Who's responsible for the chaos in Kabul? Joe Biden, of course. He's commander-in-chief and the buck stops with him.
Fine. But with that formality out of the way, who's really responsible? If we want to learn any lessons from this, we have to go beyond platitudes and dig a little deeper.
So then: to a first approximation, the answer is "nobody." Withdrawing from Afghanistan was always going to be a bloody, chaotic affair no matter what. That's why no one wanted to do it: It was pretty obvious how it would go down, and no one with any sense wants that as part of their presidential legacy. But the bloodshed was inevitable once the decision to leave was made.
Now dig a little deeper. Sure, withdrawal was always going to be messy, but why was it this messy? Recent reporting makes it clear that the answer is twofold. First, the military insisted on an inept training strategy that left the Afghans with a literally useless army the moment we withdrew support. Second, the Afghans themselves were far more corrupt and far more willing to accept Taliban rule than we thought.
How is it that we misunderstood these things after 20 years in country? That remains a bit of a mystery. We could use some more reporting on this.
But now dig even deeper. Even given all our mistakes, did the events of the past couple of days have to be so horrific? My answer might surprise you: they haven't been. I'm speaking relatively, of course, but the truth is that I expected worse. I wouldn't have been surprised to see something like Fallujah on steroids: bodies hanging from bridges, lines of "traitors" being shot, Taliban fighters surrounding American forces, and so forth. But so far, we haven't seen that. The Taliban takeover has been far smoother and less vicious than I expected.
I get that this is hard to accept after watching even a few minutes of CNN. And obviously things could change rapidly. But what we've seen in Kabul has been about the best outcome we could have reasonably expected. The chaos we're seeing is simply the nature of military withdrawals under pressure. For anyone who disagrees, I can only ask: What did you expect?
MSNBC host @NicolleDWallace: "95% of the American people will agree with everything [President Biden] just said. 95% of the press covering this White House will disagree." pic.twitter.com/UzLr6DPyPz
This is Michelangelo's Pietà in St. Peter's Basilica. Normally the crowds are too large to get a picture from this far back, but a combination of COVID-19 and an early-morning start meant that the entire building, not to mention the entire plaza outside, was nearly empty.
Normally, SNAP benefits¹ go up during recessions and then fall back to their normal level afterward. Under Biden's plan, benefits will remain at a higher level permanently.
How did this happen? In 2018 Congress passed a law directing the USDA to review the minimum requirements for a healthy diet. They finished their review this year, and the result was a diet that cost more. Republicans are complaining that they thought they were voting for revenue neutrality back in 2018, but it's too late for that now. The review is finished and Biden has all the authority he needs to implement its recommendations.
It's worth noting that the average benefit in the chart above is per person. Under the new plan a family of four will receive an average benefit of about $600 per month and a maximum benefit of $835.
Is this increase a big deal? Not to you and me, probably, but to someone who's already eating only six days a week because that's all they can afford it sure is.
This is why we stayed in Afghanistan so long: no president wanted to be the one who "lost Afghanistan." Because of this, a war we should have exited at least a decade ago lasted twice as long as it should have.
But put that aside for a moment and let's zoom in on recent events. Who's really to blame for the events of the past couple of months? Who's to blame for the obviously disastrous collapse of the Afghan military and the rushed evacuation of US personnel?
For partisan reasons, Republicans will blame Biden. Even some Democrats and policy experts will do the same. But it just isn't so. Nobody wants to say this out loud, but the real blame lies with the US military.
In a broad sense, of course, they're the ones who were never able to carry out their training mission in the first place. But in a narrower sense, they're also the ones who gave consistently bad advice to Biden practically from the day he entered office. How long would it take the Taliban to take over once the drawdown was in progress? At least six months, they said, and they acted accordingly. In reality, it took weeks, not months, and the result is the panicked evacuation we're now seeing.
Nobody ever wants to blame the military for failures in the field. For one thing, there's no partisan advantage in it. For another, the military knows how to fight back in news outlets, in Congress, and in the public eye. Nobody in Washington wants to make an enemy of them.
But make no mistake: Civilian policymakers made plenty of mistakes in Afghanistan, but it was the US military that was behind all these failures. They provided bad advice. They failed in their mission. They were never able to understand the country they were occupying. This is the story that needs to be written.
As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.
But even before that, the systemic weaknesses of the Afghan security forces — which on paper numbered somewhere around 300,000 people, but in recent days have totaled around just one-sixth of that, according to U.S. officials — were apparent. These shortfalls can be traced to numerous issues that sprung from the West’s insistence on building a fully modern military with all the logistical and supply complexities one requires, and which has proved unsustainable without the United States and its NATO allies.
Commanders [knew] that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms. In the past several days, the Afghan forces have steadily collapsed as they battled to defend ever shrinking territory, losing Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s economic engine, to the Taliban on Saturday.
When U.S. forces were still operating here, the Afghan government sought to maximize its presence through the country’s far-flung countryside, maintaining more than 200 bases and outposts that could be resupplied only by air. Extending government operations to the most of Afghanistan’s more than 400 districts has long been the main pillar of America’s counterinsurgency strategy.
Mr. Ghani had ample warning of the American departure after the Trump administration signed the February 2020 agreement with the Taliban that called on all U.S. forces and contractors to leave by May 2021. Yet, the Afghan government failed to adjust its military footprint to match the new reality. Many officials didn’t believe in their hearts that the Americans would actually leave.
