Dear Commons Community,

If you watched the news on any of the major media outlets this past week, there was hour by hour coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal.  Surely this is a tragedy but the media is putting too much of the blame on the Biden administration and trying to push our country to become involved again in a never-ending war.  The major blame for all of this is not Biden and United States but the Afghanistan government and its military that completely abandoned the country and left it to the Taliban.  Below is an analysis  courtesy of the Huffington Post.

Tony

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Biden, Allies Frustrated With Media’s Hawkish Coverage Of Afghanistan Withdrawal

By Daniel Marans

As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on yesterday afternoon about the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.

“Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?” the reporter said.

Notwithstanding the militant group’s poor human rights record and ultra-conservative Islamist ideology, multiple U.S. administrations have successfully negotiated with the Taliban. The Taliban have complex interests. As Biden noted yesterday, the organization is at war with the faction of the self-declared Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which is competing for power in Afghanistan.

But the reporter’s criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a week’s worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality.

Although the White House’s failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters’ and pundits’ unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.

“The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,” said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. “They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.”

Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the de facto leader of the party’s progressive wing and Biden’s rival in the 2020 presidential primary, offered a similar assessment.

“The extent to which the media is privileging voices who have gotten this wrong for years is ridiculous,” he said. “What we’re seeing is an attempt by the Washington foreign policy establishment to expiate its sins of over 20 years by putting this on the Biden administration.”

Journalists who cover the Pentagon spend an inordinate amount of their time with current and former military officials, many of whom go on to lucrative gigs with military contractors that profited from the Afghanistan War. It’s that kind of chumminess that contributed to the media’s amplification of the specious case for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.

As The Intercept has chronicled, the problem of media bias toward foreign adventurism is especially acute among talking heads paid to discuss military policy on television. Former U.S. military generals often inveigh against the withdrawal on cable news with just their past military titles rather than their current careers as contractors who stand to profit from an extended presence in Afghanistan.

A source close to the White House identified this dynamic to HuffPost. “They are elevating the Blob, whose members spent years lying about progress in Afghanistan (and who often have financial conflicts of interest),” the source said, using the “blob” colloquialism that refers to the Washington foreign policy establishment. “The result is that many in the press are left effectively endorsing the view that the U.S. should have sent more American service members into Afghanistan to fight and die to stop another Taliban offensive ― despite supposedly being impartial.”

This president himself vented similar frustration Friday during remarks at the White House. “People now say to me and others ― many of you say it on air ― ‘Why did we have to move because no Americans were being attacked? Why did we agree to withdraw 2,500 troops when no Americans were being attacked?’” Biden said.

Biden noted that in the past year the dearth of casualties was thanks to an agreement that then-President Donald Trump made with the Taliban promising a timeline for withdrawal on the condition that the Taliban not attack U.S. forces.

He then noted that if the U.S. reneged on its commitment to announce a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban would escalate their offensive and the U.S. would have to respond in kind.

“The idea that if I had said on May the 2nd or 3rd, ‘We are not leaving. We are staying,’ does anybody truly believe that I would not have had to put in significantly more American forces ― send your sons and your daughters, like my son was sent to Iraq? To maybe die ― and for what, for what?” Biden asked incredulously.

That’s a question that much of the media has rarely interrogated — until now. News broadcasts on the three major American TV networks ― NBC, CBS and ABC ― have barely mentioned Afghanistan at all in recent years, according to data compiled by media monitor Andrew Tyndall.

The Washington industrial complex is always going to be more in favor of having a muscular military approach. Eric Schultz, senior adviser to former President Barack Obama

Even in 2020, the year in which Trump negotiated his agreement with the Taliban, the three networks mentioned Afghanistan just five times.

At the same time, now that Biden is taking a step that U.S. presidents have been very reluctant to take, he is facing a tidal wave of either negative coverage that omits critical context or outright condemnation from many of the same journalists who ignored the war under Trump and for years before.

For example, one White House correspondent passionately asked Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, why Biden did not see a national interest in keeping troops near the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Tajikistan.

Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent of NBC News, has assigned himself the even greater task of defending the U.S.’s ability to create a functioning military and nation-state in Afghanistan.

Responding to Biden’s suggestion that “nothing could have fixed Afghanistan,” Engel tweeted, “I wish he’d come to Kabul more recently, even six months ago.”

