August 17, 2021
I was asked to comment on President Biden’s speech
The fact that the press/media, both parties, are like one weighing in that Biden screwed this up is the one factor that gives me pause.
First, none of these people really know what Biden’s team of Defense, State, and White House actually did, thought about, studied, prepared for etc. What we do know is that real professionals – the layer below appointment – weighed in on this.
Second, they could have told the story better.
Third, I have managed my share of complex projects. Whether a project or a new business, they all have the same characteristic – an “S” shaped curve – wherein it takes much more time than you ever want to evolve from very little return for time and resources invested, to constant returns, to increasing returns. Further, in a really complex project – and what Biden’s team faced was as complex as getting COVID testing underway – the only way you get it done faster than usual is by going crazy. That is, a sense of urgency that you probably cannot defend to your decision makers who have other equal priorities on their agenda..
Fourth, the failure of the Biden team was the absence of a crazy sense of urgency, which would have needed to be created by a person at the center – certainly not the President – with an extremely large megaphone.
A Czar to lead this was needed weeks ago. Line organizations hate to appoint a czar because the line groups must give up power.
Fifth, I even heard Fareed Zakaria weigh in. After criticizing the Biden team for execution of the draw down on Cuomo’s show, he was asked, hey Fareed, what would you have done. Then Fareed, a smart guy, started talking. Every word he said would have been done by Biden’s planners within a week of starting their job. His thinking was unusually naïve, or ungenerous.
Finally, I heard people like Morning Joe’s Mika B. changing their tune yesterday morning. Seems she found out overnight that the Afghan military had been continuously fighting and dying while everything was so seemingly wonderful for US soldiers, i.e., no one dying. (See comment on Pence below.) Seems that she found out the military situation had increasingly gotten worse with every week after Trump made his agreement. Seems she found out it wasn’t really that easy for the current US administration to simply say, hey, Talibanis, we need a couple more months to prepare – as the Taliban are taking one district after another.
Now in fairness, Mike Pence published a statement in the WSJ this morning that presents a very different picture. Among other things, he states emphatically that there was no real fighting going on between the Taliban and government forces: “By the time we left office, the Afghan government and the Taliban each controlled their respective territories, neither was mounting major offensives.” Based on what I have read and listened to, this is flat out lie. But do your own research and decide.
I do think there was justifiable urgency to get on with it. May 1 had already been moved to September.
I do think that the fact that the Taliban collapsed the opposition as quickly as it did is more about what happens when wars end, and less about whether the opposition – the US in this case – failed to properly analyze the outcome. In all significant wars, the fighting is brutal, contested, bloody until it is not. When soldiers conclude that there is nothing more to fight for, they stop. Generally, no one can predict when that will happen. Germany was collapsing into nothing in December 1944, until they counter attacked at the Battle of the Bulge, one of the bloodiest of WW II.
Identifying, verifying, and organizing an exit for several hundred people would be a project. Doing so for a thousand would be a huge deal. Doing so for 20,000, a number being floated in the media, would be almost impossible.
So, could they have done it better? Maybe a lot better? In retrospect, of course, definitely. Line bureaucracies do not set a czar in place until they are already in big trouble. But perhaps living it in real time was not quite as easy.
Nonetheless, the vast majority of citizens will be told that he screwed it up – and not much care.
The media is going nuts about this.
The Republicans have been given a gift and they will try to make the most of it. (Again, see Pence.) You’ll hear stuff that might even make many Republicans like myself sick.
And the Democrats – well, they were piling on Monday. I don’t know why. Probably, they’ll stop doing so pretty quickly.
In my opinion, the voters will not care. In fact, I think Biden’s approval levels could even go up. The headline in the AZ Republic yesterday, the newspaper for the fifth largest U.S. City, in a red state, was : BIDEN CONFIDENT IN TROOP WITHDRAWAL. Subtext:” Says Afghan government collapse was faster than foreseen.” Even my jaw dropped. Today, the story did not make the front page.
It is of course all tragic. It is sad. War is hell! It actually is! It never ends pretty. Only Americans, with all of our affluence and our purchased military would think that its’ government would totally control the exit in a war we have been fighting and losing with someone else’s purchased military. (Again, see Pence.)
August 18, 2021
No doubt, much confusion and ass covering now, and for a while. Such things are never pretty.
New thought: Just wait until those Taliban males meet an entire generation of women who have grown up with a different set of rules. Twenty years is a long time. In the most Islamic society in the world, when the ladies go indoors, and take off the burqa, their clothing looks like a person of high fashion in London. (Seen it in Saudi Arabia.) And behind closed doors, there is a normal male/husband/father and a normal woman/wife/mother relationship going on. In the end, real change in how women are treated in Afghanistan will probably start inside the house and move outward from there. We’ll see.
