Second Thoughts

My opinion as expressed in my post on Afghanistan is different than Kevin Drum's as expressed here and here.  And perhaps deviates from Tom Friedman, who in the Times writes of the "morning after the morning after".

That's bothersome, as I respect Drum's opinions on almost everything.

So time for second thoughts:

• Trump's Doha deal with the Taliban promised we'd be out by May. Pence has criticized Biden for not respecting that.  I think Biden was right to take some time, 4 months as it turned out, to figure out whether he wanted to go with his gut or follow the recommendations of the military.  He would have been severely criticized if he pulled out in May.  It's debatable whether he could reasonably taken the whole summer to consider, so the departure would have happened after the end of the "fighting season".
• There's lots of finger pointing over the intelligence, did the CIA predict it or blow it?  We'll get lots ore on this.  My guess is the CIA was pessimistic, the military optimistic, but nobody saw the quick collapse (which seems to be Gen Milley's position).
• The planning and scheduling of the departure.  Military says they planned and did exercises.  I'll be watching to see if there was State/military planning, and joint exercises--such coordination has always been problematic, and in the absence of lots of high ranking Biden appointees and the transition coordination might well have been an early casualty.
• Based on how things have gone so far, it looks as if we would have done better by bringing the 6,000 troops much earlier--let them live in field for a couple months while the troops which have been serving there departed.  The new troops would be charged with maintaining order during the departure.
• A key element of the planning should have been developing a database of Americans who might need to depart, including both government employees and civilian contractors; a database of NATO personnel so we're clear whether we need to help other nations evacuate their nationals; and a database of Afghanis who have been on our payrolls in the last 20 years, plus their families.

One point the administration has made which I hadn't considered--early steps to evacuate were opposed by the Ghani administration and could/would be demoralizing to them.   I don't know how you handle that--if we're talking 20-100,000 people there's no way to keep arrangements secret. But that demoralization seems to be the main cause of the rapid collapse of Ghani government anyway.  

Maybe in an ideal world Biden and Blinken would have gone back to the Taliban and pitched a deal--a more planned departure. (Or departures, different arrangements depending on how events transpired.)  Problem is that Trump had bargained away US leverage, so anything we could have offered would have relied on Ghani's cooperation in facilitating a transfer of power.  

It's possible that Kevin is right--if things go relatively smoothly from here on out, what seemed to be disastrous two days ago will fade into the past.  I hope so.

Government Forms Design

 Remember the "butterfly ballot"?  The covid vaccination form joins it as an example of inept forms design, or at least of limited imagination on the part of its designers. See this GovExec piece.

Organized Fraud in Unemployment Claims

Pro Publica reports on the existence of organized fraud rings which submitted false claims for unemployment benefits/pandemic aid in multiple states.                 (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-unemployment-insurance-fraud-exploded-during-the-pandemic)

It's part of the price we pay for our individualism, freedom, and privacy, I guess.

Buck Stops With Biden

I remember Harry S, and his buck stops.  I think that is right.  I don't know that Biden did anything which led to today in Kabul, but it's his responsibility. Presidents can take credit for things which happen during their term, even though they didn't cause them; so too should we hold them responsible for the bad things which happen.  

In my mind this parallels Obama and the healthcare.gov problems.  In both cases the leader may have done all the usual "due diligence", but in both cases there was* no appreciation for Murphy's law, for the black swan event.  And in both cases the bad happened, and it was bad.   

In an ideal world the leader would do a stress test on his bureaucracy, worrying about contingency plans.  You recall Eisenhower had at least a contingency message prepared in case D-Day was a fiasco and the troops had to be evacuated.  

* I write this knowing there's been no real reporting on the decision process in either case, at least no tick-tock book which I've read.

I'd also note that Trump's agreement with the Taliban put Biden in a tough position. My knee-jerk reaction is that he perhaps should have kept the troops and support going until the last minute while paring down the civilian contingent and especially getting all the interpreters and otherwise vulnerable people on the way  out of the country. 

