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Notes -
Two National Guardsman shot in DC.
Situation is still developing... conflicting reports about deaths. Trump has already requested 500 more guardsmen to be deployed in the capital. I'm afraid that any commentary on my part will be pure speculation: I'll edit this OP as more information comes to light. Apologies for the shortness of this initial post.
I would expect ICE to be shot at, especially during active operations: but the National Guard? They're literally doing nothing but stand around. They're dads and uncles pulling overtime shifts away from their real jobs, not stormtroopers. I'm highly suspecting some sort of mental illness or dumb radicalization, but I'll refrain on coming to conclusions for now.
Edit 1: Suspect has been identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a Afghan national evacuated back in 2021.
Edit 2: Speculatively, a linkedin profile of the same name seems to point him as being connected to a bunch of American NGOs. I'm always skeptical of these - the world is big enough for strangers to have the same names - but the face on the profile seems to match the suspect.
Or perhaps I don't have an eye for Afghans, and they all look the same to me.
Afghan national
We now have a new addition to the list embarrassingly wrong Scott Alexander quotes:
How is that wrong?
Edit: I have no qualms saying my comments aged poorly.
The Afghan 'collaborators' were often drug-ridden, totally undisciplined, shamelessly corrupt, traitors and/or child rapists. These are the guys who gave us green-on-blue attacks. That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.
Plus the average Afghan refugee in the West is one of the most rapey and ill-mannered refugees.
This sounds like a cope. I am certain that allying with child-fucking warlords did not help win the hearts and minds of the Afghan population, but I also think that the eventual outcome was overdetermined the minute W invaded. Even if the US had made a point of murdering every alleged boy-fucker on the spot, the fact remains that few Afghans preferred freedom and democracy to the point where they were willing to die for it, while plenty were willing to die for the Taliban cause.
We could've installed a more effective puppet government and that would've worked. The Soviet puppet govt outlived the Soviet Union! Really not that hard to administer basic justice and secure a power base.
Realistically the US and co weren't going to do that or win because of these political factors you've identified - because freedom and liberal democracy was the goal. Would've been far easier to install a friendly govt that doesn't shelter Islamist terrorists. The bulk of the people we allied with were either feeble or corruptible, they were willing to give lip service to democracy or whatever they thought we would pay for. That's the problem.
Also I think the political value of murdering child rapists is underrated. That was the Taliban's original source of legitimacy, that was their starting mythology, hanging paedophiles from a tank barrel.
Not with US public opinion we couldn't.
"Administering justice and securing a power base" are, to the media and the US public, genocide and war crimes. We have to send our diplomats to hawk sex change surgeries to hillside goatherders and offer to "learn from Women of Color" who have an explosive belt locked around their waist by the warlord their family sold them to.
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And it's worth noting that when we went in, the US still had the geniuses behind operation condor. Say what you will, but Pinochet was not soft on crime. It wasn't lack of ability.
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Are we talking about the translators who were embeded with and beloved by US military units or the local warlords who got the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" treatment?
The program was not limited to translators, and Scott acknowledges that with "eg as translators". Anyone who worked for the American or coalition forces for at least 12 months can get a special immigrant visa.
Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck? When they swear their oath of citizenship to the United States, promising to bear arms on behalf of the US when required by law, and support and defend the Constitution, why would we believe them?
So your claim is that the Taliban regime ca. 2004 was the obvious Schelling point for Afghans interested in the long-term thriving of their country, and those who did not support the Taliban were clearly defecting from the common good of the country?
Personally, I think the loyalty of a population is earned, not given. Citizens of the US or modern Germany should display some loyalty to their government because it represents an equilibrium which has a higher utility than any other equilibrium they are likely to establish working against the government.
By contrast, less optimal regimes do not deserve loyalty. In 1945, Hitler was just the mobster in power, Stauffenberg blowing him up would not have let to a lower utility equilibrium, hence it was not treason to try to do so. Nor were the exile Germans who aided the Allies betraying Germany, because even with the Soviets, Ally-occupied Germany was a far better place for the Germans to thrive than Nazi Germany.
The real world is not Civilization where governments change but annexation is forever.
No. I just don't think they are demonstrating qualities that would make them uniquely valuable citizens, worthy of being fast-tracked through a special process. We have plenty of carrots and sticks for dealing with collaborators: money, status, security... And if we want our local collaborators to be effective, they should be invested in the success of our effort for the long haul. If their plan is to be on an evacuation flight out, why not staff the army with soldiers who only exist on paper, and rob the treasury blind?
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The Allies did polling in West Germany a year after the war ended in 45’. Hitler was still remarkably popular even then. Different societies have different attitudes about what they believe their relationship to their governments should be.
For you to have been a patriot back then you’d had to have actively opposed your own government, essentially knowing you were going to be rounded up and executed as these people undoubtedly knew. And they are certainly heroes for what they did.
