Stromata Blog

Marking Time

On August 30, 2021, just before midnight, the last American troops scuttled from Afghanistan, leaving behind at least scores, perhaps hundreds, of American citizens and thousands of Afghans who had assisted our forces and were now marked for vengeance by the Taliban.

Jim Treacher has been patiently counting the number of days that our countrymen have been stranded in the Taliban realm. Today is Day 500. The media have lost interest in their fate. We don’t know how many survive, how many have been murdered, how many of died of disease or starvation, how many linger in captivity.

A quarter century after the end of the Vietnam War, our government was still looking for living MIA’s and recovering the bodies of the dead. The Biden Administration’s search seems to have fizzled after a quarter of a year, if not sooner. Amnesia is now its preferred state of mind.

Laugh of the Day

John Kirby has the unenviable job of serving as flack for Joe Biden’s National Security Council. The Defense Department’s just-released annual report to Congress on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” aggravated his woes. Its discussion of Communist China’s use of “a wide range of diplomatic tools throughout 2021 to erode U.S. influence globally and subvert U.S.-backed security partnerships” includes this:

PRC officials and state media outlets also repeatedly condemned the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and cited the withdrawal as evidence that the U.S. is an unreliable partner and declining power.

It’s only one sotto voce sentence, but it calls up recollections that must be painful to Foggy Bottom denizens who boast of their “smart power”. Mr. Kirby was sent out this morning to convince the world that, far from being a sign of weakness and unreliability, the American scuttle from Afghanistan was a triumph. Asked by Fox News about the DOD assessment, he declared (cross-talk omitted):

Nations like China and Russia took a look at what we did in Afghanistan . . . and had to marvel at the speed, the efficiency of the effectiveness [sc. with which] that very small number of troops are able to move that many Afghans safely out of that country. No other nation in the world can do that.

Even if one forgets about the chaotic scramble to get onto flights out of Kabul and the thousands of Americans and Afghan allies who were left behind, an evacuation under fire is not an impressive display of military prowess. Nor is it a testament to American reliability that our soldiers slipped away in the night, abandoning bases without notice to the Afghans, leaving billions of dollars of equipment behind, and rendering it impossible for the Afghan army and air force to continue effective combat operations. For those afflicted by amnesia, here is one of the many contemporary summaries of the debacle.

“No other nation in the world can do that.” Once we have identified the “that”, it is certainly accurate to say, “No other American President would have done that.”

As for John Kirby, he has clinched this year’s Baghdad Bob Award.

Another Triumph of “Smart Diplomacy”

Nothing that happens in the U.N. Human Rights Council is of much significance, which is good, because the Council is rotten to the core. It’s basically a pack of wolves charged with watching out for the welfare of lambs. Nonetheless, because Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of that snake pit, the Bidenites rushed to get back in. They assured us that American “engagement” with the likes of Red China, Cuba and Venezuela would do something to promote the Rights of Man.

Yesterday, the U.S. delegation moved to open a debate on communist atrocities in Sinkiang (Xinjiang). The motion failed: 17 yea, 19 nay, 11 abstentions.

One could hardly ask for a better illustration of the ineptitude of the Blinken corps of “smart diplomats”. Looking at the vote count, one doubts that Donald Trump would have done worse, and he wouldn’t have been trying.

• Ukraine abstained. The U.S. has poured billions of dollars into saving that beleaguered country from Russian tyranny. Red China, the target of the resolution, is Russia’s only noteworthy ally. But the Bidenites couldn’t get a “yes” vote from Kiev.
• The principal victims of communist atrocities in Sinkiang are Moslems. Only one Moslem-majority country (Somalia) voted “yes”.
• Somalia was also the only “yes” vote from the continent of Africa.
• Brazil and India, with which our relations were improving during the Trump era, abstained. Brazil has a strongly anti-communist government (at least for a little while longer), and India has no reason to cozy up to Peking.

To call this outcome a diplomatic fiasco might be an overstatement, but it’s certainly no sign that “adults” are back in charge at Foggy Bottom.

Sri Lanka: The Times Keeps Its Eye Off the Ball

Today’s “Morning” newsletter from the New York Times talks about one of the greatest, least noticed disasters unfolding around us: the destruction of economy of Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Two weeks ago, on July 9th, mobs seized the offices of the country’s president and prime minister and burned down the prime minister’s home. Both men resigned their posts. The president fled into exile. The Times tells us this about “What led to the recent protests”:

Sri Lanka’s recent upheaval offers an extreme example of the world’s recent problems. Covid disrupted the country’s major industries, particularly tourism, and then leaders failed to adapt – setting off a chain of economic calamities, including food and fuel shortages. The crisis prompted protests, culminating in the president’s resignation and the installation of a new president on Wednesday.

So the “shortages” – “It’s not just that [fuel] was expensive; it was impossible to find” – were another Covid side effect, aggravated, we’re later informed, by the wishful thinking of a government controlled by a single family.

Until several months in, there was really no government recognition of the crisis. The dynast Gotabaya Rajapaksa was leading the administration at the time, and he had appointed his brothers and his nephew to his cabinet. He didn’t take a lot of counsel from outside his family.

There was a lot of denialism among them. They were told repeatedly that the economy was deteriorating. But they were certain tourism would continue to increase after Covid and that would be enough to shore up finances. But that didn’t happen; tourism was starting to come back, but it wasn’t enough.

