Month: August 2021

Josh Marshall wrote a piece about the writers at “the fancy magazines” last week that’s worth reading. He references a letter written to him by a reader who points out that all the critics of the withdrawal seem to believe “there has to have been a better way” without reckoning with the fact that no matter what Biden did, there would have been effects that changed the circumstances on the ground.

Marshall makes this interesting observation:

Let’s go back to GF‘s “there has to have been a better way.” Both parties’ foreign policy establishments opposed leaving Afghanistan. Since Sunday, many on the center-right have argued that the collapse shows that withdrawal was a mistake. The US can maintain a few thousand troops in a mostly advisory role indefinitely and it’s really not a problem. But this hasn’t been the premise of most news commentary. It’s rather been that, yes, it was probably time to leave Afghanistan, but, yes, “there has to have been a better way.”

Was there?

Certainly the way it’s played out has been messy, chaotic, mortifying. Many armchair quarterbacks have the idea that the US could have evacuated everyone who had worked with us in advance of withdrawal. But as I and many other have argued that’s a basic misunderstanding of the situation. If you evacuate everyone who might be endangered by the fall of the government in advance, you are basically signing the regime’s death warrant. You are saying you don’t expect the regime to last and that the fall will come fast. That message is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In retrospect, of course, knowing that the regime did immediately collapse, there’s sort of no loss. But the US couldn’t do that. The whole point of the almost twenty year enterprise was to build a state and an army that could stand on its own. The US was never going to prevent that regime from even trying to survive.

My point here isn’t that there’s nothing the Biden administration could have done differently or better. At a minimum they could have been processing exit paperwork more rapidly in advance for interpreters and others who worked for the US and had clearer contingency planning for evacuations of personnel outside of Kabul for a rapid collapse scenario. My point is simply that to a great extent what we are seeing today was baked into the US mission in Afghanistan all along. It is ugly. And a lot of people are going to suffer. It is mortifying on various levels – some trivial and shallow and others profound – for the United States. But it was always baked in. And what is critical to understand is that the fact that it was always baked in, and no one was ready to grab that kryptonite or make that reckoning, is precisely why we have been there for almost twenty years.

What is being imagined and demanded is an hermetic, clean and painless end to a failed military mission. That’s not responsibility but rather denial.

Here we get to the heart of the matter.

From the beginning of this twenty years there has been a tendency among intellectuals to cast America’s response to the 9/11 attacks and Islamist fanaticism in grand world-historical terms. I wrote about this 18 years ago in a review of Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (“The Orwell Temptation“).

A snippet …

May you live, as the Chinese curse has it, in interesting times. For the last 18 months, we’ve all been living in “interesting times”—often frightfully so. Yet for intellectuals there is always a craving that times would be … well, just a little more interesting.

That’s been especially true for the last half century because a shadow has hung over political intellectuals in the English- speaking world, and in some respects throughout the West. It is the shadow of the ideological wars (and the blood-and iron wars) that grew out of World War I—from communism, to fascism, appeasement, vital-center liberalism, and the rest of it. Even as these struggles congeal into history, their magnitude and seriousness hardly diminish. Understanding fascism, understanding that it could be neither accommodated nor appeased, understanding that Soviet communism was really rather like fascism—these were much more than examples of getting things right or of demonstrating intellectual courage and moral seriousness. These insights, decisions, and moments of action came to define those qualities.

Since then, things have never been quite the same. Like doctors who want to treat the most challenging patients or cops who want to take down the worst criminals, it’s only natural for people who think seriously about political and moral issues to seek out the most challenging and morally vexing questions to ponder and confront. Yet, since the Cold War hit its middle period in the late 1950s, nothing has really quite compared. For a time, the struggles of the 1960s came to rival those heady days from earlier in the century. But the tenor was too antic, the stakes too meager, and the legacy too mixed to ever quite match up. And while momentous, the collapse of communism in the late 1980s was bittersweet for intellectuals. In his essay “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama even posited that history had “ended” with the collapse of communism, ushering in an era in which there would be no more great debates or challenges, but rather a bourgeois millennium of endlessly growing investment funds, a brave new world of consumer appliances. Later, the Balkans provided a crisis of moral weight sufficient to rival those earlier times–especially for those writers and journalists, mostly on the center-left, who had the courage and intrepidity to go there. But Yugoslavia’s collapse was essentially a local affair, with no clear connections to the world beyond the mangled and rancid history of the region.

Few people think this way any more. But lingering long after has been the idea that the US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were latter day analogues to America’s conquests, occupations and decades-long military and diplomatic commitments in Asia and Europe which still form the cornerstones of US military and diplomatic strategies in the world. They were simply ones that contemporary America lacked the fortitude, commitment or character to see through.