I Should Have Blogged Earlier

 Memory is fallible.  Blog posts are reliable, at least recording the moment.

IIRC when GWB sent our forces into Afghanistan I was dubious, remembering the British and the Soviet failures. Had I been blogging then I might have recorded that opinion, which I could now point proudly to as proof of my prescience.

Of course, had I been blogging a few months later I might have posted my opinion that our easy success in Afghanistan showed we might have learned our lessons from the past and our new technology with  precision bombs would enable us to oust Saddam.  I think that's my memory, though I also think I was still queasy about invading Iraq.  

We'll never know. 

"Produced" Versus "Result of"

 I've dipped my toe into reading about the current controversy on critical race theory, but haven't gotten into it in any depth.  

One thing which did strike was a statement to the effect that "policy produced the 'hood'". To me that's a sequence like "Person A decided on policy B, policy B created C" with the implication that C was the intent of the person, the decider.  

Compare that to a statement that "policy resulted in the 'hood'". To me that's a sequence like "Person A decided on policy B, a result of policy B was C" with the implication that  C may or may not have been the intent of the decider.

As someone who likes Murphy's law the second version is more to my liking. I think there are a lot of cases where the decider focuses on the immediate situation and adopts a policy which she thinks will solve the problem, not realizing there are ramifications and unknown unknows also at play which will create unintended results.

The difference between intent and result.

George Washington and Bearing Arms

I ran across this quotation from George Washington's first (state of the union) address to Congress. Apparently sometimes Second Amendment advocates have modified it to make it clearly support an individual right to bear arms.

"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies."

I think I've done enough reading in the period to know what he was talking about.  When he took command of the military forces besieging the British in Boston there was a desperate shortage of gunpowder and arms.  The Continental Congress was desperately searching for supplies,  within the colonies, elsewhere in the British empire, in the Americas and in Europe.  

Throughout the Revolution Washington was forced to use colonial militia forces, called up for short periods of time, often poorly armed by the local governments and poorly trained during their periodic muster days.  He did not like the militia.

So what he's calling for in this sentence is a well-armed and organized military force, equipped with American made weapons and supplied with American made gunpowder, clothing and other gear. In other words, the full meaning of the Second Amendment.

Equality and Inequity in WWII--the Bomber War

 Interesting--in WWII the RAF bomber crews were self-selected with no divisions of rank or class--they stuck the men who had finished training as pilots, navigators, gunners, etc.  in a big room and let them choose each other to form a bomber crew.  Lots of diversity, at least by country (different parts of the British Empire, plus Poles, Free French, Americans, etc.)   

In contrast America was very authoritarian, as the military tends to be, and strikingly was class-based.  College men who were officers were the pilots and navigators; the rest of the crew were enlisted men. A new crew was formed by order from Washington; preferences had nothing to do with it.

Gentrification: Disturbing a Way of Life

 Liberals seem often to express sympathy for those adversely affected by gentrification.  Over the years I've seen articles in the Post covering protests by black inner-city residents of DC over the progress of gentrification.

I've tended to have ambivalent reactions.  On the one hand, having lived in DC during some of its worst days, namely the 1970s, I want to applaud any signs of "progress", a growing population rather than shrinking, people with good incomes.  On the other hand, you can't help but sympathize with the people who've lived in an area for all their life, who are in middle age or older, and who don't have jobs and income which would give them choice and power over where they live. 

On the third hand, I remember the patterns of life in rural NY when I grew up, and I know those patterns were changing then and have changed even more in the 60 years since I left.  The fact I left aggravates my ambivalence. 

The Limitations of Vertical Farming

 To be honest, I don't know that anyone has tried to use vertical farms to grow marijuana.  They use similar technology though, and as it turns out a hell of a lot more electricity to grow green pot than to grow green lettuce. See this Politico piece.

The bottom line of the piece is: legalize marijuana at the federal level so it can be grown where it is most efficient to grow it.