Saturday, August 28, 2021
C.A.A. On Vacation
Justice Breyer’s Eviction-Moratorium Dissent Would Turn the President into a Dictator
By Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday, August 27, 2021
There is simply no way of reading Justice Breyer’s dissent in last night’s
eviction-moratorium case without arriving at the conclusion that Breyer, along
with his two co-dissenters, believes that the executive branch of the federal
government is permitted to do whatever the hell it wants providing that
somewhere within the thicket that is the U.S. Code there exists a law that
might be plausibly connected with their aim.
In striking down the CDC’s nationwide ban on evictions,
the majority opinion carefully laid out the folly of Breyer’s approach. For a
start, the majority noted, the fact that the statute in question explicitly
enumerates certain powers militates against the idea that it should be
considered all-encompassing:
The Government contends that the
first sentence of §361(a) gives the CDC broad authority to take whatever
measures it deems necessary to control the spread of COVID–19, including
issuing the moratorium. But the second sentence informs the grant of authority
by illustrating the kinds of measures that could be necessary: inspection,
fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of
contaminated animals and articles. These measures directly relate to preventing
the interstate spread of disease by identifying, isolating, and destroying the
disease itself. The CDC’s moratorium, on the other hand, relates to interstate
infection far more indirectly: If evictions occur, some subset of tenants might
move from one State to another, and some subset of that group might do so while
infected with COVID–19. See 86 Fed. Reg. 43248–43249. This downstream
connection between eviction and the interstate spread of disease is markedly
different from the direct targeting of disease that characterizes the measures
identified in the statute. Reading both sentences together, rather than the
first in isolation, it is a stretch to maintain that §361(a) gives the CDC the
authority to impose this eviction moratorium.
Besides, the majority continued, even if the text were ambiguous,
the sheer scope of the CDC’s claimed authority under §361(a) would counsel
against the government’s interpretation.” Why? Because, as an elementary
constitutional matter:
We expect Congress to speak clearly
when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of “vast ‘economic and political
significance.’” Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 573 U. S. 302, 324 (2014)
(quoting FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U. S. 120, 160
(2000)). That is exactly the kind of power that the CDC claims here.
And that “kind of power,” they recorded, has never been
claimed before under that statute:
This claim of expansive authority
under §361(a) is unprecedented. Since that provision’s enactment in 1944, no
regulation premised on it has even begun to approach the size or scope of the
eviction moratorium. And it is further amplified by the CDC’s decision to
impose criminal penalties of up to a $250,000 fine and one year in jail on
those who violate the moratorium. See 86 Fed. Reg. 43252; 42 CFR §70.18(a).
Section 361(a) is a wafer-thin reed on which to rest such sweeping power.
The bottom lines: The rules of statutory construction do
not allow this interpretation. Congress is expected to be precise when doling
out broad powers to the executive — which, in any case, it is allowed to do
only up to a certain point. The fact that we have a pandemic “does not permit
agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.” And the CDC
doesn’t get to make this call; Congress does. “If a federally imposed eviction
moratorium is to continue,” the majority concluded, “Congress must specifically
authorize it.”
Which all of us, including Joe Biden, already knew.
To which Justice Breyer countered: “If Congress had meant
to exclude these types of measures from its broad grant of authority, it likely
would have said so.”
This is an utterly astonishing way of looking at the law,
which, if adopted widely, would amount to nothing less than an inversion of our
written constitutional system and a recipe for exactly the sort of fused-power
“tyranny” that James Madison warned us about in Federalist Papers 47
through 51.
In concert, Breyer proposed that because Congress wrote a
statute that serves “to empower the CDC to take ‘other measures, as in [its]
judgment may be necessary,’” much of what the CDC does during a crisis should be
assumed to be fine. But, as the majority opinion makes clear, when taken
together these arguments would lead to a de facto executive-branch
dictatorship:
Indeed, the Government’s read of
§361(a) would give the CDC a breathtaking amount of authority. It is hard to
see what measures this interpretation would place outside the CDC’s reach, and
the Government has identified no limit in §361(a) beyond the requirement that
the CDC deem a measure “necessary.” 42 U. S. C. §264(a); 42 CFR §70.2. Could
the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or
vulnerable? Require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to
work from home? Order telecommunications companies to provide free high-speed
Internet service to facilitate remote work?
Equally ugly is Breyer’s suggestion that because the law
specifically allows the government to do some pretty sweeping things, then
other sweeping things that it doesn’t allow the government to
do should be assumed to be acceptable, too:
The per curiam also says that
Congress must speak more clearly to authorize the CDC to address public health
crises via eviction moratoria. But it is undisputed that the statute permits
the CDC to adopt significant measures such as quarantines, which arguably impose
greater restrictions on individuals’ rights and state police powers than do
limits on evictions.
Naturally, this is absurd. If the Supreme Court were to
assume that the existence of a “restriction on individual rights and state
police powers” in a given federal law implied that all lesser restrictions
on individual rights and state police powers were acceptable, there would be no
point in our writing down the rules. The federal government is permitted
to execute people. Does that mean it can arrest me for wearing an
ugly shirt?
There is simply no way of squaring these two approaches
to the law. The majority’s approach holds that the text of the law matters;
that there are discrete and enforceable limits on the reach of each branch;
that if legislators are not clear in their purpose, the tie goes to liberty;
and that the courts have a role to play in maintaining the constitutional
separation of powers. The dissent, by contrast, envisions a system in which the
executive branch can do whatever it wants providing that Congress has (a)
passed a law that is tangentially related to its action, and (b) hasn’t
categorically ruled a given element out.
This decision should have been 9–0. That it was not
should be a source of great shame for Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan — along with
anyone in America who continues to enjoy their work.
The Supreme Court’s Welcome Rebuke of Biden’s Lawlessness
National Review Online
Saturday, August 28, 2021
Much of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion striking down the CDC’s nationwide
eviction moratorium reads as if it came directly from The Federalist
Papers. “We expect Congress to speak clearly,” the per curiam decision
reads, “when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of ‘vast economic and
political significance.’” The Constitution, it adds, “does not permit agencies
to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.” “If,” it concludes, “a
federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must
specifically authorize it.”
If this language sounds familiar, that’s not solely
because it smacks of Separation of Powers 101, but because, back in June,
Justice Kavanaugh decided that “clear and specific congressional authorization
(via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium
past July 31.” In response, President Biden announced that he intended to do it
anyway — not because he believed that Kavanaugh was wrong, but because he hoped
that doing so would accord him the “ability to, if we have to appeal, to keep
this going for a month at least. I hope longer.”
When added to the slam-dunk nature of the case, such open
and cynical defiance should have been enough to prompt all nine justices to put
the executive branch back in its place. Alas, when the Court finally heard the
case this week, only six justices did their jobs. The other three failed — and,
worse still, contrived a legal argument that turns the American system of government
squarely on its head.