This was never true. They were altogether different. These were far tawdrier affairs, a tawdriness that two generations of valor from American military personnel could never truly upgrade or burnish.

And yet official DC, which means the city’s elite national political press, was deeply bought in. This doesn’t mean they were warmongers or rah-rah militarists. They were seldom the biggest cheerleaders for invasions and the organizations they work for often produced some of the deepest critiques or exposes of the failures and shortcomings of these efforts. But they were deeply bought in in ways that are likely best seen in sociological terms. Countless numbers embedded with US military formations. They accompanied members of Congress on “CODELS” to the warzones. They’ve been immersed with a Pentagon which has spent two decades building hammers to hit nails in the Middle East and Central Asia. Their peers study and write in the world of DC think tanks focused on the best ways of striking those nails. Wrapping this all together, they have built relationships with America’s local allies, particularly the more cosmopolitan and liberal city dwellers who aspire to a future more like the one people take for granted in North America and Europe.

We hear about the very real and dire fate of women and young girls under the Taliban, robbed of futures, banished from public life. And yet when these realities are adduced as the justification for continued or expanded military occupations we must also see that they are both very real and also the latter day cant of empire, much like the way the British East India Company justified its rule of the subcontinent by banning practices like the suttee, the immolation of wives on their husband’s funeral pyres.

There’s more that’s well worth pondering. But I think this gets to the heart of what a lot of these people are thinking and feeling. And they convey this to their audience without context or introspection leading the public to assume that there must have been a better way as well.After all, we are America. The bestest of all the empires, amirite?

Certainly, I agree with Josh that the plight of the Afghan people is horrific and the planned withdrawal is a mess. But was there a better way? Maybe on the margins. But every decision they could have made earlier would have affected what came next and there is little chance that it would have resulted in a better outcome even if it was different than what is unfolding now. It was always going to be awful.

New polling:

After a spike in U.S. Covid-19 cases and bipartisan criticism over the chaos from America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden’s overall job-approval rating has dipped below 50 percent among adults for the first time in his early presidency, according to a new NBC News poll.

The poll also finds fewer Americans support Biden’s handling of the coronavirus and the economy now than they did last spring, and just a quarter of respondents approve of his handling of Afghanistan.

The survey findings demonstrate the public has grown more pessimistic about the coronavirus since April, the country remains split over whether Covid-19 vaccines should be mandated and an electorate is divided over which political party should control Congress after the 2022 midterms.

It’s all produced a “summer of discontent” for Biden, said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies.

“The promise of April has led to the peril of August,” Horwitt said, arguing that Covid — more than Afghanistan — has dented Biden’s numbers. “It is the domestic storm, Covid’s delta wave, that is causing more difficulties at this stage here at home and for President Biden.”

McInturff agrees.

“The best way to understand this poll is to forget Afghanistan,” he said.

According to the survey, 49 percent of adults approve of Biden’s overall job performance, while 48 percent disapprove.

That’s down from April’s NBC News poll, when 53 percent of adults approved of Biden’s job and 39 percent disapproved — with some of the biggest declines for Biden coming from independents, rural residents and white respondents.

Democrats, however, have held steady, with 88 percent of them approving of Biden’s job (it was 90 percent in April).

Among a narrower sample of registered voters, Biden’s current job rating stands at 50 percent approve, 48 percent disapprove — down from April, when it was 51 percent approve, 43 percent disapprove.

(Despite this drop for Biden, his approval rating is higher than former President Donald Trump’s ever was in the poll during his entire presidency.)

Additionally, the poll finds 53 percent of Americans approve of the president’s handling of the coronavirus (which is a 16-point drop from April) and 47 percent approve his handling of the economy (a 5-point decline from the spring).

And just 25 percent approve of Biden’s handling of Afghanistan, while 60 percent disapprove.

We all thought that we were on the verge of being free. Then the unvaccinated Delta pandemic hit and we had to pull back again. It’s made for a sour mood, when we were expecting a joyous uplift. The president takes a hit when that happens.

The CBS Poll has similar findings on Afghanistan:

This was baked in, imo. The people still want the withdrawal but they want it to be clean and efficient without complications. The media is playing into that with its over-the-top coverage.

Wars don’t end that way, unfortunately.

Senator Chris Murphy sets the record straight on the pearl clutching by Republican officials over the Afghan translators and others being stranded:

Spare me the make believe indignation from Republicans about the Afghanistan evacuation.

Here’s the story of the relentless Republican effort (led by President Trump) to undermine and destroy the programs that help bring Afghan refugees to the U.S. 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. This dovetailed with the assault by Trump and Republicans to destroy other refugee programs that bring Afghans to the U.S..

