I've always said Maria Farrell was more interesting than her brother: she describes the world—her world—of experience, but it's not enough.

I was recently in Stansted Airport, queueing in a low-ceilinged, quasi-temporary structure to enter the departure area for a Ryanair flight. There were two queues; the ‘priority queue’ which passengers had paid extra to join, and the ordinary one, but just one airport employee covering both, toggling stressfully between two irritated groups. Each time she switched, she left a line of people to wait. As I neared the front of the ordinary queue, she told a man with a wheelie case that he’d have to pay extra as his bag was too big. He objected and put it into the measuring frame. It fit easily, but the check-in woman refused to accept this, and demanded an extra £40. The man objected again and asked why the rules weren’t being followed, but ultimately paid up as he had no choice. He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired. As he moved into the boarding area, she called after him that she could have him taken off the plane, but it was very full and noisy, and he either ignored this or didn’t hear it and took a seat near the door. Both lines were now even longer, and she was dealing with the 200-odd passengers alone.

While dealing with the next passenger, and then me and the two women behind me, she began to cry. She carried on working but must have pressed a button for help, because a few minutes later, several security guards arrived. Within minutes, five or six security men arrived. The woman pointed to the passenger who had upset her, but there were too many people in between for her to directly identify him. Later still, another employee arrived to relieve her and check the rest of the passengers through. The two women and I who had witnessed the incident all sat on a window sill near the check-through desk the security guards were now clustered at, as we were worried the man would be wrongly denied boarding. When we heard the guards say they would go and find the man, we approached them to say we had seen the incident from the front of the queue and that it may have been different from what they’d been told.

We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops who now outnumbered the passport and ticket-checker by a ratio of five or six to one. The main guard thanked us but didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and we stayed nearby, implicitly ready to intervene. In the noisy disarray of the boarding area, the passenger managed to be one of the first onto the plane. As we boarded, a couple more security guards had joined the initial cluster and moved onto the tarmac, so there were now seven or eight. Walking past, we heard them say the man was already on the plane. They seemed to have decided it wasn’t worth the effort to have him taken off. As I climbed the steps of the plane, it was striking just how many security guards were now milling aimlessly around, compared to the lone and stressed out employee who’d summoned them in the first place.

Schiesser's response, playing her brother's role this time, relating description of experience to a  speculative fiction. The world of ideas is utopian by definition.

[I] He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired….

[II] We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops

In both passages, Farrell shows us how much emotional self-regulation we do in public, and also how gendered these norms are. In our contemporary culture we learn to suppress the expression of emotions especially in contexts of escalation of conflict. (Ecotopia is the polar opposite.) I doubt Farrell was afraid herself of the rent-a-cops (but I am happy to be corrected otherwise), but she clearly knows that being emotionally expressive will reduce her credibility and status in the potentially stressful interaction with them.

As I noted, Callenbach’s Ecotopia is full of vignettes that explore the impact of the absence of such extreme emotional self-regulation of the sort our society requires from its members routinely. That’s compatible with there being very different gendered and racial sanctions for violation of such norms in different local and national contexts (with the use alcohol or drugs  being supplementary mechanisms regulating this).

He should read Goffman. He'd find it revelatory . "I doubt Farrell was afraid herself of the rent-a-cops" She was intimidated. But that intimidation is also a function of desire, especially for the conservative model of femininity in which she's been socialized (see above). Farrell is married to a career soldier. Her description of him and their courtship makes him out to fit the model of the perfect gentleman—who knows how he behaved in Afghanistan. She prays every day for the health of the Pope. She's to the manor born, and lived a sheltered life, even as a technocrat.

Her brother is engaged with NATO in the defense of the west.

Schlesser has a tag

He deleted the comment and the exchange that followed.  They're here

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I left a long comment at Zachary Carter's post on DeLong's book. I kept a copy if he deletes it. 

Carter's review of DeLong in Dissent

Britain was not so generous with the rest of the world. For India, one price of expanded trade with the British Isles was the deliberate deindustrialization of the Indian economy. India ceased to manufacture its own textiles, and instead provided raw materials to Britain, which handled the factory work. Under the traditional free trade theory of comparative advantage, this process should have maximized the wealth of both countries.... 

By that traditional definition slavery should have maximized the wealth of slaves. The whole thing's a mess.

DeLong has a tag. Comparative advantage doesn't but Dani Rodrik and Angus Deaton do. That should cover it.

---

And I remembered this from the NYT on September 27th. The worst was deleted later.

The failure in Iraq marked a larger blow to America’s influence in the world than the loss of the Vietnam War, and the recent and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, after an effort of more than 20 years of democracy building, did great damage, argued Stefano Pontecorvo, the senior NATO civilian in Afghanistan and one of the last to leave after the Taliban takeover.

