Why Afghanistan's military is collapsing

Out of food, out of ammo, gun broken

The main reasons are Afghanistan government corruption and incompetence and US government incompetence. The New York Times writes:

Building the Afghan security apparatus was one of the key parts of the Obama administration’s strategy as it sought to find a way to hand over security and leave nearly a decade ago. These efforts produced an army modeled in the image of the United States’ military, an Afghan institution that was supposed to outlast the American war.

But it will likely be gone before the United States is.

How the Afghan military came to disintegrate first became apparent not last week but months ago in an accumulation of losses that started even before President Biden’s announcement that the United States would withdraw by Sept. 11.

It began with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more and more control of roads, then entire districts. As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.

But even before that, the systemic weaknesses of the Afghan security forces — which on paper numbered somewhere around 300,000 people, but in recent days have totaled around just one-sixth of that, according to U.S. officials — were apparent. These shortfalls can be traced to numerous issues that sprung from the West’s insistence on building a fully modern military with all the logistical and supply complexities one requires, and which has proved unsustainable without the United States and its NATO allies.

Soldiers and policemen have expressed ever-deeper resentment of the Afghan leadership. Officials often turned a blind eye to what was happening, knowing full well that the Afghan forces’ real manpower count was far lower than what was on the books, skewed by corruption and secrecy that they quietly accepted.

And when the Taliban started building momentum after the United States’ announcement of withdrawal, it only increased the belief that fighting in the security forces — fighting for President Ashraf Ghani’s government — wasn’t worth dying for. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of despair and feelings of abandonment.

On one frontline in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar last week, the Afghan security forces’ seeming inability to fend off the Taliban’s devastating offensive came down to potatoes.

After weeks of fighting, one cardboard box full of slimy potatoes was supposed to pass as a police unit’s daily rations. They hadn’t received anything other than spuds in various forms in several days, and their hunger and fatigue were wearing them down.

“Unfortunately, knowingly and unknowingly, a number of Parliament members and politicians fanned the flame started by the enemy,” General Tawakoli said, just hours after the Taliban had posted videos of their fighters looting the general’s sprawling base.

“No region fell as a result of the war, but as a result of the psychological war,” he said.

“We are drowning in corruption,” said Abdul Haleem, 38, a police officer on the Kandahar frontline earlier this month. His special operations unit was at half strength — 15 out of 30 people — and several of his comrades who remained on the front were there because their villages had been captured.

“How are we supposed to defeat the Taliban with this amount of ammunition?” he said. The heavy machine gun, for which his unit had very few bullets, broke later that night.

As of Thursday, it was unclear if Mr. Haleem was still alive and what remained of his comrades.

So there it is. No food, no ammunition, broken weapons, no government help. Afghan government corruption and incompetence and US government incompetence are undeniable. The US failed after 20 years and tens of billions spent. The US tried to build a modern military force in a place where such a thing is not buildable or sustainable. That is gross incompetence. Afghan government corruption and incompetence are clear.

As usual, there will be few or no repercussions. Maybe the US military will fire an officer or two as the designated scape goats, but that will be about all the accounting us dumb taxpayers can expect. As late as yesterday, in an interview in NPR with a US official, the US government was lying and spinning the situation from what it is to one where there will likely be some good outcome. Just a couple of weeks ago, the mindless former president Bush said it was a huge mistake to withdraw now. Maybe it was a mistake, but was it also a mistake to stay there and arguably even go there in the first place? The US never understood the situation it was in and, based on what what it keeps telling us, it still doesn't understand.

Questions: How stupid does the US government think the US public is, just plain stupid or really, really stupid? Can the lies about Afghanistan the US government has fed the public over the years be considered to be a form of corruption, e.g., because so much money was knowingly wasted and the government tried to hide that fact from us? Would it make any difference of the US government had not deceived for years?[1] Will there be a moral stain on the US from the thousands of Afghan allies we will leave behind for the Taliban to hunt down and slaughter?