Writing for the dissenters, Justice Breyer suggested that
“if Congress had meant to exclude these types of measures from its broad grant
of authority, it likely would have said so.” This, of course, is not how the
law works in the United States. Absent those explicitly enumerated in Article
II of the Constitution, the executive branch has no power until it is
given it by Congress; at all levels of government, we use statutes to list what
governments may do, rather than itemize what they may
not. There is simply no limiting principle in Breyer’s approach. Because
the law allows the CDC to take “other measures, as in [its] judgment may be
necessary,” he would have permitted it to engage in the superintendence of
rental agreements. But, as the majority pointed out, the law specifically lists
a number of areas in which the CDC may act, and regulating evictions is not
among them. If that does not matter, they note, “it is hard to see what
measures this interpretation would place outside the CDC’s reach.”
In his dissent, Breyer complains about the circumstances
in which the decision was made.
“These questions,” he writes, “call for considered
decisionmaking, informed by full briefing and argument.” As a substantive
matter, that is simply not true in this case; the merits here were abundantly
obvious, and the fact that the “lower courts have split on this question” is
more an indictment of the unseriousness of many of our judges than an
indication that the matter at hand was a thorny one. But even if it were,
Biden’s extraordinary behavior foreclosed the possibility of a more orderly
legal process. In the days following the Court’s initial opinion, Biden made it
clear that he understood the CDC had acted illegally and that it could not
continue to do so. He had, an aide confirmed, “not only kicked the tires,” but
“double, triple, quadruple checked.” “The bulk of the constitutional scholars,”
Biden said himself, “say it’s not likely to pass constitutional
muster.” And yet he ordered it anyway, while publicly admitting that he
was gaming the system to buy time. There is not a court in the world that would
have taken that sitting down.
That Biden has been thwarted in his attempt to usurp the
role of Congress is welcome. That he was not uniformly chastised is not. There
are certain moments in American political life in which an institutional
reprimand is necessary, and this was one of those times. That, instead, the
president will be able to point to the Court and pretend that this case
represented a quotidian ideological dispute is a great shame. And, as Biden’s
presidency lurches on, and his power wanes as the consequences of his mistakes
pile up, both desperation and his innate contempt for the Constitution will be
likely to encourage him to attempt a similar ploy once again. We have been
warned.
Biden Subcontracts U.S. Security to Terrorists
By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, August 28, 2021
Even as suicide bombers attacked the Kabul
airport on August 26 — killing, at this writing, at least 13 U.S.
servicemen and scores of civilians — visitors to the Al Jazeera website could
read an interview with Khalil Ur-Rahman Haqqani, the Taliban official and
U.S.-designated terrorist who is responsible for security in the Afghan
capital. “If we can defeat superpowers, surely we can provide safety to the
Afghan people,” said Haqqani, whose guards brandish the helmets,
night-vision goggles, small arms, and camouflage the Americans left behind.
“All of those people who left this country, we will assure them of their
safety,” Haqqani went on. “You’re all welcome back in Afghanistan.”
He’s lying, of course. Lying is what terrorists do.
Haqqani’s forces can’t protect the Afghan people from ISIS, or, apparently,
from the Taliban itself. The Islamic militia is executing civilians and former
members of the Afghan National Army, according to the United Nations. And Haqqani’s
colleague, spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, warned Afghan women and girls the other day that they
should avoid the outdoors and public spaces, since Taliban soldiers “have not
been yet trained very well.” And “we don’t want our forces, God forbid, to harm
or harass women.”
Just to subjugate them.
The massacre at Hamid Karzai airport was the consequence
of President Biden’s decision to rely on the Taliban for security. Despite the
lunacy of taking the Taliban at their word, the Biden administration sounded in
recent days as if Haqqani, Mujahid, and the rest of their deranged crew were
U.S. partners. Not only did Biden’s botched withdrawal result in America’s
departure from Central Asia, Taliban rule in Afghanistan, a catastrophe for
democracy and human rights, and a propaganda boon for the global
jihadist-Salafist movement. It guaranteed our dependence on a gang of medieval
holy warriors whose loyalty to al-Qaeda is the reason the United States invaded
Afghanistan in the first place. This historical irony is strategically dubious
and morally debased. The loss of life in Kabul is a taste of what’s to come.
Biden pretended as if the Taliban had changed. On August
19, he told George Stephanopoulos that the Taliban, like a
group of unruly teenagers, are “going through sort of an existential crisis
about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a
legitimate government.” Later, in the same interview, he added, “I’m not sure I
would’ve predicted, George, nor would you or anyone else, that when we decided
to leave, that they’d provide safe passage for Americans to get out.” Nor did
he predict that there would be more American casualties on the way out of
Afghanistan than there had been in seven years.
In his remarks on August 24, Biden said, “Thus far, the Taliban have been taking steps to work
with us so we can get our people out.” The terrorist threat, he cautioned, came
not from the Taliban but from ISIS, “which is the sworn enemy of the Taliban as
well.”
Biden didn’t mention that ISIS and the Taliban share a
common adversary: the United States. Acknowledging that reality might have
jeopardized the drawdown of American forces and evacuation at Hamid Karzai
International Airport even before the terrorists struck on August 26. But it
might also explain how the suicide bombers caused so much damage. The Kabul
airport is surrounded by Taliban checkpoints. The Taliban won’t let Afghans
pass through. How did the bombers get by?
Biden won’t violate the Taliban’s “red line” that America
must leave by the end of the month because he fears that to do so would put
U.S. soldiers and citizenry at further risk. On August 25, Secretary of State
Antony Blinken reminded the world that the safety of Americans depends on the
Taliban’s good graces. “The Taliban,” he said, “have made public and private
commitments to provide and permit safe passage for Americans, for third-country
nationals, and Afghans at risk” — at risk of what and from whom, one might ask
the Taliban — “going forward past August 31st.”
Past August 31? The safe passage ended Thursday morning.
In his August 25 remarks, Blinken said, “The United
States, our allies and partners, and more than half of the world’s countries —
114 in all — issued a statement making it clear to the Taliban that they have a
responsibility to hold to that commitment and provide safe passage for anyone
who wishes to leave the country — not just for the duration of our evacuation
and relocation mission, but for every day thereafter.” And if the Taliban shirk
this responsibility — as they clearly did before the massacre at the airport?
Well, another strongly worded note is sure to follow.
It’s not just that the Taliban hold all the cards in this
game. Biden doesn’t even want to play. He’s made U.S. national security
contingent on the Taliban’s ability to act like a “normal” government and not a
terrorist crazy state. Earlier this week, CIA director William Burns met in
secret with Taliban chief Abdul Ghani Baradar. According to David Ignatius of the Washington
Post, “Burns was delivering a personal message from Biden, who evidently
has decided his best course for now is to cooperate with the former adversary.”
Former? When did the Taliban renounce their hatred of
America — or their allegiance to al-Qaeda?
They haven’t. Yet Biden and his foreign policy team
dangled in front of the Taliban the carrot of financial assistance and
international legitimacy in exchange for cooperation on counterterrorism and
regional stability. As for sticks, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen crashed the Afghan financial system and economy two
weeks ago when she froze Afghan government reserves in U.S. banks. The
Taliban are broke. They haven’t quelled the resistance in Panjshir Valley.
Which is why they’re negotiating with Hamid Karzai and former foreign minister
Abdullah Abdullah to establish a government that would cross the threshold for
renewed foreign aid and participation in global markets.