At the height of the war, the United States spent $3 billion a year, and for nothing, he said. “The problem with exporting democracy is that it is not natural to these countries,” he said. “You can’t impose your values — you have to accommodate them to the values of the country. It took Britain 250 years to build democracy in India, and we had 20.”

From Isaac Chotiner and The Print

New Delhi: A New York Times article has removed a reference to colonial Britain’s alleged hand in building “democracy in India” over 250 years after a counterblast on social media.

The article published Tuesday quoted former NATO diplomat Stefano Pontecorvo as saying, “You can’t impose your values – you have to accommodate them to the values of the country. It took Britain 250 years to build democracy in India, and we had 20.”

The quote implies Britain’s 200-year repression of India had helped infuse egalitarian values in the country.

The quote on India is also prefaced with the observation: “The problem with exporting democracy is that it is not natural to these countries.”

The quote was first shared on Twitter by Carnegie South Asia director Milan Vaishnav and later retweeted by Observer Research Foundation director and son of India’s External Affairs minister S. Jaishankar, Dhruva Jaishankar.

The US was no more interested in bringing democracy to Afghanistan—or anywhere else—than the British were interested in bringing democracy to India.

We'll have to wait for an Indian or South Asian, non-white, non-European, "perspective" on DeLong's new book.

various

As I wrote before, an email exchange with Milanovic confirmed all my assumptions. This just makes me laugh. 

Now, almost half-a-century later, as I was writing about the war, I realized how Marxism in that case really fulfilled the essential functions of a religion.

I wasn't going to comment but earnest American socialists are celebrating his brilliant observation, nodding their heads... or something.

Milanovic commented recently that Hamasmag/Jacobin has good covering Ukraine, and I won't argue. It's really become more of an international magazine, and Volodymyr Ishchenko is very good, there, elsewhere, and again...etc.

William Arkin. 

Leonid Bershidskiy linking Niall Ferguson 

The amazing part of this column is that U.S. officials are saying out loud that they want the war to last in order to "bleed Putin". They don't care a fig about Ukraine. It stands completely alone (and Zelenskiy knows it, btw).

Mark Ames links Anand Gopal from 2020

For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters. Clotheslines were webbed between stray standing pillars, evidence that survivors were somehow living among the ruins. Nobody knows how many thousands of residents died, or how many are now homeless or confined to a wheelchair. What is certain is that the decimation of Raqqa is unlike anything seen in an American conflict since the Second World War. 

...if you ignore Korea and Cambodia.

Korea

“What hardly any Americans know or remember,” Mr. Cumings writes, “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.” The United States dropped more bombs in Korea (635,000 tons, as well as 32,557 tons of napalm) than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. Our logic seemed to be, he says, that “they are savages, so that gives us the right to shower napalm on innocents.”

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops. 

Cambodia 

The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed — not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.

The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.

...To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history.

Happy Anniversary II

I thought I'd posted this here, but that was during my twitter years. I missed it when it was published, but it's become my favorite NYT piece on Iraq. From 2004:

Sunni-Shiite Cooperation Grows, Worrying U.S. Officials

The Falluja situation represents an emerging level of Shiite-Sunni cooperation unheard of in the year-old occupation and maybe even the modern history of Iraq. Saddam Hussein exploited divisions between the two sectarian groups. So did many other Iraqi leaders. When American soldiers invaded the country a year ago, preventing a civil war between Shiites, who make up the majority, and Sunnis, who used to hold all the power, was one of the Bush administration's chief concerns.

But now that the resistance is heating up, spreading from town to town, the Sunnis and Shiites are drawing together. American military leaders say they have been watching closely.

"The danger is we believe there is a linkage that may be occurring at the very lowest levels between the Sunni and Shi'a," Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the occupation forces, said today. "We have to work very hard to ensure that it remains at the tactical level."

He also said the call for unity is "clearly an attempt to take advantage of the situation." 

If Sunni-Shiite cooperation was a problem, then maybe the US wasn't interested in democracy in Iraq, or anywhere else.

I'm sick of watching wall-to-wall sympathy for white refugees, but I don't have control of the TV. I've still seen no mention of Iraq. It's almost impressive. Even on the left, the cynicism is lacking. 

I'd forgotten the author.

Happy Anniversary

March 20 2003

Civilian casualties are the deaths of non-military individuals as a result of military operations. The number of documented civilian deaths in the Iraq war peaked in 2006 at 29,517 casualties. Since then, the number had fallen to 4,162 casualties documented in the year 2011, and the number of casualties have been decreasing since 2014. Due to the nature of the Iraq war and of war reporting, data cannot be considered exact. Many civilian deaths that occurred during the war in Iraq may remain unaccounted for.

