Sunday 26 December 2021

Chile vote augurs new possibilities

 


[Three student leaders try to meet with the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, cerca 2012, and are turned away. No matter, the guy on the right is now the president.] 

The first thing many of us noticed about the December 19 second round vote for president in Chile was how eerily closely it tracked the 1988 plebiscite in which the country voted on whether Pinochet should remain in power for another eight years.

 

2021 results: President

Gabriel Boric             55.87% (Apruebo Dignidad-left)

José Antonio Kast     44.13% (Christian Social Front-right)

 

1988 results: Pinochet to remain as president

No                               55.99%

Yes                              44.01%

 

Pinochet lost under his own rules and had to prepare for competitive elections a year later. Or, as the historic headline in the opposition newspaper Fortín Mapocho put it, “He Ran Alone and Came in Second.”

Chile’s electoral system, which assures that the candidate with the most votes wins—quite a foreign concept for some of us—allows anyone to run in the first round, then puts the top two vote-getters into a runoff a month later. (Several Latin American countries vote this way.) Kast, the fundamentalist Catholic who openly admired the Pinochet years, came out on top in the first vote, sending a good half of the country into a profound shock. After all the mobilizations of the last few years, no one could quite fathom how so many people were ready to back someone who didn’t even pretend to regret the horrors of the 1973-1990 dictatorship.

One common feature of the two-step voting procedure, known as ballotage, is that voter participation tends to drop off for the second round. That didn’t happen in Chile, and my impression from this distance is that people hit the streets in an all-out effort to convince their peers and neighbors that this was not the moment for cynical indifference. The estimates for second-round newcomers were something in the 300-400 thousand range, gives the high stakes. In actual fact, 1.2 million new voters showed up. Instead of a cliffhanger, Boric walked away with a crushing victory.

If anyone had funny business in mind to manipulate or dispute the results, the size of the winning margin wrecked those plans. (Something similar may have happened in Honduras, where the non-narco candidate racked up solid margins. Stealing elections is a lot easier when the races are close.) One dirty trick did seem to be playing out when people in many poorer (pro-Boric) neighborhoods found that public transport was suddenly non-existent. We’ll have to wait for more investigation of what happened, but many are suspicious that it wasn’t an accident. In the end, none of it mattered.

Boric came to public attention during the student mobilizations of 2011-13, one of a crop of very young activists who guided that movement adeptly and scored considerable victories. Several of them, Boric included, then parleyed their leadership into seats in the national legislature and have accumulated important experience and credibility, despite active hostility from the right-wing press (essentially all the major outlets). When the “penguin” revolt of high school students erupted in 2018, they were well placed in their senatorial tribunes to echo the popular demands.

I’m too far away from the country both physically and temporally to know much granular detail about Boric’s programs or the constellation of party and institutional forces that constitute his base. That said, I am willing to predict that his presidency will not imitate the disappointing Blair-ite, Third Way, all-hat-no-cattle, more-of-the-same-only-different governments that usually arise after an interesting new political character appears. Nor do I anticipate Venezuelan demagoguery with high-blown rhetoric masking dysfunction and a personality cult.

Despite the parallel with the 1988 plebiscite, the two events are far from equivalent. The NO vote 30-plus years ago was a NO to further dictatorship, NO to the secret police, impunity, disappearances, systematic torture, corruption, and rule by the rich. Beyond that, people were not of one mind and still remained fairly traumatized by the chaotic end of Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-73), which had concluded in the bombing of La Moneda and summary executions. The alternative at that time to more of Pinochet and his regime was a return to the centrist parties, including those that had supported the military takeover out of hostility to Allende. In fact, a major encourager of the coup became the country’s first president after the democratic restoration.

This time around, the choice was far more stark: back to the Pinochet days or a clean break with all the parts of the Pinochet package, not just political repression but more to the point, the economic variety. Boric has promised that Chile, the birthplace of the neoliberal model, will also be its tomb. Those are strong words, and an ample majority of the Chilean population is ready for them to be fulfilled. Education, health, pensions, housing—all the basic components of a decent life, are ripe for a thorough overhaul because after three decades of glowing discourse about the Chilean “success” story, plenty of citizens have seen the well-to-do elite continue to hoover up most of the benefits of economic growth while their own lives fail to improve.

This should be easy for Americans not lost in the pointless babble of our pundit class to grasp. Boric’s victory was a clear repudiation not only of nostalgia for the dictatorship but also of the failure of the two previously dominant political blocs to create conditions so that the majority of Chile’s citizens can have a decent life. These blocs, roughly equivalent to the Democrats and the Republicans here, are now deeply discredited by their failure, and the country has opted for something new. Chile’s political system, unlike our own, made it possible.

Boric comes to power just as the Constituent Assembly is due to wrap up its formulation of a new constitution for the country to replace the 1981 version written under Pinochet’s guidance and designed to sustain an ongoing dictatorship of the private sector, which it has done quite successfully. The new version has the potential of loosening the minority right-wing’s successful block of any threats to its outsized influence.

Chile has long been a social laboratory, and Boric’s determination to bury neoliberalism should be taken seriously. Margaret Thatcher famously noticed Pinochet’s adoption of the Chicago Boys/Friedmanite school of capitalist restoration to reverse the postwar consensus, and Ronald Reagan took a leaf from her book. We have lived with the result for 40 years.

Things often bubble up from the global South, and we tend to be too First World-centric to pay sufficient notice. Chile has deeply entrenched social and economic inequalities, but the incoming team also has the resources to experiment with a fairer system and to face down the inevitable trench warfare that the privileged classes will now stage.

Chile also has the painful memory of the last go-round with a left-wing experiment, and even though the Boric generation is too young to remember it directly, the country as a whole, and especially its leftist currents, has ample collective knowledge of how important it is for them to play their cards just right. In a world sorely lacking in role models, we may be permitted to hope for, to root for, great things.

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Friday 10 December 2021

Putin Wins, Americans Not Told

 


Amid the blizzard of mis-, dis-, and un-information provided to us by our dully conformist messengers in the news media, one could easily miss the crucial outcome of the latest round of alarmism over Russia: Putin has quietly won his principal demand.

For three decades, Russians have raised hell over NATO’s eastward creep. Gorbachev insisted that the USSR would not oppose the reunification of Germany as long as NATO did not expand, and Bush I promised him that. West Germany duly swallowed up the East, and the hostile alliance promptly accrued former Warsaw Pact states such as Poland and the Czech Republic and added them to NATO’s forward military posture—an early example of the U.S. being “not agreement-capable.” NATO spokespeople openly clamored for more. Georgia (the country) was in NATO’s sights briefly until the Russians reacted. But the big prize was always Ukraine with its enormous Black Sea coastline and the strategically crucial Crimean Peninsula.

Dotting Russia’s borders with military outposts, including nuclear weapons systems that could reach major Russian cities in minutes, has been a wet dream of neocon warriors since the Soviet Union’s collapse. According to some commentators, Putin could have been ousted after the 2014 Ukrainian coup for failing to perceive the threat and prevent it. Apparently, the Russians were shocked at the successful putsch that put a hyper-nationalist pro-Western regime in power in Kiev, and Russia’s dual response—backing the quasi-separatist Russian ethnics in eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea—followed swiftly.

