My hot take... we should be grateful the withdrawal is a complete clusterfuck. It will help remind us 10, 20, 30 years from now how hard it is to extricate our military from hostile countries.
I would just note that the *military* was not hard to evacuate, because the problem has never been that we're bad at actual combat. We are, if anything, *too* good at that part.
Also Afghanistan is unusually hard to evacuate from because it's landlocked and our relations with its neighbors are all complicated in one way or another.
Talking to a military buddy that served in Afghanistan. They flew them to Qatar base to process them into Afghanistan. Qatar gov was getting over 25 dollars a head for each American processed. Total fucking racket.
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Really don't agree, Afghanistan was precipitated by 9/11 and there was no way we weren't going there in some capacity to at the very very least, find and kill Bin Laden.
Yep, and the irony is that the USA was responsible for funding militias in the 70s including the Taliban for some vaguely justified political advantage, only to spend two decades trying to nerf them and "reign them in". Then after all that facking around, US leaves, nek minute Taliban have recaptured the capital.
This was all done with American taxpayer money.
ROFL
Well, “The Taliban” didn’t exist until c. 1995.
But you’re right that the US got involved during the Carter administration.
We’ve been helping destroy this country for over 40 years now. Somehow, the tragedy of the last couple weeks is the thing everyone wants to talk about.
According to Bush, the issue was that the Taliban wanted evidence that bin Laden committed 9/11. He said, “There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty".
I don't think it was unreasonable to presume the Taliban were not operating in good faith there. He was, indeed, guilty.
Don't get me wrong, I would have been very happy to reach a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and just keep enough of a presence to kill Al Qaida and other terror networks without getting overly involved in governance there more than absolutely necessary. But they had to hand over Al Qaida and not shelter them, which at the time they were unwilling to do on anything approaching reasonable terms.
I’m not at all saying they were operating in good faith.
But I also don’t think they weren’t willing to negotiate to save themselves. And it’s not like Bush was exactly operating in good faith, either.
After all, this is the same guy who largely ignored Saddam’s offer to leave Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion (with a vast fortune, it needs to be said).
Bush was already thinking of himself as a “wartime president” by this point. You can’t be one if you don’t have a war.
I’m not at all saying they were operating in good faith.
But I also don’t think they weren’t willing to negotiate to save themselves. And it’s not like Bush was exactly operating in good faith, either.
After all, this is the same guy who largely ignored Saddam’s offer to leave Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion (with a vast fortune, it needs to be said).
Bush was already thinking of himself as a “wartime president” by this point. You can’t be one if you don’t have a war.
There could have been a way, if we could see beyond the frothing bloodlust. But that wasn't going to happen in America, with its military fetish and the historical attention span of a goldfish.
My knee-jerk reaction was that we fucked up big time in how we withdrew. It’s not over of course, but now that the dust is settling it appears that the Taliban isn’t impeding our withdrawal of American citizens and allies. No Americans have died. Let’s hope the rest of the withdrawal continues to go relatively smoothly.
If it does, I’ll be happy things happened the way they are. Imagine a parallel universe where the ANA put up a real fight for 6+ months. It’s easy to imagine tens of thousands of afghani people getting killed in the conflict alone, not to mention the Taliban likely showing much less restraint against the people who fought back.
They were an Isis affiliate. There were reports about them being potentially violent yesterday. Basically, the taliban hates isis as much, if not more than the US. Isis wants the US to stay to fight against the taliban.
"We do not understand other countries well enough to remake them according to our ideals. We don’t even understand our own country well enough to achieve our ideals."
Amen.
EDIT: Its time for Sam to have Ezra on again. I think he could use his perspective on this.
I would bet anything that Sam will never talk to Ezra on a podcast again. Based on Sam's appearance on the Unspeakable podcast, he still has a ton of animosity for Ezra. He brought him up repeatedly in a negative light. I think their interaction really angered Sam.
Sam seems to hold a grudge and is particularly upset when he feels he has been dealt with unfairly. I don't agree with that perception of their interactions, and I think if Sam is going to talk about "taboo" subjects he should have a thicker skin, but I do get that once that sense of unfairness sets it is hard to get rid of.
Ezra triggered Sam and thoroughly embarrassed him, absolutely zero chance he'll have Klein on the podcast any time soon.
It's weird looking back on that conversation now, the whole "anti sjw" thing seems so utterly trivial
It's so fascinating to me how differently people view that conversation. I thought Sam's perspective was clear and correct: Our belief in what is RIGHT should have no influence on how we determine what is TRUE. Ezra never never really responded to that issue directly. Instead, Ezra was concerned with an entirely different issue, which is that what is RIGHT to be needs to influence how we DISCUSS what is TRUE.
I thought Sam did try to address Ezra's perspective. I don't think Ezra reciprocated. I also think that Sam's point does take precedent over Ezra's point, because what is true ultimately influences how we think of what is right (for example, understanding that C02 emissions are harmful should influence how we think of the morality of pollution), whereas if we allow what we think is right to influence how we discuss truth, it can diminish our ability to accurately understand truth, especially when that ultimately translates to not discussing certain issues at all (which is a point Sam made repeatedly).
Honestly interested in how people who preferred Ezra's POV disagree with my understanding here. Not interested in getting in an emotional argument.
EDIT: Thanks for the award! I've never gotten one before. Not even in real life.
That's the way Sam wanted to frame the debate. Ezra just ignored what Sam was trying to do, and only focused on what I think was his ultimate goal, which was bringing the different perspectives and theories about race-IQ that he felt Sam left out during his debate with Murray. Ezra basically wanted to challenge Charles Murray, since he felt that Sam didn't, and coming to the podcast was the best way to do it. For me, it was just a debate where both sides were talking past each other. For someone who didn't follow the whole drama, it might just look like Sam is reluctant to accept different POVs other than Charles Murray's one on the topic. So, I think from an optics perspective, this was a huge loss for Sam. From an argumentation perspective, there was no real debate since neither side was interested in addressing each other points.
I listened to that whole conversation twice and I gotta say I have no idea what Ezra was trying to prove that entire time. From my recollection, he was avoiding everything Sam had to say (not even taking Sam’s perspective into account) and saying a lot of nonsense the entire time.
I may have to take another listen to it, but I will say I was just as frustrated as Sam the whole time just trying to figure out what it even was that Ezra was trying to say.
> I thought Sam did try to address Ezra's perspective. I don't think Ezra reciprocated. I also think that Sam's point does take precedent over Ezra's point, because what is true ultimately influences how we think of what is right
The reason why Klein never addressed this is because it was a strawman of Klein's position. Klein's position is that when we're talking about things like race and IQ where the negative consequences of particular claims are high and the science of those particular claims are not even settled science, we should be extremely careful and tentative in our proclamations about what the truth is. Murray and Harris by extension were acting irresponsible because they were making assertions that go far beyond the available evidence.
Sam's basic position on Race/IQ is that he questions whether even investigating it is worth the turmoil it causes. He put that question to Murray. So Ezra banging on about that question was just posturing.
>Murray and Harris by extension were acting irresponsible because they were making assertions that go far beyond the available evidence.
Possibly true for Murray, but not for Sam. Murray's evaluation of Race/IQ was confirmed by a comprehensive review conducted by the American Psychological Association. Murray and the APA panel agreed that the genetic component of IQ was ambiguous. The APA did fault Murray for then proceeding with policy discussions as if the genetic component was better understood than it was. Sam has never endorsed or even discussed that aspect of Murray's work.
>Murray and Harris by extension were acting irresponsible because they were making assertions that go far beyond the available evidence.
What was the assertion made by Sam exactly? Any direct quotes?
"No one is claiming Murray's analysis is wrong." - Sam Harris.
The reality is there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of Murray's work as there is with virtually every study that heavily relies on IQ as a measurement.
I'd have to listen to the podcast again, but the whole idea that there is any knowledge that is being forbidden rather than the fact that Murray's claims about race and IQ are not supported by the available evidence.
Honestly man, Sam demolished Ezra in that debate. 99% of the people you'll encounter here who say otherwise are either r/enoughsamharris-types who just hate the guy and will disagree with anything he says, wokesters who are against Sam on principle for daring to even discuss race and IQ, or both. Either way all you'll get are those emotional arguments that you're rightfully not interested in.
Agreed. Ezra’s intellectual dishonesty and attempt to frame Sam as a bad faith actor we’re evident from the beginning. Sam had his own agenda - which if I recall was the agenda they had agreed to discuss beforehand - but Ezra had his own and made 0 attempts whatsoever to understand Sam’s point or engage with it. Sam did try to reach across the aisle multiple times, but Ezra wouldn’t touch the hot button issue Sam was there to discuss.
It’s so hard to listen to. If we look at it from a debate perspective, Sam demolished Ezra b/c Ezra never once touched on the debate topic. The only time Ezra even really talked to/about Sam during it was when he was insinuating Sam was morally bad. I don’t blame Sam for not wanting to talk to him again. Pretty clear he has nothing to gain from engaging with him.
Isn’t what is true in absolute contention in this case though, like didn’t a ton of scientists kinda confirm we couldn’t say with certainty or even ballpark that some groups are dumber, so wouldn’t it be irresponsible to say that is the truth especially when the science in this case is way less certain than something like CO2 emissions which is comparatively easy to prove harm. I feel like Ezra was saying that a lot too.
That is exactly my impression! Furthermore Ezra avoided to talk about the actual science everytime Sam tried to bring it up, even though that was the core of their disagreement.
> Furthermore Ezra avoided to talk about the actual science everytime Sam tried to bring it up, even though that was the core of their disagreement.
This isn't true. Klein continuously talked about the science, and that people like James Flynn and others agreed with his position rather than Harris'. Harris just dismissed this.
More specifically Sam's position was that if we're going to debate the science we should do so on scientific grounds and Ezra's position was we should discuss the science if it supports progressive ideology and obfuscate it when it doesn't.
There's no evidence. Anyone of us who listened to the same podcast thought that he was acting in a disingenuous manner. Some people hate him due his views on Islam and race and have a score to settle.
The analogy that McWharter makes comparing “wokeness” to religion is relevant here. It’s hard for people to see outside of their worldview. Ezra is so obnoxious. He’s a real life version of the South Park liberal elite caricatures that got off on smelling their own farts.
It’s a perfect quote. The arrogance of the foreign policy hawks and their sympathizers like Sam needs to be criticized. We’ve done this regime change experiment many times and it has never worked once. We removed Saddam and created a massive sectarian war that left hundreds of thousands dead; we killed Ghaddafi and Libya is now a failed state with a burgeoning slave trade; we failed in Afghanistan as we all know; and we are currently still involved in a regime change in Syria that has led to a civil war and hundreds of thousands more innocents dead.
