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April 14, 2021

Out of Afghanistan, Again

Plus, armchair vaccine bloviators fume about the Johnson & Johnson pause

 

A military helicopter flies over spectators in Kabul, Afghanistan.
(Rahmat Gul/AP Photo)

The Chief

**** When I started political blogging, foreign policy played
a much bigger role. I marched down Hollywood Boulevard and sat down in
the street in 2003 in opposition to Iraq, and focused attention through
most of George W. Bush's two terms on our imperial adventures abroad.
It was a bigger part of my identity as a writer.

The financial crisis moved me to inspect other corners of our
experience, and I haven't commented too much on foreign policy matters
since. The deadening effect of faraway, off-the-front-page military
action overseas got to me, too. The volunteer army allows too much of
the fighting to be disconnected from an American's personal contacts;
we can invisibly spend a generation at war without it impacting much of
the country.

Yesterday Joe Biden announced

he would leave Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, ending the war just
short of 20 years. Nearly half my lifetime has seen U.S. troops in
Afghanistan, and for those who have actually fought in the war it's a
much higher percentage. Many of those serving today weren't born on
9/11. And what they're accomplishing half a world away is hard to
discern. Biden is making the right choice.

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**** Sadly, he's the third straight president to announce
that we would be leaving Afghanistan. Barack Obama announced a
withdrawal

of combat troops by 2014; then-Vice President Biden restated it in the
2012 vice presidential debate ("We are leaving in 2014, period
").
Donald Trump said repeatedly that we would be leaving Afghanistan,
creating hard deadlines

on numerous occasions. It is said that Biden's "hands were tied" by an
agreement with the Taliban to leave May 1, but that's obviously not
true since the timeline shifted to September. And anyway that was
contingent on the Taliban reaching an agreement with the Kabul
government that never happened. The history of Afghanistan is littered
with broken promises of withdrawals that never happen.

There's one way in which this might be different. Other timelines in
Afghanistan were based on conditions on the ground; if fighting
intensified, planned withdrawals would be moved back. This one "is not
conditions-based," according to a senior administration official
.
"The president has judged that a conditions-based approach . . . is
a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever."

That's exactly right. Every attempt to extricate ourselves from the
war has led to the finding of reasons to stay. You're seeing this
begin already with respect to the latest announcement. It's easy for
me to say "if the Washington Post editorial board

and David Ignatius

are against it, then it must be brilliant policy," but they're just
amplifying the critiques of the foreign policy blob, the group of
defense contractors and consultants and hangers-on with a vested
interest in keeping us bogged down.  

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The truth is that we're at least 15 years past the point of
Afghanistan being a useful endeavor. We have been unable to defeat an
underground insurgency on behalf of a regime without the backing of the
public. If we cannot stand up a credible Afghan army in 20 years we're
never going to do it. And if the low-level, invisible war became a much
more visible one that sought to eradicate the Taliban, it's likely
that the American people wouldn't abide by it. And they shouldn't.

John Kerry is in Biden's administration, and he famously upon coming
back from Vietnam said "how do you ask a man to be the last man to die
for a mistake?" We're at 2,372 deaths and counting. This is a mistake
that nobody wants to admit. But Biden, by his announced actions, is
admitting it. That won't be the end of the story; the blob is going to
darkly warn of catastrophe for the next five months. They'll use any
heart-tugging story they can find. It'll be brutal. And they should be
ignored. And if Biden ignores them he'll be doing a great service.

Now if we could get him to stop selling guns to regimes

engaged in violent repression, we'd be onto something.

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A Pause That Refreshes

Yesterday, more people received vaccinations

than any other Tuesday since dosing began. We're on pace for 3.3
million shots per day, and if you predicted that within the first 3
months of the Biden administration you would have been called unduly
optimistic.

Yet the big story yesterday involved Monday morning quarterbacking
around the pausing of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, after a rare blood
clot was found in six women. These are of course just the cases we know
about with the fairly crude surveillance and analysis in place. J&J was
less than 5 percent of the overall vaccine mix in the U.S. Because of
mismanagement at the Baltimore facility making the drugs, there were due
to be far less doses in circulation anyway. States have over 50 million
shots in reserve right now. This will not affect a single person getting
a shot. Yet armchair warriors have accused the administration of killing
people with their rash behavior.

We don't know whether J&J will be paused for days or weeks
.
I've heard the argument that this will affect vaccine hesitancy, and
make people on the fence less likely to take the shot. I think it was a
damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. The fact of a small
number of people dying due to the vaccine was going to come out. The FDA
and CDC could try to educate that the risk is minimal, and have skeptics
respond that they are engaging in a coverup, or take immediate action,
and have skeptics say that their skepticism was warranted. The idea that
there's one "good" course of action comes from people being way too
confident in their knowledge of human behavior.

The percentage of vaccine skeptics has stayed at around

one

in four

for the past few months, no matter if there has been good or bad news,
and this is down from one in three and one in two previously. We'll
see if a public health agency that is attentive to concerns or tries to
downplay them is more effective. But I think the administration's
dominating vaccine rollout has earned at least some of the benefit of
the doubt.

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Day 85.

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Today I Learned

* The advance child tax credit payments will begin in July
;
there will be six monthly payments, and the rest will be credited on
2021 taxes. (CNBC)

* The IRS Commissioner who made that announcement also said yesterday
that $1 trillion in taxes go uncollected

every year. (Reuters)

* Biden suggests a summit with Vladimir Putin
.
(Financial Times)

* The FDA will allow abortion pills to be issued by mail
;
it was a joke that this didn't happen under the previous
administration. (New York Times)

* All but two members of the New York congressional delegation demand

that the state and local tax deduction cap be repealed. (Politico)

* A statistical expert who we interviewed for our story

on the Census Bureau has been nominated

to lead the Census Bureau. (Talking Points Memo)

* Sen. Warren student loan hearing yesterday

puts more pressure on Biden to forgive debt through executive action.
(CNBC)

* White House economists blog about inflation
.
(Whitehouse.gov)

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