the limits of American power and raises the broader question of how the catastrophic and embarrassing failure in Afghanistan might constrain U.S. foreign policy moving forward.
âWe know what happens when we fall to imperial hubris. What does one do with imperial heartbreak?â asked John Gans, who served as a civilian in the Pentagon during the Obama administration.
So many of todayâs rising military commanders and foreign policy experts were drawn into government service by the 9/11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan. After the relatively low-stakes peacekeeping missions of the 1990s, America and U.S. foreign policy suddenly seemed to be at the center of the world in the years after 2001. A whole generation of leaders driven âby ambition, ego and a desire to shape world eventsâ ran toward the action, Gans said.
Their numbers include lawmakers such as Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who joined the CIA, and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who signed up for the infantry, as well as top Biden foreign policy officials, such as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
It seems certain that in coming years the use of military force will be informed by this searing experience. U.S. foreign policy will be guided by more modest ambitions, especially when weighing the use of military power. Flournoy imagines a future in which military force is limited to more sharply defined objectives and informed by far greater humility when it comes to spreading democracy or changing societies.
In many cases, itâs a vision in which force is used to manage chronic problems, rather than solve them.
Another possibility is a U.S. foreign policy that is increasingly focused more on issues such as pandemics or climate change, which require U.S. leadership and a global response. Gans noted that more than 600,000 Americans have died of covid-19, far more than the number of U.S. lives lost to terrorism and war over the past 20 years.
For now, though, it seems unlikely that these threats will take center stage in U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon, with its $740 billion budget, still sucks up a larger share of discretionary spending than any other government agency. Meanwhile, the foreign policy establishment has shifted its focus increasingly to the competition with the likes of Russia and China.
âAfter 9/11, everyone raced to become a Middle East or counterterrorism expert,â said Gans. âAfter covid, you donât see many foreign policy people racing to become global health experts.â
On one subject most foreign policy experts agree: America needs to temper its faith in its armed forces. âWe had so much faith in our military that we were inevitably going to overstep,â said Dempsey, the Afghanistan veteran. âA military bureaucracy unchecked never yields good outcomes.â
It was a decision made out of impulse to strike back. Could it ever have ended any other way than this?
19h  · I watch the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan with disbelief and horror. I first visited the country with the mujahideen on February 14, 1989–the day the Soviets withdrew –and served there as Deputy Head of the UN mission in 2009.
So much went wrong but here is my very partial list of those most responsible for the fiasco.
1. The Afghan political and military leaders who were more interested in staying in power than doing anything while in office except for stealing as much as they could.
2. The US government which pumped so much money into Afghanistan that there was a lot to steal and it was easily stolen.
3. Hamid Karzai–Afghanistan’s first president was corrupt, ineffective, weird, and–after the massive fraud that accompanied his reelection, illegitimate. In 2009, he organized the fraud that got him a second term. That enabled him and his cronies to steal everything else.
4. Ban ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General who tolerated the massive fraud in the UN sponsored (and paid for) Afghanistan 2009 presidential elections. This undermined Obama’s surge which may have been the last chance to get it right.
5. David Petraeus, the other US military commanders and the so called strategic thinkers who all declared the Afghanistan War to be a counter-insurgency and also stated that successful counter-insuegencies require a local partner. They then pretended the corrupt Afghan government was a real partner when they knew it wasn’t.
6. USAID which built roads intended to raise rural incomes by getting farm products to market but actually enabled corrupt police to shakedown farmers. This won the Taliban new supporters and the new roads gave the Taliban speedy access to previously defensible areas like the Pansjir Valley (which neither the Soviets or the pre 2001 Taliban ever took).
7. Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan second president, who was a victim of Karzai’s fraud in the 2009 presidential elections and willingly took office–twice–thanks to massive electoral fraud. Ashraf is perosnally honest but when you come into office thanks to a stolen election, it is hard to crack down on the corrupt power brokers who got you there.
8. The US and UN architects of Afghanistan’s highly centralized constitution that was utterly inappropriate for a country that is as ethnically and geographically diverse as Afghanistan. Not only did the Constitution concentrate all power in Kabul at the expense of the provinces and districts but it also gave all power within Kabul to a Pashtun president as opposed to sharing power with an ethnically diverse parliament.
The rapid collapse follows a surrender agreement negotiated by Donald Trump and implemented by the Biden Administration. There is no reason to think the outcome would be any different if the US took another ten years to withdraw.
Tonight I helplessly held the hand of and stroked the hair of a beautiful 14 year old girl as she exited this world. She was looking forward to starting high school and eventually becoming a veterinarian. It was so senseless! I truly believe she could have been saved if her parents had not forbidden us from intubating her. A free vaccination would have prevented it all! This little girl was robbed of her whole life and of fulfilling all of her dreams. She had been with us 9 days and was able to communicate well until taking a turn for the worse yesterday.
About 2 hours later we were unable to save a 25 year old mother of 1 who was 15 weeks pregnant. She had refused the vaccines because of the lies about them causing infertility and harming her baby. Liars killed her, her baby and robbed a 2 year old little boy of hismommy and sibling. Not to mention robbing a husband of his wife and child. Those were 2 of 4 deaths we had tonight with the oldest being 45 years old! It was the 1st time since late March we have lost more than 3 covid patients in a single shift.
Then we find out this morning a coworker had 2 of her tires cut in 1 of our employee parking lots overnight! Fortunately, security caught and was able to detain the asshole until police arrived and took him into custody. Fuck the big orange buffoon, DeSantis, Facebook, Fox news, antivaxxers, magas, Dr Mercola, Robert Kennedy Jr, all parents who believe these killers over proven science and ALL other killers who spread anti vaccine lies. I can’t deal with people right now! I love you guys!
