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Robert E Kelly Profile picture
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29 Sep, 6 tweets, 3 min read
Good op-ed from @JRubinBlogger on why the Afghan withdrawal went about as well as can realistically be expected.

The evacuation was planned and moved out more people than expected despite early chaotic imagery.

Most Americans did get out, and the US

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washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
gov't warned them for months but can't force people to go

There is no clean exit from a lost war with a brutal, mendacious counter-party like the Taliban. Obviously

The Trump Doha deal set the frame within which Biden operated, and had we violated it,

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crooked.com/articles/biden…
the Taliban would hit back harshly. A small US force in Afghanistan could not have contained that offensive.

GOP critics knew the deal was Trump's and supported it. So most of the Fox critics about 'leaving our people behind' were bad faith.

The real issue is American

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Exceptionalism. That's why the media framing in August was about humiliation, resolve, and credibility, rather than cutting our losses, accepting the reality that the war was unwinnable, or pulling back from overextension. Americans just don't want to hear that we made a

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mistake of this magnitude.

So instead it was all: 'if we just stay a few more Friedman Units, we can win and justify all the bloodshed.' That is a recipe for never leaving any forever wars. If we followed that advice in the 1970s, we'd still be in

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Vietnam.

Sometimes you just have to admit that you erred - badly in this case - and pull back and move on. Biden deserves enormous credit for finally seeing that and breaking with the inertia of just staying indefinitely and vainly hoping for a break.

6

jabberwocking.com/joe-biden-is-t…

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More from @Robert_E_Kelly

Robert E Kelly Profile picture
19 Sep
THREAD: Why North Korea would Prefer Leaching Off South Korea to Absorbing It

There is a lot of debate on whether NK still seeks full-blown conquest/absorption of SK.

I am skeptical, bc I think the ruling Kim family are more degenerate gangsters than nationalist ideologues.

1
They won't seriously risk their rule or material perks for a psychological (nationalist) pay-off. In fact, IMO, both Koreas are de facto status quo states, despite de jure revisionism:

1. Talk is Cheap

So sure, both Koreas talk tough and maintain formal commitments to

2
unification, but talk is cheap obviously and leaders lie a lot. Unification might be formally retained as an end-goal, but only as a far-off, de rigeur ideal recited ceremonially, rather than actually seriously planned for or built into NK strategy. I could be convinced of the

3
Read 15 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
15 Sep
THREAD: Why there is No Korean Peace Treaty (It wouldn’t Change Anything)

Much of the linked thread is highly contestable:

A. Korea obviously is not a 'forever war'

This is a grossly inaccurate description. 'Forever war' implies sustained kinetic activity in an unwinnable

1
quagmire with no obvious endpoint. That is not K at all. The war has been over since mid-1953, and it is NK, not the allies, who provokes. The lack of paperwork - a formal peace treaty - has no bearing on the empirical situation on the ground which is far from open conflict.

2
B. A 'War-Ending Declaration' (종전선언) is a legally bizarre neologism which no one really understands

The only reason this strange language is used is bc the Moon government's first effort to get a 'peace treaty' failed, as did its second, vaguer 'peace regime' effort. So

3
Read 18 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
11 Sep
THREAD: Strategically, 9/11 was a one-off sucker-punch. That’s it.

1. 9/11 did not ‘change everything.’ In fact, it changed surprisingly little

This language was deployed to create political space for a vast expansion of US coercion, especially in the Middle East. If all the

1
rules have suddenly changed, then all sorts of behavior are suddenly permissible – like domestic spying, torture, and Iraq. But strategically, 9/11 did not change that much: US GDP continued to expand; US military power was scarcely affected; US alliances did not fracture; the

2
stock market re-opened after a few days and did not crash; gas prices did not spike; the global Islamic revolution Osama Bin Laden hoped this would ignite did not materialize:

2. 9/11’s big change was psychological – our shared national trauma fully

3
Read 17 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
10 Sep
THREAD: Post-'War on Terror' Restraint

If the Afghan withdrawal & 20th anniversary of 9/11 can wind-down our big foot-print 'war on terror' (for a more measured counter-terrorism), here is a quick case for greater restraint:

1. Strategic: Over-Extension

A well-known problem

1
of empires/hegemonies is too many commitments and too few resources. We should, obviously, avoid such overstretch, & given rising China, US commitments in the Middle East particularly (Afghanistan, e.g.) should be re-considered

2. Domestic/Democratic: Blowback Militarization

2
The post-9/11 militarization of US foreign policy has come home: in the torture debate (yes, we actually 'debated' torture), domestic surveillance, endemic governmental secrecy, near reverence on military and police issues (just watch Fox for 5 minutes),and the militarization/

3
Read 6 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
25 Aug
The biggest surprise, revelation even, of Afghanistan’s fall is not that the Taliban are bad or that the departure is messy. We knew that already

It’s how belligerent, even militaristic, the American and British media are, how totally captured by blob talking points about the

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‘necessity’ that America fight all over the place and that it’s always ‘defeat’ rather than retrenchment or cutting your losses.

Two weeks ago, there was almost no reporting on Afghanistan. Suddenly a few days of inevitability chaotic imagery, and America is abandoning its

2
responsibilities in a fiasco.

And it was all hawks all the time on-air to comment. No retrenchers or restrainers to place the withdrawal in greater context.

Even in academia, a lot of international relations scholars have deeply soured on the war for more than a decade. But

3
Read 4 tweets
Robert E Kelly Profile picture
19 Aug
THREAD: 5 Bad Afghanistan Takes you should Ignore

1. Tragic: ‘What about all we lost there?’

If Afghanistan collapses this fast, there wasn’t actually that much there to lose. If anything, the rapid collapse indicates just how accurate were all those leaks over the last

1
decade, including the A Papers, about how little progress we were making, how corrupt the government was, how soft its military’s independent capabilities were, and so on.

2. Demagogic: ‘Did our soldiers die for nothing?’

That is an emotionally manipulative version of the

2
sunk cost fallacy. We cannot bring back our war dead. If we must stay in an unwinnable conflict to ‘honor their sacrifice,’ then we condemn more to die later. That’s immoral. The logic of this argument means also we can never leave a commitment, no matter misconceived, which

3
Read 12 tweets

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