Donald Trump is backtracking from his assertion that Vladimir Putin is a “genius” for invading Ukraine. Tucker Carlson actually admits that he was wrong about Ukraine- although it’s Joe Biden’s fault that he’ was wrong.
America and the world have united behind a brave people determined to remain free and their heroic citizen-president. Russia thought overrunning Ukraine and putting a puppet in President Zelenskyy’s place would be easy. It’s turning out not to be.
Putin has been fighting with one hand behind his back. He’s been trying for propaganda reasons to at least appear to be exercising restraint. The more frustrated he becomes, the more likely that he takes the gloves off and fights dirty like he did in Chechnya. He will be even more discredited in the eyes of the world, but it won’t be pretty to watch much less experience. Not that it’s actually pretty now.
Putin has stepped in it. This invasion may be his undoing. But the odds are still overwhelming that Ukraine will be overrun. I don’t think President Zelenskyy will leave, and I’m very much afraid that Putin will have him killed. May God protect him.
But the salient reality is that Ukraine is going to be impossible for Russia to hold. The people of Ukraine won’t accept Russian occupation. A continuing insurgency will make Ukraine a hell for Russia. It will only be a matter of time before Ukraine recovers its independence.
Even Switzerland is joining in the sanctions. Germany has overcome its traditional reluctance to be actively hostile to Russia. Finland and Sweden are considering joining NATO. And barring a return of the Cheeto Benito to the Oval Office, NATO will not only survive but will be stronger and more united than ever.
Brave people are dying and will continue to die. The valiant people of Ukraine are suffering terribly and will probably continue to suffer for a long time. But what looked a couple of weeks ago like it was going to be another bleak triumph for authoritarianism and the bullies of the world seems to have turned completely around and rallied the world to the cause of humanity and democratic values.
However much suffering they inflict, it seems clear that at the moment the bullies are on the run. The forces of illiberalism and reaction are reeling. Right now, the good guys appear, at least in the long term, to be winning. It’s been a long time since that was the case, and it feels good.
Slava Ukraini!
Foreign Policy
Russia must howl
The invasion of Ukraine- you know, the one Vladimir Putin wasn’t going to order- is underway. Predictably, so is the idiocy from the MAGAverse.
Donald Trump- who never met an authoritarian he didn’t like- just loves Vladimir Putin. He fawned over Putin throughout his presidency, defending him from charges that Russia was involved in hacking the computers of both major American parties during the 2016 campaign despite conclusive evidence to the contrary obtained by the American intelligence community. He enabled Putin’s ongoing goal of undermining NATO by insulting and even lying about other members of the alliance and openly questioning whether NATO was even necessary now that the Cold War is over.
Putin, on the other hand, takes a different view, whether he admits it or not. This invasion is motivated by Putin’s objection to the possibility that Ukraine might someday join NATO. Despite the fact that every invasion over the border between Russia and the rest of Europe since World War II has been an invasion staged by Russia (this is Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine, and he’s recently attacked Georgia and has virtually taken over Belarus), Putin sees the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as “encirclement.” This fits well with Russia’s historic paranoia about invasion from the West, even though the West has far greater reason in recent history to fear invasion by Russia!
Nevertheless, Russia sees the presence of a country allied with the United States on its border as somehow a provocation. And international law aside, he believes he has every right to invade any such country and- well, make it not aligned with the United States. Tucker Carlson’s odd nightly attempts to justify this by suggesting that we would be justified in invading Canada if it were aligned with Russia make sense only to those who don’t stop to reflect that no, we wouldn’t be justified in doing that and that moreover, we would be unlikely even to consider it. The Putin/Carlson view of the matter makes sense only to the paranoid and those not in the habit of thinking much before forming their opinions.
Putin’s overarching goal is to undermine and, if possible, destroy the Atlantic alliance. Donald Trump, of course, is on board. It’s worth reflecting that on one occasion while he was president Russian state television jokingly referred to him as a Russian “asset,” and suggested that, in view of his service to the Rodina, he be offered an apartment in Moscow to move into when he left the White House.
Ukraine is not, at present, a member of NATO. There were no plans for it to become a member of NATO any time soon. If it were, we would face an even darker situation tonight- that is, if Putin invaded Ukraine at all. If Ukraine were a current member of NATO, he probably wouldn’t. The reason is simple: under Article Five of the NATO charter, an attack on any member of the alliance would obligate all of the other members to treat it as an attack on each of them, and respond accordingly. If Ukraine were currently a member of NATO, Putin’s invasion would be tantamount to a declaration of war on the United States, Germany, the UK, France, and the rest of the Atlantic alliance. We would be obligated to respond accordingly.
Putin has already sliced off a piece of Ukraine- the Crimea- in a previous invasion. He seized nearly a quarter of Georgia. We did very little about either. This invasion is the next step in his ongoing quest- which Mr. Trump is apparently fine with- to reassemble the Iron Curtain, establishing Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe once again and creating a buffer zone of client states between itself and the rest of Europe. He has, again, no justification in recent history for thinking that he needs a buffer zone; he’s the guy who does all the invading. Whatever happened in Operation Barbarossa, today’s Germany is unlikely to repeat it any time soon!