For all of his optimism about the United States’ ability to shape politics in countries as different as Afghanistan, Engel apparently had little to say about the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers. The 2019 papers, which made public more than 2,000 pages of government documents discussing the war, reveal the degree to which U.S. military and civilian leaders considered the war unwinnable but lied to the public about the progress they were making.

To critics of the Washington press corps’s coziness with the national security establishment, some reporters’ selective indignation about the withdrawal is nothing new.

“The Washington industrial complex is always going to be more in favor of having a muscular military approach,” said Schultz, who is now a senior adviser to Obama. “That will always be the gravitational pull in Washington.”

What is novel is the willingness of many Democrats, including Biden himself, not to be cowed by hawkish Beltway voices and their chorus in the media.

Biden’s own transformation from an Iraq War proponent and member of the foreign policy “Blob” in good standing to an early and outspoken skeptic of Obama’s surge of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is remarkable.

He has stuck to his guns while under attack in the press, laying out a case for the limits of American military power in an interview with ABC News that would have been unthinkable at the height of the “global war on terror.”

“The idea that we’re able to deal with the rights of women around the world by military force is not rational. Not rational,” he said.

Schultz says that Biden has learned from the experience of Obama, who had to contend with the national security establishment’s skepticism of his decision not to intervene in Syria and his nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran.

“As a Democrat, I’m very relieved and encouraged and heartened that the White House knows they’re speaking to the country, not just Playbook subscribers,” Schultz said, referring to Politico’s popular inside-the-Beltway newsletter.

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden is standing firm by his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, despite chaotic scenes of the Taliban rapidly seizing control and the U.S. rushing to airlift diplomats out of the country.

Behind his confidence is a political bet that a war-weary U.S. public will stick with him and enable him to weather a firestorm of criticism, not just from his Republican opposition but also from Democratic allies who promise to investigate failures surrounding the withdrawal.

Public support for the withdrawal has fallen from earlier this year, but pluralities indicate that Americans still want U.S. forces out, according to two new surveys.

A Yahoo News poll found that 40 percent support the pullout, while 28 percent oppose it. (In July, 50 percent favored the pullout.)

A Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 49 percent support the withdrawal, while 37 percent oppose it. (In April, 69 percent backed withdrawal.)

The criticism has been heaviest over the execution of the withdrawal, including the failure to evacuate U.S. personnel and partners in time for the rapid Taliban takeover. Republican lawmakers, and some Democrats, have compared it to the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, in 1975.

Biden needs all the political capital he can muster — to spend on signing an infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion social safety net package at the core of his domestic agenda, which his party is counting on to survive a difficult midterm election cycle next year.

Democratic strategists say Biden is on solid political footing, arguing that Americans will ultimately see the issue as a simple choice between continuing the occupation and ending it.

“No one likes where this ended up, but it’s hard to see Republicans winning elections on a campaign promise to go back to war in Afghanistan in 2022 or 2024,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant who has worked for the party’s House campaign arm and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.

Republicans see little opportunity in digging in on a pro-war position, particularly after 20 years of money and lives lost trying to build a democratic state that collapsed like a house of cards as soon as U.S. forces left.

Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the Senate GOP campaign arm, said of the politics of the withdrawal: “It’s hard to tell how it’ll play in the long run.”

But he said the situation paints Biden as a “weak leader” who operates with a “nonchalance” on issues like the border, inflation and now Afghanistan. Taken together, he said, Biden appears “weak, disengaged or just plain lost.”

Matt Gorman, a Republican consultant who has worked on presidential and House races, said the issue of Afghanistan resonates with voters insofar as Biden’s opposition can tie it to his leadership on matters that affect them day to day.

“The biggest political risk here is that it compounds with inflation, gas prices and crime. This is all making Biden look like a bystander,” he said. “He’s watching events and not leading them.”

But to Biden’s allies, the decision to pull out and absorb the short-term pain was a mark of leadership that his three predecessors who oversaw the war lacked the courage to practice. In a speech Monday, Biden said that Americans shouldn’t be asked to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces wouldn’t and that he won’t “pass this responsibility on to a fifth president.”

He defended his decision in an ABC News interview published Wednesday.

“The idea that somehow there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” Biden said. “I had a simple choice. If I said, ‘We’re going to stay,’ then we’d better be prepared to put a whole lot, hell of a lot more troops in.”