“We will judge our engagement with any Taliban-led
government in Afghanistan based on one simple proposition: our interests, and
does it help us advance them or not,” said Secretary of State Blinken. “If
engagement with the government can advance the enduring interests we will have
in counterterrorism, the enduring interest we’ll have in trying to help the
Afghan people who need humanitarian assistance, in the enduring interest we
have in seeing that the rights of all Afghans, especially women and girls, are
upheld, then we’ll do it.”
That sounded like a secretary of state ready to engage.
Precedent suggests that deteriorating conditions on the ground won’t matter.
Yasser Arafat’s incitement to violence and militarization of the Palestinian
security forces did not prevent Bill Clinton from indulging in the farcical
Israeli–Palestinian “peace process.” Neither Obama nor Biden thought twice
about promising (and in Obama’s case delivering) cash money to the
terrorist-sponsoring Iranian regime if it stopped spinning a few nuclear
centrifuges for a while.
Nor will the violence in Afghanistan this week derail the
U.S.–Taliban “partnership.” The Taliban’s string of broken promises didn’t
pause the “strategic dialogue” that has been taking place in Qatar for the last
several years between their personnel and U.S. special representative Zalmay
Khalilzad. Indeed, the mayhem in Kabul might reaffirm the administration’s
belief that the Taliban can be separated from, and used to combat, ISIS. In a
briefing on the afternoon of August 26, General McKenzie, head of Central
Command, said there was “no reason” to think that the Taliban
were involved in the assault on our troops. Our forces have been sharing intel
with the Taliban since August 14. “We will continue to coordinate with the
Taliban on preventing terrorist attacks,” McKenzie said.
“Any relationship or partnership with the Taliban is going
to be deeply frustrating for us,” former State Department official Carter
Malkasian, author of The American War in Afghanistan: A History, told
David Ignatius. It already is. The terrible events of Thursday morning have
made that clear. More terrible events await. How depressing to contemplate that
the 20th anniversary of 9/11 arrives with the Taliban in power, terrorism
resurgent, and America at the mercy of evil men.
Friday, August 27, 2021
As We Mourn Today
By John Podhoretz
Thursday, August 26, 2021
As we mourn the losses of American servicemembers today
in Kabul, please keep this in mind: They would not be dead if Joe Biden had not
chosen to pull American forces out of Afghanistan.
The number of deaths today in Afghanistan is greater than
the entire number of Americans who died there in 2020. They mark the first
service deaths in Afghanistan since February 2020. The change here was the
deliberate and conscious decision to “end a war” in which Americans were not
suffering combat casualties.
The status quo held. And then Joe Biden, in between licks
of his ice cream cones, heedlessly and vaingloriously smashed it to bits. He
wanted to be the bringer of peace; he is instead the bringer of chaos. And we
haven’t seen anything yet.
Don’t Let Them Blame the Americans Trapped in Afghanistan for Getting Left Behind
By Noah Rothman
Thursday, August 26, 2021
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony
Blinken revealed that “any remaining Americans” left behind in
Afghanistan after the U.S. military departs—this time, for good—won’t be
forgotten by their government. What the White House will do from afar to save
those stranded Americans, Legal Permanent Residents, and eligible evacuees is a
mystery. But at least the administration has finally admitted that the American
mission in Afghanistan won’t be over on August 31, even if we’re no longer
officially executing it.
It would, however, be a mistake to interpret this as an
effort by the administration to assume some responsibility for the disaster
over which it presides. For weeks, the White House and its allies have been
laying the groundwork to blame the predicament in which the Americans stranded
behind enemy lines find themselves on these Americans’ own negligence.
“Any American who wants to come home, we will get you
home,” Joe Biden promised late last week. Press Sec. Jen Psaki has adopted this curious formulation, too.
The administration’s goal, she told reporters, is to ensure that “any American
who wants to leave, to help them leave.” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said something similar. “We believe that
we have time between now and the 31st to get out any American who wants to get
out,” he insisted.
Now, there are scattered reports of
Americans in Afghanistan who are reluctant to sacrifice their partners,
friends, and families with small children to the mercies of the Taliban. But
there are a far greater number of Americans who cannot run the
Taliban-administered gauntlet between themselves and U.S. custody. The
implication in the idea that the White House is on track to exfiltrate any
American “who wants to get out” is that those who will be left behind are
trapped as a result of their own actions.
Few in the administration have issued such a callous and
offensively inaccurate claim outright. But we’re quickly approaching the point
at which the White House’s allies will test this line in earnest.
In an interview with CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell,
America’s Chargé d’Affaires in Afghanistan, Ross Wilson, flirted with this pusillanimous rationale. “We
put out repeated warnings every three weeks to Americans going back to, I think,
March or April. Each one in stronger terms: Leave now. Leave immediately,” he
said. “People chose not to leave. That’s their business. That’s their right. We
regret now that many may find themselves in a position that they would rather
not be in, and we will try to help them.”
There’s a palpable tension in Wilson’s remarks—as though
he is aware of the cravenness of shifting the blame for this disaster onto the
aid workers, NGOs, civil servants, and U.S. government employees who woke up
one morning to find themselves in a failed state. But others outside the
administration are bolder in their advantage seeking. As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin insisted, “the embassy
focused for months on the Americans in Afghanistan,” warning in “ominous” tones
of the uncertainty ahead. “Despite all that,” she continued, thousands of
Americans chose to “remain across the country.”
Well, maybe they chose to remain because they were
getting terribly mixed signals from the administration? “It’s not
inevitable,” Joe Biden insisted as recently as July 8 when asked
directly if the Taliban would eventually topple the American-backed government
in Kabul. “The likelihood that there’s going to be a Taliban overrunning
everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” And even as
fighting between the Taliban and Afghan National Forces intensified after Biden
withdrew air and logistical support, the U.S. diplomatic mission in Afghanistan
did not convey the fear with which the State Department was supposedly
overcome. “The U.S. Embassy in Kabul is open & will remain open,” the Embassy insisted on July 4. “We have no plans to close
the Embassy.” Indeed, the facility “has well-developed security plans to safely
protect our personnel & facilities” should the need arise.
And even if the State Department’s messaging was at odds
with itself and the president was projecting undue calm, so what? At best, this
exercise in butt-covering is a non-sequitur. Let’s concede that a handful of cables
were prescient and should have been observed by all Americans in Afghanistan.
That’s irrelevant. They’re still there now. They’re being harassed, beaten, and prevented from accessing the
airport. They’re about to be abandoned in the effort to preserve an artificial
timetable, at which point the White House hoped to declare America’s
commitments to Afghanistan fulfilled.
Now that this unachievable goal is plainly out of reach,
the White House and its supporters are hoping to distribute the blame for the
disaster to any and all—including the American citizens and green-card holders
charged with executing the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
We’re in the end game now. America’s NATO
allies are wrapping up their evacuation efforts or have concluded them
even though they, too, are leaving
their people behind. Government sources tell CNN that the U.S. mission in the country
will conclude in mere hours. The Pentagon disputes the claim (“We will continue to evacuate as
many people as we can,” Defense Department spokesman John Kirby meekly pledged), but getting American troops and materiel
out before next Tuesday will necessarily put a halt to the evacuation of
civilians. Indeed, that mission may have functionally concluded already.
