This was a Lawfare Live event this afternoon. I came in a few minutes late, so I plan to start from the beginning and watch it again. Really knowledgable people having a real discussion– the opposite of all the talking heads on TV.
On Monday, August 16th, at 11:00am EST, the Lawfare Podcast hosted a live discussion of the unprecedented state of affairs in Afghanistan with a panel of experts, including Madiha Afzal of the Brookings Institution, Laurel Miller of the International Crisis Group, and Jonathan Schroden of Center for Naval Analysis (CNA).
You can watch the event above and you can read the transcript here.
They express somef disappointment with President Biden and the administration in this video, but it’s not knee-jerk and it’s not game playing. These are people who work on these issues every day, and it’s clear that it’s personal for them. I can deal with that.
A couple of excerpts from Preet’s email today titled Good Faith, that I think are worth sharing:
I am not an expert on Afghanistan, and I have not pretended to become one in the last nine days..
I think, in the end, it is not disagreement that most divides us; it’s bad faith. Bad faith in debates over Afghanistan, over who won the election, over the efficacy of masks and vaccines, over climate change, bad faith in countless other areas also. It’s hard to maintain one’s composure and calm when the other side resorts to bad faith arguments again and again. It’s hard when facts are met with lies, when logic is met with insults, when science is met with slogans.
It’s hard when facts are met with lies, when logic is met with insults, when science is met with slogans.
Like John’s post, the categories for this post are War and Open Thread. That seems crazy at first glance, but these are the times we live in.
Open thread.
featheredsprite
If you are old enough, you might remember the Brer Rabbit stories and the Tar Baby. Afghanistan is a tar baby and has been for a long time.
For you youngsters, Tar Baby was a doll or man made out of tar, and maybe sticks and such. Tar Baby irritated Brer Rabbit [by being non responsive]. Brer was a good ol’ boy and naturally responded with shouts and then violence. But every time he hit Tar Baby, he became more entangled.
Afghanistan is a tar baby.
schrodingers_cat
@featheredsprite: And what do we call the Empire that made the so called Tar baby by creating Afghanistan as bulwark against Tsarist Russia, dividing ethnic Pashtuns into two countries?
debbie
@featheredsprite:
Fixed. We’ve been doing this since forever.
Ruckus
@featheredsprite:
I like the analogy.
eddie blake
watergirl, can you post the entire email?
schrodingers_cat
And if I have to read that line again about Afghanistan being the graveyard of empires, I am going to fucking scream. Or a quote by fucking Kipling about how hard it was to rape, murder and pillage Afghanistan. Unlike Germany, Britain has neither acknowledged nor apologized for its genocides.
mrmoshpotato
Fixed.
Mary G
@schrodingers_cat: They really should be world pariahs for fucking up pretty much every country across the globe they got their hands on. Bojo the Flobalob is karma.
WaterGirl
@eddie blake:
Preet’s entire email.that’s just too long. Send me an email and I’ll forward the email to you.
mrmoshpotato
@Mary G:
As is Brexshit. Good on all the racist slapdicks who voted for a lie.
schrodingers_cat
@mrmoshpotato: Compared to what they have inflicted on rest of the world the punishment is quite mild.
Timurid
@schrodingers_cat: The original blame falls on the Sikh Empire. They invaded Afghanistan to acquire strategic depth and stop raids from that country. Their new border later became the Durand Line after they were conquered by the British and then the Af-Pak border after Independence. The Sikh Empire and its fall were indirectly the cause of a whole lot of evil in the region. Aside from their division of ‘Pashtunistan’ another big problem was Kashmir, which they also held. When they attacked the Sikhs, the British convinced several of their generals to defect. One of them was rewarded with the throne of Kashmir. He was a Hindu, which became important after Independence when his descendant agreed to turn (Muslim majority) Kashmir over to India instead of Pakistan. The rest is (painful) history.
In my South Asia classes I give a lecture about the founder of the Sikh Empire with the (mostly) joking title of “Ranjit Singh: History’s Greatest Monster?”
cain
@Mary G:
It’s just galling that small island has done so much damage. There isn’t a hot spot in the world that isn’t tied up with decisions the British did.
Apparently the U.S. is the only colony that didn’t get fucked over. Probably because they couldn’t divide and conquer like they did the other countries.
schrodingers_cat
@Timurid: I don’t get your drift what should Ranjit Singh have done? Not fought the British?
schrodingers_cat
@cain: Native Americans may beg to differ. The Brits came up with the charming idea of giving the Native Americans smallpox infected blankets.
