Both BettyC and John did very good posts on President Biden’s decision on Tuesday to adhere to the agreement that the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban and withdraw US forces from Afghanistan. I wanted to write a little bit about this in terms of the strategic implications and what I think the strategic calculus was.
For full disclosure: I was informally told to begin preparing in 2009 to be deployed to Afghanistan sometime in 2010, that at some point I’d be put back in training and assigned a new team. This did not happen. I was handed off to the Army’s second culture program and assigned to be the Cultural Advisor/Senior Civilian Advisor to the Commandant of the US Army War College, where I was dual hatted internally as the Professor of Culture, Strategy, and Policy, as well as dual hatted within the program as the senior subject matter expert and, ultimately, as the staffer Acting as the Deputy Director. It was an honor and privilege to serve the 48th, 49th, and 50th Commandants, so no complaints there. And from 2009 through 2014 I spent a lot of time providing support – from pre-deployment preparation to reach back analytical support – to elements at and above brigade deployed to Afghanistan. So while I don’t have boots on the ground time in Afghanistan like I do in Iraq – where I’ve also either volunteered to deploy or been asked to and agreed to deploy a number of times since 2014, which didn’t happen for a variety of reasons (cough, sequester, cough) – I have spent a lot of time working on Afghan and Afghan related issues for different Army elements.
I think there are three strategic considerations that went into the Biden national-security team’s analysis of how to proceed in Afghanistan. They are:
- What happens if we break the agreement the previous administration locked us into?
- What happens if we adhere to the agreement the previous administration locked us into?
- Have we done what was necessary, or, perhaps, is it even possible to do what is necessary through our operations in Afghanistan to set the conditions to secure the peace once we withdraw?
These questions/considerations are undergirded and framed within one of the key strategist’s questions: how much risk am I willing to assume? I think from the reporting we can pretty much conclude that Biden and his team ran the traps on the first two questions and concluded that honoring the agreement assumes less risk for the US, our allies and partners, and the region than breaking it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t any risk. I don’t for a moment think that the Taliban are going to be positive actors once we and our NATO allies withdraw, let alone between now and the withdrawal. And I doubt anyone on the Biden nat-sec team is so naive as to think that either.
The third question is the harder one to answer. Because it is, I think, abundantly clear that we have not done what was required, either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table or in advising and assisting or in doing political development and building infrastructure, to set the conditions to secure the peace once we withdraw. I also think it is abundantly clear that no matter who is doing the policy and strategy development, the planning, the analysis, etc regarding Afghanistan that we have in 2021 any real, let alone better idea of how to do or achieve any of this in Afghanistan. And that’s where the strategic rubber meets the operational reality road. The point of waging war is to establish conditions through the use of force to inflict so much pain on one’s opponent or opponents as to make them unable and/or unwilling to continue fighting that it allows one to secure the peace once fighting has concluded. I don’t know of anyone, including the Afghan subject matter experts I used to work with on this stuff, who have any good and/or realistic ideas how to do this vis a vis the Taliban. And if you cannot do this and you are not going to simply stay some place as a third party counterinsurgent and peacemaking force for ever, then you don’t have an achievable strategic objective.
And the largest, overarching, and overwhelming problem with the US’s Afghanistan policy and theater strategy for the better part of the past twenty years, is that it hasn’t been achievable. Getting bin Laden – either capture or kill – was achievable and has been achieved. Dismantling al Qaeda’s ability to use Afghanistan as a base of operation and originating node of influence in a transnational terrorist network was achievable and a lot of it has been achieved. But turning Afghanistan into a functioning state and society, that has an Afghan contextualized and acceptable form of small “l” and small “d” liberal democracy was always somewhere between an exceedingly heavy lift and impossible. A lot of that has to do with Afghanistan and its human and political geography; its socio-cultural, socio-political, socio-religious, and socio-economic reality as it is, not as we wish it was or might be. A lot of it has to do with the fact that it is almost impossible to successfully conduct a third party counterinsurgency to successful conclusion. There are only four or five of these that have ever been successful and what made them successful in terms of the actual military operations is no longer acceptable. The classic example of success is the Malaya campaign, which the US and our allies cannot and will not emulate anywhere.