His remarks channeled weariness with war among the public, with voters in both parties turning against wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks nearly 20 years ago. Trump capitalized on similar sentiments in his 2016 campaign.

Likely voters support the withdrawal by 51 percent to 37 percent, according to a new poll by Data for Progress, a progressive firm that has been cited by the White House.

“Even with the negative coverage of the last few days, Data for Progress and other pollsters still find net support for withdrawal,” said Sean McElwee, the group’s executive director. “Ultimately, the American public does not support permanent overseas occupation.”

I believe that Biden and the Democrats will weather the Afghanistan withdrawal situation by the time the midterm elections come in 2022.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Helgoland:  Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution is a new book by Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who has held positions in Italy, France and the United States.  Rovelli has written several books (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, and The Order of Time) on physics and the cosmos and in Helgoland, he provides lucid insights into quantum theory and several of the physicists who contributed to its formulation.  The book’s title comes from the name of a “treeless island” in the North Sea where Werner Heisenberg had his breakthrough insights on quantum mechanics.  Rovelli also uses quantum theory as the basis for exploring the mind and reality claiming that all facts are relative and based on interactions not on one universal law or vision.

If you have not read a Rovelli book, you are in for a treat.  He writes with a flair and a light almost poetic style on topics that are dense by nature. He has done it again with Helgoland on a topic that Richard Feyman has been quoted as saying that “nobody understands quanta”.

I found it an interesting read that provided me with new insight to fundamental questions in the world of physics.  If you are at all disposed, I recommend it.

Below is a New York Times review.

Tony

New York Times Book Review

Dear Commons Community.

Former President Donald Trump once again showed his ignorance yesterday in an attempt to sow doubt about COVID-19 vaccinations.  

The former president appeared on Fox Business and said he was “proud” to have taken the COVID vaccine, while falsely claiming that when he left office, the coronavirus “was virtually gone.” 

He threw in some xenophobia as well, using the racist term “China virus” to describe the pathogen.

Trump dismissed the recommendations by the Biden White House that Americans get booster shots eight months after receiving their second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, in order to combat the delta variant of the virus.

“That sounds to me like a money-making operation for Pfizer,” Trump said. “Think of the money involved. A booster shot, that’s tens of billions of dollars. How good of business is that? If you’re a businessman, you say, ‘You know what? Let’s give them another shot.’ That’s another $10 billion of money coming in. The whole thing is just crazy.”

The president also once again showed that he doesn’t really understand the concept of evolving guidance based on new information.

“You wouldn’t think you would need a booster,” Trump said. “When these first came out, they were good for life. Then they were good for a year or two. And I could see the writing on the wall, I could see the dollar signs in their eyes.”

Conservative columnist George Will had the right term for Trump – “a bloviating ignoramus.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article earlier this summer entitled,”A Mass Exodus: Inflexible Remote-Work Policies Could Bring Major Staff  Turnover”.  It described that colleges and universities experiencing large losses of staff,  are examining policies requiring them to work on on-site versus remotely.

At least 570,000 workers, or one out of nine workers in academe, lost or left their job since the coronavirus pandemic began, according to preliminary, seasonally adjusted figures from the U.S. Labor Department. Now employees have some leverage in a tightening labor market, and work policies are one of many factors driving sky-high turnover levels. As reported in The Chronicle article.

Eliminating flexibility could lead to a “turnover tsunami” on college campuses, Rob Shomaker, senior vice president for the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR, said at a recent event.

In recent communications, interviews, and released policies, colleges like Drexel University, Virginia Tech, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Illinois at Chicago have acknowledged that flexibility could attract job applicants, improve staff retention, and lift employee morale.

The University of South Florida even tied flexible work policies to the campus’s goals to advance in national rankings. “The global marketplace for talent is evolving toward flexible work, creating more competition for top performers who can help us reach our aspirations for Top 25 U.S. News & World Report rankings and AAU eligibility,” campus officials wrote in one message.

The rise of remote work across the country means that colleges will compete for applicants with businesses and organizations nationally, not just with local industry, meaning that this could be an area where colleges keep pace with other employers — or fall short.

Staff aren’t indentured servants. They’re professionals — constant free agents.