But in the end, so the Times assures us, things aren’t so bad. “Gleefulness” was the hallmark of the protests (no mention of the accompanying arson). Admittedly, the erstwhile protesters “are not happy” that the deposed PM managed to get himself elected president. Still and all –

In the short term, we probably will see continued turmoil. But people are invested in ensuring Sri Lanka doesn’t fall again into this situation where it’s teetering on autocracy, where there’s little transparency and where the will of the people is ignored. So it’s mostly a positive story.

That “positive story” leaves out just a few bits of information.

The immediate cause of the country’s food shortage was the government’s enactment of a ban on chemical fertilizers. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had become a convert to organic farming and a “Green Sri Lanka”.

Milton Friedman said that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, there would be a sand shortage. What the Sri Lankan government has done is almost as unbelievable. There are few better places in the world for agriculture. Sri Lanka is a warm, tropical island with plenty of annual rainfall, perfect for growing rice, tea, cocoa, and spices, and located along numerous ocean-trade routes for easy market access.

With the addition of modern fertilizers and farming techniques, the country went from subsistence farming to commercial farming. Sri Lanka had been self-sufficient in rice production since 2005. A 20-year-old Sri Lankan has seen the country’s GDP per capita roughly double over his lifetime. In 1990, Sri Lanka’s GDP per capita was about $2,000 greater than in nearby India. By 2020, it was more than $6,000 greater.

But after the fertilizer ban went into effect, rice production fell by 20 percent in only six months. The country had to import $450 million worth of rice to make up the difference, and rice prices still went up by 50 percent. Tea exports plummeted, costing the economy $425 million. The government reversed parts of the policy in November 2021, but the damage was already done.

The fertilizer ban was only the latest marcher in a parade of economic follies. Here is a summary written last April:

This slow-motion train wreck first began in November 2019 when Gotabaya Rajapaksa won a decisive victory in the country’s presidential elections. He immediately placed family members into key government positions and suspended Parliament. Then in August 2020, his Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party – the Sri Lanka People’s Front – posted a landslide victory. The win gave Rajapaksa the ability to amend the country’s constitution, which he quickly availed himself of. In total control, President Rajapaksa and his brother Mahinda, the prime minister [whom protests forced to resign in May], went on a spending spree that was financed in part by Sri Lanka’s central bank. The results have been economic devastation. The rupee has lost 44 percent of its value since President Rajapaksa took the reins, and inflation, according to my measure, is running at a stunning 74.5 percent per year. Last week, Sri Lanka announced that it was unilaterally suspending payments on its external debt. These economic developments have led to Sri Lankans protesting in the streets and a government in disarray.

The “spending spree” included “an international airport, a seaport, numerous unnecessary roads and bridges, and a cricket stadium”, in other words, “infrastructure”, in other other words, “jobs for the boys and shovel-ready graft”.

Covid certainly didn’t help Sri Lanka, but it’s doubtful that conditions there would be a lot better today even if Dr. Fauxi’s Chicom friends had maintained proper safety measures at their Wuhan biological laboratory. I wonder why the Times leaves out so much of the story.

No, actually I don’t wonder.

The Quid Pro Quo?

Peter Schweizer sums up in bullet points:

• Thanks to a Treasury Department “interpretation,” Americans can still own stock in companies that were placed on a blacklist by the Trump administration because of their direct ties to the Chinese military.
• Thanks to the Biden administration, the “China Initiative” at the Department of Justice to crack down on Chinese attempts to acquire or steal American technology has been discontinued.
• Thanks to the Biden administration’s “green energy” enthusiasm, tariffs on solar panels made by Asian countries who are assembling or repackaging solar panels made in China were removed.
• The Biden administration has also signaled its intention to remove or lift other tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese products. It has also been friendlier toward Chinese companies such as Huawei and ByteDance (owner of TikTok) in recent weeks.
• And all of this has been done with zero concessions from the Chinese government on any of the outstanding diplomatic, military, strategic, health or trade issues that so concern most Americans.
• Because the Biden family has been so deeply involved and so vehemently denied their involvement with Chinese business, the next question is as inescapable as the first: Does the flow of money to the Biden family from China influence the foreign policy of the United States?

Let me add that, whatever his motives, Joe Biden couldn’t do all that by himself. If his foreign policy appointees and their civil service underlings viewed the Communist-controlled regions of China as a genuine threat, they would throw up obstacles to the President’s actions. One can only conclude that they don’t take the Chicoms seriously, at least not seriously enough to let spats with them distract from reordering the world along progressive, neo-dystopian lines. If the President were Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom or any other Democrat, our China policy would almost certainly be just about the same, even if the Chief Magistrate had never taken a single dirty renminbi.

David Frum’s Genius Plan

David Frum and I have never met, but our degree of separation is fractional. I know several people who knew him well when he was a Yale undergraduate. One of our mutual acquaintances told me that the first time she heard him speak in the Yale Political Union, she assumed from his demeanor and range of knowledge that he was a graduate student. He was actually a first term freshman.

I mention these facts in the hope of rendering plausible the thesis that I am about to advance: that Mr. Frum has concocted an ingenious scheme to undermine President Biden under the guise of denouncing Donald Trump. An ostensible (not to mention ostentatious) display of Trump Derangement Syndrome will lure readers of The Atlantic into accepting a set of premises that, when applied to the incumbent President, can easily lead to the conclusion that he is engaged in ongoing collusion with Communist China, just as President Trump is believed by the Progressive Elect to have formed a partnership with Vladimir Putin.

