Suicide By Sycophancy

How many articles predicting the ruin that became Afghanistan’s end-game have you read? I recently wrote one, and in all my study for it, I could not find a single source that forecast the speed of the Afghan National Army (ANA) collapse. In the many versions I tried, one predicted that if we were able to get a 9/11 retrospective photo-op out of the 2 trillion dollar project, we would be lucky. I discarded that as too cynical. If I had published it, that would have put me, a full time paramedic writing in a blog, in the top rank of Afghanistan experts, if we define it by the power of prognostication (LOL).

Which makes the crucial national security question not what the fall of Afghanistan means to us, but how our expert class failed in the prediction of failure your layman scribbler saw plain as daylight. And how they failed to know (or worse, report on) the implications of Afghan dysfunction for 20 years. And if they knew, and they had to have, why did they not adapt?

We have seen this same failure before. Here is the last CIA station Chief in Saigon, before being lifted out on the last perched helicopter, the which President Biden referring to, when he assured us there will be none of that:

1. WITH RECEIPT PRESIDENTIAL MESSAGE ADVISING THAT EVACUATION AMERICAN EMBASSY SAIGON MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE 0345 LOCAL TIME 30 APRIL, WISH TO ADVISE THAT THIS WILL BE THE FINAL MESSAGE FROM SAIGON STATION.

 

2. IT WILL TAKE US ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES TO DESTROY EQUIPMENT. ACCOMPLISH BY APPROXIMATELY 0320 HOURS LOCAL. WE MUST TERMINATE CLASSIFIED TRANSMISSIONS.

 

3. IT HAS BEEN A LONG FIGHT AND WE HAVE LOST. THIS EXPERIENCE UNIQUE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES DOES NOT SIGNAL NECESSARILY THE DEMISE OF THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER. THE SEVERITY OF THE DEFEAT AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF IT, HOWEVER, WOULD SEEM TO CALL FOR A REASSESSMENT OF THE POLICIES OF NIGGARDLY HALF MEASURES WHICH HAVE CHARACTERIZED MUCH OF OUR PARTICIPATiON HERE DESPITE THE COMMITMENT OF MANPOWER AND RESOURCES WHICH WERE CERTAINLY GENEROUS. THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE FORCED TO REPEAT IT. LET US HOPE THAT WE WILL NOT HAVE ANOTHER VIETNAM EXPERIENCE AND THAT WE HAVE LEARNED OUR LESSON.

 

SAIGON SIGNING OFF.

There is that same expert/totally wrong blind spot we now face up to in Afghanistan. He uses “niggardly” resources and “certainly generous costs” in the same damn paragraph. But the basic questions: ‘Did the army we so expensively prepared to prevent this possess this basic capability?’ Or better yet: ‘What difference to Americans’ safety will any of this make?” was never publicly raised by anyone expert in pursuing the war. They didn’t report that the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam was built on feet of clay, either.

Granted, it was a catastrophe for the political rights of many South Asians, but how many of them formed one of the vaunted Vietnamese guerrilla groups to carry on the fight for what we tried to “give” them? We and the Vietnamese are friends today (they can look at a map and see China, same as we can).

The spectacle of Afghans lobbing their babies to our soldiers over the barbed wire fence at the evacuation point could certainly have been avoided. As the Vietnamese boat-lift could have been; as the Rwandan genocide could have been; as the Bangladeshi genocide and famine could have been; as the cultural genocide that is happening in Burma at this very moment could still be. But at what cost? And why is it being borne only in American blood and treasure? Just the other day, 13 of our precious people paid the ultimate cost, the latest sunk of far too many (we can only pray they will be the last). If it were my life, I would not lose it to a last sink (and I’ve risked mine for the cause of my city many times).

The broadest view is that for all of our military expertise, we failed to apply two of the simplest strategic principals to our Afghan adventure: Security of Base and Economy of Force. They both, most emphatically, include economics. We are the most indebted nation in the history of the planet, and we are indebted to our only true national security threat, China. Look at a table globe: Afghanistan is on the opposite side of it from us. It costs us one million dollars per soldier per year to maintain troops there. Every time we fire a missile at a Taliban goat cart, imagine them launching a top of the line BMW. That’s not including the cost of shipping it to the war zone (imagine the cost of it being sent by Amazon). To protect a people who have not the slightest interest in being protected (the 300,000 man ANA army disintegrated in a week). We’ve been doing it the same way for 3/4 of a generation. And who is poised to reap Afghanistan’s abundant natural resources when the situation stabilizes? China is.

