Monday Reads: Playing Hot Potato with a Costly War
Posted: August 23, 2021 Filed under: just because | Tags: and Pompeo, Morning reads, Taliban, Trump 23 CommentsGood Day Sky Dancers!
It’s hard to explain how much of what’s going on in Kabul today should rest directly and squarely on the bad faith negotiations of Trump’s Secretary of State–steal all the government booze–Pompeo. Please watch this smug, smarmy, man laugh while under questioning by Representative Allred who asks what we’re doing to ensure that our conditions will be good as we leave Kabul. It amazes me that more isn’t being made about Pompeo’s role in the chaos we experience now. It’s worth remembering that all this was negotiated about a year ago. Oh, wait, it was supposed to be negotiated at Camp David with Trump on the anniversary of 9/11 last year. President Tin Ear was stopped on that one however.
Here’s Chris Wallace on Fox News dumping on the man who created this mess as he lies his way to a nonanswer.
Jennifer Ruben’s opinion piece today at WaPo discusses “Why so many people find Biden an easy target.”
The vehemence with which many politicians and media pundits on the left and right have attacked President Biden should not be surprising. Given the chaotic and heart-wrenching scenes in Afghanistan, the commander in chief becomes an obvious target, especially for a press corps desperate to show they do not have a liberal bias.
But “chaotic” does not equal “failed,” and just because our intelligence community blew it big time — again — does not mean the United States has abandoned its Afghan partners. Since Aug. 14, we have evacuated over 37,000 people. The United States has enlisted a slew of allies to help receive refugees. And our allies remain united that they will not recognize nor extend aid to the Taliban until we are satisfied they have not hindered our evacuation and are respecting human rights.
Despite the torrent of angry media coverage, a recent CBS News poll found that 63 percent of Americans still want out of Afghanistan. And while Biden’s approval ratings have dipped (largely due to the covid-19 surge), the decline is less than one might expect. In NBC News’s poll, for example, he has dropped only one point among registered voters — from 51 to 50 percent — since April. So why is the media so determined to convey that Biden’s effort has “failed”?
Too many reporters adopt the talking points of critics of an administration, even when those critics have an interest to make Biden the fall guy. The media, for example, have parroted the right wing’s deliberate effort to impugn the Biden administration’s motives about “abandoning Afghans” (as it airlifts tens of thousands of them out the country) while ignoring the Trump team’s destruction of the visa system. With a straight face, reporters ask for the judgment of politicians and those in the military who lied for two decades about progress in Afghanistan — as if they and the reporters themselves hadn’t contributed to the rosy, false narrative about the Afghan army’s viability. And the media have run with the notion that the Biden administration broke Afghans’ “morale” rather than focusing on our utter failure to forge a national army, the endemic corruption in their government and Afghan leaders’ selling out to the Taliban for money.
The media almost by definition operates on anecdotes. They see European back-benchers criticizing Biden and squawk about a crisis among our allies. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday:
From the get-go, I’ve spent more time with our NATO partners in Brussels, virtually, from before the president made his decision, to when he made his decision, to every time since. We’ve been working very, very closely together. We’ve gotten the G7 together, NATO together, the U.N. Security Council together. We had 113 countries, thanks to our diplomacy, put out a clear understanding of the Taliban’s requirements to let people leave the country. … I’ve heard, across the board, deep appreciation and thanks from allies and partners for everything that we’ve done to bring our allies and partners out of harm’s way. This has been a remarkable part of the effort. I’ve seen them stand up, step up to help out, including, as I said, agreements with more than two dozen countries now to help out on transit. And beyond that, we’re very focused together on the way forward, including the way forward in Afghanistan, and setting very clear expectations for the Taliban in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Which is the better indicator of our allies’ sentiments: stray comments to the media, or all of the actions Blinken outlined?
A Marine with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) provides fresh water to a child during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 20, 2021. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Samuel Ruiz)
Listening to the people who served there is a good way to get out of the damn media’s obsessions with creating tempests in teapots and seeing what was going to be a difficult process–even if perfectly planned–as the problem of the guy who’s only had 7ish months of holding a 20-year-old hot potato. This is from the Kansas City Star and was written by Veteran Lucas Kince who served in that theatre: “I served in Afghanistan as a US Marine, twice. Here’s the truth in two sentences.”
What we are seeing in Afghanistan right now shouldn’t shock you. It only seems that way because our institutions are steeped in systematic dishonesty. It doesn’t require a dissertation to explain what you’re seeing. Just two sentences.
One: For 20 years, politicians, elites and D.C. military leaders lied to us about Afghanistan.
Two: What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you.
I know because I was there. Twice. On special operations task forces. I learned Pashto as a U.S. Marine captain and spoke to everyone I could there: everyday people, elites, allies and yes, even the Taliban.
The truth is that the Afghan National Security Forces was a jobs program for Afghans, propped up by U.S. taxpayer dollars — a military jobs program populated by nonmilitary people or “paper” forces (that didn’t really exist) and a bevy of elites grabbing what they could when they could.
You probably didn’t know that. That’s the point.
And it wasn’t just in Afghanistan. They also lied about Iraq.
I led a team of Marines training Iraqi security forces to defend their country. When I arrived I received a “stoplight” chart on their supposed capabilities in dozens of missions and responsibilities. Green meant they were good. Yellow was needed improvement; red said they couldn’t do it at all.
I was delighted to see how far along they were on paper — until I actually began working with them. I attempted to adjust the charts to reflect reality and was quickly shut down. The ratings could not go down. That was the deal. It was the kind of lie that kept the war going.
So when people ask me if we made the right call getting out of Afghanistan in 2021, I answer truthfully: Absolutely not. The right call was getting out in 2002. 2003. Every year we didn’t get out was another year the Taliban used to refine their skills and tactics against us — the best fighting force in the world. After two decades, $2 trillion and nearly 2,500 American lives lost, 2021 was way too late to make the right call.
What I have read repeatedly from folks on the ground is that the only people that try won the 20 year-long war were military contractors and corrupt government officials in Afghanistan. You can read my Friday reads for more on that from former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes.
The reality of Biden’s follow through with the result of the Trump/Pompeo man-crushes on the Taliban is explained by CNN’s John Harwood. “Why Biden’s Afghanistan exit wasn’t about good politics”. We always knew what Biden wanted because he stated his opposition to the failed Obama Surge while he was VEEP.
In ending America’s longest war, President Joe Biden did something popular. It was never going to help him politically.
That was true before damaging images of chaos and desperation filled American television screens last week. The reason is that public opinion about the Afghanistan conflict, as with most overseas events and issues, remains ill-defined and loosely held.
Even after 20 years, the conflict that ended with the lightning Taliban takeover represents a distant blur for most Americans. Only a small sliver of the US population has a personal connection to the war through service in the all-volunteer military. Its duration through years of diminishing troop levels and casualties led much of the public to tune the story out.
Pollsters who have tracked the subject describe opinions no firmer than jello. Asked whether the American military should stay or leave, majorities say leave. Asked whether the military should leave or stay to continue counterterrorism operations, majorities say stay.
