Taliban reclaims Afghanistan

[kramerica.inc]

Seems damage control of Biden and his administration has now hit mass effort....sad.

Somebody had to get us out of Afghanistan. Sorry it isn't the pretty kisses goodbye story that you and the Right would have liked.

Let's try to stay focused on truth and reality here...

Yes, somebody did have to get us out but of course, that isn't the issue though is it? It's how incompetently the getting out has been handled and that is on Biden.

And to make it seem as though only the Right is outraged at how badly Biden and his admin have so-called managed this, is a bald-faced lie.

Biden's going to take flak from all sides on this one, that's true.
But I don't think that seacoaster implied otherwise; just that the "Right" is trying to make this a partisan matter when it really shouldn't be. Pretending that there was a "pretty kisses goodbye story" possible, much less likely under Trump's management would be complete BS.

The Trumpist Fox-heads "Right" etc have no leg to stand on when it comes to incompetence on this one.

This was going to be ugly, no matter who was in charge, given all the time the Taliban had to prepare (given the May 1 deal) to roll through and the actual weakness of the Afghan government and its forces despite the enormous costs of having supported them to be otherwise.

The only question is how ugly. And we really won't know the answer to that for some time.

And I'm not referring to politicians or the media, which seems to be the only entities people care about on here. I'm referring to American citizens who are outraged despite their political affiliations.

Hmmm, being whipped up into the "outrage" by the media.

I'm very interested in what the veterans have to say, it must be darn hard to have lost mates in that interminable fight, to have truly cared about making Afghanistan a better place, only to find that it was never going to be as hoped. I know that many veterans had come to that conclusion quite a while ago, but it's nevertheless gotta be hard.

It may be better, though, to reflect upon this from some distance. Right now, it's all quite raw.

A few coworkers who are Army vets are spitting mad. "They (M)ucked up a lot of peoples lives...for what?" was one comment.

[MDlaxfan76]

Seems damage control of Biden and his administration has now hit mass effort....sad.

Somebody had to get us out of Afghanistan. Sorry it isn't the pretty kisses goodbye story that you and the Right would have liked.

Let's try to stay focused on truth and reality here...

Yes, somebody did have to get us out but of course, that isn't the issue though is it? It's how incompetently the getting out has been handled and that is on Biden.

And to make it seem as though only the Right is outraged at how badly Biden and his admin have so-called managed this, is a bald-faced lie.

Biden's going to take flak from all sides on this one, that's true.
But I don't think that seacoaster implied otherwise; just that the "Right" is trying to make this a partisan matter when it really shouldn't be. Pretending that there was a "pretty kisses goodbye story" possible, much less likely under Trump's management would be complete BS.

The Trumpist Fox-heads "Right" etc have no leg to stand on when it comes to incompetence on this one.

This was going to be ugly, no matter who was in charge, given all the time the Taliban had to prepare (given the May 1 deal) to roll through and the actual weakness of the Afghan government and its forces despite the enormous costs of having supported them to be otherwise.

The only question is how ugly. And we really won't know the answer to that for some time.

And I'm not referring to politicians or the media, which seems to be the only entities people care about on here. I'm referring to American citizens who are outraged despite their political affiliations.

Hmmm, being whipped up into the "outrage" by the media.

I'm very interested in what the veterans have to say, it must be darn hard to have lost mates in that interminable fight, to have truly cared about making Afghanistan a better place, only to find that it was never going to be as hoped. I know that many veterans had come to that conclusion quite a while ago, but it's nevertheless gotta be hard.

It may be better, though, to reflect upon this from some distance. Right now, it's all quite raw.

A few coworkers who are Army vets are spitting mad. "They (M)ucked up a lot of peoples lives...for what?" was one comment.

I'd think there's going to be a lot of those sorts of feelings.
Have been for awhile actually.

A lot of those feelings about Vietnam too.

The guys and gals on the ground, who do the dirty work and clean up the blood, aren't responsible for the strategy, but they bear the emotional scars.

[PizzaSnake]

Seems damage control of Biden and his administration has now hit mass effort....sad.

Somebody had to get us out of Afghanistan. Sorry it isn't the pretty kisses goodbye story that you and the Right would have liked.

Let's try to stay focused on truth and reality here...

Yes, somebody did have to get us out but of course, that isn't the issue though is it? It's how incompetently the getting out has been handled and that is on Biden.

And to make it seem as though only the Right is outraged at how badly Biden and his admin have so-called managed this, is a bald-faced lie.

Biden's going to take flak from all sides on this one, that's true.
But I don't think that seacoaster implied otherwise; just that the "Right" is trying to make this a partisan matter when it really shouldn't be. Pretending that there was a "pretty kisses goodbye story" possible, much less likely under Trump's management would be complete BS.

