[Winstonm]

 Lovera, on 2021-August-25, 09:19, said:

Also "Afghan Lives Matter"

I agree that Afghan Lives Matter but they also mattered in 2002-2008 when the U.S. and its neo conservative leaders decided that nation-building in Afghanistan was a good idea.

[Gilithin]

 kenberg, on 2021-August-25, 09:03, said:

Get on the plane, Jane.

What would you say to Americans who are actively making an effort to fly to Kabul at this time?

[kenberg]

 Gilithin, on 2021-August-25, 12:06, said:

What would you say to Americans who are actively making an effort to fly to Kabul at this time?

Maybe "If they can't get you out, I don't mind"?

[cherdano]

 kenberg, on 2021-August-25, 07:28, said:

A word or two about ignorance. In my intro to this thread I began "I guess someone should say something. I confess to ignorance." A few posts back Cherdano cited this, suggesting, or so I took it, that if I am ignorant maybe I should not be saying something.

I disagreed with "someone should say something", so it was direct at all of us. I am just as ignorant about Afghanistan.

I mean, I can pretend to have a highly informed opinion by choosing whose analysis to trust etc. Give me 30 minutes, and I can probably pretend better than most in this thread. But in truth, it's not those analyses I read that formed my opinion, instead it is just based on a few simple priors.
(1) I think war is bad, people dying is bad, and 10,000 Afghans were dying per year (not counting Taliban forces).
(2) I think that if a war can't be won in 20 years, including a much-discussed "surge", it can't be won.
(3) Continuing to fight a way that can't be won after 20 years in which 10,000 people per year die seems very bad.
(4) I don't trust the US national security establishment, instead I consider them complicit in this failure.
(5) I am definitely not an expert on military tactics, but most people aren't, and I think any pundit who thinks they know which airport the US should have used instead etc. is just full of *****. And no, that's not based on a point-by-point rebuttal, that's just my prior. And I also think that the responsibility for military tactics lies with generals, not with the US president.

I find the consequences of the withdrawal devastating for Afghans, especially Afghan women. But that's not a reason to keep fighting an unwinnable war.

[cherdano]

 Lovera, on 2021-August-25, 09:19, said:

Also "Afghan Lives Matter"

I agree (duh!) but I have no idea what this is supposed to argue for. Arguing to stay so Afghan girls can keep going to school? Arguing to leave because right now >10,000 Afghans are dying in the war per year? Arguing to evacuate everyone who wants to?

[y66]

Zeeshan Aleem at MSNBC said:

Pulling out of a two decade long imperial fantasy that achieved little more than mass casualties — and deciding to eat the political costs that accompany the complicated maneuver — is the precise opposite of pure rhetoric and drift from the real world.

Bruno Maçães, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute said:

A journalist asked me today how I made sense of the Biden administration. My answer, perhaps too charitable, is that I think they live in a world of pure rhetoric, where speeches alone matter and the real world has been lost

[Lovera]

What I have indicated must be seen in the sense of daily living (wellfare), logistics, networks, infrastructures at the service of the population for various situations, all aimed in their favor and also realized with foresight looking at the territory and favoring support for the development of their autonomy. Of course, about 20 years is a long period that is now also being questioned for what has been done, for what has not been able to be completed and for what has not been well foreseen. It is not the time to procrastinate but to be decisive in the defense of what has been carried out so far. Because if it all started with all the best intentions and emphasis this does not mean that, with the passage of time and in the field of reality, no obstacles to achieving the objectives have been glimpsed. A predictable and difficult thing to manage is "exporting" the Occidental model without considering having to preserve their Afghan identity. Perhaps at a certain point it was proceeded "automatically" without having great results and, therefore, starting to waste energy over time and, perhaps, it had to know how to stop and reconsider. However, the resistance to the return of the Taliban regime could be the sign that not all has been lost.

[kenberg]

 Lovera, on 2021-August-26, 01:23, said:

What I have indicated must be seen in the sense of daily living (wellfare), logistics, networks, infrastructures at the service of the population for various situations, all aimed in their favor and also realized with foresight looking at the territory and favoring support for the development of their autonomy. Of course, about 20 years is a long period that is now also being questioned for what has been done, for what has not been able to be completed and for what has not been well foreseen. It is not the time to procrastinate but to be decisive in the defense of what has been carried out so far. Because if it all started with all the best intentions and emphasis this does not mean that, with the passage of time and in the field of reality, no obstacles to achieving the objectives have been glimpsed. A predictable and difficult thing to manage is "exporting" the Occidental model without considering having to preserve their Afghan identity. Perhaps at a certain point it was proceeded "automatically" without having great results and, therefore, starting to waste energy over time and, perhaps, it had to know how to stop and reconsider. However, the resistance to the return of the Taliban regime could be the sign that not all has been lost.