Either way, voters have not counted Afghanistan among their top-priority concerns. Survey research on foreign policy, observed Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, “is always very fluid.”
That reality means that neither side of the long-running debate on the war can unambiguously claim the upper hand in public sentiment.
Afghans crowd at the tarmac of the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, to flee the country as the Taliban were in control of Afghanistan after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and conceded the insurgents had won the 20-year war. AFP PHOTO
From the initial push for war by the Bush administration to the idea of a surge by the Obama administration to the total dump it on the Taliban and let Biden deal with it by the Trump administration there has been one bad commitment to bad ideas after another. You all know I’ve never been a big Biden fan. I have to say he’s the only President that just decided to get it done and be done with it. The collapse of Kabul was always inevitable since the Afghanistan people and their regionalism vs federalism approach to things has seriously been misunderstood by many “experts”. It still seems this was another nation-building opportunity that only enriched the military-industrial complex. That’s my thoughts.
In other news, the FDA has given the Pfizer vaccine full approval.
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals.
“The FDA’s approval of this vaccine is a milestone as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorization, as the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product,” said Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, M.D. “While millions of people have already safely received COVID-19 vaccines, we recognize that for some, the FDA approval of a vaccine may now instill additional confidence to get vaccinated. Today’s milestone puts us one step closer to altering the course of this pandemic in the U.S.”
Since Dec. 11, 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has been available under EUA in individuals 16 years of age and older, and the authorization was expanded to include those 12 through 15 years of age on May 10, 2021. EUAs can be used by the FDA during public health emergencies to provide access to medical products that may be effective in preventing, diagnosing, or treating a disease, provided that the FDA determines that the known and potential benefits of a product, when used to prevent, diagnose, or treat the disease, outweigh the known and potential risks of the product.
FDA-approved vaccines undergo the agency’s standard process for reviewing the quality, safety and effectiveness of medical products. For all vaccines, the FDA evaluates data and information included in the manufacturer’s submission of a biologics license application (BLA). A BLA is a comprehensive document that is submitted to the agency providing very specific requirements. For Comirnaty, the BLA builds on the extensive data and information previously submitted that supported the EUA, such as preclinical and clinical data and information, as well as details of the manufacturing process, vaccine testing results to ensure vaccine quality, and inspections of the sites where the vaccine is made. The agency conducts its own analyses of the information in the BLA to make sure the vaccine is safe and effective and meets the FDA’s standards for approval.
I am without patience for anyone not getting the vaccine. I’m still ready to tell them to go to their crazy places–churches, Republican Party National Headquarter, Mara Lago, etc.– to get treatment and stay away from our children and healthcare workers. More and more employers are mandating vaccines and I’m really down with that.
So, what’s on your blogging list today? This war and pandemic stuff is wearing me out!
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: August 21, 2021 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Afghanistan, cat art, caturday, Covid-19, James W. Loewen, media freakout, Peter Baker 17 Comments
Britt Ehringer, Frida Katlobrow
Good Afternoon!!
As usual, the news is pretty depressing today–Covid-19 is still raging and the media is still viciously attacking President Biden on Afghanistan while ignoring the roles of Trump, Pompeo, and Stephen Miller in setting up the current state of affairs. I have a mix of reads to share, beginning with the obituary of a brilliant author and anti-racist who worked to change Americans’ understanding of our history.
The New York Times: James W. Loewen, Who Challenged How History Is Taught, Dies at 79.
James W. Loewen, a sociologist and civil rights champion who took high school teachers and textbook publishers to task for distorting American history, particularly the struggle of Black people in the South, by oversimplifying their experience and omitting the ugly parts, died on Thursday in Bethesda, Md. He was 79.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Ellen Adler, his publisher at the New Press, who said he died after an unspecified “long illness.”
“Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the 11th grade,” Dr. Loewen wrote in “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” (1995), the best known of his dozen books attacking historical misconceptions.
Dr. Loewen was a relentless contrarian who challenged anyone who imagined academic life as a passage through genteel lectures on settled matters for drowsy students on leafy campuses. He charged through history like a warrior, dismantling fictions and exposing towns for excluding minorities; teachers and historians for dumbing lessons down; and defendants in 50 class-action lawsuits who, according to his expert testimony, victimized people in civil rights, voting rights and job discrimination cases.
A Northerner fascinated with Mississippi, he wrote his first book about the Chinese population there. He wrote another about how America’s historic sites distort our knowledge of the past. And it was a mistake to get him started on the origin of Thanksgiving: Plymouth was already a village with cleared fields when the Pilgrims found it deserted by plague victims. No turkey was served in 1621 — perhaps it was duck. And there was no pie. The settlers had no wheat flour for crust and no oven for baking. The holiday Americans celebrate has nothing to do with the Pilgrims. It was invented 242 years later by Abraham Lincoln to celebrate the North’s victory at Gettysburg.
“History is by far our worst-taught subject in high school,” Dr. Loewen told The Atlantic in 2018. “I think we’re stupider in thinking about the past than we are, say, in thinking about Shakespeare, or algebra, or other subjects. Historians tend to make everything so nuanced that the idea of truth almost disappears.”
Loewen’s work is more important than ever with the current rise of disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Painting by Rose Freymuth-Frazier
Trumpists are organizing a pro-January 6 rally in Washington D.C. on September 18, and this time the Metropolitan Police are taking the warnings seriously. The purpose of the rally is to free the “political prisoners” who are being prosecuted for attacking the U.S. Capitol building.
WUSA9.com: MPD fully activates department ahead of planned ‘Justice for J6’ protest on Sept. 18.
WASHINGTON — In a flash notice sent to all officers and members of the department Thursday, Metropolitan Police activated the entire force and postponed vacation days, in anticipation of a Sept. 18 protest organized by supporters of Jan. 6 defendants.
The rally, known as “Justice for J6,” is planned for the Union Square area of the Capitol grounds, the section of the west front encompassing the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial and Capitol reflecting pool.
The full activation alert, sent as Thursday’s Capitol Hill bomb threat investigation continued, assigned specific notice to MPD civil disturbance units trained for First Amendment demonstrations. The department-wide notification has not been previously reported.
When asked for comment, MPD responded with this statement:
“In anticipation of First Amendment activities on Saturday, September 18, 2021, the Metropolitan Police Department will be fully prepared. As with all First Amendment demonstrations, MPD will be monitoring and assessing the activities and planning accordingly with our federal law enforcement partners. MPD will have an increased presence around the city where demonstrations will be taking place and will be prepared to make street closures for public safety.”
Read more about the known goals for the event at the link, but here’s a brief summary from The Daily Beast:
The event, organized by former Donald Trump flack Matt Braynard, hopes to seek justice for those who stormed and defiled the Capitol on Jan. 6. Braynard announced the rally on former Trump adviser and current crackpot Steve Bannon’s podcast. “As we continue to raise the profile of these individuals, it makes it harder and harder for the left’s phony narrative about an insurrection to stick,” Braynard said, according to WUSA9. “What’s going to define [the rally] is where it’s going to take place: we’re going back to the Capitol.” He said the event has obtained permits. U.S. Capitol Police said it was aware of the event, but declined to comment.