The Trumpist Fox-heads "Right" etc have no leg to stand on when it comes to incompetence on this one.

This was going to be ugly, no matter who was in charge, given all the time the Taliban had to prepare (given the May 1 deal) to roll through and the actual weakness of the Afghan government and its forces despite the enormous costs of having supported them to be otherwise.

The only question is how ugly. And we really won't know the answer to that for some time.

And I'm not referring to politicians or the media, which seems to be the only entities people care about on here. I'm referring to American citizens who are outraged despite their political affiliations.

Hmmm, being whipped up into the "outrage" by the media.

I'm very interested in what the veterans have to say, it must be darn hard to have lost mates in that interminable fight, to have truly cared about making Afghanistan a better place, only to find that it was never going to be as hoped. I know that many veterans had come to that conclusion quite a while ago, but it's nevertheless gotta be hard.

It may be better, though, to reflect upon this from some distance. Right now, it's all quite raw.

A few coworkers who are Army vets are spitting mad. "They (M)ucked up a lot of peoples lives...for what?" was one comment.

Not to be too unsympathetic, but did they bother to study the history of the US, and employment of its military in the last fifty odd years specifically? Always a good idea to know something about the group you are volunteering to join. I had quite a handsome offer from the US Navy, but declined it as I was aware of the Navy's history, and knew that I could not in good conscience sign up for that sort of organizational ethos. Of course, it is unfair that they "prey" upon people with brains that are not fully formed and can't generally make informed decisions -- appears deliberate. Might even call it child abuse... I am curious how the military contract can be enforced on minors (those under the age of 18). Anyone know?

[PizzaSnake]

It may be better, though, to reflect upon this from some distance. Right now, it's all quite raw.

A few coworkers who are Army vets are spitting mad. "They (M)ucked up a lot of peoples lives...for what?" was one comment.

I'd think there's going to be a lot of those sorts of feelings.
Have been for awhile actually.

A lot of those feelings about Vietnam too.

The guys and gals on the ground, who do the dirty work and clean up the blood, aren't responsible for the strategy, but they bear the emotional scars.
[/quote]

Speaking of "dirty work":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/book ... press.html

"“Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America,” a disturbing and necessary new book by Eyal Press, describes with great empathy the lives of workers who do jobs that they themselves find morally horrifying. Press acquaints us intimately with the trauma suffered by a participant in a drone strike who watches a child slowly reassemble his father’s exploded remains into human shape; by a worker in a slaughterhouse who is nuzzled affectionately by pigs only to have to kill them moments later; and by a psychologist who is supposed to provide therapy to psychiatric patients in one of the correctional facilities where America often confines the severely mentally ill, but instead witnesses daily brutality including a homicide so gruesome it will be seared in any reader’s memory."

[jhu72]

Poll taken August 12-16 on Afghanistan (after the bad news and during the confusion) still has 62% of Americans wanting out of Afghanistan. A July poll had that number at 72%. Only 10% have changed their minds!

It's pretty clear, most of the complaints to getting out, even now, is from people who never wanted to leave, and that includes the MEDIA, playing the inside game. Those who never wanted to leave are just changing their line of attack - incompetency, given the confusion. Virtue signaling.

Associated press poll.

[DMac]

It may be better, though, to reflect upon this from some distance. Right now, it's all quite raw.

A few coworkers who are Army vets are spitting mad. "They (M)ucked up a lot of peoples lives...for what?" was one comment.

I'd think there's going to be a lot of those sorts of feelings.
Have been for awhile actually.

A lot of those feelings about Vietnam too.

The guys and gals on the ground, who do the dirty work and clean up the blood, aren't responsible for the strategy, but they bear the emotional scars.

Speaking from personal experience I can tell you that they will bear the emotional scars and live with a bitter taste in their mouths for the rest of their lives. I had a front row seat in country and watched the crumbling of South Vietnam and what I'm seeing on video and hearing from the mouths of those who were in Afghanistan is the exact same thing. I saw as a low ranking twenty year old what was happening and knew exactly how it was going to end in Vietnam while the politicians lied and spread false hope. This is absolutely sinful, and quite frankly I'm blown away by how much this has resurfaced and absolutely smacked me with those long time buried emotions. These guys and gals too will hear about how they fought in the war we lost. No, they didn't lose it but there are a lot of people you can point fingers at who did. Can't even put into words how my heart bleeds for these guys and gals.
Welcome home, troops, hold your heads high. There are a whole lot of us who know who the losers of this campaign are and it's not you who wore/wear the uniform.
Am so pizzed.