I'll start at the "what now" portion of what you say.
1. Accept that we will have very little to say.
2. Fulfill our promises to get people out as best we can.
3. Give some thought to the future.

As to the future, it is unlikely that the consequences of the Taliban takeover will end at the borders of Afghanistan.

Now about "started with the best intentions". Often actions are taken with some blend of self-interest and goodwill. These two motives can blend together. Domestically, I would like to see those who are living on the edge be given a chance to do better. I would like to see it because I hope for the best for people, but I also think the nation I live in will do better if everyone develops as well as possible. This would be good for me as well as them. Ok, back to Afghanistan. A western style democracy, although not perfect, could be good for Afghans. If that had been successful, it would also be good for us and I strongly suspect that was the main thought.

We just did a really crappy job of it. Why? I am not wise enough to give a full answer but surely part of it was that we are outsiders telling the people who live there what to do.

At any rate, we must accept that however much some, perhaps many, Afghans like some, probably not all, of what we were trying to do, that's over. The Taliban is in charge, they will not be calling us for advice on the education of women or anything else, and we have to deal as best we can with a very bad situation for people that we have made direct promises to about getting them out. And then try to look ahead realistically.

[y66]

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg said:

Let’s talk about media bias and Afghanistan. Because this is a really good case study of how real media bias works.

I’ll start with an excellent column from my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru, in which he supplies eight reasons why President Joe Biden is getting terrible press over the events in Afghanistan. He’s pushing back against Biden’s defenders and opponents of U.S. involvement who have argued that the media are actively cheerleading for war, or perhaps punishing Biden for not continuing the fight.

Ponnuru points out that ideological bias isn’t necessary for explaining how Afghanistan is being covered, because other media biases were triggered. So for example (as he points out) a situation where the president’s party is split while the out-party is united against a policy generally yields negative coverage for the president. In this case, the terrible events were also happening where the cameras happened to be in Kabul, which produced heavy coverage, while the same media — especially TV — had almost invariably ignored much heavier violence for years because it was happening far from where the press was based.

All of this is perfectly typical of real media bias. As are the reactions. When bias runs against Republicans, they assume that the reason is partisan or ideological, which might make sense given that the majority of journalists tend to be liberal. When, as in this case, it runs against Democrats, they’re quick to note the corporate ownership of media outlets and their sponsors.

But political scientists and other scholars who have studied this topic invariably find that within the explicitly neutral media the biases that matter are almost always related to the way that journalists go about their jobs; the values of neutrality they try to uphold; and, to be sure, self-interest, such as paying more attention to stories that attract readers and viewers.

Remember, bias is inevitable. Choices must be made about what to cover and how to interpret it, and there are no purely fair answers for how to make those decisions or uncontroversial standards to refer to. At least beyond those that the “neutral” media uses. That doesn’t mean that the media shouldn’t be criticized, or can’t get stories wrong.

As for the accusation that there’s a general bias in favor of hawkishness? What I think we’re seeing is a “mainstream” bias — that is, the neutral media considers some views mainstream and others not, and feels free to dismiss the latter. What I think really angers a lot of Biden’s defenders is that certain hawkish viewpoints — and the pundits pushing them — have survived U.S. use of torture, the fiasco in Iraq and now the futility of the last years in Afghanistan without managing to be disqualified from the mainstream. And that certainly has affected coverage of these events.

For the most part, however, I think that’s less a media story than it is a party story. Republicans (with the occasional exception of Donald Trump) haven’t moved on from the ideas that forged George W. Bush’s policies or the people who advanced them. And there’s always been a faction of Democrats who either stood with them or at least near them (a faction that has withered but hasn’t disappeared). It’s not necessarily correct for the media to keep classifying those people and ideas as mainstream, but that’s generally how it’s done. For better or worse.

[Winstonm]

Excellent article and post. This also helps explain the vast desert of missing information and analysis that used to be supplied by foreign news bureaus scattered over the globe but have since been eliminated in cost-saving measures.

[kenberg]

I looked at a long article in WaPo yesterday and did not think it was biased. I am sorry that I did not post it since I can't find it now. The second paragraph talked of vatious concerns without being specific and I did not like that, but the specifics came later and it seemed carefully written.