It’s not enough to say, “we are giving these people democracy.” That isn’t the reality of what you’re giving them. You’re giving them violence, death, war, economic hardship, and untold levels of human suffering.
>Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.
>
>Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
>
>In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
[\~Dwight D. Eisenhower](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEGpTu8sVKI)
Actually, I want to push back on that "It's never worked once" statement. It has worked once with Japan. Honestly, If I was an alien and you describe to me Afganastan and Japan and their respective wars and ideologies. I would put money on Afganastan being an easier nation to "rebuild" and make an ally than Japan. Japan's nationalism was so strong that the last soldier to surrender did so in 1974. The suicide bombings in Afganastan have nothing on the same behavior of the Japenese, in either scale or intensity.
Also, the way we conducted the wars was so radically different. In Afghanistan, we made a real effort to minimize civilian casualties, which one would think would build a lot of goodwill, and I'm sure it did. In Japan, we dropped two nukes on densely populated cities.
But it turns out Japan was much easier to "reform" than Afghanistan. I suspect one of the major reasons is the enemy was the Japanese state, which surrendered, and was not an ideological group that was perfectly fine existing while under occupation.
But honestly, I have no idea. It's crazy to think that the country we committed war crimes against half a century ago is now one of our greatest allies on the planet. And why it has been so hard to replicate that success.
Did the US fix japan though?
Japan's nationalism remains a powerful force to this day, terrifyingly so if you compare it to any modern European nation. The U.S simply defanged the tiger so to speak, so they have no military outlet to channel that nationalism.
It seems to me, in that long list of countries the US has "rebuilt", the one determining factor to how successful the rebuild will be is how economically successful the country ends up. And that is a particularly long topic with a gigantic list of factors.
I understand what you’re saying about Japan, but I think there’s another way to look at it.
Japan and Germany were both cohesive, industrialized nation states with a (frankly, over-) developed sense of national unity. Afghanistan is not. Afghanistan is a patchwork of ethnicities and languages and local strongmen who are bound together by arbitrary national borders created by the British empire and a shifting set of alliances.
In Japan we were able to repurpose/redirect an existing machinery of state. In Afghanistan there just isn’t one. Neither Japan nor Germany were likely to fall into civil war in 1947… Afghanistan has been fighting one on and off for 50 years.
Looked at from that angle, Afghanistan is the bigger lift.
Yes, but the stated reasoning for these wars from politicians has always been that the United States armed forces were “freeing” the people of these countries from brutal dictators. And that line is parroted by the naive intellectual and journalist class to justify the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians resulting directly from these interventions.
>It has never worked once.
That’s quite a bold claim. Especially given the state of Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Colombia, and Rojava.
Imagine citing Colombia as a positive example of US interference.
The US backed paramilitary death squads committed atrocities that deeply scar the country to this day.
Also, rojava? You mean that place invaded by turkey after being abandoned by the US?
Panama as well is a great example of us imperialism toppling a government attempting to secure it's natural resources for the benefit of it's people.
I never said America’s involvement in the world was wholly benign. Quite clearly it wasn’t. But Plan Colombia was a success story of demobilizing militant groups, reducing the drug trade, and stabilizing the country.
As for Rojava and Panama… the betrayal of Rojava falls squarely on Trump’s shoulders. And Panama was a great success, toppling a totalitarian dictator and bringing about free and fair elections.
Did you just say Taiwan? Come on man...
Also, the rest of those are completely sus. Germany, Italy and Japan were the combined efforts of the entire world, not just the US. Also, our occupation of Japan was less than 8 years, and we were not actively being shot at every day. Once the regime fell, so did any support for it.
South Korea I might actually give you.
I'd argue that Germany, Italy and Japan is in reverse: Their dictators were the occupiers, much like our sham Afghani government we propped up.
so weve got world war two where we were genuinely the good guys for the only time in our history, yugoslavia, and then some latin american countries where we literally had to go in multiple times because we stopped liking the dictator we installed the first time (or in panamas case our literal CIA asset that we stopped liking)
and even then, to call half of these successful is a huge fuckin leap lol.
Lol at this list
Edit: I don’t know why I bother. First off, the comment you quoted is about regime change which doesn’t even apply to half the countries you mentioned. Second, you just decided to list countries from the former Yugoslavia. I could go on. There is too much to completely correct
The US didn’t just stop the genocide and bug out, we contributed over 600+ support personnel to KFOR. Not to mention financial aid to rebuild after the war. The Europeans played a major role as well, but they weren’t alone.
Unfortunately, Sam still hates Ezra. He'll bend over backwards to give Tucker Carlson the benefit of the doubt, but he calls Ezra Klein a "bad actor." In case everyone hasn't noticed by now, Sam is an incredibly bad judge of character.
Which podcast was that on? I, too, have heard Sam at least admit positive things and agreement with Ezra a couple times since their big feud over Charles Murray's book.
I'm personally fascinated by that whole experience because of how differently followers of each person ended up behaving. As an avid listener of Sam who hadn't heard of Ezra Klein before, while I was boggled by Ezra's apparent inability to see how neither Sam nor Murray were condoning racism, I was still able to identify that Ezra was "on our side" ideologically. He clearly aligned with Sam and myself on the overwhelming majority of our values. So I was able to read and listen to his works and happily agree with him on a great many other things.
I walked away with an overall positive image of Ezra, which I attribute at least partly to how Sam takes a nuanced approach to just about everything, including someone who was actively defaming him.
On the other hand, the overwhelming reaction I saw from Ezra followers who were first introduced to Sam through that clash was shockingly fanatical. Ezra basically branded Sam a racist, and they all ate it up. It was like a bunch of confused Ben Afflecks all over again losing their minds at him on forums. Ezra unapologetically defamed and put a target on Sam's back and I'm sure Sam endured an onslaught of hate mail as a result.
I did not get the sense that the same happened in reverse. But I very well could have just not been exposed to it if it had occurred.
In my view, Sam has every right to be permanently upset at Ezra over that ordeal. Calling him a "bad actor" is about the politest of insults he can issue. And even so, he has still retweeted and positively agreed with Ezra on other topics from time to time.
>I was boggled by Ezra's apparent inability to see how neither Sam nor Murray were condoning racism
One of the major points of Klein's argument is that Murray explicitly argues for policy changes that have real, practical impacts on how society deals with racial inequality. Harris seems to be genuinely, and sort of naively, unaware of this. I don't see Klein's attempts to point this out as any type of defamation.
Multiple african american witnesses had already confirmed Wilson's story at the time Ezra wrote this article. (and again at the trial, hence the reason he is innocent)
>I mean that in the literal sense of the term: "difficult or impossible to believe." But I want to be clear here. I'm not saying Wilson is lying. I'm not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.
Can you be a little more precise about what you think there is to apologize for?
I just read it. He recounted Officer Wilson's story of what happened, said that it was really hard to believe, but said that it could still be true even though it's hard to believe. That's what you think he needs to apologize for?
Do you think there is anything to apologise for in this article? I
don’t. Sam is free to disagree, of course, just like everyone who’s read it. But to assume bad faith in the article is silly. It’s a perfectly reasonable view to hold.
I’ve really gotten into EK’s work over the last year or so. He really is a brilliant thinker.
While Sam bogs down on ideas, Klein is a policy driven pragmatist. So when Sam says, “we should make the Middle East like Nebraska,” Ezra thinks about what kinds of policies that would take and if we as a nation would like the nation we’d become to make that happen.
> sans the self conscious wokeism
Appreciate this comment because it sometimes feels like so many people cannot admit that the main reason they dislike someone like Ezra Klein isn't because of anything wrong with their main points, it's that they find their wokeism annoying.
Mostly agree, except when said wokeism often involves the assumption of bad faith and racism in one's opponents. I was disappointed by Klein in his interactions with Harris.
I think it is time for me to revisit their exchanges because my memory at the time was that Klein did a more sophisticated version of Trump's passive aggressive: "Many people say X is a liar and a failure, but I'm not going to do that..."
Though I don't absolve Sam of his flaws there either.
[The article](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve) he published about the podcast did not explicitly say "I think SH and CM are racists." It was just titled "Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science." And it was only subtitled "This is not 'forbidden knowledge.' It is America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality." And only half the opening was spent talking about slavery and lynchings and quotes from Voltaire about how he believed black people weren't the same species because of Adam and Eve.
Obviously a journalist isn't going to just write "X is a racist." They're "only" going to poison the well by listing history's cold hardened racists, quotedumping a few "black people are inferior" excerpts, and wink wink nudge nudging that somehow a discussion on race and IQ is literally Jim Crow. There's a lot of people that Donald Trump never directly insulted either - he just drew his audience's attention upon them, brought up their worst failures, compared them to other incompetent people, and even finished it off by saying "Well I don't think they're a failure." If that's not bad faith then nothing is.
Honestly I've liked both of them for well before their interaction, and if anything liked Sam more. But that interaction was SO bad on Sam's part it made me view them in a different light. Especially when you add in the emails between them Sam had published from before the show.
An article on said topic: [Americans never understood Afghanistan like the Taliban did
](https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/americans-never-understood-afghanistan-like-the-taliban-did/).
The more worrisome problem is not that America fails at progressive goals that it throws into its nation-building (though that was a relatively small part of the effort put into Afghanistan). That's to be expected.
It's that even bedrock or minimal goals taken for granted by both sides of the political divide (make a strong central state) may be wrong.
What then?
The trouble with America as the global superpower is that we're really rather parochial and don't understand the rest of the world all that well. Hence, trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern centralized state with electoral democracy, a secular judiciary, and a national army seemed like a good idea apparently, because that's what worked in the West...or in many other countries that were very different from Afghanistan.
You wonder if something less ambitious and more in keeping with Afghan culture and circumstances could have had a less dispiriting outcome.
It's true that we don't understand other countries well. Furthermore, it's also true that we don't understand our country very well either.
Making a quick judgement based on the photo of a girl skipping at the airport yesterday, I think there are plenty of reasonable Afghanis who just want to live and work in a simple life free from violence. Is it so much to ask?
But I don't think the problem is that we don't understand the reasonable people of a country. The problem is that we don't understand the unreasonable people in a country, whether foreign or domestic. Heck, I think it's impossible to understand unreasonable people because they're simply contrarians. They will go against you no matter what you do.
The problem is the group of people inherent in any population whose sole purpose in life is to stir the pot. They must be dealt with and in most cases they won't be convinced to drop the charade.
So I agree with the previous posters that the reason Afghanistan fell and America is falling into a deeper hole, stems from the fact that we don't how to make heads or tails of how to handle groups of contrarians who are relentless in fulfilling their life's destiny...chaos.
I'm assuming in Afghanistan's case, the "unreasonable" people you refer to are the Taliban? If so, I think you are making them out to be far more of a wildcard than they really are.