The Iraq war was launched in March 2003 upon the invasion of Iraq by US forces. Eight years later, in December 2011, the US formally declared an end to the Iraq war. From the start of the war in 2003 until September 30, 2015, it is estimated that the United States spent a total of over 819 billion US dollars on war costs in Iraq. This number includes funding requested by the President and appropriated by Congress, and accounts for both military and non-military spending. Spending was highest in 2008, that year over 142 billion US dollars were spent in Iraq by the United States government. As of 2019, about 7,990 U.S. active-duty military personnel were deployed in North Africa, the Near East, and South Asia. 

The number of US American soldiers killed in Iraq peaked in 2007 with just over nine hundred causalities. In the same year, there were over 25,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.

And Petraeus is on the TV talking to Jake Tapper about Ukraine.

Costs of War 

At least 929,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. The number of people who have been wounded or have fallen ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who have died indirectly as a result of the destruction of hospitals and infrastructure and environmental contamination, among other war-related problems.

Thousands of United States service members have died in combat, as have thousands of civilian contractors. Many have died later on from injuries and illnesses sustained in the war zones. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and contractors have been wounded and are living with disabilities and war-related illnesses. Allied security forces have also suffered significant casualties, as have opposition forces.

Far more of the people killed have been civilians. More than 387,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting since 2001.

Millions of people living in the war zones have also been displaced by war. The U.S. post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.

The U.S. could have pursued several nonmilitary alternatives to holding accountable those responsible for perpetrating the 9/11 attacks. These alternatives would have been far less costly in human lives. For example, the U.S. invasion of Iraq turned the country into a laboratory in which militant groups such as Islamic State have been able to hone their techniques of recruitment and violence. The formation of Islamist militant groups spreading throughout the region counts among the many human costs of that war.

Back in Connecticut and stuck watching CNN/MSNBC, all day long. He won't turn the shit off. It's unbearable.

Nationalism in Eastern Europe is the worst possible disease. It was subdued under communism. It was used as a tool to undo communist regimes. It might now blow up the entire world into pieces.

— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) March 6, 2022

In recent days, militia leaders in France, Finland and Ukraine have posted declarations urging their supporters to join in the fight to defend Ukraine against a Russian invasion. The posts have been located and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization that specializes in tracking extremist groups.

Rita Katz, the director of SITE, said that numerous far-right white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups throughout Europe and North America had expressed an outpouring of support for Ukraine, including by seeking to join paramilitary units in battling Russia.

All across the United States, small groups of military veterans are gathering, planning and getting passports in order. After years of serving in smoldering occupations, trying to spread democracy in places that had only a tepid interest in it, many are hungry for what they see as a righteous fight to defend freedom against an autocratic aggressor with a conventional and target-rich army.

Danish government likely to exempt Ukrainians from controversial refugee ‘jewellery law’

A controversial law allowing Danish authorities to confiscate valuable items from refugees is unlikely to be applied to Ukrainians who seek protection in the Nordic country. 

---

After 20 years of US occupation, my country has been left in ruins. The US and its allies did nothing to develop Afghanistan. We were made into a dependency, relying on flows of humanitarian aid rather than building our own economic capacities. The evidence? Our current economic collapse and the humanitarian catastrophe that has followed from it.

Biden may have withdrawn the US military, but he has refused responsibility for America’s intervention in our country. Instead, he has added great insult to profound injury by stealing our scarce financial resources. His actions will make the bread queues longer and the number of children dying of painful hunger greater. This crime against humanity should never be forgotten.

In 2002, Congress passed a law enabling United States forces to unilaterally storm into peaceful Holland to liberate American soldiers held for war crimes.

Coming in the early days of the war on terrorists, and as the International Criminal Court was being formed here, the measure provoked controversy and seemed to the Dutch – stout US allies – an absurd example of America's "with us or against us" foreign policy.

The law is still on the books.

Formally titled the American Service Members Protection Act, the measure is widely and derisively known here as the Invasion of The Hague Act.

Odd as it may seem, the law allows the US to constitutionally send jack-booted commandos to fly over fields of innocent tulips, swoop into the land of wooden shoes, tread past threatening windmills and sleepy milk cows into the Dutch capital – into a city synonymous with international law – and pry loose any US troops.   

As extreme hunger tightens its grip on Afghanistan, more parents are sacrificing their bodies in order to feed their children.

Illegal organ trading existed before the Taliban takeover in August 2021, but the black market has exploded after millions more were plunged into poverty due to international sanctions. 

Current United Nations estimates suggest more than 24 million people – 59 per cent of the population – are in need of lifesaving humanitarian aid, 30 per cent higher than in 2021.

“I had to do it for the sake of my children,” 32-year-old Nooruddin, pictured, told news agency AFP from Herat, a city close to the border with Iran. “I didn’t have any other option.” 

All because Biden stole their money. He'll give some of it back, eventually.

So far the post Soviet US presidents are well ahead of Putin on civilian casualties, death and destruction, war crimes etc. even including Chechnya. That could change. 

The list of US crimes is getting longer, and this one's pretty much out in the open. Only Nixon could go to China; only a Democrat could be goaded into crimes against humanity. 

