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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   34540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Scott-featured global health philanthropist and activist John Green made a video about TB treatment and USAID. tl;dw, TB is the brick-shithouse of bacteria, so treatment takes 4-6 months, but the good news is that people mostly aren't contagious during treatment. Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance, including the spread of newly-treatment-resistant strains, so interruptions in the supply chain are a major global health problem. Yes, it's bad that global health was overly reliant on the USA, but it requires government-level funding and logistics. (Unsaid, his family pledged $1m/year 2024-2027 for a USAID TB program in the Philippines, in addition to $6.5m for Partners in Health, so he's literally put his money where his mouth is.) His contacts in confirm that drug supplies are being interrupted.

Even if one wants to cut USAID, a stop-work order, rather than a phase-out, was likely a net-negative by most measures of utility.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped. If you let them slow you down they'll keep finding reasons to do it until the whole thing grinds to a halt.

There was a limited supply of veto power and it has been squandered on less important issues. Don't blame the bartender for cutting you off, blame yourself for drinking too much.

This argument is constantly advanced and it's ridiculous - it's basically blaming the left for the right having a) a stupid base and b) being rubbish at politics. Plenty of politicians/movements have proven capable of picking their way through hostile bureaucracies without tearing the whole thing down. That Trump is too stupid or impulsive to do this is no-one's fault but his own.

Plenty of politicians/movements have proven capable of picking their way through hostile bureaucracies without tearing the whole thing down.

Could you give some examples?

Deng, De Gaulle, Thatcher, Feng Guifen, Attlee

Please correct me if my history is off, but AFAIK Thatcher is the poster child for tearing it all down. That's why she privatised everything she could get her hands on, destroyed the unions and ended British coal mining. It's also why the Left burns her in effigy every chance they get. Her most famous line is "The lady's not for turning."

Harold Wilson, on the other hand, is famous for trying to come to a civilised accommodation with hostile unions and failing utterly:

For 16 months Prime Minister Harold Wilson has cajoled, wheedled and haggled with Britain’s powerful labor unions in a vain effort to stop their rampaging wage demands. The basis of his policy was the “social contract,” a formal deal (although never written into law) between the government and the labor unions. The government would deliver social welfare benefits in exchange for voluntary restraints in pay settlements. Purpose: to keep workers abreast of—but not ahead of—inflation.

But the unions have welshed on the deal. One major union after another won pay raises of 30% and more; during the past twelve months, average weekly wage rates for manual workers rose 32.6%, leapfrogging ahead of the 25% inflation rate for the same period. Last week, after inflation had worsened and the pound sterling had hit a new low, Wilson and his Cabinet took a deep breath and finally scrapped the tattered social contract.

Time Magazine 1975

(And Attlee came from before the time of entrenched hostile bureaucracies. Indeed, he founded many of them, including but not limited to the NHS and the various local planning committees).

but AFAIK Thatcher is the poster child for tearing it all down

This is rather overwrought, deindustrialisation and the drawdown of employment in SOEs was well underway under Wilson, but in any case the relevant point here is in her interactions with the bureaucracy, which is the particular point of discussion in this subthread. The point is that whatever changes Thatcher was in fact able to make re: privatisation and retrenchment (though bear in mind she increaseda a range of taxes (especially early on) because unlike Republicans she actually believed in austerity, for better or for worse) she did so without tearing apart the Civil Service, even though prevailing governmental consensus was for a mixed economy and national and regional planning.

And Attlee came from before the time of entrenched hostile bureaucracies.

This is silly - just because the scale of governmental employment was not what it is now, he still was dealing with an e.g. Treasury which, though changed by the dual experiences of depression and war, was still not inclined towards his agenda.

One analogy I heard somewhat recently that I keep thinking about when seeing all this DOGE-related news is that, when you amputate an infected limb, there's almost undoubtedly lots of cells in that limb that are perfectly fine and perfectly functional, but it's just not viable to go in there and surgically (literally) remove only the bad cells and leave the good ones behind. Perhaps it might have been possible earlier on when the infection was small, but at some point, the infection became large enough such that, if we don't remove the limb along with the good cells, the host itself will die.