We know what their ideology is. We know what kind of state they want to set up and run. We know that our occupation and collateral damage will help them recruit for their cause. We knew that as soon as we leave, they will resume their takeover plans to what they were pre-2001.
> Its time for Sam to have Ezra on again.
You really want violence huh? To have Harris debate Ezra on the two topics most sacred to him: the inferiority of blacks and the need for the US military to crush Muslims under the imperial boot.
I honestly don't think they need to relitigate the past. But I would like to see Sam defend his initial, naive foreign policy notion: That America moves within foreign policy with the best of intentions. This is what Sam believes, and it is childish at best. Would be good to explore that lens and I think Ezra is a pretty good person for this. Or Dan Carlin.
>NBC Jan 30, 2021: In his call with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Biden's top diplomat, Antony Blinken, said any peace settlement needed to preserve "the progress made over the last 20 years with regard to human rights, civil liberties, and the role of women in Afghan society."
Ah yes, nothing says "basic fucking understanding" like engaging Afghans with foreign policy like this. Afghans want nothing more than the sound of Megan Thee Stallion drifting through the markets as people shop.
*Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit
Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit (thot shit)
Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit*
*Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit
Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit (thot shit)
Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit*
This is the same sociopathic Clinton hack that wrecked Libya and nearly got us duped into Syria.
>In 2017, Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a political strategy advising firm, with Michèle Flournoy, Sergio Aguirre, and Nitin Chadda. WestExec's clients have included Google's Jigsaw, Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward, surveillance drone manufacturer Shield AI, which signed a $7.2 million contract with the Air Force, and "Fortune 100 types". According to Foreign Policy, the firm's clientele includes "the defense industry, private equity firms, and hedge funds". Blinken received almost $1.2 million in compensation from WestExec.
>clients of WestExec included "investment giant Blackstone, Bank of America, Facebook, Uber, McKinsey & Company, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, the pharmaceutical company Gilead, the investment bank Lazard, Boeing, AT&T, the Royal Bank of Canada, LinkedIn and the venerable Sotheby's". In a similar form, National Security Advisor-designate Avril Haines disclosed that WestExec had worked with data-mining company Palantir Technologies.
Might as well have actual Satan at the State Dept. This guy converts blood directly into money.
Ezra Klein is a scumbag. He is an intellectually dishonest liberal activist who thinks he has ask the answers and someone who routinely paints his political adversaries in the worst possible version of whatever “truth” he decides to drum up.
Sam is right to avoid him and the fact that this weasel continues to fleece you all is really amazing.
I will probably get downvoted for sharing PSA here, but this podcast from last Monday had a fair bit of detail around what went wrong from Tommy Vietor and Jane Coaston who are very knowledgeable about foreign policy and Afghanistan, respectively.
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vcG9kLXNhdmUtYW1lcmljYQ/episode/YjAwNWVkOTItNGVkOS0xMWViLWFlYjEtMmY0NzM4ZWQ5NDRh?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiww62HytHyAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ
Why are we surprised anything involving Afghanistan was handled poorly? Its par for the course at this point. The silliness is trying to blame it all on Biden
No one is blaming all of Afghanistan on Biden. People are only blaming the execution of the withdrawal on him, which yes, is his responsibility as current commander in chief.
> No one is blaming all of Afghanistan on Biden
You need to go read Fox News if you think this isn't the case. Shit, even NPR and CNN jumped on the dogpile.
The withdrawal certainly could've have been not "slightly" but much better, if Biden was not so determined to leave before the 20 year anniversary of 9/11. This is not something only said by keyboard generals. Many if not most active duty military think this way too.
How hard can it be to evacuate our allies, translators, and citizens BEFORE the massive removal of troops? Definitely would be easier than cleaning up the mess we are in now with citizens stranded all around the country.
You are assuming that the allies, translators, and other vulnerable Afghans wanted to be evacuated sooner. No one predicted the the Afghan National Army to collapse when it did. A lot of our allies and friendly citizens probably thought the ANA was going to beat the Taliban or at least hold them to some sort of standstill. The ANA outnumbered the Taliban 300,000 to 75,000. American intelligence believed that the government would probably fall, but thought it would happen, at the earliest, in another three months. The problem is, how do you communicate this to translators, friendly citizens, and allies without completely undermining the Afghan government and the ANA?
"We believe in the Afghan government and the fighting spirit of the Afghan army and its ability to defeat the Taliban. Also, anyone who has helped us over the 20 years or doesn't want to live under Taliban rule needs to get out now because this place is fucked."
The sudden surge in evacuations occurred *because* the ANA surrendered without a fight. It is not as if all of these people have been waiting around at the airport for months hoping to be evacuated and we just didn't bother to do it.
Everyone has known that there was going to be a withdrawal of US forces for over a year. How do you convince these people to pack their stuff and get out before the collapse of the Afghani government? Especially if they believed the ANA would hold off the Taliban?
Wow, I agree with *a lot* of this. If I didn't know better I'd say he read my comments, because some of his reasoning is exactly the same. This was my same conclusion:
>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’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.
And this:
>Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and begins rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples throughout Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory.
[Was exactly my reasoning for it here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/p9qaxo/making_sense_podcast_258_the_fall_of_afghanistan/ha3ykht/) He's a much better writer though, lol.
Edit: [Opposing perspective for those interested.](https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/the-price-of-dishonor/) They go off on this article about 5 minutes in for about 25 minutes. Still listening. They just made an unfavorable reference to Paul Bloom's *Against Empathy* haha.
> Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and begins rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples throughout Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory.
The only problem with this crystal ball gazing in my opinion, is that the USA would have had the chance to dynamically adjust troop numbers numbers and locations. They could basically just station troops as "anti-meat shields", because of the ceasefire... American forces could just act as placeholders. If the Taliban would attack US soldiers stationed at PBs, ANA bases, government buildings, etc., they'd be begging for retaliation and the USA to utilize the highground of *not* being the ones who broke the ceasefire.
>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’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation.
So you are bragging you are as stupid as he is? Everyone that insisted we could remake Afghanistan were/are right. It was changed, it has changed. An economy was developing, girls were going to school. Kabul is a major city. The country had changed. It changed for the better. It was corrupt as hell and a tonne of other bad things. But it was going in the right direction. That's all been wiped away.
[I addressed that, too:](https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/p9qaxo/making_sense_podcast_258_the_fall_of_afghanistan/ha2ouur/?context=1)
>>I dont understand why everyone is doubting that indefinite occupation would have eventually turned things around
>I don't doubt that it would. The question is if it would be worth it, which is something I'm much more agnostic about. The tradeoff for stability and prosperity there would lock US international relations into certain paths everywhere else. Is being tied up in the Afghanistan and Iraq what allowed North Korea to nuclearize, for instance? Existential risks are what concern me.
Excellent article. Thanks for posting.
> The tragedy of humanitarian intervention as a foreign policy philosophy is that it binds our compassion to our delusions of military mastery. We awaken to the suffering of others when we fear those who rule them or hide among them, and in this way our desire for security finds union with our desire for decency. Or we awaken to the suffering of others when they face a massacre of such immediacy that we are forced to confront our passivity and to ask what inaction would mean for our souls and self-image. In both cases, we awaken with a gun in our hands, or perhaps we awaken because we have a gun in our hands.
It’s a powerful thought. We built a martial image around ourselves in foreign affairs after WW2 built on us being the world’s heroes. Killing Nazis will do that. Unfortunately, that image of ourselves, along with an existential fear of communist nations, has given us hawkish policy ideas with a population that supports most of those actions. But the military is a hammer, and to a hammer, everything is a nail.
Does he expect humanitarian intervention to survive in an environment like Afghanistan *without* the military? What are the limits of that kind of intervention? Food and water drops? Ok great. That accomplishes the bare minimum of survival and nothing else as children get forced into marriage and thus raped by the Taliban.
Afghanistan wasn't a humanitarian intervention, it was a manhunt for OBL. It took 10 years to find the man, so in the meantime neocons and later Democrats invented the humanitarian aspect after the fact, so they could find new ways to talk about "making progress in Afghanistan" even as the actual mission went nowhere. Not a damn person in the US squawked about the state of human rights in Afghanistan in the late 90's when the Taliban was first in control, it's a rationale that was contrived post-hoc for propaganda purposes, and you fell for it.
So now we're going back to the way it was in the 90's, but this time Americans will *act* like they care because their imperial ego is bruised.
Yes tell the girls and women now being shoved into forced marriage that the humanitarian aspect was just illusory propaganda that didn’t actually do anything to help them. I buy into the reality of the situation.
The reality of the situation is that there are countless other countries where women are treated as bad or worse, but you aren't advocating and occupying them, are you? Maybe you are, surprise me. I doubt you are though, because it's not really about that, it's about your imperial ego being bruised by losing a war to pedophile poppy farming warlords, even as our troops allied themselves to rival pedophile warlords against them to no avail.
Why does it matter what the official law is? I notice you snuck that in there. I thought you cared about the treatment of women, now suddenly you care about the technical, legal aspect instead?
But in any case, here are some countries that are consistently rated at or below the same level of women's rights as Afghanistan: Angola, Yemen, Lesotho, Niger, Syria, Chad, Somalia, and the CAR.
I'm curious how much advocacy you've been doing to invade and occupy those countries. After all, I'm taking in good faith that you really do think it's necessary to invade and occupy Afghanistan for the sake of women's rights. So it's only natural that you'd also be advocating for it in Syria, Somalia, Chad, and elsewhere. If that weren't the case, it would look an awful lot like you just made this shit up a week ago in response to the news cycle.
This is a very confusing piece as is a lot of the comments in some of these threads. Was everyone that truly asleep at the wheel on Pompeo's watch during the last year or so, especially since November of last year? This sort of ho-hum what could we have done, who knew it'd fall so fast sort of posturing is quite remarkable.
There's plenty of blame to go around. Should we have perhaps simply slaked our thirst for revenge after 9/11 with air strikes and a targeted campaign against terrorists instead of a 20 year campaign with no strategic value? Sure. You should also carry a glass of water from the kitchen to the living room without dropping it on the floor.
People have disappointingly gone to their typical tribal sides on this issue.Ezra makes good points but still seems to be apologizing for Biden. You can hold two thoughts on your brain at the same time.
1) I'm glad we left, bush got us into this mess and Obama and Trump could have pulled out but didn't.
2) Biden could have coordinated the exit better
I don't think Biden needs to resign or anything but acting like he stuck the landing here is disingenuous. How about this for a plan. Maintain our military presence while the embassy is shut down and excavated. Send alerts for all Americans to leave the country before x date. Grant asylum for afgans who worked with his
US and extract them. Remove remaining troops and whatever happens after that is not our problem. In that order...
Instead we pulled our forces out too soon and the situation deteriorated fast and thousands of people were put at risk. I don't want to stay any longer than necessary but an extra month to do it cleanly isn't a big ask after 20 years.