The Frum essay is titled “It Wasn’t a Hoax”. Its subtitle asserts, “People with scant illusions about Trump are volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.” The “Big Lie” is “Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a ‘Russia hoax’”.

The argument that there was no hoax, that is, that the progressive media’s years-long insistence on the existence of a sinister Trump-Putin connection, which is now being rowed back with maximum stealth, had an overwhelmingly strong basis in reality rests on this chain of reasoning:

1. The Trump Organization did a great deal of business in Russia, some of it with persons “whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering”, and the Trump Presidential campaign “accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures”.
2. Once he began running for President, Trump tried to minimize the extent of his involvement with Russia.
3. Trump was eager for Russian assistance, particularly for leaks of the thousands of e-mails that Hillary Clinton had sedulously wiped from her home-brewed, dubiously secure home server.
4. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to ‘harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.’” Trump scoffed at notions of Russian interference.
5. During the campaign, “Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals.”
6. “Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.”

Let’s assume that the circumstantial evidence thus outlined is true and convincing. It will surely convince most of the Atlantic’s audience. They will slide easily past the dog that didn’t bark: Regardless of what candidate Trump said before the election, very little that President Trump did after he took office can have been pleasing to Neo-Tsar Vladimir. He would not, of course, be the first business partner to be outsmarted (or, from another perspective, bilked) by Donald Trump, so the dog’s silence doesn’t definitively refute the collusion hypothesis, though it certainly renders it less significant. Mr. Frum’s chain of circumstances would have been greatly strengthened if, for instance, President Trump had stifled American energy production or refused to enforce sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Having nodded in agreement through Mr. Frum’s piece, what are progressive readers to think if they encounter Miranda Devine’s Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide, which draws on the ample materials obtained from the famous mislaid laptop of Biden fils to document the under-the-counter business dealings between Biden père and Communist China?

Next consider that, during his own Presidential campaign, Joe Biden said:

China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west. They can’t figure out how they are going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.

We don’t have any intelligence committee declarations that Xi Jinping “ordered an influence operation” to help the Biden campaign. Unless we have moles close to Xi, we couldn’t know that. For that matter, we couldn’t know about Russian influence operations in 2016 without a mole in Putin’s suite. It would be nice to think that we do, but, notwithstanding the passage that Mr. Frum quotes, I doubt it.

What we do have, more plainly than one could ever say of Trump and Russia, is a Biden policy direction that aligns with the interests of the CCP. Jim Geraghty laid out the evidence last Friday for “The Functionally Pro-China Biden Administration”. After leading off with quotes from the Washington Post’s report on the Administration’s efforts to water down Congressional proposals to ban imports of Chinese goods produced by slave labor, he adds (links omitted):

And yet, month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.

Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.

Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal in September that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions” with China. Biden rescinded Trump’s executive orders targeting TikTok, the popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

In defending his decision to withdraw all U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, Biden kept insisting that China wanted the U.S. to keep its troops in that country and that Beijing saw Afghanistan as a quagmire tying up limited American military resources. But now that U.S. forces are out, China is dramatically expanding its economic ties and diplomatic in leverage in Afghanistan – developing plans for state-run Chinese firms to move in and mine Afghanistan’s lithium deposits.

Does the Chinese government look upset that the U.S. no longer has any presence in Afghanistan?

Elsewhere, Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”

From these and other facts, Mr. Geraghty concludes, “It is fair to wonder how much of the administration’s heart is in the effort to confront Beijing.” Something of an understatement. If the facts cited by David Frum are convincing proof that Trump-Putin collusion wasn’t a hoax, isn’t it fair to wonder how deeply compromised Joe Biden is in his relationship with Peking?

As I said at the outset, David Frum is quite capable for formulating a plan to catch progressive spiders in their own web.

Defeat’s Darkening Shadow

For years, advocates of ending American support for the government of Afghanistan pontificated that withdrawal would have no adverse consequences: That fractious country had no geopolitical significance. If the Taliban took it over, that would mean not much more than a jihadi conquest of Pluto.

In one sense, they were right. It has been a mere 40 days since Joe Biden ordered our soldiers to scuttle away like frightened rabbits, leaving billions of dollars of weaponry behind. Thousands of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, along with tens of thousands of Afghans who aided our armed forces, are trapped inside the Taliban’s domain. And already attention has drifted elsewhere. As I type this post, the “Latest Headlines” page on the Wall Street Journal’s web site lists 50 stories. Not one is about Afghanistan.

Yet that “backwater” is stirring with an incipient tornado. The Long War Journal reports that the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan (known by its Urdu initials, “TPP”), “which sent thousands of fighters into Afghanistan to help the Afghan Taliban conquer the country over the summer”, has turned to “consolidating its power in Pakistan’s volatile tribal areas”. Insurgent groups that broke away from the TPP in a succession crisis after the death of its second “emir” in 2013 are pledging allegiance to the current leader, Mufti Wali Noor Mehsud (alias Abu Mansoor Asim). The TPP has added nine new partners since July of last year. Wali is –

a veteran jihadist who fought alongside the Afghan Taliban against the Northern Alliance and against the U.S. and its allies after the Oct. 2001 invasion. Wali has served as a military commander and has led the TTP in the Pakistani city of Karachi. More importantly, Wali is a religious scholar who rose to the rank of judge within the TTP. His credentials gave him the needed clout to reorganize the TTP.

