The hysterical media crescendo over the past couple days with every 60-year-old op-ed writer crawling out of the swamp to demand permanent military occupation has been been very illustrative as to the degree to which the generation which gave us the War on Terror, rather than the generations which grew up disillusioned with it, are still in control of pretty much every major media institution. There seems to be a real age gap between those people and pundits in the Millennial/Gen Z bracket who were too young to have any investment in the decision to declare war and have grown up correctly intuiting that it’s pointless.
I really think the greatest opinion divide between the "elite" media and the public (contra what a lot of Republicans will say) is around foreign policy. There tends to be widespread, bipartisan comity across the "elite" media that US military interventions are good and worthy. And there is very broad bipartisan agreement among the public these days that we should not be doing these things. Someone else here quoted Nicole Wallace's comment re the 95% of the media v the public, and yes that's an exaggeration but she hit on the key point there. It's quite remarkable. (FYI, I'm thinking outlets like WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, not so much local ones.)
Speaking of media, if I see one more showing of the same picture of Iraqis trying to climb up the stairs to the plane, I will scream. If I see one more instance of the same picture showing 6oo Iraqis crowded in a cargo plane, I will scream. I had the pleasure of watching BBC America the last two nights. They of course showed some of the chaos at the airport. They also showed calm streets in Kabul and girls in school.They even interviewed some of the girls in school. Biden hit a nerve. I don't remember any recent event to which those who blueprinted the cause, prolonged it by trying to tweak a failed interventionist strategy, took the side of Petraeus in the infamous counter-terror vs. counter insurgency debate and consistently underestimated the enemy that has drawn as many quick judgements and outrage towards the one person trying to get us out and put the decades-long Afghan calamity behind us. Call it the revenge of the zombied neocons. A lot of them will be forced to eat their words in the coming months as the 'fog' of the last two weeks clears
I dared to turn on MSNBC last night, only to find some talking heads fantasizing about scenarios that would force Biden to commit to sending more troops there.
It really has been shocking to me how many of these ghouls have apparently learned nothing. If people thought Biden came across as cold, good. I think Gen Z and Millennials have had quite enough of the "values based" foreign policy that has had us stuck in countries who don’t want us there blowing up civilians for 20 years.
There's too much credulity toward anyone who wants to do more war and too much scepticism of decisions to not fight. There was implicit cheerleading for Obama to commit troops to Syria, very little critical analysis of the Bush administration's BS at the time, very little calling out of critics of the Iran deal for being obviously full of sh*t. In international affairs, I feel like too many prominent figures have a basic value that sending in the military is good but striving for peace is bad.
You are absolutely right. Gen Z/Millenials have this figured out. They know that the real moral problems of our time are things like American black women having a more difficult time finding mascara than their white countrywomen not truly oppressive things like subjugation under the threat of murder.
To characterize the very real concern of harm (not the bullshit harms pretension Gen Zers cry crocodile tears over) to tens of thousands of people as hysterical is sad.
I didn’t miss any of it. I also didn’t support it in the first place. It’s complicated and real humans are going to die. The US should have done more to assure our friends got out and were safe. The political takes piss me off right now. I listened to a lieutenant talk about his very real Afghan friends that were at risk of being murdered and it was the most authentic and non political thing I’ve heard on MSNBC in years. It’s sad.
It’s also being peddled to you in the hopes that it pressures Biden to do a volte-face and go back in with tens of thousands of soldiers.
Let’s not mince words: to successfully evacuate the several hundred thousand Afghans who served with NATO forces and are in danger would require a several-year commitment of 20-30,000 troops to secure the whole country, find, and extricate these people.
That would culminate in the final detachment of a few thousand having to depart from an airbase and cross a foreign border to be interned.
Chances are that the two years of open warfare between NATO troops and the whole country that would precede it would cost far more lives than the Taliban will take in the coming years.
It would also entail immense risk to the soldiers asked to carry it out, especially those in the final “Anabasis”.
Dude, I'm talking about people calling for a permanent occupation, not people who criticized the administration for a horribly bungled withdrawal. Do me a favor and read my post next time before you jump down my throat, okay? I've been yelling for State to speed up evacuating Afghans for months because I figured exactly this was going to happen.
John, I'm 63 and supported the invasion of Iraq, but it has been obvious to me for years that Afghanistan was just another exercise in "saving a bunch of Asians who don't want to be saved." I apologise for not writing enough op-eds about it. But nobody was going to read them anyway, until it was too late.
9/11 happened when I was 18 and I remember driving home from school after it was cancelled thinking "Well, I'm going to get drafted". The draft didn't happen but I did know a number of people who signed up for the military and who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. The toll those deployments took on many young men and women from my generation is not appreciated near enough in my opinion. I have real anger toward GWB and people of his and older generations who never fought in a war yet were so eager to send others to war. I'm still pissed when I see a boomer come on TV and repeat the same damn talking points about this war. They can all go to hell.
I remember my dad grilling me about my view when I participated in protests against the war when I was a newly minted high school student in 2002. When he pushed me to back up my position, i told him that I’d grown up with him and all his hippie friends telling me war was bad! I’ve maintained all these years that that was the right answer then, and it seems like it’s still the right answer 20 years later.
Absolutely. The last few days have made it very clear that there’s a huge age gap between the generations who were adults in 2001-2003 and sent American kids to die in Iraq for no good reason, and the generations who grew up during that period deeply disillusioned with the war effort.
As a 20-something adult in 2001-2003 I very much supported the war (envisioning the Marshall plan in my head and successful nation building). I was skeptical of Obama (vs. Clinton) because I thought he'd pull out of Afghanistan too soon when we might be close to stabilizing it. Since then... that's not how things worked out, and I regret the decisions we made.
Feel free to blame us for supporting it, but some of us, I think, have learned our lesson.
I don't blame the average Americans for supporting it. I no doubt would have done the same at the time. The policy-makers and media commentators who are supposed to be deeply informed are the ones I expect more from, particularly in reflection after the fact, something very few of these people in the media appear to have done.
The speech I would have liked to have heard from Biden would have even more accepting of responsibility. The soldiers didn't lose this war, the taxpayers didn't lose this war, the aid organizations and volunteers didn't lose this war. GWB lost this war. Barak Obama lost this war. Donald Trump lost this war. Joe Biden lost this war. Every major military figure in command lost this war. Every sitting and former Senator and Congress person (2001-2021) lost this war. The leaders of this country lead poorly and though we bear some responsibility for voting for them, they also had a duty to us to be honest brokers of information of what was actually happening in Afghanistan and propose successful solutions. They lied to us and bathed themselves in honor the entire time, all while lecturing us on the virtues of nation building. Every politician out there crowing about how we should have stayed longer is a coward and a liar of astonishing magnitude.
I don't see how Biden lost this war. I think he probably didn't try hard enough to get people out but this was lost a long time ago. It also seems like he was given faulty intelligence on how long the Afghan army would hold out. To me, responsibility lies with GW Bush for (a)trying to nation build; and (b) starting a second war in Iraq that we had to commit resources to. The fact that two successive Presidents couldn't get it working and then the government collapsed in days suggests that this was never going to work.
Biden only lost this war in the sense that he decided he could/would be the one to take the rap for it. Three previous president's couldn't make themselves rip off the bandaid and Biden finally came along and said, here, let me...
Biden was part of the Obama administration, he is also the president who oversaw the actual retreat from the theatre of war. This should be contextualized and not used as a bad faith cudgel but it's also truth.
I don't really see that. Americans - including the ones who supported the wars in Afghanistan and/or Iraq - have been disillusioned with war for more than a decade. In Iraq, it took just a couple of years.
I haven't done a comprehensive survey of all media commentary, but I don't think it's reflective of broader popular opinion for any age group. I suspect some people of my generation or older (I was in college during 9/11) have more ambivalent feelings about Afghanistan because (1) we have more a visceral recall of the trauma of 9/11, (2) by contrast to Iraq, the Afghan war was at least motivated by an effort to respond to the people who were responsible for 9/11, (3) the repressive nature of the Taliban regime is more ingrained in our consciousness, and (4) there was early success in Afghanistan in driving out the Taliban, standing up a new regime, and having the popular support of the Afghan people. But on the whole, I think most people tired of this war at least some time during the Obama administration.
I do think we should add some younger people to the corridors of power, especially in the democratic party. However, I think you missed the point that Matt made when he said that had a younger candidate been elected president, its probable that they would have stayed.
From a distance, it looks to me like the real choice was 1) piss off and undercut the Afghan government by evacuating the embassy and willing Afghan translators BEFORE troop drawdowns or 2) do what we did, evacuate the troops while signaling confidence in the current regime by leaving everyone in place.
Is that not the crux of it? Biden administration didn’t want to invite a crisis of confidence by outwardly preparing for and anticipating imminent collapse, so they didn’t? I get the dilemma. You’d possibly get destroyed on right wing media for “not giving the Afghan people a chance.” But isn’t the basic critique here that they could have changed the order of operations to evacuated civilians earlier in the process?
It may be the case that civilian personnel, e.g. at the embassies, could not have been evacuated earlier without undermining confidence, but there's no good reason that we could not have processed the 18,000 applications for Special Immigrant Visas that are in the backlog months ago. I read with great shame this NYT article this morning (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/us/afghanistan-visa-refugees-us.html) about the plight of Afghans who risked everything to help us and have been effectively abandoned.
In 2010 I left Afghanistan after spending 9 months training Afghan Border Police. My two interpreters were Tajiks from Kabul and frankly hated everything about Helmand province, but they were in it for the visas. After I got out of the military I tried to help one of my interpreters nudge his pending application through the SIV process. It was a Kafkaesque nightmare of unresponsive subcontractors demanding document after document. In the meantime, both of my interpreters had moved back to Kabul and started working with the Australians (doing much safer jobs than they had with the Americans, I might add). Within a matter of months they had received AUS visas and were resettled in Sydney. By that point their SIV applications had been in process for more than two years. (According to the NYT article, the average wait is 3 years.) I was embarrassed and ashamed then, but today I am infuriated.
