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The neocons are probably shooting themselves in the hip once again

Axios:

The U.S. military has secured the international airport in Kabul and flights evacuating civilians and diplomats in Afghanistan have resumed….

Approximately 700 to 800 people were evacuated on seven flights overnight, including 165 American citizens. The rest are a mix of special immigrant visa (SIV) applicants and foreign nationals….

The Pentagon is aiming to have at least one flight per hour take off from Hamid Karzai International Airport when operations are fully running, with the expectation that 5,000 to 9,000 people can be evacuated per day….

The evacuation effort will continue until Aug. 31.

Possibly longer.

At the minimum of 5,000 per day, 70,000 will be evacuated by August's end.

9,000 per day would mean 126,000 evacuations, 36,000 more than the highest estimate of stranded allies.

We must remember that neocon scolds always shoot from the hip.

The dogs of (endless) war are hungry ...

… and they're going back to their roots.

Text this morning from a former senior foreign policy maker in both Democratic and Republican administrations:

“Biden speech in a nutshell. ‘I wanted to get out of Afghanistan very badly, and I got us out as badly as I could.’”

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 17, 2021

"What a bunch of crap," chimed in chickenhawk Marco Rubio. "This administration was specifically told Afghan forces would surrender faster than our ability to exit. They decided to ignore these warnings & smugly tell everyone how smart & brilliant they are," he added in a rousing display of neoconning smugness.

Yet in his national address yesterday, President Biden conceded that "the truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated."

Does that sound to you like smugness? What's more, as the Washington Post reminds us, U.S. intelligence and military officials "effectively put the public on notice" months ago about a more-rapid-than-anticipated Afghan security force collapse — after 20 years of U.S. training, guiding and conditioning, all of it useless.

It's important, I think, to note that I have not defended Biden on this because of an irreversible case of political hackery. I don't do that. I have criticized him for failing to more forcefully champion voting rights, misleading Americans as to the actual size of Afghan security forces, and there's no question that our allies' evacuation has been bungled. (The White House's counter-assertion that many of them resisted leaving doesn't cut it.) For that, Biden will have to take his lumps, which he also acknowledged yesterday in a clear sign of culpability.

Which neocons such as Bill Kristol and Marco Rubio never have and never will. They'll be smug to the end.

***

P.S.: One of their principal criticisms centers on Biden's timing. He should have waited till winter, they say, when the Taliban are snuggled in their سَرِِير. But you know that next would have come this: "Spring is just around the corner" — so we'd better stick around at least one more, one more, one more year.  

One president. Not four.

George Bush has "been watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness." No mention of personal responsibility for these tragic events, no regret, still no acknowledgement of mistakes made. He does, however, bring good tidings. He not only remains "optimistic" — which certainly lifts my optimism — he stands ready to help "in this time of need." We can now add his help to that of the IRS'.

In his statement yesterday, he thanked the "remarkable men and women of the United States" who "took out a brutal enemy and denied Al Qaeda a safe haven" in Afghanistan. Temporarily, that is. Al Qaeda can again flourish there, plus it has branches and affiliates in Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Bangladesh, Myanmar, India, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Mali and Niger. There's also ISIS in Yemen, the Sinai, Libya and, you guessed it, Afghanistan.

I never attended Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, but even I knew, as I wrote 20 years ago, that a post-9/11 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would be the prodigiously wrong way to go. Send in a special ops force and then get out, I wrote — just before Bush blundered. The sharply focused killing of bad guys is one thing, I observed; the certain mission creep and resulting permanence of thousands of combat troops quite another.

Hundreds of foreign policy mavens, military historians, columnists, editorialists, bloggers and politicians were observing the same. Bush ignored us all. And our warnings turned to a protracted, grim reality.

Vast blame-gaming and finger-pointing over the predestined debacle of U.S. withdrawal are now thriving in the Emerald City. Yet fundamentally there's just one blame to cast, one man to point a finger at.

Biden's Afghanistan address

President Biden's address to the American public was determined, forceful, comprehensive — and unapologetic, as it should have been.

He's been thrust into an impossible situation 20 years in the making by three prior presidential administrations, and he firmly refused to extend this immense America debacle even one month longer. He acknowledged that his decision to withdraw at this time and in this way would be roundly criticized, and to that, he lifted a middle finger — the sign of a strong and courageous leader, not a confused, out-of-touch one.

I watched Biden's address on MSNBC and was intrigued by anchor Nicolle Wallace's observation immediately thereafter: Ninety-five percent of the American public will agree with what the president said, and 95 percent of the press will heckle.