Obama admitted over 2,700 Afghan refugees. Trump admitted 400, bc 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 U.S..

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

And as I have noted more than once, it’s only a matter of time before the right decides that the Afghanistan evacuation allowed dangerous killers to come kill us in our beds.

From James Fallows on twitter:

Brief history thread.
During late stage in Vietnam, args for staying were:

-Ripple effects on US “credibility”

-Need to fight for democ, against Communism

-US had overwhelming military-power advantage

-Don’t panic now, little more time to give training-mission a chance

After fall of Saigon, many tragic/horrific conseq:

-For those who had worked or fought alongside US

-For the whole of Cambodia

-Catholics in VN, Montagnards i Laos, many ethnic groups

-Re-education camps

-Decades of displacement, refugee camps thru SE Asia.

But books/reports also came out about what this South Vietnamese “democracy” US had fought for was really like

How irrelevant US firepower /technology advantage was.

Why politics / culture / history are crucial elements of war.

How US had structurally deceived itself

Afghanistan is not Vietnam, in a thousand ways.

But in context of arguments then and now, please read searing essay by Sarah Chayes, about on-the ground realities she has seen.

This is what Chayes has to say about this:

I’ve been silent for a while. I’ve been silent about Afghanistan for longer. But too many things are going unsaid.

I won’t try to evoke the emotions, somehow both swirling and yet leaden: the grief, the anger, the sense of futility. Instead, as so often before, I will use my mind to shield my heart. And in the process, perhaps help you make some sense of what has happened.

For those of you who don’t know me, here is my background — the perspective from which I write tonight.

I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my way into their former capital, Kandahar, in December 2001, a few days after the collapse of their regime. Descending the last great hill into the desert city, I saw a dusty ghost town. Pickup trucks with rocket-launchers strapped to the struts patrolled the streets. People pulled on my militia friends’ sleeves, telling them where to find a Taliban weapons cache, or a last hold-out. But most remained indoors.

It was Ramadan. A few days later, at the holiday ending the month-long fast, the pent-up joy erupted. Kites took to the air. Horsemen on gorgeous, caparisoned chargers tore across a dusty common in sprint after sprint, with a festive audience cheering them on. This was Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. There was no panicked rush for the airport.

I reported for a month or so, then passed off to Steve Inskeep, now Morning Edition host. Within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (You can read about that time, and its lessons, in my first two books, The Punishment of Virtue and Thieves of State.)

From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today’s climax of a two-decade long fiasco:

Afghan government corruption, and the U.S. role enabling and reinforcing it. The last speaker of the Afghan parliament, Rahman Rahmani, I recently learned, is a multimillionaire, thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram. Is this the type of government people are likely to risk their lives to defend?

Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.

I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. 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. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.

For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That’s when I knew today was inevitable.

Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line.

I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for.

And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.

Is that American democracy?

Well…?

Pakistan. The involvement of that country’s government — in particular its top military brass — in its neighbor’s affairs is the second factor that would determine the fate of the U.S. mission.

You may have heard that the Taliban first emerged in the early 1990s, in Kandahar. That is incorrect. I conducted dozens of conversations and interviews over the course of years, both with actors in the drama and ordinary people who watched events unfold in Kandahar and in Quetta, Pakistan. All of them said the Taliban first emerged in 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. They were known as sober, studious, and gentle. These Taliban, according to the ISI messaging, had no interest in government. They just wanted to get the militiamen who infested the city to stop extorting people at every turn in the road.

Both label and message were lies.

Within a few years, Usama bin Laden found his home with the Taliban, in their de facto capital, Kandahar, hardly an hour’s drive from Quetta. Then he organized the 9/11 attacks. Then he fled to Pakistan, where we finally found him, living in a safe house in Abbottabad, practically on the grounds of the Pakistani military academy. Even knowing what I knew, I was shocked. I never expected the ISI to be that brazen.

Meanwhile, ever since 2002, the ISI had been re-configuring the Taliban: helping it regroup, training and equipping units, developing military strategy, saving key operatives when U.S. personnel identified and targeted them. That’s why the Pakistani government got no advance warning of the Bin Laden raid. U.S. officials feared the ISI would warn him.

By 2011, my boss, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Taliban were a “virtual arm of the ISI.”

And now this.

Do we really suppose the Taliban, a rag-tag, disjointed militia hiding out in the hills, as we’ve so long been told, was able to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international backing? Where do we suppose that campaign plan came from? Who gave the orders? Where did all those men, all that materiel, the endless supply of money to buy off local Afghan army and police commanders, come from? How is it that new officials were appointed in Kandahar within a day of the city’s fall? The new governor, mayor, director of education, and chief of police all speak with a Kandahari accent. But no one I know has ever heard of them. I speak with a Kandahari accent, too. Quetta is full of Pashtuns — the main ethic group in Afghanistan — and people of Afghan descent and their children. Who are these new officials?