Having “played a key role in helping conquer Afghanistan”, the TPP can look for a safe haven with, and support from, the victors. Perhaps that support will include access to the trove of military gear that President Biden generously provided.

The Pakistani government naturally will oppose its own displacement, and Isalmabad will be a harder nut to crack than Kabul. Nonetheless, there are grounds for concern:

The Pakistani military, its Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate and powerful elements of the state handcuff themselves by continuing to play both sides of the jihadist coin. The Pakistani state also played a key role in supporting the Afghan Taliban by providing safe haven support, weapons, cash, and other forms of support. The Afghan Taliban and other groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba are considered “good Taliban” by the state, as they help promote the foreign policy goals of Pakistan – primarily strategic depth against India and jihad in the Indian territory of Kashmir and Jammu.

However, the so-called “good Taliban” are allied with groups like the TTP and Al Qaeda, the so-called “bad Taliban” which actively seek to overthrow the Pakistani state. The good Taliban provide shelter, support, manpower, and such to the bad Taliban, which attacks the state. This is the “Wheel of Jihad.”

To put it another way, Pakistan has pulled the Jihad Horse inside its gates and believes that only its “good Taliban” friends are inside.

Even without seizing power in Islamabad, TPP can create havoc by furnishing well-armed reinforcements to rebels in Kashmir/Jammu, activity that will increase the danger of war, which could turn into nuclear war, between the two nations of the Indian subcontinent.

Some backwater!

“The Red Has Returned”

Last month, as reported by the China Media Project (tip of the beret to Instapundit), a more or less random Red Chinese peon blogged his reaction to “recent moves by the Chinese authorities to bring the entertainment industry in check and curb the influence of celebrities, coming on top of the suspension last year of the blockbuster IPO of China’s Ant Group, the fining of Alibaba, and the crackdown on ‘fandom culture’”.

“This change will wash away all the dust, and the capital market will no longer be a paradise for capitalists to grow rich overnight,” he writes. “The cultural market will no longer be a paradise for effeminate stars, and the press will no longer be a place for the worship of Western culture.” The author’s next line reeks of Maoist nostalgia: “The red has returned, the heroes have returned, and the grit and valor have returned.”

These events, he avers, show “that China is undergoing a major change. From the economic sphere to the financial sphere, from the cultural sphere to the political sphere, a profound transformation is underway – or, one might say, a profound revolution.”

In itself, the effusions of an obscure Maoist diehard mean nothing. We have those in the U.S., too. What does mean something is how the Xi regime reacted:

Such language, appearing on the odd social media account, might ordinarily be dismissed as the ravings of a Maoist outlier. But this post, though attributed to Li’s own public account, “Li Guangman Freezing Point Commentary”, was shared on the websites of eight major Party-state media on August 29, and on scores of commercial sites, all with the same headline: “Everyone Can Sense That a Profound Change is Underway!”

The re-publishing by Party-state media of an article from so-called “self-media” or “We media”, a term referring to digital social media platforms such as WeChat that integrate self-publishing with chat and other services, is a very rare occurrence. The assumption many observers have naturally made, therefore, is that the joint posting of this WeChat article across Party-state media websites must have been coordinated by the Central Propaganda Department and other relevant offices.

In the social media comment sections this week, the concern has been palpable. “A movement has begun,” one user commented underneath a Weibo post on the Li Guangman article. “They’re blowing a wind to see what fish they can stir up,” said another. A third comment was more portentous: “History is being repeated,” it said.

No one need ask what history we are talking about here.

And in other news –

California officials and representatives of local organizations delivered warm congratulatory messages to an online celebration held by the Chinese Consulate General in Los Angeles on Wednesday for the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Good News from Red China (Though Not So Good for the Chinese)

If the Wall Street Journal reports accurately, Xi Jinping has grown weary of prosperity and wants change for China, just as the contemporary Democratic Party wants it for the United States. President Xi –

is trying to roll back China’s decadeslong evolution toward Western-style capitalism and put the country on a different path entirely, a close examination of Mr. Xi’s writings and his discussions with party officials, and interviews with people involved in policy making, show.

For most of the 40 years after Deng Xiaoping first unleashed economic reforms in China, Communist Party leaders gave market forces wider room to flourish. That opening helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and created trillions of dollars in wealth, but also led to rampant corruption and eroded the ideological basis for continued Communist rule.

In Mr. Xi’s opinion, private capital now has been allowed to run amok, menacing the party’s legitimacy, officials familiar with his priorities say. The Wall Street Journal examination shows he is trying forcefully to get China back to the vision of Mao Zedong, who saw capitalism as a transitory phase on the road to socialism.

Mr. Xi isn’t planning to eradicate market forces, the Journal examination indicates. But he appears to want a state in which the party does more to steer flows of money, sets tighter parameters for entrepreneurs and investors and their ability to make profits, and exercises even more control over the economy than now. In essence, this suggests that he aims to rewrite the rules of business in what could someday be the world’s biggest economy.

“China has entered a new stage of development,” Mr. Xi declared in a speech in January. The goal, he said, is to build China into a “modern socialist power.”