Footnote: 

1. I strongly suspect that the US would have been out of Afghanistan years ago if the US government had been honest. How could the war be kept going if we were told it was a failing effort once that became clear (just like Vietnam)?

Chapter review: The Undrained Swamp Loves an Autocrat

The Undrained Swamp Loves an Autocrat is chapter 9 of Sarah Posner's 2020 book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. This chapter constitutes a long, detailed and frightening recitation of the influential people and tactics that America's fascist right used and still uses to advance the sacred fascist agenda. America's fascist right includes nearly all of the Republican Party. Dissent within the party has been mostly RINO hunted out. The FGOP (fascist GOP) leadership is now remarkably monolithic in (i) its ideological opposition to democracy and civil liberties for the unworthy and its support of autocracy, and (ii) its heavy reliance on deceit, lies and divisive emotional manipulation to appeal to base instincts of its rank and file followers and supporters. 

Due to its well-funded and constant propaganda, most of the rank and file (~95% ?) sincerely believe that they are defenders of democracy and civil liberties standing in staunch opposition to autocratic secular liberalism and its evil, degenerate moral values, especially rights for the hated LGBQT community and tolerance of alternate family structures, i.e., same-sex marriage. To the extent it ever was a real thing, the old Christian deflection from its core hate and intolerance, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” is replaced by “hate the sin and oppress the sinner into submission,” or something about like that. These powerful, mostly wealthy Christians are not messing around. They want power, wealth and social submission. They will crush democracy and install fascism to get it. They will lie, deceive, polarize and divide to get it.

Posner opens chapter 9 with this:

Despite his attempts to be seen as bringing fresh thinking to outdated foreign policy, his description of the European Union as a “foe” and NATO as an “obsolete” relic that should be discarded, are not harmless pronouncements of an outside, renegade president shaking up the wonks of the “deep state.” Nor is his affinity for Putin a consequence of simply his business ties to Russia, of his lust to see its hacked Hillary Clinton emails arrayed in public view. Trump means it. But he did not invent these changes. He is less a leader than a vehicle for a global assault on democratic institutions and human rights, assaults that began in Washington well before he became president, in the seamy world of unscrupulous political strategists and lobbyists --- the denizens of the swamp that Trump had disingenuously promised to drain. 

None of that is hyperbole or lies. The rest of chapter 9 provides evidence from the public record of what most of America’s radical right Christian leadership and radical autocratic conservative White power movement has been wanting for decades, at least since the 1950s. There are a lot of powerful, determined fascists in our midst. They are hell-bent on overthrowing democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law so they can install fascism with uncivil liberties and the rule of the tyrant and plutocrat. That is not an opinion, joke or misrepresentation. It is truth.

Arthur J. Finkelstein (AJF)

Posner writes about an influential Republican public relations (propaganda) expert and political strategist, AJF (1945-2107). This man was intelligent, data-driven and effective. He understood human cognitive biology and social behavior, both of which are prerequisites for expertise in modern public relations and political strategy. His professional experience included polling science, political strategy, messaging, media and ad placement, and campaign management advising. His favorite pejorative insult was “Clinton is a liberal.” His key advice to clients always was that a winning political message was one that would, in his words, “polarize the electorate.” 

A number of his proteges, called “Arthur’s kids,” wound up working with the ex-president’s 2015-2016 presidential campaign. One was the self-described “dirty trickster” Roger Stone. Stone is a felon, perjury and obstruction, who the ex-president pardoned. Another of Arthur’s kids, polling expert Tony Fabrizio, claims to have devised the critically important strategy of targeting and winning Wisconsin and Michigan, which was necessary for the ex-president’s electoral college win.