Right now the good faith push back, as opposed to the “you can’t withdraw as it is disrespectful to everyone killed or wounded in action in Afghanistan”, which is a stupid reason to continue a war, is centered on the effect this will have on groups that the Taliban targets. Specifically women and girls, LGBTQ Afghans, less religious Afghans, Afghans that live in urban areas, non-Pashtun Afghans, and several other groups that the Taliban has historically brutalized, oppressed, and mistreated both when they were running Afghanistan and in the areas of Afghanistan they currently control. This is a compelling moral argument. It is an important argument. However, this argument basically requires American’s political leadership – from President Biden to both Democratic and Republican members of the House and the Senate – to hold a very public discussion with each other and the American people as to what this would entail, why it would be worth it for US security and that of our allies given the risks to both human and economic resources involved, and for the US military to actually produce a feasible, acceptable, and suitable theater strategy with clearly understood and achievable measures of effectiveness to undertake this mission. While I have no doubt the Biden administration officials are capable of doing this, in fact Secretary of State Blinken went to Afghanistan today to speak to the troops there about the decision, I don’t see members of Congress having this debate. Both because it would quickly devolve into jingoism, but also because the most jingoistic of our members of the House and the Senate seem to have the least professional integrity. No one in Congress wants this debate because no one in Congress wants it coming up in their next reelection campaign, no matter how much of the flag they wrap themselves in.
The protection our and our allies presence have provided for these groups in parts of, but not all of Afghanistan has been a by-product of what was our actual national and theater level objectives in Afghanistan. The calls to remain in Afghanistan to provide this protection as the end-state to be achieved would change the mission. It would not be counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism. It would become peace making and peace keeping. They are very, very, very different. Frankly, I’m not really sure the US military is properly educated and trained for this type of mission. We have spent a lot of time and money – I mean A LOT – over the past twenty years trying to get US conventional forces to be able to do tactical and operational missions that are either adjacent to what our various Special Operations elements do or are lite versions of those Special Operations missions. And, frankly, the strategic success in conducting these missions has been mixed even as every year the tactical and operational competency gets better among our conventional forces. But peace making and peace keeping missions are not something the US specializes in. It is such a limited priority that the only US military program devoted to it, the Peace Keeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI), has been partially defunded and was barely rescued from being completely defunded and shut down during the Trump administration.
And it is here that we reach the strategist’s dilemma: a moral quandary. In chapter five of the Tao Te Ching, it’s author – Lao Tzu – states that:
Heaven and Earth are impartial; they treat all of creation as straw dogs.
The Master doesn’t take sides; he treats everyone like a straw dog.
This concept of dispassionately treating everyone as if they are the same is reflected in The Art of War, the classic Taoist treatise on strategy and the ethics of war and conflict. And it is the strategist’s dilemma, especially American strategists given our national ideals. We spend a lot of time in professional military education, especially at the higher, graduate, and professional education levels/equivalents (the Service academies, each Service’s strategists schools, and the Senior Leader Colleges/each Services War College) of trying to get the students, whether cadets and midshipmen or lieutenant colonels and colonels, to think about how America’s ideals influence or should influence our policy and strategy. Or whether they should even do so at all. We try to get them to think through whether it is better to try to formulate a policy and develop a strategy to achieve it that is dispassionate or that tries to incorporate and achieve some of our national ideals. Or whether it is even possible.
FDR faced this dilemma. He knew, because the allies knew, what Hitler was doing with the Final Solution. FDR knew that if he ordered the bombing of the NAZI rail lines, it would slow down the industrial extermination of the Jews of Europe. But he also knew that if he did so, it would tip the allies’ hand to the NAZI leadership. And while Hitler might not understand all the nuance, the military and intelligence leadership would. FDR’s decision was to prosecute the war as the best way of stopping the Final Solution even though it meant more Jews would die in the Holocaust than if he took direct action to stop the NAZI extermination program. It was the hardest of hard decisions and to this day it still generates enough controversy that scholars and analysts are debating it and polemicists use it to claim that FDR was a virulent anti-Semite, which he was not.