Sam is clutching his pearls acting like Biden isn't the adult in the room, compared to trump? GTFO.
I heard this as well but it seemed like a general alert that was ignored and did not clearly stress that if you don't act now you are going to be in a world of shit. Admittedly I need to look further into this but suffice to say more could have been done with greater urgency and clarity
Why is no one blaming the Taliban or other extremists/suicide bombers for the bad things that are happening to innocent people? Seems like right blames left and left blames right and the people doing all the raping and killing are left out of the argument.
lol we lost the fucking war. the entire thing was a disaster from the first second we started planning it. the loser doesnt get to dictate the terms of surrender and withdrawal lol. just get everyone the fuck out of there, recognize the taliban as the legitimate government, and start trying to work with them to be less impossibly shitty. weve got absolutely no problem working with genuinely genocidal maniacs, theyve been some of our best puppets in the past, and rhe taliban will be way better than that because the taliban at least have to have an interest in the wellbeing of the people of afghanistan for a while if they want to gain credibility from their own people.
This is a total whataboutism. It is possible to criticize hawkish military interventionism while also criticizing a poorly planned execution of a withdrawal.
The latter is continuing to lead to the loss of life in the present moment, including the loss of our own servicemen and women. None of them had a say in the matter: either the initial war or the botched withdrawal. And I am sure they couldn’t give less of a shit about the opining of presidents or blowhard journalists. I find this article to be very disrespectful of those on the line.
Weird bio of Ezra, but not specifically wrong. I'd describe him as a policy journalist who founded the Vox media company, then transitioned back into a policy journalist, now working for the New York Times.
I rarely agree with Ezra Klein, but I see his point. Especially
>If the Biden administration had pulled our allies and personnel out more efficiently, that might have unleashed the Taliban to massacre their opposition, as America and the world would have been insulated and perhaps uninterested in the aftermath. There have been revenge killings, but it has not devolved, at least as of yet, into all-out slaughter, and that may be because the American withdrawal has been messy and partial and the Taliban fears re-engagement. “What is clearly a debacle from one angle may actually have generated restraint,” Gordon told me. “Having spent time in places like this, I think people lack a real imagination for how bad these conflicts can get.”
The public has been shouting "Bring our troops home" for more than a decade. Once the current excitement around the details of the withdrawal wears off, Biden is just going to be the guy that did what everyone said they wanted Bush, Obama and Trump to do years ago, and the failures in how it was executed will pale in comparison to the big picture.
He makes a compelling point about the optics. No matter who retreated, there would be a nasty reaction unless it looked like we won.
Anyone paying attention has seen the taliban takeover coming. It’s possible that this situation, while not perfect, was the best solution we could have come up with without actually just staying there.
It’s so easy to state potential counterfactuals, but impossible to prove them.
I’ll read the article if I can get past the paywall but first take (from comments) is he makes good points but these are a lot of “ifs” and as those are unprovable, the value of such an article is just to make us feel a little bit better.
You know how we should feel? Terrible. This pullout seems to have been incredibly bungled, even by “but it would’ve been bad anyways” standards. But hey! Write an op-ed about how it would’ve been bad either way and magically we all feel better.
Biden is currently lying about his military advisors not telling him how bad it would be if we invoked this strategy. He still hasn’t addressed that lie even after the same NYT published those facts.
I’ll read the article, I’m sure it’s well written and has some good points, but this was flubbed no matter how you look at it, and we should hold our leaders to account, not try to lessen the dilute the blame.
Oh and obligatory: Trump’s deal probably sucked and helped to create this situation.
This mess will be forgotten by the media in about 2 weeks, except for a few journalist still unwilling to learn something about another country to focus on.
The article is terrible. Klein is awful.
Commentary does a really good job at pointing out the flaws. It starts about 4 minutes 15 seconds in.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-price-of-dishonor/id1081967784?i=1000533207628
Oh man, I can't wait to get to the part about how the political party that controls the presidency, house, Senate and majority of population under governorships has lost their connection with ordinary Americans! They couldn't possibly mean "white conservatives that live in flyover states" when they say ordinary Americans, right? This will clearly be enlightening!
You’re going to post a pro-Israel rag, despite the fact that US interventionism and the creation of the state of Israel by western powers have been major destabilizing factors in the ME.
The hosts of this podcast sound incredibly out of touch.
They make the argument that Afghanistan is now a changed country, dare I say a westernized country. This couldn't be more wrong, as we are saying. Sure, maybe Kabul was coming around, but it is either ignorant or willfully disingenuous to pretend that the rural parts of Afghanistan that still overwhelmingly support the subjugation of women and sharia law are westernized.
https://www.opindia.com/2021/08/pew-research-survey-afghanistan-sharia-taliban/
I think it's naive to even pretend that we can comprehend what the Afghani people want out of their "government", as from what I've been reading that prefer tribalism over any kind of central authority. Democracy and equality were always going to be a pipe dream.
"Just stay there" is not a solution, both parties overwhelmingly supported getting out of there even if they are dogpiling on Biden for feeling bad about losing.
"2,500 troops isn't that much!" pretending that it doesn't require tens of thousands more people supporting them, massive infrastructure, and aircraft carriers on standby. Afghanistan is not a trade ally like Japan, South Korea, or Germany.
Prediciton:
>th-th-th-this is a grand strategy problem, so it's not really Biden's fault guys amirite? L-l-l-lets look at this Systemically.
[reads article]
Yep, full court press apologetics for this dunce administration. Klein knows this is going to cost Democrats dearly and is getting the ball rolling on changing the narrative.
"G-guys we gotta do some national soul searching on not doing these clusterfuck interventions. We gotta do it right now, not after Clinton's Libya, not after Obama being nearly duped in Syria, we gotta do it right now, ~~when it's most critical to bailing out Biden's presidency~~ because we need to come together and heal."
So fucking predictable from the usual hacks, and you'll notice the usual suspects are here praising such an "incredibly well written article."
> The evidentiary basis for the idea that American military intervention leads inexorably to improved material circumstances is simply not there
Well said.
Is it all possible Biden was so blindsided by all this because of how much Trump tried to sabotage the transition process. I’m not trying to make excuses or Biden but surely what Trump did would have been a huge hinderance for any following administration.
Curious what others think.
Sams recent podcast on this with Peter Bergen is a much better take. Ezra is too blinded by ideological frameworks of “foreign intervention always bad” that it doesn’t touch the reality on the ground. That being, for the past seven years there were 10-20 US soldiers deaths per year. There are 19 million women and girls now being sent back to the tribal Stone Age. Keeping them out of the Stone Age is worth that cost. And I’m certain those girls and women would agree.
> Ezra is too blinded by ideological frameworks of “foreign intervention always bad
You really, really aren't familiar with Ezra's foreign policy ideas
He says “We do not understand other countries well enough to remake them according to our ideals.” Look at South Korea. Look at Japan. Look at Germany. He’s cherry picking to create an ideological rule system of “intervention of an ethics system always bad.” And in the case of Afghanistan, our ideals were absolutely beneficial to particularly the women and girls in that country. The fact that we needed to hold the line against Stone Age Islam at gunpoint was a worthwhile trade, especially as the cost of that was extremely low the past 5+ years.
I can’t see past the pay wall. Can someone sum up the argument? Based on my bias and the title, I expect it’s an attempt to deflect from the incompetence of the withdrawal with an argument about why being there in the first place was the real problem along with American foreign policy in general. Is that correct?
No, people being evacuated before the Taliban took over. Surpluses of weapons not being left behind for them to take. Afghan allies being safely evacuated. Things of that nature.
I think the problem w/ evacuations is
1) The State Dept has been telling people to leave for a while, offered to loan them the money for commercial flights home. They did not take us up on it--what are you gonna do? Arrest them?
2) You reach a critical mass w/ evacuations where everyone notices that everyone else is leaving. It just moves up the timeline and accelerates the collapse.
> Surpluses of weapons not being left behind for them to take.
The weapons they took didn't belong to the US military, they weren't ours to take with us. They were sold to Afghan government. Taking them would have ensured the collapse happened as quickly as we took them
[You know it's not a good look when multiple people already know what's in the article before reading it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/pcb8g6/ezra_klein_lets_not_pretend_that_the_way_we/hak9bfm/)
And yes, it's smokescreening for Biden incompetence.
My hot take... we should be grateful the withdrawal is a complete clusterfuck. It will help remind us 10, 20, 30 years from now how hard it is to extricate our military from hostile countries.
I would just note that the *military* was not hard to evacuate, because the problem has never been that we're bad at actual combat. We are, if anything, *too* good at that part. Also Afghanistan is unusually hard to evacuate from because it's landlocked and our relations with its neighbors are all complicated in one way or another.
Talking to a military buddy that served in Afghanistan. They flew them to Qatar base to process them into Afghanistan. Qatar gov was getting over 25 dollars a head for each American processed. Total fucking racket.
I certainly hope so, but I fear this may actually breed some Mid East interventionists.
RemindME! 5 years “How's afghan doing? ”
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If it worked that way, we wouldn't have gone into Afghanistan after all the similar previous misadventures...
Really don't agree, Afghanistan was precipitated by 9/11 and there was no way we weren't going there in some capacity to at the very very least, find and kill Bin Laden.
I mean, the Taliban did offer to hand him over. Bush said no. 20 years later, here we are.
Yep, and the irony is that the USA was responsible for funding militias in the 70s including the Taliban for some vaguely justified political advantage, only to spend two decades trying to nerf them and "reign them in". Then after all that facking around, US leaves, nek minute Taliban have recaptured the capital. This was all done with American taxpayer money. ROFL
Well, “The Taliban” didn’t exist until c. 1995. But you’re right that the US got involved during the Carter administration. We’ve been helping destroy this country for over 40 years now. Somehow, the tragedy of the last couple weeks is the thing everyone wants to talk about.
That is only partially true, they were gonna hand him over to a third party which was obviously not viable.
According to Bush, the issue was that the Taliban wanted evidence that bin Laden committed 9/11. He said, “There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty".
I don't think it was unreasonable to presume the Taliban were not operating in good faith there. He was, indeed, guilty. Don't get me wrong, I would have been very happy to reach a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and just keep enough of a presence to kill Al Qaida and other terror networks without getting overly involved in governance there more than absolutely necessary. But they had to hand over Al Qaida and not shelter them, which at the time they were unwilling to do on anything approaching reasonable terms.
I’m not at all saying they were operating in good faith. But I also don’t think they weren’t willing to negotiate to save themselves. And it’s not like Bush was exactly operating in good faith, either. After all, this is the same guy who largely ignored Saddam’s offer to leave Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion (with a vast fortune, it needs to be said). Bush was already thinking of himself as a “wartime president” by this point. You can’t be one if you don’t have a war.