“Modern socialist power” has invariably been synonymous with “failed command economy”. The attempt to manage a complex economy by substituting the guesses and assumptions of bureaucrats for the knowledge possessed by producers and consumers has always come a cropper.

Xi’s motives include an interesting commingling of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Mr. Xi has talked about the need to differentiate China’s economic system. Western capitalism, in his view, focuses too heavily on the single-minded pursuit of profit and individual wealth, while letting big companies grow too powerful, leading to inequality, social injustice and other threats to social stability.

Early this year, when Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. took down former U.S. President Donald Trump’s accounts, Mr. Xi saw yet another sign America’s economic system was flawed – it let big business dictate what a political leader should do or say – officials familiar with his views said.

For the Mini-Mao, that’s the wrong way around. Political leaders should be able to dictate what everyone else says or does.

As almost no one has failed to observe, Red China labors under the handicap of an aging population that can be supported only by steadily increasing productivity, which is exactly what government’s highly visible hand is certain to stultify. Assuming that, as the press routinely asserts, Xi’s position is unchallengeable, forecasting the mainland’s future trajectory doesn’t require consulting the I Ching. The next generation of Chinese will be poorer and will also be afflicted with greater “inequality, social injustice and other threats to social stability”.

Red China’s eclipse will owe nothing to American strategic genius and even less to the Western capitalists who blithely import Chinese values along with Chinese manufactures. Otto von Bismarck has once again been proven right.

Afghanistan: “No End of a Lesson”

The Boer War was a bitter experience for many Britons, who watched as their army flailed, seemingly helpless, against a farmers’ militia. H. H. Munro (Saki) wrote despairingly,

Dwindle, dwindle, little war.
How I wonder more and more
As across the veldt you hop
If you ever mean to stop.

After visiting the theater of war, Rudyard Kipling penned a poem starkly titled “The Lesson”. It begins –

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,
But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and again,
Were all our most holy illusions knocked higher than Gilderoy’s kite.
We have had a jolly good lesson, and it serves us jolly well right!

”Conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and again” well describes the beating that America has taken in Afghanistan. But what lessons will we learn from it? Some people, it seems, will learn only the lessons that they wanted to learn.

A popular moral, drawn by parts of both the Left and the Right – and very definitely by President Biden – is that we had no business in Afghanistan. Joe Biden was, in fact, dubious about our anti-Taliban campaign in 2001, declaring that our military should forgo air power and limit ourselves to “action that is mano a mano . . . going against other forces on the ground”. In 2021, he has gone only a little further, not only neutering our air power by abandoning Bagram airbase but refusing the commit the “forces on the ground” needed for a successful evacuation.

The essence of the case for the uselessness and futility of our presence in Afghanistan rests on two propositions: first, that America was foolishly trying to “build a nation where none had ever existed” and, second, that a Taliban victory was “inevitable”.

One can’t deny that some American efforts to bring about change in Afghanistan were ridiculous, such as spending three quarters of a billion dollars to promote “gender studies”. Nor was the Afghan government a pillar of democracy and rectitude. Our “nation building” constructed only a modest edifice. Still, one needn’t be a raging feminist to believe that a place where women can appear in public, attend school and be gainfully employed is a great improvement over one where twelve-year-old girls are forced into sexual slavery. The effort cost us very little blood. From our first incursion against the Taliban in October 2001 through the end of 2014, thirteen-plus years, 1,833 American soldiers were killed in action (11 to 12 a month). From the beginning of 2015 through the day before the Kabul suicide bombing, 80 months, the total toll was 64. Meanwhile, the Afghan army, which Joe Biden demeans as unwilling to fight, lost more than 66,000 men. From the American point of view, the streets of Chicago are a lot closer to an “endless war”.

The cost in treasure is harder to discern. Claims of trillions of dollars don’t look at the incremental cost. Much of the money spent in Afghanistan would have been spent in any event; we didn’t raise a special army just for service in that country. It is also true, and lamentable, that much money was wasted on such absurdities as the aforementioned “gender studies” programs. What one can say confidently is that, spread over 20 years, the cost scarcely strained the American economy.

Furthermore, we got more in return than a better life for the inhabitants of Kabul and Kandahar. Without our presence, it is certainly plausible that the Taliban would have quickly reestablished their rule, under which al-Qa’eda would have returned, as it is doing today. We also denied Red China access to Afghanistan’s substantial deposits of rare earth metals (even if we didn’t think to start exploiting them ourselves) and reduced the Islamofascist pressure on Pakistan.

As for the Taliban’s “inevitable” victory, the victory certainly happened, and happened very rapidly, but only after the U.S. cut off the support that the Afghan army required in order to conduct the kind of war for which we had trained it. During the 20 preceding years, the Taliban failed to take and hold even one provincial capital. They were an endemic, but not a fatal, disease.

It will take a while to sort out and digest the true lessons of this monumental failure, and it may be prudent to take some time for reflection before drawing them. We can usefully start that reflection by rejecting the old isolationist canards that Joe Biden and his fellow defeatists on both sides of the political aisle are trying to pass off as newly minted wisdom.

