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FOCUS: Rather Than Focus on How the US Got out of Afghanistan, Focus on How It Got In |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=24522"><span class="small">Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Tuesday, 17 August 2021 11:20 |
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Vanden Heuvel writes: "There should be a serious accounting for the Afghanistan debacle."
U.S. special operations personnel prepare to board a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during a mission in Kunar province, Afghanistan, Feb. 25, 2012. (photo: U.S. Department of Defense)
Rather Than Focus on How the US Got out of Afghanistan, Focus on How It Got In
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post
17 August 21
 hile politicians and pundits debate “who lost Afghanistan,” that question will likely seem very distant from many Americans’ lives. Indeed, more than two-thirds supported the decision to withdraw. If anything, most Americans might wonder how the United States came to be in the position to “lose” Afghanistan in the first place?
There should be a serious accounting for the Afghanistan debacle. The United States waged its longest war in a distant, impoverished country of only minimal strategic importance. After two decades, more than 775,000 troops deployed, far more than $1 trillion spent, more than 2,300 U.S. deaths and 20,500 wounded in action, tens of thousands of Afghani civilian deaths, the United States managed to create little more than a kleptocracy, whose swift collapse culminated in the death and panic seen at the Kabul airport on Monday.
Rather than focusing on how we got out, it would be far wiser to focus on how we got in. The accounting can draw from the official record exposed by The Post’s Afghanistan Papers project. The papers come from an internal investigation by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, based on interviews with hundreds of officials who guided the mission. Their words are a savage and telling indictment.
Under President George W. Bush, the early mission — to defeat al-Qaeda and get Osama bin Laden in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — quickly turned to nation-building. The United States would seek to build a democratic state in an impoverished country with entrenched divisions and cultural, language and religious traditions of which U.S. national security managers and military officials remained utterly ignorant.
That mission was an abject failure from the beginning. Adjusted for inflation, the United States spent more money developing Afghan institutions than it had spent to help all of Western Europe after World War II. Yet as Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan concluded, the “single biggest project” stemming from the flood of dollars “may have been the development of mass corruption.” Decades and millions of dollars devoted to building up the Afghanistan military produced forces that U.S. military trainers described as incompetent and unmotivated, with commanders making off with millions from the salaries of tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”
The effort to build a “flourishing market economy” led to, as Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghan war czar under Bush and President Barack Obama, reported, “a flourishing drug trade — the only part of the market that’s working.” Nearly $10 billion was spent to eradicate poppy production but as of 2018, Afghan farmers produced more than 80 percent of the global opium supply. The reality, Lute admitted, was that “we didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
To sustain the fiasco, presidents, generals, civilians and uniformed military up and down the line reported “progress” in a war that they knew was not being won. While avoiding enemy body counts after Vietnam, they puffed up figures — schools built, troops trained, women educated, roads laid — that were both exaggerated and irrelevant. Each commander claimed that his objectives were met on his watch. Each president offered a new strategy that would make a difference.
Even now, at the end, hawks such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) tout a new strategy, claiming aggressive U.S. air power plus a small number of U.S. troops could fend off the Taliban for years or decades at little cost and little controversy. To what end? So the corruption could continue, the casualties mount up, the fraud be sustained? To his credit, President Biden knew better, saying Monday in perhaps the most powerful and clear-eyed speech he’s ever given that “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”
Now, partisan politicians, reporters, pundits and armchair strategists have begun to issue dark warnings about a blow to U.S. credibility, another echo of Vietnam. But surely U.S. credibility suffered more from sustaining the debacle for years than it will from ending it. Ruinous and wrongheaded interventions — destabilizing the Middle East in Iraq, discrediting humanitarian intervention in Libya — erode our credibility far more.