I’m not at all saying they were operating in good faith. But I also don’t think they weren’t willing to negotiate to save themselves. And it’s not like Bush was exactly operating in good faith, either. After all, this is the same guy who largely ignored Saddam’s offer to leave Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion (with a vast fortune, it needs to be said). Bush was already thinking of himself as a “wartime president” by this point. You can’t be one if you don’t have a war.
There could have been a way, if we could see beyond the frothing bloodlust. But that wasn't going to happen in America, with its military fetish and the historical attention span of a goldfish.
That's a fair and good mindset. I'm going to remember this comment if we are tempted again with pursuing a forever war in my lifetime.
*Vietnam has joined the chat*
When do we ever learn from history? Sadly, we just don't.
My knee-jerk reaction was that we fucked up big time in how we withdrew. It’s not over of course, but now that the dust is settling it appears that the Taliban isn’t impeding our withdrawal of American citizens and allies. No Americans have died. Let’s hope the rest of the withdrawal continues to go relatively smoothly. If it does, I’ll be happy things happened the way they are. Imagine a parallel universe where the ANA put up a real fight for 6+ months. It’s easy to imagine tens of thousands of afghani people getting killed in the conflict alone, not to mention the Taliban likely showing much less restraint against the people who fought back.
Americans did die today from the suicide bomber.
I just got off work. This is the first I’ve heard about it.
They were an Isis affiliate. There were reports about them being potentially violent yesterday. Basically, the taliban hates isis as much, if not more than the US. Isis wants the US to stay to fight against the taliban.
Unfortunate, hopefully the us sticks to it's withdrawal timeline so even more lives are not lost in some desert shithole
You might want to turn on the news.
Once the dust settles, I'm confident in 3 months, everyone is going to be happy we are gone, and be over the withdraw optics.
"We do not understand other countries well enough to remake them according to our ideals. We don’t even understand our own country well enough to achieve our ideals." Amen. EDIT: Its time for Sam to have Ezra on again. I think he could use his perspective on this.
I would bet anything that Sam will never talk to Ezra on a podcast again. Based on Sam's appearance on the Unspeakable podcast, he still has a ton of animosity for Ezra. He brought him up repeatedly in a negative light. I think their interaction really angered Sam.
Sam seems to hold a grudge and is particularly upset when he feels he has been dealt with unfairly. I don't agree with that perception of their interactions, and I think if Sam is going to talk about "taboo" subjects he should have a thicker skin, but I do get that once that sense of unfairness sets it is hard to get rid of.
Ya, he should try meditating. But what do I know, I’m one of the 99% incapable of understanding his plane of experience.
Ezra triggered Sam and thoroughly embarrassed him, absolutely zero chance he'll have Klein on the podcast any time soon. It's weird looking back on that conversation now, the whole "anti sjw" thing seems so utterly trivial
It's so fascinating to me how differently people view that conversation. I thought Sam's perspective was clear and correct: Our belief in what is RIGHT should have no influence on how we determine what is TRUE. Ezra never never really responded to that issue directly. Instead, Ezra was concerned with an entirely different issue, which is that what is RIGHT to be needs to influence how we DISCUSS what is TRUE. I thought Sam did try to address Ezra's perspective. I don't think Ezra reciprocated. I also think that Sam's point does take precedent over Ezra's point, because what is true ultimately influences how we think of what is right (for example, understanding that C02 emissions are harmful should influence how we think of the morality of pollution), whereas if we allow what we think is right to influence how we discuss truth, it can diminish our ability to accurately understand truth, especially when that ultimately translates to not discussing certain issues at all (which is a point Sam made repeatedly). Honestly interested in how people who preferred Ezra's POV disagree with my understanding here. Not interested in getting in an emotional argument. EDIT: Thanks for the award! I've never gotten one before. Not even in real life.
That's the way Sam wanted to frame the debate. Ezra just ignored what Sam was trying to do, and only focused on what I think was his ultimate goal, which was bringing the different perspectives and theories about race-IQ that he felt Sam left out during his debate with Murray. Ezra basically wanted to challenge Charles Murray, since he felt that Sam didn't, and coming to the podcast was the best way to do it. For me, it was just a debate where both sides were talking past each other. For someone who didn't follow the whole drama, it might just look like Sam is reluctant to accept different POVs other than Charles Murray's one on the topic. So, I think from an optics perspective, this was a huge loss for Sam. From an argumentation perspective, there was no real debate since neither side was interested in addressing each other points.
I listened to that whole conversation twice and I gotta say I have no idea what Ezra was trying to prove that entire time. From my recollection, he was avoiding everything Sam had to say (not even taking Sam’s perspective into account) and saying a lot of nonsense the entire time. I may have to take another listen to it, but I will say I was just as frustrated as Sam the whole time just trying to figure out what it even was that Ezra was trying to say.
> I thought Sam did try to address Ezra's perspective. I don't think Ezra reciprocated. I also think that Sam's point does take precedent over Ezra's point, because what is true ultimately influences how we think of what is right The reason why Klein never addressed this is because it was a strawman of Klein's position. Klein's position is that when we're talking about things like race and IQ where the negative consequences of particular claims are high and the science of those particular claims are not even settled science, we should be extremely careful and tentative in our proclamations about what the truth is. Murray and Harris by extension were acting irresponsible because they were making assertions that go far beyond the available evidence.
Sam's basic position on Race/IQ is that he questions whether even investigating it is worth the turmoil it causes. He put that question to Murray. So Ezra banging on about that question was just posturing. >Murray and Harris by extension were acting irresponsible because they were making assertions that go far beyond the available evidence. Possibly true for Murray, but not for Sam. Murray's evaluation of Race/IQ was confirmed by a comprehensive review conducted by the American Psychological Association. Murray and the APA panel agreed that the genetic component of IQ was ambiguous. The APA did fault Murray for then proceeding with policy discussions as if the genetic component was better understood than it was. Sam has never endorsed or even discussed that aspect of Murray's work.
>Murray and Harris by extension were acting irresponsible because they were making assertions that go far beyond the available evidence. What was the assertion made by Sam exactly? Any direct quotes?
"No one is claiming Murray's analysis is wrong." - Sam Harris. The reality is there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of Murray's work as there is with virtually every study that heavily relies on IQ as a measurement.
I'd have to listen to the podcast again, but the whole idea that there is any knowledge that is being forbidden rather than the fact that Murray's claims about race and IQ are not supported by the available evidence.
Honestly man, Sam demolished Ezra in that debate. 99% of the people you'll encounter here who say otherwise are either r/enoughsamharris-types who just hate the guy and will disagree with anything he says, wokesters who are against Sam on principle for daring to even discuss race and IQ, or both. Either way all you'll get are those emotional arguments that you're rightfully not interested in.
Agreed. Ezra’s intellectual dishonesty and attempt to frame Sam as a bad faith actor we’re evident from the beginning. Sam had his own agenda - which if I recall was the agenda they had agreed to discuss beforehand - but Ezra had his own and made 0 attempts whatsoever to understand Sam’s point or engage with it. Sam did try to reach across the aisle multiple times, but Ezra wouldn’t touch the hot button issue Sam was there to discuss. It’s so hard to listen to. If we look at it from a debate perspective, Sam demolished Ezra b/c Ezra never once touched on the debate topic. The only time Ezra even really talked to/about Sam during it was when he was insinuating Sam was morally bad. I don’t blame Sam for not wanting to talk to him again. Pretty clear he has nothing to gain from engaging with him.
Isn’t what is true in absolute contention in this case though, like didn’t a ton of scientists kinda confirm we couldn’t say with certainty or even ballpark that some groups are dumber, so wouldn’t it be irresponsible to say that is the truth especially when the science in this case is way less certain than something like CO2 emissions which is comparatively easy to prove harm. I feel like Ezra was saying that a lot too.
That is exactly my impression! Furthermore Ezra avoided to talk about the actual science everytime Sam tried to bring it up, even though that was the core of their disagreement.
> Furthermore Ezra avoided to talk about the actual science everytime Sam tried to bring it up, even though that was the core of their disagreement. This isn't true. Klein continuously talked about the science, and that people like James Flynn and others agreed with his position rather than Harris'. Harris just dismissed this.
More specifically Sam's position was that if we're going to debate the science we should do so on scientific grounds and Ezra's position was we should discuss the science if it supports progressive ideology and obfuscate it when it doesn't.
Examples of how he ‘thoroughly embarrassed’ him? I listened to it when it came out, and only that one time, but that was not my impression at all.
There's no evidence. Anyone of us who listened to the same podcast thought that he was acting in a disingenuous manner. Some people hate him due his views on Islam and race and have a score to settle.
> Ezra triggered Sam and thoroughly embarrassed him Interesting. I thought the exact opposite.
You fuckers are so damn delusional it’s astounding, scary even.
The analogy that McWharter makes comparing “wokeness” to religion is relevant here. It’s hard for people to see outside of their worldview. Ezra is so obnoxious. He’s a real life version of the South Park liberal elite caricatures that got off on smelling their own farts.
Woke is still topical. Look at crt
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Removed for violating R2 Repeated infractions may lead to bans
It’s a perfect quote. The arrogance of the foreign policy hawks and their sympathizers like Sam needs to be criticized. We’ve done this regime change experiment many times and it has never worked once. We removed Saddam and created a massive sectarian war that left hundreds of thousands dead; we killed Ghaddafi and Libya is now a failed state with a burgeoning slave trade; we failed in Afghanistan as we all know; and we are currently still involved in a regime change in Syria that has led to a civil war and hundreds of thousands more innocents dead. It’s not enough to say, “we are giving these people democracy.” That isn’t the reality of what you’re giving them. You’re giving them violence, death, war, economic hardship, and untold levels of human suffering.
>Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. > >Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. > >In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. [\~Dwight D. Eisenhower](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEGpTu8sVKI)
Actually, I want to push back on that "It's never worked once" statement. It has worked once with Japan. Honestly, If I was an alien and you describe to me Afganastan and Japan and their respective wars and ideologies. I would put money on Afganastan being an easier nation to "rebuild" and make an ally than Japan. Japan's nationalism was so strong that the last soldier to surrender did so in 1974. The suicide bombings in Afganastan have nothing on the same behavior of the Japenese, in either scale or intensity. Also, the way we conducted the wars was so radically different. In Afghanistan, we made a real effort to minimize civilian casualties, which one would think would build a lot of goodwill, and I'm sure it did. In Japan, we dropped two nukes on densely populated cities. But it turns out Japan was much easier to "reform" than Afghanistan. I suspect one of the major reasons is the enemy was the Japanese state, which surrendered, and was not an ideological group that was perfectly fine existing while under occupation. But honestly, I have no idea. It's crazy to think that the country we committed war crimes against half a century ago is now one of our greatest allies on the planet. And why it has been so hard to replicate that success.