Painting by Martin Wittfooth
Covid-19 is raging all over the country, but especially in the South. CNN reports: Governor sees ‘astronomical’ number of new Covid-19 cases.
Overall hospitalizations are continuing to increase across Alabama as the “pandemic of unvaccinated people continues,” state health officer Dr. Scott Harris said on Friday. Alabama hospitals have a negative capacity of ICU beds available, he said, and the state is seeing the highest number of Covid-19 cases among children than at any other time during the pandemic.
Louisiana has seen an “astronomical” number of Covid-19 cases during the latest surge, according to Gov. John Bel Edwards, as infections are increasing particularly among younger populations.
“I can tell you that for the last couple of days, 28% of all the new cases that we’re reporting are in children zero to 17,” he said on Friday.
In Orlando, Florida, Mayor Buddy Dyer warned residents to conserve water. Orlando Sentinel: Orlando urges reduced water usage as liquid oxygen used to purify water goes to COVID patients.
The city of Orlando and its water utility made an urgent appeal Friday afternoon for residents to cut back sharply on water usage for weeks because of a pandemic-triggered shortage of liquid oxygen used to purify water.
If commercial and residential customers are unable to reduce water usage quickly and sufficiently, Orlando Utilities Commission may issue a system-wide alert for boiling water needed for drinking and cooking. Without reductions in water usage, a boil-water alert would come within a week, utility officials said.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer asked residents to immediately stop watering their lawns, washing their cars and using pressure washers. Landscape irrigation consumes about 40% of the water provided by OUC….
Medical authorities have reported that along with a spike in hospitalizations for COVID cases, hospitals are relying increasingly on treatment involving high flows of supplemental oxygen for patients.
That has spurred a nationwide shortage for liquid oxygen, which has been exacerbated by a lack of available tanker trucks and drivers.
Amanda, by Mark Ryden
In Mississippi, many people have been using a livestock deworming medication to treat or prevent Covid-19 that has been promoted on Fox News. ABC News: Mississippi officials warn against using livestock ivermectin to prevent COVID-19 after rise in poison control calls.
Mississippi’s poison control center has seen an increase in calls of people taking ivermectin, including versions of the deworming drug intended for livestock, to treat or prevent COVID-19, according to state health officials.
The Mississippi Health Department took to social media Friday to issue a warning about the phenomenon, which has been reported throughout the pandemic.
“Do not use ivermectin products made for animals,” it said in a Facebook post.
The Mississippi Health Department also issued an alert Friday to health care providers in the state regarding the increase in poison control calls due to potential ivermectin toxicity.
“At least 70% of the recent calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers,” stated the alert, which did not specify the number of total calls.
Meanwhile, there’s a free vaccine readily available that has emergency approval from the FDA.
Also in Mississippi: Mississippi threatens fines, jail time for Covid patients who don’t isolate.
Mississippi’s top health official Friday threatened jail time for people diagnosed with Covid-19 who don’t isolate in their homes.
State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs issued an “isolation order” that states, “All persons residing in Mississippi must immediately home-isolate on first knowledge of infection with COVID-19.”
Failure to do so could result in fines and jail time. Dobbs’ order mentions two possible levels of violation. One, a refusal to obey a health officer, comes with a $500 fine and, possibly, six months behind bars.
But the order says that where a life-threatening disease is involved in a refusal to obey, violators could face a fine of up to $5,000 and possibly five years behind bars.
State epidemiologist Paul Byers said Mississippi has the highest number of new Covid-19 cases per 100,000 residents in the nation. “These numbers are staggering guys,” he said during a weekly Mississippi pandemic update.
Marc Dennis, Night Out
Big media is still focused tearing down Joe Biden, so much so that they hardly paid any attention to bomb threat standoff in DC.
John Stoer at Raw Story: How the media enables a political minority to steal the majority’s freedoms.
Peter Baker is a reporter for the Times. He said this yesterday: “The Biden team’s cold political calculation is that Americans won’t care what happens in Afghanistan as long as Americans are safe. To their point, today there are no front-page stories on Afghanistan in cities like Boston, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Fresno or Miami.”
This is in keeping what I’ve been saying in the Editorial Board. Most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics. This goes double for August, that time of the year when normal people are thinking about vacations or preparing for the reopening of school. The Washington press corps barely paid any attention at all to Afghanistan, because most people most of the time stopped paying attention to it a decade ago, after the US killed the man responsible for murdering nearly 3,000 Americans a decade prior.
But Baker’s use of “cold political calculation” carries with it at least one presumption. It’s that Joe Biden is doing something obviously morally wrong; that “informed people” (i.e., elites) know he’s doing something obviously morally wrong; and that the obvious moral wrong is rooted in the fact that US forces are leaving Afghanistan. Moreover, it’s that Biden is betting he won’t pay a price for that obvious moral wrong given that voters have short attention spans and short memories, especially in August. It’s a presumption that itself presumes everything is as good or bad as everything else and nothing really matters.
“Cold political calculation” does not accurately represent reality, however. The Associated Press released this week the results of a new poll showing that two-thirds of the population does not think “America’s longest war was worth fighting.” That’s 67 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans. The poll, moreover, shows a gigantic switcher-roo over the duration of the “forever war.” In 2001, most people were worried about foreign terrorists. Now, according to the AP’s poll, most people see “major national security threats as being internal. Roughly two-thirds say they are extremely or very concerned about the threat of extremist groups based inside the United States.”
Small Game Hunter, by Rose Freymuth
My point here isn’t to pick on Peter Baker. My point is to note how the press corps often overlooks, or ignores, majority opinion, especially as it relates to the dynamics of power in Washington. When put in its proper context, you can see the president and his team were not making a “cold political calculation.” To the contrary, they were acting in accord with the will of the majority. Everything is not as good or bad as everything else. Some things are good. Some things are bad. Some things are so clearly and morally one or the other, there’s a bipartisan consensus. A president is wise to take such preferences into account. I wouldn’t call this “cold political calculation.” I’d call it good politics.
Read more at Raw Story.
Here’s a link to Peter Baker’s article at The New York Times: Biden Ran on Competence and Empathy. Afghanistan Is Testing That.
More Afghanistan reads:
Franz J. Marty at The Guardian: I was in Kabul when it fell to the Taliban. The speed of the collapse stunned me.
HuffPost: Biden, Allies Frustrated With Media’s Hawkish Coverage Of Afghanistan Withdrawal.
William Saletan at Slate: Pompeo Is Lying About Afghanistan. He laid the groundwork for the Taliban takeover. Now he’s blaming Biden.
As always, this is an open thread. I hope you all have a great weekend!
