On the Sunday morning shows today, prestige media did its best to soften the blow of Afghanistan. A key theme: we didn\u2019t lose to the Taliban, but beat ourselves. It was \u201cself-defeat,\u201d somehow not-disgraced former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told NBC, while Washington Post <\/em>columnist Eugene Robinson cautiously described the disaster of Afghanistan as \u201ca war we did not win.\u201d Chuck Todd on Meet the Press <\/em>liked that. \u201cI agree,\u201d he said, smiling a little and noting, \u201cI don\u2019t know if you can say we lost<\/em>, but we didn\u2019t win.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meet the Press <\/strong>@MeetThePressWATCH: “This is what withdrawal from a war that we did not win looks like,” says @Eugene_Robinson on #MTP \n\n“It’s messy. It’s awful. … It’s a tragic thing for a lot of Afghans … certainly for the 13 service members who lost their lives and their families.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n August 29th 2021<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Just a few weeks in, the gruesome story of Afghanistan\u2019s collapse is already being sanitized, cleaved into neat storylines for blue and red audiences who as usual are being herded into safe psychological spaces, where they can happily non-consider what happened across the last 20 years. The images they see on TV aren\u2019t their party\u2019s fault, it\u2019s those other jerks to blame, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Republicans are blissful over Joe Biden\u2019s approval rating nosedive and are thrilled to blame the whole debacle on our Sundowner-in-Chief. Biden, they say, is prioritizing Afghan lives<\/a> over Americans in his withdrawal plans, and continues to push his $3.5 trillion \u201csocialist wish list<\/a>\u201d over national security, and should have used Mike Pompeo\u2019s \u201cconditions-based<\/a>\u201d withdrawal plan instead of the ass-over-elbow deal they used in reality. Multiple Republicans are aping Trump-era Democrats by demanding the president\u2019s resignation, with one, Missouri Senator Vicky Hartzler, going so far as to demand closure of the U.S.-Mexican border to \u201cprotect American lives<\/a>\u201d from an alleged heightened terrorist threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Democrats, not completely without self-reflection in the first days of this crisis, are already back focused on counter-blame narratives. Blue-state audiences are being reminded Donald Trump negotiated the \u201cpremature\u201d May 1st pullout date, and that when critics blasted that deal as \u201cweak and dangerous,\u201d House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy advised<\/a> his caucus not to speak against it. McCarthy today is leading the charge in criticizing Biden\u2019s withdrawal, which is \u201cso freaking hypocritical,\u201d according to Senate-to-MSNBC pipeline passenger Claire McCaskill. Moreover, they say, House Democrat Jason Crow offered an amendment for his own \u201cconditions-based\u201d withdrawal plan, and that was shot down by the likes of Matt Gaetz, who last year said<\/a>, \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s all noise, designed to distract from the fact that Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we\u2019ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force<\/a>, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any<\/em> accounting), war crimes, and other problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the \u201cgood war<\/a>\u201d as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes<\/a> of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump\u2019s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. \u201cWe fully support President Trump\u2019s Defense Department\u2019s request,\u201d was Chuck Schumer\u2019s formulation<\/a> in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max<\/em> set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press\u2019s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances<\/a> on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen \u2014 all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess \u2014 has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party. It doesn\u2019t even matter so much what such a party would stand for, ideologically, so long as it adheres to one basic principle: don\u2019t accept contractor money. It seems like the only possible solution to the disease that gave us Afghanistan. Our two parties, just like our academic research institutions, news networks, and even Hollywood\u2019s movie studios, have become de facto <\/em>Pentagon subsidiaries. They\u2019re all hopelessly corrupted by the financial powers Dwight Eisenhower warned about, in his famous speech prophesying \u201cthe disastrous rise of misplaced power\u201d from America\u2019s armaments sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few stray pundits in the last two weeks have pointed out the obvious fact that despite awesome financial and technological advantages, the United States has now \u201clost\u201d virtually every war it has entered since World War II (with the possible exception of the first Gulf War, though the cleanness even of that victory is very debatable). Dominic Tierney, the author of The Right Way To Lose A War: America in the Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, <\/em>told <\/a>Time <\/a><\/em>magazine<\/a> a big reason for this was that \u201cthe nature of war itself\u201d has changed since 1945:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nearly all wars now are civil wars, complex arenas of counterinsurgency and terrorism. When you put the U.S. against another country where there\u2019s a military that wears uniforms and they meet on the field of battle, the U.S. usually wins those kinds of wars\u2014like the Gulf War in \u201891. But in complex civil wars, the United States has really struggled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d agree, with a twist: under the influence of captured parties and the military\u2019s ubiquitous and extravagantly funded public relations apparatus, America has itself redefined the \u201cnature of war.\u201d Armed conflict has gone from being an occasional unpleasant political necessity to the core product line of the American corporation. Wars are what we make, and like blue jeans or Louisville Sluggers, we build them to last, with Afghanistan the prime example. That should be the issue dominating Meet the Press<\/em>, not whether we lost or just \u201cdidn\u2019t win,\u201d or which party\u2019s leaders decided to pull out first, and why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just as we\u2019re always designing new rifles and tanks and jet fighters, we\u2019ve become adept at manufacturing fresh intellectual justifications for deploying troops, churning out everything from \u201chumanitarian war<\/a>\u201d to \u201cbenevolent hegemony<\/a>\u201d to \u201cregime change<\/a>\u201d to \u201cnation-building<\/a>\u201d to Eisenhower\u2019s own \u201cdomino theory<\/a>.\u201d Where once we fought for literal survival against other nations, and knew who\u2019d won when one side surrendered, we\u2019re now sending our kids to die (and kill) in open-ended engagements where victory is either impossible or indefinable, and the main concrete \u201cresults\u201d are masses of foreign deaths and the gigantic houses built by defense executives in places like Loudon and Fairfax Counties in northern Virginia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why, whenever we get a rare look at the real thinking underlying our modern conflicts, whether via the Pentagon or Afghanistan Papers or the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables, we keep seeing the same story: senior American military and intelligence officials struggling to come up with \u201cmetrics for success,\u201d in some cases years after they\u2019d already invaded and occupied places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It shouldn\u2019t need to be said, but if you have to invent a \u201cmetric for success\u201d in war that goes beyond defeating an enemy, you\u2019re not really at war, you\u2019re doing something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is an excerpt from today\u2019s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Subscribe now<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019re on the free list for <\/em>TK News by Matt Taibbi<\/a>. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan Matt Taibbi August 29, 2021 (taibbi@substack.com) On the Sunday morning shows today, prestige media did its best to soften the blow of Afghanistan. A key theme: we didn\u2019t lose… Continue reading <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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