An Afghan General blames defense contractors for the collapse of the Afghan army. A government inspector blames the "the pervasiveness of overoptimism" by U.S. generals. It's all that, and more.
"None of these tens of thousands of Ivy league encrusted PR savvy highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. "
------------------------
We don't hear much about the President of Afghanistan who fled the country as an example to his troops (except he allegedly fled in cars stuffed with looted cash). Ghani is an ivy leaguer, groomed to be president by other ivy leaguers. According to wikipedia (which no ivy leaguer would ever read) he is a graduate of Columbia University, was professor at Berkeley and John Hopkins and worked at the World Bank and for prestigious "think"tanks. He was ranked 50th among the top 100 intellectuals in the world by readers of Foreign Policy magazine. Wow. Such brainpower is probably responsible for his "snap decision" to flee after being "dumbfounded" by the speed of the advance of the Taliban. I don't think his corruption, cowardice and failure to correctly analyze the situation despite being in the middle of it, will cause him to fall in the intellectual rankings - he's no worse than the rest of the ivy league war mongers.
The incentives for government funded work that does not directly affect an electoral base are for over-optimism, not truth. From the field office to congress, everyone has an incentive to err on the side of optimism in reporting upwards to their boss, who in turn has the same incentive. Since there is no customer or voter who receives the product or service and can vote with their dollar or... vote, there's limited incentive for truth telling. Nobody's boss will ever find out the truth, and if they do they will all have the same incentive to hide it since everyone will have the same egg on their face.
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "<i>How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?</i>" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably <i>rifa</i>, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
Here's how the transcript thing works: a company like Parchment offers a useful service (like sending electronic copies of official transcripts, something that small IHLs can't really do on their own) for a small fee, say $2.50. Your school can pay the fee themselves, pass the fee along to the student, or add their own surcharge. Voila, $9 transcripts! I work at an IHL that can only provide transcripts in hard copy, which may be inconvenient, but we provide them for free. No one can accuse us of ripping off our alumni!
"Many of these critiques, coming from Europeans as much as American elites, are in bad faith." This statement is simply false, and reveals American incomprehension at the perspectives of other Western allies. The reality is that American forces have always been bad at handling insurgency, partly because they expect absurdly short time frames, and partly due to ill-conceived military doctrine.
As a prior example compare, for example, in the 1960s the Malayan Emergency (where British, Malayan, Australian and other Commonwealth forces fought against a Communist insurgency in the jungles of Malaya) and the Vietnam War. The Malayan Emergency was won, partly by using highly-trained professional soldiers who pursued their enemies deep into the jungle, recognizing that control of the air is worthless without control on the ground; and partly because the British doctrine of "the velvet fist in the iron glove" (yes, deliberately inverted) tried to keep the civilian population segregated from the war fighting. The Malayan campaign was a success, although it took well over a decade to achieve.
Contrast this with the Vietnam War which began at about the same time, where American military doctrines caused deep frustration among allied Australian and New Zealand troops who were veterans of Malaya: the reliance on air power, limited control of the jungle, the use of defoliants and poorly-trained conscripted soldiers instead of highly-trained volunteer jungle fighters, and the bombing of civilian villages, created a war that was inherently unwinnable and deeply demoralizing.
Now look at Afghanistan. The British, Australian, French and other forces were willing to remain fighting there another decade, because that's what it would take to build a more resilient society against the Taliban and their sponsors within Pakistan. (Demographics would help in an ultimate victory, given the growing proportion of young people exposed to Western influence in the cities.)
But a US-style executive president was always an inherently bad idea, given the proclivity for corruption in an Afghan context, and the inability of such a president to unify the tribes. And the reliance on air power for operations against the Taliban (which the US forces then suddenly withdrew this year, in the prelude to withdrawal) had a fatal effect on Afghan military morale. The precipitate behavior of Trump and Biden administrations-- in which Western allies were never consulted-- made the position of America's allies untenable.
Other Western countries do engage in 'forever wars' (e.g. France's decades-long campaign against Islamic militants in the Sahel, in its former colonies) because sometimes that's what it takes. America's allies were willing to continue to fight in Afghanistan, and fulfill the promises made to the people of Afghanistan by past American presidents. And now that has all turned to ashes.