It always boggles my mind how so many revisionist types can think otherwise. At heart I think a lot of people have this suppressed desire that they wish to have seen the Nazis win out and to have gotten their racial utopia. If you look at Nazi society it didn’t work very well for the people who were in it. And it certainly didn’t end very well for the people who were in it. Some people definitely benefitted but it wasn’t a government of its citizens, but of a particular category of citizens who the Nazis saw populating Germany’s future.
It’s also why the Allies took very careful steps in their postwar planning of Germany to crush Prussia and its influence over Germany. It historically was a massive fountainhead for its supremely militaristic attitude over all aspects of society. There’s a reason why it was called the “Iron Kingdom” and the “Sparta of Europe.” States like that tend to have a short half life. The ancient Assyrian Empire ended the same way, eventually declaring war on almost everyone within its neighborhood and having a religious ideology that demands you bring order and stability to the world outside by conquering the chaotic neighbors among the fringes of your borderlands.
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I don't really get omni-nationalism. Americans believing that the US is the greatest and deserves extra status/power/deference/etc? Sure. Ditto for the French, Brazilians, Chinese, or even Afghans. I don't see anything strange about different people having different values and opinions, even if they can't see the obvious truth that Canada is better than any of them (despite its current troubles).
Putting every country at the top of the list (but only when projecting your opinions onto other people) is a different matter. If you think your homeland is the greatest, then why do you want every foreigner to express incorrect opinions? If you're a cosmopolitan moral relativist who thinks there is no true "greatest" place and it's all opinions and tradeoffs, then why not let other people believe that too?
Saying that people should oppose you makes me feel like nationalism is a debate-club-style issue that's fun to talk about, instead of an honestly expressed and important core belief. Heck, I rarely see sports team omni-supremacy anywhere ("cheer for your home team, whichever one that is"). It's all either neutrality or people cheering for their specific favored team.
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Because the Taliban isn't "their country", it is just a group of thugs even if it is located in their country. You wouldn't ask why someone in a place run by the Mafia, or a Jew in Nazi Germany, would sell out "their country".
If they are doing it only for the money, sure, but if they are doing it for other reasons, they still need to eat.
I’m not at all convinced a large majority of Afghans view the Taliban that way. Either now or when they first came to power. In the case of the latter, they were originally greeted as liberators because they were at least bringing some kind of order to the place. Believe it or not, that’s how ISIS initially gained a large swath of supporters in Syria because they stemmed a great deal of corruption among the local population.
I also think the American “PR campaign” if you want to call it that for the Taliban is kind of funny.
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There is a line in the sand for collaborating with a foreign invader to depose your government and occupy your country, which comes with unavoidable mass murder and atrocities. For Afghanistan, the death toll is estimated at around 200,000, along with the displacement of millions. The government actively trying to genocide you certainly crosses that line. The government enforcing a strict interpretation of Islamic law? That's a lot more questionable. Even a shitty government is often better than a foreign occupation and a low-intensity insurgency. Collaborating means obtaining a personal benefit from and enabling a process that imposes mass suffering on one's countrymen. I think the willingness to do so should be considered an anti-signal when it comes to citizenship, and certainly not an automatic qualification.
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As an incentive to future collaborators? "Help us out, and you can earn your citizenship. Also, if everything does go to hell, we won't leave you in the lurch to be executed by the government you turned against".
The incentives seem misaligned when we reward our collaborators for failure. We spent decades and tens of billions of dollars training the ANA only for them to surrender practically without a fight. Giving them the prospect of an escape route to the US likely weakened their resolve rather than strengthening it. It also doesn't seem like the sort of behavior you'd expect from people who genuinely believe they will be executed or harshly persecuted by the new government.
I can see making an exception for rare cases that demonstrate remarkable courage or character as a PR strategy, but extending it to just about any collaborator is completely misguided.
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I'm talking about the Afghan military and well-connected associates of the old regime, which would presumably make up the bulk of those who got away. There may well be many decent people, translators amongst them. Generally, the population of Afghan refugees as a whole is badly behaved.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506
So, not the translators Scott was referring to?
That is what he said. Translators are included as part of this pool but do not make up the not the bulk of refugees.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2021/09/22/two-fort-mccoy-afghan-refugees-charged-child-sex-spousal-abuse/5820807001/
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YMMV, but "embedded with" =/= "beloved by"
Terps are like officers. Maybe someone somewhere had a good one, but for all the rest of us, they're the people most likely to get us killed.
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But the collaborator in Guy Ritchie's "The Covenant" seemed really nice
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I can guarantee you that there were people who were opposed to giving Afghan refugees citizenship.
I guess this one is an opinion, but I would not classify the people who rushed immigration forms for nationals of a terror-stricken country as “heroic”. Over the course of the war, there was a constant stream of Afghans who we thought were on our side becoming terrorists. The people administering this program should have known that.
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