Overnight, an imminent security threat to the airport in Kabul
(which subsequently materialized in a “complex” attack on Thursday morning) forced the State
Department to warn Americans against approaching the last remaining evacuation
site in the country.
Your American passport used to mean something that no one
on earth could afford to ignore. The Biden administration chose to sacrifice
that hard-won advantage—no one else. Many will share the blame when we leave
the Americans to fend for themselves while they’re surrounded by a vengeful
fundamentalist militia. But the fault will not lie with those who have been
abandoned by their own government. Some will do their best to make that case.
Don’t let them get away with it.
Newsom Deserves to Be Recalled
By Rich Lowry
Friday, August 27, 2021
California governor Gavin Newsom is a princeling of
progressivism who has ascended to the summit of political power in one of the
bluest states in the country, and yet is in real danger of suffering a
humiliating defeat.
In a few weeks, he could be recalled and, after
a lifetime of political striving, replaced by a conservative talk-radio host
who has thought about holding elected office for about five minutes.
Recall is a blunt instrument. There’s no denying that it
is bizarre that Larry Elder, the leading alternative candidate, could
replace Newsom after getting less than 20 percent of the vote. The way the
recall works is that voters are first asked whether or not to recall Newsom. If
a majority says “yes,” he is gone. Then, whichever candidate gets the most
votes on the replacement ballot, even if it’s a small plurality, becomes
governor.
Recall is a well-established feature of the California
system. It has been in the state’s constitution since 1911, and, of course, was
used most recently when Gray Davis was recalled and replaced by Arnold
Schwarzenegger in 2003.
Efforts to portray it as undemocratic and
unconstitutional make no sense. The recall is decided by the thoroughly
democratic method of seeing what and who gets the most votes. Newsom supporters
have the power to stop his ouster simply by outvoting, even by one ballot, the
supporters of the recall.
If there is no credible Democrat among the replacement
candidates, that was a deliberate strategic choice of the party to make the
recall a contest between an impeccably progressive governor and a motley group
of Republicans. The calculation may pay off, but it is a risk that makes the
Elder scenario plausible.
The bottom line is that recall is an escape valve in a
state with an entrenched political monoculture. It is the only plausible tool
available to deliver a well-deserved personal rebuke to Newsom and an
unmistakable message to the state’s political establishment that it is failing.
Newsom inherited a state in decline. Once a mecca for the
middle class and strivers of all kinds, California has become an
economic-inequality machine with an outrageously high cost of living and a
steady exodus of residents and companies.
Newsom is the governor by and for all the forces that
created this debacle. His Democratic predecessor, Jerry Brown, was a
substantial figure with an independent streak. Handsome and slick to a fault,
Newsom has, in contrast, risen without a trace, to paraphrase a famous line
about British TV interviewer David Frost. From San Francisco mayor to
lieutenant governor to governor, he’s wedded his ambition to a progressive
elitism that can seem out of touch even in liberal California.
He wouldn’t face a recall if it weren’t for his instantly
notorious dinner at French Laundry. This isn’t the most significant of his
lapses, but breaking his own coronavirus rules at one of the finest restaurants
in the country — the wine bill reportedly came to $12,000 — was going to
engender a fierce reaction. Especially after Newsom ordered far-reaching and
extensive lockdowns that were arbitrary (no outdoor dining — except for people
making movies!) and economically damaging.
Meanwhile, schools in the state were often closed, a
significant blow to learning and a particular burden to parents without the
means to find alternatives.
He has effectively done nothing to fight the twin crises
of wildfire and drought (environmentalists oppose forest management and
building new dams), and there’s a pervasive sense that disorder and
homelessness in the state’s big cities are intolerably degrading the quality of
life.
Newsom’s strategy is an unimaginative blunderbuss
approach — raising ungodly amounts of cash from billionaires and special
interests, and bludgeoning recall proponents as dangerous insurrectionist tools
of former President Donald Trump.
This may well work. Still, the polls have had the recall
shockingly close, evidence that even in California there’s such a thing as a
progressive being too off-putting and going too far.
Why Exactly Did We Abandon Bagram Air Base?
By Mark Antonio Wright
Friday, August 27, 2021
The Economist’s Shashank Joshi tweeted an
important observation that deserves to be highlighted. President Biden was
either confused or — worse — actively misleading the American people when he
said at Thursday’s press conference that senior military officers advised him
to abandon the Bagram air base because there “was not much value added” in
holding it.
“They concluded — the military — that Bagram was not much
value added, that it was much wiser to focus on Kabul,” President Biden said.
“And so, I followed that recommendation.”
Here’s the clip,
with the president’s full answer.
You need not be a military genius on the level of
Napoleon or Frederick the Great to realize that the international airport in
Kabul — with a single runway, surrounded by mountains, and in the middle of a
city of 4 million souls — is not an ideal base of operations from which to
conduct this evacuation. In fact, the airport is dangerously exposed.
As we’ve so painfully discovered, basic security for the
airport is a problem and flight operations can be threatened and even shut down
due to the security situation.
So why exactly did we give up our air
base at Bagram? The operational situation would suggest that a second,
more-defensible air base equipped with modern facilities would be an asset
during a crisis such as this.
Well, according to what General Mark Milley, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said just last week, we did it because of an
arbitrary cap on troop numbers in Afghanistan.
“That was all briefed and approved,” General Milley said,
“and we estimated that the risk of going out of HKIA [Kabul’s international
airport] or the risk of going out of Bagram about the same, so going out of
HKIA — was estimated to be the better tactical solution in accordance with the
mission set we were given and in accordance with getting the troops
down to about 600, 700 number” [emphasis mine].
This is indefensible from a military operations’ standpoint
— but President Biden wanted the troops out, so that was that, apparently.
Surely the president wouldn’t be misleading the American people about the reasoning behind the decision. President Biden wouldn’t be passing the buck here, would he? Surely not.
Thursday, August 26, 2021
It’s Dawning on the Democrats: Biden-Harris Will Drag Them Down
By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
The Joe Biden–Kamala Harris ticket was well-placed
to run against Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
History may show that, beyond that, it turned out to be fit for no other
purpose.
We hear an enormous amount these days about the problem
of “Flight 93-ism” on the American right, but a great deal less about the
concomitant panic that has led the Democratic Party to behave as if last year’s
election represented its last gasp. Since Joe Biden took office in January, his
party has been busy cramming everything it has ever wanted to do into a series
of multi-trillion-dollar, must-pass bills; hawking a patently unconstitutional
elections-supervision bill that would hand it full control of America’s
democratic infrastructure; and engaging in a frenzied attempt to pack the
Supreme Court, discredit the Senate, abolish the filibuster, and add new states
to the union by simple majority vote. If you ask for an explanation of this
preposterous behavior, you will be told that it is the product of the
Republican Party’s dastardly scheme to implement Jim Eagle. If you look more closely, however,
you’ll sense something else: fear — that, in a desperate
attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored
themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.
This fear is well-founded. Joe Biden is an aging,
incompetent mediocrity whose main claim to fame, like the Delta Tau Chi
fraternity from Animal House, is his long tradition of existence.
Kamala Harris, his vice president, is a widely disliked authoritarian whose last run for the
White House was stymied by her inability to garner support from more than 3
percent of the Democratic-primary electorate. If, prior to the disaster that
was the last fortnight, the Democrats hadn’t sensed that they’d tied their
party to a pair of losers, they sure as hell must have now.