A woman I knew years ago in the extended family of Zahir Shah, born under house arrest and raised in Queens, went to Afghanistan and came back with stories of NGO workers zooming around Kabul in their new Mercedes.   

repeats: from Afghanistan to Haiti and vice versa, both with links the LRB because bourgeois liberalism doesn't have to be absolute shit.

From Leiter: Mearsheimer on Ukraine from 2014. 

---

An old friend's grandparents were blacklisted in the 1950s. They were communists. The husband lost his government job. To pay the bills they opened a childcare center. They lived in New Jersey, and the parents of one of the children in their care were at the Afghan mission to the UN. J's grandmother, who'd been a barnstormer in the 20s,  had fond memories of "little Najib". When I introduced her grandson to the grandniece of Zahir Shah,  I introduced him as the grandson of the babysitters of her babysitter.

---

 

Yemen, 2015,  2016, 2021, now.

speak softly and carry a big black stick

Biden saying that he was going to choose a black woman was the worst kind of white pandering, and politically incompetent. If he'd had the guts to play hardball he would have spoken only about policy, and then nominated one of the same women he's looking at now. It's not the battle; it's the war. Leave proud statements of moral superiority to others.

In other news I'm still in the Berkshires and obliged by my host to watch MSNBC, where the talking heads of every color are praising Biden's moral superiority, calling for war with Russia, and silent about the US policy of death and destruction in Yemen and starvation in Afghanistan.

And Whoopi Goldberg is being criticized for saying Jews are white.

She's fond of the word, but political science is provincial by definition.

ISA is hosting a roundtable on Afghanistan on Sep 21 with no Afghan scholars on the panel and all the four scholars happen to be white. Isn’t this how the international community messed up Afghanistan in the first place? How can you discuss us without us? #AfghanVoices @isanet

— Ahmad Qais Munhazim (@QaisMunhazim) September 14, 2021

ISSS Virtual Roundtable Discussion on 20 Years in Afghanistan: How did we get there and what are the consequences?

Monica Duffy Toft: moderator, ISSS Chair, and Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School, Tufts University

Audrey Kurth Cronin, Distinguished Professor, School of International Service, American University

Jacqueline Hazelton, Associate Professor, Naval War College

John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago

It made me laugh, so I looked up the history. I'm not sure if this was it. I'm sure there's more.

"Roundtable critique (pdf) of that piece by Bessner and Logevall on how what academic history needs is more focus on US elites" [link]

"This bit struck me as right on the money: 'Bessner and Logevall seem to prefer an older approach, one in which non-American people, places, cultures, and societies remain in the outer reaches of their imagined U.S.-centric solar system.'"

Bessner's a putz. This now includes a link to an earlier post. 

WaPo: I was a combat interpreter in Afghanistan, where cultural illiteracy led to U.S. failure

When comparing the Taliban with the United States and its Western allies, the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils.  

 MSNBC

Zeeshan Aleem: Was there a significantly better way to withdraw from Afghanistan? 

Anand Gopal: Well, there was and there wasn't. 

There was a better way to do it if Washington faced certain hard ground truths. What would have been the better way was if the U.S. government had secured a deal with the Taliban that began a process of transfer of power to them, while the U.S. was still in the country. But that would have meant completely undermining the Afghan government to do that; it would've meant recognizing the Afghan government, basically, is a creation of the U.S. entirely, and has no real legitimacy on the ground. So that would've been a pretty major paradigm shift, almost a greater paradigm shift than just simply cutting and running, I think.

As I said, they could, but of course, they couldn't. 

And Gopal uses the same line as Ahadi (in WaPo) 

So really, you had a one-sided war in those years, between 2001 and 2004, where the U.S. was fighting an enemy that didn't exist, and innocent people were the ones who were suffering. That really is what created the Taliban's resurgence. The Taliban wasn't a popular force in 2001, but in these communities, people saw the Taliban as a lesser of two evils to the violence perpetuated by the U.S. and by the U.S. proxies. 

"Like Ordering Pizza"

Thomas Meaney in the LRB.  

Your cause is right and God is on your side!

Zbigniew Brzezinski, US national security adviser, to the Afghan mujahedin, 3 February 1980

I have benefited so greatly from the jihad in Afghanistan that it would have been impossible for me to gain such a benefit from any other chance, and this cannot be measured by tens of years but rather more than that.

Osama bin Laden, March 1997

Once, the Kabul Zoo housed ninety varieties of animals and got a thousand visitors a day, but in the era of fighting that followed the fall of the Soviets and then of Najibullah, the people stayed away, and the animals found themselves in a place more dangerous than any forest or jungle. For ten days, the elephant ran in circles, screaming, until shrapnel toppled her and she died. As the shelling went back and forth, the tigers and llamas, the ostriches, the elephant, were carried away to paradise. The aviary was ruptured and the birds flew free into the heavens from which the rockets rained.