That fighting was stopped by means of a truce and the Minsk Protocol (and its 2015 follow-up, known as Minsk II), which we westerners rarely hear about. That’s because the Ukrainian authorities signed them and then refused to carry them out, no doubt encouraged in this posture by their western masters.

Putin and his patient foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, have been broken records on the subject of what must happen to bring the border tensions to some sort of happy stasis—carry out the Minsk agreements via direct talks between Kiev and its breakaway provinces, achieve some sort of federal modus vivendi among the warring parties, including, crucially, a commitment NOT to put hostile military forces in eastern Ukraine and NOT to contemplate Ukrainian membership in NATO ever.

These Russians demands lie behind the periodic pearl-clutching that our neocon-loyal news media cook up over a supposed Russian scheme to march into the rest of Ukraine. Such a threat is a hallucination birthed in the steaming miasmas of the Potomac, but it conveniently masks the source of hostilities: Washington’s hysteria over losing its accustomed power to dictate terms. Russia’s red line about NATO encirclement means that further NATO expansion will not occur, and Russia is extremely well placed to carry out its threat to stop it should the need arise.

Biden and his amateurish crew of bullies have realized this. While we hear all sorts of dire posturing from Blinken, Sullivan, Biden himself, and a gaggle of nutcases in the Senate (from both parties), they simultaneously acknowledge that the U.S. is not ready to ratchet up to a nuclear confrontation over a rickety, nearly failed state in central Europe.

Meanwhile, the idea that the Russians are plotting to seize more Ukrainian territory assumes that Putin is eager to be saddled with a state on the verge of internal collapse. On the contrary, the uneasy status quo serves Russia perfectly well as they can simply hold out and wait for Kiev to accept the new realities provoked by the errors of 2014—for which, incidentally, the neocon grandees in DC bear a large measure of blame. If Victoria Nuland and her buddies had not encouraged the overthrow of the corrupt but legitimate (i.e., elected) president at that time, the U.S. would not be in the current no-win mess.

The Americans continue to convince themselves that with just a little more aggression, a little more weaponry, a few more ultimata, a bit more butching up, standing tough, insults, and what have you, they will finally force the hands of its adversaries of the moment. Historical lessons from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan leave no trace.

Biden’s video encounter with Putin this week was a predictable dialogue of the deaf, but despite the loyal quotation on every channel here of the script Biden managed to read, Putin came out with a solid win. The U.S. admitted indirectly that NATO will not come to Ukraine’s defense and risk a nuclear confrontation. Our leaders have not yet completely lost their minds—though they’re working hard at it. 

In addition, “further talks” were endorsed, which seems underwhelming until one considers what Putin set out as Russia’s goal: a treaty in which NATO promises to back off. That won’t happen any time soon, if ever, but the fact that the Americans didn’t immediately faint dead away and scotch the idea is a sign of how weak Biden’s position is.

Russia is not worried about further U.S. economic sanctions—the big threat emanating from DC—and is prepared for them in any case. If the Ukrainians go crazy and mount an assault, they will be very sorry as will the European countries facing a new horde of desperate refugees fleeing what’s left of their erstwhile country. Unless some real lunatic gets Joe Biden’s ear, or—heaven forbid—the clueless Kamala Harris gets pushed into a role she is unprepared for, no one in Washington is going to bring on a new geopolitical defeat that would far overshadow that Afghan debacle.

The Americans refuse to grasp the end of the happy days of imperial dictatorship that followed the demise of the USSR. Think-tank chicken hawks must be so bedazzled by all that shiny hardware piled up all over the 800 U.S. military bases scattered around the world that they think its mere existence gives them unchallenged powers. It does not. This week was a tiny defeat for their galactic imperial arrogance: more will follow. The idea that countries might come together to find ways to occupy their respective corners of the globe for mutual benefit seems far beyond their intellectual and imaginative capacities.

Meanwhile, the citizenry is equally unprepared to face facts given the vapid stenography practiced by the herd of “national security” reporters echoing every unsupported assertion emanating from the parallel state at the Pentagon and Langley. The shock of realization once these defeats become impossible to ignore could be surprisingly destabilizing, both a danger and an opportunity.

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Sunday 31 October 2021

Bipartisan Suicide

These days, political discourse consists mostly of barely intelligible strife, disputes over arcane excuses to “own the libs” or to sneer at the dumb bubbas, respectively. But on more important, even existential matters, our “leaders” are in full agreement: life on earth is dull and should end.

The long-term means of getting there—climate-based destruction—is now being shoved aside in favor of a prompter and more straightforward alternative: war, either with China or, failing that, with Russia, or perhaps—why not? —both.

On this issue, Democrats, if anything, are more insistent than the laggard Trumpians. Biden, his top officials, and his party’s congressional barking dogs in the pro-war camp now daily carry flammable liquids to the diplomatic table in eager expectation of the appearance of matches, firmly believing that America’s pansy enemies will immediately retreat shaking in fear at the sight of big, scary us.

Or perhaps they just want to ramp up worldwide tensions so that no one will notice that our dwindling national treasure is being eaten up by the war profiteers and their Pentagon-congressional allies, in which case let’s hope they’re luckier than most everyone else in human history and can calibrate their provocations short of catastrophe.

The latest sticking point chosen by the Biden team is Taiwan, the island whose status has been left conveniently ambiguous for 50 years. It is part of China, all have agreed, and yet operated for decades with considerable autonomy as long as no one uses the I-word (“independence”) or claims that it is a “state” or a “nation.” Avoiding that red line, all is well, or well enough, and things were allowed to muddle along. Taiwanese businesses do a lot of trade with China, and getting rich kept everyone modestly content.

Biden let the cat out of the bag that this status quo was to be jettisoned on Oct. 22 by answering a question at a CNN event that the U.S. would indeed come to the “defense” of Taiwan. Not only did Biden say it would, but he added “Taiwan” to a list of similarly defended nations, South Korea and Japan as if Taiwan was their equivalent, i.e., an independent state. 

The original Biden statement was at first considered another one of the old duffer’s gaffes, quickly corrected by his handlers. However, since then, a steady accumulation of unmistakably policy-shifting statements by members of his team means Biden did not goof at all but rather knew exactly what he was saying. It is now clear that the U.S. has embarked on a new confrontational attitude toward China by threatening it over the status of a piece of what it considers its national territory.

The final confirmation came just days after Biden’s comments when the U.S. announced its support for Taiwan’s return to full membership in various UN bodies. While getting Taiwan a seat at, say, the World Health Organization might be reasonable in other times, the current push from Washington is all about poking the Chinese in the face and making Taiwan look like an independent state. 

The new belligerence has been eagerly taken up by members of Congress, including plenty of Democrats, who seem just as inclined to beat the war drums than Trump’s hyper-aggressive foreign policy team. Elaine Luria, a member from the uniform-heavy Tidewater area of Virginia, went so far as to propose that the president be given the green light to launch military action over Taiwan without prior congressional approval. Luria endorsed the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act, which is a Republican brainchild, proving that on the issue of suiting up for battle, there is zero culture war in America today—everyone fer it, no one agin’ it. 