So now I just looked at the first thing that came up, from https://www.washingt...-live-updates/:

Quote

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed that two explosions took place outside Kabul’s airport on Thursday, causing “U.S. and civilian casualties” in a complex attack that followed repeated threat warnings from the United States and its allies.

According to Kirby, the first blast took place right outside the airport’s Abbey gate and the second at the nearby Baron Hotel. Scattered gunshots were heard after the blasts.


Large crowds of Afghans have been gathering daily at the airport in hopes of fleeing the country following the Taliban takeover. Kirby did not give precise figures, but Reuters cited Taliban officials as saying that up to 13 people could have been killed, including children.



The U.S. Embassy in Kabul warned Americans late Wednesday to avoid traveling to Kabul airport because of unspecified security threats and advised citizens at three airport gates to “leave immediately.”



Australia and Britain also issued warnings that Afghanistan was facing a “high threat” of a terrorist attack. Although officials did not provide more details, the Biden administration previously warned that the Islamic State poses a threat to the evacuation mission.


The warnings came as NATO allies, including Poland and Belgium, ended their evacuation flights ahead of an Aug. 31 deadline for U.S. troops to depart. Turkey, which has played a significant role in airport security, also began withdrawing its military.

If by bias we mean op-eds, sure, columnists gove their opinions, WaPo includes many, from George Will
to E J Dionne on varied topics with varied views.


The reporting, done in real time, of course has to be taken with a grain of salt. But it seems to me they are trying to tell it straight.

[y66]

Ezra Klein at NYT said:

In 2005, two of my colleagues at The American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, wrote an essay I think about often. It was called “The Incompetence Dodge,” and it argued that American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. At the time, they were writing about the liberal hawks who were blaming the catastrophe of the Iraq war on the Bush administration’s maladministration rather than rethinking the enterprise in its totality. But the same dynamic suffuses the recriminations over the Afghanistan withdrawal.

To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one. That is the reckoning that lies beneath events that are still unfolding, and much of the cable news conversation is a frenzied, bipartisan effort to avoid it.

Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.

“The pro-war crowd sees this as a mechanism by which they can absolve themselves of an accounting for the last 20 years,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. “Just think about the epic size of this policy failure. Twenty years of training. More than $2 trillion worth of expenditure. For almost nothing. It is heartbreaking to watch these images, but it is equally heartbreaking to think about all of the effort, of lives and money we wasted in pursuit of a goal that was illusory.”

Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, phrased it well: “There’s no denying America is the most powerful country in the world, but what we’ve seen over and over in recent decades is we cannot turn that into the outcomes we want. Whether it’s Afghanistan or Libya or sanctions on Russia and Venezuela, we don’t get the policy outcomes we want, and I think that’s because we overreach — we assume that because we are very powerful, we can achieve things that are unachievable.”

It is worth considering some counterfactuals for how our occupation could have ended. Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and began rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples through Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory.

Another possible scenario was suggested to me by Grant Gordon, a political scientist who works on conflict and refugee crises (and is, I should say, an old friend): If the Biden administration had pulled our allies and personnel out more efficiently, that might have unleashed the Taliban to massacre their opposition, as America and the world would have been insulated and perhaps uninterested in the aftermath. There have been revenge killings, but it has not devolved, at least as of yet, into all-out slaughter, and that may be because the American withdrawal has been messy and partial and the Taliban fears re-engagement. “What is clearly a debacle from one angle may actually have generated restraint,” Gordon told me. “Having spent time in places like this, I think people lack a real imagination for how bad these conflicts can get.”

Let me offer one more: Even though few believed Ghani’s government would prevail in our absence, and the Trump administration cut them out of its deal with the Taliban, there’s widespread disappointment that the government we supported collapsed so quickly. Biden has been particularly unsparing in his descriptions of the Afghan Army’s abdication, and I agree with those who say he’s been unfair, underestimating the courage and sacrifice shown by Afghan troops throughout the war. But put that aside: Americans might have felt better seeing our allies in Afghanistan put up a longer fight, even if the Taliban emerged victorious. But would a multiyear civil war have been better for the Afghans caught in the crossfire?

Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, put it simply: “I think there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance, and smart people are struggling with how to rationalize defeat. Because that’s what we have here in Afghanistan — a defeat.”

I will not pretend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But neither do a lot of people dominating the airwaves right now. And the confident pronouncements to the contrary over the past two weeks leave me worried that America has learned little. We are still holding not just to the illusion of our control, but to the illusion of our knowledge.

This is an illusion that, for me, shattered long ago. I was a college freshman when America invaded Iraq. And, to my enduring shame, I supported it. My reasoning was straightforward: If George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell and, yes, Joe Biden all thought there was some profound and present danger posed by Saddam Hussein, they must have known something I didn’t.

