The Graveyard of Empires

Critics of President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and/or President Bush's decision to invade in the first place have been quoting the "graveyard of empires" description of that country. I may have even done so in some previous posts. But there is a very good piece in Politico this week entitled The Old Cliché About Afghanistan That Won’t Die that gives a different perspective. It is well worth reading.

Recommended: The Ides of August

There is a very good - and very disturbing - piece by reporter Sarah Chayes entitled The Ides of August that is well worth reading to understand why we failed so abysmally in Afghanistan. See also an interview with her here which is equally as good (and equally as unsettling).

The focus these days is on the incompetence of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, but perhaps the more important issue is the much larger incompetence we as a nation exhibited during the 20 years we occupied Afghanistan.

Priorities

 It’s easy to lose sight of the essential priorities, especially when daily events like the Afghanistan difficulties intrude, but it seems to me one of the highest priorities is to try to understand what really is driving the increasing political and cultural and generational polarization in our nation – polarization that might eventually end up destroying us if we can’t control it. The crude stereotypes and glib partisan answers provided by politicians, activists, and the media talking heads are of no help here.

This is not an easy problem with a single simple answer. Cultures are incredibly complex, especially in a nation as large and diverse as ours. As some authors have argued, we are really 7 or 9 or 11 different nations, depending on how one counts*. So the root causes of today’s polarization are likely to by many, and subtle, and perhaps different in different regions of the country, and perhaps different in different economic or social classes, and in some cases counterintuitive.   

But it is essential to try to understand why almost half the nation’s voters would vote for a disruptive populist like Donald Trump. Or why so many people object - violently object - to wearing masks or getting vaccinated in a pandemic. Or why school board meetings have suddenly turned raucous and even violent in some places. Or why an escapee from North Korea would report, in print, that speech suppression at Columbia University, where she took some classes, is far worse than anything she ever experienced in North Korea.

A useful starting place – but just a start – might be David Brooks’ recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled How Bobos Broke America, a rethinking of the thesis he propounded in his 2001 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. (“Bobos” comes from the conjunction of “bourgeois” and “bohemian”, the synthesis of meritocratic entitlement and counterculture pretention). It might also be useful afterward to read Peter Berkowitz’s critique David Brooks Reproaches Elites, Recycles Cliches About the People.

Also useful as a start is David Goodhart’s 2020 book Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, Ezra Klein’s 2020 book Why We’re Polarized, Joan Williams’ 2017 book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, Richard Reeves 2017 book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It., Arlie Russel Hochschild’s 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Jonathan Haidt’s 2013 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Michael Foley’s 2010 book The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy, Susan Jacoby’s 2008 book The Age of American Unreason, and George Lakoff’s 2002 book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservative Think  None of these will provide THE answer. All will provide different perspectives, and perhaps some part of the answer

* See, for example, Colin Woodards 2021 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Cultures in North America

Recommended: Piece about David Brooks

David Brooks , who often writes in the New York Times (see here for recent pieces by him) is one of the people I follow. He is one of the reasonable voices in the moderate conservative group, and as much a sociologist as a political commentator. Peter Berkowitz has just written a piece about him entitled David Brooks Reproaches Elites, Recycles Cliches About the People. He has an interesting perspective. 

The first thing about his argument that that I had never really thought about was his claim that conservatives understand progressives much better than progressives understand conservatives. The reason is obvious (now that it has been pointed out!), the liberal progressive worldview dominates the news, academia, public schools, the movies, etc. So, like it or not, conservatives are bathed daily in the progressive world view, while progressives have to go looking for the conservative worldview, and few bother. Instead most just accept the common (liberal) stereotypes, constantly aired in the progressive worldview, that conservatives must surely be uneducated knuckle-draggers, because otherwise they would obviously accept the progressive worldview. 

I suppose that the naive belief that the American progressive worldview is so obviously better than any other worldview is part of what may have blinded our supposedly well-educated elites in Washington to why traditional religious cultures in the Middle East aren't so eager to be "Americanized". 

His other critiques of Brooks seem to me fair. But in David's defense, it is always very difficult to look outside of our own cultural "bubble", so I'm inclined to credit David Brooks for trying, rather than condemn him for failing to succeed completely.

In any case, this is an interesting argument, worth pondering..

The Afghanistan debacle 3

 Now that it is clear to everyone how badly we screwed up the Afghanistan withdrawal all the predictable things are happening. Fingers are being pointed, asses are being covered, spin doctors are working overtime to put lipstick on the pig. Biden surrogates are claiming it was Trump’s fault. Trump is claiming it is Biden’s fault. Experts all over the place are saying “I told you so”. Democrats are blaming Republicans and Republicans are blaming Democrats.  