The practical consequences of Luria’s idea are minimal as anyone not living under a rock can see that the presidency is already far too empowered to go to any war its occupant fancies. The point is to gin up bipartisan clamor for a more threatening posture against China.

No one seems terribly bothered that this proposal encourages the president to launch hostilities with a foreign nuclear power without so much as a brief stop by Congress to see if it’s okay. The 330 million of us who might have other ideas are to be cut out of that rather major decision entirely.

The GOP-Luria bill also calls for a resumption of full U.S.-Taiwan military relations and military exercises with the island’s forces, topped off with a presidential visit to Taiwan. None of this is likely to happen, but it is a sign of the growing detachment from reality that this sort of loose talk is popular in Washington.

Reading what passes for analysis among the foreign policy Blob on Taiwan (and other issues—more below) requires that one enter into a magical land of adult make-believe. (I hope to post this on Hallowe’en, which, come to think of it, is perfect.) The Blobians insist that the decision to throw over 50 years of a peaceable status quo and put up the national dukes will work because the Chinese are sure to back down once their bluff is called. Biden himself referred to the U.S.’s massive war machine that will surely intimidate anyone paying attention. The possibility that foreign nuclear powers might have their own red lines is dismissed as weak-kneed groveling unworthy of Real Men.

Meanwhile, in Europe we have even more demented displays of war-posturing glee. The outgoing German Defense Minister recently called for NATO to get ready for “non-conventional warfare, including nuclear weapons, cyber-attacks, and space military technology. “‘This is the way of deterrence,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told a German radio station, repeating her threat of first use of nukes in Europe in defense of the Baltic states. “We must make it very clear to Russia that we are ready to use such measures,” she insisted. 

No doubt the geniuses behind NATO are desperate to drum up some way to convince their populations that that tottering entity still has a raison d’etre of some sort, but ratcheting up talk of a nuclear weapons toss around Europe seems a bit over the top. Given the tone of such statements, the Russian response has been admirably measured, along the lines of “Perhaps you’ve forgotten how that ended last time around. We haven’t.”

A lot of the commentary around all this war talk tends toward reassurances based on the assumption that threat exaggeration is a long-standing tactic of the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank (MICIMATT) complex [hat tip Ray McGovern], whose ultimate goal is merely more cash for their boondoggles. As Gary Brecher puts it in The eXiled,

No one who matters in the defense business wants total war with China. They just want to keep those trash fires burning, hoping one of them will blaze up big, like a gender-reveal wildfire. And even if none of them do, it’s good for business, because most war scares are about funding. 

But history also has plenty of examples of how provocatively wagging one’s missile at the enemy can lead to an actual war. Pumping up the populace over real or imagined slights can let loose uncontrollable social forces as the Argentine generals learned to their dismay when they let the Falklands/Malvinas genie out of that bottle.

On a deeper level, however, I believe there is a moment of truth approaching about how our species has handled its affairs for many thousands of years, namely, the ingrained assumption that relations among polities is inevitably a zero-sum game in which the mighty dictate and the subordinate obey. The corollary is that if one isn’t up, then one is necessarily down. The idea of simply getting along and working out differences as equals seems foreign to our human consciousness, and it might just be time to evolve to something more intelligent given that the capacity to blow ourselves up once and finally has been in human hands for a while.

Daniel Larison at Antiwar.com calls that attitude the “bankruptcy of Great Power Competition,” and I believe he is on to something crucial about why and how opposition to the madness could mobilize: 

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union split Europe down the middle, but it was in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that massive bloodletting took place. During the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, huge numbers of people were reduced to collateral damage, far away from famous First World flashpoints such as Berlin, their deaths seen as acceptable, if not celebrated,” including genocides in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Indonesia. 

Once major powers have decided on a militaristic, confrontational course, it becomes extremely easy for their political leaders to justify any number of atrocities against innocent people in neutral or contested countries in the name of preventing the rival from advancing. [Therefore,] it is not surprising that almost all states in Southeast Asia want nothing to do with the militarized anti-China coalition that the U.S. is trying to assemble. The nations of Southeast Asia do not want to be forced to choose sides or to become pawns in someone else’s struggle yet again.

The whole article is worth a read. It is a much-needed reminder that the Democrats now in power will have to be completely discredited if the human race is to stand a chance, followed by the complete discrediting of the Republicans who will surely inherit the bipartisan mess.

*

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Friday 8 October 2021

Little by little, then all at once

While the evaporation of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan has drawn our attention, other momentous developments are taking place in U.S. relations with the outside world that barely have scratched the insular consciousness of our citizenry. Dealings with both major and minor powers have delineated the outlines of strategic decision-making—or perhaps “posturing” is the more apt term—at the highest levels. 

In both the Afghan and non-Afghan matters, there are two considerations: the goals the Biden Administration is pursuing and his team’s competence in pursuing them. 

The record is not encouraging on either count. 

The very concept of “diplomacy” implies the deployment of tact, restraint, and even charm based on the assumption that while states have competing interests, they should tread cautiously around conflicts that could escalate (i.e., most if not all of them). We humans glorify war, but we hate losing; even stalemated fights can be enormously costly. 

Given recent setbacks, we ought to be a bit more mindful of this fact, and no doubt average citizens are. 

From all indications, however, the denizens of our nation’s foreign policy/ military/intelligence establishment, often affectionately termed “The Blob,” are not. 

Belligerence, sometimes called “toughness,” is a popular stance among the domestic U.S. audience,    and no doubt that is a universal tendency among our species. We feel protected when our leaders promise us victory and safety, and powerful states get away with imposing their will on subject peoples. As Thucydides famously phrased it, “The powerful exact what they can, and the weak comply.” 

However, American “diplomats” have become imprudently accustomed to thinking that the U.S. is, and will ever be, the powerful state, the only game in town, the modern Athens lording it over weaker cities and dictating terms of submission. This was unsurprising during the Trump years as it reflected that personage’s self-image and worldview as the Master of All He Surveys. 

Biden’s people have replicated the boorishness. Secretary of State Blinken in Anchorage, Deputy Secretary Sherman in Tianjin, China, and most recently the State Department itself in its inflammatory declaration on Taiwan all have poked the Chinese in the ribs and twisted their noses for good measure. U.S. interlocutors consistently refuse to recognize China’s “red lines,” their non-negotiable, core interests, and think nothing of lecturing Chinese diplomats publicly to browbeat them for not doing the Americans’ bidding.
  
Wendy Sherman, schoolmarm [Photo ANDREW HARNIK/POOL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES] 

At the same time, Biden & Co. seem to think that side conversations on topics of interest to the U.S. can proceed normally despite these ongoing attempts at public shaming. 

The behavior might work if the U.S. held all the cards. Because that is not the case, it is time to introduce another concept that originated with the Greeks: hubris. 

Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad. –Greek proverb 

Our diplomats’ attitude, apparently shared by the entire Blobosphere, is remarkably schizophrenic. First, the U.S. spokesperson slams China for all its naughty behavior while back home things like nuclear-powered submarines for Australia are openly described as meant to threaten China with destruction and thereby keep it in line. Then, cooperation is expected on issues important to the U.S. 