There are many issues with the analogy, such as the fact that the host in this case probably won't die and the fact that the good cells in the limb are humans with suffering, free will, a voice, and a vote, and the fact that whether the infection has gotten so bad that amputation is the only viable option isn't something we can determine with the same level of confidence as a doctor looking at an infected limb. But I think it's a reasonable enough position to have with respect to the current circumstances.

And I think it points to the fact that, if the "good" cells in a metaphorical infected limb wants to survive, then it's incumbent on them to take control over the infection within and take active steps to credibly signal that it's in control, if not rooted out entirely. I think the past couple decades of escalating DEI (I think the term "DEI" becoming a popular catchall term for this is more recent, but certainly the push for that exact sort of ideology has been around and quite strong at least since the 90s) is one part of this that shows the utter failure of many institutions, both within and out of the government, to make credible signals that they have the infection under control.

Are there any previous examples? Trump has a pretty wide open range of options, and I don’t see why there is a rush on it.

Unless the point someone is making is that absolutely zero dollars should be spent in foreign aid, I feel like it would be useful to come up with an objective approach and do at least a basic combing through.

There is a long history of government “efficiency” initiatives spinning up, wasting unimaginable gobs of taxpayer money, and ending up with nothing usable to show for it. Elon mentioned from the Oval Office yesterday that the government stores and processes retirement records on paper inside an underground mine. Here is an old GAO report detailing past attempts to modernize the process. The theme of the piece is repeated abject failure.

You can’t waste time on planning, outreach, and meetings. You either do the thing, or the thing never gets done. Existing governmental organizations are not going to give you what you need to do the thing. You have to make them accept a fait accompli

If previous attempts failed, I assume it’s because they lacked a real focus and drive. What you highlight, I’m guessing b/c the link is broken, is more about a process change. Embarrassing to fail at fixing it for so long, but that’s at least a difficult problem. You’re making repairs to a moving vehicle.

In comparison, choosing which USAID programs are worthwhile and which aren’t should be fairly simple, at least at a surface level, and there currently an enormous push to make cuts and authority to do it. If it’s easy for them to shut down the whole thing, why wouldn’t it be similarly simple to cut off only parts of it?

Start by cutting and popularizing the obvious cases, I’m sure there’s easy instances where even the average Kamala voter would agree that it’s wasteful. Then get into the more ideological stuff. Continue extending as ideology and politics permit, until you’re left with useful programs. You could do this in a month or two, and I think it would actually change minds about the situation.

Thats what efficiency means to me, and the fact that the administration isn’t doing that leads me to that that either they aren’t very component or they really don’t care and just want to burn it all down.

Why didn't Alexander just unwind the Gordian Knot?

I guess he just wasn't competent and lacked real focus and drive.

Well if I’m not given specific examples I can’t exactly respond in specifics. But it does seem like the first time in my lifetime that government ‘efficiency’ is actually top of the president goals, so I do think it has real focus and drive unlike, say, a house report or something.

Unwinding the knot is impossible because it was designed to not be unwound. When the millionth competent person walks up to the Gordian Knot and fails to unwind it, it's not because they're all actually just dumb and incompetent, it's because the Gordian Knot is designed to not be unwound. It must be cut.

The federal worker retirement system is literally bureaucrats toiling in a mine underground and shuffling manila folders back and forth between caverns. It takes months for retirement paperwork to be done. There is a hard limit on the physical ability of the toiling bureaucrats to process retirement claims. Meanwhile, it takes the stroke of a key to send dozens of millions of dollars illegally to a Hotel operator to house illegals.

This is a purposefully designed Gordian Knot in order to make what Trump is doing impossible. It's hard to not notice that most critics actually don't want the Gordian Knot to be unwound and/or they don't like Trump and that was he's doing is at the very least moving the needle and the various criticisms about Trump not doing it "the right way" and whatever else are just soldiers in that war.

Previous attempts failed because they were sabotaged with the exact same appeals to decorum and proper conduct and empathy and compassion and coincidence and fortune and anything else that would fucking stick, and all of it topped with a heaping helping of 'while I've never looked into it or even thought about it you probably can't do anything about it and therefore shouldn't even try' as you peddle here.