I think obviously more could have been done, but I think the extent to which the Trump administration hamstrung the US visa process is one of the underreported stories here. It wasn't just that they reduced the number of refugee visas to nothing, but they also eliminated a lot of the visa approval infrastructure. So it wasn't just a matter of kicking off visa approvals on Jan 21st, but of rebuilding US processing capability.
"Critics say that the U.S. government, going back several administrations, has delayed special immigrant visa approvals by demanding an extraordinary amount of documentation as part of an unwieldy 14-step process.
Applicants have faced average wait times of three years, though Congress had specified that it should take no more than nine months. Many have been waiting as long as a decade for the outcome of their cases."
I know from the Iraq version of the SIV program that it is a long-standing problem. Our immigration bureaucracy is set up to make it difficult, all out of a fear that undesirables of one or another ilk might somehow get in and do something bad.
How do you reconcile those two things - "extent to which the Trump administration hamstrung the US visa process" vs "going back several administrations...unwieldy 14 step process?"
Further - if the process is that broken, perhaps we should have focused on prioritizing and fixing it prior to exit?
Sure, the process was always cumbersome, but as part of an overall hostility to refugees and immigration in general, the Trump administration made it a policy to do everything it could to shut off the flow. Lots of good reporting at the time, this is just the first general piece I came across:
Trump dropped the refugee cap from an Obama-era 110k to 15k--the lowest since the relevant laws took effect. Biden raised it to 65k and was lambasted for slow-walking it.
Reading both those articles, it seems that Trump definitely didn't improve things, but doesn't seem clear to me that the process was made dramatically worse by him. The law passed in 2013 was done because the system was so messed up it wasn't working, and its not clear to me that it was substantially better prior to 2016.
Further, the second article says "But World Relief, a humanitarian organisation, last month said White House claims that the US refugee resettlement programme needed to be rebuilt after the Trump years were "a completely false narrative" and "a purely political calculation".
Matt on the Weeds has talked about how Biden is slow walking a lot of the asylum claims. I don't see how this is any different...but even if it was and they needed more time, then they should prioritized it and taken more time before doing the withdrawal.
"Further - if the process is that broken, perhaps we should have focused on prioritizing and fixing it prior to exit?"
This would've meant reversing the Trump negotiated cease fire, which would've meant pouring in significantly more troops, and going back to taking casualties and hemorrhaging cash indefinitely. IOW, the status quo pre Trump.
Every single critic of Biden's judgement starts with "no one could have foreseen this coming" and finishes with "this is on biden for not seeing this coming."
No, the administration believed, for whatever reason, that the Afghan government would not collapse so quickly and they failed to adequately plan and prepare for this contingency.
You hear this a lot, but it's not clear to me at all what "adequate planning" for this contingency would've looked like. It would help if folks would be more specific when talking about all the great options that were bypassed here.
Sure, First thing's first, if one suspects that the government will collapse quickly, or one wants to plan for that contingency, then that drives certain actions:
- To start with, removing combat forces is the last thing you would do and not the first. The reason we have to roll 6k troops into Afghanistan on short notice is because we removed all the forces we had in the country except for a skeleton staff at the embassy and airport. And we did that because we wrongly assumed the Afghan military and government wouldn't collapse quickly. Even if one makes that assumption, it's still prudent to have forces on hand in case the assumption doesn't pan out, which is what happened here.
- Secondly, you wouldn't give up Bagram until everyone was out because it's a much better facility to do the kind of things we are trying to do now at Kabul airport. A contingency plan where we maintain control of the most important base near the capital, and evacuate it only at the end, would have been another prudent measure.
- Third, you would have the personnel, plans, and procedures in place to move and evacuate personnel quickly. And you would have started the process as soon as it became apparent (several days ago) that the Taliban were on track to roll-up the entire country in less than a week.
- You wouldn't have waited until the very last minute to expedite the visa procedures for Afghans. This oversight alone has resulted in a lot of people getting killed with many more to come. Piss poor planning and the lack of urgency on this has a cost in blood.
"removing combat forces is the last thing you would do and not the first"
Ok, so my understanding is that the bulk of the troop drawdown began long before Biden was in office:
"The Trump administration completed its reduction of forces to 2,500 troops in January 2021, the lowest number of American soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001.[62] As of January 2021, there are more than seven contractors for each US military service member remaining in Afghanistan, amounting to over 18,000 contractors,[63] according to figures from US Central Command.[63] In January 2021, then-incoming president Joe Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US would review the peace agreement in order to effectively withdraw its remaining 2,500 soldiers from Afghanistan."
I still argue that Trump left the US in an untenable position, one in which the subsequent elements you outline would be unavailable to Biden without what would effectively be a re-invasion.
Yes, and Biden removed those 2500 troops a couple of weeks ago, leaving no forces in-country that could respond if something went wrong, and something did go very wrong.
The US was not in an untenable position. Biden had already unilaterally extended the deadline to leave from May 1st to September. There was nothing that forced him to remove US forces while having no options to deal with foreseeable contingencies. The administration did this not because they were somehow forced to, but because they assumed the Afghan military and government wouldn't fold for months, much less in a week. This was an error by the administration and it can't be blamed on Trump.
Not sure where you’re getting info on numbers and dates of troop withdrawals under Biden. But I’d like to see them. Closest thing I could find was implying that troops were redeployed to Kabul—not withdrawn.
I came to point this out as well. I guess it is a typo, since smaller correlates with the benign security situation in Europe.
But South Korea is top five-ish in defense spending at 2.7% GDP, and Japan has been constrained by their constitution and domestic politics.
Only Taiwan spending at 1.7% GDP doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I’m not sure comparing their situation to Afghanistan will be very persuasive. Best to let them figure it out, considering the increased sabre rattling from China.
The strategic argument for leaving Afghanistan is crystal clear, and Biden is showing true leadership in biting the bullet and getting it done despite political risks.
That said, when the dust settles there should be a lot of honest reflection on failures in execution of an orderly transition. It is too early for a full account but I don’t think it’s sufficient to just blame the military for trying to notch an operation they opposed. (If it can be shown to be the fault of military leaders, I expect heads to roll.)
My guess is that there won't be a single reflection. We will all move on and Afghanistan will recede into the rearview mirror.
I totally agree that Biden showed true leadership -- this may have been the most courageous decision I've seen by a President in my lifetime. I wish it had gone better; I wish we'd been able to get more Afghans out.
But in a perhaps twisted way, I think the disastrous collapse of the Afghan government's "fight" against the Taliban will in the end be to Biden's political advantage, to put it crudely. Imagine if instead they'd fought a tough, grinding, bloody battle of slow retreat, while we stood on the sidelines. The sense of betrayal would have been enormous. Instead, it's been revealed to the watching world that the Afghan government had zero legitimacy, there was no will to fight, and all the two decades' efforts we made to the contrary were of no use whatsoever.
And Biden was the one who said, Enough -- not one more American life, not one more American dollar.
It hurts to be associated with a loss right now for Americans (though infinitely less than if you're an Afghan!) but I think Biden's resoluteness, combined with the Afghan government's fecklessness, has created a path for us to move past this twenty year folly.
"... I think the disastrous collapse of the Afghan government's "fight" against the Taliban will in the end be to Biden's political advantage..."
Agree with this. The lack of commitment to fighting the Taliban, on the part of the puppet govt and puppet army, is the most vivid possible demonstration that we wasted 20 years on this project, and any further commitment on our part would have simply been further waste.
Watching it all collapse in a matter of days only shows how hollow it always was.
"I think the disastrous collapse of the Afghan government's 'fight' against the Taliban will in the end be to Biden's political advantage, to put it crudely."
I think you're 100% correct as I'd reached the same conclusion myself. The Taliban did Biden (and the Democrats for that matter!) a big favor with the speed that they took down the US-backed government versus a scenario like Vietnam where the NVA took two years grinding down the ARVN before taking Saigon. The fall of Kabul is going to be old news in media hype cycle terms by the time of the 2022 elections and positively ancient by 2024. If Trump or whomever the Republican candidate is attempts to run against Biden on "Biden lost Afghanistan!" in 2024, it will probably produce a net gain in votes for Biden.
On the media reaction to the withdrawal, I think an underappreciated factor is that journalists who cover foreign affairs are likely to be influenced by the class of educated, professional Afghans, for whom the return of Taliban rule is a total catastrophe. That's not the sole factor animating the media commentary, and it's not by itself a sufficient justification for opposing withdrawal. But most Americans don't really care about the immediate impact on certain segments of Afghan society, and most journalists covering Afghanistan probably do, even if it's not a bias they are willing to admit.
Relatedly, Biden faces no political risk from the Afghan withdrawal. He faces significant political risk, though, from any attempt to resettle Afghan refugees in the United States.
Relatedly Afghanistan's population is 74% rural and it is very hard for the government to deliver services in the remote areas. The people in rural areas probably see terrible results from the central government and at least get something from the local tribal leader/possible Taliban affiliate. But reporters probably are mostly talking to people in Kabul.
The couple of times I've seen journalists get Afghan (male) peasants on the record in the last days, the comment has been, roughly "good to see the back of those corrupt bastards, wonder what the new lot can be like, who cares"... So yes, suspect you and RS are entirely right and journalists are talking to a wildly skewed sample of people. (Which makes sense as well, because if the majority of the (male) population hated the Taliban so passionately I don't think they would have won).
That's a great point. Journalists are deeply worried about the Afghans that they've worked with or who were sources, which they should be and reflects well on them as human beings. But it does mean they are reporting their own reaction/perspective, not really a broader or (dare I say it) objective POV.
How different our reaction would have been after 9/11 if Gore had been president instead of Bush is my most perplexing counterfactual. I keep wishing for a quick surgical strike against the Taliban and a rapid withdrawal. That of course would have been roundly criticized as too weak and ineffectual which might have goaded Gore into a more massive attack.