[kramerica.inc]

The only consolation is that those soldiers gave a lot of natives a taste of freedom for the past 20 years. Even if it wasn't perfect. Despite the lack of effort by the local soldiers to fight for their own country, it appears there were some seeds of freedom sown.

[PizzaSnake]

It may be better, though, to reflect upon this from some distance. Right now, it's all quite raw.

A few coworkers who are Army vets are spitting mad. "They (M)ucked up a lot of peoples lives...for what?" was one comment.

I'd think there's going to be a lot of those sorts of feelings.
Have been for awhile actually.

A lot of those feelings about Vietnam too.

The guys and gals on the ground, who do the dirty work and clean up the blood, aren't responsible for the strategy, but they bear the emotional scars.

Speaking from personal experience I can tell you that they will bear the emotional scars and live with a bitter taste in their mouths for the rest of their lives. I had a front row seat in country and watched the crumbling of South Vietnam and what I'm seeing on video and hearing from the mouths of those who were in Afghanistan is the exact same thing. I saw as a low ranking twenty year old what was happening and knew exactly how it was going to end in Vietnam while the politicians lied and spread false hope. This is absolutely sinful, and quite frankly I'm blown away by how much this has resurfaced and absolutely smacked me with those long time buried emotions. These guys and gals too will hear about how they fought in the war we lost. No, they didn't lose it but there are a lot of people you can point fingers at who did. Can't even put into words how my heart bleeds for these guys and gals.
Welcome home, troops, hold your heads high. There are a whole lot of us who know who the losers of this campaign are and it's not you who wore/wear the uniform.
Am so pizzed.

And that is the rub, from the same book:

"But the book isn’t entirely about those workers. It’s about us. Press’s thesis is that our society confers on these workers an “unconscious mandate” to do jobs that are morally objectionable and at the same time wants those jobs to remain invisible.'"

We, as society want others to do the "dirty work" and not bother us with the details. However, it is all of ours "work" and we need to acknowledge those that do it for us and the burden it imposes on them, as it is our burden as well. They deserve more than empty slogans and magnetic car symbols.

[jhu72]

... looks like Germans and and US are going to closely cooperate in moving the refugees. Planes will start heading for Ramstein / Landstuhl. Supposedly they will start filling planes and begin to fly out at capacity. Kuwait is at capacity for refugees, won't allow anymore in. I just love how ME countries (allies) can always be relied on to extend themselves in these kinds of situations.

[youthathletics]

Seems damage control of Biden and his administration has now hit mass effort....sad.

Joe got left holding the bag for 12 years of GOP governance (including the last four in which Trump and Pompadour dithered) and eight years of his boss's governance of this issue. Somebody had to get us out of Afghanistan. Sorry it isn't the pretty kisses goodbye story that you and the Right would have liked.

Getting out of Afghanistan is not even the issue...that was the easy part, even someone like Joe Biden could make that call and that's not saying much. It is the utter incompetence of the planning, not listening to your DoS boots on the ground in the area, telling the public Taliban will not take control of Kabul, promising daily updates from SoS.....two thus far, not knowing how many Americans are even there, Taliban marching with our weapons and sensitive gear/equipment. Then Biden tries to say this is not a failure to your boy George Steph.....if this not failure, failure does not exist. pitiful.

Smooches and hugs my friend.

[jhu72]

Seems damage control of Biden and his administration has now hit mass effort....sad.

Joe got left holding the bag for 12 years of GOP governance (including the last four in which Trump and Pompadour dithered) and eight years of his boss's governance of this issue. Somebody had to get us out of Afghanistan. Sorry it isn't the pretty kisses goodbye story that you and the Right would have liked.

Getting out of Afghanistan is not even the issue...that was the easy part, even someone like Joe Biden could make that call and that's not saying much. It is the utter incompetence of the planning, not listening to your DoS boots on the ground in the area, telling the public Taliban will not take control of Kabul, promising daily updates from SoS.....two thus far, not knowing how many Americans are even there, Taliban marching with our weapons and sensitive gear/equipment. Then Biden tries to say this is not a failure to your boy George Steph.....if this not failure, failure does not exist. pitiful.

Smooches and hugs my friend.

... it is too soon to call it a failure. A fu*ked up mess, yes. Failure no.

[jhu72]

The only consolation is that those soldiers gave a lot of natives a taste of freedom for the past 20 years. Even if it wasn't perfect. Despite the lack of effort by the local soldiers to fight for their own country, it appears there were some seeds of freedom sown.

... as I said a few days ago, this is not the country it was 20 years ago. The future is in the hands of the generation that was raised in those 20 years. They could turn those 20 years into a success, snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

[youthathletics]

Seems damage control of Biden and his administration has now hit mass effort....sad.

