Whitcomb: After Afghanistan; Time Passing Them By; Extreme Localism
Sunday, August 22, 2021
“Over coffee at Mac’s, people count.
Some have caught a fish. Four crescent tails
are nailed to my woodshed door.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTFor summers to come
they will draw the iridescent flies.’’
-- From “Bluefish Run, Machias, Maine,’’ by Paul Nelson (born 1934)
“To find a friend, one must close one eye. To keep him – two.’’
-- Norman Douglas (1868-1952), British writer
“Nineteen years is enough, in fact, far too much and way too long. I made early withdrawal possible by already pulling much of our billions of dollars of equipment out and, more importantly, reducing our military presence to less than 2,000 troops from the 16,000 level that was there (likewise in Iraq, and zero troops in Syria except for the area where we KEPT THE OIL).’’
-- Part of Donald Trump’s statement on April 18, 2021, in which he urged Biden to stick with Trump’s deadline of May 1 for American forces to leave Afghanistan
Well, that might explain some of what has happened. Afghanistan was being disarmed for quite some time before it collapsed.
Could our exit from Afghanistan, set in motion by an agreement between Trump and the Taliban last year in which he bypassed the Afghan government and praised the Taliban, have been a lot less of a mess? Probably.
Once the Taliban knew that neither Trump, if he had remained in office, nor Joe Biden would keep American forces in that mix of brutal medieval Islamo-fascists, powerful tribes and a scared general population called Afghanistan, all they had to do was bide their time and then move very fast. After all, there were plenty of reasons to think that the often inept and corrupt (but not, unlike the Taliban, proudly vicious) Afghan government would quickly crumble without the presence of an active, fast-responding U.S. military.
But let’s praise the Afghan soldiers who bravely fought Taliban totalitarianism, more than 60,000 of whom died doing it, compared to 2,400 Americans. The charge that the Afghan army and security forces were unwilling to fight is a very false libel.
The decision to remove U.S. forces, aircraft and heavy weapons, and then close airfields and other bases, before evacuating the most at-risk of our Afghan allies from all over the country, not just those who could get to the still U.S.-controlled Kabul airport, has been disastrous. We need to hear a detailed rationale for this from Biden, who now, of course “owns” the controversy, and his aides. And second-guessing is a popular pastime….
So far, the president’s main defense seems to be that the now-dead Afghan government had rejected an earlier U.S.-facilitated mass exodus of our Afghan allies because, as his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said last Tuesday, it could trigger a “crisis of confidence’’ in that government. Well, chaos is what we got, and there’s long been a crisis of confidence in the government, though it was infinitely better than the Taliban.
And whatever the deal that Trump made with the Taliban, the U.S. probably would have done better not to have left during the group’s usual “summer fighting season’’ in which weather and open roads let it move faster than it could have during the winter.
There seems to have been very big intelligence failures in projecting the speed of a Taliban takeover. We need to know why, and how to improve in the future. Scholars in think tanks, universities and in such national-security centers as the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, will be analyzing the American departure from Afghanistan for years to come.
Our long-running Afghanistan adventure and its ending, coming after our Iraq mess, will make it politically impossible for years to get American support for “nation-building’’ elsewhere. Indeed, if we still had had the military draft, instead of our all-volunteer armed service, we would have left Afghanistan long ago because of domestic political pressure.
Can we believe the promises from the Taliban that its rule will be more humane than its horrific reign of 1996-2001? Not much. As with all dictatorships, assume that what they say is a lie until proven otherwise. And whatever their adherence to 8th Century Sharia law, they will revel in power for the sake of power, and do pretty much anything to keep it. There will also be plenty of thievery by figures in the regime; few will have their hands cut off according to Sharia law.
Most Taliban fighters are young and ill-educated men. Fueled by a fanaticism they’ve been fed since boyhood and testosterone, and occasional sadism, they’ll continue to engage in barbarism, especially away from Kabul, a city where their actions are more visible to the world than they are elsewhere in country.
I hope that Americans don’t confuse the Taliban with the attitudes and behavior of Muslims in general – most of whom are mortified by the likes of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS, et al. (I speak with a little bit of experience. Besides my studying the Mideast and Islam at universities and watching it as a journalist for more than 50 years, I worked for several years with the Aga Khan University, named for the head of the Ismailis, a branch of Shia Islam. It has done terrific work in improving the lives of many thousands of people, most notably in South Asia (including Afghanistan) and East Africa. See:
That said, Afghanistan shows how religion can be a lethal disease.
A week is an eternity in politics, especially with the World Wide Web and cable TV speeding up the news cycle. So I doubt that the shocking scenes from Kabul, while slamming Biden in the polls now, will have all that much long-term effect on his political fortunes. For one thing, most Americans, who tend to have short memories anyway, have long wanted to quit Afghanistan. For another, the sweep of news will bury Afghanistan under new layers of events.
I keep thinking these days of the answer of George W. Bush, who launched us into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, in response to Bob Woodward’s question on how history would judge him: ‘’Who knows? We’ll all be dead.’’