Denis Johnson, 1 April 1997

Let’s step back a moment. Let’s just pause, just for a minute. And think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.

US Representative Barbara Lee, 14 September 2001

This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient.

President George W. Bush, 17 September 2001

The Taliban regime already belongs to history.

Jürgen Habermas, December 2001

I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Donald Rumsfeld, 8 September 2003

I will venture a prediction. The Taliban/al-Qaida riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to power.

Christopher Hitchens, November 2004

The markets for defence and related advanced technology systems for 2005 and beyond will continue to be affected by the global war on terrorism, through the continued need for military missions and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the related fiscal consequences of war.

Lockheed Martin Annual Report, 1 March 2005

Well, it was a just war in the beginning.

Michael Walzer, 3 December 2009

RAMBO IN AFGHANISTAN. A screening of Rambo III at the Duck and Cover. Wear a headband for $1 off drinks.

Email chain invitation, US compound, Kabul, 2010

Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanising the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German and other European women could help to overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe towards the ISAF mission.

CIA Analysis Report, 11 March 2010

The overthrow of the Taliban was the ennobling corollary of a security policy; it was collateral humanitarianism.

Leon Wieseltier, 24 October 2010

Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don’t fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear. Children don’t play so often now, and have stopped going to school. Education isn’t possible as long as the drones circle overhead.

Zubair Rehman, 13-year-old Pakistani student, 29 October 2013

I think his legacy in terms of his country will be a strong one.

US Ambassador James B. Cunningham on Hamid Karzai, 23 September 2014

While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures.

President Barack Obama, 15 October 2015

When [Afghans] leave, they break the social contract. This is an existential choice. Countries do not survive with their best attempting to flee. So I have no sympathy.

President Ashraf Ghani, 31 March 2016

He reads books on the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, on the Central Asian enlightenment of a thousand years ago, on modern warfare, on the history of Afghanistan’s rivers.

George Packer on Ashraf Ghani, 4 July 2016

It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture.

Senior NSC official, 16 September 2016

We’re getting along very, very well with the Taliban.

President Donald Trump, 10 September 2020

This is manifestly not Saigon.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, 15 August 2021

The disarray of the past weeks needs to be replaced by something resembling coherence, and with a plan that is credible and realistic.

Tony Blair, 21 August 2021

Laura and I, along with the team at the Bush Centre, stand ready as Americans to lend our support and assistance in this time of need. Let us all resolve to be united in saving lives and praying for the people of Afghanistan.

George W. Bush, 16 August 2021

...The real war in Afghanistan was waged far above ground. In the early days of the conflict, an Allied patrol would need to draw fire before calling in air support, but by the end, as the rules of engagement relaxed, it was only necessary to have a sense of where a Taliban position was to radio in a drone or a fighter jet. ‘It got pretty ritualistic,’ a former US Marine pilot told me last week, ‘like ordering pizza.’...  

In 2009, when he dissented from Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan, it was less in the cause of devolving America’s global projection of force than of refining it. Biden wanted over-the-horizon capability then, and he wants something like it now.  The killing of thirteen US Marines at Kabul airport has not diverted that desire: a reduced US troop presence will provide fewer targets for local militants, Biden has argued, and those militants will be ‘hunted’ for retribution by more remote means. Biden was even more sanguine than Obama about the promise of drones and special forces to fight America’s enemies. He isn’t so much the undertaker of the war on terror as its McKinsey consultant.

The Taliban nearly eradicated heroin production in Afghanistan in the 1990s, but the Allies did everything in their power to push poppy cultivation into Taliban-held territory, and then, by destroying supply elsewhere, to raise prices. They have made the Taliban appear a better prospect to many Afghans than a government that was a byword for crookedness. The departing president, Ashraf Ghani, who in the 2019 election won the vote of 2.5 per cent of the population, who wrote his dissertation at Columbia on state failure, and who fled Kabul in a chopper (according to some sources, with piles of cash onboard), has now joined the ranks of Washington’s failed proxies: Ngô Đình Diêm, Ahmed Chalabi, Nouri al-Maliki, Hamid Karzai. The corruption of the Afghan government is dwarfed only by that of the American operation itself, which constituted a massive wealth transfer to US defence industries.

Will the Taliban behave? They have entered a very different Kabul – one with beauty salons and shopping malls – from the one they left twenty years ago. In the interim, they have developed the ambition to run a state,...

There is also a brisk traffic in arms: US manufacturers recently announced the sale to _____ of 24 new F-16 fighter jets and other equipment, worth an estimated $3.2 billion. Steven Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations has published a ‘contingency planning memorandum’ in favour of continued support to the regime, which, as he describes it, ‘has helped create a regional order that makes it relatively inexpensive for the United States to exercise its power’. 

I'm so sick of the "responsible" anti-war blather that the US could never win the war or that "America is not capable of 'nation-building'." 