The anger and disgust of your allies is real.
See the speech in the British House of Commons by Tom Tugenhat MP (Chair of the Foreign Affairs committee, and a former British soldier in Afghanistan) .
Your description of "the blob" is so apt. It's like a giant amoeba that simply engulfs anything in its way. It's a massive groupthink in which the thinking part is relegated to the sum total of economic opportunism, careerism, and political expediency. It's a mob ruled by expediency, greed and power, and has no mechanism for internal restraint or reflective wisdom.
It's one thing for a consumer goods industry to devolve into that; it's another entirely when it represents an outsourcing of a government's complete defense and foreign policy operation. And one that has its own PR wing dishing out propaganda and actively obstructing transparency. One that reinforces its power with outsourced private intel, paired with enforcers, thugsters to squish pests who get too nosey.
But ... how to dismantle such a blob? President Eisenhower warned about it 70 years ago.
Whitney Kessel is a "Mentor" for Girls who Code - however, she has zero coding experience, showing me she doesn't exactly understand what "mentor" is supposed to mean. I think she thinks it means "something that looks good on my resume".
So here's a thought... knowing that the American military are vulnerable through contractors and infrastructure that they themselves can't service, and that civilian American infrastructure is being hit through, among other things, supply-chain attacks, what are the odds that the next big American military failure will occur through supply-chain failures, in the middle of a transition period between contractors, where private contractors yank out a dongle on a critical system at a crucial moment, just as, say, a compromised supply chain knocks out another system as ransomware demands that the US Military pay someone bitcoin or else their plans get leaked?
We've kinda seen a similar thing in the rental assistance debacle. Decades of winnowing the public sector and civil service left government totally incapable of doling out the cash. It turned to armies of consultants and inefficient, decentralized nonprofit social service provider networks to try and do it, but the plans were pretty much totally illusory. The nonprofit also don't really have the capacity to handle the need, and when they are able to assist folks, it goes into a terrible system that takes forever to go through whatever channels, making payout to the landlords a process often longer than an eviction proceeding. It's an ungodly mess, but boy did those consultants get paid. We just no longer have needed state capacity. Instead, we have a whole bunch of overpaid folks in suits that don't actually do much of anything of social value. Being someone who works at one of these nonprofits and has been watching this slow motion trainwreck, I can tell folks this is one of the most underreported parts of our failed pandemic response. We're on the verge of a huge homelessness crisis, brought on my a total failure for the state to distribute billions of dollars. A humanitarian crisis is on the verge of erupting, and we're just sitting around with piles of useless money. Don't think too hard about that, America. It starts to apply to all kinds of things that are wrong. The problem hasn't been a lack of congressional funding, it's been that we don't really have the kind of functional civil service that would be necessary to operationalize disbursement of said funds. How folks seem to be laser focused on ignoring this lesson has been amazing to watch.
--"Going back to the last significant victory, the allies won World War II in large part for two reasons. ....second, the U.S. military, government, labor, and business leaders were exceptionally good at logistics."
Maybe...a must-watch movie for these times -- Catch 22 -- or better still read the book by Joseph Heller. Hilarious and very very dark and sobering...already the fix was in.
If ever we needed a congressional committee to look at the who, what, and where of the $2.3 trillion spent in Afghanistan, I might even get an upgrade to live Hulu to watch. Talk about PowerPoint presentations on how the money was laundered through the country just like Assange told us was happening in 2011. Much of the dollars coming right back to Washington.
Also, while the incompetent war machine was training the nationals, you should check out Pepe Escobar's work on the CIA's ratline on getting opium out of the country and why they are a little ticked off at Biden for pulling the plug on their black ops. The Taliban already said, "NO" to opium so Russia and the US better invest in treatment centers.
I am endlessly in awe of and grateful for the amount of work that you do. I do not in the least begrudge your taking a vacation. I hope you had fun.