Friday Reads: Of Buddhas, Taliban, and White Male US Domestic Terrorists
Posted: August 20, 2021 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Afghan Women, Afghanistan War 17 Comments
The oldest oil paintings are in Afghanistan. They were found in caves behind the 2 ancient colossal Buddha statues destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban. Many people worldwide were in shock when the Taliban destroyed The Banyam Buddhas. It was a Western Heritage site. Behind those statues are caves decorated with paintings from the fifth to ninth centuries.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
So, it’s hard to remain dispassionately compassionate in today’s America. Here I am wanting doctors and hospitals to turn away the unvaccinated for one. Then, I’d like to trade the entire Trump family, that white male domestic terrorist that took up hours of everyone’s time plus thousands of dollars just to have a hissy fit in front of the Library of Congress while lying about having a bomb, and an entire list of Republican politicians to the Taliban in exchange for every Afghani who definitely would make better US Citizens then these freaks of white privilege, corruption, and angst.
Let’s send them the Proud Boys and get back the Afghanistani Girls Robotics Team. I’d say we’d definitely get the better deal. Maybe Fox News–minus a few leggy,dyed, and dumb blondes–would like to set up its entire empire there and broadcast Tucker Carlson from the kind of government he seems to want. Although the thought of Laura Ingrahm in a burkha has a certain appeal to me that I must admit. Ah, but I cannot play Karma just as anyone with tendencies to Deism can play the Goddess or God.
BB sent me a link to a former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes who reported on the original removal of the Taliban from Afghanistan. I saw her on MSNBC where she completely ripped apart a young Obama staffer who basically was trying to say that the surge was a mistake but could only be seen from hindsight. She’s fierce, outspoken, and amazingly well-versed on the entire 20-year commitment to your basic corruption story. First, here’s the transcript of her appearance on MSNBC. Medhi Hassan sat in for Chris Hayes on that day. The other participant in the discussion is Tommy Vietor is the former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama. He`s now a co-host of the podcast Pod Save America and host of Pod Save the World. She took him down with ease.
Thank you both for coming on the show. Tommy, let me start with you. You were on the NSC. This is a huge screw up is it not? You and I may agree with Joe Biden that this was the right thing to do, but this was a failure in the way that it was handled, in the way that you know it was not seen coming according to NBC reporting.
The CIA warned of a rapid collapse. And now they`re playing the blame game. General Mark Milley said today, nope, he never saw any of that Intel. This is bad, is it not?
TOMMY VIETOR, HOST, POD SAVE THE WORLD. Giving out the people who helped us in this war effort over the past few decades is bad. And they need to rectify that immediately. And obviously, that part of this process getting these Special Immigrant Visas out, getting the P1, the P2 Visas out. All these people that help the United States, the USAID, helped the news media. We need to get those people out.
And so, this mission isn`t over. Joe Biden needs to figure out how to get them out. I do agree with President Biden`s assessment that after 20 years, it was time to end the war in Afghanistan. The mission against al-Qaeda had gone well, the nation-building exercise was doomed to fail from the beginning and it was in the state to continue with this long.
HASAN: Sarah, you lived in Afghanistan. You also later advise the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What did we all get wrong about the durability even, dare I say, the popularity of the Taliban in parts of Afghanistan? What did we miss? What did U.S. general miss?
SARAH CHAYES, FORMER REPORTER, NPR: So, I actually disagree with Tommy on that. And I would say I don`t think the Taliban are particularly popular. I don`t think that`s quite an accurate way of putting it either. There were two decisive variables in this whole situation from the beginning. And they were Afghan government corruption aided and abetted reinforce (AUDIO GAP) and with every Afghan leader that we supported.
And the second decisive variable was the role of Pakistan. It`s not as though the Taliban or some, you know, grassroots movement that sprang up inside Afghanistan, as we often hear. I spent months interviewing people, both ordinary Afghans who had been living in Kandahar and in Qatar, across the border in Pakistan, and also key actors in this drama back in 1994.
Everyone agrees that it was the Pakistani military intelligence agency that basically concocted the Taliban back in about 1993, and then reconstituted them starting approximately 2003. And so, I actually think there`s a lot we could have done differently.
And having been also in interagency policy development in 2010-2011, I can tell you, there were some of us who were arguing very forcefully for a stronger U.S. stance in holding the Afghan government to basic standards of integrity, and it was explicitly rejected by the U.S. cabinet and President Obama.
And the same thing is true of Pakistan. Many people were pointing out the active role Pakistan had played, not to mention that they also provided nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran. So, I don`t understand one of those decisions that (INAUDIBLE) that period.
[20:25:17]
HASAN: You mentioned Obama, so let me bring Tommy back in. Tommy, you obviously worked for Barack Obama. You and I have talked many times before about various aspects of foreign policy that he may have got wrong, he could have done better on. Where does Afghanistan fit into that scheme in your view when you look at Syria, and Libya, and some of the other areas, Yemen, of contention that you and I have discussed? I mean, Joe Biden as successfully pulling troops out of Afghanistan. He may be doing it in a bad way, but he`s managing to do it. We know that Barack Obama had a similar instinct, but he never did this.
VIETOR: So, during the Obama years, especially early on, the threat from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan was growing and was significant. And, you know, that was largely because George W. Bush started the war there, took his eye off the ball, and then decided to invade Iraq.
So, what Obama decided to do was surge a bunch of additional troops in 2009 and 2010 to push back the Taliban, and try to buy some time and space to go after al-Qaeda and essentially prevent the government toppling — prevent major population centers from being overrun. What did that get us? It got us back to a status quo ante.
And in hindsight, I think that that major surge was probably a mistake, and that the U.S. should have shifted to a counterterrorism mission sooner and drawn down troops sooner. And I agree, Mehdi, in hindsight, it`s very easy to say the safe haven in Pakistan was a problem, corruption has been a problem. It`s very easy to identify those problems, solving them is much harder, especially when you have a bunch of other competing priorities like the need to be able to undertake counterterrorism missions in Pakistan, the need to keep the lid on Pakistan`s nuclear weapons program, the need to do a million other things, it becomes complicated.
And so look, I think the surge in hindsight was a mistake. I do think it was time to end this war, and that, frankly, it was doomed for a long time.
HASAN: Yes. And Joe Biden, of course, was one of those people who at least at the time, briefed the people he was against that search. It`s interesting him following up now as president. Sarah, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani turned up today in the United Arab Emirates, reportedly accused of taking $169 million of cash with him.
This was the guy who was supposed to be clean. He was the guy who was going to fix Afghanistan, the technocrat, the economist, and it looks like he may have just been as corrupt as everyone before him. We talk a lot about the Afghan military`s fault, but how much is Afghan political leadership over 20 years to blame for this debacle now?
CHAYES: Afghan political leadership and the incentive structure that the United States and many of its international allies put in place. We set up an incentive structure that rewarded the most corrupt. And again, I beg to differ with you, Tommy. A lot of us — it`s not in hindsight. A lot of us had been talking about Pakistan and corruption for years. That interagency process —
(CROSSTALK)
CHAYES: They were tracking — sorry?