There’s an old line: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And so it was with the Iraq war. Bush and Clinton and Powell and Blair knew quite a bit that wasn’t true. As Robert Draper shows in his book “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” they were certain Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Only he didn’t. They were also certain, based on decades of testimony from Iraqi expats, that Americans would be welcomed as liberators.

There were many lessons to be learned from the Iraq war, but this, for me, was the most central: We don’t know what we don’t know, and, even worse, we don’t always know what we think we know. Policymakers are easily fooled by people with seemingly relevant experience or credentials who will tell them what they want to hear or what they already believe. The flow of money, interests, enmities and factions is opaque to outsiders and even to insiders. We do not understand other countries well enough to remake them according to our ideals. We don’t even understand our own country well enough to achieve our ideals.

“Look at the countries in which the war on terror has been waged,” Ben Rhodes, who served as a top foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama, told me. “Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Somalia. Libya. Every one of those countries is worse off today in some fashion. The evidentiary basis for the idea that American military intervention leads inexorably to improved material circumstances is simply not there.”

I wrote a book on political polarization so I am often asked to do interviews where the point is to lament how awful polarization is. But the continuing power of the war-on-terror framework reflects the problems that come from too much bipartisanship. Too much agreement can be as toxic to a political system as too much disagreement. The alternative to polarization is often the suppression of dissenting viewpoints. If the parties agree with each other, then they have incentive to marginalize those who disagree with both of them.

At least for my adult life, on foreign policy, our political problem has been that the parties have agreed on too much, and dissenting voices have been shut out. That has allowed too much to go unquestioned, and too many failures to go uncorrected. It is telling that it is Biden who is taking the blame for America’s defeat in Afghanistan. The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them.

Initially, the war in Afghanistan was as broadly supported and bipartisan as anything in American politics has ever been. That made it hard to question, and it has made it harder to end. The same is true of the assumptions lying beneath it, and much else in our foreign policy — that America is always a good actor; that we understand enough about the rest of the world, and about ourselves, to remake it in our image; that humanitarianism and militarism are easily grafted together.

The tragedy of humanitarian intervention as a foreign policy philosophy is that it binds our compassion to our delusions of military mastery. We awaken to the suffering of others when we fear those who rule them or hide among them, and in this way our desire for security finds union with our desire for decency. Or we awaken to the suffering of others when they face a massacre of such immediacy that we are forced to confront our passivity and to ask what inaction would mean for our souls and self-image. In both cases, we awaken with a gun in our hands, or perhaps we awaken because we have a gun in our hands.

To many, America’s pretensions of humanitarian motivation were always suspect. There are vicious regimes America does nothing to stop. There are vicious regimes America finances directly. It is callous to suggest that the only suffering we bear responsibility for is the suffering inflicted by our withdrawal. Our wars and drone strikes and tactical raids and the resulting geopolitical chaos directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis.

This is the deep lacuna in America’s foreign policy conversation: The American foreign policy establishment obsesses over the harms caused by our absence or withdrawal. But there’s no similar culpability for the harms we commit or that our presence creates. We are much quicker to blame ourselves for what we don’t do than what we do.

My heart breaks for the suffering we will leave behind in Afghanistan. But we do not know how to fix Afghanistan. We failed in that effort so completely that we ended up strengthening the Taliban. We should do all we can to bring American citizens and allies home. But if we truly care about educating girls worldwide, we know how to build schools and finance education. If we truly care about protecting those who fear tyranny, we know how to issue visas and admit refugees. If we truly care about the suffering of others, there is so much we could do. Only 1 percent of the residents of poor countries are vaccinated against the coronavirus. We could change that. More than 400,000 people die from malaria each year. We could change that, too.

“I want America more forward-deployed, but I want it through a massive international financing arm and a massive renewable energy arm,” Senator Murphy told me. “That’s the United States I want to see spread across the world — not the face of America today that’s by and large arms sales, military trainers and brigades.”

The choice we face is not between isolationism and militarism. We are not powerful enough to achieve the unachievable. But we are powerful enough to do far more good, and far less harm, than we do now.

[Winstonm]

 kenberg, on 2021-August-26, 11:23, said:

I looked at a long article in WaPo yesterday and did not think it was biased. I am sorry that I did not post it since I can't find it now. The second paragraph talked of vatious concerns without being specific and I did not like that, but the specifics came later and it seemed carefully written.

