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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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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?

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?

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?

...what occupation services do you think soldiers who only exist on paper would have provided that reduced the chance of the evacuation before it became necessary? And what do you think the treasury's prospects are if you had to pay actual market rates for collaborators to occupation forces who expose themselves and their families to retaliation?

The prospect of immigration preference for themselves or their families is the non-fiscal carrot to incentivize cooperation. It's fine if you don't think this demonstrates qualities that would make them 'uniquely' valuable citizens, but your zinger is kind directly ignoring the sort of direct contributions that they are providing, i.e. what services collaborators provide that a paper army doesn't, and how the prospect of compensation in some forms (migration) compensates/reduces the requirements of compensation in other forms (treasury).

You might as well ask 'if the plan is to get out of a collapsing burning building, why not replace firefighters with sinecures?' The answer is rather simple: because while there is a limit to what you can expect hires to do, the jobs they are hired to do is what reduces the risk of the sort of disaster that the hires would not stick around to die in.

I think the point was more "If you hire someone to keep a building from catching on fire, but part of their incentive package is a reliable promise that if a fire happens then they will be the first to get rescued and also they win the lottery, then overall you haven't given them a strong incentive to be invested in a lack of building fires."

If so, it would be a poorer point. Collaborators during an insurgency aren't hired to keep a building from catching on fire- the building already being on fire, hence why you need collaborators to operate the buildings while your counterinsurgency forces try to stamp out the fires the arsonists are regularly starting.

It may be very disappointing that the hired help did not nobly perish in the flames the employer gave up fighting, but a man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or a petty distinction.