1. To what country have we given almost $35 billion over the last 20 years?
2. In what country was Osama Bin Laden killed? (in a safe house next to the country’s leading military academy)
3. What country has a nuclear arsenal of at least 50 weapons?
4. What country sheltered, armed, and trained the Taliban?
5. What country is, according to Sadanand Dhume in his column in the Wall Street Journal, 50 times more dangerous than Afghanistan?

The answer, as should have been obvious, to all five questions is Pakistan.

Here’s a telling quote from the linked piece:

Exultant Pakistanis shared a video clip from 2014 featuring Hamid Gul, a former head of the army’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America,” Gul says to a fawning TV studio audience. “Then there will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.”

The Pakistanis are not our friends. I don’t know that they’re anybody’s friends other than, perhaps, the Taliban.

Maybe French President Emmanuel Macron was right. Here he is as quoted by the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

French President Emmanuel Macron took considerable flak in 2019 for saying NATO is experiencing “brain death.” He warned that with or without President Trump in office, the U.S. was becoming a less reliable ally and argued that Europe would need to “reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States.” Mr. Biden has made him seem prescient, and the wonder is that Mr. Macron has been too polite this week to point it out. French leaders are now planning for the refugee crisis Paris fears Mr. Biden has unleashed on Europe.

I think that withdrawing from Afghanistan was a 9 on policy, has been a 2 on execution up to this point, and could deteriorate. I also think that NATO is barely an alliance at all at this point. I don’t know how our putative allies will respond or what they’re thinking. I’d speculate that whatever they’re saying in public they’re mostly thinking about themselves.

Three points to make here:

1. President Trump was “underwater” (disapproval rating higher than his approval rating) for nearly his entire presidency
2. It’s not impossible to recover from this sharp a decline in approval/increase in disapproval. Obama accomplished it several times in the course of his presidency. It is, however, unusual to recover the earlier high approval rating.
3. This is a significant decline. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding himself or herself.

President Biden needs to do some course correction quick.

Shikha Dalmia, in an op-ed in the New York Times, proposes that the federal government allow the states to decide how many foreign workers they need and want:

America should begin its own version of this program but take it one step further and let states set their own limits on foreign workers. This would get federal bureaucrats out of the business of centrally planning the labor market for the whole country. States that understand their own labor markets would do a much better job of finding suitable workers for their businesses.

The states wouldn’t have to hew to the federal high-skilled and low-skilled distinction for visas. Right now, both high-tech and low-tech states are suffering from a tight labor market. States that don’t want or need immigrant workers could opt out of the program. Foreign workers would be free to travel anywhere in the country, but they would be limited to jobs in participating states until they are naturalized. This would be an improvement over the existing system for them, since work visas currently tether them to a single employer, unless they find a new employer to undertake the onerous process of sponsoring them. It would also reassure states that they would have a measure of control over the level of in-migration from other states at least for some time.

States wouldn’t be required to participate, but they would face an inherent incentive to do so because businesses are far more likely to prefer locations where there are suitably skilled, motivated workers. Such a program would render the current broken and dysfunctional federal immigration system beside the point. (Constitutionally, immigration is a federal function, but nothing prevents Washington from voluntarily giving states more latitude to make their own decisions about foreign workers. Other aspects of immigration policy can remain in federal hands.)

which she characterizes as following the Canadian model. I am reflexively drawn to such a system but I am retain some skepticism. We have problems that Canada does not have including a completely broken tourist and student visa program, a counter-productive sponsorship program, an ancillary lottery system, and a country with which we share a 1,500 mile border with a median family income 20% of ours. Had we the same circumstances as Canada and as strict a system of labor enforcement as Canada does I would support the plan enthusiastically.

I’d also like to repeat something I’ve mentioned before. Under our present system state and local governments bear most of the costs for illegal migrant workers which cannot possibly be recouped from most of the migrants and for some reason of other boosters of increased immigration always cite the benefits of immigration without reckoning its costs which are substantial. If all of our migrant workers were professionals with six figure incomes it would be one thing but the overwhelming preponderance earn minimum or even sub-minimum wage. And nobody actually knows how many of those there are—everybody’s guessing.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post William F. Parker and Govind Persad question the Biden Administration’s plan to emphasize COVID-19 booster shots for Americans:

This decision is a mistake. Not only does it risk depriving millions throughout the world of the vaccine, but there also is no evidence that additional shots meaningfully reduce death or hospitalization from covid-19 for healthy Americans. Far better would be to wait for solid trial data on booster shots.