I have a suggestion for the latter. Charter some planes, fly into Kabul's airport and others throughout the countryside, gather up as many American diplomats, civilian workers and Afghan allies as you can, fly them … wherever? … and fly back to Kabul and elsewhere. Then repeat.

One other suggestion: Go well armed.

Our unshared "dream" of Afghanistan's future

From the Times, a mostly mistaken headline:

The Times is correct in saying the war had to end, yet it was bound to end in chaos. America's I.V. withdrawal of lives and treasure has always meant the inexorability of a whimpering, sad-sack disaster. Afghan culture has been braindead for ages, and only ages more of U.S. intervention could have prevented it from flatlining once again.

I agree with the Times that the greatest tragedy is this: "Shaping a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule proved to be … a dream." The Times, however, describes this as the American dream. For it to have materialized, the dream had to have been a powerful, organic, Afghan objective. And it never was. The war's end as a tragedy? Or a choice? 

The Times is also correct in observing that "the U.S. military is, if nothing else, a logistical superpower, and it should move heaven and earth and anything in between to rescue those people who have risked everything for a better future. Red tape shouldn’t stand between allies and salvation." What the Times omits is that far more than red tape stands between our allies and their salvation. Many of them are scattered all over Afghanistan's countryside; thus to do what the Times suggests in any ultimate way also suggests another full-scale invasion.

But yes, of course, for those in Kabul, heaven and earth should be moved — which is exactly what the Biden administration is attempting.

The machinery of Afghanistan's dreadful fate has so many moving parts, it's impossible to lay out a thoroughgoing schematic. All that can be nailed down with honest precision is what comes in the Times' mid-headline segment: "The war had to end."

A telling tweet: Uproars in D.C.'s exalted atmosphere, silence on the ground

Mr. Gallego is an Iraq War vet and Democratic congressman from Arizona's 7th district.

What I am feeling and thinking about the situation in Afghanistan, I can never fit on Twitter. But one thing that is definitely sticking out is that I haven’t gotten one constituent call about it and my district has a large Veteran population.

— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) August 14, 2021

Some readers may think that reflecting on Afghanistan's awful predicament in terms of U.S. politics is repellent as well as reductive. But such reflections are actually quite helpful and should be welcomed, since politics always dictate the course of American life and treasure. Everything is subordinate to politics.

Which, paradoxically, Rep. Gallego isn't playing in his tweet — though he is, in a kind of yin-yang way. He dismisses the politics of Afghanistan as a domestic blowback danger, which, of course, is itself politics-embracing. Yet his associated purpose is to remind constituents of what they evidently have already remembered, that being President Biden's expressed sentiment last month: "We have members of our military whose parents fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago. Would you send their children and their grandchildren as well? Would you send your own son or daughter?"

Two days ago, Biden added that "an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me."

Nor has it been acceptable to the American electorate, which accounts for the silence among Gallego's constituents.

What a disgrace

Never failing to gobsmack this spectator are pseudoconservatives' dramatic windups — contortions of recent history — in the service of dazzling curve balls — cheap political attacks landing smack in the strike zone of fandom.

And this morning the Wall Street Journal editorial board, in "Biden's Afghanistan Surrender," leads with a beaut:

"President Biden’s statement on Saturday washing his hands of Afghanistan deserves to go down as one of the most shameful in history by a Commander in Chief…. With that statement of capitulation, the Afghan military’s last resistance collapsed."

The "capitulation" the Journal's editors are pitching was defined by Afghanistan's surrender. In city after city, province after province, the nation's oxymoronic security forces laid down their arms before the Taliban without a fight; such has been their "resistance." To redefine this rolling debacle as Biden's surrender is merely to pull a fast one.

These days I always hesitate to use this noun, since it's one of Trump's exceedingly rare best words which he uses incessantly. But in this instance, it's a perfect fit: The WSJ's sophistry is a disgrace.

The potential danger here is that anti-interventionist, pro-interventionist Republicans, depending on which party sits in the White House, will revive the myth of U.S. omnipotence. The arrogance of neoconservatism is strong, which, setting aside its monstrous failure in Vietnam, has for 20 years cost trillions of dollars, 2,372 American military deaths and more than 20,000 wounded in Afghanistan.

And yet we read from WSJ editors and hear from likeminded pols of President Biden's surrender — which, in fact, on the ground and in the cultural air, has been Afghanistan's all along.

Order ≠ Afghanistan, never has

​​​​​Note the contradiction between this first Washington Post paragraph and the sixth:

By the middle of the week, as cities across Afghanistan were falling like dominoes to the Taliban and U.S. diplomats appeared increasingly at risk, President Biden’s plan for an orderly end to the United States’ longest war was quickly falling apart….