This is the strategic dilemma that the Biden national-security team and President Biden are facing. The only really compelling reason to stay in Afghanistan now is to put US and our coalition forces in between the Taliban and the Afghans that the Taliban would tyrannize, abuse, and mistreat. The US military is not really prepared to do this type of operation. The only one of our allies who really specialize in it, and who are the best at it, is New Zealand and they just don’t have the force capacity to do it by themselves. However, there are a number of compelling reasons to bring the Afghan campaign to a conclusion. The most prominent of them is that the Trump administration, when they were the US government, obligated the United States to do so.
There are no good strategic solutions to Afghanistan. We are a third party actor in Afghanistan. Even after twenty years of operations there, of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines going back multiple times during the course of their careers, and hiring civilian subject matter experts with deep expertise into Afghan politics, culture, history, and religion, we still cannot formulate and/or articulate a way forward that both makes sense within an Afghan context and is achievable. Staying in Afghanistan assumes risk. Leaving assumes risk. The questions, after all the words are typed, is the same: how much risk and what types of risk are we willing to assume. And the answers will only come, as they always do, in time.
Changing what type of and how much risk we are willing to assume does not, however, dishonor the service and the sacrifice of anyone who served in Afghanistan over the past twenty years.
Open thread.
oldster
“The only really compelling reason to stay in Afghanistan now is to put US and our coalition forces in between the Taliban and the Afghans that the Taliban would tyrannize, abuse, and mistreat. ”
I agree that this won’t work, and that we have now 20 years of demonstrating that this won’t work.
But there’s one exception that I’d like to put in a plea for: the interpreters and other assistants who actively aided American and Coalition troops during our occupation. They should all be given transport to a country of their choice, including the US, and if they choose the US then they should be put on a fast track to citizenship.
People who help our troops in time of need should be able to count on the protection of the US in their time of need. It is an enduring shame that we have betrayed Iraqi translators and assistants in this way. It is also an enduring impediment to our seeking assistance when it is needed in future conflicts.
We don’t have to make the same mistake in Afghanistan. If they helped us, and they want refuge, they should get a ticket to the States and assistance in making a life here.
Robert Sneddon
NATO forces in Afghanistan have not been (officially) taking part in combat since 2014 or so. The 10,000 NATO troops currently there, of which the US contingent is a minority, are supposedly only carrying out training of Afghan security forces and police (what the British called native rifle regiments in the old days but I digress).
This training effort started around 2005 IIRC. If the Afghan government can’t stand up a respectable home-grown security apparatus with the financial, logistical and educational help of the NATO forces in-country when they’ve had fifteen years to succeed then I don’t really see any difference in the outcomes if the NATO forces stay or go at this point in time.
Cameron
Thanks for this post.
Adam L Silverman
@oldster: No arguments from me.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
To me, this scenario is akin to the findings and conclusions of the Pentagon Papers – that there are practical limits and impossibilities to what is attainable by our conventional forces in an asymmetric and insurgent based civil war that is exacerbated by local ethnic and religious differences.
piratedan
@oldster: echoing my sentiments, after what took place in Iraq and with the Kurds; I would very much like to see this change. If we’re going to claim to have a right to be the “white hats”, then we need to aid and assist those that have trusted us and worked with us. If that means we empty out the damn country and place them in South Dakota, then that’s what we do.
Brachiator
This is a tough question, and I note all your excellent comments on this.
I note that the Soviet Union had previously imposed a compliant government on Afghanistan and that the rebellion and collapse followed their expulsion. The US tried to help, but the unstable conditions long preceded our entry there.
Ultimately, we tried to prevent that country from becoming a terrorist haven. And we tried to help build a nation.
Maybe it will be up to Pakistan and other Muslim nations to try to help build something in Afghanistan. It is to their benefit to suppress terrorism I would think.
However, we have no idea what else might happen there. Worst case scenario, a resurgent Taliban will make the country hell on earth for women and girls. There have already been a steady wave of murder of young women who dare to participate in the public sphere.
