Month: August 2021

The governor of Mississippi apparently tweeted a message to the effect that it was unnecessary to take extraordinary precautions against the virus in his state because the people of Mississippi were Christians and believed in an afterlife. Hence, the high rates of infection in his state.

As a statement of reactionary thought, this one is hard to beat. It incorporates the two principal threads of contemporary reactionary doctrine: fundamentalist Christian concepts and faux libertarianism. Unfortunately, neither Jesus nor rugged individualism is a viable solution to the virus; only collective action organized by the government will suffice. And so, virus deaths in Mississippi will remain unnecessarily high. One has to hope for them that they’re right about the afterlife.

About a week ago I did a post in which I suggested half-seriously that the extreme right in this country would find inspiration in the Taliban’s victory. As it turns out, according to Michelle Goldberg, I was more right than I knew. Not only is the alt-right crowing on social media; Tucker Carlson was speaking approvingly about the Taliban’s combination of swagger, violence, and religiosity.

What do you expect from a party whose absolute bedrock principle is toxic masculinity? Praying for divine approval, and then blowing stuff up—that’s the Republican way.

Now the end of the war is at hand.

The fiasco is not what we planned.

The reaction has won.

It may not yet be done.

Keep your eyes on our own Taliban.

By about 2035, the Republican Party as we know it today will be dead. Its Silent Generation and Boomer voters will have been replaced by Gen Z voters who fear neither socialism nor wokeness. Hence, the sense of desperation in the air.

The GOP is determined to lock in, by hook or by crook, its electoral advantages and its values in the brief window that remains to it. Will that work? Will the next generations agree to be ruled by the dead hands of Mitch McConnell and John Roberts out of love for a liberal democratic system that, in reality, was dispatched by the reactionary right years before?

Dream on, guys.

You may wonder how a relatively small number of fundamentalist fighters, with zero experience in running a government, are going to govern Afghanistan. Here is how it will work:

1. The Taliban have had effective control over much of the countryside for some time. Their existing structures will remain in place.
2. Parts of the countryside are populated by ethnic minorities with little sympathy for the Taliban. Here, the new government will be forced by its lack of resources to make deals with the existing leaders. These deals will be fragile, at best.
3. The toughest task will be to run Kabul, which is essentially a large island of blue people in a sea of red (think Austin here). Large, cosmopolitan cities cannot governed without the assistance of experts. Failure in Kabul would endanger the regime; the problems must, therefore, be addressed. The Taliban will respond by using a mixture of carrots and sticks to force government employees back to work. In the short run, this will be difficult; in the longer run, they will succeed, because the employees will have no better options.

The narrator on a documentary series on St. Paul that I was watching this week insisted repeatedly that God never gives us more than we can handle. With all due respect to the saint and the talking head, that’s a load of crap. The world is full of injustices, many of which are far beyond remedy. If you don’t believe me, just ask the people of Haiti, or the Afghans who died at the airport.

There are only two ways to deal with the persistence of injustice, other than to fight against it as best you can. First, you can follow most religions and assume that all will be put right in the next world, so the here and now is relatively unimportant. Or, if you can’t swallow that, you can take the position that all we can do is play the hand we have been dealt as best we can. That is stoicism, or, if you prefer, it’s twentieth century cousin, existentialism.

Which attitude is best? You decide.

It’s tempting to look at these mob scenes at the Kabul airport and assume the Afghans who are trying to leave are representative of the country as a whole, with the Taliban being cultural intruders. Tempting, but wrong.

The majority of Afghans live in the country, not Kabul. Everything I have read over the years tells me these people wanted, above all, reasonably clean government and an end to the bloodshed. Furthermore, their cultural values are not far from the Taliban’s. They will gladly live with some repression if it also means peace and stability.

In other words, Afghanistan as a whole is more Oklahoma than New York. The refugees-to-be are just a relatively small cohort of liberals that we created during the occupation. They don’t stand for the country as a whole; it would be a mistake for us to behave as if they do. Or, to put it another way, we were the alien force, not the Taliban.

You may not have noticed this, but the mainstream of the GOP has changed its position on climate change! Yes, faced with what seems like an unending parade of fires, heat waves, and hurricanes, Republicans are now admitting that climate change actually exists; they simply aren’t willing to do anything about it, for fear of damaging the interests of its fossil fuel industry voters and donors. Even Rick Scott has gotten into the act! Will wonders never cease?

In other words, we’ve moved from “I’m not a scientist, man” to “Don’t worry, be happy.”

One assumes the GOP thinks it can score points with millennials by being stupid and criminally irresponsible instead of insane. That seems a bit overly optimistic to me.

The President and Jake Sullivan are in the Oval Office, talking about Afghanistan. Harris is doing damage control in Southeast Asia.

B: We need to talk about what this means, and where we go from here.

S: Agreed.

B: Where did we go wrong? By “we,” I mean America, not just us.

S: The initial campaign was justified, but mission creep set in. We wanted to make Afghanistan look too much like America. We didn’t have a clue as to how to do that. Then our military, without asking anyone, created an Afghan military that couldn’t fight without us. We either had to stay forever, or go and watch a Taliban parade in Kabul. The rest is history.