But here’s the problem: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia- pretty much all of the remaining states of the old Soviet empire- are member states of NATO, as, of course, is Germany. Among other things, the invasion of Ukraine is a test case of NATO’s resolve. We did little when Crimea and much of Georgia were conquered or when Belarus was virtually annexed. This is a test case of our resolve. The next step in Putin’s long-term plan will almost inevitably be to move against one of the former satellite states- probably Estonia or one of the other Balkan nations- that are members of NATO. An invasion of one of them would trigger Article Five, and one of two things would happen. Either the United States and its NATO allies would come to the defense of the member state that was attacked, resulting in a major war that might well turn into World War III, or they wouldn’t. And if they didn’t, NATO would be revealed as a toothless paper tiger, and effectively collapse- and Russia would effectively dominate the European continent.
The European Union would be of little use in preventing that. For centuries, each of the European states has had as its primary foreign policy goal the prevention of any one of the others from dominating Europe. France managed it for a little while during the Napoleonic era. Germany managed it during World War II. It didn’t turn out well for anybody else either time. The EU is a delicate balance of power in the political and economic realms; everybody is anxious to prevent any one nation from assuming clear and undisputed leadership. And while Donald Trump and the neo-isolationists don’t seem to grasp the point, that’s why the only powerful Western democracy that isn’t a part of Europe has to lead NATO. That’s why the existence of NATO is vital to European security and stability, and to world peace. And that’s why the United States has to lead it.
Mr. Trump is notoriously ignorant when it comes to international relations, as is the case with many other things. He doesn’t realize all this. And insofar as the only apparent organizing principle of his foreign policy seems to be a fondness for authoritarians and bullies, that’s why he’s rooting for Russia in its war with Ukraine. I doubt that Tucker Carlson even has a reason for siding with the bully, other than that it’s what Trump does. The same is true of a good many MAGA neo-isolationists.
That, and the utterly clueless argument that what happens in Europe is “none of our business,” and “doesn’t affect us.” Of course, it does affect us. It affects us profoundly. The economic consequences of a Russian-dominated Europe for the United States alone would be catastrophic, just as would be the case if China achieved hegemony in Asia. And unless we come out of the current war in Ukraine with Russia deterred from continuing Putin’s quest to undermine NATO and achieve European hegemony, the only alternative would be a strong possibility that sometime in the near future the United States and Russia are going to come to blows militarily.
Which, by the way, literally nobody is advocating at the moment. Despite all the voices being raised to warn against our intervening militarily in Ukraine, literally nobody is suggesting that. Nobody. Although I am intrigued by Jonathan V. Last’s suggestion that while we shouldn’t attack any Russian naval vessels, it might not be out of place for the U.S. Navy to send the yachts of some of the Russian oligarchs who make up Putin’s power base and happen to be docked in foreign ports to Davey Jones.
President Biden is being blamed by Trumpworld simultaneously for not doing enough to push back against Putin and for doing too much. The illogic is typical, considering the source; opponents of the orange god-king subject themselves to the disapproval of the cult not for the substance of their actions or positions, but merely for opposing Trump. In Trumpworld, as among extremists generally, emotions rather than logical arguments drive people’s attitudes, and it’s unnecessary to make sense. When you live in an alternate universe, truth is the least of your concerns, Any fact that disagrees with what one wants to believe is either false or irrelevant and any lie that supports it- however bizarre and transparent- is the truth.
But for honest people in contact with reality, any consideration of the situation has to begin with praise for Mr. Biden because at least he’s standing up to Putin. That’s refreshing after four years of a president who was Putin’s lapdog and who seems actually to be on board with Putin’s ambition to destroy NATO. The heroic people of Ukraine will fight bravely for the cause of freedom while many Americans either stand by apathetically or even, like Tucker Carlson, openly root for a bully and tyrant. But the thoughtful among us realize that America’s interests are deeply affected by the events in Eastern Europe, and those who are truest to our founding values will be rooting for the good guys.
The people of Ukraine will fight and die and inevitably lose. This war is a mismatch. There is no question as to its outcome, and tragically, we can’t help Ukraine avoid the inevitable. The democratically-elected government will be deposed, and a puppet regime with Putin pulling the strings will take its place. It’s too late to prevent that. Bolstering our military presence in Eastern Europe might have made a difference at some point as a token of our resolve. It might have made Putin think again. But it’s too late for that now.
All we can do is honor and pray for the heroic people of Ukraine, and resolve to make Vladimir Putin howl with sanctions so crippling that he gives up his ambition to recover Russian dominance of Eastern Europe and destroy NATO. That, and make sure that his orange lapdog doesn’t get anywhere near regaining a position from which he can help Putin achieve those objectives.
We can hope that Joe Biden is tougher and more resolute than Barack Obama and Donald Trump were. And maybe torpedo a yacht or two, if that’s what it takes to make Putin and the kleptocrats who keep him in power think again before repeating this crime.
Useful idiots
Here’s a brain teaser for you: When was the last time Russia was invaded by those awful people to the West of them in Europe. You know. The ones who are “encircling” them?
Hint: 1941, when Hitler double-crossed Stalin and staged Operation Barbarossa. And of course, there was Napoleon.
Now. When was the last time Russia invaded one of those countries? Answer: When they invaded Ukraine in 2022, as they had previously in 2014. And then there was Georgia in 2008. And Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, Estonia in 1941, Finland in 1939, and Latvia in 1944. And they never really left the satellite countries they invaded in World War II until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Tucker Carlson wants to know how we would react if one of our neighbors- say, Mexico- was a hostile power. Interesting; I always thought the Trumpenvolk thought that Mexico was our enemy! Well, two things. First, Ukraine is “hostile” to Russia only inasmuch as Russia would kind of like to gobble it up, and Ukraine is reluctant to be gobbled. And secondly, as Mona Charon pointed out yesterday, whatever would do in that situation, we wouldn’t be massing troops on the Rio Grande preparing to stage a pre-emptive invasion!