This is not just a problem for the US. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any reliable way of protecting the rights of women in nations that adhere to noxious fundamentalist values.
LongHairedWeirdo
The whole “it would be disrespectful to those killed and wounded” is a *perfect* example of the accounting, poker, and warfare principle: sunk costs don’t count. They’re gone. You can’t retrieve them. You can not make them less dead or wounded with “honor”. Instead, you decide: “if I spend more now (whether the expenditure is money, or more fighters in the meat grinder), can I reasonably expect the most likely outcome will be worth that expenditure?”
Trying to use that as an argument is pretty conclusive evidence of a lack of critical thinking (or, possibly, of a person’s raw stupidity), or bad faith.
Martin
I’ve been hearing that Biden wants Iran to take over for us in Afghanistan, as a neighbor who both likely better understands Afghan internal politics, and who has a vested interest in stability. This would give them a role that would be looked favorably upon, and might get them to slightly disinvest in harassing Israel.
germy
The only solution I can think of is to offer them a home here.
I certainly don’t want any more of our young people being sent there to be shot at or blown up.
Mike in NC
America can’t be the world’s policeman, even though Republicans want us to be. John McCain was perfectly happy with occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for 50 years.
Brachiator
@Martin:
While I would hope that other Muslim nations might be able to help Afghanistan, or maybe influence them via assistance, I don’t think the various Afghan tribes and communities are looking for any outsiders to “take over” for America or any other nation.
Cameron
@Martin: That’s interesting. I heard a while back that the Russians were making overtures to the Taliban because they didn’t want Afghanistan becoming a safe space for terrorists.
Adam L Silverman
@Martin: Form whom? This is non-sensical. Iran is twelves Shia, the majority of Afghans are Sunni. I’d really love to see the source on this.
piratedan
@germy: well, I understand that West Virginia is looking for people to relocate there because of their declining population…..
burnspbesq
@piratedan:
Can you imagine the look on Noem’s face when this is announced? That alone makes it worth doing.
germy
germy
Republican voters seem to disagree, though.
I remember during the W administration, conservatives were pro-war. They were all about our spreading Democracy around the world (oddly enough, they were the same ones who told me America isn’t a Democracy, it’s a Republic).
But now, the conservatives I encounter have had enough of the endless “wars” (not so much wars as just occupying and pacifying people of color in other countries) and want to focus their aggression on people of color here.
Wyatt Salamanca
Adam,
Can you please share your reaction to this news when you get a chance?
There may not have been Russian bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan after all
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/04/15/there-may-not-have-been-russian-bounties-on-us-troops-in-afghanistan-after-all/
U.S. Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put Bounties on American Troops
https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-intel-walks-back-claim-russians-put-bounties-on-american-troops?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
VOR
Absolutely. We owe them.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Y’know, I think about such destabilizing influences around the world, and I keep reaching a mental point of wondering whether there’s a GoFundMe for Chechen separatists….
germy
@VOR:
Chuck Lorre has produced a sitcom called “The United States of Al” that portrays a U.S. military interpreter from Afghanistan.
I don’t know if it’s any good. Probably not.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: The only way would be unacceptable to 1/2 the American citizenry as a betrayal of our ideals and unacceptable to about 30% because we were helping non-Americans who aren’t Christians. It would also be unacceptable to almost all of our allies and partners as a betrayal of ideals.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Unfortunately, any attempt to bring them here, even if its just the ones who worked for us, is politically toxic because the Republicans have sown xenophobic, white supremacist nativism. And we are all now, unfortunately, stuck with the bitter harvest.
Adam L Silverman
@burnspbesq: She already preemptively tweeted at Biden that she has declared South Dakota closed and off limits to anyone he tries to settle there.
Adam L Silverman
@Wyatt Salamanca: I’ll try to get to it tonight or tomorrow.
Other MJS
In what way? Not skeptical, just uninformed.
Steeplejack
@germy:
The few promos I’ve seen are horrendous.
NotMax
Would be curious of your (translated for laymen) pros and cons summary of this budgetary (and oversight ) reformation/re-establishment, which seemingly hasn’t gotten more than cursory coverage outside of the inner sanctums of the military-industrial complex.