VIETOR: I think that what was lacking were the solutions. You know, it`s not that there weren`t like ideas in white paper —
CHAYES: I`m sorry. I`m sorry, Tommy. The number of plants, the number of — the number of extremely explicit governance campaign plans that were put forward, I mean, with most likely most dangerous mitigation strategies for what might go wrong, I can think of three or four that were submitted and frankly, died in the national security staff.
So, I think there`s a bit of disingenuousness here. And again, I have had no, I want to say, sympathy for corrupt Afghan officials. But on the other hand, let`s just take a look. I feel like we`re in a hall of mirrors today. You know, look at the mansions in the massive neighborhoods around Washington where contractors and government officials live after having promulgated failed policies. And then we call —
HASAN: It is truly — it is truly horrific to see. Sarah, we`re out of time. I do want to give Tommy 20 seconds since you — since you made a couple of jobs there. We`re out of time but Tommy, 20 seconds, last word.
VIETOR: Listen, I would just say that white papers and plans in Washington in the Situation Room had bumped up against the reality in Afghanistan and Pakistan for 20 years. And the smartest people writing the smartest way papers have not managed to fix the problems. I don`t think it was the lack of trying. I think it was the lack of good ideas, I think it was time to end this mission.
CHAYES: Tommy, I`m sorry, I lived on the ground. I lived in Kandahar. Don`t you tell me as a — as speechwriter what realities are on the ground in Kandahar — in Afghanistan.
VIETOR: I wasn`t speaking to you.
HASAN: I wish — I wish we had — I wish we had more time.
CHAYES: Give me a break. I mean, seriously.
It was truly a joy to watch this. Anyway, here’s the link to her website that BB sent me and her post “The Ides of August”. There is a lot there but here’s more about the role of Pakistan in the Taliban.
Pakistan. The involvement of that country’s government — in particular its top military brass — in its neighbor’s affairs is the second factor that would determine the fate of the U.S. mission.
You may have heard that the Taliban first emerged in the early 1990s, in Kandahar. That is incorrect. I conducted dozens of conversations and interviews over the course of years, both with actors in the drama and ordinary people who watched events unfold in Kandahar and in Quetta, Pakistan. All of them said the Taliban first emerged in Pakistan.
The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. “Taliban” worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders. They were known as sober, studious, and gentle. These Taliban, according to the ISI messaging, had no interest in government. They just wanted to get the militiamen who infested the city to stop extorting people at every turn in the road.
Both label and message were lies.
Within a few years, Usama bin Laden found his home with the Taliban, in their de facto capital, Kandahar, hardly an hour’s drive from Quetta. Then he organized the 9/11 attacks. Then he fled to Pakistan, where we finally found him, living in a safe house in Abbottabad, practically on the grounds of the Pakistani military academy. Even knowing what I knew, I was shocked. I never expected the ISI to be that brazen.
Meanwhile, ever since 2002, the ISI had been re-configuring the Taliban: helping it regroup, training and equipping units, developing military strategy, saving key operatives when U.S. personnel identified and targeted them. That’s why the Pakistani government got no advance warning of the Bin Laden raid. U.S. officials feared the ISI would warn him.
By 2011, my boss, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Taliban were a “virtual arm of the ISI.”
And now this.
Do we really suppose the Taliban, a rag-tag, disjointed militia hiding out in the hills, as we’ve so long been told, was able to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international backing? Where do we suppose that campaign plan came from? Who gave the orders? Where did all those men, all that materiel, the endless supply of money to buy off local Afghan army and police commanders, come from? How is it that new officials were appointed in Kandahar within a day of the city’s fall? The new governor, mayor, director of education, and chief of police all speak with a Kandahari accent. But no one I know has ever heard of them. I speak with a Kandahari accent, too. Quetta is full of Pashtuns — the main ethic group in Afghanistan — and people of Afghan descent and their children. Who are these new officials?
Over those same years, by the way, the Pakistani military also provided nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. But for two decades, while all this was going on, the United States insisted on considering Pakistan an ally. We still do.
So we are finally getting more coverage on Trump’s role in the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. This is from Michael Crowly at the NYT: “Trump’s Deal With the Taliban Draws Fire From His Former Allies. The former president and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are attacking President Biden over Afghanistan even as their own policy faces harsh criticism.”
Days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks two years ago, President Donald J. Trump had a novel idea. He would invite leaders of the Taliban, the group that harbored Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan as the founder of Al Qaeda plotted his strikes on America, to join peace negotiations at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.
The notion of any presidential meeting with the Taliban, let alone one close to Sept. 11, stunned many of Mr. Trump’s top advisers. But Mr. Trump was eager to engage with the militant group, which the United States had been fighting for almost 20 years, as he pursued his goal of removing American troops from Afghanistan by the end of his term.
Months earlier, at Mr. Trump’s direction, the State Department had begun face-to-face talks with the Taliban in Qatar to negotiate an American exit. Mr. Trump called off the Taliban visit to Camp David after an American soldier was killed in a bombing in Kabul, the Afghan capital, but the peace talks continued.
They culminated in a February 2020 deal under which the United States agreed to withdraw in return for Taliban promises not to harbor terrorists and to engage in their first direct negotiations with the Afghan government. Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, attended the signing ceremony in Doha and posed for a photo alongside the Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, which resurfaced this week on social media. Mr. Baradar is widely expected to become the head of a new Taliban government based in Kabul.
Some former senior Trump officials now call that agreement fatally flawed, saying it did little more than provide cover for a pullout that Mr. Trump was impatient to begin before his re-election bid. They also say it laid the groundwork for the chaos unfolding now in Kabul.
“Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said of Mr. Pompeo during a podcast interview with the journalist Bari Weiss on Wednesday. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”
And in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said that, while President Biden “owns” the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan, Mr. Trump had earlier “undermined” the agreement through his barely disguised impatience to exit the country with little apparent regard for the consequences. That included an October 2020 declaration by Mr. Trump that he wanted the 5,000 American troops then in Afghanistan home by Christmas.
After Mr. Trump moved thousands of troops out of Afghanistan during his last year in office, Mr. Biden inherited just 2,500 troops in the country. Mr. Biden has cited the U.S. commitment in Doha to remove all remaining forces by May of this year, a deadline he did not meet, as a key factor in his decision to continue the withdrawal.
So my question continues to be this: How the hell could any country hold a bunch of airports all over Afghanistan open for an exodus with only 2500 troops? The only way was to surge again into Afghanistan, break Trump’s commitment, and really go against what the American people wanted as well as what Joe Biden had announced he was against over and over and over.
Again, here’s my suggestion. We get the remainder of the Girl’s Robotic team that are still stuck in Afghanistan and we hand the Taliban Trump and his spawn. He said he likes them. He can build a Trump Prayer Tower and pretend he’s a devout follower of Mohammed and everyone wins! I’m sure they don’t want Lindsey Graham given his sexual preference but could we offer up Senator Kennedy from Louisiana as a court Jester of sorts?