In addition to poisoning American politics, AJF sold his talents to fascist movements and leaders outside the US. He appears to have been instrumental in resurrecting the political fortunes of the fascist Viktor Orban and his fascist Fidesz Party. AJF helped engineer Orban’s election wins in 2004 and 2014, cementing his power in Hungary. Posner comments on how Orban used his power to attack democracy in Hungary:

When Fidez and Orban scored another resounding victory in the 2014 elections, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) --- another transnational democracy-promoting organization in the crosshairs of Europe’s far right nationalists --- charged that a number of factors provided undue advantage to Fidesz, including “the manner in which a large number of changes to the legal framework were passed, restrictive campaign regulations, biased media coverage, and the blurring of the separation between the ruling party and the state.” Barack Obama’s State Department, in its annual human rights report for Hungary for that year, made note of the OSCE criticism as well as “serious governmental and law enforcement actions against civil society organizations, continued curtailment of media pluralism, .... the systemic erosion of the rule of law, checks and balances, democratic institutions, and transparency, and of increased intimidation of independent societal voices.”

In undertaking a coordinated assault on democratic institutions that would become a model for other European autocrats, Orban was not only directly snubbing the EU, of which Hungary had only recently become a member. He was also sticking his finger in the eye of the established, bipartisan American foreign policy consensus.

That sounds an awful lot like current FGOP tactics and its anti-democratic political goals. The parallels are about as clear as parallels in politics can be. In essence, American fascists are exporting their expertise in establishing fascism to attack other democracies, democratic institutions and human rights throughout the world. This is not just a local political movement.

Another point about AJF is important to note. Posner writes: “The most important political point for an aspiring political strategist to remember, was that because ‘no one knows anything about anything,’ a consultant’s job was to tell people what they should know and ‘make it interesting.’” Posner goes on to cite a political attack ad that AJF dreamed up for an Albanian fascist politician insinuating that the fascist’s opponent knew nothing about Albania. The reaction from the attacked politician made everyone want to see the ad, which helped the fascist. 

Posner then draws the obvious parallel with US politics: “To see the impact of this same vapid political strategy in the United States, one need look no further than Trump’s Twitter feed, where he can dictate the course of a day’s news coverage with a false, misleading, racist, sexist, or simply insipid Tweet. Distracting people from what really does matter --- and steering them into thinking meaningless conflict is what matters --- is the point. Meanwhile, democracy is in tatters.” 

Other fascist groups and sleazeballs and their anti-democratic antics that Posner discusses include the pro-Putin Paul Manafort, the pro-Putin, pro-Orban, Republican representative Dana Rohrabacher, fascist mercenary lobbyists on K Street, including former congressman Connie Mack IV (worked for Orban), the ex-president, the fascist Jeff Sessions, the fascist idiot Devin Nunes, the fascist Heritage Foundation (a tax subsidized fascist organization pretending to be a pro-democracy think tank), the radical Christian nationalist and staunch democracy hater Mike Pompeo, White Supremacist and former Iowa republican representative Steve King, fascist former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and a slew of other fascist democracy haters and pro-autocracy groups.

The global war on democracy and human rights

One last thought. Posner discusses common beliefs among the fascists and autocrats in different countries as a possible common ground or glue to bring dictatorships and democracies together. One shared concern on the radical right is worry about families and the usual family structure. The hope is that by scaring the public into accepting and engaging in overt bigotry against same-sex and other non-traditional family structures, countries such as the US and Russia can be drawn together into a close alliance. To the extent they could, people like the ex-president, Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo dismantled US efforts to defend democracy. When he was in charge of the State Department, Tillerson was as blunt about this as he could be. He told State Department employees that promoting human rights and democracy is an “obstacle” to advancing American interests. If that isn’t anti-democratic fascism, then what is it? The ex-president did his best to neuter the State Department in this regard, as Posner writes:

Midway through his presidency, Trump had yet to name a nominee for fifty senior posts within the State Department, nearly a third of the total political posts requiring Senate confirmation. Trump’s base of Christian right and nativist supporters not only doesn’t care --- it actively cheerleads the denigration of democracy and human rights, the rise of autocrats whipping up the grievances of right-wing populists, and distain for what America once was.  

All the bureaucratic and policy changes are driven not by Trump acting alone but by a profound rightward ideological shift within the Republican Party.