So now I just looked at the first thing that came up, from https://www.washingt...-live-updates/:




[color=#2A2A2A][font=georgia,]


If by bias we mean op-eds, sure, columnists gove their opinions, WaPo includes many, from George Will
to E J Dionne on varied topics with varied views.


The reporting, done in real time, of course has to be taken with a grain of salt. But it seems to me they are trying to tell it straight.

Have you watched any televised news?

[Winstonm]

Joe Biden with more political courage and seemingly more common gumption understands that when you find yourself in a hole the first order of business is to stop digging.

[kenberg]

 Winstonm, on 2021-August-26, 13:51, said:

Have you watched any televised news?

I fairly often watch PBS Newshour. Sometimes Amanpour and Company. Not too much else. It's true that they have a view. I cope.

[Winstonm]

 kenberg, on 2021-August-26, 14:07, said:

I fairly often watch PBS Newshour. Sometimes Amanpour and Company. Not too much else. It's true that they have a view. I cope.

Not that I recommend making it a staple, but you might try a few minutes of CNN and MSNBC or even CBS, NBC, or ABC and compare their coverages to see the bias to which the article refers.

[kenberg]

 Winstonm, on 2021-August-26, 14:19, said:

Not that I recommend making it a staple, but you might try a few minutes of CNN and MSNBC or even CBS, NBC, or ABC and compare their coverages to see the bias to which the article refers.

Been there, done that. When I was in high school we were given an assignment: Pick the new to pick of our choice, pick three new magazines of our choice, read how they each handled the topic and write up a comparison. It was an interesting assignment but I am not so sure I want to repeat it. Anyway, I have the WC as a source.

Jane Ferguson is now out. She was in Qatar least night while I was listening to PBS. I looked up her tweets, here is one from Qatar:

Quote

Sat on tarmac in #Doha - just off US evacuation flight from #Afghanistan. Parents begged for water for kids, some near fainting. Asked if they could be allowed into terminal building: ‘no one is going into a building, they are full. Wait time 6-8 hours.’ Its 102 degrees out here.

I can skip CBS.

[Winstonm]

 kenberg, on 2021-August-26, 15:06, said:

Been there, done that. When I was in high school we were given an assignment: Pick the new to pick of our choice, pick three new magazines of our choice, read how they each handled the topic and write up a comparison. It was an interesting assignment but I am not so sure I want to repeat it. Anyway, I have the WC as a source.

Jane Ferguson is now out. She was in Qatar least night while I was listening to PBS. I looked up her tweets, here is one from Qatar:

[/font][/color][/size]


I can skip CBS.

Ken,
All I was saying was that if you don’t see the bias that the author wrote about you would understand his point if you watched cable news. Perhaps I misunderstood but it seemed you didn’t agree with his assessment because you weren’t reading it in the WaPo. Most likely I misunderstood 😛

[kenberg]

 Winstonm, on 2021-August-26, 17:27, said:

Ken,
All I was saying was that if you don't see the bias that the author wrote about you would understand his point if you watched cable news. Perhaps I misunderstood but it seemed you didn't agree with his assessment because you weren't reading it in the WaPo. Most likely I misunderstood ��

There have been some posts here and comments elsewhere about media bias and so a couple of days back I decided to take a WaPo story and look at it from that point of view. Some WaPo articles are better than others, and I don't think that they should be given a pass just because they are WaPo.WaPo stories most but not all of them allow for reader comment and I have, at times, commented. Sometimes favorably, sometimes not.

The point being that I decided to try to take an objective look at the media that I actually look at. I really think WaPo is good. That doesn't mean I think all articles are written with total objectivity, that would require a robot and that would have its own problems. I think if a person reads WaPo and exercises a reasonable level of caution he can be pretty accurately informed.

I realize that WaPo is at the upper end.

I sometimes wonder about the many recitations of what was said on outlets of lesser credibility. I see stories along the lines of "Look what they are saying on Witchcraft News". Ok, but I don't watch Witchcraft News. And those who do watch Witchcraft News probably don't read what I write. This is a real problem but I am not so sure the solution is for me to watch Witchcraft News.

It's a real problem. I checked WaPo because I took it on as a challenge to read it critically and see what I thought. Largely I am satisfied. I can't account for Witchcraft News.

Not that CBS is aka WN. Trust no one completely, go with those who seem to be making an effort.

[PeterAlan]

 kenberg, on 2021-August-26, 11:23, said:

I looked at a long article in WaPo yesterday and did not think it was biased. I am sorry that I did not post it since I can't find it now. The second paragraph talked of vatious concerns without being specific and I did not like that, but the specifics came later and it seemed carefully written.

Possibly this piece Ken?