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Notes -
There's a poem I learned as a kid:
You don't want to do the job, so you do a bad job on purpose.
There's a piece of advice I heard from a re-enactor once:
This isn't about not wanting to do the job, it's about not wanting the job to be done at all.
And now we reach true bureaucratic sophistication: manipulating your boss into not ordering the job done in the first place. Wag-The-Dog. Top-from-the-bottom.
For contrast:
Rogers doesn't like the order he's been given. He thinks his boss's plan is disastrously bad. He still lays out the best method to accomplish the stated objective, even while that they shouldn't do it.
That's what I'm asking for: a clear-eyed assessment saying "we have be3en ordered to withdraw by this date, here's the problems we have to overcome, here's the resources we need to do it."
The paper you linked is... not that. I'd say it's pretty disappointing, but honestly I wouldn't expect much better. It's "informative" in the loosest possible sense of the word, which is I suppose exactly what its authors are paid to be. My impression is that it's written so that, no matter what happens, its authors can be considered prudent.
Again, you understand the concept of malicious compliance and bureaucratic wag-the-dog. You're aware that the US military is not immune to these activities. Why do you believe that what we saw in the pullout was entirely or even mostly the result of policy set by the president?
"Tactics" - How to win a firefight or a battle. "Strategy" - How to string together a series of tactical victories into an overall victory. "Bureaucracy" - What drawer the papers are filed in and who does the filing.
In the abstract, an Executive is supposed to decide what value a war offers, when to fight and when to make peace. He has final command over the top-level strategy where it impinges on that question, but below that the details are down to men who have made those details their lives' profession.
Likewise for Bureaucracy; an Executive should be concerned with questions of policy, not with the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of getting the folders handed round. What we are seeing now with Trump and DOGE is not, in fact, how any of this is supposed to work; a President is not supposed to have to micromanage his underlings to ensure they are performing their jobs competently and in good faith. Likewise, the President should not be having to inform his generals about the Afghan fighting season and suggest to them the proper way to account for its effects on the pullout. He should, in fact, be able to give a date for a pullout a year in advance, and our troops should be able to pull out on that date with no further input from the President other than signing and approving the orders. I'm bewildered as to how it could possibly be otherwise.
Indeed. So, keeping the date fixed, what did Biden need to do to make the pullout not a disastrous fuckup on the part of the US forces? What, specifically, did he do wrong? I'm not accepting "pick another date", because I don't buy that a year's lead time was insufficient to plan a better pullout. I'm not buying that he forced a bad plan through over the objection of the pentagon unless I see the actual orders.
How? What was the president of the United States supposed to do to make this operation not a hilarious fuckfest?
With Benghazi, I think I have a reasonable answer to that question: Clinton and Obama slow-rolled response out of political concerns. With Mogadishu, I think I have a reasonable answer: Clinton denied heavier assets for the snatch, and when things went bad "joint" operations were a huge mess to coordinate, and also a whole lot of things went very wrong. For this, if I'm supposed to blame the president, I want to know specifically what the President did, and until I have specifics my assumption is that the people actually drawing up the plans are at fault when a plan is a complete mess.
You got me! I assumed the DoD was in overall control our presence in Afghanistan, given that it was still an active war. I'm happy to withdraw the relevant questions and resubmit them as "why the fuck is the state department this incompetent?" ...Though that surprises me somewhat less. It still seems like a pretty important question, though, and it seems to me that there are probably people who were paid a considerable salary to run this shit, and those people should probably lose their jobs and possibly go to jail. They seem to have done a really bad job, and if they are not removed they are probably going to continue to do a bad job wherever they are placed next, no? But a considerable amount of the clamor I heard was specifically over the military side of things, and the military side of things isn't the state department. And again, this looks to me like basic competence failure, to the point that I'm suspicious.
My argument isn't that the military should be running diplomacy. I am happy to complain equally about the State Department. My argument is that agents of the federal government were given a job, their implementation was disastrous, and I see people on the Right saying "well, it's all Biden's fault", and people on the left sort of shrugging their shoulders. I loath Biden, but I'm not going to blame him unless I have some actual explanation about what, specifically, he did wrong. And so far, all I've got is "he timed the pullout during the fighting season". I'm not buying that, and I don't think you should buy it either.
That's an entirely fair position, and again, the same question applies to the State department and whoever else did not comprehend what "we are pulling out in a year" meant.
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