This is like saying to one’s neighbor, “You really are an asshole. Let’s meet at 4:00 to trim the hedge between our two properties.” 

It has not gone well. Nonetheless, failure seems not to have generated the slightest doubts about the wisdom of continuing to pursue this approach. 

A similar program was rolled out not long ago to deal with awful, terrible, loathsome, despicable, Big Meanie, etc., etc., Vladimir Putin. How did that episode go? The Americans’ freshly minted client state of Ukraine lost two big chunks of its eastern territory to separatists; then Russia annexed Crimea and announced that attempts to stir up military operations along the border will lead to the destruction of the Ukraine as a viable state (which wouldn’t take much in any case). 

The plutocrat-run Ukrainian protectorate and its neo-Nazi militia bands continues to sink into a hyper-corrupt Slough of Despond and periodically causes U.S. domestic politics to boil over into a frothy, putrid mess (Impeachment I, Hunter Biden). This failure could have been—and was—predicted by those who criticized the eastward march of NATO engineered by the Bushes I and II, Clinton, Obama, and some Trumpians. 

Unsurprisingly, this bipartisan plot to encircle Russia where memories linger of 26 million dead the last time that happened drew a reaction as outlined above. The Blob, instead of learning anything, cheered when Hillary (diplomatically) compared Putin to Hitler. 

What did our leaders think they could do when the Russians said, That will be enough? They could threaten nuclear annihilation but not much else. 

We are headed down the same path with the Chinese where Blobish schizophrenia is even more acute and of longer standing. After all, who exactly who paved the way for China to turn itself into the low-cost production behemoth of the industrial world and to compile huge piles of wealth to invest in its infrastructure and in technical advances? The neoliberal consensus, of which The Blob is an integral part, enabled leaders of both our major parties to convince themselves that out-shoring manufacturing and destroying the U.S. industrial base would not only provide juicy profits but also magically transform China into a clone of western capitalist societies. Someone should research whether they really believed this happy dream or simply could not resist the immense short-term gains to be hoovered up by their buddies. 

How ironic that American captains of industry waged a half-century Cold War against communism only to sell out their own workers to it! Apparently, they never heard the quote misattributed to Lenin that “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.” He never said that though he should have. But I digress. 

What is particularly hard to fathom is The Blob’s persistent belief that by continually confronting and threatening America’s adversaries, the U.S. is guaranteed eventually to win because all these pansy rival countries must and ultimately will “back down.” Given the compelling evidence to the contrary, including the just concluded Afghan debacle, the stubbornness of this delusion is grounds for forensic study. 

American warships recently made a show of force in the waters around Taiwan, a provocation explicitly confirmed by official statements of U.S. commitment to its “democratic ally.” This term suggested a breach of the decades-old One China policy and obliquely questioned China’s sovereignty over Taiwan.

China’s leadership has said in every imaginable key and language that it is not prepared to countenance Taiwan’s independence and will take whatever measures required to prevent it, including the use of force. If the U.S. insists on pushing this dangerous envelope, China will respond militarily at which point the U.S. will face three undesirable options: 

—The U.S. backs down, avoids a confrontation, and is publicly humiliated. Any sitting president would be immediately pilloried in terms rarely seen and could easily find him/herself forced out of office. 

—The U.S. escalates to a nuclear confrontation, earning itself the eternal enmity of all humanity in the unlikely event that there is any left. 

—The U.S. engages in conventional warfare with China, which produces a long and nasty conflict, which ends, in all probability, with the Americans being handed their ass on a plate. If the U.S. “wins,” it then is stuck planning for inevitable next round of fighting and spending untold treasure defending an island half a world away. If Afghanistan cost $6 trillion over 20 years, imagine the price tag of that one. 

Earlier this week, Biden dispatched his national security advisor to an emergency meeting in Switzerland with his Chinese counterpart. Someone in Washington must have escaped the Blobbish bubble long enough to realize China might not be bluffing and that America is in no condition to countenance any of these scenarios. 

While immediate dangers have been avoided, there is no sign that the U.S. has shifted its course. The Chinese must have concluded that there is no reasoning with the Americans and no alternative to preparing for war, which they are plainly doing. 

What is the cause of this stubborn incapacity for seeing the world in anything other than imperial terms? Why can’t America see the benefits of sharing its toys? Or at least not whacking the other kids with sticks? 

One aspect of the mysterious Blob disease is that it is incapable of seeing itself as, well, a Blob, a rigid in-group toeing a party line that admits no real dissent. A recent article in the New York Times illustrated this fact by publishing an article mocking the very notion of The Blob. The author quoted a raft of foreign policy poohbahs who duly agreed that their critics are nincompoops (none of whom were quoted in response) and that the idea of a hegemonic “Blob” was nonsense—itself a sterling example of full-on Blobulousness. 

For example, note how the decline and ignominious fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul stirred Blobbian groupthink to sudden, polemical life. Biden, shepherded into office with their serene approval, was roundly and promptly denounced for abandoning an outpost of empire. Bloboids argued that the rickety apparatus could have been held together a bit longer with some geopolitical sealing wax, thereby avoiding loss of “credibility,” the ghost of Neville Chamberlain, etc. No one was brought onto the TV talk shows or cable networks to offer an alternative view, and any doubters with career ambitions quickly saw that Biden’s decision to withdrawal should not be defended. 

As Daniel Larison wrote in Substack, "The idea that the U.S. would be better off by simply quitting an unwinnable war was considered unthinkable or nonsensical." 

What is never part of this imperial orthodoxy is any hint that the U.S. could fit itself into a world of coexistence with other states and peoples as equals rather than as a master announcing terms to its subjects. A system built on compromise and mutual benefit is unimaginable to them; we are either rulers or ruled. 

Instead, the world is a priori assumed to be implacably hostile and dangerous despite the disappearance of any real ideological competition of the Cold War sort. Threat exaggeration continues in an unbroken line from Kennedy’s fictitious “missile gap” to the Soviet bugaboo of the Reagan years and the convenient elevation of terrorism today, the latter having the special advantage of being impossible to eradicate and therefore eternal.

This post is already long, and the question of whence the intellectual ossification of this inbred gaggle must be set aside for further reflection. That said, the fact of The Blob’s obtuseness remains, and the very brittleness of its consensus makes it highly prone to misjudgment given that it has so effectively suppressed dissident voices. 

No one is tugging at the emperor’s sleeve to remind him that he is a mere mortal, and for that reason the gradual decline of U.S. world dominance could provoke errors that would turn into a precipitous rout. We could find ourselves in a very different world. 

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Wednesday 15 September 2021

Afghanistan II

[photo: Jim Huylebroek, New York Times]

 

“On the afternoon of October 9, 2009, President Barack Obama met with his top generals, Cabinet officials, and his vice president to hash out strategy for the war in Afghanistan. Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, along with much of the military brass, were pushing for a troop increase of 40,000 to 85,000 in Afghanistan. Advocates for an expanded war found their most nettlesome opponent in Joe Biden.

