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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.
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/
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.
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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, 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.
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.
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.
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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).
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