What is firm in my mind is that we never would have been in Iraq as that was solely a Bush Freudian Oedipal fantasy egged on my Cheney's financial stakes in loosing the military industrial complex on a petrostate. Without the Iraq attack there is no Isis, no chaos in Syria, no refugee crisis.
If Gore had been President, the Clinton-era intelligence on al-Qaeda might not have been ignored. 9/11 could have been prevented. (And indeed, it was just an excuse for PNAC to follow their existing plan to invade Iraq.)
Well -- more like, "hinges on Republican SCOTUS justices installing an illegitimate president using reasoning that they themselves admitted was indefensible." But, yeah, the badly-designed ballot did not help.
I wouldn't use the term Clinton era intelligence but the Bush Administration was (i) completely incompetent; (ii) clear warning signs were received by US govt that terrorist attack was likely (Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US).
A more competent domestic government would have had a greater shot of stopping it.
Well, I was an intelligence analyst at that time and read and briefed the daily reports throughout the summer about AQ attack planning. No one in the national security business at the time was ignoring or downplaying this.
There is a difference between, what we call in the trade, strategic and tactical warning. We had strategic warning for the attack - in other words we knew an attack was coming. The problem is we didn't have tactical warning, which is information on the time, location, scope, and method of the attack. The retrospective analysis, such as the 9/11 commission, did give some clues that only became obvious in hindsight.
And BTW, this had nothing to do with the Bush administration. This analytical function is part of the nation defense bureaucracy which existed during Clinton's tenure. The notion that a "more competent" (ie. Democratic) government would have somehow created actionable tactical intelligence just misunderstands how the federal government works.
Given that otherwise competent governments of the left and right did not successfully stop terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, Paris, etc over the years (even after observing 9/11!), I'm very skeptical Gore would have stopped 9/11. It reads as liberal wishcasting to me.
This is what you are going to sealion over, that it wasn't Clinton-era intelligence? The key word here is "ignored".
NYT Headline from May 16, 2002: BUSH WAS WARNED BIN LADEN WANTED TO HIJACK PLANES
Bush demoted Richard Clarke and was in general was dismissive of the entire terrorism threat. Just ask Condoleeza Rice about how attentive he was in briefings.
Like I noted below, I was an intelligence analyst at that time and read and briefed the daily reports throughout the summer about AQ attack planning. Yeah, everyone knew an attack was coming. No one in the national security business at the time was ignoring or downplaying this - it was on everyone's radar all summer.
The problem we had, from an intelligence perspective, is that we lacked the kind of tactical information necessary to disrupt the plot specifically, such as the time, location, scope, and method of the attack. And that was because AQ practiced excellent operational security. The retrospective analysis, such as the 9/11 commission, did give some clues that only became obvious in hindsight.
There was no secret bit of Clinton intelligence that was ignored. The intelligence bureaucracy was the same under Clinton and Bush, the only difference being the agency heads who are managers, not intelligence analysts or practitioners.
I worked with an international organization in Afghanistan for years and was deeply involved on the political side - things like electoral support. It's definitely true about the mismatch of political goals and military resources. Before the 2018 and 2019 elections, ie years after the 2014 troop drawdown, we would have endless meetings at which senior US officials - among many others - got into all kinds of weeds about ballot design, the placement of polling centres, the election commission's outreach strategy, etc etc... all conducted by foreigners who could barely leave their embassy grounds without a helicopter. It was sort of remarkable.
You need a certain level of civil society to support a democracy. The realistic choices were a despot or colonialism. I think people realized this, which is why we attempted pseudo colonialism for 20 years. Realistically, it was a 50+ year project with little return for the US.
Yup, the literacy rate in Afghanistan is below 1/2. It is basically impossible for a democracy to sustain itself in that condition. Zimbabwe failed and its literacy rate is well above 2/3.
Not saying this is be all end all but it just doesn't work
I'm going to channel George Aiken here and say that in fact, Biden and Trump did the right thing on Afghanistan because the war was *won* long ago. We got bin Laden and shut down al-Qaeda's camps. All these other alleged war aims were just mission creep.
Yes, the Bush administration screwed things up pretty badly by not caring, which badly delayed our victory and prevented it from being the rout it could and should have been. Regardless, bin Laden is dead (and General Motors is alive!). It only feels like a loss because we later set the bar artificially high.
I think there is a lot that is correct in this piece, but your history of the beginnings is just plain wrong, namely the idea that Afghanistan was under-resourced from the beginning because of Iraq.
This is the post-hoc reasoning that Democrats created after the Iraq war turned to shit, but it's simply not an accurate take on history.
The Bush administration originally wanted to go big in Afghanistan, but the military refused for a number of reasons, which I'll touch in a minute, and instead, the strategy involved the CIA taking the lead along with Special Forces to buttress Karzai and the Northern Alliance. In other words, using US airpower to give opponents of the Taliban the ability to break the strategic and tactical stalemate that existed for years.
But the main reason that going big was never in the cards was two-fold - and had nothing to do with Iraq:
- The first part of this was logistics - Afghanistan was a landlocked country with bad infrastructure. It was was simply not possible to support a large military presence there without both the acquiescence of Pakistan, but also a lot of time to do basic infrastructure stuff like build roads.
- But an even bigger reason we adopted using a "light footprint" in Afghanistan was based on trying to avoid the Soviet experience. It's really important to understand that, at the beginning, the history and lessons of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan were foremost in the minds of military planners. We did not want to appear to be like another invading Soviet-style army that we thought would trigger a general uprising and resistance. Afghanistan at that time was a country that was seen to have a culture of extreme xenophobia. So any notion of "going big" in Afghanistan crashed against that wall.
- Finally, way back in the early oughts, "nation-building" was simply not considered to be a military role. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the military's job was to defeat the enemy forces and then provide security so that the other functions of government could come in and do the nation-building part. We know now that never happened. The US never built that capacity and over time the military was expected to take on this role. So the ACTUAL resource problem was the failure to create a modern version of the kinds of "colonial" administrations that existed 100 years earlier. Instead, Bush and then Obama took the easy way out and militarized what should have been a civilian nation and capacity-building role, particularly after the "revolt of the diplomats" in 2007.
So the reality is that even if Bush didn't have eyes on Iraq, we still would have gone small in Afghanistan. And by early 2002, this strategy had achieved all our objectives except the head of UBL which, at that time, was considered less important than destroying AQ's infrastructure, networks, and ability to plan and implement the kinds of major attacks they were known for. The importance of UBL as a Bush "failure" was another post-hoc creation for domestic US political purposes as a line of attack against Bush. The idea that our plans in Afghanistan would have been any different had UBL been killed is completely lacking in any evidence. And indeed, once we did finally kill UBL, nothing changed and our involvement went another entire decade! Killing UBL was a catharsis, but strategically irrelevant, particularly in terms of the nation-building effort.
Let's also do a counter-factual - suppose we had done the first "plausible" approach you listed - take out the Taliban and AQ and then leave the Northern alliance in charge. I happen to think this is what we should have done, but it would have come with some pretty big downsides. It would continue the Afghan civil war. It would enable the "warlords" to run rampant again, which was a big factor in the Taliban origin story. And, a lot more bad things would have happened. And the Democratic narrative on Bush would not be much different.
But speaking of the Taliban for a minute, the surrender offer you mention was only one of many, which were not serious, were not taken seriously, and, post-hoc, should not be taken seriously. Mullah Omar was not a dictator - he presided over a shura of leadership that made collective decisions. The notion that this Taliban leadership would toss away all their political goals so that Omar, alone, could live peaceably in Kandahar is laughable.
Finally, the whole idea that things would be different if only Bush has properly "resourced" Afghanistan is similarly flawed. And it's also one of those assertions that is paper-thin since none of the people who claim to believe this (that I've talked to at least) can explain what that means, what more "resources" specifically would have accomplished, what strategy would have worked instead, and what the end goals would be and if they could actually be achieved. Instead, it's the underpants gnome strategy of "more resources" then "profit!" I think the reality is that no amount of US "resources" could make the fundamental changes in Afghan society that would turn them into a unified country, much less one with liberal democratic values. And regardless, the American people - as should be blindingly obvious now - were not willing or prepared to engage in an actual multi-generational project to attempt to turn Afghanistan into something resembling an actual nation.
As much as I’m not a fan of Trump, one thing about his tone on foreign policy that was refreshing was a lack of moralizing language. I think a lot of the media and political leadership does a poor job of making it clear that a lot of times our choices in these areas are between, by our cultural standards, bad and worse.
No, no, I'm assured by the media and the overwhelming majority of US politicians that every nation of the world is filled with millions of Jeffersonian small-D democrats yearning to breathe free!
I think Matt's basic point is that under Bush there was a mismatch between US goals (nation building) and resources and attention(*) applied to that goal. It was probably never an achievable goal no matter the resources, but that just means it shouldn't have been the goal. Under-resourcing it made it all the worse.
So the implied goal was to declare victory and get out. In that sense, blowing the capturing/killing of UBL at Tora Bora was disastrous. Whether or not it would have hurt AQ is debatable, but it almost certainly would have been the symbolic victory that an American departure would need for political if no other reasons.
(*) The diversion of attention -- from the White House, through CENTCOM and all the way down -- from Afghanistan to Iraq may have been more important for bogging us down in Afghanistan than any under-resourcing of efforts there. Basically, no one cared about Afghanistan any more and put it on the back burner. No way to win a war.
To me, that argument doesn't make much sense. If no amount of resources could achieve US goals, then, by definition, any amount of resources would also have been too few. So what is the argument for providing more resources? I'm not sure this is the case, but if is Matt arguing that the Bush administration should have thrown away *more* resources into the black hole of Afghanistan in a hopeless quest to remake Afghanistan, then that is a really bad argument If the goal isn't achievable regardless of the resources, how does it make sense to increase our sunk costs? By that logic, it would have been better if Bush had resourced the effort even less.
I don't think he was arguing for more resources. I believe his focus was on the wrong goals being pursued. He (like me!) was on the "Kill Osama and get the hell out" bandwagon.