“‘As I read your report, you’re saying that we have about a year,’ Biden said to McChrystal. ‘And that our success relies upon having a reliable, a strong partner in governance to make this work?’

“McChrystal said yes, that was the case. Biden turned to Karl Eikenberry, a former general who was now ambassador to Afghanistan. ‘In your estimation, can we, can that be achieved in the next year?’

“Eikenberry told Biden no, it was not possible. ‘Right now, we’re dealing with an extraordinarily corrupt government,’ he said.

“Biden cut in: ‘If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?’ he asked.

“Woodward’s next lines are the most telling: ‘No one recorded an answer in their notes.’

“Again, Biden asked: ‘If the government doesn’t improve and if you get the troops, in a year, what would be the impact?’

“Richard Holbrooke, special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, chimed in with a reality that was largely kept from the U.S. public. ‘Our presence is the corrupting force,’ Holbrooke said. It’s like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.’”

—Ryan Grim, “Biden’s basic question in a 2009 White House meeting exposed the folly of the Afghanistan war,” The Intercept, Sep 2 2021

*

“In the name of preventing deaths from political violence at home, the United States has fueled a generation of political violence abroad—some 46,000 civilian deaths and 69,000 national military and police deaths in Afghanistan, at least 185,000 civilian deaths and at least 45,000 national military and police in Iraq. However, support for the Afghanistan withdrawal has equally reflected a belief in the ‘smarter’ use of US military might. This entails raining death and destruction on terrorist networks (and civilian bystanders) through air wars and drone strikes while redirecting personnel and material towards Russia and China. When Fareed Zakaria frames a US commitment to Afghanistan as ‘imperial overextension,’ his problem seems to be with the overextension, not the imperial presence.

Andrew Leber, “Losing the wars,” Fellow Travelers, Sep 12, 2021

*

“Ghani spent his formative years in the United States as both a student and professor. His children still live in the States; in fact, his son is a top aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and his daughter-in-law worked for now-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. Ironically, Ghani was often at odds with the basic principles and values the United States were trying to promote in Afghanistan. His government and the strongmen linked to him pursued abuses with impunity. The targeted killing in November 2020 of my brother Yama Siawash, who was a prominent journalist and a staunch critic of Ghani and his strongmen, highlights this impunity. Yama was consistently threatened by Ghani’s supporters as he engaged in heated debates with senior officials on live television, seeking to hold his government to account through his journalism. The car bomb, which killed my brother, occurred in a vehicle owned by the Afghan government and was parked in the government’s parking lot in Kabul’s green zone, a heavily-surveilled premises with footage accessible to the U.S. government via the American army’s surveillance blimps.”

— Baktash Siawash, “Ashraf Ghani was an American mistake with a high price for Afghans,” Responsible Statecraft, Sep 14, 2021

*

“We are shown tragic scenes from the Kabul airport on a loop and not the countless images of twenty years of suffering inflicted on the Afghan people by the war: night raids, scared faces, families torn apart, houses crushed by airstrike, children without limbs. Biden made sure to make it clear that the indefinite ‘war on Terror’ is here to stay. He clarified how the war is to be continued: ‘We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed.’ The world witnessed the unfolding of this ‘new’ strategy already shortly before American troops left Afghanistan when US drone strikes in retaliation of the ISIS-K attack killed ten civilians, including seven children. Perhaps to the American public the phrase ‘over-the-horizon capabilities’ sounds like a new strategy. To us Middle Easterners, they are very well known.”

Mir Ali Hosseini, “Why we shouldn’t congratulate Biden on Afghanistan,” Counterpunch, Sep 10, 2021

*

“After having spent roughly half [my adult life] as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform the production of disinformation and propaganda for use as frequently against America’s allies as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude and speed of the change from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: ‘Stop resisting.’”

—Edward Snowden, “A hell of our own making,” Continuing Ed, Aug 17, 2021

*

“The Afghanistan Papers’ greatest value is to provide an impressionistic portrait of the generational worldview and shaping illusions of an American elite—Democrats and Republicans alike on both sides of the civilian-military divide—who responded to a long public record of defeats, blunders, and missed opportunities in Afghanistan by doubling down. Numerous U.S. officials privately acknowledged believing that the war was unwinnable. ‘Your job was not to win; it was to not lose,’ one former member of the National Security Council staff said in 2014.

“‘There was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working despite hard evidence to the contrary,” recalls a National Security Council official quoted by the [Washington] Post. ‘Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,’ said Army colonel and senior counterinsurgency adviser Bob Crowley in a 2016 interview.

“The blob was a self-protecting vehicle for the ambitions of an American ruling class cut off from the consequences of its own policies. Evidence of failure often led to bitter intra-class recriminations along partisan lines, but it did not shake the broadly shared faith in this class’s right to rule by grand design.”

—Jacob Siegel, “Data-driven defeat: Information versus interests in Afghanistan,” American Affairs, Summer 2020 [a year before the collapse]

*

“It stretches credulity to believe a nation that spent over $500 billion during 2001–13 on intelligence and $527 billion more during the next seven years was so utterly inept that it had no idea of Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban for over two decades. Logically, only two conclusions are possible: either the famed capability of U.S. intelligence is a hoax, or, finding itself mired in a faulty strategy in Afghanistan, Washington was left with no option but to ignore what Pakistan had been doing.”

— N.C. Asthanam, “Pakistan’s support of the Taliban is one of the greatest fears of covert intelligence,” The Wire, Sep 5, 2021

*

“It was a dozen years into the war when I visited Camp Shorabak [where] we were taken to see NATO’s mission to train Afghan soldiers in the use of the new and alien U.S. weaponry that Congress had compelled them to adopt under the influence of the US military-industrial complex. The Afghan officers, unarmed, sat on the ground. The British instructor, with a pistol at his side, stood at the whiteboard, entirely reliant on an unarmed Afghan translator. In each doorway stood a Georgian soldier in full body armour, holding an automatic rifle poised with the safety catch off, the Caucasian nation displaying its eagerness to join NATO through its readiness to shoot our Afghan allies on the spot if they made a move to attack their teacher. If I didn’t know already that the Afghan campaign was doomed, I knew it then.”

Anatol Lieven, “Nemesis: Why the west was doomed to lose in Afghanistan,” Prospect, Aug 27, 2021

*

[Note the lack of human agency in the highlighted texts.]

“In hindsight, we can now see that 9/11 was a harbinger of what was to come: not the globalization of terrorism but the terrors of globalization. Nonetheless, 9/11 marked a historical turning point with a profound impact on US foreign policy in the two decades since. Although the attacks did not usher in an era of global terrorism, they did usher in the so-called Global War on Terrorism, which profoundly affected what the U.S. did in the world, how the world came to regard the U.S., and how many Americans came to see their country’s foreign policy.

The Global War on Terrorism also led the US to launch a war in Iraq. Decisions to disband the Iraqi military and exclude from government jobs many of the Iraqis who had been associated with the previous regime exacerbated an already chaotic situation. In the end, the U.S. was forced to increase its military presence to nearly 170,000 troops to sustain the embattled successor government in Baghdad.