Ah, well. Probably not realistic but you know, in war it’s not unusual to trade our traitors for theirs so why not? We could use a few journalists that really know about the war and there are women doctors over there as well. They get the entire Fox news outfit and we get some great Journalists and more doctors that believe in vaccines!! How about that?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: Iraq Coverage Deja Vu
Posted: August 19, 2021 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, The Media SUCKS | Tags: Afghani art, Afghanistan, Lawrence O'Donnell, Timothy Kudo, Vietnam 17 Comments
Afghani artist Mohammad Salim Attaie
Good Afternoon!!
I’m really struggling to write a post this morning. I’ve been having a powerful sense of deja vu as the Afghanistan withdrawal and the media reaction to it have played out. I had a similar helpless, despairing feeling when I realized George W. Bush was going to push us into a war in Iraq that would very likely mire us in another Vietnam-type conflict and the mainstream media was going to help him.
I didn’t think we should have gone into Afghanistan, and now Bush wanted to start a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, based on obvious lies and exaggerations. Naturally, big media was thrilled and pushed hard for the war–particularly at The New York Times. Now I’m watching helplessly as the NYT and other outlets gleefully tear down Joe Biden and in the process possibly help Republicans retake the House and Senate in 2022.
I don’t know if anyone here has been watching Lawrence O’Donnell this week on MSNBC, but I agree with his take on what’s happening in Afghanistan. On Tuesday night he talked about how people who weren’t even born yet when we withdrew from Vietnam are claiming that the Afghanistan situation is even worse. That’s insane. As O’Donnell said, “Everything about Vietnam was much worse than what has happened in Afghanistan.” It’s not even close.
“Here’s the link to O’Donnell’s commentary. I hope you’ll watch it if you didn’t see it already. He also argues that the Pentagon and military have no idea how to conduct a withdrawal after losing a war, and it would likely be chaotic no matter what we did to prepare. Also see this interview with marine captain Timothy Kudo, who served in Afghanistan.
Kudo wrote an op-ed for The New York Times that was published on Monday: I Was a Marine in Afghanistan. We Sacrificed Lives for a Lie. You really need to read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
I see a report that the American Embassy will destroy its American flags to deny the Taliban a propaganda victory. I think of the star-spangled banner that flew over my old patrol base, called Habib, Arabic for “beloved.” Five men died under that flag, for what?
Moheb Sadiq, Impressionist painting of Afghani landscape
The hawks still circle and screech. The voices from the past 20 years who prodded us forward into battle return to the evening news to sell us on staying. “It’s not too late,” the former generals, secretaries and ambassadors say. “More troops can hold the line. Victory is just around the corner.”
But the speed of the Taliban’s advance makes clear that this outcome was always inevitable. The enemy had no reason to negotiate and no reputation for restraint. The only question before President Biden was how many American troops should die before it happened. But if leaving now was the right decision for America, it is a catastrophe for the Afghan people whom we have betrayed.
The Afghans are forced back into living under religious tyranny, an existence made all the more painful by their brief experience with freedom. Now they see the light from the far end of a dark tunnel. The school doors will close for girls, and the boys will return to their religious studies. For them, the arc of the moral universe will bend backward and break.
It’s my old unit, First Battalion, Eighth Marines, that is sent in to secure the airport in Kabul. I am jealous. I would give anything to return right now, to give what last full measure remains.
Yes, what is happening is unbearably tragic, but is it Joe Biden’s fault as the media “analysts” keep telling us? How can Biden, after 6 months in office, suddenly be responsible for 20 years of failures? It just makes no sense.
Eric Levitz at New York Magazine: The Media Is Helping Hawks Win the War Over Biden’s Withdrawal. This piece is critical of Biden’s Afghanistan policy, but even more critical of those who fought to extend the war for two decades and now want it to continue.
Biden’s failure of moral courage and contingency planning is this moment’s lesser scandal. The bigger one is the war that he is ending, which recent events have certified as an unmitigated disaster. Yet you might not know this from the many ostensibly objective news reports that have cast Biden’s troop withdrawal as the source of our nation’s “humiliation.”
‘Kochi’ by Afghani artist Azim Rawofi
The first 20 years of America’s occupation of Afghanistan cost, by one estimate, 241,000 lives (including 2,448 U.S. troops and 71,000 civilians) and more than $2 trillion. The Taliban’s swift triumph has made it clear just how little all those deaths and dollars bought. Anyone paying attention already knew that the U.S. had engineered a kleptocracy in Kabul. But Afghan president Ashraf Ghani’s decision to flee the country with $169 million in tow, even as his government was on the cusp of reaching a cease-fire agreement with the Taliban, made our client state’s depravity newly conspicuous.
Critical observers understood that the Afghan army was a paper tiger whose true ranks were far thinner than advertised and whose loyalty to the government was rooted less in patriotism than a mercenary’s interest in gainful employment. But the fact that America had invested $80 billion into training an army that was so incapable of independent action that it could not feed itself in the absence of U.S. air support — and so disenchanted with its own government that it would forfeit its capital with little fight — was not readily apparent until now.
Those who fought to extend America’s war in Afghanistan have every incentive to divert our attention from these revelations. They would like the public to miss the forest for the trees — by mistaking Biden’s tactical errors for strategic ones. The primary lesson of the past week could be that the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a catastrophe and that those who misled the public about the Afghan army’s strength deserve little input on future policy, no matter how many stars they have on their uniforms or diplomas they have on their walls. Alternatively, if news coverage focuses exhaustively on the shortcomings of Biden’s withdrawal, while largely ignoring what our client state’s abrupt collapse tells us about our two-decade-long occupation, then the lesson of Kabul’s fall could be quite favorable for Beltway hawks: Presidents shouldn’t end wars in defiance of the military brass unless they wish to become unpopular.
Artist Mohibullah Attaie (Moheb Sadiq)
Unfortunately, we are currently hurtling toward that latter outcome. In recent days, much of the mainstream media has comported itself as the Pentagon’s Pravda. Reporters have indignantly asked the White House how it could say that America doesn’t have a vital national security interest in maintaining a military presence near Tajikistan. NBC’s Richard Engel has devoted his Twitter feed to scolding Biden for suggesting that America’s nation-building project in Afghanistan was always hopeless, and that the Kabul government was “basically a failed state.” CNN’s Jim Sciutto lamented on Twitter Wednesday, “Too many times, I’ve witnessed the US military attempt to dutifully carry out difficult & dangerous missions left to them by the miscalculations of civilian leaders.” This sentiment is disconcerting in the abstract, since it seems to suggest that civilian control of the military may be unwise. But it’s even stranger in context. As we learned just two years ago, American military leaders in Kabul systematically lied to the public about how well the war against the Taliban was going, so as to insulate their preferred foreign policy from democratic contestation.
For more context and the critique of Biden, read the whole thing at New York Magazine.
This piece is by Jed Legum, Tesnim Zekeria, and Rebecca Crosby at Popular Information: Where are the anti-war voices?
Yesterday’s newsletter detailed how the media is largely overlooking voices that supported Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Instead media reports are almost exclusively highlighting criticism of the withdrawal — often from people complicit in two decades of failed policy in Afghanistan.