The core problem seems to be that Bush faced a tough choice and going for an option that didn't exist. His choice was aggressive goals with high cost or modest goals with lower cost. He went for. aggressive goals with low investment, leading to failure, and in the long run high cost.
This seems this is the heart of Republican governance on issue after issue. Covid, climate change, taxes. They just govern the world they wish to exist instead of reality.
It was also symptomatic of how the late '90s/early '00s GOP was simply not into antiterrorism (as opposed to "antiterrorism") because it wasn't sexy for them. That's the reason why the Bush administration was sleeping for the first 8 months of 2001 while 9/11 was being put into action, why they fired Richard Clarke, etc. Their base was made up of isolationists who had accused Bill Clinton of wagging the dog, while their intellectuals were all wrapped up in grandiose ideas attributing all world events to state actors. Their thinking didn't change even after 9/11 - they just shoehorned their preexisting thinking into antiterrorism rhetoric.
I'm at least open to the possibility that W actually never moved much on this issue but was just steamrolled by others in his administration. The dude sits at home painting portraits these days.
I'm in full agreement with this. Dubya wasn't stupid as alleged. But he was completely uninformed on policy and really uninterested in governance beyond a few narrow policy areas and elections.
I'm unsympathetic to view. Either Bush was smart enough to understand things and not get steamrolled, or he was to stupid to understand things and got steamrolled. You can be smart in one area and not in others. Matt's assertion was that Obama was stupid on this and got steam rolled.
As for sitting at home painting, that isn't exactly true - he has partnered with Clinton on a number of initiatives - Haiti relief fund, Presidential Leadership Scholarship fund, and does quite a bit of charity work. He's just been much quieter about it. Bush was deeply unpopular when he left office, so I'm not sure what cause would have been excited to have him be in a leading light the way Obama or Clinton were.
Not just Republican - I think it’s the combination of basic human nature and the structure of a broadly democratic process. Could probably address this with more technocratic decision making but it will bring its own problems.
The other striking thing about Matt's article and his twitter discourse is how much power he assigns the military in controlling the foreign policy of the president. Military independence was somewhat cheered on during the Trump presidency, but is actually very worrying if true. A bedrock of our success has been civilian control of the military. If this has been compromised, we should take immediate action to remedy it.
I agree. You don't hear this too much anymore but I remember when Republican presidential candidates would tout how they would "listen to the generals" and I remember thinking how dangerous that is. The military should advise the president on the how but not the what. To the extent this isn't the case, it's a problem.
One data point that gives me a glimmer of hope: The median age of the Afghanistan population is 18 years old. So over half the country has lived exclusively under a non-Taliban, US-supported regime where women are educated, communication is (relatively) open, and the internet is available. The Taliban will want to change all these things, but I hope it will be much harder to do than it was in the 1990's.
"So over half the country has lived exclusively under a non-Taliban, US-supported regime where women are educated, communication is (relatively) open, and the internet is available."
We're talking about a warlord-dominated, tribally-fragmented rentier state engaged extensively in child molestation, human trafficking, and drug cultivation, which also let girls in a few cities go without the hijab.
The Taliban overrunning the whole country in a week *IS* the young deciding they want something better; it's just that their definition of better is a Sunni near-theocracy that will curtail child rape, hang corrupt officials, run health clinics, probably not kill all the minorities, and maybe still let girls go to school this time.
Yes, the experience of the last two decades will inform how the Taliban governs; it's already markedly more "moderate" than it was in 1998. But let's not oversell what the IRA government actually was to the people it governed.
I agree with your underlying point, which is that the experience of relatively open (if otherwise terrible) IRA governance will force the Taliban to be less horrible this time. That's one of the factors informing my "let them sort it out" theory of US involvement, or rather lack thereof.
It's been pretty fascinating to see how pro-intervention elite opinion in the US has been very recently. I normally can't stand Greenwald and that crew of folks, but I have to admit that he (especially a decade ago when he was less crazy) has a number of very good points about how pro-national security state the NYT, WaPo and other elite journalists/take haver types really are. (I follow Megan McArdle on Twitter, maybe not the best example, but I've been kinda surprised to see this Koch libertarian type be pretty pro-intervention over the past few days?) The 'Blob' community of active/former natsec professionals is definitely real, but it's certainly empowered by some of the wealthiest & most influential parts of US society. It'll be interesting to see how the inevitable Chinese blockade of Taiwan turns out....
Also, elite journalistic opinion being virtually wall-to-wall 'we should've stayed' doesn't really help Biden's political fortunes, seeing as they're going to bang that drum hard up through the midterms
NBC Nightly News had David Petraeus on for an interview last night and I thought I had gone back in time 10 years. He offered deep insights like "We must do everything we can with all the resources available to us to ensure that we meet the moral obligation to [Afghanistan]."
The fact that John Freakin' Bolton was interviewed at the top of Morning Edition by NPR really speaks volumes. All of the people who gave us Iraq are still highly placed at these media institutions and have 0 interest in holding anyone accountable for the war they cheerled.
It's a real shame that the interviews aren't asking "Isn't this the inevitable result of the war that you promoted. How heavy do all those deaths lie on your conscience?"
Slightly unpopular take her, but one conservative critique of the media that is correct is the media has an overt cosmopolitan bias. Maybe not as cosmopolitan as average person here but far more than average American.
Media is always inclined to favor those who want to engage on a foreign policy abroad vs those who don't
It's opposite of 'unpopular', media's upper-middleclass blue state bias is conventional wisdom in this blog. One of the very first posts by Matt deals precisely with this phenomenon.
I’m usually pretty unpersuaded by “follow the money” arguments (truth is usually much more complicated) but yeah it’s pretty much the money. Lots of prestigious fellowships/opportunities/parties that a certain type of media person loves. Same type of person that really buys into credentialism.
Independent media, especially opinion media, is really important.
I'm a little more optimistic about Biden's political fortunes on this issue. Biden is way more popular than "elite journalistic opinion", one of the most unpopular political actors in the country. Anything could happen – the upscale suburban Romney/Clinton voters might be especially likely to buy the media narrative – but I'm inclined to think Republicans would have to tie the Afghanistan situation to a broader narrative of "disorder", including domestic policy examples, for it to move a ton of votes.
Yes, I have thought the same. I think it’s because all the people in charge or high places at these various institutions are mostly ones who were adults during the 2001-2003 period and therefore still remain "bought in" to the moralistic crusader view of foreign policy, whereas the younger generations who grew up disillusioned with it are still working their way up. McCardle, for example, is 48.
As for the midterms, voters don’t care about foreign policy, hate "their side" media talking bad about people on their side, especially a President, and voters particularly hate these wars. I think Biden is on the right side of it with regard to public opinion, and it’s the media who will have to correct course once they calm down from the hysterics they’ve flown into as a result of the immediate emotional impact of social media.
I'm also 48 and the people of my age that were opposed to the war just got completely shut out of the elite media here in the UK, and it was much worse in the US.
I was a protestor against the Iraq war. I wasn't trying to get into media, but I watched others of my generation get pushed to the side. Some made it by avoiding politics (if you're writing in the style section or you're doing TV criticism, then no-one cares what your politics are, and then you can work your way back across sometimes), but otherwise, careers just stalled out.
Nicole Wallace may have slightly exaggerated the ratio when she said 95 percent of the American people were in favor of this withdrawal and 95 percent of journalists would be against it. But not by much. Of the soldiers being interviewed who actually had extensive in country experience you see a lot of stories from soldiers who lamented the pointless loss of their comrades and not so many from soldiers who said it was an inevitable end. There's a lot of those too. So there's a question I have for all those journalists in country and out who have been crawling all over Afghanistan, many of whom are still there. Why didn't any of you predict the swift collapse of the Afghan government? Who were you talking to that led you to believe it wouldn't happen? Why were you bullshitting us all this time?
One thing that is striking to me in conversation is how backwards the discussions feels -
Generally progressives are broadly supportive of investing immense amounts of money into bad situations with the idea that it takes generational support to make significant changes. The clear understanding that you can't overcome centuries of oppression in the US with one generation of less racism. Yet the conclusion in Afghanistan is that its complete collapse upon pullout is simply a clear signal that they were never going to be able to maintain a liberal democracy because of culture, background etc.
In reverse, conservatives generally oppose sinking vast amounts of money into such situations as they see as pouring good money after bad. They would say that money can't overcome bad culture and poor personal choices, and that what really makes a change is people lifting themselves up through the adoption of better values. Yet in Afghanistan, there is a general belief that the US government/military has the ability to establish a liberal democracy overcoming a vastly different culture and widespread differences in values.
Some people look at this and would say there are massive differences in the situations, and I would agree! Its just that the talking point reversal seems very striking to me.
The hysterical media crescendo over the past couple days with every 60-year-old op-ed writer crawling out of the swamp to demand permanent military occupation has been been very illustrative as to the degree to which the generation which gave us the War on Terror, rather than the generations which grew up disillusioned with it, are still in control of pretty much every major media institution. There seems to be a real age gap between those people and pundits in the Millennial/Gen Z bracket who were too young to have any investment in the decision to declare war and have grown up correctly intuiting that it’s pointless.
I really think the greatest opinion divide between the "elite" media and the public (contra what a lot of Republicans will say) is around foreign policy. There tends to be widespread, bipartisan comity across the "elite" media that US military interventions are good and worthy. And there is very broad bipartisan agreement among the public these days that we should not be doing these things. Someone else here quoted Nicole Wallace's comment re the 95% of the media v the public, and yes that's an exaggeration but she hit on the key point there. It's quite remarkable. (FYI, I'm thinking outlets like WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, not so much local ones.)