Joe got left holding the bag for 12 years of GOP governance (including the last four in which Trump and Pompadour dithered) and eight years of his boss's governance of this issue. Somebody had to get us out of Afghanistan. Sorry it isn't the pretty kisses goodbye story that you and the Right would have liked.

Getting out of Afghanistan is not even the issue...that was the easy part, even someone like Joe Biden could make that call and that's not saying much. It is the utter incompetence of the planning, not listening to your DoS boots on the ground in the area, telling the public Taliban will not take control of Kabul, promising daily updates from SoS.....two thus far, not knowing how many Americans are even there, Taliban marching with our weapons and sensitive gear/equipment. Then Biden tries to say this is not a failure to your boy George Steph.....if this not failure, failure does not exist. pitiful.

Smooches and hugs my friend.

... it is too soon to call it a failure. A fu*ked up mess, yes. Failure no.

...let's hope so sir.

[RedFromMI]

From Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:

The Fall of Kabul, Washington and the Guys at the Fancy Magazines

I wrote at the beginning of the week that the lightning collapse of the Afghan Army and the Afghan state, far from making me question the decision, had removed any doubt in my mind that it was the correct one. The subsequent week has only deepened this judgment. Since then I’ve been wrestling with, trying to make sense of the elite or prestige national media response. TPM Reader GF captured some of this on Tuesday …

I had to laugh at your post today titled “DC Press Bigs Escalate to Peak Screech Over Biden Defiance” as it made me think of a Punchbowl news article I read first thing this am. The article said the execution of the withdrawal has been awful, Biden has played it poorly etc. etc. The truly gold statement in that Punchbowl article just after saying how poorly Biden has managed the execution of the withdrawal was “There has to have been a better way.” None of these folks know or can suggest what would have been the better way except to make such silly statements as Biden did poorly because there had to be a better way with no follow-on as to what the better way is or was.

Like hyenas and chimpanzees, reporters hunt in packs. There’s a reason they call them ‘feeding frenzies’. They’re also obsessed with images. But none of that is unique to the current situation. There’s something more at work here.

Some claim that there is a great appetite in the press to beat up on Joe Biden to demonstrate that all the criticism of Donald Trump wasn’t bias, just solid reporting. That’s a significant factor but I don’t think the most important. Will Bunch points out a real and very human factor: many reporters at national news outlets know at least the kinds of people endangered by the Taliban rout and in many cases particular people. Your news organization worked with translators and handlers. You embedded with military formations and met military translators or members of the Afghan Army. This is human and real, even righteous. But again, I think this is only a part and not the biggest part of what we’ve seen play out over recent days.

I will repeat what I wrote before this bottom fell out. The US owes a profound responsibility to everyone who worked for the US during the mission in Afghanistan and is now endangered by the association. We should welcome them all, along with their families, for resettlement in the United States. We should go to great lengths to make good on that commitment. America always needs more good people.

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

Was there?

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

In retrospect of course, knowing that the regime did immediately collapse, sort of no loss. But of course the US couldn’t do that. The whole point of the almost 20 year enterprise was to build a state and an army that could stand on its own. The US was never going to prevent that regime from even trying to survive.

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

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

Here we get to the heart of the matter.

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

A snippet …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will emphasize again this isn’t a flag-waving, America’s never wrong ‘pro-war’ mindset. It’s more varied and critical, capable of seeing the collateral damage of these engagements, the toll on American service members post combat, the corruption endemic in occupation-backed governments. And yet still very bought in. You see this in a different way in some of the country’s most accomplished longform magazine writers, many of whom have spent ample time in these warzones. Again, not at all militarists or gungho armchair warriors but people capable of capturing the subtleties and discontents of these missions and the individuals caught up in their storms. And yet still very bought in. And it is from these voices that we are hearing many of the most anguished accusations of betrayal and abandonment. It is harrowing to process years or decades of denial in hours or days.

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. ‘There had to have been a better way’ is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved. Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

This morning I noticed this tweet from The New York Times Peter Baker, half of the husband and wife team of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, two of Washington’s most respected journalists, both of whom have spent the last week castigating America’s betrayal of its friends and the loss of American ‘credibility’ abroad. Baker laments the “cold political calculation” of the Biden administration which hopes Americans won’t care about the consequences of withdrawal as long as Americans are safe.

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.

Who is the villain here? Joe Biden who pulled the plug or the American people who can be relied upon not to care? To Baker, it seems like the answer is both. And he’s not alone.

[Typical Lax Dad]

It may be better, though, to reflect upon this from some distance. Right now, it's all quite raw.

A few coworkers who are Army vets are spitting mad. "They (M)ucked up a lot of peoples lives...for what?" was one comment.