"None of these tens of thousands of Ivy league encrusted PR savvy highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. "
------------------------
We don't hear much about the President of Afghanistan who fled the country as an example to his troops (except he allegedly fled in cars stuffed with looted cash). Ghani is an ivy leaguer, groomed to be president by other ivy leaguers. According to wikipedia (which no ivy leaguer would ever read) he is a graduate of Columbia University, was professor at Berkeley and John Hopkins and worked at the World Bank and for prestigious "think"tanks. He was ranked 50th among the top 100 intellectuals in the world by readers of Foreign Policy magazine. Wow. Such brainpower is probably responsible for his "snap decision" to flee after being "dumbfounded" by the speed of the advance of the Taliban. I don't think his corruption, cowardice and failure to correctly analyze the situation despite being in the middle of it, will cause him to fall in the intellectual rankings - he's no worse than the rest of the ivy league war mongers.
The incentives for government funded work that does not directly affect an electoral base are for over-optimism, not truth. From the field office to congress, everyone has an incentive to err on the side of optimism in reporting upwards to their boss, who in turn has the same incentive. Since there is no customer or voter who receives the product or service and can vote with their dollar or... vote, there's limited incentive for truth telling. Nobody's boss will ever find out the truth, and if they do they will all have the same incentive to hide it since everyone will have the same egg on their face.
One of your bests Mr. Stoller.
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "<i>How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?</i>" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably <i>rifa</i>, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
Here's how the transcript thing works: a company like Parchment offers a useful service (like sending electronic copies of official transcripts, something that small IHLs can't really do on their own) for a small fee, say $2.50. Your school can pay the fee themselves, pass the fee along to the student, or add their own surcharge. Voila, $9 transcripts! I work at an IHL that can only provide transcripts in hard copy, which may be inconvenient, but we provide them for free. No one can accuse us of ripping off our alumni!
On breaking-up Facebook and Google -- NOT likely:
Facebook's Partner: The Atlantic Council (5 Frightening Facts) (rumble.com)
https://rumble.com/vleq6v-facebooks-partner-the-atlantic-council-5-frightening-facts.html
Facebook's Partner: The Atlantic Council (5 Frightening Facts)
YouTube demonetizes Jimmy Dore for criticizing AOC -- by using her own words
YouTube Suppresses Jimmy Dore's Criticism Of AOC - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9DbTimhVJc
"Many of these critiques, coming from Europeans as much as American elites, are in bad faith." This statement is simply false, and reveals American incomprehension at the perspectives of other Western allies. The reality is that American forces have always been bad at handling insurgency, partly because they expect absurdly short time frames, and partly due to ill-conceived military doctrine.
As a prior example compare, for example, in the 1960s the Malayan Emergency (where British, Malayan, Australian and other Commonwealth forces fought against a Communist insurgency in the jungles of Malaya) and the Vietnam War. The Malayan Emergency was won, partly by using highly-trained professional soldiers who pursued their enemies deep into the jungle, recognizing that control of the air is worthless without control on the ground; and partly because the British doctrine of "the velvet fist in the iron glove" (yes, deliberately inverted) tried to keep the civilian population segregated from the war fighting. The Malayan campaign was a success, although it took well over a decade to achieve.
Contrast this with the Vietnam War which began at about the same time, where American military doctrines caused deep frustration among allied Australian and New Zealand troops who were veterans of Malaya: the reliance on air power, limited control of the jungle, the use of defoliants and poorly-trained conscripted soldiers instead of highly-trained volunteer jungle fighters, and the bombing of civilian villages, created a war that was inherently unwinnable and deeply demoralizing.
Now look at Afghanistan. The British, Australian, French and other forces were willing to remain fighting there another decade, because that's what it would take to build a more resilient society against the Taliban and their sponsors within Pakistan. (Demographics would help in an ultimate victory, given the growing proportion of young people exposed to Western influence in the cities.)
But a US-style executive president was always an inherently bad idea, given the proclivity for corruption in an Afghan context, and the inability of such a president to unify the tribes. And the reliance on air power for operations against the Taliban (which the US forces then suddenly withdrew this year, in the prelude to withdrawal) had a fatal effect on Afghan military morale. The precipitate behavior of Trump and Biden administrations-- in which Western allies were never consulted-- made the position of America's allies untenable.