Speaking of media, if I see one more showing of the same picture of Iraqis trying to climb up the stairs to the plane, I will scream. If I see one more instance of the same picture showing 6oo Iraqis crowded in a cargo plane, I will scream. I had the pleasure of watching BBC America the last two nights. They of course showed some of the chaos at the airport. They also showed calm streets in Kabul and girls in school.They even interviewed some of the girls in school. Biden hit a nerve. I don't remember any recent event to which those who blueprinted the cause, prolonged it by trying to tweak a failed interventionist strategy, took the side of Petraeus in the infamous counter-terror vs. counter insurgency debate and consistently underestimated the enemy that has drawn as many quick judgements and outrage towards the one person trying to get us out and put the decades-long Afghan calamity behind us. Call it the revenge of the zombied neocons. A lot of them will be forced to eat their words in the coming months as the 'fog' of the last two weeks clears
I dared to turn on MSNBC last night, only to find some talking heads fantasizing about scenarios that would force Biden to commit to sending more troops there.
It really has been shocking to me how many of these ghouls have apparently learned nothing. If people thought Biden came across as cold, good. I think Gen Z and Millennials have had quite enough of the "values based" foreign policy that has had us stuck in countries who don’t want us there blowing up civilians for 20 years.
I suspect that any impact this has in Boomer or Xer voting in 2022 and '24 will be more than offset by it decreasing youth disillusionment a wee bit.
There's too much credulity toward anyone who wants to do more war and too much scepticism of decisions to not fight. There was implicit cheerleading for Obama to commit troops to Syria, very little critical analysis of the Bush administration's BS at the time, very little calling out of critics of the Iran deal for being obviously full of sh*t. In international affairs, I feel like too many prominent figures have a basic value that sending in the military is good but striving for peace is bad.
There was *explicit* cheerleading when Trump bombed Syria!
You are absolutely right. Gen Z/Millenials have this figured out. They know that the real moral problems of our time are things like American black women having a more difficult time finding mascara than their white countrywomen not truly oppressive things like subjugation under the threat of murder.
To characterize the very real concern of harm (not the bullshit harms pretension Gen Zers cry crocodile tears over) to tens of thousands of people as hysterical is sad.
Did you miss the nature of the Afghan government we propped up for the last 20 years?
I didn’t miss any of it. I also didn’t support it in the first place. It’s complicated and real humans are going to die. The US should have done more to assure our friends got out and were safe. The political takes piss me off right now. I listened to a lieutenant talk about his very real Afghan friends that were at risk of being murdered and it was the most authentic and non political thing I’ve heard on MSNBC in years. It’s sad.
It’s also being peddled to you in the hopes that it pressures Biden to do a volte-face and go back in with tens of thousands of soldiers.
Let’s not mince words: to successfully evacuate the several hundred thousand Afghans who served with NATO forces and are in danger would require a several-year commitment of 20-30,000 troops to secure the whole country, find, and extricate these people.
That would culminate in the final detachment of a few thousand having to depart from an airbase and cross a foreign border to be interned.
Chances are that the two years of open warfare between NATO troops and the whole country that would precede it would cost far more lives than the Taliban will take in the coming years.
It would also entail immense risk to the soldiers asked to carry it out, especially those in the final “Anabasis”.
Dude, I'm talking about people calling for a permanent occupation, not people who criticized the administration for a horribly bungled withdrawal. Do me a favor and read my post next time before you jump down my throat, okay? I've been yelling for State to speed up evacuating Afghans for months because I figured exactly this was going to happen.
There's a very modest solution to all of this, from the maldistribution of wealth to the housing crisis to the foreign policy establishment:
Let us offer the Boomers "in sale to the persons of quality and fortune... for a good table."
Ugh --no one wants to eat that stringy shit. At least Irish babies are tender (and plumper than they were in Swift's time!)
John, I'm 63 and supported the invasion of Iraq, but it has been obvious to me for years that Afghanistan was just another exercise in "saving a bunch of Asians who don't want to be saved." I apologise for not writing enough op-eds about it. But nobody was going to read them anyway, until it was too late.
9/11 happened when I was 18 and I remember driving home from school after it was cancelled thinking "Well, I'm going to get drafted". The draft didn't happen but I did know a number of people who signed up for the military and who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. The toll those deployments took on many young men and women from my generation is not appreciated near enough in my opinion. I have real anger toward GWB and people of his and older generations who never fought in a war yet were so eager to send others to war. I'm still pissed when I see a boomer come on TV and repeat the same damn talking points about this war. They can all go to hell.
I remember my dad grilling me about my view when I participated in protests against the war when I was a newly minted high school student in 2002. When he pushed me to back up my position, i told him that I’d grown up with him and all his hippie friends telling me war was bad! I’ve maintained all these years that that was the right answer then, and it seems like it’s still the right answer 20 years later.
Absolutely. The last few days have made it very clear that there’s a huge age gap between the generations who were adults in 2001-2003 and sent American kids to die in Iraq for no good reason, and the generations who grew up during that period deeply disillusioned with the war effort.
As a 20-something adult in 2001-2003 I very much supported the war (envisioning the Marshall plan in my head and successful nation building). I was skeptical of Obama (vs. Clinton) because I thought he'd pull out of Afghanistan too soon when we might be close to stabilizing it. Since then... that's not how things worked out, and I regret the decisions we made.
Feel free to blame us for supporting it, but some of us, I think, have learned our lesson.
I don't blame the average Americans for supporting it. I no doubt would have done the same at the time. The policy-makers and media commentators who are supposed to be deeply informed are the ones I expect more from, particularly in reflection after the fact, something very few of these people in the media appear to have done.
The speech I would have liked to have heard from Biden would have even more accepting of responsibility. The soldiers didn't lose this war, the taxpayers didn't lose this war, the aid organizations and volunteers didn't lose this war. GWB lost this war. Barak Obama lost this war. Donald Trump lost this war. Joe Biden lost this war. Every major military figure in command lost this war. Every sitting and former Senator and Congress person (2001-2021) lost this war. The leaders of this country lead poorly and though we bear some responsibility for voting for them, they also had a duty to us to be honest brokers of information of what was actually happening in Afghanistan and propose successful solutions. They lied to us and bathed themselves in honor the entire time, all while lecturing us on the virtues of nation building. Every politician out there crowing about how we should have stayed longer is a coward and a liar of astonishing magnitude.
I don't see how Biden lost this war. I think he probably didn't try hard enough to get people out but this was lost a long time ago. It also seems like he was given faulty intelligence on how long the Afghan army would hold out. To me, responsibility lies with GW Bush for (a)trying to nation build; and (b) starting a second war in Iraq that we had to commit resources to. The fact that two successive Presidents couldn't get it working and then the government collapsed in days suggests that this was never going to work.
Also, given what we know, the military wasn't honest about what was happening, so I would fault them too
Biden only lost this war in the sense that he decided he could/would be the one to take the rap for it. Three previous president's couldn't make themselves rip off the bandaid and Biden finally came along and said, here, let me...
Biden was part of the Obama administration, he is also the president who oversaw the actual retreat from the theatre of war. This should be contextualized and not used as a bad faith cudgel but it's also truth.
I don't really see that. Americans - including the ones who supported the wars in Afghanistan and/or Iraq - have been disillusioned with war for more than a decade. In Iraq, it took just a couple of years.
I haven't done a comprehensive survey of all media commentary, but I don't think it's reflective of broader popular opinion for any age group. I suspect some people of my generation or older (I was in college during 9/11) have more ambivalent feelings about Afghanistan because (1) we have more a visceral recall of the trauma of 9/11, (2) by contrast to Iraq, the Afghan war was at least motivated by an effort to respond to the people who were responsible for 9/11, (3) the repressive nature of the Taliban regime is more ingrained in our consciousness, and (4) there was early success in Afghanistan in driving out the Taliban, standing up a new regime, and having the popular support of the Afghan people. But on the whole, I think most people tired of this war at least some time during the Obama administration.
I do think we should add some younger people to the corridors of power, especially in the democratic party. However, I think you missed the point that Matt made when he said that had a younger candidate been elected president, its probable that they would have stayed.
From a distance, it looks to me like the real choice was 1) piss off and undercut the Afghan government by evacuating the embassy and willing Afghan translators BEFORE troop drawdowns or 2) do what we did, evacuate the troops while signaling confidence in the current regime by leaving everyone in place.
Is that not the crux of it? Biden administration didn’t want to invite a crisis of confidence by outwardly preparing for and anticipating imminent collapse, so they didn’t? I get the dilemma. You’d possibly get destroyed on right wing media for “not giving the Afghan people a chance.” But isn’t the basic critique here that they could have changed the order of operations to evacuated civilians earlier in the process?
It may be the case that civilian personnel, e.g. at the embassies, could not have been evacuated earlier without undermining confidence, but there's no good reason that we could not have processed the 18,000 applications for Special Immigrant Visas that are in the backlog months ago. I read with great shame this NYT article this morning (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/us/afghanistan-visa-refugees-us.html) about the plight of Afghans who risked everything to help us and have been effectively abandoned.
In 2010 I left Afghanistan after spending 9 months training Afghan Border Police. My two interpreters were Tajiks from Kabul and frankly hated everything about Helmand province, but they were in it for the visas. After I got out of the military I tried to help one of my interpreters nudge his pending application through the SIV process. It was a Kafkaesque nightmare of unresponsive subcontractors demanding document after document. In the meantime, both of my interpreters had moved back to Kabul and started working with the Australians (doing much safer jobs than they had with the Americans, I might add). Within a matter of months they had received AUS visas and were resettled in Sydney. By that point their SIV applications had been in process for more than two years. (According to the NYT article, the average wait is 3 years.) I was embarrassed and ashamed then, but today I am infuriated.
I think obviously more could have been done, but I think the extent to which the Trump administration hamstrung the US visa process is one of the underreported stories here. It wasn't just that they reduced the number of refugee visas to nothing, but they also eliminated a lot of the visa approval infrastructure. So it wasn't just a matter of kicking off visa approvals on Jan 21st, but of rebuilding US processing capability.
"Critics say that the U.S. government, going back several administrations, has delayed special immigrant visa approvals by demanding an extraordinary amount of documentation as part of an unwieldy 14-step process.
Applicants have faced average wait times of three years, though Congress had specified that it should take no more than nine months. Many have been waiting as long as a decade for the outcome of their cases."