Over those same years, by the way, the Pakistani military also provided nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. But for two decades, while all this was going on, the United States insisted on considering Pakistan an ally. We still do.

Hamid Karzai. During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government’s role in the Taliban’s initial rise, I learned this breathtaking fact: Hamid Karzai, the U.S. 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.

I spent months probing the stories. I spoke to servants in the Karzai household. I spoke to a former Mujahideen commander, Mullah Naqib, who admitted to being persuaded by the label and the message Karzai was peddling. The old commander also admitted he was at his wits’ end at the misbehavior of his own men. I spoke with his chief lieutenant, who disagreed with his tribal elder and commander, and took his own men off to neighboring Helmand Province to keep fighting. I heard that Karzai’s own father broke with him over his support for this ISI project. Members of Karzai’s household and Quetta neighbors told me about Karzai’s frequent meetings with armed Taliban at his house there, in the months leading up to their seizure of power.

And lo. Karzai abruptly emerges from this vortex, at the head of a “coordinating committee” that will negotiate the Taliban’s return to power? Again?

It was like a repeat of that morning of May, 2011, when I first glimpsed the pictures of the safe-house where Usama bin Laden had been sheltered. Once again — even knowing everything I knew — I was shocked. I was shocked for about four seconds. Then everything seemed clear.

It is my belief that Karzai may have been a key go-between negotiating this surrender, just as he did in 1994, this time enlisting other discredited figures from Afghanistan’s past, as they were useful to him. Former co-head of the Afghan government, Abdullah Abdullah, could speak to his old battle-buddies, the Mujahideen commanders of the north and west. You may have heard some of their names as they surrendered their cities in recent days: Ismail Khan, Dostum, Atta Muhammad Noor. The other person mentioned together with Karzai is Gulbuddin Hikmatyar — a bona fide Taliban commander, who could take the lead in some conversations with them and with the ISI.

As Americans have witnessed in our own context — the #MeToo movement, for example, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, or the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — surprisingly abrupt events are often months or years in the quiet making. The abrupt collapse of 20 years’ effort in Afghanistan is, in my view, one of those cases.

Thinking this hypothesis through, I find myself wondering: what role did U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad play? And old friend of Karzai’s, he was the one who ran the negotiations with the Taliban for the Trump Administration, in which the Afghan government was forced to make concession after concession. Could President 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?

Self-Delusion. How many times did you read stories about the Afghan security forces’ steady progress? How often, over the past two decades, did you hear some U.S. official proclaim that the Taliban’s eye-catching attacks in urban settings were signs of their “desperation” and their “inability to control territory?” How many heart-warming accounts did you hear about all the good we were doing, especially for women and girls?

Who were we deluding? Ourselves?

What else are we deluding ourselves about?

One final point. I hold U.S. civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can and did find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the U.S. 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 faced with calls to do so, no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.

Today, as many of those officials enjoy their retirement, who is suffering the cost?

This is a perspective you aren’t seeing on your television right now, that’s for sure. Instead they are showing horrifying pictures of desperate people literally dying to leave the country. But keep in mind that if the withdrawal had gone as the media apparently assumed it would — the US efficiently leaving with their interpreters and others in tow — as the Afghan army they trained fought off the Taliban, would have left millions of people these media figures supposedly care so much about,to a bloody civil war for who knows how long. In other words, the good scenario in their minds was more carnage. Everyone needs to take a deep breath on this. There were no good options.

Voter fraud fraudsters are so desperate to prove election crimes occured that they will commit them themselves just to prove it.

“Election machine passwords from Mesa County, Colo., mysteriously appeared earlier this month on a right-wing conspiracy website,” the Washington Post Editorial Board reports. In this mini-saga, Tina M. Peters (R), Mesa County’s elected clerk and recorder, allegedly hacked her own county’s voting machines to show how it’s done, and “the county clerk’s presence at the election conspiracy-fest that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell held in South Dakota last week does not help her credibility.” Peters is under investigation by both the Colorado Secretary of State’s office and the FBI:

This weird episode appears to pose no ongoing threat to voting security in Mesa County. But it suggests the lengths to which those devoted to the Trumpist lie will go — and the sabotage they could do if they are in positions of responsibility. Across the country, conspiracist candidates are running for election administration jobs, from secretary of state on down. Many Republican gubernatorial and state legislative candidates have also embraced the effort to undermine the credibility of the country’s democratic system by falsely claiming the 2020 presidential contest was rigged. Meanwhile, election workers simply doing their jobs are regularly facing threats to their safety, forcing them to wonder whether an unglamorous administrative job is worth the risk.