Other Western countries do engage in 'forever wars' (e.g. France's decades-long campaign against Islamic militants in the Sahel, in its former colonies) because sometimes that's what it takes. America's allies were willing to continue to fight in Afghanistan, and fulfill the promises made to the people of Afghanistan by past American presidents. And now that has all turned to ashes.
The anger and disgust of your allies is real.
See the speech in the British House of Commons by Tom Tugenhat MP (Chair of the Foreign Affairs committee, and a former British soldier in Afghanistan) .
Your description of "the blob" is so apt. It's like a giant amoeba that simply engulfs anything in its way. It's a massive groupthink in which the thinking part is relegated to the sum total of economic opportunism, careerism, and political expediency. It's a mob ruled by expediency, greed and power, and has no mechanism for internal restraint or reflective wisdom.
It's one thing for a consumer goods industry to devolve into that; it's another entirely when it represents an outsourcing of a government's complete defense and foreign policy operation. And one that has its own PR wing dishing out propaganda and actively obstructing transparency. One that reinforces its power with outsourced private intel, paired with enforcers, thugsters to squish pests who get too nosey.
But ... how to dismantle such a blob? President Eisenhower warned about it 70 years ago.
Whitney Kessel is a "Mentor" for Girls who Code - however, she has zero coding experience, showing me she doesn't exactly understand what "mentor" is supposed to mean. I think she thinks it means "something that looks good on my resume".
So here's a thought... knowing that the American military are vulnerable through contractors and infrastructure that they themselves can't service, and that civilian American infrastructure is being hit through, among other things, supply-chain attacks, what are the odds that the next big American military failure will occur through supply-chain failures, in the middle of a transition period between contractors, where private contractors yank out a dongle on a critical system at a crucial moment, just as, say, a compromised supply chain knocks out another system as ransomware demands that the US Military pay someone bitcoin or else their plans get leaked?
We've kinda seen a similar thing in the rental assistance debacle. Decades of winnowing the public sector and civil service left government totally incapable of doling out the cash. It turned to armies of consultants and inefficient, decentralized nonprofit social service provider networks to try and do it, but the plans were pretty much totally illusory. The nonprofit also don't really have the capacity to handle the need, and when they are able to assist folks, it goes into a terrible system that takes forever to go through whatever channels, making payout to the landlords a process often longer than an eviction proceeding. It's an ungodly mess, but boy did those consultants get paid. We just no longer have needed state capacity. Instead, we have a whole bunch of overpaid folks in suits that don't actually do much of anything of social value. Being someone who works at one of these nonprofits and has been watching this slow motion trainwreck, I can tell folks this is one of the most underreported parts of our failed pandemic response. We're on the verge of a huge homelessness crisis, brought on my a total failure for the state to distribute billions of dollars. A humanitarian crisis is on the verge of erupting, and we're just sitting around with piles of useless money. Don't think too hard about that, America. It starts to apply to all kinds of things that are wrong. The problem hasn't been a lack of congressional funding, it's been that we don't really have the kind of functional civil service that would be necessary to operationalize disbursement of said funds. How folks seem to be laser focused on ignoring this lesson has been amazing to watch.
--"Going back to the last significant victory, the allies won World War II in large part for two reasons. ....second, the U.S. military, government, labor, and business leaders were exceptionally good at logistics."
Maybe...a must-watch movie for these times -- Catch 22 -- or better still read the book by Joseph Heller. Hilarious and very very dark and sobering...already the fix was in.
Whitney Kassel left Arkin Group in 2015. She now works for Morgan Stanley. https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitney-kassel-728a0043/
If ever we needed a congressional committee to look at the who, what, and where of the $2.3 trillion spent in Afghanistan, I might even get an upgrade to live Hulu to watch. Talk about PowerPoint presentations on how the money was laundered through the country just like Assange told us was happening in 2011. Much of the dollars coming right back to Washington.
Also, while the incompetent war machine was training the nationals, you should check out Pepe Escobar's work on the CIA's ratline on getting opium out of the country and why they are a little ticked off at Biden for pulling the plug on their black ops. The Taliban already said, "NO" to opium so Russia and the US better invest in treatment centers.
Excellent work Matt!