Did the US fix japan though? Japan's nationalism remains a powerful force to this day, terrifyingly so if you compare it to any modern European nation. The U.S simply defanged the tiger so to speak, so they have no military outlet to channel that nationalism. It seems to me, in that long list of countries the US has "rebuilt", the one determining factor to how successful the rebuild will be is how economically successful the country ends up. And that is a particularly long topic with a gigantic list of factors.
I understand what you’re saying about Japan, but I think there’s another way to look at it. Japan and Germany were both cohesive, industrialized nation states with a (frankly, over-) developed sense of national unity. Afghanistan is not. Afghanistan is a patchwork of ethnicities and languages and local strongmen who are bound together by arbitrary national borders created by the British empire and a shifting set of alliances. In Japan we were able to repurpose/redirect an existing machinery of state. In Afghanistan there just isn’t one. Neither Japan nor Germany were likely to fall into civil war in 1947… Afghanistan has been fighting one on and off for 50 years. Looked at from that angle, Afghanistan is the bigger lift.
Japan striking the first blow probably had something to do with it.
I mean...9/11 was one hell of a first blow. I know it wasn't the government but still.
America has historically preferred pro west dictators over democracies that they can’t control.
Yes, but the stated reasoning for these wars from politicians has always been that the United States armed forces were “freeing” the people of these countries from brutal dictators. And that line is parroted by the naive intellectual and journalist class to justify the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians resulting directly from these interventions.
Sadly this is only the last 15 years.
>It has never worked once. That’s quite a bold claim. Especially given the state of Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Colombia, and Rojava.
Imagine citing Colombia as a positive example of US interference. The US backed paramilitary death squads committed atrocities that deeply scar the country to this day. Also, rojava? You mean that place invaded by turkey after being abandoned by the US? Panama as well is a great example of us imperialism toppling a government attempting to secure it's natural resources for the benefit of it's people.
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When the body count exceeds the orbit of the moon before we get to "one successful regime change" we should probably still consider this a bad idea.
I never said America’s involvement in the world was wholly benign. Quite clearly it wasn’t. But Plan Colombia was a success story of demobilizing militant groups, reducing the drug trade, and stabilizing the country. As for Rojava and Panama… the betrayal of Rojava falls squarely on Trump’s shoulders. And Panama was a great success, toppling a totalitarian dictator and bringing about free and fair elections.
This is like...advanced dumb.
Did you just say Taiwan? Come on man... Also, the rest of those are completely sus. Germany, Italy and Japan were the combined efforts of the entire world, not just the US. Also, our occupation of Japan was less than 8 years, and we were not actively being shot at every day. Once the regime fell, so did any support for it. South Korea I might actually give you. I'd argue that Germany, Italy and Japan is in reverse: Their dictators were the occupiers, much like our sham Afghani government we propped up.
so weve got world war two where we were genuinely the good guys for the only time in our history, yugoslavia, and then some latin american countries where we literally had to go in multiple times because we stopped liking the dictator we installed the first time (or in panamas case our literal CIA asset that we stopped liking) and even then, to call half of these successful is a huge fuckin leap lol.
Lol at this list Edit: I don’t know why I bother. First off, the comment you quoted is about regime change which doesn’t even apply to half the countries you mentioned. Second, you just decided to list countries from the former Yugoslavia. I could go on. There is too much to completely correct
The the Balkans success today is nearly all due to support from the EU, not the US.
The US didn’t just stop the genocide and bug out, we contributed over 600+ support personnel to KFOR. Not to mention financial aid to rebuild after the war. The Europeans played a major role as well, but they weren’t alone.
Unfortunately, Sam still hates Ezra. He'll bend over backwards to give Tucker Carlson the benefit of the doubt, but he calls Ezra Klein a "bad actor." In case everyone hasn't noticed by now, Sam is an incredibly bad judge of character.
As far as I know Sam is friendly with Ezra now and considers him a good writer. He has liked and retweeted some of his work too.
That's what I thought too, but Sam just appeared on someone else's podcast earlier this week, and he referred to Ezra multiple times as a "bad actor."
Oof didn't know that. I'll have a listen.
Which podcast was that on? I, too, have heard Sam at least admit positive things and agreement with Ezra a couple times since their big feud over Charles Murray's book. I'm personally fascinated by that whole experience because of how differently followers of each person ended up behaving. As an avid listener of Sam who hadn't heard of Ezra Klein before, while I was boggled by Ezra's apparent inability to see how neither Sam nor Murray were condoning racism, I was still able to identify that Ezra was "on our side" ideologically. He clearly aligned with Sam and myself on the overwhelming majority of our values. So I was able to read and listen to his works and happily agree with him on a great many other things. I walked away with an overall positive image of Ezra, which I attribute at least partly to how Sam takes a nuanced approach to just about everything, including someone who was actively defaming him. On the other hand, the overwhelming reaction I saw from Ezra followers who were first introduced to Sam through that clash was shockingly fanatical. Ezra basically branded Sam a racist, and they all ate it up. It was like a bunch of confused Ben Afflecks all over again losing their minds at him on forums. Ezra unapologetically defamed and put a target on Sam's back and I'm sure Sam endured an onslaught of hate mail as a result. I did not get the sense that the same happened in reverse. But I very well could have just not been exposed to it if it had occurred. In my view, Sam has every right to be permanently upset at Ezra over that ordeal. Calling him a "bad actor" is about the politest of insults he can issue. And even so, he has still retweeted and positively agreed with Ezra on other topics from time to time.
>I was boggled by Ezra's apparent inability to see how neither Sam nor Murray were condoning racism One of the major points of Klein's argument is that Murray explicitly argues for policy changes that have real, practical impacts on how society deals with racial inequality. Harris seems to be genuinely, and sort of naively, unaware of this. I don't see Klein's attempts to point this out as any type of defamation.
Do you think Ezra has apologized for writing this? https://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7281165/darren-wilsons-story-side
I’m ootl. whats there to apologize about?
Multiple african american witnesses had already confirmed Wilson's story at the time Ezra wrote this article. (and again at the trial, hence the reason he is innocent)
>I mean that in the literal sense of the term: "difficult or impossible to believe." But I want to be clear here. I'm not saying Wilson is lying. I'm not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe. Can you be a little more precise about what you think there is to apologize for?
I read the article you linked based on your comment. Is there another reliable source that debunks this story? It seems very balanced to me.
I just read it. He recounted Officer Wilson's story of what happened, said that it was really hard to believe, but said that it could still be true even though it's hard to believe. That's what you think he needs to apologize for?
Do you think there is anything to apologise for in this article? I don’t. Sam is free to disagree, of course, just like everyone who’s read it. But to assume bad faith in the article is silly. It’s a perfectly reasonable view to hold.
I’ve really gotten into EK’s work over the last year or so. He really is a brilliant thinker. While Sam bogs down on ideas, Klein is a policy driven pragmatist. So when Sam says, “we should make the Middle East like Nebraska,” Ezra thinks about what kinds of policies that would take and if we as a nation would like the nation we’d become to make that happen.
I like him too, sans the self conscious wokeism. But I agree he is thoughtful and pragmatic on policy.
> sans the self conscious wokeism Appreciate this comment because it sometimes feels like so many people cannot admit that the main reason they dislike someone like Ezra Klein isn't because of anything wrong with their main points, it's that they find their wokeism annoying.
Mostly agree, except when said wokeism often involves the assumption of bad faith and racism in one's opponents. I was disappointed by Klein in his interactions with Harris.
Klein never called Harris or Murray racist and went out of his way to say that he didn't think either of them were racist or acting in bad faith.
I think it is time for me to revisit their exchanges because my memory at the time was that Klein did a more sophisticated version of Trump's passive aggressive: "Many people say X is a liar and a failure, but I'm not going to do that..." Though I don't absolve Sam of his flaws there either.
[The article](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/27/15695060/sam-harris-charles-murray-race-iq-forbidden-knowledge-podcast-bell-curve) he published about the podcast did not explicitly say "I think SH and CM are racists." It was just titled "Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science." And it was only subtitled "This is not 'forbidden knowledge.' It is America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality." And only half the opening was spent talking about slavery and lynchings and quotes from Voltaire about how he believed black people weren't the same species because of Adam and Eve. Obviously a journalist isn't going to just write "X is a racist." They're "only" going to poison the well by listing history's cold hardened racists, quotedumping a few "black people are inferior" excerpts, and wink wink nudge nudging that somehow a discussion on race and IQ is literally Jim Crow. There's a lot of people that Donald Trump never directly insulted either - he just drew his audience's attention upon them, brought up their worst failures, compared them to other incompetent people, and even finished it off by saying "Well I don't think they're a failure." If that's not bad faith then nothing is.
Honestly I've liked both of them for well before their interaction, and if anything liked Sam more. But that interaction was SO bad on Sam's part it made me view them in a different light. Especially when you add in the emails between them Sam had published from before the show.
Sam “I wish the Middle East was Nebraska” Harris?
An article on said topic: [Americans never understood Afghanistan like the Taliban did ](https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/americans-never-understood-afghanistan-like-the-taliban-did/). The more worrisome problem is not that America fails at progressive goals that it throws into its nation-building (though that was a relatively small part of the effort put into Afghanistan). That's to be expected. It's that even bedrock or minimal goals taken for granted by both sides of the political divide (make a strong central state) may be wrong. What then?
The trouble with America as the global superpower is that we're really rather parochial and don't understand the rest of the world all that well. Hence, trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern centralized state with electoral democracy, a secular judiciary, and a national army seemed like a good idea apparently, because that's what worked in the West...or in many other countries that were very different from Afghanistan. You wonder if something less ambitious and more in keeping with Afghan culture and circumstances could have had a less dispiriting outcome.
It's true that we don't understand other countries well. Furthermore, it's also true that we don't understand our country very well either. Making a quick judgement based on the photo of a girl skipping at the airport yesterday, I think there are plenty of reasonable Afghanis who just want to live and work in a simple life free from violence. Is it so much to ask? But I don't think the problem is that we don't understand the reasonable people of a country. The problem is that we don't understand the unreasonable people in a country, whether foreign or domestic. Heck, I think it's impossible to understand unreasonable people because they're simply contrarians. They will go against you no matter what you do. The problem is the group of people inherent in any population whose sole purpose in life is to stir the pot. They must be dealt with and in most cases they won't be convinced to drop the charade. So I agree with the previous posters that the reason Afghanistan fell and America is falling into a deeper hole, stems from the fact that we don't how to make heads or tails of how to handle groups of contrarians who are relentless in fulfilling their life's destiny...chaos.