It’s already a key issue for job candidates, college leaders said at the CUPA-HR event on Wednesday. The large majority of recent potential applicants to Amherst College asked whether there were remote-work options, said Lisa Rutherford, chief policy officer and general counsel at the college. In the last three months, every recruitment effort that Bryan Garey, vice president for human resources at Virginia Tech, was involved in included a conversation about flexible work, he said.

Even before the pandemic, Boston University heard from applicants that flexible work was a priority. The inquiries since then have only increased, said Natalie McKnight, dean of the college of general studies. When the university’s website published an article about the future of remote work, the comments flooded in:

• “BU has two options. Adapt and remain competitive in order to retain its top staff and attract the future workforce, or, don’t adapt, and witness a wave of staff leave and struggle to hire the next generation.”

• “Increasing job flexibility, especially for those with children, is the only way to retain loyal employees.”

• “If BU wishes to retain talented staff, an official flex work policy is essential. This should be a no-brainer decision that can easily improve morale, employee well being, and productivity. I foresee a mass exodus to other area institutions or sectors should a formal flex-work policy not be established come fall 2021.”

The high cost of living in cities and towns where many colleges are located marks another challenge. Erwin Hesse, executive director of enrollment management at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, leads a team of people, most of whom are in their 20s. He knows that when the pandemic hit, some entry-level staff members left Washington, D.C., and its high cost of living, to live with family.

The team has performed well, and applications for prospective students have gone up, he said. “We’re killing it right now,” he said. “We’re doing what we need to do. We’re connecting with prospects.”

Now the School of Continuing Studies is considering changing employees’ work modality to telework or remote, he said. If such a change does not proceed, Hesse said, his staff would need to move back to the Washington area — and he expects some would seek employment elsewhere.

“My biggest concern,” he said, “is losing people.”

A university spokeswoman, Ruth McBain, told The Chronicle that Georgetown intends “to provide as much flexibility as possible to balance operational needs with individual circumstances, while also ensuring we continue to achieve our educational and research missions.”

Back to ‘That Old World’?

When people leave higher education, said Justin Lind, who works in institutional research at Stanford University, it’s not because they stop appreciating the good things about the sector.

He himself values the missions of equity and knowledge-generation. But such missions may be “no longer enough to compensate for the downsides,” he said, like less-competitive pay and unaffordable housing in some college towns.

At Stanford, the “affordability crisis” in the Bay Area made staff members want remote work well before the pandemic, Lind said. Employees were commuting long hours from more-affordable areas, he said, and his colleagues could work one day a week remotely.

During the pandemic, employees showed they could function remotely five days each week. “People said, ‘We don’t want to just go back to four days in the office,’” Lind said. “Everyone knows we can do this work well. Let’s not go back to the status quo.”

“I suspect in my group, there will be enough flexibility that we won’t lose people because of rigid come-back-to-work policies,” he said. “But I’m sure across Stanford at large, lots and lots of people will suddenly say, ‘I don’t want to go back to that old world.’”

In a statement provided by a Stanford spokesman, the university’s vice president for human resources, Elizabeth Zacharias, wrote that the university will assess staff experiences and infrastructure needs and test in-person, hybrid, and remote flexible working arrangements.

There are benefits to these arrangements, including retention and work-life balance, she wrote. Still, remote work may not be effective “in certain settings when the university returns to full operations,” she wrote. “Our goal is to find the right balance of flexible work to meet our operational, unit, and individual staff needs.”

Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s admissions and enrollment office has lost four people over the last few months. Two moved for career growth, said Andrew Palumbo, dean of admissions and financial aid, and one went to graduate school. The fourth moved closer to family. Each of those transitions made sense, Palumbo said. “Staff aren’t indentured servants. They’re professionals — constant free agents.”

Still, he said, offering flexibility — in addition to mission-driven work — is a way that colleges can compete for talent. His office is allowing employees to work four days in the office and one day remotely, and while operating a hybrid office will be more challenging for supervisors, Palumbo said people will value the flexibility.

“As people look around,” he said, they’ll want to know “not just what are the hours I’m going to work” but also “what is the quality of time I’m spending at work.”

The University of West Florida told supervisors and department heads to return to their offices by July 6, with exceptions for “permanent remote workers” and those with Americans With Disabilities Act and Family Medical and Leave Act paperwork on file.

Jeffrey Djerlek, associate vice president for finance and university controller, is expecting his team to come back to the office fully. He asked his direct reports how teleworking and hybrid scheduling were working for them.

