I used to write often, but I haven’t written much of anything for years. I feel like I’m spending too much time on twitter and my thoughts right now aren’t necessarily twitter-size. They’re also not necessarily coherent or conclusive, but there are a few that I can’t shake and would like to share.
This last week has been much harder than I thought it would be. I’m reconnecting with the friends I served with in Afghanistan with, many of whom I haven’t talked with in 10 years. We are devastated, this is the fucking worst. Organisation armée secrète-level anger.
I don’t have much to add to the train wreck we’re watching unfold, but I have three thoughts I haven’t seen really discussed anywhere else.
The Afghanistan conflict did serve a purpose the last 20 years
Government by committee doesn’t work for military action
Our leaders don’t believe in free will
The purpose of Afghanistan
Nobody wants to admit that Afghanistan served a purpose the last 20 years because Americans are uncomfortable with acknowledging the purpose.
In The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, the success of a utopian town is dependent on the continued misery of one child chained up in a basement. Afghanistan was our child in the basement.
The marked absence of Islamic terror attacks in America was secured by the misery, peril, and death of Americans in Afghanistan.
Every time some stupid asshole terrorist scraped together some money, guns, or bomb materials they could go blow themselves up in the next village over. No need to journey 5,000 miles to harm Americans when the Americans were right nearby.
For 20 years, terrorists attacked the people who volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way and the civilian population in the US was safe from car bombings.
Maybe this was a bad deal and the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. Forever wars are not popular and Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. I’m open to the idea that it was time to leave, but people should understand that leaving Afghanistan to the terrorists doesn’t make the US safer from terrorism.
I’m pretty confident that will see more islamic terror attacks in our country in the next twenty years than we did in the last twenty and they will be traced back to Afghanistan.
Government by committee
Joe Biden clearly isn’t up to the job of commander in chief, I think we can all see that. He started his term with the mental acuity that Ronald Reagan had near the end of his second term.
Behind the scenes, the government is being run by committee and cabinet members. This “WeekendatBerniesocracy” can be effective for many of the objectives of the state. Committees of like-minded individuals can draft infrastructure bills, whip votes, and send aid to Haiti when there is an earthquake.
The Commander in Chief role, though, cannot be managed by committee. Unelected beltway functionaries are incentivized to never make a decision that could end in calamity, but that’s exactly what military leaders must do. They must send troops into harm’s way to achieve worthwhile ends with imperfect information.
Right now, today, there are American women and children stranded in Taliban-held territory. The easiest call for any President for the last 245 years has been to send every able-bodied soldier, sailor and marine to rescue them and to shoot anyone who threatens them. Yet, only the British seem capable of this today.
Our top general yesterday said that American civilians were responsible for moving through Taliban checkpoints and getting to the airport.
If they didn’t arrive by the deadline we might just leave without them, but maybe we’ll stay until they’re all safe, but we can’t be sure. Nobody knows, least of all the President.
This is not the message that you get with a competent commander in chief.
Creeping Determinism
Determinism, the idea that future events are predetermined and unchangeable, is creeping into every facet of American life. Peter Thiel talks about this with his “Definite/Indefinite” matrix in Zero to One. We assume things will continue moving in the right direction in America because we have seen them move in the right direction for so long.
In a deterministic world, we can take nuclear and coal power plants offline without causing energy shortages. In a deterministic world, we can spend trillions of dollars without causing inflation. In a deterministic world, we can announce a military retreat before we leave a country and not worry that our military enemies might take advantage of it.
Biden confidently said last month that the Taliban wouldn’t take over Afghanistan and there would be no “Saigon-like” evacuation. Now, after both statements have been proven entirely wrong, he is saying that this chaos was an inevitable outcome, that this is the best-case scenario.
This seems like a contradiction, right? Not if you view it through a lens of determinism. In hindsight, it’s now clear to the President that the Afghan army was always going to surrender, the evidence is clear because the Afghan army surrendered.
A determinist Biden can’t be bothered with the notion that maybe if we hadn’t abandoned Bagram in the middle of the night without telling our partners or pulled air support and grounded the ANA’s air force that the army wouldn’t have surrendered in an instant.
A determinist leader lives in a world where bad events actually absolve them from responsibility rather than induce guilt and this upside-down nonsensical outlook has never been on greater display than in the interview he gave with Stephanopolous where he said “no one’s being killed right now” and KNOCKS ON WOOD.
Here is the man with sole command of the best-funded military in the history of the world, and his solution to prevent American deaths in a combat zone is to hope for the best and knock on wood.
Conclusion
There’s been a big energy shift in the last few days as people have lost faith in this President and the military apparatus. It’s going to end poorly, the pendulum is going to swing back the other way harder than it should.
Trump would win an election held today in a landslide, not great news for a moderate like myself. Jeb Bush was right when he said that Trump was a chaos president, but Biden is clearly “chaosier.” Absolute disaster. Kamala’s most redeeming feature as VP was that she’s so disliked amongst both Republican and Democratic senators that the Senate would never vote to impeach Biden. Not sure that’s enough anymore.
We just took America’s most fiercely patriotic cohort, veterans, and decimated their national pride. I don’t think it works out well in the long run.
Excellent post.