“Likewise, the push for war, together with the 2007–09 global financial crisis and its economic fallout, powerfully undermined Americans’ faith in elites, stimulating the rise of populist sentiment that, among other things, helped pave the way for the presidency of Donald Trump.”

—Richard Haass, “The world 9/11 made,” Project Syndicate, Sep 9, 2021

[Haass is a mega-blob-creature speaking for the war-making apparatus.]

*

“After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, the top U.S. commanders in Hawaii were summarily relieved of their posts, reduced in rank, and retired. Unless failure has consequences, further failures are all but guaranteed. Allow me to suggest a corrective action: a purge. Oblige all active duty three- and four-star generals (and admirals) to retire forthwith. Rebuild the ranks of the senior officer corps with members of a younger generation willing and able to acknowledge the shortcomings of recent American military leadership at the top. I would suggest the following approach: The secretary of defense—not the current incumbent; as a former four-star he too should be purged—should personally interview one- and two-star officers deemed to possess particular promise. The interview need not be long. Indeed, it should consist of a single question: ‘On a scale of 1-to-10, where 1 is lousy, 10 excellent, and 5 mediocre, how would you rate U.S. military performance over the past 20 years?’”

“Those replying with a number above 5 should be immediately excused and denied consideration for further promotion. Those replying with a number of 5 or below should be invited into an adjacent room and given two hours to write an essay that addresses the following topic: ‘What is the problem and how do we fix it?’”

—Andrew Bacevich, “A modest proposal: Fire all of the post 9/11 generals,” Responsible Statecraft, Sep 11, 2021 https://bit.ly/3Ad7d5Q

*

“Now we can lure the Russians into the Afghan trap,” Brzezinski wrote Carter in a secret note of February 1979. Carter is still alive. The mainstream American press are not reporting that they have asked Carter for comment or that he has refused. Not even the alt-media investigators have pursued him. But it’s already clear what Carter thinks. He believes he scored one of the world’s great strategic victories; he is disgruntled that he has never received the public credit he thinks he deserves.”

— John Helmer, “The two Satans of Afghanistan—and Jimmy Carter’s lips are sealed,” Dances with Bears, Sep 5, 2021

*

“You know what’s deadly misinformation? When the government drones a bunch of kids in Kabul and says there are no civilian casualties. Or when leaders go to war on false pretenses. I don’t see anyone calling for Internet bans of the Pentagon.”

—Matt Taibbi on Twitter

*

“We came in through the Khyber Pass, risking the gunmen, or flew on small planes, soaring over the mountains before diving sharply to the runway. Landing in Kabul was dizzying even without the raw excitement of being there, hearts pounding as we taxied past the carcasses of old military planes, the backstory of the war we’d come to watch. Afghanistan opened for us like a movie, in which we—the journalists who covered this war—played multiple and sometimes conflicting roles. Many of us mainlined it, drawn back again and again to the place and the people, to the way it made us feel worthy by feeding the hope that we could do some good.

“Now I wonder what role I played in this disaster. How was I—how were we, the press on the ground—complicit? We wrote about America’s misdeeds, but the people back home must have missed those stories. The government listened for a while, then got tired of it. What was our role? How did we feed the war by serving as its narrators, its chorus, its riveted audience?

“However adversarial, however skeptical, we were there as a corollary of Western power. We made our careers in these places, fancied ourselves truth-tellers, documenting the doublespeak of our governments and the Afghans in power—but what did it matter if no one was paying attention?

“Moral injury is now, I believe, a national disorder. In our broken country, perhaps nothing connects us so powerfully as our rage, guilt, and failure to trust each other—all symptoms of this illness. Our leaders are morally compromised. By extension, we are liars, cheaters, not to be trusted.”

Vanessa Gezari, “I reported on the war in Afghanistan. Was I complicit in the harm America caused?” The Intercept, Sep 2, 2021

*

“Before he stole $169 million and fled his failed state in disgrace, Afghanistan’s puppet President Ashraf Ghani was formed in elite American universities, given U.S. citizenship, trained in neoliberal economics by the World Bank, glorified in the media as an ‘incorruptible’ technocrat, coached by powerful DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council.

“Indeed, Western governments and their stenographers in the corporate media enjoyed a veritable love affair with Ashraf Ghani. He was a poster boy for the exportation of neoliberalism to what had been Taliban territory, their very own Afghan Milton Friedman, a faithful disciple of Francis Fukuyama—who proudly blurbed Ghani’s book. Washington was thrilled with Ghani’s reign in Afghanistan, because it had finally found a new way to implement Augusto Pinochet’s economic program but without the PR cost of torturing and massacring droves of dissenters in stadiums.

“Ghani worked at the World Bank for a decade overseeing the implementation of devastating structural adjustment programs, austerity measures, and mass privatizations, primarily in the Global South, but also in the former Soviet Union. In 2006, Ghani leveraged his experience implementing ‘pro-business’ policies from post-Soviet Russia to his own homeland to co-found a think tank called the Institute for State Effectiveness (ISE). Any novelist seeking to satirize DC think tanks might have been criticized for being too on the nose if they wrote about such an ISE. The cherry on top of the absurdity came in 2008, when Ghani and Lockhart detailed their technocratic worldview in a book entitled Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.

“Highlighting their ideological zealotry, [coauthors] Ghani and Lockhart even went so far as to assert an ‘incompatibility between capitalism and corruption.’ Of course, Ghani would go on to prove just how absurd this statement was by selling off his country to U.S. companies in which his family members had invested, furnishing them with exclusive access to Afghanistan’s mineral reserves, and then bolting to a Gulf monarchy with $169 million in stolen state funds.”

Ben Norton, “How elite US institutions created Afghanistan’s neoliberal President Ashraf Ghani who stole $169 million from his country,” Grayzone, Sep 2, 2021 https://bit.ly/3AdpCPN

*

“In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—[warlord & U.S. ally] Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to ‘cover for’ the fact that Dado’s forces had been ‘involved with the ambush.’

“The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable. The United Nations began agitating for Dado’s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort. In 2004, the U.N. launched a program to disarm pro-government militias. A [Dado-linked] commander learned of the plan and rebranded a segment of the militia as a ‘private-security company’ under contract with the Americans, enabling roughly a third of the fighters to remain armed. Another third kept their weapons by signing a contract with a Texas-based firm to protect road-paving crews. (When the Karzai government replaced these private guards with police, the commander engineered a hit that killed 15 policemen, and then recovered the contract.)

“In 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children. The next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid.”

—Anand Gopal, “The other Afghan women,” New Yorker, Sep 6, 2021

*

“In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S.-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners by jamming them into metal shipping containers and letting them suffocate. At the time, Dostum was on the CIA’s payroll and had been working with U.S. special forces to oust the Taliban from power. The Bush administration blocked subsequent efforts to investigate the mass murder even after the FBI interviewed witnesses among the surviving Afghans who had been moved to the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after human rights officials publicly identified the mass grave site where Dostum’s forces had disposed of bodies. Later, President Barack Obama promised to investigate and then took no action.