Yeah, I know. We kind of did that a long time ago, and Mexico was no more hostile to us than Ukraine is hostile to Russia today. But that was before the Civil War, in which the people who were hungriest to grab Mexican land with which to carve out new slave states lost.
William Buckley pointed out many years ago that it won’t do to draw a false analogy between America’s sphere of influence and Russia’s. A man who pushes an old lady in front of a bus and a man who pushes her away from the bus and to safety are both pushing an old lady around, but their behavior is not morally equivalent. The events in Eastern Europe are not the playing out of some Russian equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine. Not all “spheres of influence” are morally or legally equal. Attempting to dominate one’s neighbor through military intimidation and coercion in direct violation of international law is simply not the same thing as guaranteeing the independence of one’s neighbor against somebody else doing so by the threat or use of military power. The argument that the United States is being hypocritical by maintaining its own sphere of influence while denying Russia’s right to do the same is about as disingenuous as you can get.
Yes, there have been times- the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the CIA-engineered coup against the Marxist but democratically elected Allende government in Chile come to mind- when the United States has acted just as Russia is acting now. But those incidents simply do not justify Russia in doing the same thing, nor do they destroy the distinction between protecting one’s neighbors from outside aggression and committing aggression against them ourselves!
Russia has a history of being an expansionist power. And it has just as long a history of being paranoid about “encirclement” from the West- although how it’s possible to be “encircled” on only one side is hard to see. Vladimir Putin doesn’t really expect NATO to invade Russia, and besides, Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO. At least not yet. But he does want to dominate Europe. That means weakening the EU and especially NATO as much as possible. Donald Trump did a great deal of the work for him when he scoffed at NATO’s significance, lied about the degree to which our NATO allies were contributing to the alliance, and generally undermined our alliances in Europe as well as in the rest of the world. The Nord Stream pipeline drove a further wedge in NATO and Germany seems more concerned with oil than with European security.
This past week I read a letter to some editor or other by a guy who wanted to know why we should care about Ukraine. Well, here’s the thing: if Putin can manage to divide NATO when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine, it won’t simply be a matter of a precedent being set for strong countries to invade and bully smaller ones and get away with it. It won’t simply be a matter of it becoming clear that bad guys can get away with that kind of stuff with impunity and that no effective mechanism exists for getting in the way. It won’t simply be a matter of our hand in Asia being weakened by further evidence that the United States has become an isolationist paper tiger that will let anybody get away with anything and will simply cave in if pushed. It won’t simply be a matter of our economic and geopolitical interests all over the world- and especially in Europe, where the countries with which we have our closest cultural and economic ties are located- being threatened. The mechanisms by which world peace has been maintained, more or less, ever since the end of World War II will be to all intents and purposes destroyed.
This isn’t the Eighteenth Century anymore. However the unrealistic among us might want to decry “globalism,” we are a part of a global economy in a world which jet planes and ICBMS have made uncomfortably small. The nations of the world- including ours- depend on each other, and what happens in one part of the world affects everyone, and not only the people in that particular region. The day is long, long past when the United States can depend upon the oceans on either coast which seperate us from the Old World to protect us from what happens on their opposite shores. World War II was caused to no small extent by the blindness created by the very kind of isolationism and false security which characterizes both political parties and most of the American people right now. If Russia dominates Europe politically and economically, or if China not only dominates Asia but replaces us as the strongest political, military, and economic power on the planet the consequences for the United States and everybody who lives in it will be catastrophic.
Putin and his pipeline have driven a wedge into the NATO alliance, and Ukraine invasion #3 will doubtless weaken the alliance further. Our precipitate bugouts from Iraq and especially Afghanistan (where we had suffered a grand total of 212 combat casualties since 2014) have strengthened the impression around the world that the United States lacks the will to follow through on its commitments; Putin would love nothing more than to cause our allies to waver in their commitment to NATO. Germany is already waffling. The next step: an invasion of one of the NATO member states in the Baltic, also former Soviet satellites.
Ukraine is not at present a member of NATO, and Russia is determined that it should not be. We are not formally obligated to come to the defense of Ukraine, and that’s a good thing, because given the state of our military deployment in Europe (and NATO’s) there isn’t a thing we could do to stop Putin from doing whatever he wants in Ukraine. But an invasion of, say, Estonia would be a different matter. The heart of the NATO alliance is Article Five of the NATO treaty, which obligates all member states to come to the aid of any other member state that is attacked. Estonia is a member of NATO. If Russia invaded Estonia or another NATO member state, and NATO didn’t respond with military force, NATO would effectively cease to exist and Putin would have a free hand in Europe. If some of the members of NATO balked at fulfilling their obligation to Estonia under the treaty, the alliance would be seriously and perhaps fatally wounded.
Donald Trump’s undermining of the alliance and his alienation of the other members of NATO, combined with the growing impression around the world that the United States does not honor its commitments to its allies, has caused members of the European Union to increasingly move in the direction of making their own arrangements for the defense of the continent on the assumption that America simply cannot be relied upon. Doubtless the isolationists who make up such a large proportion of the American electorate would see that as a good thing, laboring as they do under the delusion that Russian expansion would be anything but economically and strategically disastrous for the United States, not only in the area of trade and military relations with the nations of Europe but around the world. China is watching what happens in Ukraine with great interest. So is Taiwan. After all, yet another example of America’s lack of resolution would go a long way toward encouraging Bejing to move against its democratic former province which it longs to bring back into the fold.
