Despite whatever level of culpability Biden has for not planning the logistics of the evacuation effectively, it's also become abundantly clear that those Afghanis who supported the twenty-year American boondoggle in Afghanistan as translators, etc. should be very happy that Biden was in office rather than Trump. This withdrawal was going to be a mess no matter what. I know that Trump made the initial decision to get out, but whatever the incompetencies on display from the Biden administration, just imagine how much worse it would have been had the uber-incompetent Trump and his team of racist xenophobes still been in office.
So my hat's off to Biden for making the hard decision to take the heat from the media and the military and to go through with the withdrawal. My respect for Biden has, if anything, been increased by the events of the last couple of weeks.
Joe Biden's only real mistake was to listen to his military and its assessments of the reality on the ground in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is astonishingly clueless in its estimations of its own efficacy, and it never learns from its mistakes. The problem for a U.S. president is that he must depend on the cluelessness of his military and the so-called intelligence community for the information he needs to make decisions. These people are obviously not stupid, but their thinking is in the service of very simplistic, fear-driven assumptions that never seem to be questioned. I know this sounds simplistic--it is--but it's more right than it's wrong.
If someone does question them, he or she is clearly not a team player and never gets promoted. Cluelessness is thus baked into the military culture. The clueless only promote those who have bought into the fundamental cluelessness, and so the cluelessness is ineluctably passed on from generation to generation. Nothing really changes from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. Fixing that is rather like trying to fix the racism that pervades most police departments. You don't change the fundamental elements that structure a group's culture by sending people to a training seminar. To think that works is just part of the fundamental cluelessness.
For another example of premium-quality cluelessness, read Anne Applebaum's piece in the Atlantic. It's astonishing to me is that The Atlantic will still publish Neocon nonsense like this. This woman is operating on a planet other than earth, and on it some kind of political theory rules in a way that feels no need to accommodate the realities on the ground. She is not unintelligent; she's just naively captured by her ideological presuppositions. This is not unlike the ailment from which the military suffers. In theory Afghanistan or Vietnam or whatever should all work out very differently. We just lack the will to make the theory work. Whatever. The bottom line is that to argue that the U.S. should be fighting for liberal democracy abroad when it is at serious risk of losing it at home is just plain nutty.
To think that any country in the world would trust us now or look to us after the messes we have made every time we tried to make the world a better place is delusional. Or even now, there's a good chance that the Bannonist Right*, with the help of gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, will take over the house and senate next year and the White House in '24. Why would anybody in the world look to the U.S., teetering on the brink of illiberalism, as even a remotely decent model of liberal democracy? To think that the U.S. now has a role in modeling anything good and decent for the world is truly, deeply, clueless.
***
It has struck me that 1989 was the year that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan under similarly humiliating circumstances. And everybody knows what happened next--no more Soviet Union. It collapsed of its own dead weight and broke apart. I've been writing here for some time that the Liberal Order in the U.S. is teetering in a way that is very similar to situation of the Soviet Union in the 80s. And it's pretty clear that if Bannonistic fascism and Fox News get their way, they will push the rickety thing over for good. Goodbye America as the open society that we have known.
Or, as I've also written, perhaps the country will just fall apart into ethno-religious areas as in the Balkans or the Soviet Union in the 90s, but in the U.S. defined more by the blue and red areas on the U.S voting maps. Or Colin Woodard's map below and his writing about "American Nations" is a good place to start thinking about how this may play out:
How this breakup happens in practical, logistical terms is anyone's guess--will it be state by state? will it be in regional coalitions? some other possibility? But something has to give. Either one side wins the culture war or things break apart. The country is otherwise ungovernable. If the Blues win, as it should with its clear popular majorities, we should expect if not a secession movement in the Red areas, a growing number of de-stablizing, right-wing terrorist events--assassinations, bombings a la McVeigh, etc. If, on the other hand, there is another Bannonite/revanchist takeover of the federal government as described above, it won't give up power again.
The events since Nov. 6 have shown beyond any doubt that the Republican Party has become an anti-democratic, fascistic political movement that will cross any ethical or legal line to obtain power and remain in it. November 3, 2020, to January 6, 2020 was just the dress rehearsal. And if they succeed next time, then it's a question of how the more populous, better-educated, and wealthier blue areas of the country are going to respond. Does anyone think they'll just accept such a coup? Something has to give.
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*Perhaps I give Bannon too much credit in talking about the "Bannonite Right". But there is no other figure I can think of, regardless of his current relevance or personal hygiene, who has articulated better the religio-nationalist ideology that has the best chances of effecting a successful Right-wing takeover of the U.S federal and state governments. I believe there's a very good chance that Trump would be in power today if he had listened to Bannon rather than to have fired him. But because Trump was a fool, does not mean that others are, and whether or not Bannon plays a role in any future attempts at a fascistic takeover of the U.S., he will have been one of its most influential theorists and propagandists.