I know from the Iraq version of the SIV program that it is a long-standing problem. Our immigration bureaucracy is set up to make it difficult, all out of a fear that undesirables of one or another ilk might somehow get in and do something bad.
How do you reconcile those two things - "extent to which the Trump administration hamstrung the US visa process" vs "going back several administrations...unwieldy 14 step process?"
Further - if the process is that broken, perhaps we should have focused on prioritizing and fixing it prior to exit?
The process is encoded in statute. You can't change it without a years long congressional fight that was never going to happen.
Trump crippled the ability of the government to administer the statutory regime.
Sure, the process was always cumbersome, but as part of an overall hostility to refugees and immigration in general, the Trump administration made it a policy to do everything it could to shut off the flow. Lots of good reporting at the time, this is just the first general piece I came across:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-broke-law-visa-delays-afghans-iraqis-who-worked-n1057846
Trump dropped the refugee cap from an Obama-era 110k to 15k--the lowest since the relevant laws took effect. Biden raised it to 65k and was lambasted for slow-walking it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56975402
Reading both those articles, it seems that Trump definitely didn't improve things, but doesn't seem clear to me that the process was made dramatically worse by him. The law passed in 2013 was done because the system was so messed up it wasn't working, and its not clear to me that it was substantially better prior to 2016.
Further, the second article says "But World Relief, a humanitarian organisation, last month said White House claims that the US refugee resettlement programme needed to be rebuilt after the Trump years were "a completely false narrative" and "a purely political calculation".
Matt on the Weeds has talked about how Biden is slow walking a lot of the asylum claims. I don't see how this is any different...but even if it was and they needed more time, then they should prioritized it and taken more time before doing the withdrawal.
"Further - if the process is that broken, perhaps we should have focused on prioritizing and fixing it prior to exit?"
This would've meant reversing the Trump negotiated cease fire, which would've meant pouring in significantly more troops, and going back to taking casualties and hemorrhaging cash indefinitely. IOW, the status quo pre Trump.
One explanation, which has been given, is that the collapse was a lot faster than expected
Every single critic of Biden's judgement starts with "no one could have foreseen this coming" and finishes with "this is on biden for not seeing this coming."
No, the administration believed, for whatever reason, that the Afghan government would not collapse so quickly and they failed to adequately plan and prepare for this contingency.
You hear this a lot, but it's not clear to me at all what "adequate planning" for this contingency would've looked like. It would help if folks would be more specific when talking about all the great options that were bypassed here.
Sure, First thing's first, if one suspects that the government will collapse quickly, or one wants to plan for that contingency, then that drives certain actions:
- To start with, removing combat forces is the last thing you would do and not the first. The reason we have to roll 6k troops into Afghanistan on short notice is because we removed all the forces we had in the country except for a skeleton staff at the embassy and airport. And we did that because we wrongly assumed the Afghan military and government wouldn't collapse quickly. Even if one makes that assumption, it's still prudent to have forces on hand in case the assumption doesn't pan out, which is what happened here.
- Secondly, you wouldn't give up Bagram until everyone was out because it's a much better facility to do the kind of things we are trying to do now at Kabul airport. A contingency plan where we maintain control of the most important base near the capital, and evacuate it only at the end, would have been another prudent measure.
- Third, you would have the personnel, plans, and procedures in place to move and evacuate personnel quickly. And you would have started the process as soon as it became apparent (several days ago) that the Taliban were on track to roll-up the entire country in less than a week.
- You wouldn't have waited until the very last minute to expedite the visa procedures for Afghans. This oversight alone has resulted in a lot of people getting killed with many more to come. Piss poor planning and the lack of urgency on this has a cost in blood.
Those are the major elements IMO.
"removing combat forces is the last thing you would do and not the first"
Ok, so my understanding is that the bulk of the troop drawdown began long before Biden was in office:
"The Trump administration completed its reduction of forces to 2,500 troops in January 2021, the lowest number of American soldiers in Afghanistan since 2001.[62] As of January 2021, there are more than seven contractors for each US military service member remaining in Afghanistan, amounting to over 18,000 contractors,[63] according to figures from US Central Command.[63] In January 2021, then-incoming president Joe Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US would review the peace agreement in order to effectively withdraw its remaining 2,500 soldiers from Afghanistan."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_United_States_troops_from_Afghanistan_(2020%E2%80%932021)
I still argue that Trump left the US in an untenable position, one in which the subsequent elements you outline would be unavailable to Biden without what would effectively be a re-invasion.
Yes, and Biden removed those 2500 troops a couple of weeks ago, leaving no forces in-country that could respond if something went wrong, and something did go very wrong.
The US was not in an untenable position. Biden had already unilaterally extended the deadline to leave from May 1st to September. There was nothing that forced him to remove US forces while having no options to deal with foreseeable contingencies. The administration did this not because they were somehow forced to, but because they assumed the Afghan military and government wouldn't fold for months, much less in a week. This was an error by the administration and it can't be blamed on Trump.
Not sure where you’re getting info on numbers and dates of troop withdrawals under Biden. But I’d like to see them. Closest thing I could find was implying that troops were redeployed to Kabul—not withdrawn.
This is the best explanation I've seen so far of what we CAN reasonably blame Biden for.
"Our European allies spend a much larger share of GDP on defense than we do."
Is "larger" supposed to be smaller?
i am guessing typo
I came to point this out as well. I guess it is a typo, since smaller correlates with the benign security situation in Europe.
But South Korea is top five-ish in defense spending at 2.7% GDP, and Japan has been constrained by their constitution and domestic politics.
Only Taiwan spending at 1.7% GDP doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I’m not sure comparing their situation to Afghanistan will be very persuasive. Best to let them figure it out, considering the increased sabre rattling from China.
The strategic argument for leaving Afghanistan is crystal clear, and Biden is showing true leadership in biting the bullet and getting it done despite political risks.
That said, when the dust settles there should be a lot of honest reflection on failures in execution of an orderly transition. It is too early for a full account but I don’t think it’s sufficient to just blame the military for trying to notch an operation they opposed. (If it can be shown to be the fault of military leaders, I expect heads to roll.)
My guess is that there won't be a single reflection. We will all move on and Afghanistan will recede into the rearview mirror.
I totally agree that Biden showed true leadership -- this may have been the most courageous decision I've seen by a President in my lifetime. I wish it had gone better; I wish we'd been able to get more Afghans out.
But in a perhaps twisted way, I think the disastrous collapse of the Afghan government's "fight" against the Taliban will in the end be to Biden's political advantage, to put it crudely. Imagine if instead they'd fought a tough, grinding, bloody battle of slow retreat, while we stood on the sidelines. The sense of betrayal would have been enormous. Instead, it's been revealed to the watching world that the Afghan government had zero legitimacy, there was no will to fight, and all the two decades' efforts we made to the contrary were of no use whatsoever.
And Biden was the one who said, Enough -- not one more American life, not one more American dollar.
It hurts to be associated with a loss right now for Americans (though infinitely less than if you're an Afghan!) but I think Biden's resoluteness, combined with the Afghan government's fecklessness, has created a path for us to move past this twenty year folly.
"... I think the disastrous collapse of the Afghan government's "fight" against the Taliban will in the end be to Biden's political advantage..."
Agree with this. The lack of commitment to fighting the Taliban, on the part of the puppet govt and puppet army, is the most vivid possible demonstration that we wasted 20 years on this project, and any further commitment on our part would have simply been further waste.
Watching it all collapse in a matter of days only shows how hollow it always was.
Same outcome was coming whether it was 2021 or 2081.
"I think the disastrous collapse of the Afghan government's 'fight' against the Taliban will in the end be to Biden's political advantage, to put it crudely."
I think you're 100% correct as I'd reached the same conclusion myself. The Taliban did Biden (and the Democrats for that matter!) a big favor with the speed that they took down the US-backed government versus a scenario like Vietnam where the NVA took two years grinding down the ARVN before taking Saigon. The fall of Kabul is going to be old news in media hype cycle terms by the time of the 2022 elections and positively ancient by 2024. If Trump or whomever the Republican candidate is attempts to run against Biden on "Biden lost Afghanistan!" in 2024, it will probably produce a net gain in votes for Biden.
*botch
On the media reaction to the withdrawal, I think an underappreciated factor is that journalists who cover foreign affairs are likely to be influenced by the class of educated, professional Afghans, for whom the return of Taliban rule is a total catastrophe. That's not the sole factor animating the media commentary, and it's not by itself a sufficient justification for opposing withdrawal. But most Americans don't really care about the immediate impact on certain segments of Afghan society, and most journalists covering Afghanistan probably do, even if it's not a bias they are willing to admit.
Relatedly, Biden faces no political risk from the Afghan withdrawal. He faces significant political risk, though, from any attempt to resettle Afghan refugees in the United States.
Relatedly Afghanistan's population is 74% rural and it is very hard for the government to deliver services in the remote areas. The people in rural areas probably see terrible results from the central government and at least get something from the local tribal leader/possible Taliban affiliate. But reporters probably are mostly talking to people in Kabul.
The couple of times I've seen journalists get Afghan (male) peasants on the record in the last days, the comment has been, roughly "good to see the back of those corrupt bastards, wonder what the new lot can be like, who cares"... So yes, suspect you and RS are entirely right and journalists are talking to a wildly skewed sample of people. (Which makes sense as well, because if the majority of the (male) population hated the Taliban so passionately I don't think they would have won).
That's a great point. Journalists are deeply worried about the Afghans that they've worked with or who were sources, which they should be and reflects well on them as human beings. But it does mean they are reporting their own reaction/perspective, not really a broader or (dare I say it) objective POV.
Yes. This joint letter to Biden from the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo underscores the point: https://www.nytco.com/press/group-statement-sent-to-president-biden-on-behalf-of-the-new-york-times-the-wall-street-journal-and-the-washington-post/
How different our reaction would have been after 9/11 if Gore had been president instead of Bush is my most perplexing counterfactual. I keep wishing for a quick surgical strike against the Taliban and a rapid withdrawal. That of course would have been roundly criticized as too weak and ineffectual which might have goaded Gore into a more massive attack.
