The View from Right Field

The End State in Afghanistan

Lt. General H.R. McMaster (ret.) and Bradley Bowman wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal about “How to Avert Disaster in Afghanistan” (July 27), but I fear it may be too late.  Afghanistan is beginning to look like South Vietnam in 1975.  When the North Vietnamese attacked in 1975, South Vietnam couldn’t defend all of its territory because of U.S. aid cutbacks.  So President Thieu tried to withdraw to what could be defended.  But once the retreat started, it developed a momentum of its own.

This may be occurring in Afghanistan now.  The Taliban probably isn’t as strong as the North Vietnamese, but once people lose faith in their government to protect them, as happened in South Vietnam and appears to be happening in Afghanistan, it is hard to get it back.

Biden Has Defined Success in His Afghan Exit: Nobody Pulled Off an Embassy Roof By Helicopter

When Joe Biden was asked last week if there was any similarity between Kabul today and Saigon in 1975, he said no:

“None whatsoever.  Zero.  What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our Embassy.  Six if I’m not mistaken.  The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army.  They’re not – they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.  There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy [in Afghanistan].”

He also defended the withdrawal by asking:

Biden Got the G7, NATO, and EU to Say What He Wanted. But Will They Follow Through?

With Joe Biden back from his “If it’s Tuesday, it must be NATO” tour of Europe, the question is: What did it accomplish?  President Biden told the G7: “America is back at the table.  America is back leading the world.”¹  The communiques and statements issued by the G7, NATO, and the meeting with the EU were reasonably strong.  They mentioned China, human rights, Russia, etc.  The NATO statement said that China posed “systemic challenges” to the rules-based international order.²  According to President Biden. while the G7 didn’t mention China in 2019, this year they did, “explicitly agree[ing] to call out human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.”  On Russia, the NATO statement said that in appropriate cases, co-ordinate cyber attacks could be a justification to invoke the collective defense provisions of Article 5 of the NATO agreement.³

The question is what countries will do now that the meetings are over and they are back to day-to-day considerations of politics and national interest.

The “Why Should Anybody Trust Us” Version of Leaving Afghanistan

As we leave Afghanistan, the question (or at least one of the questions) is what about the people who we are leaving behind.  Maine Senator Angus King (I, but really D), among others, is worried we aren’t going to be getting our Afghan translators and interpreters out with us.¹  These people helped us.  They worked with us.  They took a big risk in doing so, because the Taliban, who are not nice people, will come after them if they can.  They already have in some cases.  When we leave, they’ll do it more.

We promised these people we would get them to the United States, but guess what, it’s not going to happen.  Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told CNN:

“We’re determined to make good on our obligation to those who helped us, who put their lives on the line, put their families’ lives on the line working with our military, working with our diplomats”

We Defended Berlin. Will We Help Defend Taiwan?

Several years ago, we were on a tour of Morocco.  One of the couples in our group was of Chinese ancestry.  The wife said she had been born in Taiwan and had come to the United States when she was young.  I asked the husband when he had come to the United States.  I was embarrassed when he said that he had been born in the United States and that his ancestors had come to the United States in the 1800s, to help build the transcontinental railroad.  In other words, his ancestors may have come to the United States before mine.

One of the other people in the group asked them if they thought China, i.e., the People’s Republic of China, would invade Taiwan.  The wife said Beijing could take Taiwan anytime it wanted to.  The husband, however, who was a retired major general in the Army, merely mentioned the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 and did not say much else.

Something Big Is Happening In Belarus and Russia and We Need to Respond

On Sunday, Belarus forced a Ryanair plane flying from Greece to Lithuania to land in Minsk so Belarus could take a Belarusian dissident off the plane and arrest him.  Which is just outrageous.  There is no justification for this.

EU nations have told their airlines to avoid flying through Belarusian airspace, which seems pretty obvious.  But now, Russia is now banning European airlines from entering Russian airspace if they do not fly to Russia via Belarusian airspace.  At least two flights to Moscow, one AirFrance and one Austrian airlines, have already been cancelled.

Arsenal of Democracy Then. Vaccine Maker of the World Now.

Demand for vaccines is dropping around the United States.  States are telling the federal government they don’t need their full share.  If we don’t have more vaccines than we need now, we will soon.  So here is an idea of what to do with the extra doses we will have: Send them around the world to the people and countries that need them.

Instead of making a show of supporting a waiver of patent rights in vaccines, something that will take months to negotiate with other countries and months more before companies can start manufacturing vaccines they have never made before, why don’t we make them for the world ourselves?  We can allow American companies to export vaccines.  And for poor countries, we can buy them from American manufacturers and give them to those who can’t afford them.¹

“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea” (to tune of “Maria” from “The Sound of Music”)

Except, of course, I am referring just to North Korea, not all of Korea; and except that, while North Korea is a problem, it is not Maria.  There was a solution for Maria: sending her to be governess at Captain von Trapp’s house.  As for North Korea, consider the situation.

1.  North Korea is an economic disaster. Earlier this month, Kim Jong Un compared the country’s worsening economic situation to the 1990s famine that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Floods last summer and US sanctions contributed to the problems, as has North Korea’s closing of its borders with the world, including even China, because of Covid-19.  But mostly, it’s the system, both economic and dictatorial.  Several weeks ago, there was a picture of people from the Russian embassy using a handcar to leave the country.

Why Shouldn’t We Take Care of Ourselves Instead of the World?

[See Note below]

With Russia massing tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s border and China increasing its aggressive behavior against Taiwan, maybe now is a good time to consider what the purpose of U.S. foreign policy should be and what our national interests are in connection with either or both of those situations.  Actually, the real question is what our national interests are in general. 

We hear talk about supporting a rules-based international order.  But is that really what we should be doing?  Is it our goal to support other countries or do we need to worry about ourselves?  Some would say that we have lots of problems in the United States; there are lots of things we need to do for our people.  The Biden administration is proposing spending trillions of dollars on important domestic priorities.  Given all of this, do we really have the money – or the time or energy – to deal with Ukraine or Taiwan – or the Uighurs or Alexei Navalny?     

Leaving Afghanistan

I have predicted several times that we would be leaving Afghanistan.  It now looks like this will happen and we will be gone by September 11, 2021.  Five comments:

First, I’m not surprised.  Joe Biden was always going to leave.  And he will get it done because his people want to leave, too,¹ and because we are putting no conditions on what the Taliban, etc., have to done before we leave.