There is no doubt that the United States has engaged in some foolish military adventures in past decades. We failed to see the folly of taking over for the French in Vietnam. The second Gulf War was an unmitigated blunder; it was widely foreseen that whatever one might say about Saddam Hussein, his removal would plunge Iraq into chaos. Ironically, Afghanistan- a war we engaged in because the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden and al Quaeda- was one of the least costly wars in our history; we sustained slightly more than two thousand casualties in the twenty years we fought there. Now that the Taliban is back in control, al Quaeda, ISIS, and other Islamic terrorist organizations will once again have an unchallenged and essentially invulnerable base of training and operations. Even so, a case of sorts can be made that we should have been satisfied with deposing the Taliban and driving al Quaeda out of the country (though it’s hard to see what would have been gained by accomplishing that and then allowing them to regain power once we left). The alternative would have been the very permanent garrison in Afghanistan, playing mostly a support role, that both of our last two presidents and apparently the American people thought was too high a price to pay despite the lack of casualties.
Clearly, there was never going to be a democratic Afghanistan, any more than there could have been a democratic Iraq or a democratic Vietnam. Nation-building and the notion that it’s possible to establish democracies in countries with no tradition of democracy has been thoroughly discredited. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the blunders of the past several decades. But we seem to have learned the wrong lessons. And in the process, we seem to have forgotten the lesson that we should have had etched in our memories for all time by the most disastrous war in modern history.
Instead of learning discrimination and discernment in our use of military power, and its intelligent and careful use to achieve specific, well-defined, achievable and limited objectives, our mistakes seem to have taught us not to use it at all, and to repeat the blunder of withdrawing into Fortress America and sticking our heads in the sand, somehow assuming that what happens on the other side of the world doesn’t affect us. That’s a conclusion which no thoughtful, intelligent person can take seriously in the Twenty-First Century. As the World Wars should have taught us, it wasn’t even a viable proposition in the Twentieth. The world has grown too small, and its nations too interdependent. And there is no going back.
Vladimir Lenin used to talk about the “useful idiots” in the West, who helped advance Russia’s agenda through their naivette and gullibility. Such people helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler in the years leading up to the Second World War. The isolationists of that period even used some of the same slogans we hear today. “America First” was the battle-cry of Hitler’s enablers before it was adopted by the enablers of Vladimir Putin.
The actions of Putin and Xi and the other bad actors in today’s world affect us even more directly in today’s interdependent world than did those of their predecessors in the 1930’s. This is a dangerous world we live in. Forces are on the move which we cannot allow to work their will unopposed. At this point there is little that we can do to deter Putin. He will almost certainly invade Ukraine, and impose a government friendly to Moscow and hostile to the United States and NATO. The divisions in NATO will be exposed, and draw us closer to the day when a move against the Baltic states by Russia will bring about an Article Five crisis which likely will achieve Putin’s goal of effectively destroying the alliance and putting Russia into a position it was unable to achieve throughout the Cold War: effectively becoming the preeminent power in Europe. And only a fool can believe that we will not pay a heavy economic, political, and strategic price for letting it happen, not only in Europe but throughout the world.
We are about to find out that economic sanctions such as President Biden threatens will not be enough to deter Putin. And neither the nations of Europe nor the American people seem to have the stomach for the military buildup and the resolute use of hard power which alone can stave of a hard lesson in why what happens on the other side of the world does affect us and is absolutely our business.
Hopefully, this time we won’t learn that lesson through another world war. We need to revitalize both our commitment to NATO and the alliance itself. We need to vastly increase our military presence in the region and thus our ability to speak to Putin in the only language he understands. However unpopular the axiom, “If you would have peace, prepare for war” might be, history leaves no doubt as to its wisdom. The only way to deter Putin from staging another invasion that actually would trigger Article Five of the NATO treaty and bring about World War III is to make it as clear as we can that it would be a bad idea. And the only way to do that is to present him with a situation in which the cost of invading his neighbors is high enough that he will decline to pay it.
The cost of stupidity
After Donald Trump negotiated our unforced surrender in Afghanistan and Joe Biden delayed implementing it a bit and then carried it out, the idiocy of getting out of Afghanistan has been made clear by the attacks at the Kabul airport yesterday, the bloodiest day since 2011 in our longest but least-bloody war.
Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta put it bluntly: “Now we’re going to have to go back in and get ISIS.”
This isn’t hard. We’ve left twice the troops we’d need in Afghanistan as a permanent garrison in Korea for SEVENTY YEARS. If anything, stopping ISIS and al-Qaeda is even more important to our security. The only thing that has changed is that pulling the rug out from under the Afghan government and driving the Afghan army into despairing dissolution will now make it harder and bloodier to get back to where we were a couple of years ago.
Trump would have ignored reality and claimed that everything was fine and that he’d done the right thing no matter what the consequences turned out to be. We will now see whether Joe Biden suffered a temporary lapse of judgment in following through on the Trump surrender, and will recognize the mistake and do what our national security and common sense requires despite the isolationist mentality that has seized the nation. If not, the crisis of clueless bad judgment we thought had ended with the defeat of Donald Trump may well continue through another adminstration.