The US was never interested in nation-building in Afghanistan; it was interested in exercising its power. It won the war easily, but victory wasn't enough. Trying to work on the cheap, predictably, it chose bribery. Laziness and cheapness over time is saving $5 to spend 10, as corruption reinforces itself, undermining the state in the US as in Afghanistan. 

Meanwhile this is one of the "serious" Americans:

"While the U.S. war in Vietnam was a pointless tragedy that resulted in untold human misery, it was not totally absurd for U.S. decision-makers to believe that communism was an existential threat worth fighting. The same cannot be said for the war in Afghanistan—"   

The Quincy Institute is an American organization for an American audience.

---  

Bessner previously

Various,  

"Swedish staff left the embassy as their Afghan colleagues worked. Then, they refused to answer calls from the Afghan staff and even blocked their official email accounts. Left the country."

"When Afghan employees of the Dutch embassy in Kabul arrived at the office on Sunday, they were flabbergasted to find that the Dutch had all left without telling them anything. They just left."

"A German Defense Ministry spokesperson on its responsibility to get local Afghan support staff and translators out of the country: 'It's not like we forced them to cooperate with us.' " 

"Macron vows EU initiative to protect against migrant flows from Afghanistan"

The source for the German Defense Ministry is the Frankfurter Allgemeine 

The US could have admitted defeat and that the Taliban would take over the moment they left. They could have planned an exit without chaos. But of course they couldn't.

8/16/21, the twitter account @ResoluteSupport has been deleted.

repeats mostly

Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present,  trans. John King, Columbia University Press, 2005 .

The role of the loya jirga, inaugurated by the former king Zahir Shah on 11 June 2002, was the transfer of the interim administration's authority to the Afghanistan Transitional Authority. There was inevitably some confusion, but the positions of the various delegates gravitated towards the exclusion of former ‘commanders' and to support for Zahir Shah. However, the crucial decisions and in particular the choice of Hamid Karzai, had already been taken by the Americans, at whose behest Zahir Shah was obliged to step aside. Actually a majority of the delegates appeared to be prepared to cast their votes for Zahir Shah, a development which would have blocked the election of the Americans’ candidate. For his part the king let it be known that he was ready to assume any responsibility which the loya jirga might wish to confer upon him, but in spite of this, shortly after the Loya jirga opened, the US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad publicly denied that Zahir Shah intended to put himself forward, and confirmed that he would give his support to Hamid Karzai. Some hours later Zahir Shah fell into line with the US position at a press conference, where the only diplomatic observers present were Americans, and irrevocably renounced anything other than a ceremonial role. 

HRW, 2017

The US-led NATO Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan just published a photo of Gen. John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, sharing a laugh with Kandahar strongman Gen. Abdul Raziq, long accused of forcibly disappearing detainees and having his henchman drill holes in the heads of some of them. Raziq runs secret prisons where torture is rife, and he’s also been implicated in corruption involving cross-border smuggling and unpaid custom duties. Both the United Nations and Afghan human rights activists have accused Raziq’s forces of extrajudicial killings going back at least a decade.  

Gen. Nicholson & Lt. Gen. Raziq provincial Chief of Police of Kandahar met at TAAC-S to reinforce partnership between coalition and #ANDSF pic.twitter.com/3LJutYztmh

— Resolute Support (@ResoluteSupport) June 24, 2017

Patrick Cockburn, Harpers, 2015 

It was obviously something big: although the explosion had taken place on the other side of Sher Darwaza, a mountain in the center of Kabul, McWilliams had heard it clearly. After negotiating a maze of narrow streets on the south side of the city, he found the site. A massive car bomb, designed to kill as many civilians as possible, had been detonated in a neighborhood full of Hazaras, a much-persecuted minority.

McWilliams took pictures of the devastation, headed back to the embassy, and sent a report to Washington. It was very badly received — not because someone had launched a terrorist attack against Afghan civilians, but because McWilliams had reported it. The bomb, it turned out, had been the work of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedeen commander who received more CIA money and support than any other leader of the Afghan rebellion. The attack, the first of many, was part of a CIA-blessed scheme to “put pressure” on the Soviet presence in Kabul. Informing the Washington bureaucracy that Hekmatyar’s explosives were being deployed to kill civilians was therefore entirely unwelcome.

“Those were Gulbuddin’s bombs,” McWilliams, a Rhode Islander with a gift for laconic understatement, told me recently. “He was supposed to get the credit for this.” In the meantime, the former diplomat recalled, the CIA pressured him to “report a little less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those vehicle bombs.”

I tracked down McWilliams, now retired to the remote mountains of southern New Mexico, because the extremist Islamist groups currently operating in Syria and Iraq called to mind the extremist Islamist groups whom we lavishly supported in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Hekmatyar, with his documented fondness for throwing acid in women’s faces, would have had nothing to learn from Al Qaeda. When a courageous ABC News team led by my wife, Leslie Cockburn, interviewed him in 1993, he had beheaded half a dozen people earlier that day. Later, he killed their translator. 

 etc.