One thing surprised him: They said they would prefer to be either fully remote or fully in person rather than a hybrid mix. Such a mix felt “too complicated” to nearly everyone he talked to, he recalled. It would be difficult to remember to send and bring information and files back and forth between workplaces.

Djerlek knows of colleagues elsewhere in higher education who are seeking early retirement instead of coming back to campus. He said he can count 10 people in Florida’s university system who have left or plan to leave by the end of the year.

“They got a little taste” of not coming into the office, he said. “Now they understand the balance of life. It’s more important now.”

Greater Balance

Many staff jobs in higher education are student-facing, and the remote-work decision for such positions has a different calculation than for behind-the-scenes jobs like data analysis and technology.

Advisers in the honors college at the University of South Florida will begin rotating back into the office later in June before a full return in August, said Reginald Lucien, director of advising.

His team is “here to support the students where the students happen to be,” he said. “They want to be on campus, and they want to engage on campus.” Students will have the option to meet remotely, but advisers will take those meetings from campus, he said.

Lucien draws a distinction between that work and more-administrative tasks, which “could be accomplished via dual modality.”

He said he expects some flexibility to continue, however, after the pandemic. If employees need to take an hour to drop off a pet at the vet, or take care of a sick relative, “it’s going to be easier.”

Though people are “all over the spectrum,” many of Kevin Grubb’s colleagues in Villanova University’s career-services office hope for “some version of flexibility,” he said.

The priority is to make decisions focused on students’ best interest, said Grubb, associate vice provost for professional development and executive director of the career center.

Balancing personal lives and family obligations has been much easier with a more flexible approach, said Brandi Scott, director of the multicultural student center for equity and justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She said she hopes higher education — and employers more broadly — have learned that from this experience.

The center will pursue a hybrid schedule moving forward, primarily due to continued Covid-19 safety concerns, Scott said. One team will be on campus on Monday and Wednesday, and another team will be there on Tuesday and Thursday. There will be a rotating support staff on Friday.

The sensitive conversations that Scott’s center once led in intimate settings are taking place online. Students have attended virtual events in larger numbers than expected, Scott said. After the murder of George Floyd last year, hundreds of people participated in a community gathering on Zoom.

It demonstrated to students, faculty, and staff, she said, that this challenging work could be conducted virtually.

It is my sense that as we move to a blended university, most colleges will implement more flexible work rules that will allow their staffs to work remotely either fully or partially.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

NBC News is reporting that over 8,000 students and hundreds of employees in a single Florida school district have tested positive for Covid-19 or may have been exposed to the coronavirus, school officials.

Hillsborough County Public Schools said in a statement that 8,400 students and 316 staff members are in isolation or quarantine.

“Isolation refers to individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 while quarantine refers to those who have had close contact with a positive case,” the statement said.

The school district called an emergency board meeting for today at 1 p.m. to discuss measures “up to and including mandatory face coverings for all students and staff.”

The district, which includes Tampa, serves over 200,000 students in more than 200 elementary, middle and high schools, according to its website. It is the seventh largest in the country.

“We must continue safety practices community-wide as we work to combat this virus,” Superintendent Addison Davis said Saturday.

The deaths of two teachers and a teacher’s assistant from Covid in Broward County rattled residents as children began to return to classrooms, even as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis challenged school districts that flout his ban on mask mandates for schoolchildren.

Florida broke its record for daily confirmed Covid cases this month.

Speaking Friday to MSNBC, Davis said the district would mandate masks while allowing parents to opt out.

“We’re going to make sure we still follow every statutory requirement, all the legal ramifications,” Davis said. “But at the same time show that sensitivity with Covid in our community and put mitigation strategies in order to be successful.”

The announcement of the emergency meeting did not mention whether opting out of the proposed mask mandate would be considered.

Please learn the lesson of the need to vaccinate and masked-up!

Tony

Greg Abbott

Dear Commons Community,

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has tested positive for COVID-19, his office said in a statement issued yesterday.

“Governor Greg Abbott today tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. The Governor has been testing daily, and today was the first positive test result,” the statement read. “Governor Abbott is in constant communication with his staff, agency heads, and government officials to ensure that state government continues to operate smoothly and efficiently.”