But underneath all this petty and useless silliness there are at least two serious questions:

1. How come the intelligence community once again got it so wrong? There have been plenty of journalists over the past 20 years who have written about how corrupt the Afghanistan army was, how many “ghost soldiers” were kept on the payroll to enrich commanders, how poorly they were trained and led, how often they sold their weapons. There have been a number of articles explaining how in Afghanistan tribal links matter more than organizational links, and how often and easily fighters switched sides for money or tribal advantage. There have been a number of articles about how massive amounts of US aid money to Afghanistan just “disappeared” into the pockets of corrupt officials.  

So if there was all this information from observers and journalists, how come the intelligence agencies didn’t take all this information into account? Were they ignorant of it? Did they think it didn’t matter – didn’t affect the fighting capability of the army? Was it not used because of some institutional pride – our information is better? Did they really know the truth but fed the politicians what they thought they wanted to hear?

2. If the intelligence community and the politicians misread the Afghanistan situation so badly, how much can we trust their assessment of the China threat, the North Korean threat, the Iranian threat, or the Russian threat?

It seems to me that this calls for a pretty deep review of the intelligence community. Has it simply gotten too big and too bureaucratic and too politicized to be of any use? These are questions that should have been asked after 9/11, but apparently were not – we just quadrupled the size of the intelligence community, threw money at it and hoped it would get better. It clearly didn’t.

Understanding China

Tomas Pueyo has an fascinating and well done Twitter stream about China, and how geographic realities drive its history.  You can view it here. Quick to watch and highly recommended.

Peter Zeihan on Afghanistan

 Geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan has an excellent piece today entitled The Return of American Narcissism.  The media is focused on the near-term day-to-day disaster in Afghanistan. Peter gives a much broader view of the whole affair.  I really like Peter's writing and analysis. He is non-partisan (as he says, no party represents him at the moment), he basis his analysis on facts and data, not ideology or wishful thinking (he admits he is not particularly happy with the future he predicts), and he is pretty blunt, which is refreshing in a world of focus-group tested talking points and political doublespeak.

The Afghanistan debacle 2

I suggested is a post back in June that the midterm election results would probably turn on a few key issues, of which the Afghanistan withdrawal was one. At the time I suggested that it depended on whether the medias found a “Saigon moment” (see photo below, the last people leaving on the helicopter on the roof of the American Embassy) or not to trumpet.

 A month ago US intelligence estimated that Kabul might fall to the Taliban in 6 to 12 months. Last week they revised this estimate to 90 days. Yesterday morning Taliban troops entered the outskirts of Kabul.

On Thursday, July 8, asked in a news conference if a Taliban takeover was inevitable, Biden said “No, it is not, because you have the Afghan troops, they're 300,000 well-equipped, as well equipped as any army in the world, and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable."

On Thursday, August 12, Biden said there would be "no circumstance in which you are going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan."  This morning helicopters are carrying staff from the American Embassy to the Kabul airport. Administration figures vigorously deny this is anything like Saigon, but in fact it is exactly like the Saigon debacle, and no amount of spin and denial is going to hide that.

All of these predictions were wildly wrong. The Taliban took over the country in about a week. Clearly it was long past time to get out of a 20-year unwinnable war, so in that respect Biden did the right thing to withdraw. Clearly there was thoroughly inadequate planning for this withdrawal, and in that respect Biden and his administration own the consequences. Oh, the military did a good, careful job of withdrawing their people and equipment, but the administration completely failed to account for the civilians, Afghans and foreigners, who also had to be withdrawn.

Trump, if he had been re-elected, might well have done as badly, But he wasn’t re-elected (whatever he says) so Biden and his administration own this debacle, and it will no doubt have consequences in the upcoming midterm elections.

 

The Afghanistan debacle

So we spent 20 years in Afghanistan training their troops and advising their politicians, we lost 2,312 soldiers killed and 20,066 wounded, killed somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 Afghan civilians, and spent about $824 billion dollars. Now, within weeks of beginning the withdrawal of our troops, the Taliban, now increasingly equipped with captured US Humvees and M16 rifles abandoned by fleeing government troops, have retaken more than half the country, and the US is shipping in 3000 troops to hold the airport at Kabul while we evacuate most or all of the staff from the new $750+ million US embassy in Kabul.

Clearly the whole effort has been a disaster, and while Biden will probably get blamed, unfairly, for most of the inevitable fallout, in truth he finally did the right thing - what previous presidents in both parties couldn’t bring themselves to do – end an unwinnable war.