The lightning collapse is rooted in misplaced assumptions — including a failure to account for how the U.S. departure would catalyze a crisis of confidence in Afghan leaders and security forces, enabling the Taliban blitz — from the moment Biden announced the withdrawal this spring. It is equally the product of two decades of miscalculations about transforming Afghanistan and overly optimistic assessments of progress that have plagued the war from its start.

Writing in paragraph 6 that "the lightning collapse is rooted in misplaced assumptions" is less an observation of Biden's plan "quickly falling apart" (paragraph 1) than it is a familiar reference to "overly optimistic assessments" and "miscalculations" which "have plagued the war from its start." Which is to speculate that the withdrawal plan, as with nearly every U.S. plan in Afghanistan, was likely rooted in misplaced assumptions — which, in all their variations, have sabotaged every foreign invader since the early 19th century.

The one alternative — perhaps the more likely alternative — to misplaced assumptions about a peaceful, orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops is that Afghan mayhem was indeed assumed by the administration; that is, the "lightning collapse" was less a "failure to account for" the acute "crisis of confidence" in the country's central government than an anticipated consequence of the U.S. just ripping off the bandaids.

Order ≠ Afghanistan, never has.

Afghanistan's eternal predicament, and the U.S. politics of it all

The most striking quote I've yet read as to why Afghanistan is so swiftly falling to the Taliban comes from a police chief who was fighting for Kandahar's survival last week: "They’re just trying to finish us off."

"They" being the Taliban, right? Wrong. The chief was speaking of his own government; a government so demonstrably incompetent in supplying its security forces with food and ammunition, let alone air power, it must be in cahoots with the insurgents, he believed.

That's one theory, and it's supported by an Afghan Army corps commander: "A number of Parliament members and politicians fanned the flame started by the enemy." By that he meant his country is falling not because of the Taliban's manpower, but because of its "psychological war" — one more influential among government leaders than troops.

The more common theory for Afghanistan's collapse was reiterated by another police chief: "We are drowning in corruption." This, understandably, has led security forces to reason that dying for corrupt officials in charge of an incompetent, possibly Taliban-collaborating government is merely the better part of stupidity.

As for the Taliban's manpower? It's much larger than Afghanistan's security forces. President Biden persists in saying their number is 300,000 strong. It was once, but it's now about 50,000. Taliban forces, on the other hand, number up to 100,000, with many combatants coming from our good and reliable ally, Pakistan.

The American politics of Afghanistan's collapse? Naturally, the Trump Party couldn't be giddier. As its Senate leader rejoices over this "foreseen … debacle," Trump himself is spinning out fundraising emails in which he comically assures his marks that he would have orchestrated a "much more successful withdrawal." Meanwhile, Trump Partiers everywhere are somehow forgetting that their man had ordered a U.S. withdrawal to take place four months before Biden's.

Who, so far at least, has the American public behind him. One mid-July poll of registered voters found that 59% supported Biden's getting out of Dodge. Another poll found 62% approval, and yet another unearthed the support of 70%.

The Washington Post observes that "the political risk to Biden will grow if … significant terrorist attacks are launched from Afghan soil." The risk is real, of course. But Biden has had to balance the risk against spending billions of dollars more and who knows how many American lives to support a corrupt, incompetent government which, quite possibly, is sympathetic to the Taliban's aims.

One of which, I should think, is not to invite future U.S. strikes, thus reducing the risk of "significant terrorist attacks." Talibaners are vicious, but they aren't idiots. 

Sen. Chris Murphy — my choice as Biden's successor — has summarized it best: "The Taliban’s surge is actually a reason to stick to the withdrawal plan. The complete, utter failure of the Afghan National Army, absent our hand-holding, to defend their country is a blistering indictment of a failed 20-year strategy predicated on the belief that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars could create an effective, democratic central government in a nation that has never had one."

As noted, President Biden extended Trump's withdrawal timeline by four months. But, also noted time and again by all those of any predictive power whatsoever, four more years or four decades of U.S. hand-holding — indeed, entire epochs of battling Afghanistan's still-medieval and warlording history — would leave us and them where we and they are now.

Chait has this utterly backward

I don't usually comment on Jonathan Chait's commentary, since I usually agree with him. Where's the fun in regurgitating a lot of what I already think? This morning, though, our thinking clashed when I read his "9 Moderate Democrats Threaten to Tank Entire Biden Presidency" over the infrastructure- reconciliation House dispute.