If we’d kept the American people better informed about the fact that in the 48 hours preceding yesterday’s attack we’d lost more American lives to COVID-19 than we had in the entire twenty years of the war in Afghanistan, I have a hunch that public opinion might have taken a different turn. If we stopped to reflect on the consequences of having nowhere at all in the region to use as a base for our own operations against al-Qaeda. ISIS, and their Taliban buddies, yesterday’s tragedy, the ongoing agony of the Afghan people, and the self-inflicted body blow we’ve taken not only to our prestige but to our credibility all over the world due to this bi-partisan blunder could have been avoided.
It’s too late now to save the lives of those who have died due to the combined stupidity of the Trump and Biden bugout obsession. But it’s not too late to stop things from getting worse.
Joe Biden needs to do what Donald Trump could never bring himself to do about anything: admit that he was wrong, bite the bullet, accept responsibilty like a man, and protect our country.
ADDENDUM: Apparently that isn’t going to happen. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that the military advised President Biden to keep 250,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, a number which might have been enough in a support role to prevent the dissolution of the Afghan army and keep the Taliban and al Quaeda out of power. Mr. Biden denies that.
I see no reason for Gen. Miley to lie. Did the president misunderstand the advice he was given? Did it somehow not sink in? Did he forget it somehow? I’d prefer to think that he isn’t simply doing a Trump and substituting a reality he’d prefer for what actually happened. Even if the malicious claims that the Commander-in-Chief is in his dotage are true, a senile Joe Biden is still more competent than Donald Trump was on his best day. But even so, I’m beginning to about how much of an improvement the foreign policy of the new administration is going to be over the comedy act that preceded it. And I really wish that we had a viable alternative.
That’s the really scary part. Since 2016, we haven’t had a realistic and responsible alternative to the Democrats. The Republicans just aren’t a rational option, and I don’t expect them to become one any time soon. And that puts our nation- and the world, which depends on it far more than contemporary isolationists would like to think- in a difficult bind.
If I lived in Ukraine, Estonia, or Taiwan right now…
…I would be very, very nervous.
The United States has a military second to none. Nobody is even close. No country in the world could defeat us- if we had the will to defeat them instead.
It would be difficult right now to make the case that we could summon the will to much of anything. Two consecutive administrations, one of each party, has been naive enough to believe that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not two sides of the same coin, and that the fall of Afghanistan would not give them once again an entire nation to use as a training and staging-ground from which to attack us. Yes, al-Qaeda is active elsewhere. But since the invasion of Afghanistan they haven’t had a whole country to play with. Today, they have Afghanistan back again.
There is no “Taliban 2.0,” They remain the same brutal outfit we kicked out of power twenty years ago. For all their talk of moderation, we will hear about the mass executions and atrocities again very soon. The Trump administation was naive and feckless and just plain clueless enough to think they could negotiate a deal with them and that they would keep their word. Mike Pompeo and company were so deluded that they even suggested that the Taliban would keep al-Qaeda in line and even fight them if necessary to keep them from using Afghanistan as a base again. But they’ve been using the Taliban-controled areas of Afghanistan as training bases for quite a while. The only reason the Taliban’s alter ego has not been launching terrorist attacks on the West of late is that they’ve been concentrating all their resources on defeating us in Afghanistan. Well, now they have.
The discussion below is between three journalists with extensive experience both in military matters and in counter-terrorism. Tom Jocelyn in particular has forgotten more about Aftghanistan than it would appear a great many of those who have been fashioning our foreign policy and military strategy ever knew. David French is a veteran of the war in Iraq as well as one of the sharpest political columnists we have. Steve Hayes, too, has been covering this stuff for a very long time. You are about to learn things we should have been hearing from the last three presidents. Instead, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have each focused their attention on assuring that this day would come, and that there was no way that it could be prevented. Ever since George W. Bush, the government of the United States has made it clear that its number one objective in Afghanistan was getting out. The objective of the Taliban, on the other hand, was always winning.
Not on a negotiated settlement. Not on power sharing. On winning.
I’ve written before about North Vietnamese Col. Bo Tin’s observation that his government and the Viet Cong planned all along to simply wait the Americans out, because democracies lack the will to stay in a long fight until the end. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion below is French’s explanation of why the Afghan army- and the South Vietnamese army, too- fell apart so completely and so suddenly. President Biden’s insulting statement that it “refused to fight” ignored the 66,000 casualties it had just taken before the collapse.
As French points out, something changes when the United States enters a war. The side we support knows that we’re the toughest kid on the block. They know that are soldiers are trained professionals, let at least in theory by competent officers. They know that they’ll have American air support on their side. The entire dynamic of a war changes. America’s allies believe that because we’re fighting beside them, they can win.
That belief is diminished when it becomes clear, as it did in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, that we aren’t fighting to win, but rather that our objective is simply to get out. As happened with the South Korean army in the face of the Chinese invasion during the Korean War and with the South Vietnamese army a couple of decades later, any army ceases to be an effective fighting force when it ceases to believe that it can and will win. American troops were able to step into the breach and turn the tide in Korea. The ROK army was able to believe again that with us at their side, they could win. The Chinese and the North Koreans were driven back. The war ended in, at worst, a draw.