It seems unlikely that outside events will save the party
from its mistake. During the last week, we have begun to hear rumblings about
that popular old chestnut, the 25th Amendment. Speaking to Hugh Hewitt this
morning, Senator Rick Scott asked and answered what he called a “a legitimate
question” about the incumbent president. “Does this guy,” Scott inquired, “have
the capability to lead the United States and be commander in chief of the most
powerful and lethal military force ever created in the history of the world?”
“If he does not,” Scott concluded, “then we have got to do something about it.”
But, absent some shattering revelation about the state of
Joe Biden’s health, this is not going to happen. The 25th Amendment is an
escape hatch reserved for genuine crises, not an open-ended enabling act by
which the cabinet and the Congress might facilitate a legalized coup. In
order for the provision to be successfully invoked, advocates would have to
convince a majority of the cabinet and a supermajority of the Congress that the
president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” — not
politically, but as a matter of medical fact. Clearly, this ain’t in the cards.
Joe Biden, who has the power under the amendment to counter “that no inability
exists,” is not going to go along with it. Kamala Harris, who would have
everything to lose if she acquiesced in a failed attempt, is not going to risk
it. And Congress, which would be called upon to follow through in the unlikely
event the cabinet pulled the trigger, is not going to vote for it.
And why should it, given that getting rid of President
Biden would not actually fix the Democrats’ problems? Joe Biden’s approval
rating is currently around 46 percent in national poll averages — not great for
a president in his seventh month in office, but dramatically better than Kamala
Harris’s rating, which stands at just 37 percent. Per NBC, Harris
inspires “very positive” feelings in just 19 percent of the population while
prompting “very negative feelings” among 36 percent — a feat that makes her
the most strongly disliked VP since records began. If,
today, the Democratic Party decided to cut its losses and replace Biden with
Harris, it would be selecting a new president who was nearly ten points less
popular than the old one. This would be absurd.
Which means that if the Democratic Party is destined for
a reckoning with its ticket — as now seems increasingly likely — it will have
to come during the next set of presidential primaries. Come 2024, Joe Biden
will be nearly 82 years old — nearly a decade older than any president has ever
been at any point in any term — while Harris, with four years of cackling
ineptitude under her belt, will likely have become an even more septic
proposition than she presently is. Given the threat of a returning Donald Trump
or an “even worse than Trump!” figure such as Governor DeSantis,
it isn’t too tough to imagine the drumbeat from the have-to-win-this-most-important-ever-election
crowd growing so loud that switching to an alternative, unsullied set of
nominees seems like the most prudent choice.
It is less easy, however, to imagine this actually
working. Aside from the obvious challenge of explaining to their identity
politics-obsessed base why it is just so inspiring! to have Kamala Harris as
VP, but it wouldn’t be at all inspiring to have her continue in the role (or
become the president herself), a Democratic Party that sought to substitute in
another set of candidates would be attempting to sidestep one of the ironclad
rules of modern politics: that when an incumbent president is subject to a
serious challenge during the primary, that president goes on to lose the
general. It happened in 1992, after Pat Buchanan took on George H. W. Bush; it
happened in 1980, after Ted Kennedy took on Jimmy Carter; it happened in 1976,
after Ronald Reagan took on Gerald Ford; and, in 1968, the mere prospect of it
happening forced LBJ to retire and helped Hubert Humphrey to lose.
Rock, meet hard place. In a couple of years, you’re gonna
get on great.
The Long, Quiet Death of American Foreign Policy
By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, August 26, 2021
Asked for his opinion of Western civilization,
Mohandas K. Gandhi wryly replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” We could
say the same about U.S. foreign policy.
We don’t really have one, but it would be interesting to
try one out.
In the United States, foreign policy is entirely
subordinate to day-to-day domestic politics, and it has been that way for some
time. China and Russia, Turkey and Poland, the United Kingdom and Afghanistan —
these are not subjects for U.S. foreign policy but props for side engagements
in purely domestic political rivalries, many of them based around identity
politics. Consider how large Hungary and its risible little caudillo loom in
our current political imagination, for one example — or how few Americans could
tell you who Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan is.
Critics of U.S. political practice complain that our
democracy is insufficiently robust, their perverse parallel complaints being
that there is too little engagement by the ignorant and apathetic (relatively
low voter turnout) and too much engagement by the informed and interested (“big
money” in politics). But the real problem is more often the opposite: Too much
democracy, and too few institutions that can or will overrule the will of the
people when appropriate.
For example, a century-long program of progressive reform
has almost completely undermined the institutional power of political parties,
empowering irresponsible demagogues (Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump) who once
would have been excluded by the prudent action of men operating in those
“smoked-filled rooms” we used to hear so much about. Changes in primary
elections and party organization have been amplified by social and
technological changes, notably the rise of social media and other forms of
digital media that have supplanted older fundraising and communication
networks, unleashing a particularly noxious strain of personality-driven mob
politics.
This has been bad for U.S. politics across the board, and
catastrophic for U.S. foreign policy, which today must be run through a
gauntlet of domestic interest-group demands, often petty and parochial, making
it nearly impossible to implement a productive and responsible strategy during
the course of a single presidential administration, much less to maintain some
kind of policy coherence and consistency across administrations. It is for
this reason that U.S. presidents as different as Barack Obama and Donald Trump
both, to take one example, failed to comprehend our relationship with China as
much more than a question of the balance of trade and the payrolls at North
Carolina tire factories. It is also for this reason that the ladies and
gentlemen in Washington cannot make the intellectual link between the billions
of dollars they spend on farm subsidies and the stampede of illegal immigrants
at our southern border — and that even those who do understand the connection
find themselves unable to do anything about it.
The mess in Afghanistan is best understood as the Biden
administration’s being slightly more incompetent in executing Donald Trump’s
Afghanistan policy than the Trump administration was, while the Trump
administration was slightly more incompetent in managing Barack Obama’s
promised withdrawal from Afghanistan than the Obama administration was. But all
three presidents wanted out of Afghanistan for the same reason: Being in
Afghanistan costs money (plus the lives of soldiers, almost always an
afterthought), and that money could instead be spent on what Barack Obama
called “nation-building at home” in his argument for abandoning Afghanistan.
Donald Trump used very similar language when he argued for an immediate
withdrawal, complaining that “we waste billions” training the Afghan army when
we should “rebuild the U.S.A.” Joe Biden says that in the case of Afghanistan
“nation-building . . . never made any sense to me,” and insists that the money
the U.S. government has spent there should have been sufficient to prevent the
Taliban’s revanche.
Though being in Afghanistan is expensive, costs fell
sharply in recent years as the U.S. mission evolved. In 2018, we spent about
$45 billion in the country. For context, the U.S. government will spend nearly
that much money on Social Security alone between yesterday and Labor Day, but
you have never heard Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Joe Biden fret very much
about those dollars going out the door.
And that is because they learned something from George H.