Progressive activists often call for “speaking truth to power.” The Afghanistan Papers show however that those in power often know the truth, but hide it from the American people. Accountability and truth-telling could begin with the media. Why are those who have consistently lied to the American people populating news talk shows as supposed experts? Why are those who got it right, such as Andrew Bacevich, Matthew Hoh, Phyllis Bennis or Danny Sjursen, largely shunned? Why are networks — not just Fox News, but CNN, MSNBC and others — part of the culture of misleading Americans?
We also need accountability and truth-telling in Congress. As Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has proposed, it’s time for public hearings to probe the bureaucracy about its pattern of lying, while strengthening the War Powers Act and congressional oversight. A special committee should investigate the abject failure of Congress to do its job. Having had the courage to end the war, Biden could launch an internal investigation of the national security bureaucracies to figure out how to root out the culture of lying and end the promotion of buck-passing officers pretending to achieve fanciful goals. At the very least, Biden might ensure that those who promoted, defended and lied about the Afghanistan folly have the opportunity in private life to reflect on their failures.
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Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35987"><span class="small">Jordan Weissmann, Slate</span></a>
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Tuesday, 17 August 2021 08:20 |
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Weissmann writes: "Donald Trump and the Republican Party he shaped represent the fading face of the United States, winning over an older, more rural, and overwhelmingly caucasian bloc of voters that reflected the country's past more than its more urban and diverse future."
Supporters react as U.S. president Donald Trump holds a campaign rally. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump.
By Jordan Weissmann, Slate
17 August 21
Ninety percent of counties that lost population in the last decade backed the ex-president.
 onald Trump and the Republican Party he shaped represent the fading face of the United States, winning over an older, more rural, and overwhelmingly caucasian bloc of voters that reflected the country’s past more than its more urban and diverse future.
The latest data from the 2020 census, which the government released on Thursday to kick off the congressional redistricting process, illustrate that fact in incredibly stark terms. It shows that the white population fell for the first time in history during the last decade, and that Americans continued to cluster in growing cities and suburbs, whether in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, or New York.
Perhaps most strikingly, while metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph below, rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.
This isn’t a new story per se. Rural America and small towns have been losing residents for decades. But the trend seems to have accelerated. From 2000 to 2010, for instance, only around one-third of all counties lost residents.
Given what we already knew about Trump’s base of support, it seemed likely that most of these emptying counties voted Republican in the last election. But how many, exactly? Mark Muro of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings ran the numbers for me.* He found that, in the 1,636 counties that shrank during the 2010s, the former president won a majority of votes in 90 percent of them. (Muro’s team had to exclude Alaska from its numbers because of a technical glitch.) If a corner of America is depopulating, it is almost certainly part of Trump country.
This is not to say that Trump country on the whole is in decline. The former president only received about 19 percent of his 74 million votes from counties with shrinking populations, according to Muro and his team’s analysis. Overall, the counties where he won added 7.8 million people during the previous decade. But Biden counties nearly doubled that total, expanding by 14.9 million individuals. Blue America is driving America’s population growth.
It’s unclear at this point whether the population trends of the past decade are set to continue. Muro noted to me, for instance, that metro-area growth softened during the last third of the 2010s, pre-pandemic. It’s also possible that the post-COVID acceptance of remote work could be a countervailing force that spreads Americans around ever-so-slightly more outside of big blue cities, though so far the pandemic doesn’t seem to have fundamentally changed the country’s moving patterns.
But the fact that places with diminishing populations so overwhelmingly backed our last president is one more data point in a bigger story about how the country has been polarizing between thriving metros dominated by Democrats and increasingly conservative communities that are either growing more slowly than major cities or are in outright decline. This is true both demographically and economically (though of course those things are intertwined). The Metropolitan Policy Program has previously found, for instance, that Biden counties generated 70 percent of the country’s GDP.* “Republican counties represent a waning, traditional economic base, situated in struggling small towns and rural areas,” Muro told me. “And the census story underscores the sense that growth, in the most literal sense, is somewhere else. Prosperity is out of reach.”