Not so in Vietnam. Not so in Afghanistan. In neither case was it any secret that the United States was looking for a convenient exit, not for victory. In neither case did this reassure our ally. And there comes a point, as it did just before the fall of Saigon and again just before the fall of Kabul, that it sinks in that we don’t have their backs, that they are on their own, that we’re going to abandon them. And the lose the thing that motivates soldiers, the thing that the very intervention of the mightiest nation on Earth first gave them: hope. And when they lose that, the army collapses. It melts away. And it can all happen in a matter of days.
We remain the mightest nation on the planet. Nobody can match our power, or even come close. But even might as massive as ours is useless without will. And it has been decades since not only the world but thoughtful Americans have had such good reason to doubt America’s will.
We don’t even know how many Americans are in Afghanistan right now. We have told them to go to the airport in Kabul. We have also told them that we cannot guarantee their safety on the trip. And there are Taliban checkpoints everywhere that they will have to get through. Some won’t. And in coming days or weeks or, at most, months, the Taliban will be taking American hostages, and threatening to behead them if we don’t make humiliating concessions.
Having won the war, humiliating the United States will be their next objective. We don’t know yet when the next 9/11 will be attempted.
Certainly at this point it’s nearly hopeless to think that most of the Afghans who have put their lives on the line for us- the soldiers, the translators, the cooks, the secretaries, the teachers, the clerks- will be saved. Some will. But President Biden has shamefully disclaimed any American obligation to them. The Trump administration thought it could negotiate a peace with monsters who have no honor and whose word was worthless; the Biden administration could have denounced the betrayal, and if it exited at all done so in a deliberate, orderly fashion. Instead, the incompetence of two consecutive American administrations- arguably three- has doomed the people who risked everything to be our friends, and innocent people all over Afghanistan.
By the way, it’s no coincidence that the final Taliban offensive began on May 1. That, after all, was the day President Trump had set for our exit as part of a “negotiated settlement.” Today he praised the Taliban and their courage, claiming-falsely- that they’d been around for “thousands of years.” The plan has been to humilate the United States all along, and their goal was advanced by the fact that they were negotiating with a fool, a sucker.
Already the Chinese state media are tormenting the Taiwanese with the message, “You put your faith in the Americans. Are you watching what’s happening in Afghanistan?” American prestige is not all that has taken a beating from this. Our credibility is at an all-time low. The European Union seems to share in the impression that we have been building all over the world for decades that America simply cannot be trusted, that our word is no good, and that we will always betray our friends. Several European leaders have spoken of the need to make their security arrangements without depending on us. The process of alienating our allies, begun and earnestly pursued by the Trump administration, seems to have been vastly advanced by the Biden administration, and the hope of its friends that the comic-opera incompetence of the Trump administration had been replaced by something better and wiser has been deeply shaken.
No power on Earth can match the military might of the United States. Russia, China, and bad actors all over the globe are given pause by that power, and hesitate to provoke us because they only suspect, and are not entirely sure, that we lack the will to use it and to press our cause to final victory.
They are considerably surer tonight. No, I would not want to be a citizen of Estonia or Ukraine or Taiwan tonight. The realization that melted the hearts of they Afghan army is nagging them. Once again, we have proven to the world that while we have the might to keep our committments, we lack the will, and will always let our allies down. And it’s only a matter of time until Russia or China decide to take the risk and put that theory to the test.
Dispatch Live: Afghanistan from The Dispatch on Vimeo.
The GOP moves to enable the spread of COVID-19
In a move of moral perversity ignoring the logic of every public health effort ever undertaken, Republicans nationally are pushing legislation granting protection against discrimination to- wait for it- unvaccinated Americans.
Yes, that’s right. Republicans are on record as supporting the granting of special rights to potential carriers of the COVID-19 virus, and effectively adding sociopathy to race, religion, sex, national origin, and sexual orientation as legally protected characteristics meriting special status under civil rights legislation. It continues to become clearer and clearer that the GOP believes that there is a constitutional right for ethically depraved narcissists to selfishly risk spreading a deadly virus among the rest of us.
Well, no. I should retract that. The logic of the general Republican position would not discriminate. It would grant legal protection to all viruses. Logically, it would mean that people who might be infected with smallpox could freely mingle with the rest of us, and their movements could not be consistently restricted. Folks potentially exposed to Ebola could jostle us in the subway, and there wouldn’t be a thing the government could do about it. Ain’t freedom wonderful?
How do people become so preoccupied with their own supposedly unbounded and unlimited “rights” that they fail to see that for a person who might be a carrier of a potentially deadly and highly contagious disease to mix freely with the rest of the population deprives everyone else of their right to remain healthy and alive? I guess that’s what happens once we elect a narcissist president. All of a sudden, a movement arises to make narcissism our national ethos forevermore.
You can’t make this stuff up. It can’t be emphasized strongly enough that this is not a debatable matter about which reasonable people might disagree, any more than Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters (well, except for sociopaths and the willfully ignorant, whom they apparently want to make protected categories). This simply nuts. The position that sees lockdowns, masks, and strong incentives to be vaccinated as somehow violations of individual liberty is pure, unadulterated moral and intellectual perversity, and if we let the sociopathy from which it springs prevail (which I’m confident that we won’t), we all deserve the consequences natural selection will inflict upon us.