The Texas Republican, who has signed legislation banning vaccine and mask mandates in his state, gave what he described as a “standing room only event in Collin County” Monday night. Photos of the event show few people wearing masks at the indoor gathering.

Like former President Donald Trump, Abbott was receiving a monoclonal antibody treatment, the statement from his office said. But unlike Trump, who entered Walter Reed hospital in reportedly dire health, Abbott is asymptomatic and has already been vaccinated.

“The Governor will isolate in the Governor’s Mansion and continue to test daily. Governor Abbott is receiving Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment,” the statement read.

Abbott had reportedly told others that he had received a booster shot, NBC News reported.

This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a recommendation that Americans with compromised immune systems receive a booster shot for COVID-19. The U.S. plans to advise most Americans to receive a booster shot eight months after being fully immunized for COVID-19.

Breakthrough infections of COVID-19 remain very rare. In the U.S., 193,204 cases of COVID-19 have been reported among fully vaccinated people between Jan. 1 and early August, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Abbott’s wife, Cecilia, tested negative for the virus, the statement said, and those who had recently come in close contact with the governor have been notified of his positive test result.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Biden addressed the nation (see video above) last night and stood by his decision to pull American troops out of Afghanistan.  I saw his address and he had no regrets.  His speech captured the futility of prolonging the U.S. mission but offered little reflection on how the Taliban were able to so swiftly take over the country.  Here is an analysis courtesy of NBC News.

“President Joe Biden said yesterday that the stunning collapse of the 20-year American project in Afghanistan proved he was correct to end the U.S. mission, arguing that the Taliban’s takeover of the country vindicated his decision to bring home the U.S. troops stationed there.

“I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said. “After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.” 

The president conceded that the success of the militants “did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” over a two-week blitz of Taliban offensives. That will not sway his plans, however: After the 6,000 troops Biden recently deployed to Afghanistan evacuate Americans and U.S. allies in the coming days, “we will conclude our military withdrawal and we will end America’s longest war,” he said.

Biden’s gamble that his defense of his policy will resonate with Americans reflects how war-weariness and skepticism of U.S. foreign policy have gained ground nationally ― a big change from the years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, which prompted then-U.S. leaders to invade Afghanistan, dislodge the Taliban regime, and aggressively, often illegally, pursue other perceived national security threats. 

Earlier this year, Biden set an Aug. 31 deadline for pulling American forces out of Afghanistan, under the terms of a deal that former President Donald Trump signed with the Taliban in 2020. Anti-war lawmakers and organizers see Biden’s decision to follow through on Trump’s plan as a major bipartisan victory in their bid to restrain America’s propensity for costly, brutal foreign military interventions.

“Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it’s always been: preventing a terrorist attack on America’s homeland,” Biden said, adding that he opposed the idea of “nation-building” to establish a Western-style democracy in Afghanistan. He noted that he was the fourth president to oversee a U.S. deployment there: “I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president.”

He said simply continuing the existing mission was not an option, a view many experts share: His realistic choice was to either pull out or double down, given the Taliban’s strength and willingness to attack Americans if the Trump-era deal fell apart.

But the president’s speech offered little reflection on how America had mis-stepped and created the conditions for repressive Taliban forces to reestablish their control over millions of Afghans. And Biden did not address broad, bipartisan criticism of how his team has handled the withdrawal amid the surprisingly fast Taliban advance ― an approach that has caused many Afghans to panic and fueled scenes of desperation at Kabul airport, currently the last American stronghold in the country.

“Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country,” the president said. “The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight … what we could not provide them was the will to fight for their future.” 

National security analysts say U.S. officials should have realized far sooner that they were pumping American taxpayer dollars into a deeply corrupt system that many Afghans had little interest in defending and that they designed the Afghan military to operate along American lines ― a critical vulnerability once the U.S. drawdown began.

Washington also overlooked how its military operations and lack of accountability for excesses drove some Afghans into the Taliban’s arms. In Biden’s telling, the U.S. sent troops to “fight Afghanistan’s civil war” — an absurd depiction given that American choices shaped the war.

Members of Congress and humanitarian groups say that Biden must now focus intensely on Afghans who could be targeted by the Taliban, such as people who worked with the U.S., women in public life and human rights activists.

Biden said his team will work to remove the vulnerable Afghans but blamed others for their plight.

“Some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier,” he claimed, adding that Afghan officials “discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus.”