Consider that most Americans after the fall of Saigon in 1975 tried to put the Vietnam War – a much bigger one than the one in Afghanistan – behind them as fast as possible.
The economy and COVID will probably dominate the news for some time to come and likely determine the outcome of the 2022 congressional elections, God and the Great GOP Gerrymander permitting. The real U.S. COVID death toll could be approaching a million people, by the way. Hit this link and extrapolate from this May article:
As for 2024, I’d be very surprised if Biden ran for re-election, given his age. And I don’t think that Kamala Harris will be the Democrats’ presidential candidate either.
The fall of Afghanistan is yet another reminder of the need for the minority of the world’s nations that are true and long-established democracies to circle the wagons and strengthen their capacity to thwart the expansionism of China and Russia and other dictatorships – a more serious threat to us than whatever Islamic terrorists come out next from Afghanistan or, for that matter, Pakistan, a Chinese ally and still a refuge for anti-Western terrorists. Of course, a democracy can become very fragile very fast, as witness the embrace of fascism by many in the Republican Party.
Presumably, all this will be taken up by the summit of democracies organized by Biden for this December.
“This is the Russian model: use social media campaigns, mercenary special forces, counter-terrorism measures, sabotage, surveillance, cyber-attacks, espionage, political influence and infiltration, and, where needed, targeted drone or airstrikes to weaken or punish ‘enemy’ states and preemptively destroy weapons, leaders, and organizations. Diplomacy is another important tactic as are sanctions, tariffs, or market access curbs.’’
-- Canadian journalist Diane Francis
How to Lose an Eye or Two
BB guns are not toys. Getting hit by a BB in the eyes can permanently blind you. Consider that as you follow this maddening Providence police story, whose latest iteration can be seen in GoLocalProv.com:
I remember the stupid BB gunfights in the woods of my hometown by 12-year-old boys in the ‘50s. I assume that their parents actually bought them!
In Search of Lost Time
More and more I think the anger of so many Trump cultists, who skew old, white and male, is caused by their feeling of being left behind, as rapid technological, economic and demographic change (especially growing black and brown minority populations) makes them feel they no longer have a stable, secure, even dominant, place in American society. Of course, the Grim Reaper is reducing their numbers at an ever-faster clip. Still, I’m surprised that more of them don’t accept the classic conservative’s recognition that nothing lasts. They’d be less angry if they did.
I note, as an elderly white guy myself, the increasing sense of distance from American culture that one gets as one gets older – of being left behind. Who are these pop singers? Why is everything so loud? (Or why can’t I hear it?) What does this new slang mean? Why do people dress like such slobs on airlines? Whatever happened to thank-you notes? TikTok! …. But roll with it and watch the show. And today’s young will be left behind before they know it.
Extreme Localism
Speaking of lost time, I had a great-great-grandfather named Daniel Webster Butler (1838-1907) who, after making quite a bit of money as a manufacturer in Boston from about 1860 to 1880, retired to his native Falmouth, Mass., and built a big house (which is still there) in its village of Woods Hole. He filled it with nice stuff. A cousin of my father asked Mr. Butler’s daughter Virginia: “Did Grampa Dan {as he was called in the family} travel all over the Orient to get all these beautiful objects and furnishings?’’
“Heavens no,’’ she answered. “He would never leave Woods Hole.’’
(But he might have enjoyed traveling by the World Wide Web, whose founder, Timothy Berners Lee, was married for a while to a Butler descendant.)
Dan Butler was also well known in the village for membership in an “exclusive’’ club that as far as can be determined, had no more than three members and met in an old fishing shack.
Yard Work
I love water features in gardens, especially little pools with fountains. We set up an inexpensive solar-powered fountain in our yard and it’s attracting of lot of birds. The sound of the water and the birdsong is very soothing. But will the numerous raccoons in our neighborhood be drawn to it, too?
xxx
Cleaning vinegar is a fine weed killer -- much better than the dangerous Roundup and similar products.
xxx
With cities and towns facing continued big commercial changes because of COVID and the rise of Amazon, etc., there will probably be more vacant buildings in urban cores over the next few years. Perhaps some of these can be torn down and replaced by courtyards and small parks.
xxx
The MBTA is maintaining surprisingly good Providence-Boston weekend train service despite COVID. As of late last week, I was hoping to use it to see a Red Sox game today (Aug. 22), Henri permitting. Use it when you can. Car traffic is intensifying again.
Hoffer’s Diary in the ‘70s
Before the Sabbath (published in 1979), a six-month diary by the late, once-famous longshoreman, essayist and conservative philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), has plenty of fine, common-sensical ideas and some silly ones, too, and is usually very engaging. He takes on big, open-ended themes, such as how to deal with his aging, lessons that can be derived from history and the fate of democracy, as well as responding to the news of the day in his entries. In the latter I was surprised in turn how much had changed from the ‘70s, and how little.
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