W. Bush.
It was under the first President Bush that the United
States last had a foreign policy worth the appellation. His response to the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was something of a master class in diplomacy and the
intelligent application of military force. Not since World War II had U.S.
capabilities enjoyed so much credibility or U.S. leadership such prestige. It
was something to see. And his administration and much of its work was promptly
undone by a two-bit nobody making vague noises about “hope and change” and
promising to redirect our resources from dusty foreign pits to fixing potholes
in Sheboygan and funding free false teeth in Possum Bluff — there is a Baghdad
in Florida as well as the one in Iraq, and Florida has more votes in the
Electoral College. George W. Bush must have seethed watching the glib and
lightly experienced Obama running the same campaign against John McCain and, by
proxy, his own administration, as Bill Clinton had run against his father, the
foreign policy of which had been entirely sunk in the molasses of domestic
political opportunism.
Various interest groups prefer to think of their own
agendas as “beyond politics,” a term that has been thrown around from
time to time in regard to foreign policy. In truth, there is no such thing as
“beyond politics” in a democracy such as ours — we can no more take the
politics out of foreign policy than we can take the tuna out of tuna salad. But
there is a difference between having a political debate over competing visions
and approaches to foreign policy and an engagement with the world that embraces
no real national interest at all beyond those immediately connected to our
quadrennial convulsion and the advantage-seeking associated with it.
Our national interests do not change with the drapes in
the White House.
The dysfunction in our government is deep — the last time
Congress could be bothered to carry out its regular appropriations process,
Frank Sinatra was alive to see it, the Spice Girls were on the radio, and the
face of sober Republican government was Rudy Giuliani. That same year, a
previously obscure group called the Taliban declared the Islamic Emirate
of Afghanistan, not that we Americans were paying much attention — what did any
of that have to do with us?
It is remarkable that we still haven’t quite managed to
answer that question. It is also dangerous.
Foreign policy? Maybe we should try one out.
Ezra Klein Tries to Wonk-Absolve Joe Biden of Responsibility for Afghanistan
By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, August 26, 2021
In the New York Times, Ezra Klein proposes that the United States’ disastrous withdrawal
from Afghanistan was not really Joe Biden’s fault — and,
moreover, that the people who disagree (which is pretty much everyone in America, it seems) are “pretending”:
In 2005, 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.
To drive home the point, Klein adds:
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 is especially interesting to see Klein taking this
tack, given that he is typically of the view that what the United States needs
more than anything else is to put a competent technocrat into the White House.
During the early months of COVID-19, for example, Klein fantasized publicly
about how much better things would be if Elizabeth Warren were president.
“Taking [sic] to @ewarren right now,” Klein tweeted in April of last year, “is a strange, slightly
melancholy experience: like glimpsing an alternate reality where political
leadership is proportionate to the crisis we’re facing.” In that tweet, Klein
linked to a piece in which he praised Warren for being “the
first presidential candidate to release a plan for combating coronavirus” and
concluded that “Warren’s penchant for planning stands in particularly stark
contrast to this administration, which still has not released a clear
coronavirus plan.” A few days later, after Warren had dropped out of the race,
Klein tweeted dolefully, “I miss Elizabeth Warren.”
As usual, Klein has got things backwards. While “winning”
the war in Afghanistan was, indeed, a pipe dream, it would not, in fact, have
been especially hard for the United States to get out in a more orderly
fashion. The Biden administration could probably not have prevented the Taliban
from taking over again (although, if this was always inevitable, Joe Biden
shouldn’t have said exactly the opposite). But it could quite obviously have
ensured that before our troops were drawn down we had got every American,
permanent resident, and eligible Afghan out; we had removed both our weaponry
and any sensitive information; and we had consulted properly with our allies.
That part — which, to use Klein’s term, is not “the war” but “the execution of
the withdrawal” — was within Joe Biden’s control. And he completely and utterly
screwed it up. For a technocrat such as Klein to try to obfuscate this is
nothing short of astonishing.
COVID-19, by contrast, was — and is — a
far, far more difficult challenge. Frequent readers of mine will have noticed
that, with the exception of Andrew Cuomo, who engaged in a disgraceful
cover-up, I have not been especially critical of any of our leaders’ responses
to this pandemic. Why not? Well, because, outside of a handful of areas (the
development, production, and dissemination of vaccines, for example) this is
simply not an area in which one can establish easy or obvious links between the
inputs (“planning,” say) and the outputs (say, infection rates, or deaths). The
state with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths, New York, is also the
state that had the governor whom everyone praised to the hilt, while Florida,
which has a governor whom critics have rechristened “DeathSantis,” is 26th. As
I write, Texas and Hawaii are producing virtually identical per
capita infection charts, despite having adopted dramatically different policies.
Seven months into the presidency that was going to save us — and despite his
having said on July 4 of this year that “we’re closer than ever to declaring
our independence from a deadly virus” — President Joe Biden is still presiding
over a crisis. Israel, which did everything “right” from the very start, is now
seeing a brutal surge. And the rest of the world? Well, if you can
find me a coherent cause–effect pattern there, I’ll buy you an ice cream. The
idea that Elizabeth Warren could have fixed all this simply by running around
and sounding officious is absurd.
The truth is that Klein is doing here what he always
does, which is dressing up a partisan propaganda effort in pseudo-scientific
garb. What Joe Biden needs more than anything right now is for the American
people to conclude that the real issue here is not his own
stunning incompetence, but the wisdom of the war in Afghanistan per se. And so,
right on cue, Klein pops up with the goods. There’s a word for that sort of
journalist; but it’s sure as hell not “wonk.”
Biden Can’t Blame Trump Anymore
By Philip Klein
Thursday, August 26, 2021
In the early days of any administration, there is a
tendency for new presidents to blame their predecessors for problems they claim
to have inherited — and there is a window during which the public is willing to
accept such arguments. But for President Biden, the window on blaming Donald
Trump has now closed. As Americans process the tragic news of double-digit
deaths of U.S. service members in twin terrorist attacks in the midst of a
botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, it will be hard for Biden to dodge
responsibility.
When Biden took office, COVID-19 was two weeks past its
winter peak, the U.S. was administering over a million vaccine doses a day, and
the economy had bounced back. Biden nonetheless falsely said that he had inherited the
“worst crisis since the Great Depression” and claimed that the administration
was launching a vaccination campaign from scratch, and he told Americans to “mask up” for just 100 days in keeping with his campaign vow
to “shut down the virus.” Yet we’re now in the midst of a COVID-19 surge, and
more than a hundred days since his first hundred days, the CDC still maintains masking
guidance — even for the fully vaccinated.
Biden similarly has attempted to blame Trump for the
mounting fiasco in Afghanistan. And while it’s true that Trump made the initial
agreement to withdraw and wind down the troop presence, it was Biden’s role as
commander in chief to oversee that withdrawal. It’s true that the baseline
assumption on both sides of the “stay” vs. “leave” debate was that leaving
Afghanistan would be chaotic in the short term. That events have unfolded in a
way that’s significantly worse than even these low baseline expectations is
quite the testament to Biden’s incompetence. Biden cannot blame Trump for, say,
abandoning Bagram Air Base. Leaving was never going to be smooth, but it could
have been done in a way that would ensure that Americans and our allies were
out before the withdrawal. And it could have been done without today’s bloody catastrophe.