I'd think there's going to be a lot of those sorts of feelings.
Have been for awhile actually.

A lot of those feelings about Vietnam too.

The guys and gals on the ground, who do the dirty work and clean up the blood, aren't responsible for the strategy, but they bear the emotional scars.

Speaking from personal experience I can tell you that they will bear the emotional scars and live with a bitter taste in their mouths for the rest of their lives. I had a front row seat in country and watched the crumbling of South Vietnam and what I'm seeing on video and hearing from the mouths of those who were in Afghanistan is the exact same thing. I saw as a low ranking twenty year old what was happening and knew exactly how it was going to end in Vietnam while the politicians lied and spread false hope. This is absolutely sinful, and quite frankly I'm blown away by how much this has resurfaced and absolutely smacked me with those long time buried emotions. These guys and gals too will hear about how they fought in the war we lost. No, they didn't lose it but there are a lot of people you can point fingers at who did. Can't even put into words how my heart bleeds for these guys and gals.
Welcome home, troops, hold your heads high. There are a whole lot of us who know who the losers of this campaign are and it's not you who wore/wear the uniform.
Am so pizzed.

No sure you saw this. I posted it to a different thread last week.

[Typical Lax Dad]

From Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:

The Fall of Kabul, Washington and the Guys at the Fancy Magazines

I wrote at the beginning of the week that the lightning collapse of the Afghan Army and the Afghan state, far from making me question the decision, had removed any doubt in my mind that it was the correct one. The subsequent week has only deepened this judgment. Since then I’ve been wrestling with, trying to make sense of the elite or prestige national media response. TPM Reader GF captured some of this on Tuesday …

I had to laugh at your post today titled “DC Press Bigs Escalate to Peak Screech Over Biden Defiance” as it made me think of a Punchbowl news article I read first thing this am. The article said the execution of the withdrawal has been awful, Biden has played it poorly etc. etc. The truly gold statement in that Punchbowl article just after saying how poorly Biden has managed the execution of the withdrawal was “There has to have been a better way.” None of these folks know or can suggest what would have been the better way except to make such silly statements as Biden did poorly because there had to be a better way with no follow-on as to what the better way is or was.

Like hyenas and chimpanzees, reporters hunt in packs. There’s a reason they call them ‘feeding frenzies’. They’re also obsessed with images. But none of that is unique to the current situation. There’s something more at work here.

Some claim that there is a great appetite in the press to beat up on Joe Biden to demonstrate that all the criticism of Donald Trump wasn’t bias, just solid reporting. That’s a significant factor but I don’t think the most important. Will Bunch points out a real and very human factor: many reporters at national news outlets know at least the kinds of people endangered by the Taliban rout and in many cases particular people. Your news organization worked with translators and handlers. You embedded with military formations and met military translators or members of the Afghan Army. This is human and real, even righteous. But again, I think this is only a part and not the biggest part of what we’ve seen play out over recent days.

I will repeat what I wrote before this bottom fell out. The US owes a profound responsibility to everyone who worked for the US during the mission in Afghanistan and is now endangered by the association. We should welcome them all, along with their families, for resettlement in the United States. We should go to great lengths to make good on that commitment. America always needs more good people.

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

Was there?

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

In retrospect of course, knowing that the regime did immediately collapse, sort of no loss. But of course the US couldn’t do that. The whole point of the almost 20 year enterprise was to build a state and an army that could stand on its own. The US was never going to prevent that regime from even trying to survive.

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

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

Here we get to the heart of the matter.

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

A snippet …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will emphasize again this isn’t a flag-waving, America’s never wrong ‘pro-war’ mindset. It’s more varied and critical, capable of seeing the collateral damage of these engagements, the toll on American service members post combat, the corruption endemic in occupation-backed governments. And yet still very bought in. You see this in a different way in some of the country’s most accomplished longform magazine writers, many of whom have spent ample time in these warzones. Again, not at all militarists or gungho armchair warriors but people capable of capturing the subtleties and discontents of these missions and the individuals caught up in their storms. And yet still very bought in. And it is from these voices that we are hearing many of the most anguished accusations of betrayal and abandonment. It is harrowing to process years or decades of denial in hours or days.

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. ‘There had to have been a better way’ is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved. Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

This morning I noticed this tweet from The New York Times Peter Baker, half of the husband and wife team of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, two of Washington’s most respected journalists, both of whom have spent the last week castigating America’s betrayal of its friends and the loss of American ‘credibility’ abroad. Baker laments the “cold political calculation” of the Biden administration which hopes Americans won’t care about the consequences of withdrawal as long as Americans are safe.

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.

Who is the villain here? Joe Biden who pulled the plug or the American people who can be relied upon not to care? To Baker, it seems like the answer is both. And he’s not alone.