Even amid the tribalism of today’s politics, there are still tribunes of hope and sanity. Matt Crane, the Republican head of the Colorado County Clerks Association, condemned the Mesa breach. “There is nothing heroic or honorable about what happened in Mesa County,” he said. “As election officials, we have to be the grownups in the room.” U.S. democracy will no doubt depend once again on public-spirited officials such as Mr. Crane doing their duty against the unrelenting pressure of Mr. Trump and his acolytes.

Public spirit is not dead, just on a ventilator in certain quarters. Republican elections officials I have worked beside are for the most part doing the unsexy work of election administration because they believe in the work as public service. That does not mean that if you press the right buttons some crazy won’t leak out. But for the most part, they keep it in check and keep what they think privately separate from what they do as public officials. It’s the bleacher bums you have to watch out for, Ms. Peters (allegedly) excepted.

That is how it is supposed to work in federal service as well. What Trump and Trumpists encouraged, and Bushies before them, was putting partisanship above citizenship and duty. All that flag-waving and Constitution-clutching is more about allegiance to their team than to their country, whatever lies they believe about themselves.

Last week, Rep. Terri Sewell, Democrat of Alabama, introduced some tweaks to the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Among the modifications is some interesting bit of legislatin’ designed to rein in Roberts Supreme Court where it comes to voting rights rulings. Three of the court’s judges signalled last fall that they were content to void tens of thousands of ballots submitted under legal rules the Supremes later overruled.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern summarizes Ian Millhizer’s Vox analysis:

The House bill actually repeals the court’s own rules for deciding election-related cases—which strongly favor states’ ability to suppress votes—replacing them with voter-friendly directives that would force the justices to safeguard equal suffrage. H.R. 4 also takes on the “shadow docket,” prohibiting the Supreme Court from issuing unreasoned emergency orders reversing lower court decisions that protected the franchise. And it abolishes the legal doctrine that allows the justices to shield anti-voting laws from judicial scrutiny in the run-up to an election.

Inspiring the changes are the court’s response to changes voters demanded to election rules in 2020 to make it easier and safer to vote during the pandemic. While lower courts often granted that flexibilty, the Supremes quashed those rulings on review in the “shadow docket,” often citing what Millhizer describes as “new, seemingly made-up limits on the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against racism in elections.”

Stern explains:

First, the conservatives turbocharged “the Purcell principle,” the doctrine that federal judges shouldn’t change voting laws on the eve of an election. The Purcell principle began as a modest warning against confusing voters who are already on their way to the polls. But throughout the 2020 election, SCOTUS wielded the Purcell principle to insulate state voting procedures from judicial review in the months before Election Day. Second, the conservatives consistently ignored or rejected district courts’ factual findings that election regulations would severely burden the right to vote. Third, and relatedly, these justices valued states’ interest in enforcing their own election laws over citizens’ right to cast a ballot. They even seemed to reject the notion that the public has an interest in protecting the right to vote; instead, they assumed that the public’s only interest lay in enforcing restrictive statutes. Because the court had to weigh the public interest when deciding whether to halt a lower court order, this hostility led the majority to block multiple orders expanding access to the vote.

Three Republican-appointed justices also pushed the court to the brink of the (previously) unthinkable: Nullifying ballots cast pursuant to a lower court order. On Sept. 18, 2020, a district court suspended South Carolina’s requirement that a “witness” sign mail ballots. The federal appeals court declined to halt the decision, so for weeks, thousands of voters returned mail ballots lacking a witness signature. Then, on Oct. 5, the Supreme Court restored this requirement. Alarmingly, three justices—Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and Neil Gorsuch—would’ve voided every ballot lacking a witness signature, including those cast in reliance on the lower courts’ decisions. Ballots, in other words, that were perfectly legal at the time they were mailed back.

H.R. 4 is a frontal assault on every component of the Supreme Court’s voting rights shadow docket. It repeals the Purcell principle, forbidding both SCOTUS and the federal appeals courts from citing proximity to an election as an excuse to reinstate a voting restriction. (There are minor exceptions for extreme circumstances on the eve of Election Day.) It bars the justices from considering “a state’s generalized interest in enforcing its enacted laws” when deciding whether to block or permit an election regulation. And it instead compels the court to “give substantial weight to the public’s interest in expanding access to the right to vote.” Under H.R. 4, the Supreme Court may not set aside a lower court decision expanding voting access unless it finds that burdens on the state “substantially outweigh” the “public’s interest in expanding access to the ballot. The court may not set aside the district court’s factual findings unless they’re “clearly erroneous.” And it must provide a “written explanation” laying out its reasoning.