Like Vietnam, the American public were bombarded throughout most of these 20 years with optimistic press briefings about how we were just about to turn things around, about how the Taliban were almost defeated, about how soon Afghanistan would become a modernized democratic nation under American tutelage. Like Vietnam, we were assured several times that just one more “surge” of American troops would solve our problems. Like Vietnam, the civilian politicians refused to listen to their military advisors.  Like Vietnam, there was plenty of historical precedent (the French efforts in Vietnam, the Russian efforts in Afghanistan) to warn of the difficulties, which Washington experts and politicians ignored. Like Vietnam, Washington politicians had almost no understanding of the culture of their opponents, nor apparently any interest in learning.

There is plenty of blame to go around. This wasn’t a Democratic failure or a Republican failure – this was a profound failure of the American foreign policy establishment in Washington, all the worse because they apparently didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam.  The press were outraged that Trump drove out so many of the experienced people in the State Department and in the foreign policy establishment. From my point of view it may have been one of the few things he did right.

Progress, they say, is making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones. We need a new generation in Washington, making new mistakes, not repeating the old ones.  

Will we get Trump again in 2024?

Let me say at the start that I didn’t want Trump in 2016 or in 2020, and I certainly don’t want him as president again. But looking at how things are going, I think if he chooses to run in 2024 he will quite likely win again.

Why? Well first of all, if he seeks the nomination I think hardly any Republican will run against him, and any who try will probably be dispatched as easily as he dispatched all his primary opponents last time. It is always a mistake to underestimate one’s opponents, as both Republicans and Democrats did in 2016. The man is an unprincipled sociopath, but he is absolutely brilliant at dominating the national media (who cooperate because his daily outrages make news and drive readership), and at persuading and reading the mood of his base – much, much better than any opponent he has faced thus far, as Scott Adams pointed out during the 2016 election.

If he runs, who will he likely run against? Biden was appealing in 2020 because he carried no major baggage. As vice president to Obama he was largely invisible, and his handlers kept him mostly under wraps during the 2020 campaign, a smart move since he has always been gaff-prone and clearly has lost a step or two as he has aged. Against Trump’s mishandling of the COVID pandemic, and the media’s obvious bias toward him (like suppressing Tara Reade’s sexual assault charge against him) Biden was in a good place. Yet even so Biden just barely won the election. Yes, he did well in the popular vote, but it is the electoral vote that counts, and he won that by the slimmest of margins in a few swing states. And if COVID hadn’t hit, Trump would most likely have won again on a growing economy and rising wages.

But Biden this time, 84 by the time 2024 arrives, will carry all the baggage that a sitting president always accumulates – blame for everything that goes wrong, whether it was his fault or not, and disillusionment among his base that he didn’t deliver everything he promised in his campaign.

If Biden, for whatever reason, doesn’t run for re-election in 2024, the obvious replacement will be his vice president, Kamala Harris. Given the current progressive movement in the Democratic party it would be hard to refuse a mixed-race woman vice president the nomination if she wanted it. But as she first showed in her painfully inept campaign in 2020, and subsequently in her performance thus far as vice-president in charge of the border crisis, she simply isn’t up to the job yet, and may never be. It’s not that she isn’t smart, it’s that she appears to have no political sense – she appears not to know how to play the media or work the political systems or appeal broadly to a base, or apparently (according to some insiders) even run a staff. Not surprising, since being a Stanford economics professor doesn’t really prepare one for this sort of thing. Trump would likely make a meal of her in a media-dominated election.

And the 2022 midterm election probably won’t help. Historically the president’s party almost always loses Congressional seats in the first midterm election, and the Democratic margin in both the House and the Senate is so thin that losing just a seat or two would be enough to tip the balance and completely stall the progressive legislative agenda. Just the redistricting exercise about to start will probably deliver an additional seat or two in the House to the Republicans.

So the Democratic candidate will probably have few recent legislative achievements to run on in 2024.

Now consider the issues that are likely to shape the 2024 election: rising inflation, rising crime rates along with the unpopular ‘defund the police” movement, increased illegal immigration across the Southern border, the fight over Critical Race Theory in schools, the fight over mask mandates, especially for school children, and the fallout from our Afghanistan withdrawal. These are all issues that animate the Republican base and mostly put Democratic policies on the defensive.

Of course, as I have said before, a week is eternity in politics, and all sorts of unexpected events before November 2024 could completely change the environment. But from where we are now, I would guess that if Trump runs in 2024 he is quite likely to win again. He is clearly maintaining his base and continuing to position himself for a run, if he is healthy enough when the time comes.

Not comforting, but a reality to deal with.