Most people I have heard from don’t understand what we were supposed to do? It would have been nice if we had a cleaner exit but not sure anyone knew the Afghans were not going to out up a fight. The fact that there was no fight tells me we should have bounced years ago. The people were just putting up a front like they do when management walks around the plant. Probably resented our presence and us cutting a deal with the Taliban probably didn’t help.

[Farfromgeneva]

From Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:

The Fall of Kabul, Washington and the Guys at the Fancy Magazines

I wrote at the beginning of the week that the lightning collapse of the Afghan Army and the Afghan state, far from making me question the decision, had removed any doubt in my mind that it was the correct one. The subsequent week has only deepened this judgment. Since then I’ve been wrestling with, trying to make sense of the elite or prestige national media response. TPM Reader GF captured some of this on Tuesday …

I had to laugh at your post today titled “DC Press Bigs Escalate to Peak Screech Over Biden Defiance” as it made me think of a Punchbowl news article I read first thing this am. The article said the execution of the withdrawal has been awful, Biden has played it poorly etc. etc. The truly gold statement in that Punchbowl article just after saying how poorly Biden has managed the execution of the withdrawal was “There has to have been a better way.” None of these folks know or can suggest what would have been the better way except to make such silly statements as Biden did poorly because there had to be a better way with no follow-on as to what the better way is or was.

Like hyenas and chimpanzees, reporters hunt in packs. There’s a reason they call them ‘feeding frenzies’. They’re also obsessed with images. But none of that is unique to the current situation. There’s something more at work here.

Some claim that there is a great appetite in the press to beat up on Joe Biden to demonstrate that all the criticism of Donald Trump wasn’t bias, just solid reporting. That’s a significant factor but I don’t think the most important. Will Bunch points out a real and very human factor: many reporters at national news outlets know at least the kinds of people endangered by the Taliban rout and in many cases particular people. Your news organization worked with translators and handlers. You embedded with military formations and met military translators or members of the Afghan Army. This is human and real, even righteous. But again, I think this is only a part and not the biggest part of what we’ve seen play out over recent days.

I will repeat what I wrote before this bottom fell out. The US owes a profound responsibility to everyone who worked for the US during the mission in Afghanistan and is now endangered by the association. We should welcome them all, along with their families, for resettlement in the United States. We should go to great lengths to make good on that commitment. America always needs more good people.

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

Was there?

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

In retrospect of course, knowing that the regime did immediately collapse, sort of no loss. But of course the US couldn’t do that. The whole point of the almost 20 year enterprise was to build a state and an army that could stand on its own. The US was never going to prevent that regime from even trying to survive.

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

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

Here we get to the heart of the matter.

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

A snippet …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will emphasize again this isn’t a flag-waving, America’s never wrong ‘pro-war’ mindset. It’s more varied and critical, capable of seeing the collateral damage of these engagements, the toll on American service members post combat, the corruption endemic in occupation-backed governments. And yet still very bought in. You see this in a different way in some of the country’s most accomplished longform magazine writers, many of whom have spent ample time in these warzones. Again, not at all militarists or gungho armchair warriors but people capable of capturing the subtleties and discontents of these missions and the individuals caught up in their storms. And yet still very bought in. And it is from these voices that we are hearing many of the most anguished accusations of betrayal and abandonment. It is harrowing to process years or decades of denial in hours or days.

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. ‘There had to have been a better way’ is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved. Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

This morning I noticed this tweet from The New York Times Peter Baker, half of the husband and wife team of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, two of Washington’s most respected journalists, both of whom have spent the last week castigating America’s betrayal of its friends and the loss of American ‘credibility’ abroad. Baker laments the “cold political calculation” of the Biden administration which hopes Americans won’t care about the consequences of withdrawal as long as Americans are safe.

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.

Who is the villain here? Joe Biden who pulled the plug or the American people who can be relied upon not to care? To Baker, it seems like the answer is both. And he’s not alone.

Most people I have heard from don’t understand what we were supposed to do? It would have been nice if we had a cleaner exit but not sure anyone knew the Afghans were not going to out up a fight. The fact that there was no fight tells me we should have bounced years ago. The people were just putting up a front like they do when management walks around the plant. Probably resented our presence and us cutting a deal with the Taliban probably didn’t help.

I kind of feel like most people in the know for the past 10-15yrs have known they wouldn’t put up a fight and just kicked the can because it was always going to be ugly. But that’s just my working theory.