We incurred all that cost (the Global War on Terror is about a 1/3 of our deficit) to achieve what? When we invaded Afghanistan they were the one failed state in the world (when was the last time you heard that slogan?). Today, there are more than a half dozen. And many failed because the wars we waged weakened them too much for them to “succeed” (which IMHO, is why the “failed state” slogan now is so passe).

Think about the dozens (probably hundreds) of senior military men, all of whom get an Ivy League-level education on every aspect of our strategy, in the many staff colleges we taxpayers put them through, who have been mute for two decades on what Afghanistan was. And, as it follows, what it turned out to be. The question of “evil vs ignorance” has to be raised, but the conclusion is forgone when talking about such educated people.

Let’s name the evil. The story of General Shinseki makes a great example: he testified to Congress that we were up-selling the Iraq invasion by outright lying about its likely costs. Marvel at how Paul Wolfowitz, somehow deemed “expert” enough to testify on the matter before Congress, claimed that the troop levels needed in Bosnia (the precedent for Shinseki’s assessment) were not comparable to Iraq, because Iraq was not as factionalized (and marvel more at how Congress took him at his word).

General Shinseki made sure he was in “KMA mode” (“Kiss My Ass:” senior enough to be able to claim his pension), so he would be protected against retaliation. That would be institutional retaliation, for doing his sworn-to-the-Constitution duty to tell the truth to the committee deliberating a preemptive invasion we had only the thinnest of pretexts for (not to mention all of the strategically disastrous sequelae). Truth which would have spoiled their war. Dwell on that: our top general will only tell the truth if he has a golden parachute to evade the payback of the politicos. Given the sorts of politicos we have been getting, a look in the mirror is clearly where the true national security threat lies.

General George Marshall, our Chief of Staff during World War II, knew such institutionalism was the weak link in the strong chain we would need to face the greatest crisis ever faced by Western Civilization. He culled huge numbers of senior officers in the wind-up to the war, at a time one would think we needed them the most. General Marshall’s rewarding of success, and punishing of failure, in people who are expected to make incredibly consequential decisions, was the secret weapon that finished the fascists before the A-bomb. The fact that rewards for success and punishments for failure is such an outlier in government is most of the libertarian argument. This talk by Rick Atkinson is priceless for understanding the paramount importance of pruning dysfunctional institutional wood. Atkinson is one of our top writers on military affairs, and he researched this for years before concluding that this is the great unseen factor in our inability to win any wars over the last half century (1st Gulf war excepted… kinda). Be sure to read the comment section too, for the input from military personnel. Our military product contrasts disgracefully with the fact that we have a larger military budget than the next 11 top-spending nations combined (and with us being broke).

Last we come to sycophant-superior, Colin Powell, once one of our most honored military men, who sold his honor when he (too) exaggerated the Iraq invasion case. Forgive me for quoting my dad: “the man is a decorated war veteran, obviously not a coward. But there are different types of cowardice; people will risk their skins, but not their careers.” Just so.

What have senior officers been fired for, if not for distorted strategic vision? One was relieved of duty for demanding our ever-missing accountability for the debacle of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which seems like nothing but the obvious truth. Another was fired for mocking the incompetence of the man who now presides over that debacle. Firings might happen, but only over careerism, it appears.

The threat this poses to our national security is nothing less than a short-circuit of our Checks and Balances system: the electorate (presumed educated, we won’t go there today) makes their desires on national security known to their representatives. The representatives order the military to implement the people’s will. But the expertise of the military is needed, especially in feedback. Most especially, their feedback is needed to adapt to inevitable failures, so that we don’t keep throwing blood and treasure down an endless hole. If they act out of personal gain, in trying to climb an emerging career ladder of combat experience, however futile, but which is against the abstract, but actual, national interest, the voters will only see the truth only after the smoke they blew up our asses clears away. And that will incur an incalculable price to our trust in our government. Consider what that’s cost us, just lately, when thinking about our real National Security.