We have reason to believe that this is not an accident. On Wednesday, Popular Information spoke to a veteran communications professional who has been trying to place prominent voices supportive of the withdrawal on television and in print. The source said that it has been next to impossible:
“I’ve been in political media for over two decades, and I have never experienced something like this before. Not only can I not get people booked on shows, but I can’t even get TV bookers who frequently book my guests to give me a call back…
I’ve fed sources to reporters, who end up not quoting the sources, but do quote multiple voices who are critical of the president and/or put the withdrawal in a negative light.
I turn on TV and watch CNN and, frankly, a lot of MSNBC shows, and they’re presenting it as if there’s not a voice out there willing to defend the president and his decision to withdraw. But I offered those very shows those voices, and the shows purposely decided to shut them out.
In so many ways this feels like Iraq and 2003 all over again. The media has coalesced around a narrative, and any threat to that narrative needs to be shut out.”
Who is on TV? As Media Matters has documented, there are plenty of former Bush administration officials criticizing the withdrawal.
Is it really about execution?
Much of the criticism of Biden’s decision to withdraw has focused on the administration’s “execution.” The critics claim the withdrawal was poorly planned, chaotic, and unnecessarily put Americans — and their Afghan allies — in danger.
Some of these claims may be true. It’s hard to know, for example, how many people have been left behind since evacuations are ongoing. But, with a few exceptions, the criticisms of Biden’s execution are being made by people who opposed withdrawal altogether.
Click the link to read the rest.
An Afghan “war rug” at the College of New Jersey Art Gallery
I’m honestly depressed and disheartened by what is happening in the Afghanistan coverage. That’s about all I can say about it for now. Here are some other stories to check out today:
Politico: Several Hill office buildings evacuated amid ‘active bomb threat investigation’
AP: Gulf Coast’s beloved ‘Redneck Riviera’ now a virus hotspot.
The Washington Post: An Alabama doctor watched patients reject the coronavirus vaccine. Now he’s refusing to treat them.
Salon via Raw Story: The lambda variant is ominous for what it says about the future trajectory of the pandemic
Steve Inskeep at NPR: A Mission To Give Afghans Democracy Became A Bid To Repair America’s Own.
USA Today: These 16 Republicans voted against speeding up visas for Afghans fleeing the Taliban.
Defense One: Trump’s Pledge to Exit Afghanistan Was a Ruse, His Final SecDef Says.
What else is happening? As always, this is an open thread.
Tuesday Reads: The Media’s Afghanistan Freakout
Posted: August 17, 2021 Filed under: just because, morning reads | Tags: Afghanistan, beltway media, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, media freakout, media narratives 30 CommentsGood Morning!!
Lubeck Orphanage, 1894, Gotthardt Kuel
It looks like the media is going to focus on Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. They’ve spent the past 6 months searching for something they can attack Biden about, and now they’ve found it. Never mind that Trump is the one who negotiated with the Taliban and withdrew most of the troops. This is all Biden’s fault.
Never mind that Trump mismanaged and then ignored a deadly virus that has now killed more Americans than the Civil War. Never mind that Republican Governors in the South and people refusing vaccines based on conspiracy theories that are making the pandemic worse. That can’t be pinned on Biden, so the media will ignore the problem for now. They will also largely ignore the horrific earthquake in Haiti. The media loves covering wars.
I have to admit that I’m no expert on Afghanistan. I just know that after 20 years, it’s obvious that we aren’t going win a war against the Taliban. I lived through years of our government waging a war in Vietnam that killed nearly 60,000 U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese army and civilians.
This war has gone on much longer than Vietnam, and it’s clear we’re not going to win it. The best thing we can do is get as many vulnerable Afghanis out and bring them to the U.S. or send them to other countries. Of course Republicans won’t like that, even though they are criticizing the pullout at the moment (They cheered Trump and Pompeo’s agreement with the Taliban that freed 5,000 fighters from prison. Now they are pretending that didn’t happen).
I’m not saying what’s happening in Afghanistan at the moment isn’t horrible. It is. I honestly don’t know if it could have been handled better. Maybe so. Wiser people than I will have plenty to say about that. But I’m willing to wait and see what happens.
A couple of pieces on the media reaction:
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: DC Press Bigs Escalate to Peak Screech Over Biden Defiance.
If nothing else for media watchers there’s a fascinating dynamic developing over the last day or so in trying to define the US exit from Afghanistan. It’s not a new dynamic. In fact, it’s one I first saw a quarter century ago when DC’s establishment press got really, really upset that not only Bill Clinton but more importantly most of the country didn’t agree with their take on impeachment in 1998. Official DC was baffled when Democrats actually managed to pick up a few seats in the 1998 midterm that was entirely about impeachment. The specifics of the case are of course pretty radically different. But the dynamic of establishment DC press escalation is not. Politico’s morning newsletter this morning captures the dynamic. It starts quoting David Axelrod making clear that Biden messed up and has admit he messed up but then notes that Biden didn’t get the message and said it was the right decision. A sort of primal scream of “WTF, JOE BIDEN?!?!?!!?!” virtually bleeds through the copy.
After quoting Biden at length saying “I stand squarely behind my decision…” Politico jumps back in: “Of course, that’s not the issue. And Republicans — as well as many in the media — were quick to point that out …”
No, no, no, Joe Biden! that’s not right!
Sunday Afternoon – Interior with a Girl Reading, Michael Peter Ancher
As I’ve made clear repeatedly, it’s not like this is a big win for Biden, at least in the near term. American public opinion is never going to like seeing the people we spent twenty years and a trillion dollars fighting getting comfy in the presidential palace after the US-backed President hopped the first plane out of Kabul. That stings no matter what the backstory. But there’s also little question that the very strong consensus among establishment DC press opinion-makers is not in line with the mood or opinion of most of the country.
At least half a dozen Politico articles in the last 36 hours have run with a snap Morning Consult poll showing that support for Biden’s withdrawal plan has fallen from 69% in May to 49% on Sunday, a whopping 20 point drop. This is hardly surprising: the concept of bringing everyone home is easier to support without pictures of the messy realities of the situation. The data point is listed in this morning’s Politico newsletter as well (“Here’s one bad sign for Biden:”). Not mentioned as far as I can tell in any of these write-ups is this: Even after a weekend of chaotic, ugly images and 48 hours of relentlessly negative news coverage, support and opposition to Biden’s withdrawal plan, according to this poll was 49% in favor and 37% opposed. The fact that the plan still has a net +12 approval even at such a bleak moment is surely a relevant part of the story.
There’s a pretty palpable reflex to keep the storyline in check and Biden is not helping.
The media needs everyone to go along with their narrative, just as they did when they were cheering the buildup to the Iraq war and many of us ordinary American were terrified of another Vietnam.
This piece at The Hill is by Joe Ferullo, a journalist and former network news executive: Beltway reporting of Afghanistan withdrawal a disservice to Americans.
As Taliban forces pushed through Afghanistan this past week, most news outlets covered the swiftly shifting story by falling back to their usual position: reporting from inside the Beltway.