Further Reading: Col. Christopher Vanek (Ret.), “Abandoning Afghanistan comes with massive price” (Col. Vanek served in Afghanistan for six years. “A continued presence in the form of advising and assisting Afghan national security forces indefinitely could have guaranteed our future safety and provided both reassurance and hope to the Afghan people.”
Jim Geraghty, “The Americans Joe Biden Left Behind”
Jim Treacher, “8/31 is the New 9/10”
Dominic Green, “Biden is spinning the Afghan disaster faster than a Blackhawk’s rotors”
John Podhoretz, “An angry Biden blames Trump for Afghan pullout – then takes credit for it”

A Black Sunday

Joe Biden’s original plan was to hand Afghanistan over to America’s enemies on September 11th. For a man of his generation, December 7th might have been more symbolic, but perhaps that day was too far off. As it was, the semi-competent, semi-democratic, semi-legitimate government in Kabul collapsed on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945. V-J Day and D-A Day are now ironically linked.

The 20-year American presence in Afghanistan was a classic of “muddling through”. From the invasion in September 2001 until a couple of weeks ago, our soldiers, diplomats and aid workers accomplished the difficult feat of maintaining a status quo whose virtue was that, messy as it was, the alternatives were worse. As the country adjusted to a normality of low-level, endemic civil war, the incremental cost that we paid, in blood and treasure, steadily declined. Traffic accidents became more dangerous to Americans than enemy fire.

The contrast with the Soviet Union’s failure in the same country is striking. Year after year, Moscow had to pour greater and greater resources into Afghanistan. Year after year, the United States had to do less. If our leaders had only recognized that where victory is unattainable, inexpensive stalemate is better than a costly loss, we could have stayed in Afghanistan for as long as we’ve stayed in Korea or Western Europe. That would have been better for both the Afghans and ourselves than the future that the Biden Administration has now chosen.

The people who prate about “soft power” seem utterly unable to recognize it. It wasn’t the “hard power” of a few thousand U.S. and allied soldiers that kept the Taliban from overrunning provincial capitals and marching into Kabul. It was the psychological impact of knowing that the world’s most powerful nation was on the scene, coupled with the memory of how swiftly and decisively it could act when aroused.

Then Donald Trump started toying with that linchpin, and Joe Biden pulled it out.

The inevitable blame casting may be useful, but it misses the point. Our military failed to turn the Afghan army into an effective fighting force. Our intelligence agencies were oblivious to much of what was happening on the ground. Our diplomats were more interested in promoting trendy social justice causes than in helping the government in Kabul gain control of the provinces. None of that caused our debacle. The same actors have, so far as one can tell, been feckless in the same way for more than a decade. That wasn’t fatal, because their work wasn’t what sustained the status quo. They didn’t need to be good; they just had to be there. Competence at their jobs would have been a bonus.

Having chosen defeat, our leaders wait for the consequences. The humanitarian catastrophe will barely be noticed by those who panic at a modestly deadly virus. Perhaps they will wake up if hundreds of Americans are taken hostage in Kabul, if the Taliban regime welcomes back a revivified al-Qa’eda, if Red China, deploying money in place of troops, becomes Afghanistan’s de facto overlord, if the pressure of an Islamofascist regime on its flank turns Pakistan into a full-fledged enemy, if fear of that outcome drives India to war with Pakistan, or if the “unknown unknowns” produce a direr future than any of those.

A tweet sums it up: “From the looks of Afghanistan I guess you don’t really need the F15s or nukes to take on the US govt after all.” If that’s what the world thinks, it will be true.

Still, there’s a bright side. What happens in Afghanistan will have no impact on ice cream production.

Further Reading: Jim Geraghty, “The Foreign Policy ‘Smart Set’ Leads America to Defeat Again”:

The Neocons care, and want to act, even if those actions will often be destructive and have unforeseen consequences. They’re going to make a mess, and spend a lot in blood and treasure, but they’re hell-bent on punishing the world’s most malevolent leaders, regimes, and factions. Maybe you think that’s worthwhile, maybe you don’t, but it’s a coherent worldview that doesn’t rely on the pledges and promises of the world’s most ruthless regimes. The Trump-y isolationists don’t care, and openly say so. Agree or disagree, there’s something refreshingly honest about their lack of empathy and eagerness to tell the rest of the world that they’re on their own.

But the Democrats? The Democratic foreign-policy establishment never speaks or acts as if it faces a menu of difficult choices, with the risks of reacting too hard or too soft in the face of potential threats. It’s always convinced it knows just what to do, once it’s back in power. It’s always telling us that it can generate much better results because its people are so much smarter than everyone else. It understands the world so much better than the other guys. It points to the sterling resumes of its members and warm receptions at the Davos Summit and applause at the Aspen Ideas festival. In many cases, it has already met, conversed, and even dined with the figures who represent the preeminent challenges to U.S. foreign policy.

Every four years, the message is the same: Trust us, we’re the ones who know what we’re doing.

And yet, the oddest thing happens – the Democratic foreign-policy establishment gets in power, and a short while later, so many things go wrong.

The Fatuity of Evil

Often evil is, in Hannah’s Arendt’s word, banal. Occasionally, it is fatuous:

China’s Communist regime has mounted a full-scale effort to ban the sale of jasmine. Even the mention of the flower anywhere on the Internet is forbidden.

The reason for this bizarre ruling reported by the New York Times is that the revolt in Tunisia earlier this year became known as the “Jasmine Revolution.” The successful effort to oust an authoritarian government has so scared the Chinese leadership that they have gone so far as to censor videos of President Hu Jintao singing “Mo Li Qua” - a song that is a traditional tribute to jasmine that was played at every medal ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The Chinese characters for jasmine have been blocked on cell-phone texts, and the China International Jasmine Festival scheduled for this summer has been abruptly canceled.