Pundits spent years and untold pixels arguing about whether “economic anxiety” actually motivated many Trump voters, an idea that seems shakier as time goes on and conservatism delves deeper into its anti-vax, anti-CRT politics. What’s more obviously true is that a large share of today’s Republicans live in parts of the country, including deindustrialized rural areas, that are simply remote from the sort of institutions, from government to colleges to major corporations, that tend to generate wealth and growth. The political tragedy of America’s shrinking communities is how that alienation has helped lead them to embrace a reactionary populism dedicated to waging culture wars and leveraging our outdated electoral structure to make sure a minority of the population can continue to govern rather than, say, taking steps that might actually revitalize small towns and farming communities. The sort of robust immigration and public investment favored by progressives might help bring a place back to life, after all; owning the libs for the next decade or so will not. Trump voters, regrettably, have made it clear which they care about more.
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The Fall of Kabul |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36655"><span class="small">Nick Turse, The Intercept</span></a>
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Monday, 16 August 2021 13:23 |
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Turse writes: "Joe Biden claimed 'zero' parallels between U.S. withdrawals from Afghanistan and Vietnam. As the Taliban take Kabul, he's proved wrong."
Thousands of Afghans rush to the Hamid Karzai International Airport as they try to flee the Afghan capital of Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 16, 2021. (photo: Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The Fall of Kabul
By Nick Turse, The Intercept
16 August 21
 ast month, President Joe Biden announced that America’s “military mission in Afghanistan will conclude on August 31st.” In the time since the July 8 statement, a Taliban offensive has overrun city after city across the country. On Sunday, the militant group entered the Afghan capital of Kabul, and several countries, including the United States, began to evacuate their embassies. As reports emerged that the Taliban had seized the presidential palace, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
“We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events. … But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world,” said the U.S. president.
But that president wasn’t Biden. It was Gerald Ford on April 23, 1975, as North Vietnamese forces rolled toward Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam.
A two-decade American effort to turn South Vietnam into a noncommunist bulwark in Southeast Asia had failed. A million-man army long advised, financed, trained, and equipped by the United States was crumbling as South Vietnamese soldiers fled the front lines. They stripped off their uniforms and attempted to disappear into the civilian population.
“We can and we should help others to help themselves,” said Ford. “But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours.”
Last month, Biden echoed the same sentiments, putting the fate of Afghanistan squarely on the shoulders of the Afghan government and military. It is, he said, “the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”
While the United States and its allies had propped up the Afghan government for the better part of two decades and had spent at least $83 billion to build, advise, train, and equip its faltering armed forces, Biden seemingly washed his and the rest of the U.S.’s hands of further responsibility. “We provided our Afghan partners with all the tools — let me emphasize: all the tools, training, and equipment of any modern military. We provided advanced weaponry,” he said.
The case was the same in South Vietnam. The United States had provided billions in high-tech weapons, but it hardly mattered as North Vietnamese forces rolled toward Saigon. The U.S.-backed “puppet troops,” as they were called by the North, melted away.
A week after Ford made his speech, South Vietnam ceased to exist. The United States’s military efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos fared no better. “Some tend to feel that if we do not succeed in everything everywhere, then we have succeeded in nothing anywhere. I reject categorically such polarized thinking,” Ford told the crowd at Tulane University. “America’s future depends upon Americans — especially your generation, which is now equipping itself to assume the challenges of the future, to help write the agenda for America.”
That new agenda could have included a complete reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy and a rejection of the ruinous national security strategy and reckless foreign interventions that led to America’s embarrassing defeats in Southeast Asia. Ford had demanded that “we accept the responsibilities of leadership as a good neighbor to all peoples and the enemy of none.” But in a few short years, the United States began a massive effort to saddle the Soviet Union with its own Vietnam War. It was one of the most aggressive campaigns ever mounted by the CIA, aiding guerrillas in Afghanistan and setting the stage for 9/11, the forever wars, and today’s Afghan collapse.