Yes there are better ways to do things. Considering what has already been uncovered, the amount of graft and waste and just plain corrupt and autocratic bullshit we have already learned has been done in the name of the American people ENTIRELY in the dark, I prefer "incompetence". At least we can see when they fuck up.

What previous attempts you referring to?

Also, what am I supposed to be peddling? I never said you shouldn’t look into it.

https://x.com/realdogeusa/status/1889885247787217374

You might not be doing it deliberately, but you are pushing the same line and attitude mate. Even with the revelations of the circuitous and incestuous nest of payola and corruption that has USAID funding the media to push its propaganda, and working as a cut out for the CIA to overthrow democracies (then bringing those tactics back home) your assumption is that any previous failed attempts must have lacked focus and drive, not deliberate sabotage by the people who would lose their job if it succeeded. And on top of that, you also don't like the attempt with focus and drive.

And the previous attempts I am referring to are all of them. Trump's first term, the tea party movement, Buchanan's attempt to rein in the neo cons - they always have heaps of momentum at the start, but because they are asking bureaucrats to reduce bureaucracy they get stymied by malicious compliance and feigned incompetence at every turn. Meanwhile the media - these days especially - fixates on every error and ignores any positives, ginning up hysteria and painting a false view of the world because their own bottom line is in peril too.

The operational strategy is that of Blitzkrieg: by forgoing careful, methodical advances in favor of moving as quickly as possible, you incur substantial tactical penalties, but this is more than made up for by disrupting the abilities of your opponents to respond effectively. If your advice were followed, it would give the defenders of USAID ample time to challenge every single cut to the maximum ability possible, likely with multiple consecutive injunctions, as well as reorganize and potentially reroute funding to prevent the next most likely targets. Then, when those programs are cut, even if they have not already been rerouted elsewhere already, they will be well-prepared to immediately mount a defense-in-depth. The effort would be halted in a quagmire of legal proceedings and public propaganda for so long with so many challenges that the public would despair of any change and the political support would evaporate. That's why the only effective strategy can possibly be to cut as much as possible as quickly as possible, then give back only where it is tactically prudent to do so.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped.

My thoughts throughout this Presidency (all three weeks of it) has been a mix of:

  1. Damn, Trump is reckless, unprofessional, and vain.

  2. How the fuck does he have so much ammo?

There's a plane crash? Air Traffic Controllers were hired under a racist system. Foreign aid? Transgender operas in Colombia. Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on. Threaten Canada with tariffs? Suddenly our border security is a valid issue. Random whatever? $20M in subscriptions to the Associated Press, and another $1.6M to the NYT.

It feels like a weird mirror to the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: He gives every indication of shooting blindly, but there has actually been a bullseye where he hits all along. That could be luck or good spin, but the most compelling story is that everywhere is that bad.

(Related joke: There has been a shooting at a peaceful protest! A child molester, a sexual assaulter, and a convicted felon illegally carrying a gun are the only people injured.)

I still don't think he's doing a good job, but damn does he have a strong narrative.

Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on.

"Indirect costs" are overhead, and 60% is too high (much higher than average in the US right now), but it's not all administrative overhead. Everything from lab equipment and computers to the lights and air conditioning in the research buildings is being paid for by that indirect take. You could make grant recipients itemize instead, but then you either have administrators (more administrative overhead!) do the itemizing, or you have often-highly-paid researchers wasting time on figuring out what fraction of their PC upgrade needs to come out of grant A vs grant B.

This feels like the ivory tower version of "What do you mean the plumber is charging $200! He worked for an hour to replace a $50 part!" You might want to look for a cheaper plumber next time (and in this analogy, I do think it's a problem that spending other people's money doesn't give grant committees so much incentive to price shop), but if you can't find any cheaper plumbers then it might just be possible that you're not considering his whole cost accounting.

It's one of those spectrum things or Russel conjugations. Hard to know when it goes from being somewhat convenient bundled billing to unaccountable slush fund. They are effectively lying on many of their budgets. I've seen some where the PI is taking less than a week's salary for the project. Everyone "knows" that's fake and that there's no real accounting of what the guy is spending his time on.