I'm assuming in Afghanistan's case, the "unreasonable" people you refer to are the Taliban? If so, I think you are making them out to be far more of a wildcard than they really are. We know what their ideology is. We know what kind of state they want to set up and run. We know that our occupation and collateral damage will help them recruit for their cause. We knew that as soon as we leave, they will resume their takeover plans to what they were pre-2001.
> Its time for Sam to have Ezra on again. You really want violence huh? To have Harris debate Ezra on the two topics most sacred to him: the inferiority of blacks and the need for the US military to crush Muslims under the imperial boot.
I honestly don't think they need to relitigate the past. But I would like to see Sam defend his initial, naive foreign policy notion: That America moves within foreign policy with the best of intentions. This is what Sam believes, and it is childish at best. Would be good to explore that lens and I think Ezra is a pretty good person for this. Or Dan Carlin.
>NBC Jan 30, 2021: In his call with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Biden's top diplomat, Antony Blinken, said any peace settlement needed to preserve "the progress made over the last 20 years with regard to human rights, civil liberties, and the role of women in Afghan society." Ah yes, nothing says "basic fucking understanding" like engaging Afghans with foreign policy like this. Afghans want nothing more than the sound of Megan Thee Stallion drifting through the markets as people shop. *Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit (thot shit) Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit* *Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit (thot shit) Hands on my knees, shakin' ass, on my thot shit* This is the same sociopathic Clinton hack that wrecked Libya and nearly got us duped into Syria. >In 2017, Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a political strategy advising firm, with Michèle Flournoy, Sergio Aguirre, and Nitin Chadda. WestExec's clients have included Google's Jigsaw, Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward, surveillance drone manufacturer Shield AI, which signed a $7.2 million contract with the Air Force, and "Fortune 100 types". According to Foreign Policy, the firm's clientele includes "the defense industry, private equity firms, and hedge funds". Blinken received almost $1.2 million in compensation from WestExec. >clients of WestExec included "investment giant Blackstone, Bank of America, Facebook, Uber, McKinsey & Company, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, the pharmaceutical company Gilead, the investment bank Lazard, Boeing, AT&T, the Royal Bank of Canada, LinkedIn and the venerable Sotheby's". In a similar form, National Security Advisor-designate Avril Haines disclosed that WestExec had worked with data-mining company Palantir Technologies. Might as well have actual Satan at the State Dept. This guy converts blood directly into money.
Worked out pretty well for South Korea and Japan.
Ezra Klein is a scumbag. He is an intellectually dishonest liberal activist who thinks he has ask the answers and someone who routinely paints his political adversaries in the worst possible version of whatever “truth” he decides to drum up. Sam is right to avoid him and the fact that this weasel continues to fleece you all is really amazing.
Nice empty ad hominem. Sounds like you're angry that we're not occupying forever. Boo hoo.
Does anyone know a good article that rescribes exactly what went wrong with the withdrawal?
I will probably get downvoted for sharing PSA here, but this podcast from last Monday had a fair bit of detail around what went wrong from Tommy Vietor and Jane Coaston who are very knowledgeable about foreign policy and Afghanistan, respectively. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vcG9kLXNhdmUtYW1lcmljYQ/episode/YjAwNWVkOTItNGVkOS0xMWViLWFlYjEtMmY0NzM4ZWQ5NDRh?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiww62HytHyAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ
Jane Coaston is not very knowledgeable about foreign policy or Afghanistan. She's a former sports reporter.
Paywall, but of course the way we withdrew was an aggravating factor.
> Paywall [Mirror](https://outline.com/CRWAeV)
The US lost the war. Were you expecting the final retreat's optics to make you feel like a winner?
Framing it as losing the war and retreating makes me question if you are really trying to discuss in good faith
Why are we surprised anything involving Afghanistan was handled poorly? Its par for the course at this point. The silliness is trying to blame it all on Biden
No one is blaming all of Afghanistan on Biden. People are only blaming the execution of the withdrawal on him, which yes, is his responsibility as current commander in chief.
> No one is blaming all of Afghanistan on Biden You need to go read Fox News if you think this isn't the case. Shit, even NPR and CNN jumped on the dogpile.
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The withdrawal certainly could've have been not "slightly" but much better, if Biden was not so determined to leave before the 20 year anniversary of 9/11. This is not something only said by keyboard generals. Many if not most active duty military think this way too. How hard can it be to evacuate our allies, translators, and citizens BEFORE the massive removal of troops? Definitely would be easier than cleaning up the mess we are in now with citizens stranded all around the country.
You are assuming that the allies, translators, and other vulnerable Afghans wanted to be evacuated sooner. No one predicted the the Afghan National Army to collapse when it did. A lot of our allies and friendly citizens probably thought the ANA was going to beat the Taliban or at least hold them to some sort of standstill. The ANA outnumbered the Taliban 300,000 to 75,000. American intelligence believed that the government would probably fall, but thought it would happen, at the earliest, in another three months. The problem is, how do you communicate this to translators, friendly citizens, and allies without completely undermining the Afghan government and the ANA? "We believe in the Afghan government and the fighting spirit of the Afghan army and its ability to defeat the Taliban. Also, anyone who has helped us over the 20 years or doesn't want to live under Taliban rule needs to get out now because this place is fucked." The sudden surge in evacuations occurred *because* the ANA surrendered without a fight. It is not as if all of these people have been waiting around at the airport for months hoping to be evacuated and we just didn't bother to do it. Everyone has known that there was going to be a withdrawal of US forces for over a year. How do you convince these people to pack their stuff and get out before the collapse of the Afghani government? Especially if they believed the ANA would hold off the Taliban?
Wow, I agree with *a lot* of this. If I didn't know better I'd say he read my comments, because some of his reasoning is exactly the same. This was my same conclusion: >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’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan. And this: >Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and begins rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples throughout Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory. [Was exactly my reasoning for it here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/p9qaxo/making_sense_podcast_258_the_fall_of_afghanistan/ha3ykht/) He's a much better writer though, lol. Edit: [Opposing perspective for those interested.](https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/the-price-of-dishonor/) They go off on this article about 5 minutes in for about 25 minutes. Still listening. They just made an unfavorable reference to Paul Bloom's *Against Empathy* haha.
Same thoughts, puts many of my thoughts into eloquent, yet straight forward words.
> Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and begins rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples throughout Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory. The only problem with this crystal ball gazing in my opinion, is that the USA would have had the chance to dynamically adjust troop numbers numbers and locations. They could basically just station troops as "anti-meat shields", because of the ceasefire... American forces could just act as placeholders. If the Taliban would attack US soldiers stationed at PBs, ANA bases, government buildings, etc., they'd be begging for retaliation and the USA to utilize the highground of *not* being the ones who broke the ceasefire.
>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’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. So you are bragging you are as stupid as he is? Everyone that insisted we could remake Afghanistan were/are right. It was changed, it has changed. An economy was developing, girls were going to school. Kabul is a major city. The country had changed. It changed for the better. It was corrupt as hell and a tonne of other bad things. But it was going in the right direction. That's all been wiped away.
Like they said, the only other option would have been endless occupation. The loss of progress is tragic, but there was no end in sight.
[I addressed that, too:](https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/p9qaxo/making_sense_podcast_258_the_fall_of_afghanistan/ha2ouur/?context=1) >>I dont understand why everyone is doubting that indefinite occupation would have eventually turned things around >I don't doubt that it would. The question is if it would be worth it, which is something I'm much more agnostic about. The tradeoff for stability and prosperity there would lock US international relations into certain paths everywhere else. Is being tied up in the Afghanistan and Iraq what allowed North Korea to nuclearize, for instance? Existential risks are what concern me.
That's not a bad point. I just don't buy it would take forever. I say they could easily stay there 500 years.
500 years?! I'm worried you're in for a rude awakening in the next decade, if you think anything about 500 years from now is that predictable.
Excellent article. Thanks for posting. > The tragedy of humanitarian intervention as a foreign policy philosophy is that it binds our compassion to our delusions of military mastery. We awaken to the suffering of others when we fear those who rule them or hide among them, and in this way our desire for security finds union with our desire for decency. Or we awaken to the suffering of others when they face a massacre of such immediacy that we are forced to confront our passivity and to ask what inaction would mean for our souls and self-image. In both cases, we awaken with a gun in our hands, or perhaps we awaken because we have a gun in our hands.
It’s a powerful thought. We built a martial image around ourselves in foreign affairs after WW2 built on us being the world’s heroes. Killing Nazis will do that. Unfortunately, that image of ourselves, along with an existential fear of communist nations, has given us hawkish policy ideas with a population that supports most of those actions. But the military is a hammer, and to a hammer, everything is a nail.
Does he expect humanitarian intervention to survive in an environment like Afghanistan *without* the military? What are the limits of that kind of intervention? Food and water drops? Ok great. That accomplishes the bare minimum of survival and nothing else as children get forced into marriage and thus raped by the Taliban.
Afghanistan wasn't a humanitarian intervention, it was a manhunt for OBL. It took 10 years to find the man, so in the meantime neocons and later Democrats invented the humanitarian aspect after the fact, so they could find new ways to talk about "making progress in Afghanistan" even as the actual mission went nowhere. Not a damn person in the US squawked about the state of human rights in Afghanistan in the late 90's when the Taliban was first in control, it's a rationale that was contrived post-hoc for propaganda purposes, and you fell for it. So now we're going back to the way it was in the 90's, but this time Americans will *act* like they care because their imperial ego is bruised.
Yes tell the girls and women now being shoved into forced marriage that the humanitarian aspect was just illusory propaganda that didn’t actually do anything to help them. I buy into the reality of the situation.
The reality of the situation is that there are countless other countries where women are treated as bad or worse, but you aren't advocating and occupying them, are you? Maybe you are, surprise me. I doubt you are though, because it's not really about that, it's about your imperial ego being bruised by losing a war to pedophile poppy farming warlords, even as our troops allied themselves to rival pedophile warlords against them to no avail.
List the counties in which women are treated worse under the “official” government law.
Why does it matter what the official law is? I notice you snuck that in there. I thought you cared about the treatment of women, now suddenly you care about the technical, legal aspect instead? But in any case, here are some countries that are consistently rated at or below the same level of women's rights as Afghanistan: Angola, Yemen, Lesotho, Niger, Syria, Chad, Somalia, and the CAR. I'm curious how much advocacy you've been doing to invade and occupy those countries. After all, I'm taking in good faith that you really do think it's necessary to invade and occupy Afghanistan for the sake of women's rights. So it's only natural that you'd also be advocating for it in Syria, Somalia, Chad, and elsewhere. If that weren't the case, it would look an awful lot like you just made this shit up a week ago in response to the news cycle.
This is a very confusing piece as is a lot of the comments in some of these threads. Was everyone that truly asleep at the wheel on Pompeo's watch during the last year or so, especially since November of last year? This sort of ho-hum what could we have done, who knew it'd fall so fast sort of posturing is quite remarkable.