Questions: What do you think -- do we face a serious, imminent fascist threat in the US, or is that exaggerated to the point of being nonsense? Or, do you need more evidence to form an opinion? Is it reasonable to believe that no one knows anything about anything, leaving propagandists with a big pool of minds potentially at least partly open to what information the propaganda delivers, even if it is mostly or completely lies, immoral irrational emotional manipulation and/or crackpot motivated reasoning?  

Republican Party campaign morality: “There’s no obligation to tell the truth”

I've argued repeatedly here that FGOP (fascist GOP) campaign tactics are completely unconcerned about lying, deceiving, slandering, irrational emotional manipulation (unwarranted fear, rage, hate, bigotry, distrust, etc.) and crackpot motivated reasoning. The only moral principle is winning power and wealth. All means, legal or not, justify the ends. The following is a beautiful example of how utterly irrelevant truth is to FGOP operatives and insiders. The Washington Post writes about comments made by Rudy Giuliani and his partner Marc Mukasey made to FBI agents in 2018:

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s promise of a “big surprise” to help Donald Trump’s election in October 2016 led to Democratic accusations the FBI was feeding him secrets about an investigation of Hillary Clinton.

But a newly obtained transcript shows the former New York mayor told federal agents it was okay to “throw a fake” when campaigning, to which his then-law partner added, “there’s no obligation to tell the truth.”

Giuliani’s private defense of his actions has come to light as he and other Trump lawyers face discipline and possible court sanctions for their unfounded statements surrounding the 2020 election, raising questions about lawyers’ integrity in a democracy.

“In the heat of a political campaign, on television, I’m not saying Rudy necessarily, but everybody embellishes everything,” Mukasey said.

“Oh, you could throw a fake,” added Giuliani — who in addition to serving as mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001 also spent eight years as a federal prosecutor in the city.

“You’re under no obligation to tell the truth,” Mukasey replies, according to the transcript. To which Giuliani repeats, “You could throw a fake.”

An agent then said, “Fake news, right?”

Mukasey replied, “Right.”

There you have it fans of truth in politics. Spewing fake news is OK, because there is no obligation to tell the truth. That summarizes the morality of lying FGOP liars as they lie to the American people in their relentless anti-democratic quest for power and wealth. And, we all know who else this morality applies to in spades, i.e., the ex-president and his lying liar cadre of felons, thugs and crooks.

I know most everyone is aware of allegations like these. It just make sense to show some of the undeniable evidence when it crops up from time to time.

Questions: Is it true that “in the heat of a political campaign .... everybody embellishes everything”? Or is that a Republican lie to deflect from (i) the FGOP's endless stream of whoppers and fake news, and/or (ii) the possibility that FGOP candidates lie significantly more than most Democrats in most campaigns? Is it just me, or does anyone else notice that the allegations that the FGOP and its goons level at others, e.g., “everybody embellishes everything”, is something they do themselves in spades, but almost always sanctimoniously deny it when they are called out on their immoral sleaze?

Rudy's credibility

More vaccine regret stories: the lesson still has not sunk in

The New York Times reports on the situation in unvaccinated Texaslandia, where hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed:

Dr. Abhishek Patel, who works in the hospital’s pediatric I.C.U., walked in and out of a room where a 6-month-old and a 2-month-old were battling severe Covid-19 infections and were breathing with the aid of supplemental oxygen. This week alone, he said, two teenagers, who had other underlying health problems, succumbed to the virus.

In a room nearby, Cerena Gonzales, 14, moaned in pain. Last week, she was an excited teenager looking forward to starting her freshman year in high school. On Tuesday, she was surrounded by hospital equipment. She and her younger sister got sick after their parents, Carlos Gonzales, 47, and his wife Elizabeth, 42, began developing Covid symptoms and were taken to the hospital. None of them had been vaccinated, Ms. Gonzales said.

“We hesitated,” Ms. Gonzales said. “We were all a healthy family.”