If they limit overhead unis probably will just start itemizing a few more of the regular things. I won't be surprised to see them start charging for their tuition 'waivers'. That'll still be a fake number that mostly finds its way into a slush fund. They'll pump up the base numbers with more 'newly standard' stuff, drop the overhead a bit and end up with about the same overall number.

I've seen "the PI is barely getting paid" budgets before, but they weren't lies, they were common cases where the bulk of the work was being done by a postdoc or one or two grad students, with a faculty member PI just providing supervision and answering questions for a couple hours a week for each such project. Arguably the most important thing the PI was doing in those situations was "having the paper qualifications for the bureaucracy to allow them to be a PI", and maybe that should raise some eyebrows, but about bureaucratic requirements rather than funding. Even then I'm not sure changing requirements would change much, because the second most important thing the PI was doing was acting as a guarantor, using their track record of good collaborative work to indicate that they were good at picking successful postdocs and students and that they'd help keep that record up if the current project ran into problems.

I might have just been lucky enough to be around honorable people, though. E.g. these were the sorts of PIs who would insist on a paper's first author being the lowly student who did most of the work, whereas I've heard that "the first author is the one with seniority" is sometimes the rule elsewhere.

I just don’t have much belief in price discovery where the main buyer is price indifferent

How the fuck does he have so much ammo?

General rule of politics is that systems will be about as corrupt as they can get away with. One would presume that DOGE was not baked into the calculations of how much they could get away with.

The top level comment is about the hostage puppy of tuberculosis treatment. Which suggests how it works. Corruption grows, shielded by hostage puppies. The puppies are very effective at shielding corruption. Corruption grows: 10% corrupt, 90% puppies; 50% corrupt, 50% puppies; 90% corrupt, 10% puppies; 99% corrupt, 1% puppies.

Eventually the anti-corruption campaigners have a vast amount of ammo; there just aren't enough hostage puppies to provide cover for all the corruption. The level of corruption at which the anti-corruption campaigners can break through is determined by how sentimental the general public is. The more sentimental they are, the better the hostage puppies work at shielding corruption, and the more complete the corruption has to be before the dam breaks.

I doubt anything's 99% corrupt, at least with regard to its stated mission (obviously there are departments whose stated mission many think is evil). 1% puppy, sure, but there's usually quite a lot of stuff that's fulfilling the stated mission (so not corrupt) but also not puppy. I'd expect corruption levels to usually top out somewhere between 20% and 70%, depending largely on scrutiny levels (I developed this rule from experience in Australia; our local governments are typically shockingly corrupt but state and federal ones far less so, and the obvious reason why is that media and electorate attention focuses on state and federal politics).

Corporate security at my job keeps referencing "attack surface". How much vulnerable and hypothetically open to malicious action "surface" are we exposing to the world? They go a bit far in fearing this, in my opinion. Saying we shouldn't be handing out business cards on foreign trips, etc. But their larger point is valid. If you go around leaving possible vulnerabilities exposed to the world, then someone is going to exploit some of them.

Millions spent on transgender animal research, millions on Central American gender assessment clinics, etc, etc. They are hanging targets for a Republican Texas sharpshooter to accidentally hit while making broad cuts. The attack surface was massive so even blundering unfocused "attacks" happen to stike it again and again.

The name of the concept you're reaching for is "target-rich environment".

I've been digging into some of these laws and regulations. I'm coming away more convinced than ever that democratic governance is a myth. No regular person could possibly comprehend the byzantine labyrinth of rules, regulations, and case law required to competently evaluate government decision making.

Every spigot of federal funds grows into a hydrothermal vent of highly-specialized fauna perfectly adapted for siphoning-off those sweet sweet grants. Congress can't fix the problem, because all they are able or willing to do is appropriate more funding for things.

At least in the US, Trump has demonstrated that democratic governance is not a myth. You can in fact elect someone to take an axe to everything and they can take an axe to everything.

Robert Michels eternally vindicated. To say organization is to say oligarchy, where the people who care about the organization inevitably rule over the people who care about the goals of the organization.

The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped.

Can you give examples of past attempts? As a cynic, it wouldn't surprise me, but this is The Motte, not The Bailey, so I don't want to assume that what wouldn't surprise cynical, old me is correct.