In fact, thousands of Afghans remain trapped in a bureaucratic backlog as the U.S. has been slow to process their applications for visas despite the Taliban onslaught. The State Department opened up a new visa category for Afghan refugees this month ― but that status is only available to people who have already managed to leave Afghanistan and was announced with little time for most eligible Afghans to apply.

Focusing on what he described as the most important considerations to the U.S., including other terror threats and competition with China, Biden offered few words to the Afghans and others afraid of a newly empowered Taliban ― even, as he said, “human rights must be at the center of our foreign policy.”

“I’m deeply saddened by the facts we now face,” Biden said. “But I do not regret my decision.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

CNN’s Chris Cillizza had an op-ed entitled, The Titanic Hubris of Lindsey Graham, who thinks that he alone can fix Trump and make him a unifying figure for the Republican Party.  Here is the entire piece.

“The following two paragraphs were written about Graham in a lengthy New York Times profile over the weekend:

“He alone can fix the former president, he believes, and make him a unifying figure for Republicans to take back both houses of Congress next year and beyond. To that end, he says, he is determined to steer Mr. Trump away from a dangerous obsession with 2020.

“‘What I say to him is, ‘Do you want January the 6th to be your political obituary?’ he said. ‘Because if you don’t get over it, it’s going to be.'”

Lindsey Graham thinks he can “fix” Donald Trump, turning the former president from a narcissistic obsessive about nonexistent fraud in the 2020 election into a powerful force for good within the Republican Party.

Which, in a word, HA!

There’s lots of reasons why Graham’s belief that he can fundamentally alter Trump is deeply misguided. Let’s go through them.

1) Trump remains totally focused on nonexistent election fraud: While the former president no longer has Twitter — he was permanently banned from the platform after his reaction to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol — he is still issuing a slew of statements every week via his “Save America” PAC. And the common theme in the majority of them is that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him — and that the truth will emerge sometime soon.

“It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the Border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” Trump said Sunday. “It shouldn’t be a big deal, because he wasn’t elected legitimately in the first place!”

“Why are RINOs standing in the way of a full Forensic Audit in Michigan?” Trump said late last week. “The voters are demanding it because they have no confidence in their elections after the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election Scam.”

Yeah, that totally seems like a guy who is ready to move on! He’s totally coming to terms with losing the 2020 election!

2) There is NO Trump 2.0: Remember when Trump promised — after it became clear he would be the Republican nominee in 2016 — that he would be “so presidential [that] you will be so bored. You’ll say, ‘Can’t he have a little more energy?'” How’s that promise looking with five years of hindsight?

The truth is — and always has been — that there is no pivot possible. There is not other gear that Trump can go to, some other side of his personality he hasn’t shown yet. He’s a 75-year-old man who has behaved the same way — boorishly, crudely and utterly without introspection — for his entire adult life. The idea that he will suddenly change — because Lindsey Graham told him to! — is beyond ridiculous.

3) Graham isn’t the boss of their relationship: Even if you discount the two points above — and you shouldn’t — there’s still no chance that Graham can bring his vision of Trump to fruition. Why? Because even by Graham’s own admission, he’s not that guy!

This, from the Times, is illuminating on that point:

“Mr. Graham, 66, has from his school days chosen to ally himself with protective figures he calls ‘alpha dogs,’ men more powerful than himself…

“…’To be part of a football team, you don’t have to be the quarterback, right?’ Mr. Graham said in the interview. ‘I mean, there’s a value in being part of something.'”

Sure! But the left guard doesn’t tell the quarterback what to do. Or suggest how the QB can change himself in order to be a better team player.

That Graham thinks he can change Trump, then, speaks to two things: His own towering sense of self-importance and his fundamental misreading of who Donald Trump is (and always has been). There is no “new” Trump waiting to be discovered by Graham (or anyone else). There’s just Trump. Take him or leave him.”

For those of us who live in New York, we have seen for decades the low character of Donald Trump.  For all his billions, his hotels, and his name in lights,  he was always regarded as a selfish, self-promoting boor.

Tony

Ashraf Ghani

Dear Commons Community,

Afghanistan’s embattled President Ashraf Ghani  left the country yesterday, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.  As reported by the Associated Press.

The Taliban, who for hours had been on the outskirts of Kabul, announced soon after they would move further into a city gripped by panic where helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out.