B: What could we have done better?

S: We could have done a better job of consulting with our NATO partners. We could have communicated the risks of the withdrawal process more clearly to the American people. But, let’s be honest: once the decision to withdraw was made, this was going to happen at some point in time. There is no plausible scenario that doesn’t involve a rush to the airport.

B: I wish I hadn’t said the thing about Saigon. What do we do next?

S: Get as many people out as quickly as possible. Use our financial and diplomatic leverage to save anyone who is left.

B: What are the lasting domestic political impacts?

S: As long as the evacuation is reasonably successful, don’t worry too much. If we have a hostage situation, that’s a different story.

B: Should we recognize the Taliban government?

S: All of our dealings with the Taliban should be based solely on self-interest. If we get something valuable for recognizing them at some point in the future, maybe. The bottom line is that they belong to Pakistan, and Pakistan belongs to China. We’re not going to pay to stabilize the neighborhood for the benefit of hostile nations. Our friend in the area is India.

B: That’s what I thought. (Sullivan leaves.)

Yesterday’s NYT contained an op-ed from an Afghan military commander which accuses Trump, Biden, and the Afghan government of betraying the army. That isn’t the interesting part. The significant information is hidden in the middle.

The op-ed tells us that the Afghan military was designed to be totally dependent on the support of the American military and American contractors. Once they were withdrawn, the end was quick and inevitable.

What this means is that the top levels of our military, either by design or negligence, committed us to stay in Afghanistan in perpetuity. While they were doing this without our knowledge and consent, they were lying to us about the success of their mission, while privately advising our political leaders to keep kicking the can.

They are the architects of our Afghan failure. No thanks for their service, indeed.

A small group of House progressives is attempting to use the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which they support, as leverage to force moderates to vote for their far more expansive human capital bill. A group of moderate House and Senate members, for their part, is trying to hold the human capital bill hostage to move the infrastructure bill forward.

The only beneficiaries of this dispute are the Republicans, who stand to gain politically if it appears that the government can’t get anything done. If Nancy Pelosi feels a bit like the sheriff facing down the mob in “Blazing Saddles,” you can understand it.

Bret Stephens longs for the days when America was willing to serve as the world’s policeman. Without the cop on the beat busting petty criminals, he fears, the world is going to become a more dangerous and messy place—Gotham City without Batman. Is he right?

Here are my thoughts:

1. There was a brief time after the end of the Cold War when we could afford to act as the world’s policeman.
2. In Iraq, we were more arsonist than cop. The analogy only works if the policeman knows what he’s doing.
3. With the rise of China, the opportunity to enforce the rules on our own has vanished.
4. We no longer have the preponderance of resources necessary to serve as a cop. The focus of our foreign policy has to be on our self-interest, in collaboration with allies whenever possible.
5. Most of the events cited by Stephens would have happened even in the brief golden age of American dominance. Under no circumstances were we ever going to war over Crimea or Hong Kong. The threat would not have been credible.
6. Yes, the world may become a messier place. We have to learn to live with that. It is a natural condition. It was the golden age that was the aberration.

Two prominent members of the blob, Condeleeza Rice and Ryan Crocker, maintain we simply weren’t patient enough with the Afghan government. Twenty years, they say, is too short a period to deal with the problems of such a troubled country. Is there any merit to this position?

Let’s put it this way: they probably think the Cuban trade embargo is about to topple the regime after 60 years, too. If things aren’t improving after 20 years, and you don’t have any new ideas as to how to fix the problems, kicking the can for another decade or two probably isn’t going to bear any fruit.

With no apparent sense of irony, members of the reactionary right are carrying signs stating “My Body, My Choice” at anti-mask demonstrations. This is, of course, a slogan used by abortion supporters.

I would guess that, if pressed, these people would argue that abortion is murder, and masks don’t work. The latter is demonstrably false, and the former is a philosophical position, not a scientific one, with which most Americans don’t agree.

In reality, what the sign means in this context is that I, as a real American, have the right to do whatever I want, and you, as an interloper, can go suck eggs.

Since it has been obvious for at least a decade that conditions in Afghanistan were never going to improve, the relevant question was whether the benefits of maintaining a significant military presence there (preventing terrorism; protecting women; maintaining geopolitical stability) justified the costs (money; casualties; distraction from more compelling concerns). In my opinion, they did, and I said so. However, reasonable people could disagree on this point. Biden did, and I respect his choice.

With an equilibrium of sorts in place prior to our withdrawal, we pretty well know what would have happened if we had stayed. But what about the people who argue that the concept of withdrawal was sound, but the execution was flawed?

Consider a counterfactual in which the fall of Afghanistan happens in accordance with the predictions of the intelligence community—in other words, the government hangs on for a much longer time. Is the evacuation process smoother and more deliberate?

No. It is human nature to assume that the worst won’t happen until the last minute. The Afghan government would have discouraged any slow exodus, and the citizens would have gone along until it was too late. The scenes of chaos you are seeing today would be substantially similar.

In other words, the critics of the execution of the withdrawal have no case. The only people with a right to complain are those who wanted to stay indefinitely, and they have an obligation to own up to the costs of staying.