As well it may. At this very moment, a new flare-up of the Delta variant is occuring in the states with the lowest vaccination rates. What we’re experiencing now is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” If the consequences were restricted to them, one could argue that they would simply be the result of decisions the newly-infected had made for themselves. But some people are becoming infected because for one practical reason or another they can’t be vaccinated. And as long as Missouri, Mississippi, and the other hotbeds of resistence to vaccination remain, the virus will have a chance to mutate in their midst and produce new variants- variants against which the vaccines may no longer be effective. It is not an exaggeration to say that those who willfully refuse to be vaccinated are responsible for keeping the pandemic going not only in their own midst, but potentially elsewhere. They are putting us in danger of losing a golden opportunity to put COVID-19 behind us. They are not only endangering the lives of those in their midst who cannot be vaccinated. They are potentially also endangering the lives of those of us who have, but who can’t assume that Missouri and Mississippi and the other vaccine-resistent states will not be statewide Petrie dishes, breeding variants of COVID-19 against which the vaccines will be useless.
The rhetoric to the contrary, nobody is advocating compulsory vaccination. But it seems only reasonable to treat vaccination against COVID the same way we’ve historically treated vaccination against smallpox, polio, and other diseases. It’s not simply reasonable that unvaccinated people be prevented from participating in activities through which they might potentially spread the disease to others. “Vaccine passports” stand firmly in the mainstream of the way in which ours and other democratic societies have always dealt with situations like this.
It’s not merely the entire history of Western political theory and of constitutional law that tells us that one’s right to swing one’s fist ends at the point of the next guy’s nose. It’s common sense. But common sense seems to have entirely vanished from a conservative movement increasingly dominated by the fruitcakes these days, and there seems no limit to the absurdities it can unabashedly embrace.
THE ONION is eerily prophetic
It’s not often that The Onion accurately predicts a news story. But there’s a first time for everything.
The United States is literally sneaking out of Afghanistan in the middle of the night.. Our forces abandoned Bagham Air Force Base, a major hub of our operations in that country, under cover of darkness and without telling our Afghan allies that they were going to do it. They left behind huge caches of supplies and equipment, supposedly for the Afghans- who eventually found out that the Americans had left through the grapevine, shrugged, and moved in. But the Afghan army will have to make do with what the looters left for them.
The Biden administration’s Afghan policy seems to be identical to that of the Trump administration’s: get out of Dodge just as fast as our legs will carry us; do not pass go, do not collect $200. Our armed forces can’t be blamed, of course; they take orders from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But our latest abandonment of our allies- something that is becoming a regular part of American foreign policy, and understandably causing them to conclude that the U.S. can’t be relied upon- is in some respects making the fall of Saigon look like the Alamo by comparison.
At least in Vietnam our final withdrawal came because we had lost the war and the enemy was attacking our ally’s capital city. But in the case of Afghanistan, we’ve yawned, stretched our arms, said “I’m tired and I’m going home,” and are in the process of letting the enemy win. Few doubt that they will- and given Taliban gains since we began a withdrawal that is now 90% complete, it will probably be rather quickly.
True, we have been fighting this “forever war” for twenty years. True, it’s been very expensive. But it’s cost us fewer than three thousand lives. By comparison, Vietnam cost us 57,000.
Contrary to what many people have claimed down through the years, it was not the great North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Communist victories over both France and the United States, who was the source of the statement below. It was North Vietnamese Col. Bui Tin, who made it in a 1995 interview with the Wall Street Journal. But it’s hard to miss their significance both for our involvement in Afghanistan and in the future:
Q: How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?
A: By fighting a long war which would break their will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, “We don’t need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”
Bui goes on to explain that given the roles dissent and protest play in democracies, they cannot win protracted wars. Even though Bui doesn’t say so, that isn’t necessarily the case when everyone can clearly see that their own immediate welfare and that of the nation are on the line. But when the war is on the other side of the globe, and it’s hard to see the immediate consequences of failing to prevail, when a war begins to drag on and on- even if, as in Afghanistan, casualties have been minimal- the citizens of democracies tire of them. And in the long run, democracies will never be able to summon the will to see a lengthly foreign war to a successful conclusion unless the nation itself would be put in immediate danger if it failed to do so.
That, ultimately, was the lesson of Vietnam. We can win short, decisive conflicts. But in a war like Vietnam or even one like Afghanistan, in which casualties have been light, it is a built-in weakness of countries in which the people finally call the shots that unless there are obvious and fairly immediate consequences to losing, democracies simply cannot and will not stay the course..
That is a fact of life history has taught us at a considerable cost in lives and treasure. Both Donald Trump-style isolationists and George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson-style internationalists should take it as a fundamental law of nature and govern their policies accordingly.
We forget that we went to war in Afghanistan originally because the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden and al Queda in Afghanistan. The war was enormously popular in the United States at the time, and jolly well should have been. We kicked the Taliban out. The trouble is that Afghanistan, like Iraq, is an ancient and relatively undeveloped region, rather than a nation in the modern sense. Like Vietnam, and like Iraq, it is essentially an artificial nation cobbled together by outsiders. We defeated the Taliban, and removed them from power. But as in Iraq, we then faced the dilemma of lacking any abiding sense of mutual identity or a generally recognized central authority to install in power in place of our defeated adversary. The “forever war” has been a struggle to prevent the Taliban- which, like the Viet Minh and its successors in Vietnam, was the only truly unified force capable of forming a stable government, from stepping into what amounted to a vaccum and seizing power again.
The rule of the Taliban- a misogynistic outfit of religious fanatics intent on ruling by strict Sharia law- was a nightmare for the people of Afghanistan. It is a nightmare into which they are about to be plunged once more.