My own single sentence outsider’s initial take: It’s about goddamned time.
germy
Cheryl Rofer
@oldster: I saw a tweet this morning that said that Blinken committed to protecting the Afghans who worked with American forces, but I can’t find it now.
It was only one tweet, and reporters are known to overread stuff like this, so I’m waiting for confirmation.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Chuck Lorre plagiarized it from the true story, which was published as a book, of an actual US service member and members of his unit and his command, busting their asses to get that interpreter and his family out and to safety. They even tried pitching it as a fact based movie. Lorre got his hands out it and turned them all into a walking joke.
Adam L Silverman
@Other MJS: Read the book at the link. But the short answer is that doing so would have been proof we’d cracked the NAZIs codes ahead of D-Day, which would have allowed them to changed them, destroying our intelligence advantage and making D-Day harder if not impossible to pull off.
germy
@Steeplejack:
I’ve never cared for Lorre’s sitcoms. The only one I like is Bob Heart Abishola, and that’s because the talented and funny Gina Yashere is a producer and writer.
I can tell the stuff she writes (the bits about the African immigrant family) vs. the stuff Lorre and his friends write (Bob’s dysfunctional family). Lorre’s stuff is dreadful, Gina’s work is great.
germy
@Adam L Silverman:
South Dakota is way too crowded.
Almost as bad as Montana.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: All of the budget should be in the budget. It shouldn’t be “here’s the Defense budget and here’s this other Defense budget to get around what we can’t do in the actual Defense budget”.
The larger budgeting problem is that the DOD and the Services work on a five to ten year budget window and Congress works on an annual budget window. So they either have to revise how Congress budgets and funds the military so that it isn’t annually and closer matches how DOD and the Services actually do their budgeting or vice versa.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: If you think that was the only person he was sharing info with he shouldn’t have been, then you’ve never met Linda Robinson. Who went from somewhat obscure correspondent to serving on Petraues’s special staff after he cultivated her. Now she’s a big deal at RAND. And no one asks any questions…
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: The easy part is committing to protect them, the hard part is going to be doing it. Leaving aside that Stephen Miller and his catspaws completely broke the refugee program at State and the elements at DHS that enable it, the minute word gets out that Biden wants to resettle Afghans, who will just be referred to as Muslims, in the US the entire House and Senate Republican caucuses, as well as Fox News will go ballistic.
hilts
@germy:
I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that it’s crap. FWIW, Major Garrett from CBS was recently slobbering all over it on his podcast.
Adam L Silverman
I’m going to go finish my workout. Back in 30.
Geminid
@Martin: I don’t think any foreign country can take over Afghanistan, but it could be that Afghanistan will undergo a defacto partition, and Iran might support an Afghan warlord in Herat, maybe in alliance with the 4 million Hazaras in the country’s north central mountains. The Harara are Shiites, I think, and have ample reason to resist the Taliban because of the way that they were brutalized when the Taliban was in power. There was a warlord, Ismail Khan, who used to run Herat under the post-Taliban government. I don’t know if he is still around, but the Iranians might find someone like him.
germy
Why not?
Soprano2
I hate what is going to happen to anyone in Afghanistan who isn’t hard-line Muslim once the Taliban take over again (which is probably inevitable), but I also understand why we have to leave. Way back in early 2001 I posted on a message board about how awful what was happening in Afghanistan was, since I’d been reading about it in women’s magazines since the early 1990’s and had heard Mavis Leno talk about it on the “Tonight Show”. One of the regular conservative poster’s (a woman, no less) reply to me can be summed up as “Who cares what happens there anyway, they’re just a small backwards country that doesn’t really matter.” I thought about that reply a lot after 9-11 happened; conservatives accused feminists of not caring about women who were oppressed in places like that, but in matter of fact the only people who seemed to care what was happening to women in places like that were feminists!!!
Gravenstone
@germy: He said no questions….
Dmbeaster
I guarantee you that the GQP meme hereafter will be about how Biden lost Afghanistan, and should have stayed. The fact that the prior Republican president made a deal to withdraw will be ignored.