What is firm in my mind is that we never would have been in Iraq as that was solely a Bush Freudian Oedipal fantasy egged on my Cheney's financial stakes in loosing the military industrial complex on a petrostate. Without the Iraq attack there is no Isis, no chaos in Syria, no refugee crisis.
So many roads taken that shouldn't have been.
If Gore had been President, the Clinton-era intelligence on al-Qaeda might not have been ignored. 9/11 could have been prevented. (And indeed, it was just an excuse for PNAC to follow their existing plan to invade Iraq.)
So much of 21st century history hinges on that butterfly ballot flapping its wings.
Well -- more like, "hinges on Republican SCOTUS justices installing an illegitimate president using reasoning that they themselves admitted was indefensible." But, yeah, the badly-designed ballot did not help.
All downstream of the ballot itself. And Pat Buchanan running at all.
What Clinton-era intelligence - specifically - was ignored?
I don't know about intelligence per so, but supposedly Clinton told Bush he would need to think about Al Qaeda every single day and Bush... didn't.
Well, that's not true, see my responses to Old Man Riverwalk and yellowjkt.
I wouldn't use the term Clinton era intelligence but the Bush Administration was (i) completely incompetent; (ii) clear warning signs were received by US govt that terrorist attack was likely (Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US).
A more competent domestic government would have had a greater shot of stopping it.
Well, I was an intelligence analyst at that time and read and briefed the daily reports throughout the summer about AQ attack planning. No one in the national security business at the time was ignoring or downplaying this.
There is a difference between, what we call in the trade, strategic and tactical warning. We had strategic warning for the attack - in other words we knew an attack was coming. The problem is we didn't have tactical warning, which is information on the time, location, scope, and method of the attack. The retrospective analysis, such as the 9/11 commission, did give some clues that only became obvious in hindsight.
And BTW, this had nothing to do with the Bush administration. This analytical function is part of the nation defense bureaucracy which existed during Clinton's tenure. The notion that a "more competent" (ie. Democratic) government would have somehow created actionable tactical intelligence just misunderstands how the federal government works.
Given that otherwise competent governments of the left and right did not successfully stop terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, Paris, etc over the years (even after observing 9/11!), I'm very skeptical Gore would have stopped 9/11. It reads as liberal wishcasting to me.
This is what you are going to sealion over, that it wasn't Clinton-era intelligence? The key word here is "ignored".
NYT Headline from May 16, 2002: BUSH WAS WARNED BIN LADEN WANTED TO HIJACK PLANES
Bush demoted Richard Clarke and was in general was dismissive of the entire terrorism threat. Just ask Condoleeza Rice about how attentive he was in briefings.
Like I noted below, I was an intelligence analyst at that time and read and briefed the daily reports throughout the summer about AQ attack planning. Yeah, everyone knew an attack was coming. No one in the national security business at the time was ignoring or downplaying this - it was on everyone's radar all summer.
The problem we had, from an intelligence perspective, is that we lacked the kind of tactical information necessary to disrupt the plot specifically, such as the time, location, scope, and method of the attack. And that was because AQ practiced excellent operational security. The retrospective analysis, such as the 9/11 commission, did give some clues that only became obvious in hindsight.
There was no secret bit of Clinton intelligence that was ignored. The intelligence bureaucracy was the same under Clinton and Bush, the only difference being the agency heads who are managers, not intelligence analysts or practitioners.
I worked with an international organization in Afghanistan for years and was deeply involved on the political side - things like electoral support. It's definitely true about the mismatch of political goals and military resources. Before the 2018 and 2019 elections, ie years after the 2014 troop drawdown, we would have endless meetings at which senior US officials - among many others - got into all kinds of weeds about ballot design, the placement of polling centres, the election commission's outreach strategy, etc etc... all conducted by foreigners who could barely leave their embassy grounds without a helicopter. It was sort of remarkable.
You need a certain level of civil society to support a democracy. The realistic choices were a despot or colonialism. I think people realized this, which is why we attempted pseudo colonialism for 20 years. Realistically, it was a 50+ year project with little return for the US.
Yup, the literacy rate in Afghanistan is below 1/2. It is basically impossible for a democracy to sustain itself in that condition. Zimbabwe failed and its literacy rate is well above 2/3.
Not saying this is be all end all but it just doesn't work
I'm going to channel George Aiken here and say that in fact, Biden and Trump did the right thing on Afghanistan because the war was *won* long ago. We got bin Laden and shut down al-Qaeda's camps. All these other alleged war aims were just mission creep.
Yes, the Bush administration screwed things up pretty badly by not caring, which badly delayed our victory and prevented it from being the rout it could and should have been. Regardless, bin Laden is dead (and General Motors is alive!). It only feels like a loss because we later set the bar artificially high.
I think there is a lot that is correct in this piece, but your history of the beginnings is just plain wrong, namely the idea that Afghanistan was under-resourced from the beginning because of Iraq.
This is the post-hoc reasoning that Democrats created after the Iraq war turned to shit, but it's simply not an accurate take on history.
The Bush administration originally wanted to go big in Afghanistan, but the military refused for a number of reasons, which I'll touch in a minute, and instead, the strategy involved the CIA taking the lead along with Special Forces to buttress Karzai and the Northern Alliance. In other words, using US airpower to give opponents of the Taliban the ability to break the strategic and tactical stalemate that existed for years.
But the main reason that going big was never in the cards was two-fold - and had nothing to do with Iraq:
- The first part of this was logistics - Afghanistan was a landlocked country with bad infrastructure. It was was simply not possible to support a large military presence there without both the acquiescence of Pakistan, but also a lot of time to do basic infrastructure stuff like build roads.
- But an even bigger reason we adopted using a "light footprint" in Afghanistan was based on trying to avoid the Soviet experience. It's really important to understand that, at the beginning, the history and lessons of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan were foremost in the minds of military planners. We did not want to appear to be like another invading Soviet-style army that we thought would trigger a general uprising and resistance. Afghanistan at that time was a country that was seen to have a culture of extreme xenophobia. So any notion of "going big" in Afghanistan crashed against that wall.
- Finally, way back in the early oughts, "nation-building" was simply not considered to be a military role. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the military's job was to defeat the enemy forces and then provide security so that the other functions of government could come in and do the nation-building part. We know now that never happened. The US never built that capacity and over time the military was expected to take on this role. So the ACTUAL resource problem was the failure to create a modern version of the kinds of "colonial" administrations that existed 100 years earlier. Instead, Bush and then Obama took the easy way out and militarized what should have been a civilian nation and capacity-building role, particularly after the "revolt of the diplomats" in 2007.
So the reality is that even if Bush didn't have eyes on Iraq, we still would have gone small in Afghanistan. And by early 2002, this strategy had achieved all our objectives except the head of UBL which, at that time, was considered less important than destroying AQ's infrastructure, networks, and ability to plan and implement the kinds of major attacks they were known for. The importance of UBL as a Bush "failure" was another post-hoc creation for domestic US political purposes as a line of attack against Bush. The idea that our plans in Afghanistan would have been any different had UBL been killed is completely lacking in any evidence. And indeed, once we did finally kill UBL, nothing changed and our involvement went another entire decade! Killing UBL was a catharsis, but strategically irrelevant, particularly in terms of the nation-building effort.
Let's also do a counter-factual - suppose we had done the first "plausible" approach you listed - take out the Taliban and AQ and then leave the Northern alliance in charge. I happen to think this is what we should have done, but it would have come with some pretty big downsides. It would continue the Afghan civil war. It would enable the "warlords" to run rampant again, which was a big factor in the Taliban origin story. And, a lot more bad things would have happened. And the Democratic narrative on Bush would not be much different.
But speaking of the Taliban for a minute, the surrender offer you mention was only one of many, which were not serious, were not taken seriously, and, post-hoc, should not be taken seriously. Mullah Omar was not a dictator - he presided over a shura of leadership that made collective decisions. The notion that this Taliban leadership would toss away all their political goals so that Omar, alone, could live peaceably in Kandahar is laughable.
Finally, the whole idea that things would be different if only Bush has properly "resourced" Afghanistan is similarly flawed. And it's also one of those assertions that is paper-thin since none of the people who claim to believe this (that I've talked to at least) can explain what that means, what more "resources" specifically would have accomplished, what strategy would have worked instead, and what the end goals would be and if they could actually be achieved. Instead, it's the underpants gnome strategy of "more resources" then "profit!" I think the reality is that no amount of US "resources" could make the fundamental changes in Afghan society that would turn them into a unified country, much less one with liberal democratic values. And regardless, the American people - as should be blindingly obvious now - were not willing or prepared to engage in an actual multi-generational project to attempt to turn Afghanistan into something resembling an actual nation.
As much as I’m not a fan of Trump, one thing about his tone on foreign policy that was refreshing was a lack of moralizing language. I think a lot of the media and political leadership does a poor job of making it clear that a lot of times our choices in these areas are between, by our cultural standards, bad and worse.
No, no, I'm assured by the media and the overwhelming majority of US politicians that every nation of the world is filled with millions of Jeffersonian small-D democrats yearning to breathe free!
I think Matt's basic point is that under Bush there was a mismatch between US goals (nation building) and resources and attention(*) applied to that goal. It was probably never an achievable goal no matter the resources, but that just means it shouldn't have been the goal. Under-resourcing it made it all the worse.
So the implied goal was to declare victory and get out. In that sense, blowing the capturing/killing of UBL at Tora Bora was disastrous. Whether or not it would have hurt AQ is debatable, but it almost certainly would have been the symbolic victory that an American departure would need for political if no other reasons.
(*) The diversion of attention -- from the White House, through CENTCOM and all the way down -- from Afghanistan to Iraq may have been more important for bogging us down in Afghanistan than any under-resourcing of efforts there. Basically, no one cared about Afghanistan any more and put it on the back burner. No way to win a war.