At this point, Americans are unlikely to accept “blame
Trump” excuses. Per CNBC:
A recent NBC News poll found that approval of Biden’s Covid
handling fell from 69% in April to 53% in August, a 13-point drop.
Meanwhile, just 25% of voters said
they approved of Biden’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan.
“The promise of April has led to
the peril of August,” Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt, who conducted the NBC News poll, told the network.
Meanwhile, a YouGov poll released today found that more
than two-thirds of Americans, and even 55 percent of Democrats, agree that the
Afghanistan withdrawal has been handled “badly.” And he is underwater in his overall approval rating.
Keep in mind, all these polls were taken before today’s
terrorist attacks.
Biden owes his political success entirely to the fact
that he has had Trump as a foil. It’s why Democrats were willing to nominate an
elderly, shaky, and twice-defeated presidential candidate. It’s the reason he
was elected. And the contrast with Trump was the reason why he enjoyed generally
positive approval ratings during his first six months in office. But now, Biden
is on his own. Because he can no longer use Trump as an excuse for his own
failures.
Biden’s Deadly Afghanistan Gamble
By David Harsanyi
Thursday, August 26, 2021
It is almost surely the case that President Joe
Biden’s Afghan withdrawal was propelled by political considerations rather than
any pressing moral or foreign-policy imperative. Biden, who for 20 years has
taken whatever the most popular position happened to be on Afghanistan
(so, all of them), believed he could get a quick, much-needed political
victory.
You can still witness the cynical polling-centric takes
from Biden defenders like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who only this morning, a few
hours before American troops were being murdered by suicide bombers at the Kabul
airport, was telling his co-host Mika Brzezinski, “As you look
at those numbers and you look at the numbers right now, post-Afghan chaos, look
at the numbers beforehand, 75 percent of Americans supporting it.” Later in the
show, Jonathan Lemire, White House correspondent for the Associated Press,
noted that “eventually, maybe not right away, eventually Americans will even
give him credit for being the U.S. president that was able to finally end the
war, something his predecessors were not able to do.”
As a policy matter, of course, Biden’s botching the
evacuation is a separate issue from whether the United States should be
withdrawing from the country, despite continual efforts to conflate the two.
And past mistakes regarding Afghanistan do not absolve the president of his
administration’s astonishing incompetence. Of course, Biden was also a
proponent of both the war and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan. It’s not
as if he had no hand in creating the situation he is now bungling in
deadly fashion.
By needlessly abandoning Bagram in June, by
hamstringing the U.S. military and locking them in an airport, by failing to
account for Americans and partners in-country before evacuating secure
positions, by relying on the Taliban’s cooperation and allowing the group to
dictate terms and timelines of withdrawal and security, the administration has
created a humanitarian crisis. Now, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S.
citizens may be stranded in Afghanistan, in danger not only from the Taliban
but also from ISIS and possibly al-Qaeda.
As far as polling goes, perhaps Scarborough and Lemire
will be proven right. But it is almost surely true that support for getting out
of Afghanistan is far less intense among voters than support
for not seeing Americans being blown up by ISIS suicide bombers or being taken
hostage by Islamists. Most voters, no doubt, favor leaving the region because
they do not want to see Americans put in harm’s way. And yet that’s exactly
what Biden has done through his staggering ineptitude. Today has been the
deadliest day for American troops in Afghanistan in over a decade.
The American public’s positions on foreign policy can
dramatically and quickly change. Pundits might feel compelled, as a matter of
professional integrity, to remain philosophically consistent or to explain a
change of heart (though fewer and fewer do.) Voters don’t. According to a
Gallup poll, for example, the number of Americans who favored the war in Iraq —
which Biden also enthusiastically supported — reached 60 percent leading up to
the conflict. By 2003, when things were going well, polls were regularly above
70 percent in support. By the end of 2004, after troops were bogged down in
nation-building and terrorist-hunting efforts, those numbers began cratering.
Many of the people who supported going to war did 180s.
Today, a YouGov America poll, taken before the suicide bombings, finds that 68
percent of Americans say the Afghanistan evacuation was handled badly —
including over 55 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of independents, and 84
percent of Republicans. Only 16 percent say it was handled well. I can’t
remember any event in recent political history that Americans thought was more
poorly managed. How many Americans wanted to end the war on this note?
Indeed, unlike the way they view most domestic issues,
voters aren’t particularly ideological about foreign affairs. I don’t think
I’ve ever met a self-described “neoconservative” or “isolationist” who didn’t
work at a think tank or wasn’t involved in politics or journalism in some way.
Americans want competence from their military, the biggest and most powerful in
the world. They’re getting the exact opposite from the president, his
administration, and our military leaders. It is quite likely that Biden has
made a serious miscalculation, not only for the thousands of people in danger
on the ground, but for his political fortunes.
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
The Day Afghanistan Died
By Brad Taylor
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
If you’ve read the plethora of post-mortem
reports on Afghanistan, there are plenty of enemies to go around, from
corruption, to incompetent leadership, to 20 years of rosy assessments from our
own defense establishment. For me, there is a single day that Afghanistan died,
and it was June 16, 2021.
I have spent my entire adult life studying insurgency
and terrorism, sometimes with books and research, other times from the barrel
of a gun, and because of it, I have learned Napoleon’s ultimate truth: In warfare,
the moral is to the physical as three is to one. Insurgency as a form of
warfare is based on faith and belief that one will win. Why else would a
peasant take up a rifle and fight against an entrenched government with every
bit of that physical capability against him, if not for the belief that he or
she would eventually win? It is the single form of warfare where perception can
actually become reality — and that is exactly what happened in Afghanistan on
June 16, 2021.
The Afghanistan Commandos are the only force in the
Afghanistan National Army (ANA) that actually fight and win. They have done so
since we began building them, first with the CIA, then with our own Special
Forces. They were known as the only force that had no tribal affiliation and were
the only force in the country that would fight for the state of Afghanistan
regardless of the human terrain. And they were really good. At one point,
toward the end, they were conducting upwards of 90 percent of all combat
actions inside the country — strained to the breaking point but succeeding with
the support of the United States.
And then we pulled the support.
There was a nationwide plan for Commando use, which,
put simply, was that they would insert and clear out Taliban influence, and
then would be replaced with regular ANA components to keep the area secure and
out of Taliban control. To this, they had been very successful. On that fateful
day in June, everything changed.
The Commandos assaulted a village called Dawlat Abad
and routed the Taliban. They called in the ANA to take over, and the ANA
refused to enter, afraid of the Taliban. The Taliban regrouped and surrounded
the village, pounding it with mortar fire and conducting a siege, until the
small contingent of Commandos had no recourse but to surrender. Calls for air
support went unheeded, because America had pulled the maintenance capability of
the very aircraft that would have responded. There was no help coming.
Twenty-two Commandos surrendered to the Taliban. All
22 were summarily executed — on video. One of the men killed was a soldier
named Sohrab Azimi. He was the son of an ANA general, trained in the United
States, and engaged to be married to a United States citizen. He could have
done anything with his life, but he chose to lead the Commandos. He was the
best and brightest of Afghanistan, and he was killed on the street with a
bullet to the back of his head because his pleas for air support went unheeded.