Afghanistan and Syria withdrawals last Trump term come to mind. Generals bragged about playing shell games in Syria with troop numbers.

https://nypost.com/2020/11/13/diplomat-says-officials-misled-trump-on-troop-count-in-syria/

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” James Jeffrey, US special representative for Syria engagement, said in an interview with Defense One.

Different branch of gov, but basically the same idea. Leave wiggle room and you leave them room for to wiggle out of the order.

Relatedly, pulling out of Afghanistan. We finally did it, but the military leadership insisted on dragging their feet and doing it in an incompetent fashion to undermine Biden and it worked.

No, Biden absolutely owned that one, on multiple levels. From the decision to delay the American withdrawal in an attempt to renegotiate with the Taliban to the choice to putting the formal American withdrawal to the anniversary of 9-11, which was the peak of the Afghan fighting season, was an American political decision to try and wrap a bow on it for the american electorate.

Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?

I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan. Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.

It was a Presidential level, or at least cabinet level, decision to trust Afghani security forces ability to protect Kabul airport and rely on that for the exit as opposed to maintaining Bagram airfield and staging the exit from there. As was the exact timing. Others have pointed out that there are more advantageous seasons to stage a withdrawal. 3 months later an exit from Bagram would have likely been fairly orderly.

Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?

Because in August you can still more or less drive freely in Afghanistan, and in February you can't because the mountain passes are still snowed in.

Due to the elevation, topography, and regional climate, the term 'fighting season' in Afghanistan was literal, not just figurative. Fighters would literally drive / ride / walk out of Afghanistan before the winter snows, because if they didn't before they were liable to be unable to (or risk death if they tried, because no help is coming on those roads or in those passes). Civilization basically shuts down, and while there is no hard dates, the fighting season is typically over in October and doesn't start again until March-April, once the passes free of snow and you can get people in

In turn, this made the summer season an escalating tempo, as more reinforcements / seasonal fighters would enter the country, prepare for major attacks in the country, and so on. Typically the there would be a peak during whatever the last major islamic holiday was of the fighting season- basically islamist theology that virtuous actions are holier then- and then the tempo would fall off as militants began to move out for the winter.

In 2021, when Afghanistan fell in August, the offensives that started building the pressure were basically timing to such religious holiday offensives. Specifically, while Kabul fell on 15 August, in 2021 that was 3 days before the Day of Ashura, a week after the Hijra, Islamic new year, and Eid-al-Adba, was 20 July, less than 4 weeks before.

Put another way- the Taliban took over in the middle of a series of obvious, typically, and routinely foreseen religious holiday offenses at the height of the fighting season. These offensives were going to occur because they'd occurred yearly for the previous decade, almost two. The offensive was as fast as it was because you could literally drive from a village that had just flipped to the next village, with the village leader who flipped, and make the point that if he flipped, maybe you should to, and anyone who was familiar with Afghan tribal / clan based politics could have told you the implications that had- which were forewarned more than once.

In the original Trump-era plan, the plan was for the US forces by 1 May 2021. Since the American troops don't literally board the plane the last day, but typically do so over weeks and months, the actual pullout would have been in the preceeding months. That means March and April on the final combat units, before the fighting season is in full swing, and January February for everyone else, still in the winter lull.

Which is to say, the Americans would have stayed in force for the climax of the last fighting season, had an uncontested winter non-fighting season to withdraw in good order, and have the opening months of the first fighting season (March/April) to make a decision of re-surging if necessary before a major Taliban offensive could get the people and material in-country for a country-wide offensive.

That, in turn, would have given the western leaders who wanted to more time to decide to send in a relief force to secure Kabul, rather than be overtaken by events on the ground, and given the Afghan government a gradual escalation of enemy activity rather than a sudden shock of attacks everywhere. Because the situation would have taken longer to unfold, the nature of the system shock that enabled / incentivized the domino cascade would have differed, in part because, again, you couldn't just drive from Pakistan to Kabul.

Kabul might still have fallen, but it would have taken considerably longer without the political cascade effect, and most notably well after the Americans had mostly withdrawn, without the Taliban able to claim the momentum of an uncontested crescendo.