The years since have been typified by U.S. military interventions that yielded little, like the ruinous 1983 deployment of U.S. Marines to Beirut, the 1986 bombing of Libya, and, more recently, military setbacks, stalemates, and defeats from Iraq to Burkina Faso, Somalia to Libya, Mali to, again, Afghanistan. Victories, such as they are, have been confined to efforts in places like Grenada and Panama.
As he concluded his July 8 speech, Biden, like Ford before him, attempted to turn the page. “We have to defeat Covid-19 at home and around the world … [and] take concerted action to fight existential threats of climate change,” he asserted. The rapid rise in Covid-19 infections and deaths in the United States, paired with the devastating report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests that meeting these challenges may be far more difficult than those the U.S. faced and failed in Afghanistan.
Taking questions from the press in July, Biden was asked if he saw “any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam.”
“None whatsoever. Zero,” he replied.
He was, in some way, right. The Afghan collapse was far more precipitous than that of the South Vietnamese armed forces. But Biden ignores the clear parallels between that past moment of defeat and the current one at his own peril and that of the United States as a whole. Ford’s 1975 speech was loaded with absurd rhetoric about the future, lacking any real attempt at redefining American foreign policy. Without a true reevaluation this time around, the U.S. risks falling into well-worn patterns that may, one day, make the military debacles in Southeast and Southwest Asia look terribly small.
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The Only Way to Stop Cocaine Mitch Is to Kill the Filibuster |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=57777"><span class="small">Margaret Carlson, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Monday, 16 August 2021 13:23 |
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Carlson writes: "Don't be fooled by his one-time-only nod to bipartisanship. He remains 100% committed to 'stopping this new administration.'"
Mitch McConnell. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Only Way to Stop Cocaine Mitch Is to Kill the Filibuster
By Margaret Carlson, The Daily Beast
16 August 21
Don’t be fooled by his one-time-only nod to bipartisanship. He remains 100% committed to “stopping this new administration.”
 nly in the retiring, legacy-focused mind of Ron Portman, the pragmatic, back-slapping hands of Chuck Schumer, and the misty eyes of the ever-nostalgic Joe Biden is the $1 trillion infrastructure bill a triumph of bipartisanship.
A one-time truce hardly heralds an Age of Aquarius or makes Mitch McConnell a reasonable person. It means that the wily minority leader has taken advantage of Biden’s weakness for opposition buy-in to extract concessions that weaken the bill but increase its odds of passage. Now when McConnell kills everything else, he can dredge up the time he delivered his lordly self and 18 others as an alibi.
Forget that building things is a GOP priority too, since a new exit ramp or a bridge to somewhere is as close to apple pie and motherhood as it gets in Washington. It was decidedly in McConnell’s interest to send a honey pot of money to Republican states just before the 2022 election. Grateful voters could repay the favor by returning the 79-year old to the majority before it’s too late.
Prior to this burst of comity, McConnell was largely a thorn in Biden’s side. The minority leader whipped votes against a third stimulus payment of $1,400 that proved so popular that his members took credit for the checks they’d voted against when they went home on spring recess.
Now he’s making up for not sending a check by sending a bridge. But c’mon man, that doesn’t make Republicans bipartisan, it makes them opportunists. If Biden weren’t hung up on everyone getting along, infrastructure could have been wrapped into reconciliation and passed on a party-line vote. The amount appropriated would have ended up closer to Sanders’ six trillion dollars rather than the Republican’s one trillion since it could be passed without them.
That’s not to diminish the first infrastructure bill to pass in three decades, or Democrats’ brilliance in hanging together to the end. There’s nothing more concrete than concrete and pouring millions of cubic yards into a falling-down country is all to the good. It reassures our allies that the U.S. isn’t completely gridlocked or in the grip of a violent mob calling themselves patriots. The lights are on.
But patching our sorry roads and upgrading our antiquated railbeds is no Construction New Deal. This hardly moves the country into the 21st century, as any civil engineer, the non-partisan kind with a pencil protector and no axe to grind, would tell you.