The same nonsense was the meme for Iraq after Bush bound us by treaty to leave. Obama sought to renegotiate the deal, which the Iraqis refused, so he honored it and left. Therafter, Republican nutballs were forever dissing him for abandoning Iraq.
Just expect it, and be prepared to kick back at the lies.
germy
Again, I’m not sure how that’ll play with republican voters. They’re pretty isolationist nowadays. They’re tired of seeing their sons and daughters come home with PTSD or missing limbs or brain damage.
People like Lindsey Graham can huff and puff all they want, but I think the GOP voting base has changed course.
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman:
am of the firm belief that I do not give a fuck about what the GOP will do about it…
We’re all acquainted with the script… we leave them there to die, they wail that we abandoned our faithful allies
We stay, they wail that we’re not following the established policy of TFG
we bring them in, they bellow about MUISLIM, MUSLIM, MUSLIM!!!!
In short it doesn’t matter what they say because they are going to find fault no matter what is done, even if NOTHING was done.
we don’t stop doing what’s right because disingenuous fuckers are going to be disingenuous fuckers.
just my humble opinion… it’s time that we started “walking the walk”, so to speak.
Another Scott
Good post.
I had some comments downstairs that I won’t repeat here. But one additional thing that I think should guide us going forward is: What are neighbors and regional powers doing, overtly and covertly? Are they encouraging the conflict to continue, or are they indifferent, or are they working to see the conflict end?
Afghanistan’s nearest neighbors are:
– Iran
– Turkmenistan
– Uzbekistan
– Tajikistan
– China
– India (Jammu and Kashmir)
– Pakistan
Why should we, after 20 years, have more responsibility for the security and political development of Afghanistan than her neighbors? Yes, spheres of influence is a dangerous topic in some ways. But surely the policies and actions of neighbors should inform our thinking and policies.
What’s the hard-headed political case for spending another few $T in protecting the women and girls and minorities in Afghanistan vs those anywhere else in the world??
Too often we’ve been in the position of using the US military to support narrow economic interests (e.g. Central America) or cartoon political slogans (“Domino Theory”) or the Sunk Cost Fallacy. We need to think long and hard about what military action means and the ways to end it. That should have happened after Korea and Vietnam, but it seems that the GQP has no interest in learning…
My $0.02.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
Gee, “It don’t mean nutihn” is even in the Urban Dictionary.
germy
I agree. How are women treated in Saudi Arabia? I hope no one gets the idea to send American troops there.
Other MJS
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you. And that was not the only agonizing call, of course.
M31
@piratedan: I read an article some years ago on some Afghani refugees who settled the American west, now I can’t quite remember where, maybe Idaho? in any case, a sparsely populated, mountainous, desert region that was pretty much desolate — they loved it, “it’s just like home”
NotMax
Have occasionally mused (in a alternate history sort of way) how things might have played out had the feelers for restoration of the Barakzai monarchy had been accepted.
Also – a different scenario – if Massoud had not been assassinated and managed to establish a Northern Alliance dominated government.
NotMax
@M31
Afghani is the unit of currency.
Afghan is the people.
.
/pet peeve
Another Scott
@NotMax: Counterfactuals can be fun.
I pointed to this Attackerman piece from Wired from 2011 a couple of days ago:
Imagine the counter-factual history where that strategy memo had been adopted in October 2001. We might have gotten out of Afghanistan as quickly as we got in, but the Iraq war might have started a year or more earlier, and who knows where else W and Rummy might have invaded next…
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
I would bet that we will continue to try to influence Pakistan, and even pay them to try to influence Afghanistan. It is not just a matter of neighboring countries having responsibility. Some issues have a way of spilling over globally.
Because the Taliban have been particularly and exceptionally cruel? Doesn’t mean that we invade again, or that we work alone.
Of course, we could also go back to finishing the wall, and doing everything we can to keep immigrants and asylum seekers out.
Isn’t that the standard right wing argument? That we should only take care of our own, or at least pretend to?