This is a regime to whose Supremo an American President bows? With which we’re considering a joint Mars mission?

Clowns are clowns, even if they’re thugs, too.

Air Superiority Lost?

One of the keys to American military supremacy is our mastery of the air. The qualitative and qualitative advantages of the U.S. Air Force over the rest of the world are so immense that the Obama Administration regarded them last year as “big enough” and decided to shut down production of the fifth generation F-22 Raptor fighter. The Secretary of Defense explained at the time why the F-22 would merely gild over gold:

Consider that by 2020, the United States is projected to have nearly 2,500 manned combat aircraft of all kinds. Of those, nearly 1,100 will be the most advanced fifth generation F-35s and F-22s. China, by contrast, is projected to have no fifth generation aircraft by 2020. And by 2025, the gap only widens. The U.S. will have approximately 1,700 of the most advanced fifth generation fighters versus a handful of comparable aircraft for the Chinese.

Nine months later, that forecast looks shaky. According to Air Power Australia, a Russian prototype is at least equal to the F-22 and easily outclasses the F-35, which the Administration has picked as our front-line fighter.

The available evidence demonstrates at this time that a mature production PAK-FA design has the potential to compete with the F-22A Raptor in VLO performance from key aspects, and will outperform the F-22A Raptor aerodynamically and kinematically. Therefore, from a technological strategy perspective, the PAK-FA renders all legacy US fighter aircraft, and the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, strategically irrelevant and non-viable after the PAK-FA achieves IOC in 2015. . . .

Once the PAK-FA is deployed within a theatre of operations, especially if it is supported robustly by counter-VLO capable ISR systems, the United States will no longer have the capability to rapidly impose air superiority, or possibly even achieve air superiority. This will not only deny the United States access to an opponent's defended airspace, it also presents the prospect of United States forces being unable to reliably defend in-theatre basing and lines of resupply. Should this occur, in-theatre basing and surface assets become exposed to air attack by aircraft armed with a wide range of accurate and highly lethal Precision Guided Munitions, with the potential for very high loss of life and equipment deployed in-theatre. . . .

Should the United States continue along the force structure path for TACAIR mapped out by OSD policy definition of the last three years [i. e., relying primarily on the F-35], it will be denied access to any operational theatre into which credible numbers of the PAK-FA are deployed by an opponent. In turn, the United States will be deterred from the use of conventional forces in such a scenario. The consequence of this, in turn, is that significant pressure will be placed upon a future President to threaten the use of, or operationally use, tactical nuclear weapons.

Whether Russia’s tottering economy can sustain a world class air force is doubtful, but Red China surely can. If the PAK-FA lives up to Air Power Australia’s expectations (far from a certainty, but how lucky do we feel?), the design will be available within a few years (before the end of a hypothetical second Obama term) for purchase or pirating by Peking. Its extensive deployment would put the United States and its Asian allies in the position of spear-armed natives facing Gatling guns, effectively turning the region into a new, Chinese-dominated version of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (albeit probably without much prosperity).

There is still time to revive the F-22 program, as Air Power Australia urges:

In basic grand strategy terms, the arrival of the PAK-FA leaves the United States with only one viable option if it intends to remain viable in the global air power game – build enough F-22 Raptors to replace most of the US legacy fighter fleet, and terminate the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as soon as possible, as the F-35 will no longer be a usable combat aircraft for roles other than Counter Insurgency (COIN), though more cost effective and more appropriate solutions already exist for this role.

Keeping the F-22 assembly lines running would even “save or create” jobs. The alternative is to scrimp now and suffer later.

“Smart Power” Made Stupid

The slogan “work smarter, not harder” was popular for a time, then was laughed out of cubicles across the land when Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss adopted it. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have never seen a cubicle, of course, so they’re no doubt far enough out of touch to imagine that “being smart” really is a strategy instead of just an aspiration.

The concept behind “smart power” is reliance on cleverness rather than force to overcome or win over one’s adversaries. Similar ideas have often been mooted in the military realm: “We don’t need as many men, tanks and guns, because we can outthink the enemy.” Sometimes that works on the battlefield. The problem is, the enemy is able to think, too, and there’s no guarantee that an otherwise weaker army will be able to negate superior firepower with brilliant tactics.

In diplomacy, counting on unassisted brains is iffier yet. When President Obama or Secretary Clinton lauds “smart power” as a self-sufficient counter to Islamofascism, Red Chinese hegemonism or Russian truculence, he (or she) implicitly claims the ability to consistently outwit Osama bin-Laden, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin. Well, maybe Barry and Hill are the new Metternich and Bismarck, but how much national security should we bet on that prospect?

In less than two weeks, the new Administration hasn’t had much time to chalk up foreign policy successes or failures. What it has done, however, has suggested its “little gray cells” may need a more robust supplement.

The sheerest and most incredible absence of “smartness” is the President’s failure to keep his party from inserting “Buy American” mandates into the Stagflation Stimulus Bill now pending in Congress. If he didn’t know about those provisions, he was negligent. If he doesn’t care, he is dumb. A trade war with our allies – worse, one that we are bound to lose at considerable cost to both our and our friends’ economies – is about the greatest boon our enemies could ask for.