In the Biden plan, which became a thing because Biden tried to abandon the Trump plan but then wasn't able to secure another full year for withdrawal, the Americans withdrew in the middle of the fighting season. Which, of course, the Taliban knew, and the Afghan government knew, and all the tribals elders knew. This, in turn, set the conditions for the sudden offensive shock that saw the rapidity of the cascade we saw in history, as American forces ceased combat support operations in preparation for the multi-month pullout process.

What this also did was mess with the coalition evacuation plans. Up to the year before, the plans to leave Afghanistan if necessary relied on using Bagram Airfield, the major American military airbase in the capital. As long as the US was in Afghanistan, it was the safest / most defensible / easiest to access route for any entry or exit movement. When it was abandoned- because of the summer pullout schedule- various states and organizations hadn't actually updated their plans on how to leave Kabul. Which left Kabul airport, with the results you saw of the American airborne basically flying in to occupy from the inside while the Taliban controlled the gates, rather than having American and their Afghan partners at the guard points.

Further, the nature of the speed- and thus shock- is what led to the American embassy implicitly burning all its Afghan personnel records in the 'burn it all / don't let anything get captured' continency that most warzone embassies have. Except... in part because the embassy hadn't actually had to follow through on the evacuation according to the earlier timetable, the US Embassy in Kabul was the only location with the various documents such as the pre-approved visas for Afghan partners who were intended to be pulled out last moment. Which were supposed to be what cleared Afghan friends and partners to get on the planes to get out.

So when those went into the burn pit, you had literally nothing distinguish -person who helped US soldiers for decade at great risk to themselves- from -person who sees opportunity to get into US / flee the Taliban-. Which is how you got the stories of afghans calling American soldiers they worked with years ago, who called actively serving soldiers at the airport, to guide people to sneak in side doors, using nothing but 'I know a guy who knows a guy' levels of trust and coordination.

Because the partner document packets were burned in a panic that wasn't necessary.

Because the Embassy thought it was going to be overrun in an offensive that wouldn't have been possible 6 months earlier or later.

Because the Embassy thought it had several more months to get around to dispersing the documents because Biden pushed the pullout date back to the end of the fighting season.

Because anything but Trump was the order of 2021, and after his election in 2020 Biden was signaling he was going to redo the pullout (but was 'convinced' not to by his opposite negotiators).

Because Biden wanted a big ceremonial 9-11 anniversary rather than an unceremonious pullout that would have been a minor political critique in his first year.

I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan.

I, too, approve of actually getting out of Afghanistan. I don't think that was a mistake. I even think biting the bullet and accepting the humiliation was the correct move. History would be significantly different had Biden doubled-down, and had a major military force in Afghanistan when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.

What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?

The American military was not responsible for the decisions to re-adjust the military pullout to the middle of the fighting season. They were not responsible for the decision to handover Bagram, the main military airbase to be used for emergency evacuation plans, or the timeline to do so. They were not responsible for the decision by the Embassy to destroy partner national documentation, or to only have the copies literally in Kabul. They weren't even responsible for sending the airborne to into Kabul airport at the end, where the world then got to see Afghans falling to their deaths off of military aircraft.

And I do not even believe those were all bad decisions to make. Once the offensive was clearly racing forward, embassy purge was not an unreasonable choice to make. Having already given up a military airbase, a civilian airport is not the worse substitute. The Afghan pullout, as much as it is remembered as a shameful defeat, was an unprecedented logistical effort that, coincidentally, got a lot of people- including non-Afghan partners- safely out of Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. Many of the ISAF partners were in more or less the same boat of having no backup plan to Bagram, because they, too, thought ISAF would have time to muster a relief force.

But the Biden administration, including Biden himself, made a significant number of political decisions with easily predictable- and predicted- consequences that led to those reasonable-in-context decisions. Consequences that- had the administration struck to the start-of-the-fighting season pullout- would have substantially reduced the various costs, reputational and otherwise, to the americans in general and to the Biden administration in particular (which certainly did itself no favors by claiming no one warned them and claiming that a 9-11 anniversary just happened to be necessary for a well-ordered pullout).

Thanks you for the effortful post, and Jesus Christ on a cracker, what a mess.