[youthathletics]

From Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:

The Fall of Kabul, Washington and the Guys at the Fancy Magazines

I wrote at the beginning of the week that the lightning collapse of the Afghan Army and the Afghan state, far from making me question the decision, had removed any doubt in my mind that it was the correct one. The subsequent week has only deepened this judgment. Since then I’ve been wrestling with, trying to make sense of the elite or prestige national media response. TPM Reader GF captured some of this on Tuesday …

I had to laugh at your post today titled “DC Press Bigs Escalate to Peak Screech Over Biden Defiance” as it made me think of a Punchbowl news article I read first thing this am. The article said the execution of the withdrawal has been awful, Biden has played it poorly etc. etc. The truly gold statement in that Punchbowl article just after saying how poorly Biden has managed the execution of the withdrawal was “There has to have been a better way.” None of these folks know or can suggest what would have been the better way except to make such silly statements as Biden did poorly because there had to be a better way with no follow-on as to what the better way is or was.

Like hyenas and chimpanzees, reporters hunt in packs. There’s a reason they call them ‘feeding frenzies’. They’re also obsessed with images. But none of that is unique to the current situation. There’s something more at work here.

Some claim that there is a great appetite in the press to beat up on Joe Biden to demonstrate that all the criticism of Donald Trump wasn’t bias, just solid reporting. That’s a significant factor but I don’t think the most important. Will Bunch points out a real and very human factor: many reporters at national news outlets know at least the kinds of people endangered by the Taliban rout and in many cases particular people. Your news organization worked with translators and handlers. You embedded with military formations and met military translators or members of the Afghan Army. This is human and real, even righteous. But again, I think this is only a part and not the biggest part of what we’ve seen play out over recent days.

I will repeat what I wrote before this bottom fell out. The US owes a profound responsibility to everyone who worked for the US during the mission in Afghanistan and is now endangered by the association. We should welcome them all, along with their families, for resettlement in the United States. We should go to great lengths to make good on that commitment. America always needs more good people.

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

Was there?

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

In retrospect of course, knowing that the regime did immediately collapse, sort of no loss. But of course the US couldn’t do that. The whole point of the almost 20 year enterprise was to build a state and an army that could stand on its own. The US was never going to prevent that regime from even trying to survive.

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

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

Here we get to the heart of the matter.

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

A snippet …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will emphasize again this isn’t a flag-waving, America’s never wrong ‘pro-war’ mindset. It’s more varied and critical, capable of seeing the collateral damage of these engagements, the toll on American service members post combat, the corruption endemic in occupation-backed governments. And yet still very bought in. You see this in a different way in some of the country’s most accomplished longform magazine writers, many of whom have spent ample time in these warzones. Again, not at all militarists or gungho armchair warriors but people capable of capturing the subtleties and discontents of these missions and the individuals caught up in their storms. And yet still very bought in. And it is from these voices that we are hearing many of the most anguished accusations of betrayal and abandonment. It is harrowing to process years or decades of denial in hours or days.

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. ‘There had to have been a better way’ is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved. Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

This morning I noticed this tweet from The New York Times Peter Baker, half of the husband and wife team of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, two of Washington’s most respected journalists, both of whom have spent the last week castigating America’s betrayal of its friends and the loss of American ‘credibility’ abroad. Baker laments the “cold political calculation” of the Biden administration which hopes Americans won’t care about the consequences of withdrawal as long as Americans are safe.

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.

Who is the villain here? Joe Biden who pulled the plug or the American people who can be relied upon not to care? To Baker, it seems like the answer is both. And he’s not alone.

Most people I have heard from don’t understand what we were supposed to do? It would have been nice if we had a cleaner exit but not sure anyone knew the Afghans were not going to out up a fight. The fact that there was no fight tells me we should have bounced years ago. The people were just putting up a front like they do when management walks around the plant. Probably resented our presence and us cutting a deal with the Taliban probably didn’t help.

WE kicked the can down the road far too long IMO.

The Afghanistanis Army was damned near useless in the fight, they are not disciplined enough, not strong enough, and would rather smoke hash. It IS why we have had to stay for so long.

And in 2010 Flynn was all over it.... "And if that isn't enough, Flynn also warns that "time is running out" for the American-led International Security Assistance Force. "Regional instability is rapidly increasing and getting worse," the report says."

Which is why ripping off the band-aide is cool with me, no issues with that. Worth a read....https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-war-afghanistan

[Typical Lax Dad]

From Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:

The Fall of Kabul, Washington and the Guys at the Fancy Magazines

I wrote at the beginning of the week that the lightning collapse of the Afghan Army and the Afghan state, far from making me question the decision, had removed any doubt in my mind that it was the correct one. The subsequent week has only deepened this judgment. Since then I’ve been wrestling with, trying to make sense of the elite or prestige national media response. TPM Reader GF captured some of this on Tuesday …

I had to laugh at your post today titled “DC Press Bigs Escalate to Peak Screech Over Biden Defiance” as it made me think of a Punchbowl news article I read first thing this am. The article said the execution of the withdrawal has been awful, Biden has played it poorly etc. etc. The truly gold statement in that Punchbowl article just after saying how poorly Biden has managed the execution of the withdrawal was “There has to have been a better way.” None of these folks know or can suggest what would have been the better way except to make such silly statements as Biden did poorly because there had to be a better way with no follow-on as to what the better way is or was.