The Stinger missiles supplied by the United States gave Afghan guerrillas, generally known as the Mujahideen, the ability to destroy the dreaded Mi-24D helicopter gunships deployed by the Soviets to enforce their control over Afghanistan. #HISTINT #Museum

— CIA (@CIA) April 6, 2021

NYT 2013, With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”...

No one mentions the agency’s money at cabinet meetings. It is handled by a small clique at the National Security Council, including its administrative chief, Mohammed Zia Salehi, Afghan officials said.

Mr. Salehi, though, is better known for being arrested in 2010 in connection with a sprawling, American-led investigation that tied together Afghan cash smuggling, Taliban finances and the opium trade. Mr. Karzai had him released within hours, and the C.I.A. then helped persuade the Obama administration to back off its anticorruption push, American officials said.

After his release, Mr. Salehi jokingly came up with a motto that succinctly summed up America’s conflicting priorities. He was, he began telling colleagues, “an enemy of the F.B.I., and a hero to the C.I.A.” 

And this of course. Maria Farrell, proper army wife, "Chicks dig the uniform", and the rest. 

"Sometime in Spring, two years ago, my brother Henry received a hand-written letter from a woman in Ireland he’d neither met nor heard of. It was a letter of introduction. The person being introduced was Edward, 'a decent, entertaining fellow. We have known him all our lives.'

...A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest."

As I said: if the Farrells were Muslim, she'd be in hijab. If they were Iranian, she'd be a religious liberal; if they were Jewish they'd be Zionists.

Just for fun, and memories of the good old days.

Henry Farrell recommends Osita Nwanevu: "This is good"

The Enemies of Truth
"The true enemy of writing Packer conjures up isn’t belonging or fear, but the reader."

The pic is Henry's sister, smiling army wife. "Chicks dig the uniform", "I love a man in uniform,  "Reader, I married him", etc. 

The Farrells and Hitchens, and "Learning by Doing"

Maria Farrell, like Hitchens, is honest. And like Hitchens whether what she says is true or not –comporting with the facts–is another matter. Her brother, like Packer, is dishonest. Both make a living as pedants, writing for an audience more than for themselves, imaging their own objectivity, blind to their own affect, false humility and self-importance. Nwanevu is a U. Chicago grad building a career. He has time to learn but won't.

The Independent:

War crimes court could investigate British army for first time over alleged civilian killings in Afghanistan and Iraq

HRW

When it comes to cosying up to alleged torturers in Afghanistan, the United States military has been a slow learner. 

The US-led NATO Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan just published a photo of Gen. John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, sharing a laugh with Kandahar strongman Gen. Abdul Raziq, long accused of forcibly disappearing detainees and having his henchman drill holes in the heads of some of them. Raziq runs secret prisons where torture is rife, and he’s also been implicated in corruption involving cross-border smuggling and unpaid custom duties. Both the United Nations and Afghan human rights activists have accused Raziq’s forces of extrajudicial killings going back at least a decade.

Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present,  trans. John King, Columbia University Press, 2005 .

The role of the loya jirga, inaugurated by the former king Zahir Shah on 11 June 2002, was the transfer of the interim administration's authority to the Afghanistan Transitional Authority. There was inevitably some confusion, but the positions of the various delegates gravitated towards the exclusion of former ‘commanders' and to support for Zahir Shah. However, the crucial decisions and in particular the choice of Hamid Karzai, had already been taken by the Americans, at whose behest Zahir Shah was obliged to step aside. Actually a majority of the delegates appeared to be prepared to cast their votes for Zahir Shah, a development which would have blocked the election of the Americans’ candidate. For his part the king let it be known that he was ready to assume any responsibility which the loya jirga might wish to confer upon him, but in spite of this, shortly after the Loya jirga opened, the US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad publicly denied that Zahir Shah intended to put himself forward, and confirmed that he would give his support to Hamid Karzai. Some hours later Zahir Shah fell into line with the US position at a press conference, where the only diplomatic observers present were Americans, and irrevocably renounced anything other than a ceremonial role. 

It was obviously something big: although the explosion had taken place on the other side of Sher Darwaza, a mountain in the center of Kabul, McWilliams had heard it clearly. After negotiating a maze of narrow streets on the south side of the city, he found the site. A massive car bomb, designed to kill as many civilians as possible, had been detonated in a neighborhood full of Hazaras, a much-persecuted minority.

McWilliams took pictures of the devastation, headed back to the embassy, and sent a report to Washington. It was very badly received — not because someone had launched a terrorist attack against Afghan civilians, but because McWilliams had reported it. The bomb, it turned out, had been the work of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedeen commander who received more CIA money and support than any other leader of the Afghan rebellion. The attack, the first of many, was part of a CIA-blessed scheme to “put pressure” on the Soviet presence in Kabul. Informing the Washington bureaucracy that Hekmatyar’s explosives were being deployed to kill civilians was therefore entirely unwelcome.