"The [major] problem with this threat is that it misunderstands the actual leverage they possess," he writes. "The nine Democratic saboteurs could get an infrastructure bill tomorrow, but that wouldn’t help them because it almost certainly won’t pass the House. The bill needs liberal Democrats to pass, and the liberals are supporting Biden’s strategy. So, getting the infrastructure bill up for a vote would simply mean the infrastructure bill would be defeated by mass opposition."

For starters, Chait fails to identify what he says is the nine moderates' leverage. He instead trails off into irrelevant musings. What's more, if the infrastructure bill indeed cannot pass the House "tomorrow," as Chait notes, then in fact the moderates possess no leverage whatsoever. The introductory sentence makes no sense.

However there is "actual leverage," on both sides, yet it's Chait who misunderstands it. There's a deal to made, an agreement by which the moderates would jettison their insufferable, Trumplike tax demands on the social bill's fiscal side in exchange for progressives' acceptance of Infrastructure Now. The moderates would additionally agree to back the reconciliation bill as essentially conceived in toto — again, as long as progressives agree to first permit infrastructure's passage.

Chait is correct in his lede sentence: "Joe Biden’s success to date has owed itself to many factors, the largest of which is the willingness of congressional Democrats to compromise with each other." Exactly. And this is a perfect opportunity to do just that — with progressives coming out ahead. Far ahead.

***

Update: To be exceptionally fair, if by "the actual leverage [moderates] possess," Chait means none, he should have clarified that. Nevertheless, either way, he's wrong. They do possess "actual leverage."  

Shocking. A neocon is pissed.

Frederick Kagan, incurable neocon kibitzer and brother of Robert, writes that "a disastrous Taliban takeover wasn’t inevitable…. Adopting a more judicious approach would have required Mr. Biden to accept two things in addition to a longer timeline: the temporary deployment of additional U.S. forces and the slightly increased risk of American casualties."

We've been hearing that for 20 years, and had President Biden taken Kagan's repetitive advice, we'd be there for years more. Kagan is a military historian who has learned nothing of military history as a practical guide to foreign policy. Afghanistan is a bottomless sinkhole for self-confident interventionists; it always has been and probably will be for centuries to come.

The villain is not Biden, not even the congenitally incompetent Trump, a criminal enterpriser who negotiated a laughable "deal" with the criminally enterprising Taliban, who, as all criminals do, promptly broke it. The villain, of course, is George W. Bush. He committed the initial, horrendous error of turning what should have been a special ops mission in Afghanistan into an American occupation. That boneheadedness wasn't enough, however; he then swiftly shifted U.S. personnel and matériel to Iraq hostilities, an altogether unprovoked war. We've been paying for both errors ever since.

And who was there, rooting for George all along? Our ineducable military historian and manly foreign policy kibitzer, who's still singing the same song.

The aisles of D.C.: "Colors," starring Robert Duvall, Sean Penn, and Nancy Pelosi

Colors, colors, colors,
Colors, colors, colors,
Colors, colors, colors,
Colors, colors

I am a nightmare walking, psychopath talking
King of my jungle just a gangster stalking
Living life like a firecracker quick is my fuse
Then dead as a deathpack the colors I choose
Blue, Purple or Red

Nine moderate House Democrats told Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday that they will not vote for a budget resolution meant to pave the way for the passage of a $3.5 trillion social policy package later this year until a Senate-approved infrastructure bill passes the House and is signed into law….

To assuage liberal Democrats more interested in the social policy bill, Ms. Pelosi promised that she would not bring the infrastructure bill to a vote in the House until the Senate passed the social policy bill….

Further complicating the situation, more than half of the nearly 100-strong Congressional Progressive Caucus has taken the opposite position, saying they will not vote for the infrastructure bill until they have a social policy measure funding their priorities….

With the promised defections from the Progressive Caucus, it would appear that Ms. Pelosi faces a stalemate, lacking the votes to either deliver the infrastructure bill to President Biden’s desk or advance the budget resolution needed to protect the final legislation from Republican obstruction.

Until now, most congressional Democrats had been optimistic that both measures could find enough support.

If there's ever been a Speaker who could separate the two warring gangs and defuse a legislative apocalypse, it's Nancy Pelosi. But, in this conflict, both sides have dug in with abnormally fierce levels of obstinacy, knowing that next year they must each face the voters of their variously colored districts: blue, purple or red. Conciliation could get one's electoral throat cut — though doing nothing could spell suicide.

I'm sympathetic to progressives' position: "This is President Biden’s agenda, this is the Democrats’ agenda, this is what we ran on and we need to deliver," says Rep. Ilhan Omar. She's right. Yet she's also wrong. Neither Biden nor any thinking congressional Democrat ever believed that each piece of their campaign promises would be passed without considerable adaptations. That, plus ideological intransigence is offensive to every pragmatic bone in my body, as well as Biden's and Pelosi's.