I point this op-ed out for two reasons. First, it mentions something I have mentioned from time to time in the past: the urgent need for the United States to subsidize vaccinations if not all over the world at least in Central and South America and the Caribbean.

But second I don’t think the decision is completely cut and dried. I honestly don’t know how effective booster shots for those already vaccinated will be in preventing serious disease and, if the authors are correct, no one else does, either. And even more importantly reducing the incidence of disease in Central and South America by ensuring that more doses of vaccine are administered there will not only reduce morbidity and mortality due to the disease in those countries but will also have some impact on reducing morbidity and mortality here. How much? Who knows?

I also didn’t want to let this editorial at Bloomberg on the horrible mess of our fiscal policy go by without comment. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a greater free flight of fancy. Here’s a snippet:

A comprehensive back-to-basics overhaul of Washington’s budget process is undoubtedly called for. The goals would be simple enough: Explain exactly what new spending is meant to achieve; ensure that value for taxpayer dollars will be maximized; be clear about how new commitments will be paid for; judge the long-term implications for public debt and the economy; and do all this transparently. Over the years, reformers have proposed numerous schemes with such basic principles in mind, and none have gained traction. Members of Congress would find such disciplines inconvenient, and they face no great pressure to change. For the moment, they prefer to fight about other things.

More modest reforms might be feasible, though. Washington’s fiscal incompetence is so extreme that smaller tweaks could make a big difference. Last month, for example, a group of representatives from both parties voiced support for an annual Fiscal State of the Nation — a joint hearing of the House and Senate budget committees, at which the head of the Government Accountability Office would give an overview of the country’s finances. Another bipartisan proposal, the Sustainable Budget Act, would create a new National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. This too could be valuable: Getting Congress to pay attention to the issue would be progress in itself.

Narrower reforms are also worth undertaking. Put the debt ceiling at the top of this list. Planning spending increases as though the debt ceiling didn’t exist, and then resorting to “special measures” to avoid a foreseeable self-induced crisis, might be the single biggest absurdity in current fiscal practice. The solution certainly isn’t to ignore mounting debt. Quite the opposite. Budget measures should face the implications for debt — raising the ceiling if that can be justified — as and when the borrowing is agreed to, not later. Smarter targets, based on debt as a proportion of national income, as opposed to debt in money terms, would give a better sense of whether additions to borrowing are prudent or excessive.

I think they are missing some things that are gob-smackingly obvious:

1. Both the Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership think that what they have been doing is working and from their point of view it is. They’re being re-elected year after year, aren’t they?
2. Contrariwise, they think that they wouldn’t keep those jobs if they followed the editors’ advice.

I agree with the editors that we need need fiscal reform. I disagree that it is something that any foreseeable Congress will impose of its own free will. It would need to be imposed on them.

I wanted to pass along the frank assessment of Afghanistan from David Ignatius in his most recent Washington Post column:

The weird part is that military victory was never really the United States’ goal. We were playing for a tie — a stalemate that weakened the Taliban enough that it would accept a diplomatic solution. We started trying to negotiate with the Taliban back in 2009 when the legendary Richard C. Holbrooke was special envoy, and serious talks were underway two years later under his successor, Marc Grossman.

President Barack Obama announced the official end of the United States’ combat mission in 2014, but it continued. President Donald Trump briefly tried for a win, hoping the enormous explosive device known as the “mother of all bombs,” would intimidate the Taliban. When it didn’t, he gave up and had his envoy Zalmay Khalilzad negotiate a peace deal. Trump was too worried about the risks to actually pull out the troops — but President Biden, who had been dubious about the Afghanistan mission, rejected the advice of his advisers and pulled the plug. U.S. combat troops finally left, and in six weeks, the tower of illusion crumbled.

Biden is being flayed both for his decision and its sloppy execution. Many of us had warned that by withdrawing the small remaining force too quickly, without a transition plan, he was unwisely ending a low-cost insurance policy against the disaster now unfolding. Biden owns the final decision, for better or worse.