The near-collapse of the Afghan army in the space of just a few stunning weeks is prompting the military and Washington’s policymakers to reflect on their failures over the course of nearly two decades....“You look at the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn [in 2001] and it was trying to create a Western democracy,” said Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010. “In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.”
....On trips to Afghanistan, she met frequently with young Afghans, including women’s groups, who shared America’s vision for the country....But those individuals were no match for the rot that had permeated the Afghan government. She and other U.S. officials understood that with all the U.S. money floating around in Afghanistan, there would be “petty corruption,” she said. What U.S. officials discovered in 2010, after the surge was already underway, was a corruption that ran far deeper than they had previously understood and that jeopardized their strategy, which depended on building the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
“We realized that this is not going to work,” Flournoy said. “We had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten.”
Let's round this all up:
Hubristic nation building.
Starry-eyed constitution writing.
Wildly unrealistic military training.
Vast corruption.
Lack of food and weapons for Afghan soldiers.
Bad negotiating from the Trump administration.
Afghan leadership void.
I'm glad everyone is finally able to admit this now that the war is over, but it sure sounds like it's been common knowledge for at least a decade. This is why I think it's folly to suggest that things would have been any different if we'd waited another six months before withdrawing.
There's no question that the US policy class has a lot to answer for here, but the bulk of the blame has to be placed on the army. They were the ones on the ground. They were the ones who built an Afghan military that was completely unsuitable to the country. They're the ones who apparently never grasped the full extent of the corruption they were up against. They were the ones who advised four different US presidents that things were going well if they could just have a little more time and a few more troops.
The US military is hardly the only organization that hates to be the bearer of bad news. Nor are they the only organization that hates to admit they can't do the job they're being asked to do. But an unwillingness to do these things was one of the primary reasons we lost Vietnam, and our military leadership at the time swore it would never happen again.
But it did, just as soon as they found themselves in a similar situation. I remember years and years of blathering about counterinsurgency during the aughts, with army officers insisting that we could learn how to do it and skeptics pointing out that there were practically no examples of successful Western counterinsurgencies in the entire era since World War II. But after David Petraeus left the scene everyone got tired of this stuff and the nation's op-ed pages moved on to other things.
Here's the current mortality rate in the US compared to the same group of peer countries that I've been following for the past year:
The peak mortality rates during winter mostly ranged from about 5 to 10 deaths per million, so we're still quite a bit lower than that. Nevertheless, the US death rate is the highest in this group of countries and is heading straight up. This is all due to vaccination rates, which are higher in every single one of these countries than in the United States.
So get vaccinated, people! The fact that we have highly effective and incredibly safe vaccines easily available to anyone is nothing short of a miracle. It's crazy. Why are so many people spurning a gift from God?
Unsurprisingly, I've gotten some pushback about my relatively rosy view of the rental market. Naturally I'd like to test this with some good historical data, but unfortunately there's very little available. The best I can do is to make use of the Household Pulse survey that the Census Bureau started last year in order to track households during the pandemic. Two of the questions for renters go all the way back to April 2020, so I chose those to look at:
The line in green is the percentage of renters who said they had "no" or "slight" confidence in their ability to make next month's rent. The line in purple is the percentage of renters who said they were currently behind on rent.
It would be nice to have pre-pandemic figures to compare these to, but we don't. However, the April figures are very early in the pandemic and probably not much affected by it. I can only guess about this, but my guess is that the April figures are pretty close to those from before the pandemic.
In any case, both lines have been going down ever since the pandemic started. This is almost certainly due to the trillions of dollars in assistance that went directly to everyone (checks) or everyone who lost a job (expanded UI benefits). And that assistance worked. There's really no evidence that renters today are in greater trouble than they've ever been.
Enough with all this Roman cat nonsense; it's time to turn this space back over to the hometown cats who deserve it. Today's photo is a typical morning scene around here. We let the cats out and Hopper starts chewing on the grass or drinking out of the bird bath, while Hilbert steps out to make sure everyone knows who's in charge at this house. Answer: Hilbert, that's who. Anyone want to make something of it?
This is how it's going to happen. States, unfortunately, won't put broad mandates in place, so it's going to happen bit by bit. The military will get mandatory vaccinations. Federal employees will get mandatory vaccinations. New job openings will require vaccinations. Foreign travel will require vaccinations. Getting into sports events will require vaccinations. Etc.
This is slow as hell, but eventually it will work. There will always be some holdouts, but increasingly you'll have to be something of a hermit if you insist on staying unvaccinated.
In the New York Times today, Fred Kagan has an op-ed guest essay titled "Biden Could Have Stopped the Taliban. He Chose Not To." I haven't heard Kagan's name since the heyday of the warbloggers circa 2004, so I was curious to see what he had to say:
As U.S. military planners well know, the Afghan war has a seasonal pattern. The Taliban leadership retreats to bases, largely in Pakistan, every winter and then launches the group’s fighting season campaign in the spring, moving into high gear in the summer after the poppy harvest. At the very least, the United States should have continued to support the Afghans through this period to help them blunt the Taliban’s latest offensive and buy time to plan for a future devoid of American military assistance.
American diplomats could have used this time to negotiate access to regional bases from which to continue counterterrorism operations. Simultaneously, the American military should have prepared contingencies in case those negotiations failed.
In other words, just a few more months would have done it! After 20 years of American training and assistance, after which the Afghan military literally collapsed at the mere sight of Taliban troops, waiting until next year would have made all the difference.
I don't doubt that Kagan is sincere in this belief. That's the problem.