What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?

This is not an easy question to answer. Complicated opaque processes require trust, and if trust is broken, you're left with a question of balance between false positives and false negatives in your oversight.

First, it's worth pointing out that, at least in my view, trust has been broken here. The DoD is a bureaucracy, with all the attendant moral hazard that label implies. We know they can be incompetent. We know they cover their incompetence when they can. We also know they can be malicious: we have the papers out of Afghanistan showing that DoD leadership was lying to the public for two decades, and we have numerous examples of them lying to Trump to circumvent his direct orders, and even bragging about it publicly.

More abstractly, at some point, "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" ignores the fact that malice is easily disguised as incompetence in a complex, opaque environment, and also the fact that sufficiently advanced incompetence is isomorphic to malice, and the DoD over the last few decades has, in my view, cleared this bar.

There's been several threads of discussion above about the DOGE versus USAID; one side of those threads is "why not just do cuts in an orderly fashion?" The answer that keeps emerging is "we don't trust the bureaucracy to cooperate in good faith, so it is better to treat them as hostile and simply cut everything." You seem amenable to that explanation. If I asked you "what would convince you that USAID is simply compliant rather than maliciously compliant", what would your answer be?

Or maybe it's a bit simpler. If someone can present a DoD planning document stating "if you issue these orders, here are the negative consequences", and Biden signed it saying "do it anyway", that would be a pretty open-and-shut case of this being Biden's fault. Only, I'm pretty sure that document doesn't exist.

Further, reading through the description you've provided, I find a lot of the items seem to simply kick the can down the road. Okay, the Taliban has a known fighting season. We could have avoided the known fighting season, but that's been scotched. But by your explanation, what happens next should be predictable, which means our extraordinarily-well-resourced DoD should adapt to the change in circumstances. That adaption doesn't appear to have materialized. I understand that the enemy gets a vote, that the DoD and our military personnel are also human, that morale on the very end of a twenty-year mission was probably not high, and that requests for additional resources for an operation explicitly aiming at reducing resources to zero is not going to work well. All of these are plausible forces pushing against success.

But at the end of the day, our military's job is to take a mission assigned and execute it done with a high degree of professionalism, and that very evidently did not happen here. To the extent that constraints complicate matters, it is their job to work the problem and deliver a solution. To the extent that the mission was simply not possible within the given constraints, they need to say so (and I don't expect they actually will; Yes-Manning seems to be endemic throughout the officer corps of at least the army and navy, from what I've observed.)

Likewise with the paperwork. Why is all this paperwork being kept in an office in Afghanistan? We have telecommunications. There were no backups in Washington? Those backups weren't integrated into the bugout plan? There was no way to keep this important data other than in paper files in a cabinet in Kabul?

I am not inclined to hold Biden accountable for the outcome because he is neither a tactician nor a strategist nor a bureaucracy expert. I can readily believe he imposed restraints: get out of Afghanistan by one year from now, in time for the 9/11 anniversary. A year is a pretty damn long runway for an event that should have been pre-planned in detail twenty years ago. If there was not a plan on a shelf for this eventuality, that seems like a failure on the part of the planners. What if an actual hot war kicked off, and we needed to pull our forces out of Afghanistan not in a year, but by the end of this week? There was no plan for that?

And again, I appreciate that hindsight is 20/20, and it's all very easy for me to say, having never been involved in the un-invasion of Afghanistan. But I don't actually trust the DoD, and that lack of trust arises from what seem to me to be sound reasons. If I'm expected to blame political leadership, I want a paper trail of explicit warnings that the leadership explicitly ignored and efforts to compensate that the leadership explicitly overruled. If the system is, as I suspect, built more or less entirely around preventing such things from existing, well, that's one more reason why I don't trust it, and why you shouldn't either.

Alternatively, maybe that paper trail does exist, in which case I'll be happy to update.

More comments

The Taliban actually have a fighting season (weird I know). The original plan was to pull out when the Taliban weren’t in their fighting season which would’ve meant less chaotic exit (eg abandoning a bunch of perfectly useful tech at Bagaram).

Reagan is the classic example. But pat Buchanan in the 90s is an additional attempt. Government grew over the time period.

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