The news of June 16 didn’t even create a blip in the
United States. Nobody cared, but make no mistake, the average soldier or
civilian in the Afghanistan hierarchy did. Sohrab Azimi was a national hero in
Afghanistan. He was like a cross between Captain America and Saladin. I read
the story and felt horrible at the loss. When I thought about it pragmatically,
the only thought that entered my mind was, “This is the end.” And that was two
months before the fall of Kabul. Perception in insurgency has a sway all its
own. It becomes reality, and when the action happened, I saw the reality.
Why would any small-time regular soldier of the ANA
stand against the Taliban when the vaunted Commandos tried to do so and were
unceremoniously executed on the street? When the man who represented them as
the future of Afghanistan died in a puddle of blood on his knees? Regardless of
the failure from the cowards of the ANA, the signal was sent by our lack of
support that nobody is coming to help. If you stand against the Taliban, you
will die. Even your brothers will refuse to help.
And that perception began to grow with every village
that capitulated. It began to take on a life of its own, until it was a
foregone conclusion. General Scotty Miller, the last commander of Afghanistan,
said as much on his way out the door a month before the fall. In an ABC This
Week interview, he said “. . . war is physical, but it’s also got a
psychological or moral component to it. And hope actually matters. And so, as
you watch the Taliban moving across the country, what you don’t want to have
happen is that the people lose hope and they believe they now have a foregone
conclusion presented to them. Civil war is certainly a path that could be
visualized. That should be a concern for the world.”
At that point, he didn’t believe it was a forgone
conclusion, but it was. All hope was lost. The signal sent by our lack of
support was precisely the perception that the Taliban wanted: You are
all going to die. And the people in positions of authority both low
and high took that to heart. Afghanistan was done on that date.
What is tragic to me is that we held the country
together with only 2,500 troops. Why did we leave? Strategically, Bagram
Airbase was the single thorn in the side of everyone in the neighborhood. The
current administration keeps talking about “shifting focus” to “threats that
matter” in order to “get out of the forever wars” but take a look at the
location of Afghanistan. To the north of Bagram airfield is Russia. To the east
is China. To the west is Iran. You couldn’t ask for a better force-projection
platform for the shift to the so-called “Great Power Competition.” Giving that
up is a self-defeating prophecy. And that’s before we allowed
the Taliban to free 5,000 terrorist prisoners from their cells on the base.
Every time I hear the words “Forever War,” as if
that’s a mantra against fighting for United States interests, I can’t help but
think about Korea. We are literally at war on the Korean peninsula to this day.
We never signed a peace treaty, but our positioning of troops there has
stabilized the region for close to 70 years. And the cost was well worth it.
Nobody in America cares about this, but we have 29,000 troops in South Korea.
So, 2,500 troops in Afghanistan was a ball breaker?
Our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan will do nothing
for stability in the region or our own security. Beyond the strategic loss of
Bagram as a power-projection platform, the Taliban are going to welcome
terrorist groups with open arms. The administration claims that this is no big
deal, because terrorists are operating in ungoverned spaces such as Yemen,
Libya, and Somalia right now, and we deal with them from “over the horizon,”
but this is a chimera. One, you need intelligence to decipher terrorist threats.
Who is going to give us that in Afghanistan? Nobody, that’s who, because being
seen as helping the United States is a death sentence. Two, there is an
enormous difference between terrorist groups operating in ungoverned spaces and
terrorist groups operating with the support of a state. If you question this,
take a look at Hezbollah versus al-Qaeda right now. One has the capability —
supported by Iran — to literally cause the downfall of the State of Israel. The
other is living in a cave fantasizing about future attacks, waiting on their
perception to become reality.
There are a lot of different reasons for the fall of
Afghanistan, and plenty of blame to go around, but the end result was not
pre-ordained.
Until June 16, 2021. When perception became reality.
Democrats Stay Silent as Unprecedented ‘Benefits Cliff’ Approaches
By Matt Weidinger
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
On Labor Day, an estimated 7.5 million individuals are expected to see their temporary
federal unemployment benefits come to an abrupt end. But even though that will
mark the largest shutoff of such benefits in American history, two political
dynamics have made mention of the approaching benefits cliff all but taboo in
progressive policy circles: The cliff was designed by the Democratic authors of
the March 2021 American Rescue Plan, and it will disproportionately affect
residents of blue states.
The 7.5 million Americans poised to lose benefits in
two weeks is a huge figure, exceeding the combined population of the cities in Major League Baseball’s two Central Divisions —
Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit,
Minneapolis, and Kansas City. As the chart below shows, the coming benefits cliff is almost six times “steeper” than the
next-steepest such cliff in American history:
The primary cause of this predicament is that more
people have been made eligible for, and continue to collect, the federal
benefits in question than ever before. As a result of the pandemic and unprecedented new federal benefit programs,
recipients of unemployment checks peaked at almost 33 million in June 2020 — more than two and a half times the prior record.
Today, despite 10 million job openings and an unemployment rate that has
fallen to 5.4 percent, 12 million Americans remain on benefits — a figure that approaches the pre-pandemic record for recipients, set in January 2010
when unemployment was a far-higher 9.8 percent.
About three-quarters of current recipients collect only federal benefits, and thus
stand to lose all unemployment checks when temporary federal programs expire on
Labor Day. Others will remain eligible for up to 26 weeks of state unemployment
checks, but lose a $300-per-week federal supplement.
One of the ironies of the coming cliff is that it was
intentional. The Democratic authors of the March 2021 American Rescue Plan that
extended benefits through Labor Day insisted on replacing the “soft phaseouts” created in a bipartisan December 2020 law, which would have allowed current
recipients to continue collecting benefits for some time after the program
closed to new applicants, with a “hard cutoff” that took away all recipients’
benefits at the same time. Why? Because in the bizarre logic of some liberal policymakers, hard cutoffs improve the odds that Congress will approve another
extension. The more acute and widespread the pain of a program’s expiration,
the malign thinking goes, the greater the political pressure to extend it.
That logic has been undercut by many states’ decision
to simply opt out of paying federal benefits in recent
weeks. The opt-outs include most red states, whose leaders argue that expanded
federal unemployment benefits have kept people from returning to work. And as a result, they have reduced many red-state representatives’
incentive to support another extension of benefits, since the checks wouldn’t
be going to their constituents regardless.
That contributes to the second irony behind the coming
benefits cliff: The vast majority of those about to lose benefits as a result
of the Democrat-designed law are residents of blue states, including populous
California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey. In the
week ending July 24, over 80 percent of those receiving major federal benefits were in states led by a
Democratic governor.
With vaccines widely available and record job
openings, it is well past time for these extraordinary benefits to end. President Biden dismissed the possibility of another extension in May. Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.)
recently seconded that, when he suggested “I’m done with extensions.” Just last week, the Biden
administration formally pulled the plug on further federal funding, stating in
a letter to Congress that the $300 bonuses
“will expire” as scheduled. The fact that it is Democrats who are nixing any
chance of another extension has undoubtedly contributed to what some call the “current silence of federal
policymakers” about the upcoming benefits cliff. But two lesser-known truths —
that the cliff was designed by Democrats, and that it will
disproportionately affect the residents of blue states — also explain why
Washington lawmakers who usually cheer on more benefits have been notably
silent about the “hard cutoff” to come.