Finally, H.R. 4 preempts the Supreme Court from issuing a future decision nullifying valid ballots, as Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch tried to do in South Carolina. The justices “shall not order relief,” the bill states, that abridges the right to vote of “any citizen who has acted in reliance” on a lower court order that suspended voting restrictions.

What a concept.

Rick Hasen, election law scholar at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, predicted in 2016, “By making the Purcell principle paramount, the Court runs the risk of issuing orders which can disenfranchise voters or impose significant burdens on election administrators for no good reason.” Just the kind of judicial overreach Republicans normally decry.

Millhizer concluded last week:

If enacted, the new John Lewis Act would be one of the most ambitious voting rights laws ever enacted by Congress — though, again, its success depends on Senate Democrats unanimously concluding that protecting democracy is more important than preserving the filibuster. In either event, however, the bill is a giant middle finger to the Roberts Court, which has been extraordinarily hostile toward voting rights.

If nothing else, in other words, the latest version of the John Lewis Act recognizes that one of the greatest threats to American democracy is the Supreme Court of the United States — and that Congress needs to confront the Court’s recent decisions directly if it hopes to protect democracy in the United States.

Millhizer has much more on what is in the bill as it stands now. The problem, of course, is the filibuster standing in the way of Democrats passing it through the Senate.

Anyone else sick of hearing that broken record skip?

For those who say that what has happened in the last week will permanently damage America’s standing in the world, a short list of reasons why, bad as it was, it won’t even make the top 30 things that have really harmed our standing.

1. A coup against our government led by our president
2. Support for the coup from the entire Republican Party
3. A major political party (see above) dedicated to dismantling democracy in the United States
4. A president impeached for encouraging the coup

5. A president impeached for trying to blackmail a US ally
6. A president who bullied & insulted our allies for 4 years
7. A president and party who have actively promoted racism and ethno-nationalism
8. A president & party who sought to shut our borders to people of color

9. Re: the preceding, a president & party who sought to block the entry of Afghan (& Iraqi) allies into the country
10. A president who helped deepen the global COVID crisis through selfishness, ignorance and corruption
11. US having the highest COVID death total in the world

12. A president cozying up to dictators worldwide
13. A president corruptly profiting from the presidency
14. A president who was a serial sex offender
15. A president who is a serial tax cheat

16. A president who serially obstructed justice
17. A president who was, at least, the pawn of a foreign enemy who he catered to at the expense of US national security and that of our allies
18. A president surrounded by a long list of corrupt, indicted, convicted cronies

19. A president who unilaterally and without cause pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal
20. A president who unilaterally and without cause pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords
21. A president who pulled the US out of key UN organizations

22. A president who turned his back on our Kurdish allies
23. A president who helped defend the murderers of a US journalist and pardoned war criminals (and whole host of other corrupt cronies including those who helped serve foreign enemies)

24. Another president who sat by inertly in the face of the abuses of the Syrian gov’t
25. 2 presidents in a row who failed to close Guantanamo
26. 2 presidents in a row who have embraced the violation of the sovereignty of foreign nations via drone & other attacks

27. A president who violated int’t law via rendition programs and the opening of the prison in Guantanamo
28. A president who illegally invaded Iraq without justification causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents
29. A president who embraced unilateralism

30. A president who invaded Afghanistan with the purpose of responding to Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack and then without justification or hope of success expanded the mission to nation building thus triggering a fruitless, costly 20 year conflict.

What happened in the past week was bad. We should seek to aid and give refuge to Afghan allies. We should use all the tools at our disposal to help ensure respect for human rights in Afghanistan.But getting out of that country & ending that war was actually the right thing to do.

We did it badly. We must learn from the error. But to suggest that the damage done to our international standing or our relationship with our allies is more grave than any of the other things listed above is preposterous.

To suggest that damage done will set us back more than did dropping a nuclear weapon on Japan, the fiasco in Vietnam, the assaults on the values we preach like Watergate or Iran-Contra, the support of the use of WMDs by the Iraqis against the Iranian.,

…wars we have undertaken to serve major multinational corporate interests, conflicts we have failed to enter despite the fact that only we could lead the protection of peoples at risk and worse, the visible and continuing dysfunction of our government,…

…our mercurial views toward the international community, our failure to lead on major global issues like protecting the environment, our failure to invest in ourselves and maintaining our competitive edge against new rivals…

…to suggest this week’s errors even approach those things (as some heavy-breathing credits have) just does not survive even the most cursory analysis. We mismanaged an event in pursuit of doing the right thing.