An aside: If you haven’t seen the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, based on the book by George Crille III, I highly recommend it. It’s a funny but also an important film, somewhat fictionalized but preserving the essense of what actually happened when a lovable and rather blatantly corrupt congressman combined with a bizarre collection of marginal characters inside and outside the CIA to get the Mujahideen- the Afghans fighting the Russians- Stinger missles and other military support which they could use to repel the invaders. Afghanistan was a far different experience for the Russians than it was for us. It’s misleading to call it the “Russian Vietnam,” as some do; we lost 57,000 soldiers and sailors in Vietnam, whereas the Soviet Union lost only 15,000 (our own loses in Afghanistan total 2,376). But it was enough to convince the Kremlin that the war was unwinnable, and get them to pull out.
The movie ends with a sad postscript about how, having won the trust and friendship of the Afghan people, we squandered them by losing interest and forgetting about Afghanistan. The result was the Taliban coming to power. History, it seems, repeats itself. But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if our interest in a stable Afghanistan that wasn’t going to be a playground for bad actors had continued. Perhaps the “forever war” might never have been fought at all.
Effective and empathetic foreign aid when possible, and covert operations to support our friends, or even short, decisive military encounters when they are necessary, can and should be undertaken when they’re in our interests, and in the interests of freedom and stability. But not twenty-year wars, even when they result in fewer than 3,000 casualties over that entire period.
How do you avoid quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, in which we can keep the bad guys out of power only if we stay involved at a level we cannot sustain in the long run? First and foremost, you try to help avoid the circumstances in which they develop. But contrary to the paleocon/Trump/Buchanan/Paul isolationist instinct, we can’t simply shut ourselves within our own borders, behind the ramparts of two oceans, and cry “America First!” World War II proved how badly that works. Throughout history, there has always been a leading world power that has lent stability to world affairs. The Brits played that role for a long time. We are their successors. The alternative is a global power vacuum in which Hitlers arise. The days of “Fortress America” are far in the past. The world has become too small. We are too deeply effected, economically, culturally, and in many other ways by what happens on the otherside of the globe to curl up in a ball and hide.
And above all else, we can be mindful of our limitations. I’m not sure what the answer is when our military presence is or might be the only thing keeping tyrants and monsters from filling power vacuums on the other side of the world. But the Butterfly Effect is real in modern international affairs. It may be very indirectly, but we in the United States will be affected by the impending descent of Afghanistan back into the dark medieval night of Sharia law, misogyny and tyranny. And like it or not, history has cast us in the role the British played for so long, not necessarily as a world-bestriding empire but as a strong anchor for peace and order, a rallying point around which the nations can gather to protect the interests of peace and even civilization. 9/11 is a chilling reminder of what happens when we lose interest in what happens beyond our borders.
Multilateralism is part of the solution, to be sure. But then, our effort in Afghanistan has been multilateral; it’s been a NATO operation. And our NATO allies, too are democracies, subject to the short attention span of their voters.
I suppose the best we can do is to encourage enlightened people and movements non-militarily, and on a limited and even covert scale when military action must be taken, again unless it’s possible to bring overwhelming force to bear to bring about a clear, quick, decisive, limited, and well-defined outcome, as was the case in the First Gulf War.
We dare not run away from our responsibilities in the world because we cannot. The world will not let us. The fruit of any prolonged effort will be bitter indeed; as it is, the damage done to our posture in the world and our relationship with our allies by four years of Trump isolationism will probably take decades to repair. But there are limits, as a practical matter, to what even a democracy as mighty as ours can do. We need to learn those limits, stay within them, always keep a clear and limted goal in mind, and do the best we can. Reality is a harsh mistress, and we have no choice but to obey it. And in our misadventures around the world since the 50s, reality has spoken clearly, and keeps repeating itself, it seems.
We should not mishear it. We dare not respond to Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan by withdrawing from the world, or by failing what we can do to lead the world order in staving off chaos and disaster. If we won’t do it, China will- and the consequences won’t be pretty.
The Biden administration is doing its best to avoid a reprise of the disaster we experienced in the fall of Saigon. But there will be Afghans who have put their lives on the line to be our friends, and who will lose those lives because we have abandoned them. And that is a cause for deep shame.
We have lost only 2,367 lives in Afghanistan. Each of those lives is a universe for the friends and family of the casualties. But those are far fewer losses than we’ve experienced in previous wars. We are not leaving Afghanistan because the cost of staying would be too high. We are leaving, yes, because it seems unlikely given the nature of Afghanistan itself that we can finally prevail, unless perhaps we stay there for 50 or 75 or a hundred years. But fundamentally, we’re leaving because democracies can’t summon the political will to fight protracted wars unless they’re invaded, or in immediate danger of being invaded.
But leaving means that while no life lost in the defense of freedom and decency is ever spent in vain, those 2,367 lives will have been lost in a cause that failed. Perhaps if we’d paid more attention and done our nation-building in peacetime, the war would never have had to be fought and those men and women would still be alive. As it happened, we find ourselves in a situation in which final victory in Afghanistan is probably impossible. Yes, there is a case to be made for getting out before more lives are lost. But while on the whole I’m a supporter of the Biden administration, it ought to be a cause for shame that our withdrawal is not happening more thoughfully and deliberately, over a far longer period. It’s not the MRI’s and DVD’s and ordnance we’re leaving behind that bothers me.
It’s the people.
Watersblogged 