Civilians fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country as well, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor — who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital — remained in their thousands in parks and open spaces throughout the city.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the U.S. pullout from Vietnam, as many watched in disbelief at the sight of helicopters landing in the embassy compound.

President  Ghani flew out of the country, two officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief journalists. Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, later confirmed that Ghani had left.

“The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation,” Abdullah said. “God should hold him accountable.” 

In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.

Instead, the Taliban swiftly defeated, co-opted or sent Afghan security forces fleeing from wide swaths of the country, even though they had some air support from the U.S. military. But a peace deal with the U.S. limited direct military action targeting them, allowing them to prepare and move quickly to seize key areas when President Joe Biden announced his plans to withdraw all American forces by the end of this month. 

Many quickly drew comparisons between the fall of Kabul — helicopters rumbling overhead evacuating American diplomats — to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, which saw even more chaotic airborne rescues. Pressed on CNN about it, Blinken said: “This is not Saigon.” However, he acknowledged the “hollowness” of the Afghan security forces.

“From the perspective of our strategic competitors around the world, there’s nothing they would like more than see us in Afghanistan for another five, 10, 20 years,” he said. “It’s simply not in the national interest.”

On Sunday, the insurgents entered the outskirts of Kabul but initially remained outside of the city’s downtown. Meanwhile, Taliban negotiators in Kabul discussed the transfer of power, said an Afghan official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. It remained unclear when that transfer would take place and who among the Taliban was negotiating.

The negotiators on the government side included former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah, who has been a vocal critic of Ghani. 

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the closed-doors negotiations, described them as “tense.” Karzai himself appeared in a video posted online, his three young daughters around him, saying he remained in Kabul.

“We are trying to solve the issue of Afghanistan with the Taliban leadership peacefully,” he said, while the roar of a passing helicopter could be heard overhead.

Afghanistan’s acting defense minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, didn’t hold back his criticism of the fleeing president.

“They tied our hands from behind and sold the country,” he wrote on Twitter. “Curse Ghani and his gang.”

The insurgents tried to calm residents of the capital, insisting their fighters wouldn’t enter people’s homes or interfere with businesses. They also said they’d offer an “amnesty” to those who worked with the Afghan government or foreign forces.

“No one’s life, property and dignity will be harmed and the lives of the citizens of Kabul will not be at risk,” the insurgents said in a statement. 

But there have been reports of revenge killings and other brutal tactics in areas of the country the Taliban have seized in recent days. 

And yesterday, panic set in as many rushed to leave the country through the Kabul airport, the last route out of the country as the Taliban now hold every border crossing. NATO said it was “helping to maintain operations at Kabul airport to keep Afghanistan connected with the world.”

One Afghan university student described feeling betrayed as she watched the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy.

“You failed the younger generation of Afghanistan,” said Aisha Khurram, 22, who is now unsure of whether she’ll be able to graduate in two months’ time. “A generation … raised in the modern Afghanistan were hoping to build the country with their own hands. They put blood, efforts and sweat into whatever we had right now.”

The U.S. decided a few days ago to send in thousands of troops to help evacuate some personnel, and two officials said Sunday that American diplomats were being moved from the embassy to the airport. Military helicopters shuttled between the embassy compound and the airport, where a core presence will remain for as long as possible given security conditions. 

The officials were not authorized to discuss diplomatic movements and spoke on condition of anonymity. 

The flights began a few hours after the Taliban seized the nearby city of Jalalabad — which had been the last major city besides the capital not in their hands. 

Meanwhile, wisps of smoke could be seen near the embassy’s roof as diplomats urgently destroyed sensitive documents, according to two American military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation. The smoke grew heavier over time in the area, home to other nation’s embassies as well.

Afghan officials said the militants also took the capitals of Maidan Wardak, Khost, Kapisa and Parwan provinces on Sunday.

The insurgents also seized the land border at Torkham, the last not in their control, on Sunday. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told local broadcaster Geo TV that Pakistan halted cross-border traffic there after the militants seized it. 

Later, Afghan forces at Bagram air base, home to a prison housing 5,000 inmates, surrendered to the Taliban, according to Bagram district chief Darwaish Raufi. The prison at the former U.S. base held both Taliban and Islamic State group fighters.

The United States did not learn its lesson in Vietnam and suffered the consequences in Afghanistan!

Tony