Michael Cain
@oldster:
They and their families. And not just transport. Housing, food, support services and a lot more are going to be needed.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: She’s worked herself into a position of seniority and influence with RAND. So she’s protected. Do I think he gave her classified info like he did with his mistress? I have no reason to know one way or another. But she went look to do reporting on him as the COIN guru and came out having abandoned her career as a journalist and as a member of his special staff and a senior advisor to him. I’ve never met her. I did have some oversight of a research project of hers when I was a senior fellow and it was methodologically bad. As in major human subjects protections violations bad despite being DOD funded and therefore subject to the Federal laws and DOD regulations pertaining to human subjects protection in research. This was part of the mess that ultimately led me to resign my senior fellowship.
Adam L Silverman
@Gravenstone: It is what it is.
Adam L Silverman
@piratedan: There are only so many things that the Biden administration can do at one time. This has to do with things like political capital and time and human resource to be applied to the effort. I personally and professionally think the effort should be made here. I don’t know if it will. And I’m not sure if it will.
NotMax
@Another Scott
Another one has been (for nigh on 20 years now) what if instead of a poppy crop eradication program we had diverted a fraction of the spigot of money flowing into the place for martial uses to purchasing the crop at above market price and destroying it once harvested, picked up and owned.
M31
@NotMax:
(oops, sorry to any Afghans)
so what are the blankets called that my grandma used to crochet?
Adam L Silverman
@Other MJS: No. The reality was that FDR was no more or less anti-Semitic than other Americans of his social and economic status at the time. He appeared to have some Jewish friends, but his views towards Jews was both as complicated and simple as it was for a lot of non-Jewish Americans at the time. What people often forget is that in the 1938 midterm elections, the majority of Americans voted for openly anti-Semitic, pro-isolationist, and/or pro-NAZI candidates. The latter being candidates whose position, if they took one, was that Hitler wasn’t so bad and the US should stay out of whatever problems the Europeans had.
NotMax
@M31
Small “a” afghans.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: A number of us have, when appropriate, recommended this course of action. Unfortunately, at least in my case, the people I’ve recommended it to aren’t the final decision maker.
Geminid
@Adam L Silverman: My understanding was that the U.S. curtailed bombing of the Taliban last year, but that changed some under the new administration. Do you think that between now and September we will use airstrikes to kill and degrade Taliban forces, and help government forces? Would this make any difference?
Adam L Silverman
@Geminid: I have no idea what we will or won’t do. The Taliban has announced that they are going to intensify their campaign because we are violating the agreement by not leaving by May. So my guess is that we will have to respond as appropriate.
Another Scott
@NotMax: There has been talk about expanding the legal opium production in Afghanistan at times, but there was always counter-arguments that won-out (from 2008):
(Emphasis added.)
To your point, less than $100M a year doesn’t sound like that big an effort compared to what would seem to be a guesstimate of what the war cost.
I’m not sure I buy all of his analysis, but the difficulty in getting warlords to give up their funding and letting the government gain control of it would be a very hard sell.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ksmiami
@Adam L Silverman: actually if the Germans had followed the Ally activities in the Pacific, they would have realized that we had cracked Enigma, but they were arrogant and focused on Russia so…
Adam L Silverman
@Ksmiami: That too…
Robert Sneddon
@Ksmiami:
The assumption should be that in any sort of a conflict the Other Side has all your secrets, they have broken all your codes and suborned all your agents-in-place. Believing otherwise is a fool’s mistake.
debbie
You’re not wrong, but I weep for the women and girls.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: I’m not thrilled either. Here’s what I said when I was asked for comment back in November:
https://www.newsweek.com/will-trump-troop-withdrawals-tie-bidens-hands-afghanistan-iraq-1548059
Click across and read the whole thing, it is excellent reporting.
Geminid
@Adam L Silverman: When Secretary Austin made his trip tp Afghanistan a couple weeks ago, he noted that a commander’s first duty was to protect his troops, and that General Miller “had ample resources” for that purpose. I guess I’m hoping U.S. forces will help government forces in the next couple of months. The Taliban reneged on a promise to reduce their violence, and I hope we go after them. We can only do so much, but the government forces are not soft, and could use some help. I doubt if we’ll do much after we leave, but the damage would be long term for many Taliban fighters. I generally don’t want to see anybody bombed anywhere, but I think some Taliban need bombing. And they are fighting by choice.