“Instead, Hollywood stepped in and turned Dostum into a hero. The 2018 movie, 12 Strong, a jingoistic account of the partnership between U.S. special forces and Dostum in the 2001 invasion, whitewashed Dostum even as his crimes continued to pile up in the years after the prisoner massacre. At the time of the movie’s January 2018 release, Dostum was in exile, hiding from criminal charges in Afghanistan for having ordered his bodyguards to rape a political opponent with an assault rifle. The movie (filmed in New Mexico, not Afghanistan) was based on a book that a New York Times reviewer called ‘a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work.’

“One of the first things the U.S. did after gaining effective control over Afghanistan following the Taliban’s ouster in 2001 was to set up secret torture chambers. Beginning in 2002, the CIA tortured both Afghans and foreign prisoners flown to these torture rooms from all over Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The worst torture chamber was nicknamed ‘The Darkness’ by the prisoners sent there, who suffered such complete sensory deprivation that they did not even know they were in Afghanistan. They were chained in solitary confinement with no light and music blaring constantly. They were hung by their arms for as long as two days, slammed against walls, forced to lie naked on tarps while gallons of ice water were poured over their bodies. At least one prisoner died in CIA custody after being left shackled in frigid temperatures.

“No one was ever held to account for the American torture regime in Afghanistan.”

—James Risen, “A war’s epitaph,” The Intercept, Aug 26, 2021

*

[And finally, the original casus belli: 9/11]

“The 9/11 hijackers did not act alone. They had a substantial support network that was deeply embedded inside the United States and abroad for nearly a decade prior to, on, and after the 9/11 attacks. It is my understanding that this support network spanned several states including California; Arizona; Nevada; Washington; Minnesota; Oklahoma; Illinois; Florida; North Carolina; Virginia; Massachusetts; Maine; New York; New Jersey; and Texas. The support network also included several countries like Germany; Spain; France; the U.K.; Egypt; Kenya; Tanzania; Sudan; Yemen; Saudi Arabia; the United Arab Emirates; Qatar; Pakistan; Malaysia; Thailand; Iran; and Afghanistan.

“Known and lethal terrorists openly and freely operated inside the U.S. for years before the 9/11 attacks, and yet authorities failed to prevent the cold-blooded murders of our 3,000 loved ones. More than 14 U.S. local and federal jurisdictions had law enforcement agencies that brushed up against the 9/11 hijackers and their supporters. Moreover, more than 18 foreign law enforcement counterparts also investigated some of those involved in the 9/11 attacks. They unearthed evidence, wrote reports, monitored activities, watched money wires, and investigated stock sales, arms and weapons shipments across borders, eyebrow-raising passports and visa documents, and lethal operatives roaming the world, planning murder with impunity. These people remain fully aware of the truth and how their one part of the damning puzzle fits together. Yet none speak out.

“It would seem implausible that not one individual, entity, bank, or business has been fully prosecuted and found criminally responsible as a co-conspirator for the crime that took place. And yet our nation has not found, and will not ever find, it necessary to hold any co-conspirator of the 9/11 hijackers accountable in a court of criminal law.

“Without any standing indictments or prosecutions meted out by the Department of Justice against the other identifiable co-conspirators, the job of seeking out accountability and justice has fallen on the shoulders of the 9/11 families, who were left to take matters of justice into our own hands through the second-rate route of civil litigation. This leaves us alone and with a stark disadvantage as we try to hold terrorists and their co-conspirators accountable for the murder of our loved ones in federal civil court.

“Year after year, Department of Justice lawyers, attorneys general, and prosecutors willfully choose to not help the 9/11 families as we fight the terrorists in court; they nastily refuse to share or declassify the information and evidence they have in their files so that we can nail terrorists and terrorist supporters. Instead, horrifically, some U.S. prosecutors literally sit on the side of the defendants (in this case, Saudi Arabia) and help the key evidence we need stay secret.”

—Kristen Breitweiser, “My husband died on 9/11. I am still waiting for a trial of his killers,” The Intercept, Sep 4 2021

*

If you would like to receive alerts of these posts, email me at <tfrasca@yahoo.com>

Saturday 28 August 2021

Episode 1, Page 1, Upper Left-Hand Corner: Afghanistan



“Any post-mortem on ‘what went wrong in Afghanistan’ that does not include a root cause of dysfunction within the United States government is missing the cause of the disaster that the Global War on Terror has become. Afghanistan is a political failure, it is a policy failure, it is a military failure, and it is a human failure. A United States that cannot conduct conflict resolution within its own government can neither project nor maintain a coherent foreign policy to the rest of the world.”

—Andrew Donaldson, “The rootcause of the Afghanistan crisis? U.S. domestic politics,” Diplomatic Courier, Aug 21, 2021 

*

“There is a more important question that keeps coming up, whether it’s [Afghanistan], the Boeing 737 Max, opioids, Covid mismanagement, or anything else of social importance. Do we have the competence to govern ourselves anymore? Will this loss spur genuine reform of our McKinsey-ified elites who failed so spectacularly? None of these tens of thousands of Ivy League-encrusted, PR-savvy, highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. They can write books on leadership, or do PowerPoints, or leak stories. But the hard logistics of actually using resources to achieve something important are foreign to them. The people who are in charge of the governing institutions in our society are simply divorced from the underlying logistics of what makes them work.”

—Matt Stoller, “The war in Afghanistan is what happens whenMcKinsey types run everything,” BIG, Aug 27, 2021

*

“Receiving less attention than this disaster, but also revealing an utter lack of senior leader accountability, is our surrendering a modern weapons arsenal to the Taliban. To date, the senior officials responsible for handing our enemy millions of dollars of weaponry have faced less adverse consequence than my soldiers and I received for losing an inert piece of plastic worth less than $100. In fact, if the past is precedent, many of the architects of this catastrophic failure will soon enjoy corporate board perches from which to make small fortunes while also making frequent guest appearances on cable news. In this breathtaking lack of accountability, our Afghanistan mission mirrors the society from which it emerged. There is a yawning disconnect between the accountability that we enforce on those occupying the lower rungs of society while our ruling class continues to show a remarkable ability to ‘fail up.’”

—Will Bardenwerper, “The breathtakinglack of official accountability in Afghanistan,” Responsible Statecraft,” Aug 25, 2021 

*

“The Taliban have seized U.S. military biometrics devices that could aid in the identification of Afghans who assisted coalition forces. Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) devices contain iris scans and fingerprints as well as biographical information and are used to access large centralized databases.”

—Ken Klippenstein & Sara Sirota, “The Taliban have seizedU.S. military biometrics devices,” The Intercept, Aug 17 2021 

*

“On a visit to Moscow in 2018, a high officer of the Duma told me that Russia’s post-Soviet recovery began with the decision in 1992 to cut military spending by 75%, clearing the way for eventual domestic reconstruction, and even for the creation of a military force that actually meets Russia’s contemporary security needs. A similar moment has arrived in the US. Given the current American mood and the truths now emerging, to accept the world as it is might also prove to be, of all things, politically astute. This is the moment to acknowledge that the country’s vast and expensive military power no longer serves any purpose that can justify its cost.”