That kind of journalism — insular and hermetically-sealed — can read “out of touch” to most news consumers and only further cements skepticism about the media.
In Washington, the situation in Afghanistan was largely viewed as an event with disastrous consequences for President Biden. According to the headlines, the president now faced “political peril” as the end of the war entered “treacherous terrain.”
More than that, one report insisted, this represented a “grim reckoning” for Biden, who had “rebuffed Pentagon recommendations” to leave a contingent of U.S. troops in the country.
In case the point was somehow missed, a cable news chyron shouted: “Afghanistan’s Rapid Unravelling Threatens Biden’s Legacy.”
It’s undeniable that the circumstances in Afghanistan have deteriorated much more quickly than the administration anticipated — or, at least, that it wanted to discuss publicly. But two main questions were left under-examined as the political media rushed to do what it too-often does: Find a simple D.C.-centric story thread and race to repeat it.
The more important questions, according to Ferullo:
Black Man Reading Newspaper by Candlelight, Henry Louis Stevens
The most important issue: What do the American people want? Reports from outside the Beltway, looking for voter reaction, have been rare. But recent polling makes the answer clear. In one April survey, 73 percent of respondents approved of Biden’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. As late as last month, polls showed 57 percent supported ending the war.
In other words, the people who have for the past 20 years been asked to do the fighting — or to send loved ones far away, tour-after-tour, as the conflict dragged on — have said “Enough is enough.” Their voices should count for something, yet their point of view was largely missing from reports out of Washington this past week.
Also largely left unconsidered: Why was the Taliban able to advance so quickly? The story line most often picked up blamed a hasty U.S. withdrawal. It was, according to one headline, “Joe Biden’s Fall of Saigon.”
That comparison actually rings true — but not for the reasons most journalists have settled on. With the passage of time, it became clear that, in large part, South Vietnam fell so quickly because its government simply did not have the support of its people. America’s military presence in Vietnam — over the course of nearly 20 years and 58,000 U.S. combat deaths — was unable to build a political infrastructure that citizens could trust.
The same is true in Afghanistan. We set up a government that the people didn’t like or trust. Read more at the link.
Biden’s Explanation of His Decisions
Biden made his case in a speech yesterday. Here’s a bit of it:
My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every constituency, including — and contingency — including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now….
We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.
We did that. We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him. That was a decade ago.
Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy….
I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism — not counterinsurgency or nation building. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was Vice President.
And that’s why, as President, I am adamant that we focus on the threats we face today in 2021 — not yesterday’s threats.
Christopher Wilson We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence.
If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.
Rosa and Bertha Gugger, 1883, Albert Anker
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — just a little over three months after I took office.
U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country, and the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1.
There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.
There’s more at the link but here’s the bottom line.
I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces….
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.
We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support….
And here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. If the political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down, they would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them.
Support for Biden’s Arguments
This is from right wing site Axios: Biden officials: Trump left bare cupboard on Afghanistan.
Senior national security officials presiding over a historic foreign policy collapse are privately expressing deep frustrations about the thin Afghanistan withdrawal plans left behind by Donald Trump.
Why it matters: Many experienced operatives in both parties are aghast that President Biden and his team didn’t ready better preparations over nearly seven months since taking office.
- But two Biden officials who spoke with Axios on Monday on condition of anonymity bristled at the criticism coming from former President Trump and his administration in the wake of the Taliban’s rapid sweep across Afghanistan and capture of Kabul.
What they’re saying: “There was no plan to evacuate our diplomats to the airport,” a senior national security official told Axios about the preparations they inherited from the previous administration. “None of this was on the shelf, so to speak.”
- “When we got in, on Jan. 20, we saw that the cupboard was bare,” the official said, echoing a complaint Team Biden also made about Trump’s vaccine distribution plan….
Reading (Clara), circa 1865, Federico Faruffini
Biden officials said that Trump’s team during the transition, was slow to brief them on key details and context behind the 2020 peace agreement signed in Doha.
- That Trump-era deal between the U.S. and the Taliban called for a withdrawal of troops by May 2021.
- Separately, Trump, after losing the election, signed a secret memo to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan before Biden took office, as Axios’ Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu reported. But after some Trump officials became aware of “an off-the-books operation by the commander in chief himself,” they eventually persuaded Trump to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.
After all of that, the senior Biden officials said, Trump effectively didn’t have a plan to bring all Americans including troops, contractors and diplomats home safely. One said that created “headwinds” and “unnecessarily increased” the degree of difficulty for the new administration.
- “The entire policy process had atrophied,” one of the officials said. “It was really manifest here.
- “On the one hand, they set a May deadline for withdrawal,” the official said. “On the other hand, there was no interagency planning on how to execute a withdrawal.”
The bottom line: Biden officials aren’t directly blaming Trump for how events unfolded in Kabul.
-
But they do want to challenge what they see as bad-faith arguments from Trump officials making the case that they would have presided over a more orderly withdrawal.
David Rothkopf at The Daily Beast: Biden’s Right That It’s Time for Us to Leave Afghanistan.
Joe Biden did not give the speech his critics wanted to hear when he addressed the nation on the Taliban take-over of Afghanistan. But he gave the speech America needed to hear.
Biden, keenly aware of the impact of the horrifying scenes of chaos in the Afghan capital of Kabul, looked straight into the camera and said, “I am the president of the United States and the buck stops with me.” He acknowledged the mayhem and the human toll it is taking and he expressed his clear anger at the failure of the Afghan government and military to mount a defense of their own country. He specifically noted that the government had urged the U.S. not to begin early evacuations of foreign nationals because of the message it might send.
After he spoke, the talking heads came out in force and argued he did not accept responsibility. But “the buck stops here” is the ultimate expression of a president owning his actions. They said he did not explain how we could be in the situation we are in. But what they really mean is that he did not give the explanation they wanted.
Compartment C, Car 293, 1938, Edward Hopper
CNN’s Jake Tapper called Biden’s description of the swift collapse of the Afghan central government and military “finger pointing.” But it was indeed that collapse that accounted for the speed of the Taliban’s take-over: When the Afghan forces the U.S. has invested billions in should have stood up, they did not. Given that it was widely expected that the Taliban would ultimately seize control of the country — they were, after all, the parties with whom the last administration was negotiating — the key variable was whether the Taliban would meet any resistance.
Biden described the measures being taken to get thousands of embassy employees, US citizens, citizens of allied nations and Afghans who had aiding allied forces out. He reasserted the commitment of the U.S. to using international mechanisms to provide aid to the people of Afghanistan, and stressed that the U.S. would continue to place human rights at the center of our foreign policy priorities.
It would have been heartening to hear him use tougher language with regard to applying international pressure should the rights of women and girls be violated. He should have made a commitment to investigate fully where things went wrong with the exit plan. But he left no uncertainty about our willingness to use force in the event that violent extremists posing a threat to the U.S. again appear within Afghanistan’s borders.
So that’s a counterpoint to the media freakout. I’ll post some of the latest attacks on Biden along with some more reasoned articles in the comment thread. Let me know what you think, and remember this is an open thread.
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