As soon as she was discharged, Ms. Gonzales, still breathing with the aid of two portable oxygen tanks, rushed to her daughter’s side. She caressed her daughter’s forehead and tried to keep her upbeat. She recalled in tears the harrowing scene days earlier when doctors put her on a speakerphone so that she could hear as her daughter was intubated. “I thought I was going to lose my mind,” Ms. Gonzales said. “I could not be there with her.”

By Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Gonzales said she believed the worst of the crisis was over. She untangled her daughter’s thick black hair from IV tubes and gently encouraged her to drink orange juice.

Several members of her family had been ravaged by the virus, she said, and so she now plans to organize a family excursion to get vaccinated. “There is no reason any parent should go through this,” she said.

So there you have it, rationality fans, lots of irrationality sometimes sprinkled with hints of rational hindsight. The family was healthy so therefore, don't get vaccinated. No reason any parent should go through what they set the family up to go through? Hardly. There was a darned good reason. A knowing choice to not get the family vaccinated. 

Texas governor Greg Abbott continues to stick with his opposition to telling people to get vaccinated. For him, it's a matter of personal freedom, not public health. He also continues to oppose mask mandates and has made it illegal to do so in the state. But also at the same time, he is looking for outside help. As the NYT puts it: "To help manage the surge, Mr. Abbott appealed this week to health care workers outside the state to travel to Texas and help the overloaded hospitals."  

Why on Earth would anyone want to go to Texas to help? Texas can fend for itself and is proud of that tradition of independence and rigid fealty to unfettered freedom, as enshrined in the state meme we all know and love, 

DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS!

The people of the state of Texas voted for Abbott and the fascist Republican Party. They deserve what they asked for, namely incompetent fascist Abbott and the rest of the incompetent, corrupt fascist Texas GOP. Personally, I would not want to mess with Texas. It's doing just fine on its own. Sort of.

Questions: Is it fair to lay most of the blame on Texas voters for the mess, or do elected leaders share some of the responsibility for the suffering, deaths and economic damage the new surge is going to inflict on the state? Whatabout Texans who get infected and leave the state, e.g., and go to Sturgis South Dakota, and spread their germs around in other states and other people? Is it needlessly or morally unacceptably cruel to not much care about the disaster that Texas is going to experience and knowingly asked to experience?

Cleaning the room after a teenager just died from COVID

Children's Hospital of San Antonio, Texas

Speculate…

Three questions:

Q1: If Trump is ever successfully prosecuted for his possible illegalities, and must serve jail/prison time, will all political hell break loose in the U.S.?  IOW, considering Trump’s devoted following, would the Jan 6th insurrection be child’s play, in comparison? 

Q2: If you answered “yes” to Q1 (that there will be a massive and bloody revolt), do you think the judicial powers-that-be know that if they ever DARE to charge Trump with a crime, they will be willingly inviting another insurrection?  They have to be aware of that, right?

Q3: Do you think that Trump feels invincible because he KNOWS that his adoring fans will NEVER stand for his being charged with ANY illegal activity?

 

Speculate.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Chapter review: God's Strongman

Meadows believed that as a congressman, he was locked in a “spiritual battle” with dark forces, and that prayer took place more frequently in his Capitol Hill office than those of other lawmakers because he understands the nature of the enemy and “the attacks are real.” -- Sarah Posner, Chapter 3, Unholy, commenting on Mark Meadows’ (former chief of staff for the former president) view of America’s unholy situation as revealed in a core evangelical lie that Christians in America are under a severe, sustained secular attack intended to make Christianity illegal or to convert Christians to atheists by force, a/k/a/, the Christian persecution myth

God’s Strongman is chapter 2 of Sarah Posner’s 2020 book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. Chapter 2 shows how secular democracy and governance weakened and failed over a period of decades. Now secularism is a fading shadow of what it used to be. White Evangelical Christians (WECs) love it. Most Americans appear to be mostly or completely unaware of what is happening in slow motion.