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
Of course, the line about “cruelty” is what first jumps out, but “Leaving in spite of ongoing violence and instability, she argued, is “not exactly a good legacy for U.S. foreign policy” is what will haunt this country for generations.
Pittsburgh Mike
@Other MJS: I was wondering the same thing: certainly the US’s knowledge of the Final Solution didn’t require any special intelligence information.
Perhaps it would have let the Nazis know that they would pay a price if they lost the war, but IIRC, the Nazi leadership was already warned about that by various governments.
So, I’m not sure what FDR would have been concerned about.
Geminid
@Pittsburgh Mike: By 1943, the German SS were practiced at setting up temporary mass murder camps like Sobibor. It could be that Roosevelt’s people concluded that bombing railroads leading to Auschwitz would have had no consequential effect.
J R in WV
Right wingers back then would jump on any excuse to criticize FDR — they hated him, and as he famously said “I welcome their hate!”
So, even though if they had been in power they would have assisted Hitler if at all possible, when FDR didn’t do something, it was because FDR was anti-American — just ask the Republican party!
NAZIS then, still NAZIS today~!!~
Robert Sneddon
@Geminid: Railroads are remarkably robust transportation systems, even in wars. Repairing and re-establishing train movements after the railway tracks, rail beds and bridges had been damaged by enemy action is something professional militaries spent a lot of time on back in the day.
One of the more spectacular examples of this ability to repair right-of-way promptly was the tram system in Hiroshima which was made operational again three days after Little Boy was dropped on the city on August 6th 1945.
Kent
@Soprano2: We don’t care about women who are religiously oppressed in this country either. How many hundreds of thousands of women in this country live in fundamentalist religious sects like the Amish, which are basically Taliban without guns where they go to school until about age 12 and then spend the rest of their lives in the kitchen and making babies.
What about all the Amish girls who dream of becoming doctors and teachers and such? Are we going to send the 101st Airborne to Pennsylvania and Ohio to rescue them from the clutches of their fundamentalist sects? I doubt it.
So why would we do it for girls growing up in basically the identical conditions under the Taliban?
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman: understood Adam, I know that you’re in support of such measures but thus far, I haven’t seen Biden shy away from anything big yet and hoping that this will continue to be the case.
Geminid
@debbie: The Taliban still may not achieve secure control of much over half of Afghanistan. At least I hope not.
I think trump’s plan would have triggered a stampede that would have made the Taliban masters of most of Afghanistan by July. They correctly judged that trump did not care about anything or anybody but himself, and signed on to his “plan” with no intention of keeping their side of the bargain.
U.s. actions in the next few months may or may not prevent a Taliban takeover. I’m not counting the government and other anti-Talban forces out, though. This will be a violent year in Afghanistan. It was going to be anyway, and even after we leave, the fighting will go on, maybe for years.
Geminid
@Kent: The conditions for Amish women in Pennsylvania and Afghan women under the Taliban may be comparable, but they are not “identical.” For one thing, Amish girls go to school.
TomatoQueen
@Geminid:
I just saw this post, thread might be dead, but so what. Amish children go to school through the 8th grade, and can’t be required to go beyond 8th grade (the Yoder case).
Geminid
@TomatoQueen: The Amish certainly repress women. But their power is social, not enforced by governmental power. If an Amish woman commits adultery, she might be shunned, but she won’t be stoned to death. And I haven’t heard of Amish men assasinating woman health care workers, as happened recently in Afghanistan.
Soprano2
@Geminid: And the Amish don’t cut the lips off women they catch wearing lipstick.
Ohio Mom
Amish young adults can and do leave. It’s a challenge to learn to live in modern society but they manage.
I imagine the ones who are already established help the newbies adjust, just as escapees from American Ultra-orthodox Jewish communities do.
Anyway, no comparison to the lack of options for oppressed Afghans.
Adam L Silverman
@Ohio Mom:
The Manischewitz Railroad!