Another boon is for the President of the United States to echo and reinforce Islamofascist propaganda themes, as Mr. Obama did in his first interview with an Arab language television network. Bad enough was his ignorance of the history of American relations with the Moslem world; there’s no way to be usefully “smart” without a foundation of knowledge. Worse was his casual assertion that America has in the past engaged in a generalized war against, and has tried to “dictate” to, the Islamic world. That is the line that Osama and his ilk have pushed for years. A President who was exerting, rather than just talking about, “smart power” would have used this forum to emphasize the truth: that most of America’s recent wars have supported oppressed Moslems, often against Christian adversaries. He might even, as Jenn Rubin suggests, have announced America’s $20 million donation humanitarian aid in Gaza (not necessarily a great idea, but wouldn’t “smart power” get the maximum mileage out of it?) While truth telling might not penetrate the shield of Moslem paranoia, an American leader’s endorsement of outright lies can only make paranoia stronger.

And how brightly are we dealing with our major international rivals? I would have thought that one element of “smart power” was being smart enough not to speak loudly while carrying only joss sticks. Yet that is what the new Secretary of the Treasury did when he denounced Red China’s monetary policies. We have no carrots or sticks (at least, none that it would be “smart” to use) to encourage Peking to revalue its currency for our benefit. Of course we should pay no attention to the answering yawps from Chinese spokesmen, but the problem with this exchange is that it makes us look impotent and Peking strong at a moment when we ought to be doing all that we subtly can to undermine its prestige.

Doesn’t “smart power” also involve maintaining and expanding alliances? How is that consistent with reports that the Administration is already abandoning the planned European missile defense program? The friendly Polish and Romanian governments, having invested political capital in the project, are hung out to dry, while Tsar Vladimir gains a victory without any expenditure of effort. How “smart” is that?

Still, let’s be fair. If press reports are correct, “smart power” is about to go on the offensive – in Zimbabwe, where the Administration will attempt to oust the deranged tyrant Robert Mugabe without violence (violence by anti-Mugabe forces, that is; violence on the dictator’s side has been endemic for years). I hope that the effort succeeds but note that this is like trying out one’s new basketball strategy against the Dallas Academy girls’ team.

Every sentient being on the planet knows that Mugabe has ruined Zimbabwe. He is widely unpopular within the country, where he has yielded a portion (though what portion is unclear) to the opposition. His survival is not of particular strategic interest to any other country. Getting rid of him is about the easiest task that “smart power” could undertake. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t succeed. If only all the rest of our challenges were that simple.

Room for India Under That Bus?

This year we have the largest ideological shift in the Presidency since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. A striking difference between then and now is that everybody had a reasonably clear idea of what President Reagan was going to do. He had not only run on a platform of “change”; he had specified what changes he had in mind: lower taxes, less government regulation, sound money, tough anticommunism. President-Elect Obama remains comparatively a riddle. What we saw during the past two years isn’t necessarily what we’re going to get.

Quite a few conservatives have been heartened by Obamindeterminacy. Given how far to the Left he campaigned, any uncollapsed quantum waves are almost bound to scatter to the Right of what we anticipated. But before we get our hopes too high. . . .

Immediately after being elected, Senator Obama started making phone calls to foreign heads of government. There is obvious symbolism to the order of these chit-chats. Hence, it is probably not happenstance that the Prime Minister of India was not an early recipient is almost certainly not happenstance. The omission has caused a stir in Asia.

Among the world’s democracies, India is first in population and third in gross domestic product. Though not formally an ally, it is one of America’s best friends in the Far East and a front line target of the mufsidun. It recently signed a nuclear cooperation treaty with the U.S., which is awaiting Senate ratification. Yet it didn’t even make the top fifteen on the President-Elect’s list. Asked about the “oversight”, one of Prime Minister Singh’s aides sounded, to my ears, just a little testy: “Of course, we are not in the same league as South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, and we are happy not to be.”

David Frum suggests, not implausibly, that this cosmetic downgrading of India is a prelude to more substantive slights:

The US wants fuller Pakistani cooperation against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The more motivated the Pakistani military is to help, the more successful (and less costly!) anti-Taliban operations will be.

Now what one thing could the US offer that would most strongly motive the Pakistani military? Answer: a pro-Pakistani tilt on Kashmir.

Such a tilt would compromise the important US long-term goal of developing a closer relationship with India. It would reward Pakistan for decades of state sponsorship of anti-India terrorism. But it could deliver some immediate results in Afghanistan – and that might be a trade that an administration that wishes to wriggle away from a campaign promise to send more troops to Afghanistan might be willing to make.

If so, it would be unsurprising that India would not receive an early call.

Before the election, the Indo-Asian News Service published an interview with the Democratic candidate, in which he waxed loftily about the importance of India as a “strategic partner”. But that may have been “just words”. His record brims with positions that could quickly cool relations with New Delhi, most notably his know-nothing denunciations of outsourcing. He was also an early critic of the U.S.-India nuclear pact, though he eventually came down in its favor. Perhaps, then, he ignored Mr. Singh simply because closer relations with India don’t fit the his vision of the ideal world.

Or perhaps he wasn’t thinking about anything in particular and this misstep is what we can expect from a President whose limitless confidence in his own abilities is founded on a slender base of knowledge and experience.

As with much else about our leader-to-be, we shall have to wait to find out.