To me, that argument doesn't make much sense. If no amount of resources could achieve US goals, then, by definition, any amount of resources would also have been too few. So what is the argument for providing more resources? I'm not sure this is the case, but if is Matt arguing that the Bush administration should have thrown away *more* resources into the black hole of Afghanistan in a hopeless quest to remake Afghanistan, then that is a really bad argument If the goal isn't achievable regardless of the resources, how does it make sense to increase our sunk costs? By that logic, it would have been better if Bush had resourced the effort even less.
I don't think he was arguing for more resources. I believe his focus was on the wrong goals being pursued. He (like me!) was on the "Kill Osama and get the hell out" bandwagon.
The core problem seems to be that Bush faced a tough choice and going for an option that didn't exist. His choice was aggressive goals with high cost or modest goals with lower cost. He went for. aggressive goals with low investment, leading to failure, and in the long run high cost.
This seems this is the heart of Republican governance on issue after issue. Covid, climate change, taxes. They just govern the world they wish to exist instead of reality.
It was also symptomatic of how the late '90s/early '00s GOP was simply not into antiterrorism (as opposed to "antiterrorism") because it wasn't sexy for them. That's the reason why the Bush administration was sleeping for the first 8 months of 2001 while 9/11 was being put into action, why they fired Richard Clarke, etc. Their base was made up of isolationists who had accused Bill Clinton of wagging the dog, while their intellectuals were all wrapped up in grandiose ideas attributing all world events to state actors. Their thinking didn't change even after 9/11 - they just shoehorned their preexisting thinking into antiterrorism rhetoric.
People forget this, but during the 2000 campaign W was very much against nation building. Made quite a turn later.
I'm at least open to the possibility that W actually never moved much on this issue but was just steamrolled by others in his administration. The dude sits at home painting portraits these days.
I'm in full agreement with this. Dubya wasn't stupid as alleged. But he was completely uninformed on policy and really uninterested in governance beyond a few narrow policy areas and elections.
I'm unsympathetic to view. Either Bush was smart enough to understand things and not get steamrolled, or he was to stupid to understand things and got steamrolled. You can be smart in one area and not in others. Matt's assertion was that Obama was stupid on this and got steam rolled.
As for sitting at home painting, that isn't exactly true - he has partnered with Clinton on a number of initiatives - Haiti relief fund, Presidential Leadership Scholarship fund, and does quite a bit of charity work. He's just been much quieter about it. Bush was deeply unpopular when he left office, so I'm not sure what cause would have been excited to have him be in a leading light the way Obama or Clinton were.
Not just Republican - I think it’s the combination of basic human nature and the structure of a broadly democratic process. Could probably address this with more technocratic decision making but it will bring its own problems.
If the lower cost alternative meant spending $2 trillion, what would high cost look like?
As I wrote, in the long-term, the "lower cost" option proved high cost, because the US ended up staying for so much longer than expected
Not going into Iraq and shifting the resources used there into Afghanistan instead.
The other striking thing about Matt's article and his twitter discourse is how much power he assigns the military in controlling the foreign policy of the president. Military independence was somewhat cheered on during the Trump presidency, but is actually very worrying if true. A bedrock of our success has been civilian control of the military. If this has been compromised, we should take immediate action to remedy it.
I agree. You don't hear this too much anymore but I remember when Republican presidential candidates would tout how they would "listen to the generals" and I remember thinking how dangerous that is. The military should advise the president on the how but not the what. To the extent this isn't the case, it's a problem.
I second the importance of civilian control of the military. Eighteenth century Prussia should not be a role model.
One data point that gives me a glimmer of hope: The median age of the Afghanistan population is 18 years old. So over half the country has lived exclusively under a non-Taliban, US-supported regime where women are educated, communication is (relatively) open, and the internet is available. The Taliban will want to change all these things, but I hope it will be much harder to do than it was in the 1990's.
"So over half the country has lived exclusively under a non-Taliban, US-supported regime where women are educated, communication is (relatively) open, and the internet is available."
We're talking about a warlord-dominated, tribally-fragmented rentier state engaged extensively in child molestation, human trafficking, and drug cultivation, which also let girls in a few cities go without the hijab.
The Taliban overrunning the whole country in a week *IS* the young deciding they want something better; it's just that their definition of better is a Sunni near-theocracy that will curtail child rape, hang corrupt officials, run health clinics, probably not kill all the minorities, and maybe still let girls go to school this time.
Yes, the experience of the last two decades will inform how the Taliban governs; it's already markedly more "moderate" than it was in 1998. But let's not oversell what the IRA government actually was to the people it governed.
I said “glimmer” :)
Fair enough.
I agree with your underlying point, which is that the experience of relatively open (if otherwise terrible) IRA governance will force the Taliban to be less horrible this time. That's one of the factors informing my "let them sort it out" theory of US involvement, or rather lack thereof.
I'm with you on hoping this too. But then I'm usually overly optimistic about such things.....
It's been pretty fascinating to see how pro-intervention elite opinion in the US has been very recently. I normally can't stand Greenwald and that crew of folks, but I have to admit that he (especially a decade ago when he was less crazy) has a number of very good points about how pro-national security state the NYT, WaPo and other elite journalists/take haver types really are. (I follow Megan McArdle on Twitter, maybe not the best example, but I've been kinda surprised to see this Koch libertarian type be pretty pro-intervention over the past few days?) The 'Blob' community of active/former natsec professionals is definitely real, but it's certainly empowered by some of the wealthiest & most influential parts of US society. It'll be interesting to see how the inevitable Chinese blockade of Taiwan turns out....
Also, elite journalistic opinion being virtually wall-to-wall 'we should've stayed' doesn't really help Biden's political fortunes, seeing as they're going to bang that drum hard up through the midterms
NBC Nightly News had David Petraeus on for an interview last night and I thought I had gone back in time 10 years. He offered deep insights like "We must do everything we can with all the resources available to us to ensure that we meet the moral obligation to [Afghanistan]."
The fact that John Freakin' Bolton was interviewed at the top of Morning Edition by NPR really speaks volumes. All of the people who gave us Iraq are still highly placed at these media institutions and have 0 interest in holding anyone accountable for the war they cheerled.
It's a real shame that the interviews aren't asking "Isn't this the inevitable result of the war that you promoted. How heavy do all those deaths lie on your conscience?"
Well, plus “look at this terrible disaster!” is good content and who better to call it a disaster than the hawks?
Slightly unpopular take her, but one conservative critique of the media that is correct is the media has an overt cosmopolitan bias. Maybe not as cosmopolitan as average person here but far more than average American.
Media is always inclined to favor those who want to engage on a foreign policy abroad vs those who don't
It's opposite of 'unpopular', media's upper-middleclass blue state bias is conventional wisdom in this blog. One of the very first posts by Matt deals precisely with this phenomenon.
I’m usually pretty unpersuaded by “follow the money” arguments (truth is usually much more complicated) but yeah it’s pretty much the money. Lots of prestigious fellowships/opportunities/parties that a certain type of media person loves. Same type of person that really buys into credentialism.
Independent media, especially opinion media, is really important.
I'm a little more optimistic about Biden's political fortunes on this issue. Biden is way more popular than "elite journalistic opinion", one of the most unpopular political actors in the country. Anything could happen – the upscale suburban Romney/Clinton voters might be especially likely to buy the media narrative – but I'm inclined to think Republicans would have to tie the Afghanistan situation to a broader narrative of "disorder", including domestic policy examples, for it to move a ton of votes.
Yes, I have thought the same. I think it’s because all the people in charge or high places at these various institutions are mostly ones who were adults during the 2001-2003 period and therefore still remain "bought in" to the moralistic crusader view of foreign policy, whereas the younger generations who grew up disillusioned with it are still working their way up. McCardle, for example, is 48.
As for the midterms, voters don’t care about foreign policy, hate "their side" media talking bad about people on their side, especially a President, and voters particularly hate these wars. I think Biden is on the right side of it with regard to public opinion, and it’s the media who will have to correct course once they calm down from the hysterics they’ve flown into as a result of the immediate emotional impact of social media.
I'm also 48 and the people of my age that were opposed to the war just got completely shut out of the elite media here in the UK, and it was much worse in the US.
I was a protestor against the Iraq war. I wasn't trying to get into media, but I watched others of my generation get pushed to the side. Some made it by avoiding politics (if you're writing in the style section or you're doing TV criticism, then no-one cares what your politics are, and then you can work your way back across sometimes), but otherwise, careers just stalled out.
Nicole Wallace may have slightly exaggerated the ratio when she said 95 percent of the American people were in favor of this withdrawal and 95 percent of journalists would be against it. But not by much. Of the soldiers being interviewed who actually had extensive in country experience you see a lot of stories from soldiers who lamented the pointless loss of their comrades and not so many from soldiers who said it was an inevitable end. There's a lot of those too. So there's a question I have for all those journalists in country and out who have been crawling all over Afghanistan, many of whom are still there. Why didn't any of you predict the swift collapse of the Afghan government? Who were you talking to that led you to believe it wouldn't happen? Why were you bullshitting us all this time?
Great point - good question for all the media folks who are clucking and tutting at the Biden Administration.
One thing that is striking to me in conversation is how backwards the discussions feels -
Generally progressives are broadly supportive of investing immense amounts of money into bad situations with the idea that it takes generational support to make significant changes. The clear understanding that you can't overcome centuries of oppression in the US with one generation of less racism. Yet the conclusion in Afghanistan is that its complete collapse upon pullout is simply a clear signal that they were never going to be able to maintain a liberal democracy because of culture, background etc.
In reverse, conservatives generally oppose sinking vast amounts of money into such situations as they see as pouring good money after bad. They would say that money can't overcome bad culture and poor personal choices, and that what really makes a change is people lifting themselves up through the adoption of better values. Yet in Afghanistan, there is a general belief that the US government/military has the ability to establish a liberal democracy overcoming a vastly different culture and widespread differences in values.
Some people look at this and would say there are massive differences in the situations, and I would agree! Its just that the talking point reversal seems very striking to me.