Chetan Murthy
WTH? This guy Jonathan is saying we should have renegotiated the timeline, gotten 6-8mos more time to withdraw? What, exactly, would the Taliban ask for in return? I mean ….. the mind boggles that this guy is a highly-paid FP expert. And this Laurel woman is saying the same thing. I mean, why not also ask for a pony?
Ruckus
@debbie:
One of the things that makes the analogy good is that one really has to ask ones self “What the hell are we actually doing this for?”, and we really never asked that question. We had a shitty reason for starting the Gulf war in the first place, then we screwed the pooch massively, and then we made excuses out the ass why we should stay till it got better, which of course because we shouldn’t have been there in the first place and that pooch was still screwed ten ways from Sunday were BS……
The circular non logic of the shitheads that seem to like war, likely because they think it makes them look tough, which it never does because they couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone fight their way out of one and would never put themselves in harms way, because they always have someone else to fight that tar baby. They are chickenshits, they risk nothing, leaving all the risk of dying and disfigurement to someone else.
Timurid
@schrodingers_cat: As I said, the title was a joke. Ranjit Singh was actually an effective and (mostly) ethical ruler. He was also irreplaceable. The real problems started after his death. Defensible choices made during his administration had unforeseen consequences after the politics of his empire became more dysfunctional and then the British intervened.
WaterGirl
@Chetan Murthy: That must have been in the part I missed.
No matter when we were getting out, it was going to be like this. All the people who are squealing about it should have a lot of respect for Biden for doing this in spite of the fact that he knew it would be a shit show.
But this much of a shit show? I don’t think anyone expected that the Taliban would roll though the country like a hot knife cuts through butter.
Biden isn’t going to throw anyone under the bus publicly, but I bet some people are getting an earful behind the scenes. If the generals didn’t know better than this, they should have.
debbie
@Ruckus:
That question (Should we be doing this?) gets asked every time, but the questioners are always dismissed as unpatriotic.
debbie
@WaterGirl:
I sure didn’t. Where was the fucking intelligence community? Too many MAGAts in their ranks?
eddie blake
@schrodingers_cat: they also joined up to fight alongside with the british in droves during the revolutionary war, because they knew the colonists were worse.
WaterGirl
@debbie: Regardless, if it could fall that hard, that fast, it was all a house of cards anyway.
I also wonder about the intelligence community. Once again, an intelligence failure. Not good.
mrmoshpotato
@schrodingers_cat: So true.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
For some unknown reason the concept is that if we sent in enough troops to make this work better and took time to do it right it wouldn’t be such a clusterfuck. But getting out of anywhere without an operating government that was in control, which this obviously was not, wasn’t going to happen in 6-8 months, or 6-8 years. Any time you invade a country and never have absolute control, exiting is going to be fast and haphazard, or slow, far more costly – in human life and money, and still end up a clusterfuck.
I think many are invested in some way in the middle east war working out OK. But it was not thought out before going in, it was managed by Crapworks Military Concepts, Inc., had no actual ending in concept from day one, had no ending that might have gone reasonably well, no ending that might have only been a 674 on a scale of 100 possible fuck up points. IOW it was always going to either go on forever or end about like it is ending. SFB making the hundred and fifty bucks that vlad paid him to make it worse was likely still one of the best fuckups he’s ever done, because he did something for all the wrong reasons and all the wrong methodology, but he didn’t win reelection and so couldn’t make it worse, which he absolutely would have done.
Kent
Technically we haven’t gone yet. We have what? 5,000 troops still in the country?
I’m willing to believe that Trump negotiated a less than ideal withdrawal. He has fucked up everything else. But once it was put on paper and signed back last fall, I’m not sure what else could have been done. What grounds would Biden have to demand a renegotiation? A re-negotiation of what? We were down to 2500 troops when he took office.
Chetan Murthy
OK, Schroden at least delivers the truth, hard as it is: “It was not a stable environment; it was a tactically eroding one and it has been for some time.”
At least the moderator is asking the key question: “could a change in timeline have changed the ultimate outcome?” B/c if the answer is “no” then there’s no point in changing the timeline.
Madiha Afzal: deftly sidestepped with “oh but look at all the babies getting skewered on bayonets!” (ok, not exactly, but “humanitarian crisis” is tantamount to the same thing. And she doesn’t address that there’s no way for the US to pull off a massive evacuation of Afghans (the same ones supposedly running the government and military) without a major escalation of US troops. But she’s sidestepping the actual question, never answering “could we change the ultimate outcome?”
She’s “Team Stay Forever”. She as much as stated it. Crrrikey.
And she *never* answered the question.