But the hard truth is that this failure is shared by a generation of military commanders and policymakers, who let occasional tactical successes in a counterterrorism mission become a proxy for a strategy that never was. And it was subtly abetted by journalists who were scratching our heads wondering if it would work, but let the senior officials continue their magical thinking.

He continues with a timeline of activities in Afghanistan cover January 2008 through 2014. Here’s my assessment. There’s an enormous amount of blame to spread around. Putting “boots on the ground” and beginning a strategy of nation-building and counter-insurgency is on George W. Bush. Providing too-optimistic and glossy assessments is on the general staff and our intelligence organizations. There was a narrow window in 2013 when President Obama could have withdrawn our troops from Afghanistan. His failure to do so is on him. President Biden’s handling of that withdrawal is on him. Had President Trump been re-elected he might be facing even more vehement criticism for withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan than President Biden is experiencing now. We’ll never know.

The facts that we need to get our heads around but I doubt we ever will are that

1. Nation-building in Afghanistan was never possible.
2. Afghanistan was never going to be able to defend itself.
3. A successful counter-insurgency strategy requires a commitment to staying forever.
4. Out-waiting the Taliban was never a practical strategy.
5. However well-planned or executed our withdrawal from Afghanistan was never going to be anything other than a debacle.

There is a saying, the sense of which goes back millennia: success has many fathers but failure is an orphan. There’s another statement that only goes back about 40 years: the only way to win the game is not to play. That about sums it up.

In a piece at Bloomberg Matthew Yglesias argues that Green New Deals, carbon taxes, or even lesser measures targeted at decarbonization will go nowhere. He blames the American people:

If you’re a climate hawk, it’s easy to be mad at politicians for their timidity in the face of an urgent crisis. But there’s also genuinely no point in asking ecologically minded elected officials to fall on their swords and lose elections over unpopular ideas, turning over control of the government to people whose ideas are much worse. All of this leads to a difficult truth: The problem here lies not with the politicians, or even with the billionaires or oil companies. It lies with voters themselves, who recognize that climate change is a real problem but are not necessarily willing to sacrifice much of anything to tackle it.

I think he’s missing something basic. Yes, the voters are a roadblock to the “climate hawks'” agenda but that’s because they’re approaching the problem in the wrong way or maybe trying to solve a problem other than the one they claim to be. Why the opposition to nuclear power? Why is carbon capture given such short shrift? Why so much emphasis on electric vehicles when small diesels might produce even fewer carbon emissions than EVs over their productive lives, don’t depend on technological breakthroughs that may never arrive, and would be more immediately useful without requiring vast investments in recharging stations, transmission lines, etc.?

I think there’s a soup of wishful thinking, conflicts of interest, errors, and bad assumptions being made by politicians that are impediments at least as serious as popular reluctance. Start with this question: why ask people to sacrifice?

It may seem like a contradiction of my previous post but it isn’t actually. At Politico Natasha Korecki, Christopher Cadelago, and Ally Mutnick zero in on an aspect of the unfolding situation in Afghanistan more likely to affect Americans in the near term: how will it affect Democrats’ chances in the mid-term elections?

The cataclysmic series of events over the last several days marked the most devastating period of the Biden presidency, and it comes at the precise moment when a growing number of Americans were already fearful of inflation and doubting Biden’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the economy. Now, Biden’s credibility on the world stage is on the line.

It all adds up to a troubling political scenario for Democrats, who had held up their president as a seasoned international statesman, the “adult in the room” who promised to reverse what they viewed as the reckless policies of former President Donald Trump.

We’re going to see a lot of polling over the coming weeks and months. Here’s what I predict they’ll show:

• Most Americans don’t care about foreign policy.
• Most Americans don’t give a darn about Afghanistan or its people one way or another other than vague sympathy but those who care do so loudly and intensely.
• Many commentators will argue whichever way helps their preferred political cause.
• However, advertising works. The longer and more agonistically the media complain and wring their hands over the situation in Afghanistan the more likely Americans are to say that they care about it.

There are tremendous ironies in the “Big Lie” trope that’s being used these days. Most people especially those who use the term don’t realize it was coined by Adolph Hitler (in Mein Kampf). Each side thinks the other is the perpetrator of the Lie. But it’s the media that is actually most responsible for perpetrating Big Lies.

All this by way of saying that if the media manage to keep the Afghanistan story alive, it could well doom Democrats’ chances of holding the House and Senate.