That is much better by any measure than doing the wrong thing efficiently (for which many of the current chorus of critics have sought praise in the past–see surges and other initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.) What is more, the admin responded quickly.

Nearly 20,000 people have been evacuated, almost 15,000 in the past week alone. Errors were identified, acknowledged and have been fixed or are in the process of being addressed. That too is positive and sends a positive message to allies and the world.

For Trumpists to argue we have undermined our standing with allies given their leader’s record is beyond ludicrous. For anyone to suggest this week’s missteps were on a par with those of recent administrations is also absurd.

These facts won’t stop the critics. Acknowledging errors but putting them in perspective won’t suit their political agendas or biases. But facts are facts, history is history & anyone with a memory should understand where this past week fits in the story of recent US actions.

Originally tweeted by David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) on August 21, 2021.

As James Fallows wrote:

I try not to do many predictions but once in a while it’s so obvious it’s unavoidable. I predicted the other day that it was only a matter of time before the right wing starts demagoguing the Afghan refugees as possible terrorists coming to kill us all in our beds.

Behold the Texas Attorney General (a criminal, btw) on Fox News:

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Friday that he is “concerned” about Afghan refugees coming to his state because “we don’t know if they’re sending terrorists.”

Paxton made the remarks during an appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends First” in reaction to news that Fort Bliss, headquartered in El Paso, could temporarily host refugees being evacuated from Afghanistan as the Taliban takes over.

“I’m very concerned about them coming to Texas because of the way this was done. There’s not a lot of vetting,” he claimed. “We don’t know if they’re sending terrorists over.”

Paxton compared the situation to the U.S.-Mexico border, claiming “terrorists could cross there as well,” ignoring the fact that the vast majority of immigrants apprehended there are being turned away under the Title 42 expulsion order, a controversial policy which allows officials to deny entry under the guise of public safety related to the pandemic.

Refugee Services of Texas, which assists with refugee resettlement in the state, recently told a Texas news outlet that it expects to settle at least 324 Afghan civilians amid U.S. operations in the country. Officials explained that all applicants applying for resettlement would undergo background checks and health screenings before they are allowed in.

Those who have worked with the U.S. government will be able to apply for a Special Immigrant Visa through the State Department before they are allowed to travel to other parts of the United States beyond Fort Bliss. According to the El Paso Times, those whose visas are approved will then be moved to be with relatives, host families, or will be resettled separately.

And if it does happen that a jihadist managed to sneak in, wait for the media to rise up in one shrill primal scream.

There are reasons Bush, Obama and Trump just let the war go on for 20 years. This is one of them.

Recall Lyndon Johnson’s fateful words speaking to his close friend Senator Richard Russell:

Lyndon B. Johnson: I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less

Richard Russell: I know, but you go send a whole lot of our boys out there –

Lyndon B Johnson: Yeah that’s right. That’s exactly right. That’s what I’m talking about. You get a few. We had 35 killed — and we got enough hell over 35 — this year […] The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it, every one of them, even Dirksen

Richard Russell: It’s the only issue they got […] It’s a tragic situation. It’s just one of those place where you can’t win. Anything you do is wrong…

Good question. It’s the quote o’ the day:

Norwegian Cruise Lines CEO Frank Del Rio slams Gov. DeSantis (R-FL) over vaccine mandate lawsuit appeal:

“Give it up! This is a pandemic we’re talking about. People are dying everyday. Florida now is the epicenter of the epicenter. What’s it take for common sense to rule?" pic.twitter.com/U3cJffVQUG

— The Recount (@therecount) August 20, 2021

Meanwhile:

For those thinking that this COVID-19 surge doesn't affect them personally…here you go. The city uses liquid oxygen to clean our drinking water, but hospitals need it more. https://t.co/5P24x9exQq

— Caroline Catherman (@CECatherman) August 20, 2021

DeSantis’ insane COVID policies have led him to push the Regeneron treatments over vaccines and masks. Here’s how that’s going:

Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is facing a backlash after a photo of a Covid-19 patient curled up on a healthcare centre’s floor while awaiting treatment went viral.

According to Kailey Tracy of First Coast News, the city of Jacksonville confirmed that the photo was real and was taken at a monoclonal treatment centre at the downtown library on Wednesday.

According to Ms Tracy, a woman who claimed her husband took the photo posted it to Reddit.

“Woman who posted picture to Reddit says her husband took it, saw people crying in pain. COJ says they were waiting for treatment, providing triple # of wheelchairs now,” she reported.

The city issued a statement saying the centre where the photo was taken was not intended for people experiencing advanced covid symptoms.