Laurel Miller: Boy howdy, Ms. Afzal is a paragon of clarity and straight-talking, compared to this yutz. She says that we needed to pursue a peace process w/ the Taliban, when we have NO evidence that they’d ever agree to one: they’d already waited twenty fucking years, ffs.
OK: at *least* she admitted, literally in the last sentence, that there was little we could do (by 2019) to change things — that the last ten days were baked-in. Ugh. All the rest was bafflegab.
Jonathan Schroden: gets a new question, so doesn’t answer.
So at least, Miller is willing to answer. Afzal doesn’t even try, and ends up restating that she’s on Team Stay Forever.
Schroden: dissects the arguments that “things were stable and cheap, we could have stuck around.” Good on him.
[starting around 40m] Boy howdy he’s really goin’ to town on apologists for “Stay Forever (One Friedman Unit At A Time)”. “It was not a stable environment; it was a tactically eroding one and it has been for some time.”
then Miller admits (45m) that the political side is falling apart, too. “not a self-sustaining arrangement”.
Afzal (50m) tries to argue that it could have been possible to support the AFG govt in the medium-term. But she can’t bring herself to say “the could have been stable long-term”. Crrrikey.
schrodingers_cat
Another charming British legacy in India, they exiled and extremely old and ailing last Mughal Emperor to Burma and exiled the Burmese king to the west coast of India. Lovely chaps.
schrodingers_cat
@Timurid: I guess that was the problem with both the Marathas and the Sikhs reliance on a set of leader/s. Some military historian made the point the British had institutional knowledge (War colleges for the officer corps) which the Sikhs and the Marathas didn’t.
BTW Do you have a suggestion for a book/s that covers the South Asian history of the first millennium?
WaterGirl
@Chetan Murthy: I am really appreciating your take on this.
Ruckus
@debbie:
And that is always the answer from someone who has something invested and no idea or concept of what might work, what won’t work, and has zero idea where and how to go next. And for most of the twenty years that was as good an answer as there was ever going to be.
And look at the fallout from President Biden actually exiting and ending a never ending war. This man wanted us to get out in 2009 because he could see that it was never going to be any better. I’m not knocking President Obama, this was a lot younger situation then, he was getting conflicting information, I’m sure being told that things would change soon and he was dealing with overwhelming backlash because of his color and being a democrat, and the economy. President Biden has the fortune to see that, to understand how really crappy the republican party was and is and that they use war to hide their shit.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl: Awww .. [turns pink under the melanin] BTW, I also found Rory Stewart’s talk from 2009 on AFG to be enlightening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1qD_dgDmZs&t=1s
I watched this in full last night, and the lawfare vid just now. The comparison is *stark*. Stewart is straight and to-the-point, where these people all waffled. And it seems pretty clear that he’s dour on the prospects. I would love to get his take on things from 2019, and also again from today.
Especially, he is clear on all the ways in which AFG’s govt failed, and this is in 2009; one can only imagine how much worse things are today. There’s a particular bit where he says (paraphrase)
He also talked about the non-profit in AFG that he set up and ran, and again, there’s a great story about one of the people who worked for it (him, I guess) and what they thought about AFG. Again, eye-opening.
Redshift
@WaterGirl:
From what I’ve read, part of TFG’s “deal” was that the US would no longer engage in air support to keep the Taliban at bay, which was apparently the reason why hadn’t been able to take significant territory or cities until then. Basically, for years, any time they’d gather in sufficient numbers we’d bomb the crap out of them. Once that stopped, it should have been no surprise that they were effectively in control of the country in short order.
Richard Guhl
Retreats are the trickiest of all military maneuvers, because they risk the collapse of morale and unit cohesion. Once we announced we were leaving and took actual steps to make that happen, we ensured that collapse would ensue.
I mean look what happened when we began evacuating
DunkirkBagram. TheFrenchAfghans understood the jig was up and surrendered to theGermansTaliban in short order.ChurchillBiden sure had a lot of explaining to do.WaterGirl
@Redshift: T****. The give that keeps on giving.
Redshift
I’d recommend reading Preet Bharara’s entire note. He goes on to say that just because there is boundless bad faith and lies from the Trumpists and conservative pundits, that doesn’t mean all criticism is bad-faith, and the good faith questions deserve to be answered.
WaterGirl
@Redshift: HEre’s an online version of Preet’s whole note:
Link
Redshift
@WaterGirl: Yep. In the WaPo’s news analysis today, all of the sources who had been involved threw T under the bus, basically saying he didn’t care what happened and was willing to give anything away, he just wanted to get us out.
(And because this is the stupidest timeline, he probably only wanted that so he’d have a success for his reelection, the same reason he wanted the economy to “open up” during the pandemic.)