“Those were Gulbuddin’s bombs,” McWilliams, a Rhode Islander with a gift for laconic understatement, told me recently. “He was supposed to get the credit for this.” In the meantime, the former diplomat recalled, the CIA pressured him to “report a little less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those vehicle bombs.”

I tracked down McWilliams, now retired to the remote mountains of southern New Mexico, because the extremist Islamist groups currently operating in Syria and Iraq called to mind the extremist Islamist groups whom we lavishly supported in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Hekmatyar, with his documented fondness for throwing acid in women’s faces, would have had nothing to learn from Al Qaeda. When a courageous ABC News team led by my wife, Leslie Cockburn, interviewed him in 1993, he had beheaded half a dozen people earlier that day. Later, he killed their translator.

When I hear the name Hekmatyar I think of the stories above, and Cockburn's brother.

Those on the receiving end of Islamic State attacks tend to agree. Asked what could be done to help Iraq following the group’s lightning assaults in the summer of 2014, an Iraqi diplomat replied: “Bomb Saudi Arabia.”

Andrew Cockburn: The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again

Earlier in the Syrian war, U.S. officials had at least maintained the pretense that weapons were being funneled only to so-called moderate opposition groups. But in 2014, in a speech at Harvard, Vice President Joe Biden confirmed that we were arming extremists once again, although he was careful to pin the blame on America’s allies in the region, whom he denounced as “our largest problem in Syria.” In response to a student’s question, he volunteered that our allies

were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.

Biden’s explanation was entirely reminiscent of official excuses for the arming of fundamentalists in Afghanistan during the 1980s, which maintained that the Pakistanis had total control of the distribution of U.S.-supplied weapons and that the CIA was incapable of intervening when most of those weapons ended up with the likes of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Asked why the United States of America was supposedly powerless to stop nations like Qatar, population 2.19 million, from pouring arms into the arsenals of Nusra and similar groups, a former adviser to one of the Gulf States replied softly: “They didn’t want to.”

...Two years later, Washington’s capacity for denial in the face of inconvenient facts remains undiminished. Addressing the dominance of extremists in the Syrian opposition, Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, has blamed our earlier failure to arm those elusive moderates. The catastrophic consequences of this very approach in Libya are seldom mentioned. “If we had intervened more swiftly in Syria,” Gartenstein-Ross says, “the best-case scenario probably would have been another Libya. Meaning that we would still be dealing with a collapsed state and spillover into other Middle Eastern states and Europe.”

Even as we have continued our desultory bombing campaign against the Islamic State, Ahrar al-Sham and Nusra are creeping closer and closer to international respectability. A month after the London Eleven meeting, a group of scholars from the Brookings Institution published an op-ed making the case for Ahrar al-Sham: “Designating [the] group as a terrorist organization might backfire by pushing it completely into Al Qaeda’s camp.” (The think tank’s recent receipt of a multiyear, $15 million grant from Qatar was doubtless coincidental.)

1

An Afghan public affairs officer tried to shush the colonel as he spoke to a journalist at the Afghan Air Force base at Kabul airport. A United States Air Force public affairs officer looked on aghast.

But Colonel Qalandari kept on: “I will tell the truth. This is my country, and these are my men, and they deserve the truth.”

He tossed a map on the table, showing the effective range of the helicopter from its Kabul airfield: It cannot even reach areas where the Taliban normally operate. In summertime, its maximum altitude with a full load of fuel and ammunition is only 7,000 to 8,000 feet, he said — meaning it cannot cross most of the mountain ranges that encircle Kabul, which is itself at an elevation of about 6,000 feet.

“It’s unsafe to fly, the engine is too weak, the tail rotor is defective and it’s not armored. If we go down after the enemy we’re going to have enemy return fire, which we can’t survive. If we go up higher, we can’t visually target the enemy,” Colonel Qalandari said. “Even the guns are no good.”

2

The EU wants to make the point that the West Bank is not a part of Israel, she said. But according to the official policy of the Israeli government, “[Handovers of] Judea and Samaria aren’t even on the list of options we’re offering the Palestinians,” she announced. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while professing to support the creation of a Palestinian state in principle, “never said that the evacuation of Judea and Samaria is an option. He says we learned the lessons of the [2005 Gaza] Disengagement and that the world needs to get used to this idea. That’s one of the messages that I place great emphasis on.”

The world needs to internalize that the West Bank is to remain under Israeli “de facto sovereignty,” Hotovely said. “It’s not a bargaining chip. It does not depend on the Palestinians’ goodwill. It’s the land of our forefathers. We don’t intend to evacuate it, certainly not for the Islamic State or al-Qaeda or other extremist organizations that would sure to gain control over the territory.”