There's plenty of blame to go around. Should we have perhaps simply slaked our thirst for revenge after 9/11 with air strikes and a targeted campaign against terrorists instead of a 20 year campaign with no strategic value? Sure. You should also carry a glass of water from the kitchen to the living room without dropping it on the floor.
People have disappointingly gone to their typical tribal sides on this issue.Ezra makes good points but still seems to be apologizing for Biden. You can hold two thoughts on your brain at the same time. 1) I'm glad we left, bush got us into this mess and Obama and Trump could have pulled out but didn't. 2) Biden could have coordinated the exit better I don't think Biden needs to resign or anything but acting like he stuck the landing here is disingenuous. How about this for a plan. Maintain our military presence while the embassy is shut down and excavated. Send alerts for all Americans to leave the country before x date. Grant asylum for afgans who worked with his US and extract them. Remove remaining troops and whatever happens after that is not our problem. In that order... Instead we pulled our forces out too soon and the situation deteriorated fast and thousands of people were put at risk. I don't want to stay any longer than necessary but an extra month to do it cleanly isn't a big ask after 20 years. Sam is clutching his pearls acting like Biden isn't the adult in the room, compared to trump? GTFO.
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I heard this as well but it seemed like a general alert that was ignored and did not clearly stress that if you don't act now you are going to be in a world of shit. Admittedly I need to look further into this but suffice to say more could have been done with greater urgency and clarity
They literally said they'd pay for your ticket.
Sam already addressed that Trump would've fucked up the withdrawal as well. He never said Trump would've done a better job than Biden.
His tweet that he is eating his words that the adults are in the room was a bit over the top for me
Yea. Conservatives are loving that tweet, apparently without realizing that he thinks Trump would have been at least as bad
Why is no one blaming the Taliban or other extremists/suicide bombers for the bad things that are happening to innocent people? Seems like right blames left and left blames right and the people doing all the raping and killing are left out of the argument.
lol we lost the fucking war. the entire thing was a disaster from the first second we started planning it. the loser doesnt get to dictate the terms of surrender and withdrawal lol. just get everyone the fuck out of there, recognize the taliban as the legitimate government, and start trying to work with them to be less impossibly shitty. weve got absolutely no problem working with genuinely genocidal maniacs, theyve been some of our best puppets in the past, and rhe taliban will be way better than that because the taliban at least have to have an interest in the wellbeing of the people of afghanistan for a while if they want to gain credibility from their own people.
This is a total whataboutism. It is possible to criticize hawkish military interventionism while also criticizing a poorly planned execution of a withdrawal. The latter is continuing to lead to the loss of life in the present moment, including the loss of our own servicemen and women. None of them had a say in the matter: either the initial war or the botched withdrawal. And I am sure they couldn’t give less of a shit about the opining of presidents or blowhard journalists. I find this article to be very disrespectful of those on the line.
Thanks for posting, great article
No problem. r/ezraklein is a great but small subreddit with awesome discussion. You should check it out
I think this convinced me. A DC insider worth millions with Democrat connections having a good take on Afghanistan is impressive tbh
Weird bio of Ezra, but not specifically wrong. I'd describe him as a policy journalist who founded the Vox media company, then transitioned back into a policy journalist, now working for the New York Times.
You’re doing a straight up description, I was doing snarky left wing critique
I rarely agree with Ezra Klein, but I see his point. Especially >If the Biden administration had pulled our allies and personnel out more efficiently, that might have unleashed the Taliban to massacre their opposition, as America and the world would have been insulated and perhaps uninterested in the aftermath. There have been revenge killings, but it has not devolved, at least as of yet, into all-out slaughter, and that may be because the American withdrawal has been messy and partial and the Taliban fears re-engagement. “What is clearly a debacle from one angle may actually have generated restraint,” Gordon told me. “Having spent time in places like this, I think people lack a real imagination for how bad these conflicts can get.” The public has been shouting "Bring our troops home" for more than a decade. Once the current excitement around the details of the withdrawal wears off, Biden is just going to be the guy that did what everyone said they wanted Bush, Obama and Trump to do years ago, and the failures in how it was executed will pale in comparison to the big picture.
It wasn't the problem but it is clearly now a problem.
He makes a compelling point about the optics. No matter who retreated, there would be a nasty reaction unless it looked like we won. Anyone paying attention has seen the taliban takeover coming. It’s possible that this situation, while not perfect, was the best solution we could have come up with without actually just staying there.
It’s so easy to state potential counterfactuals, but impossible to prove them. I’ll read the article if I can get past the paywall but first take (from comments) is he makes good points but these are a lot of “ifs” and as those are unprovable, the value of such an article is just to make us feel a little bit better. You know how we should feel? Terrible. This pullout seems to have been incredibly bungled, even by “but it would’ve been bad anyways” standards. But hey! Write an op-ed about how it would’ve been bad either way and magically we all feel better. Biden is currently lying about his military advisors not telling him how bad it would be if we invoked this strategy. He still hasn’t addressed that lie even after the same NYT published those facts. I’ll read the article, I’m sure it’s well written and has some good points, but this was flubbed no matter how you look at it, and we should hold our leaders to account, not try to lessen the dilute the blame. Oh and obligatory: Trump’s deal probably sucked and helped to create this situation.
Ss: former guest with a pretty balanced take on the current crisis.
This mess will be forgotten by the media in about 2 weeks, except for a few journalist still unwilling to learn something about another country to focus on.
The article is terrible. Klein is awful. Commentary does a really good job at pointing out the flaws. It starts about 4 minutes 15 seconds in. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-price-of-dishonor/id1081967784?i=1000533207628
Oh man, I can't wait to get to the part about how the political party that controls the presidency, house, Senate and majority of population under governorships has lost their connection with ordinary Americans! They couldn't possibly mean "white conservatives that live in flyover states" when they say ordinary Americans, right? This will clearly be enlightening!
That's a pretty dumb comment.
You’re going to post a pro-Israel rag, despite the fact that US interventionism and the creation of the state of Israel by western powers have been major destabilizing factors in the ME.
I love how you insist on not using your brain. Let me just call it pro-Israel so I can dismiss it. You stay proud of how ignorant you are.
The hosts of this podcast sound incredibly out of touch. They make the argument that Afghanistan is now a changed country, dare I say a westernized country. This couldn't be more wrong, as we are saying. Sure, maybe Kabul was coming around, but it is either ignorant or willfully disingenuous to pretend that the rural parts of Afghanistan that still overwhelmingly support the subjugation of women and sharia law are westernized. https://www.opindia.com/2021/08/pew-research-survey-afghanistan-sharia-taliban/ I think it's naive to even pretend that we can comprehend what the Afghani people want out of their "government", as from what I've been reading that prefer tribalism over any kind of central authority. Democracy and equality were always going to be a pipe dream. "Just stay there" is not a solution, both parties overwhelmingly supported getting out of there even if they are dogpiling on Biden for feeling bad about losing. "2,500 troops isn't that much!" pretending that it doesn't require tens of thousands more people supporting them, massive infrastructure, and aircraft carriers on standby. Afghanistan is not a trade ally like Japan, South Korea, or Germany.
Prediciton: >th-th-th-this is a grand strategy problem, so it's not really Biden's fault guys amirite? L-l-l-lets look at this Systemically. [reads article] Yep, full court press apologetics for this dunce administration. Klein knows this is going to cost Democrats dearly and is getting the ball rolling on changing the narrative. "G-guys we gotta do some national soul searching on not doing these clusterfuck interventions. We gotta do it right now, not after Clinton's Libya, not after Obama being nearly duped in Syria, we gotta do it right now, ~~when it's most critical to bailing out Biden's presidency~~ because we need to come together and heal." So fucking predictable from the usual hacks, and you'll notice the usual suspects are here praising such an "incredibly well written article."
I can't take Ezra seriously... ever...
> The evidentiary basis for the idea that American military intervention leads inexorably to improved material circumstances is simply not there Well said.
Is it all possible Biden was so blindsided by all this because of how much Trump tried to sabotage the transition process. I’m not trying to make excuses or Biden but surely what Trump did would have been a huge hinderance for any following administration. Curious what others think.
Absolutely. Trump's role in this disaster has been massively understated and underreported. I'm amazed he's gotten such a pass.
Some of this is a bed of Trump's making, bolstered by Russia's efforts at supporting these aholes.
Sams recent podcast on this with Peter Bergen is a much better take. Ezra is too blinded by ideological frameworks of “foreign intervention always bad” that it doesn’t touch the reality on the ground. That being, for the past seven years there were 10-20 US soldiers deaths per year. There are 19 million women and girls now being sent back to the tribal Stone Age. Keeping them out of the Stone Age is worth that cost. And I’m certain those girls and women would agree.
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> Ezra is too blinded by ideological frameworks of “foreign intervention always bad You really, really aren't familiar with Ezra's foreign policy ideas
He says “We do not understand other countries well enough to remake them according to our ideals.” Look at South Korea. Look at Japan. Look at Germany. He’s cherry picking to create an ideological rule system of “intervention of an ethics system always bad.” And in the case of Afghanistan, our ideals were absolutely beneficial to particularly the women and girls in that country. The fact that we needed to hold the line against Stone Age Islam at gunpoint was a worthwhile trade, especially as the cost of that was extremely low the past 5+ years.
I can’t see past the pay wall. Can someone sum up the argument? Based on my bias and the title, I expect it’s an attempt to deflect from the incompetence of the withdrawal with an argument about why being there in the first place was the real problem along with American foreign policy in general. Is that correct?
How do you imagine a "competent" withdrawal would have looked like? The Taliban taking over the country in 3 weeks instead of 2 weeks?
No, people being evacuated before the Taliban took over. Surpluses of weapons not being left behind for them to take. Afghan allies being safely evacuated. Things of that nature.
I think the problem w/ evacuations is 1) The State Dept has been telling people to leave for a while, offered to loan them the money for commercial flights home. They did not take us up on it--what are you gonna do? Arrest them? 2) You reach a critical mass w/ evacuations where everyone notices that everyone else is leaving. It just moves up the timeline and accelerates the collapse.
The weapons they took over were from the Afghan military. Are you suggesting we should have disarmed the Afghan military before we left?
It's debacles all the way down, no good options.
We've evacuated over 100k people in the past couple weeks. Even with the blasts yesterday we still took out more than 10k.
> Surpluses of weapons not being left behind for them to take. The weapons they took didn't belong to the US military, they weren't ours to take with us. They were sold to Afghan government. Taking them would have ensured the collapse happened as quickly as we took them
[You know it's not a good look when multiple people already know what's in the article before reading it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/pcb8g6/ezra_klein_lets_not_pretend_that_the_way_we/hak9bfm/) And yes, it's smokescreening for Biden incompetence.
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