Earlier this year, McConnell went full obstruction. But when his bold pledge to focus 100 percent of his effort "on stopping this new administration" did nothing to reduce Biden’s favorables, which remained stubbornly high, or raise McConnell’s, which stayed depressingly low.
McConnell softened his approach calling Biden “a first-rate person” despite being hampered by his “left wing.” Speaking in Kentucky he told an audience he was so close to Biden he attended Beau’s funeral. He even chose Joe as the one president he’d be happy to be stranded on a desert island with—imagine a man as buttoned-up as his Brooks Brothers shirt enduring as much as a short flight with one who can’t be quiet? Only Biden might believe it.
All in a day’s work for McConnell, who expressed shock at the insurrection right after the Capitol was invaded but miraculously recovered to insist there was nothing to impeach, or investigate, here. He embraced the Gang Of route for infrastructure, preferable to a traditional committee process where majority counsel would alert Democrats when they were getting rolled. Republicans took a slotted spoon to the Democrats’ rich stew, skimmed out the truffles, not entirely a bad thing, but then proceeded to remove meat and bones. With the gruel suitably thinned, from $3 trillion to $1 trillion, McConnell, in a flash of cooperation, rounded up 19 yeas, including his.
You can’t credit bipartisanship for victory when Democrats could have passed the bill on their own and Republicans couldn’t be solidly opposed to something that 62 percent of Americans wanted. The GOP blew it on stimulus checks; they didn’t want to blow it again by withholding funds to fix buckling highways with weeds popping through the cracks.
Biden weakens his hand when he speaks nostalgically of reaching so far across the aisle he was asked to speak at Strom Thurmond’s funeral. His quest to prove he can attract Republican “friends” today is futile when most of those friends go along with the lie that he’s an illegitimate president.
Place your bets on who’s going to rack up more successes leading up to the midterms: Biden, who eulogized a notorious segregationist to show his bipartisanship, or McConnell, who faked his own show by delivering billions in federal funds for his members, laid the groundwork for saying no to everything else, and garnered credit for magnanimity in the process?
As a bonus he opened a smidgen of daylight between him and Trump by cementing his relationship with the bloc of 50-year old white guys in Ford-150s who love a smooth ride on fresh asphalt. The ex-president lashed out at McConnell and said he’ll never “understand why” he “allowed this non-infrastructure bill to be passed.”
Add that to so many things Trump doesn’t understand and you’ll get an idea of why he’s ranting from Bedminster and McConnell is speaking from the well of the Senate. McConnell explained that in searching for “an area of potential agreement,” he couldn’t “think of a better one than infrastructure.” And you can bet he never will.
Biden has to face it: The most partisan minority leader in memory doesn’t want to play nice with him any more than he wants the two to share an island.
It only took a few hours after the infrastructure vote for McConnell to revert to his true south, calling Democrats’ proposed budget a “reckless, partisan, taxing and spending spree” that would “shatter President Biden's promise of no middle-class tax hikes.” He also signaled he would be voting against the routine raising of the debt ceiling that would leave the U.S. defaulting on its obligations for the first time ever. Also, he’s just not that into protecting voting rights.
There’s nothing left but to end the filibuster. In one fell swoop Biden could fix half the potholes in government. The last person to filibuster for a really good cause was Jimmy Stewart, and that was in a movie 82 years ago. These days it’s more likely to be Ted Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham or someone saying he’s calling a filibuster—and he’ll be at a fundraiser at the Capitol Grill if anyone needs him.
The founding fathers hoped for a more perfect union but planned for an imperfect one of majority rule. They did not enshrine the filibuster in the constitution, it’s just a rule that can be changed, like the one that disallows “disturbing another in his speech” by spitting.
A one-vote majority was good enough for the founders. Mr. President, let it be good enough for you.
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resident Joe Biden 