Chapter 2 describes an incident where the federal government rightfully tried to correct abuses by elite WECs. That effort not only failed, it caved in and deal a major blow to secular government and church-state separation. This incident included the rapacious televangelist Paula White, who later came to be the ex-president’s top spiritual advisor, as oxymoronic as that may sound. Posner writes:

“Like Trump’s businesses, White’s had come under scrutiny, and like Trump, she evaded transparency and accountability. In 2007, Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who was the then ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, launched an inquiry into whether White and five other televangelists .... had abused their tax-exempt status by using donations to their ministries for their personal gain. .... At first Grassley seemed determined to find answers, but some of the six, including White, resisted providing full documentation that would aid the investigation. 

Unlike secular non-profits, churches are not required by law to make their tax returns public, so the finances of these televangelists remain hidden from public view. The public effectively subsidizes them because donations to them are not taxed, and the donor receives a tax deduction. Three years after launching the investigation, Grassley, under pressure from religious rights groups protesting that it was infringing on their religious liberty, shut it down without making any recommendations for greater transparency or accountability.”

The investigation was also hampered by the Senate being unable to talk to staffers, who are routinely required to sign confidentiality agreements. The staffers feared their churches would sue them. 

Senate investigators just gave up in and gently suggested “self-reform” to fix whatever problems there might have been. So the spineless Senate put the Fox in charge of the hen house.

Despite the televangelist’s opacity and refusal to cooperate, Grassley not only caved in, he turned around and actually attacked one of the few means of restraint on tax-subsidized religious operations. He recommended either eliminating or weakening the 1954 Johnson Amendment. That law conditioned non-profit tax exempt status on not using tax-exempt dollars for electioneering. That was the quid pro quo for the privilege of having tax exempt status based on taxpayer generosity to religious organizations. Posner comments on how the ex-president took the initiative a couple of years later in 2015 and 2016:

“Trump would go to make repeal of the Johnson Amendment--which would open churches up to limitless electioneering and the possible flow of unaccountable cash through their coffers-- a centerpiece of his outreach to the Christian right. .... Falwell [Jerry Jr., the president of Liberty University] said Trump spoke to him about ‘how it needed to be repealed, and how it pretty much silenced people of faith because it scares pastors and leaders of non-profit organizations like Liberty University and others from taking a political position because they’re afraid of losing their tax exempt status.’ This characterization was not true; The Johnson Amendment does not prohibit pastors or non-profits from taking positions on political issues, only from  using tax-exempt resources to endorse a candidate in an election. 

Once in office, Trump signed an executive order directing the IRS to stop enforcing the Johnson Amendment. .... Trump’s hard line message was precisely what many white evangelicals had been waiting to hear.”

Posner goes on to detail the deceit and blatant lies the WEC political movement routinely engages in. Both the public and the rank and file are to be deceived and manipulated into giving the Christian elites what they want, including fixing what is broken. 

What do they want? Wealth and power, especially their precious tax-exempt status. 

What is broken and bad in America? Evil things like secularism, feminism, abortion, gender ideology and the “dark movement forcing anti-LGBTQ Christians to accept a radical, fringe set of norms about gender and sexuality, in violation of their religious freedom.” 

That most Americans support the LGBTQ community and rights makes no difference. Also of no concern is that allowing the LGBTQ community to have civil rights does not amount to the severe persecution of and direct threats to the loving, innocent Christians that the WEC movement constantly complains bitterly of. WEC lies and deceits are shameless, endless, blatant and undeniable.  

Questions: 

1. Is it fair or even democratic to allow religious (and/or political) groups to enjoy the privilege of tax-exempt status and use of tax-free money to support candidates and campaigns, while most everyone else has to pay their taxes?  

2. Annual tax exemption benefits for religion in America is worth tens of billions annually, but is it worth it, especially in view of the kind of bigoted, anti-democratic, anti-civil liberties politics the WEC movement fights hard and dirty for?

3. Should it be legal for a president to tell a federal agency to stop enforcing a valid law, e.g., the Johnson Amendment?