Rahmat Gul/AP Photo
First100-041421
A military helicopter flies over spectators in Kabul, Afghanistan.
It’s April 14, 2021 and welcome to First 100. You can sign up to have First 100 delivered to your email by clicking here.
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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 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.
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.
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 6 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.
What Day of Biden’s Presidency Is It?
Day 85.
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)