And so it's the pragmatic side of this internal rumble that gives moderates the edge in both policy and rationality. Though immensely distasteful it may be, nail down infrastructure and then move on to the other. This would also apply some pressure on Manchin and Sinema: OK the House did its part on infrastructure, now it's time to do yours on social policy.

Such is my thinking, anyway.

My twin conundrums, of Florida's parents and Florida's governor

The SunSentinal of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties reports that "for the 11th straight day, Florida hospitals set records for the number of COVID patients they are treating, and on Wednesday the state set a new high for daily cases.

"Florida hospitals had 15,449 patients" — an increase of 1,449 from the record high of just two days earlier.

Notable, too, is that "only 230 of 261 hospitals report[ed] their COVID patients." Thus yesterday's high was low. As for the number of cases reported, that was another high, lowballed at 24,753. (The previous record was 23,958, Aug. 6.)

New patients are mostly young — 25 to 55 — and among the voluntarily unvaccinated, of course. But Delta is also affecting much younger Floridians (and others at large) who are involuntarily unvaccinated.

How vaccinated parents of our youngest resist garroting their unvaccinated neighbors is beyond me. Also beyond my comprehension is how "Governor" DeSantis can possibly believe that child endangerment is a winning political tactic.

MyPillow Guy is having a really bad week

Mike Lindell's leading cyber guru has bailed on him.

One Josh Merritt informed the Washington Times yesterday that Lindell's absolutely indisputable, undeniably "irrefutable" accusation that China had hacked the 2020 presidential election is, well, a bit less than absolutely indisputable and undeniably irrefutable. "We’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information," said Merritt.

To put this in more technical cyberspeak, Lindell is full of shit. I'm sure millions of jaws are dropping at this astonishing revelation.

And, oh dear, MyPillow Guy received yet more bad news yesterday. A federal judge allowed Dominion Voting to proceed against him in a defamation suit, accompanied by defendants Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. A first-year law student could win that one for the plaintiff.

By tonight, I imagine, Mike will be hugging his low-rated, overpriced pillow in bed, while whimpering that even his cyber expert has been seduced by the ubiquitous, diabolical forces of anti-Trumpism.

One question, a serious one: Can a civil defendant avoid financial penalties if he's declared clinically insane? Which Lindell absolutely, indisputably, undeniably and irrefutably is. 

DOJ should have cuffed Trump by now

Why has the Justice Department not opened a criminal investigation of Trump? — "if it hasn’t already," noted Harvard Law's Laurence Tribe and former U.S. attorneys Barbara McQuade and Joyce White Vance in a Washington Post op-ed a week ago. But the DOJ almost certainly has not, given that the department has opened criminal investigations into current and former Justice officials, and has made those investigations public. About Trump, we hear nothing.

Meanwhile, his evident crimes pile up in the news. Yesterday we learned that former U.S. attorney (Atlanta) Byung Pak resigned his office in early January because of Trump's intention to fire him for refusing to play the president's Georgia election-fraud game. A clear instance of attempted extortion, was it not?

That news came atop other documented reports of Trump having pressured Georgia's secretary of state to "find" 11,780 votes, his pressure on acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to declare the presidential election illegitimate — despite DOJ's contrary findings, and his directive to Justice officials to "just say the election was corrupt, [and] leave the rest to me."

Tribe, McQuade and Vance laid out a litany of crimes Trump could be charged with, including "conspiracy to commit election fraud," obstruction of Congress' "statutory duty to certify the election results on Jan. 6.," and, as noted, extortion. Possibly RICO violations, too.

In a way, the legal threesome debunked their own speculation that perhaps DOJ has "already" opened a criminal investigation of Trump. Their debunking was unwitting, however. To explain: The op-eders later observed that such an investigation "would allow prosecutors to obtain phone and text records, emails, memos and witness testimony." If such a route had indeed been taken by Justice officials, no matter how "quietly" and away from public view, Trump would have soon heard of it from his criminal co-conspirators and he'd now be fulminating in hourly press releases and on every right-wing cable outlet about this latest "witch hunt."

I can't say because I've no idea how many American voters are appalled at DOJ's sluggishness when it comes to investigating and criminally charging Trump. Reports of his crimes have been swirling for months, yet, so far at least, he remains above the law. But just as important as restoring public confidence — however much has been lost — in America's justice system is restoring confidence in fair elections. And that can't be done as long as past wrongdoing is overlooked.