—James K. Galbraith, “Afghanistanwas always about American politics,” Project Syndicate, Aug 20, 2021 

*

“Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for. And what did we stand for? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, a government system where billionaires get to write the rules. In 2011 an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts.”

—former NPR reporter who then stayed in Afghanistan for 10 years Sarah Cheyes, interviewed on PBS, “The U.S. ignoredcorruption within the Afghan government. Did that lead to its fall?” PBS News Hour, Aug 20, 2021

*

“That extremists were able to gain an early foothold in rural regions is also due in part to the massive corruption in the capital and the numerous military operations carried out by NATO and its Afghan allies. Drone attacks and brutal nightly raids regularly caused numerous civilian casualties in Afghan villages. Many survivors shifted their support to the Taliban as result.”

—Emran Feroz, "Why the West failed to understand Afghanistan," DW (Deutsche World), Aug 23, 2021

*

“An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts. Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. ‘Two dollars for each of my family killed,’ she said.”

—John Pilger, “The story of US-led collusion in razingAfghanistan to the ground,” InDepthNews, Aug 25, 2021 

*

“The U.S. government has now spent 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild Afghanistan, its security forces, civilian government institutions, economy, and civil society. The Department of Defense (DOD) has also spent $837 billion on warfighting. The extraordinary costs were meant to serve a purpose—though the definition of that purpose kept changing evolved over time. While there have been several areas of improvement—most notably in the areas of health care, maternal health, and education—progress has been elusive and the prospects for sustaining this progress are dubious.”

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), “What we need to learn: Lessons from twenty yearsof Afghanistan reconstruction,” Aug, 2021 

*

“On the weekend of August 14, German diplomats routinely driving through Kabul’s diplomatic quarter noted an oddity. US soldiers who usually keep guard had abandoned the compound. The Germans also noticed that the road to the international airport, normally secured by American troops, was also undefended. They called around to Western colleagues and learned that the US had withdrawn the forces to their own embassy. Only the next day did US diplomats inform their allies that they, too, should leave the so-called Green Zone and head to the airport, as the Americans were already doing.”

—Daniel Williams, “Biden’s US-first approach leaves NATO in thelurch,” Asia Times, Aug 23, 2021

*

“The UK knowingly entered a subordinate military arrangement with the US in Afghanistan such that the final decision to withdraw wasn’t even contingent on any ‘consultation’ with UK officials. Oddly, the basic powerlessness of a scenario where the US President can make an operational decision in Afghanistan and the UK has no choice but to follow suit never seems to have bothered [former PM Theresa] May or her like-minded colleagues at any point in the 20 years prior to August 2021. Conspicuously missing from these Parliamentary outcries is any awareness that choosing to become an inert, emasculated appendage of the US is the thing that really appears to have doomed ‘Global Britain.’

“It’s also unclear whether [critics are] familiar with the US government’s own top auditor reporting that widows of dead Afghan National Army soldiers had to give sexual favors to God-knows-who in order to receive their dead husbands’ pensions. Oddly, this never roused the passions of these sudden defenders of Afghan women, back when the US was an active combatant in the war with the UK as its obedient understudy.”

—Michael Tracey, “British melodrama over Afghanistan withdrawalmasks their own impotence and irrelevance,” MT [blog], Aug 25, 2021 

*

Christina Zhao, “Chinese state medias mock U.S. over Afghanistan:‘Smoother than presidential transition,’” Newsweek, Aug 15, 2021 

*

“Sens. Jack Reed (Armed Services), Mark Warner (Intelligence), and Robert Menendez (Foreign Affairs) are piling on the frenzy in Washington. These same senators’ reactions to the Washington Post’s investigation in December 2019—dubbed the ‘Afghanistan Papers’—which found that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan? Reed, Warner, and Menendez said very little about the Post’s findings.”

—Ben Armbruster, “Senators nowinvestigating Biden’s withdrawal were mum on ‘Afghanistan Papers,’” Responsible Statecraft, Aug 20, 2021 

*

“More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their allies destroyed. ‘Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday. It all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning; these were the people the West supported.’ In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. ‘Marina’ of RAWA told me, ‘We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know.’ Now, they do.”

—John Pilger, “The great game of smashing countries," ARENA, Aug 25, 2021 

*

“It is really something to watch this town attempt to absolve itself from two decades of jingoism, profiteering, barely existent oversight, and zero accountability by suddenly demanding answers about Afghanistan.”

—Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders

*

No doubt if Trump had followed through on his stated desire to finally end the war, the chaotic scenes emerging out of Kabul would have been portrayed as somehow part-and-parcel of his secret desire to upend the American-led world order at the behest of Vladimir Putin. The media outrage would have been even more apocalyptic and frothingly conspiratorial. Although the media’s affinities are largely against Trump and largely for Biden, both still attract hyper-animosity when they seek to end wars.”

—Michael Tracey, “Ignore the fake ‘experts’—The real ‘catastrophe’ in Afghanistan was alwaysthe war itself,” MT [blog], Aug 17, 2021 

*

“From the outset, America and its allies embraced—and never reconsidered—a top-down state-building strategy that was always destined to fail. The assumption is that if you can establish overwhelming military dominance over a territory and subdue all other sources of power, you can then impose your will. Yet in most places, this theory is only half right, at best; in Afghanistan, it was dead wrong. Most states have been constructed not by force but by compromise and cooperation. In this model, the state is not imposed on a society against its wishes; rather, state institutions build legitimacy by securing a modicum of popular support.”

—Daron Acemoglu, “Why nation-building failed in Afghanistan,” Project Syndicate, Aug 20, 2021 

*

“Some will say, they didn't fight! They get what they deserve! To which I say, ‘And what do we deserve?’” A fractious country comprised of warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; unable to wade beyond shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, and so they perish—in the span of a breath—without ever reaching the promised shore.” [He’s not talking about Afghanistan.]

Edward Snowden, “A hell ofour own making,” Continuing Ed, Aug 17, 2021 

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“The global wealth and influence of the United States was so great that it could simply afford a 20-year campaign with no practical value.”

—Andrey Shusentsov, “How much is experience worth? Twenty years of US experiments in theMiddle East,” Valdai Discussion Club, Aug 18, 2021 

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“They were careless people. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, letting others clean up the mess they had made.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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[written before the Afghanistan collapse] “Potential adversaries have spent 30 years watching and learning from U.S. operations. Any reasonably intelligent counterparty would pay attention to what the U.S. has been doing and then figure out what to expect and how to deal with it. Come the next real war, U.S. forces won’t own space or the skies. Won’t run the electromagnetic spectrum. Won’t have unfettered communications. Won’t control logistics. Won’t have good targeting data. Won’t have air supremacy, let alone sea supremacy or undersea dominance. And many of the expensive weapon systems simply won’t work in the degraded environment. It took an internal wargame in the Department of Defense to illustrate the problem such that no less than one of the most senior generals in the military came out of the closet to admit that America’s super-expensive military complex can’t win the next big war.”

—Byron W. King, “‘It failed miserably’—What if the US losta war and nobody noticed?” Whiskey & Gunpowder, Jul 29, 2021 https://bit.ly/3zprrsI