Josh Marshall
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) has a statement out that is at least semi-critical of the Biden administration’s handling of Afghanistan. I’ll print the whole thing below. But it’s this statement that caught my eye: “We also need to determine what intelligence failures led to underestimating the ease and speed of the Taliban’s advancement and work to ensure that we prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for terrorists.”
Vindication and the Fall of Kabul
Yesterday I wrote this: “In the coming days or weeks we’re likely to see a situation in which the government only controls Kabul. If you’re in the Afghan army how hard are you going to fight in that final battle? Why fight? The question answers itself.”
As we can see this morning, not days or weeks but hours. Overnight in the United States the army and government of Afghanistan melted away and remaining authorities are in the process of turning over power to a transitional Taliban government. It’s over.
People are lining up to say that this is all on Joe Biden, that he “lost” Afghanistan, that he mismanaged or failed to manage the US withdrawal, that this is “on him.” In the calculus of US military-political culture that’s likely right. But I see it quite differently. This seems to me like the ultimate vindication of his decision.
A Few Thoughts on Afghanistan
The government of Afghanistan, created under US auspices and propped up by the US military for almost two decades, appears to be collapsing under a rapid military onslaught by the Taliban. This has been triggered by but I think by no means caused by President Biden’s decision to withdraw all US military forces from the country.
Let me share a few thoughts about this in no particular order.
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Memories of Pelosi
With a gaggle of House ‘moderates’, led by the meddling Josh Gottheimer, now trying to strong-arm Nancy Pelosi into decoupling the long-linked infrastructure bills, I’m reminded of a night back in 2010. Republicans made Democrats wait some six months to seat Al Franken after he defeated Norm Coleman in Minnesota in 2008. That finally gave them 60 votes in the Senate, enough to pass what we now know as Obamacare. But now it’s January 19th, 2010. Long-serving Senator Ted Kennedy died the previous August and now there’s a special election to fill his seat. Shockingly, the race is called for Republican Scott Brown. Out of the blue, Republicans have won back their ability to filibuster Obamacare just as its near the negotiation finish line.
Fuck.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education is compiling a list college and universities that are requiring vaccination for at least some students and faculty for the coming school year.
See if you can see a pattern.
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The Feral Minority and the Schools
As we’ve discussed a number of times, Republican leaders made a clear decision over the winter of 2020-21 to embrace and cater to anti-vax, anti-mandate sentiment to supercharge their midterm election odds. I’ve seen some debate over whether GOP elites convinced GOP voters or GOP voters dragged along the elites. I think it’s a bit of both but mainly a non-issue. Unsurprisingly, elected officials and voters in a political party tend to think in similar ways. They decided to become the anti-vax party and thus helped usher in the fourth COVID wave.
But something happened on the way to the party: the Delta variant.
Go Manchin, Joe Manchin
So a few thoughts on Manchin.
We’ve said repeatedly there’s going to be a lot of drama and haggling before this gets settled. Well, see: I was right. Does this change the global picture? I don’t think so.
Many people believed that Joe Biden would never be able to get 10 Republicans to agree to a bipartisan mini-bill deal without also agreeing to jettison most of the rest of his fiscal/infrastructure/climate agenda. They figured that these efforts would eventually fail. Once it had failed, Biden would then go to the bipartisanists and say, “Look, we tried. It didn’t work. Now we pour everything into the reconciliation bill.”
That wasn’t a bad plan. It was just another way to get to passing the agenda. In any case, that’s what many people believed. I was one of them. I was wrong.
This is what I mean by Biden having his cake and eating it too.
Now, to be fair, I didn’t think it was impossible, just unlikely. But they both get you to the same end goal.
Is the Law Coming for the Coup Plotters? At least Dick Durbin Is
Most of us have understandably and rightly been focused on the new House select committee as the investigation that will get to the heart of the January 6th insurrection and the coup plot that preceded and created it. We’re right to. Indeed, before the new committee was impanelled I’d gotten used to hearing about this and that one-off hearing, most focused on security lapses on January 6th itself, and had been semi-tuning them out. But as I’ve learned from my colleagues in recent days, there’s more going on in the Senate than I realized.