“This treatment is meant to keep people OUT of the hospital and is designed for those early on in their COVID-19 diagnosis or for those who believe they have been exposed to COVID. Individuals with severe symptoms should contact a medical professional for guidance on the proper treatment for their situation,” the city said.

Florida recently opened several free monoclonal antibody centres in order to treat Covid-19 patients in an effort to ease overburdened hospitals in the state.

The centres are intended to provide early treatment in order to keep patients from developing worse symptoms that require hospitalisation.

More than half of the state’s ICU capacity is filled with coronavirus patients as of Tuesday. That number dwarfs the national average of 27 per cent, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Texas has set up similar sites. That state’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott is receiving monoclonal antibody treatment after being diagnosed with Covid-19.

Trump 2.0 is making it sound as if all people need to do if they get COVID is run to one of the centers and get cured. No need for vaccines or masks, it’s all good. And while the treatments are very effective, they don’t work if you are in full-blown COVID which most people are not understanding. They are, after all, people who have refused to get vaccinated and won’t wear masks. They believe people like Trump and DeSantis.

In this regard he might as well be telling them to drink bleach.

The following is from David Frum which I know will trigger angry recriminations for his role in the whole war on terror and for good reason. But when he’s right, he’s right even if he was wrong then:

ICYMI I wrote this on the origins of Biden’s Afghan dilemma.

When President Obama took office in 2009, he faced a deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan. After much deliberation, he ordered a surge of troops that ultimately deployed 65,000 Americans, as well as substantial contingents of NATO allies.

Those forces hard and well through the first Obama term. But they failed to achieve the thing most needed: the construction of a stable Afghan state, supported by security forces that could best the Taliban without massive foreign backing.

Meanwhile, US intel confirmed what had long been suspected: the man who started the war, Osama bin Laden, had been hiding for years not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan – surely with the connivance of at least some important people in the Pakistani state.

The Obama administration did not respond to this stark exposure of Pakistani duplicity, in part for the reasons in the thread you can read starting here.

All this was observed and witnessed by Obama VP Joe Biden. And when Biden reached the presidency in 2021, he was confronted with the same predicament that faced Obama in 2009: deteriorating security situation, weak Afghan state, etc. etc.

Only Biden’s predicament was much worse! The Trump administration – led here by SecState Pompeo – had struck a deal with the Taliban: give us low US casualties through the 2020 election, we’ll surrender Afghanistan to you after the election.

Trump’s last secretary of defense Chris Miller now justifies this deal by arguing: Trump never intended to honor it, it was just a ruse, Trump would have reneged had he somehow won the 2020 election.

But Trump made very clear: he wanted out of Afghanistan at any price. He cared nothing for Afghan lives and freedoms. Maybe *Miller* hoped to renege on Pompeo’s deal – but Miller’s hopes tell us little about what a re-elected Trump would have actually done in Afghanistan.

It’s a strange thing that the best excuse that Trump supporters can offer for the Trump-Pompeo deal with the Taliban was that Trump-Pompeo were negotiating in bad faith. But that’s the excuse.

Whether the excuse described reality or not, however, mattered little to the situation faced by the incoming Biden team. The Taliban had upheld their end of the Trump-Pompeo deal. Biden’s choices thus became quite stark.

He could renege on the Trump-Pompeo deal himself, igniting a new round of fighting that would demand a new surge of US forces – repeating the experience of 2009, but this time with even more dependence on an even less friendly Pakistan (linked thread)

Or else honor the Trump-Pompeo deal and exit Afghanistan – risking that local Afghan power-holders would rush to reach their own accommodations with the Taliban, capsizing the Afghan state faster than the US could extricate itself.

Whatever you or I or the people on cable TV would have personally advised Biden, there was no escaping the threshold question: honor Trump’s deal and surrender Afghanistan – or renege on Trump’s deal and recommit more or fewer US forces to defend Afghanistan.

Biden had attended this particular movie before. He had seen the beginning, middle, and end. So it’s unsurprising that he had his own strong views about what to do.

Nobody can ever know the hazards of the road not taken. Had Biden opted to renege on the Trump-Pompeo deal, that would have had costs too. Maybe those costs would have been worth it. But maybe it’s also the job of a president to face ugly truths and accept bad outcomes.

As powerful as the US is, it cannot do everything/be everywhere. Only one thing at a time can be the top priority. Obama’s 2009 Afghan surge limited Obama’s options w/r/t Russia, China, Pakistan.

Biden’s tough and cold Afghan decision widens US options in the world.

The most terrible burden of the presidency is the inescapable obligation to balance life against life.

Originally tweeted by David Frum (@davidfrum) on August 20, 2021.