Like hyenas and chimpanzees, reporters hunt in packs. There’s a reason they call them ‘feeding frenzies’. They’re also obsessed with images. But none of that is unique to the current situation. There’s something more at work here.

Some claim that there is a great appetite in the press to beat up on Joe Biden to demonstrate that all the criticism of Donald Trump wasn’t bias, just solid reporting. That’s a significant factor but I don’t think the most important. Will Bunch points out a real and very human factor: many reporters at national news outlets know at least the kinds of people endangered by the Taliban rout and in many cases particular people. Your news organization worked with translators and handlers. You embedded with military formations and met military translators or members of the Afghan Army. This is human and real, even righteous. But again, I think this is only a part and not the biggest part of what we’ve seen play out over recent days.

I will repeat what I wrote before this bottom fell out. The US owes a profound responsibility to everyone who worked for the US during the mission in Afghanistan and is now endangered by the association. We should welcome them all, along with their families, for resettlement in the United States. We should go to great lengths to make good on that commitment. America always needs more good people.

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

Was there?

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

In retrospect of course, knowing that the regime did immediately collapse, sort of no loss. But of course the US couldn’t do that. The whole point of the almost 20 year enterprise was to build a state and an army that could stand on its own. The US was never going to prevent that regime from even trying to survive.

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

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

Here we get to the heart of the matter.

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

A snippet …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will emphasize again this isn’t a flag-waving, America’s never wrong ‘pro-war’ mindset. It’s more varied and critical, capable of seeing the collateral damage of these engagements, the toll on American service members post combat, the corruption endemic in occupation-backed governments. And yet still very bought in. You see this in a different way in some of the country’s most accomplished longform magazine writers, many of whom have spent ample time in these warzones. Again, not at all militarists or gungho armchair warriors but people capable of capturing the subtleties and discontents of these missions and the individuals caught up in their storms. And yet still very bought in. And it is from these voices that we are hearing many of the most anguished accusations of betrayal and abandonment. It is harrowing to process years or decades of denial in hours or days.

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. ‘There had to have been a better way’ is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved. Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

This morning I noticed this tweet from The New York Times Peter Baker, half of the husband and wife team of Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, two of Washington’s most respected journalists, both of whom have spent the last week castigating America’s betrayal of its friends and the loss of American ‘credibility’ abroad. Baker laments the “cold political calculation” of the Biden administration which hopes Americans won’t care about the consequences of withdrawal as long as Americans are safe.

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.

Who is the villain here? Joe Biden who pulled the plug or the American people who can be relied upon not to care? To Baker, it seems like the answer is both. And he’s not alone.

Most people I have heard from don’t understand what we were supposed to do? It would have been nice if we had a cleaner exit but not sure anyone knew the Afghans were not going to out up a fight. The fact that there was no fight tells me we should have bounced years ago. The people were just putting up a front like they do when management walks around the plant. Probably resented our presence and us cutting a deal with the Taliban probably didn’t help.

WE kicked the can down the road far too long IMO.

The Afghanistanis Army was damned near useless in the fight, they are not disciplined enough, not strong enough, and would rather smoke hash. It IS why we have had to stay for so long.

And in 2010 Flynn was all over it.... "And if that isn't enough, Flynn also warns that "time is running out" for the American-led International Security Assistance Force. "Regional instability is rapidly increasing and getting worse," the report says."

Which is why ripping off the band-aide is cool with me, no issues with that. Worth a read....https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-war-afghanistan

Thanks. Will read.

[Brooklyn]

Why did the Taliban patriots win against the imperialist invaders and their puppet regime?

Wiki may provide an answer:


During the war in Afghanistan (2001–present), over 47,245 civilians, 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan military and police and more than 51,000 Taliban fighters have been killed as of April 2021. Overall the war has killed 171,000 to 174,000 people in Afghanistan. However, the death toll is possibly higher due to unaccounted deaths by "disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure, and/or other indirect consequences of the war." The Cost of War project estimated that the number who have died through indirect causes related to the war may be as high as 360,000 additional people based on a ratio of indirect to direct deaths in contemporary conflicts. These numbers do not include those who have died in Pakistan in the related war in North-West Pakistan.


Evidently, as Mullah Muhammed predicted, God was on their side.