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl: Thank you for this. It’s an excellent column/email. And ends on a hopeful note, which is also good. B/c without hope, who would get out of bed in the morning?
eddie blake
@Chetan Murthy: if you’re linda evangelista, you’ll get out of bed for $10,000
lol…remembering that quote made me feel… old.
Butter Emails
@Ruckus:
There are many reasons that we failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I can’t help but think that one of the key ones is that we tried to set up governments in our image. That image being the Bush Administration and a Congress fully controlled by Republicans.
Chetan Murthy
@Redshift: You’re referring to this, yes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/19/trump-officials-scramble-distance-his-taliban-deal/
Yeah: the quotes from former Trump officials are pretty brutal about their former boss and also Pompeo.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: [obvs I agree with you 100%]
On the Lawfare video, there was someone arguing for a delay: Ms. Afzal. But even she was unable to bring herself to argue that it could have any effect on the long-term situation: all she would commit to, was that the medium-term situation would be better. That’s basically the same as saying “if we stick around 8mos more, things’ll be calm for 8mos more”. And that’s all.
And sure, if that could have been done without further loss of American life, I guess it might have been acceptable — money is just money after all. But as others pointed out, the Taliban *let* us get away without battles, b/c they knew we were leaving, and there was no point in screwing that up. And yeah, as Redshift said, Trumpy negotiated that we wouldn’t bring down airstrikes on the Taliban: we’d have had to undo that, and voila, we’re back to open hostilities.
It was either leave, or escalate. And the people who argued for “8 more months” are really just “Team Stay Forever”.
P.S. And it feels relevant: who among us is ready to ask an American soldier to be the last one to die for a mistake? for a failure? I’m not. Maybe we could have contracted it out to Erik Prince’s boys. Heh.
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat:
IIRC, Timurid is very close to the author of this book on the Mughals. Not quite the time period you’re looking for though.
(Corrections welcome.)
Cheers,
Scott.
RaflW
“It’s hard to maintain one’s composure and calm when the other side resorts to bad faith arguments again and again.” Yes, though if we had a functioning fourth estate, the bad faith would be detected and dealt with. It isn’t.
OGLiberal
@Chetan Murthy: John Oliver did a good piece on Rory Stewart. It was not a flattering piece. But it was about UK domestic politics, not Afghanistan. Stewart’s travel book about Afghanistan was very good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Places_in_Between. After reading his book and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars” – both released around the same time – I knew more about the Afghan tribes, the warlords, etc. than I ever did before. Of course, that was close to nothing but, still, great books. “The Great Game” by Peter Hopkirk was also great and illuminating.
Regine Touchon
Joe Biden has balls. And after the fog of this war has cleared, this decision will prove politically advantageous:
“I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another President of the United States – yet another one – a fifth one.”
Ruckus
@Regine Touchon:
This may be one of the big deals of presidents.
A break with the constant trust of military power of the US.
A constant state of attempting to be the power in the world, the country who can’t solve problems at home but can tell the world who, what, when, where and how and spends 3 times more than the next country on their military. And that country spends over 3 times the next country. We spend 39% of all the military spending in the world.
Timurid
@Another Scott: I am the author of that book. But it certainly doesn’t cover a millennium of South Asian history. You’re not going to get much detail from anything that broad, but my go to book for ‘Plato to NATO’ undergrad level history in that region is India: a History by John Keay
Timurid
@schrodingers_cat: You’re not going to get much detail from anything that broad, but my go to book for ‘Plato to NATO’ undergrad level history in that region is India: a History by John Keay.
The prevailing narrative that Mughal successor states like the Marathas and Sikhs were less advanced in military technology and tactics than the British is completely false. They were equal to the British and in some ways more advanced. Their great weakness was their internal politics, which were divided, dysfunctional and toxic. The British remained mostly united. They were able to execute a unified policy while ruthlessly exploiting the divisions of their enemies.
Chetan Murthy
@Timurid: [not a historian, but] gosh, it sounds like the same advantage the Taliban have over the other factions in AFG.
schrodingers_cat
@Timurid: No I didn’t say they were technologically less advanced. They were evenly matched where arms, ammunition and personnel were concerned. I was talking about institutional leadership. Agreed about the internal politics. Marathas were done for after Mahadji Shinde and Nana Phadnavis died. They were not easily replaced. Brits had that problem to a lesser extent. They had a professional military and civil service.
Also the casteism and nepotism of the late Peshwai lead to its downfall.
schrodingers_cat
@Timurid:It doesn’t have to be one book. I am interested in the period after Mauryas and before the Gaznavid raids.