Sunday School 8/29/21

For this week's Sunday School, I'm only visiting the classroom with the day of the week in its name: Fox News Sunday, where Chris Wallace chatted with the Grim Reaper, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Floundering for Relevance), and with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, which is where we'll start. 

Sullivan said that President Biden "will stop at nothing" to make the ISIS-K terrorists pay for killing 13 Americans (and killing and wounding hundreds more Afghans); he also pointed to our successful 'over-the-horizon' capability that the president mentioned the other day. 

Wallace wondered if our intelligence was so good after the fact, why we didn't prevent the attack from happening in the first place. Here's part of Sullivan's response.

With respect to the attack at Kabul airport, we, of course, had been warning for days that such an attack could take place. We took action to try to prevent and disrupt such attacks. But, of course, all we can do is mitigate risk. We cannot eliminate risk. And this is a fundamentally dangerous and high-risk condition. The president has said that from the beginning. Those of us working on it have reiterated that from the beginning. And it continues, Chris, to be very dangerous. 

They talked a bit about what the next couple of days, and our final hours in Kabul, will look like. Sullivan was careful, particularly when Wallace asked how many people would be left. He said there were 300 or fewer Americans still there, some of whom have chosen not to leave. And we have some commitments from the Taliban about getting our folks out, even after the end of the month. 

Finally, Wallace wondered why President Biden wasn't "taking full responsibility" on abandoning Bagram Airport, instead of "laying this off on the generals." Sullivan reminded Wallace that he's heard Biden "take ultimate responsibility for every decision" he's made And, he explained the difference between a tactical decision, which is the purview of the generals, and a strategic decision, which belongs to the president. 

Moving on to the Grim Reaper, here's his assessment of the war in Afghanistan.

I think what's been lost in all of this, Chris, is why we went there in the first place. We went there to prevent the Taliban from having a regime that would allow terrorists to reconstitute themselves and hit us again here at home. It's been a total success. If you -- this term "endless war," let's take a look at it. The last seven months, the Afghans have lost more people fighting than we have over 20 years. They've taken 65,000 casualties. We've taken roughly 2,000 in 20 years. The last year and a half we've lost no one. With our continued deployment of 2,500 people, we were, in effect, keeping the lid on, keeping terrorists from reconstituting, and having a light footprint in the country. The policy was working. Therefore, I think calling it and endless war or claiming that we're somehow trying to get involved in a civil war is - a domestic civil war is simply not accurate. We went over there to protect us here at home. We've not had a mass casualty attack from over there in these 20 years. I'd call that a successful policy.

Now we're looking at the exit and over the next two days our heroic military is doing the best they can with a horrible policy decision. This is one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history. Much worse than Saigon because after we left Saigon, there weren't Vietnamese terrorists who were planning on attacking us here at home. That we leave behind exactly what we went in to solve 20 years ago. And I fear for the future in continuing the war on terror. You know, just because we decide to quit fighting doesn't mean the terrorists go away. So they're still out there. They're invigorated. They're emboldened and excited about the success they see in bringing America to its knees in Afghanistan.

Next, Wallace turned to the decision to leave Afghanistan, something he said McConnell opposed when Trump started the process, and he opposed Biden continuing down the path to our full withdrawal.  He asked McConnell

Senator, does President Biden have a point there? If in April he had said, hey, the Trump deal is off, we're staying in and, in fact, we're going to beef up the number of troops, he contends we'd have been back in a full-scale war with the Taliban, and, unfortunately taking a lot of casualties.

McConnell said that's not correct. 

Once again, the president's off the mark. We hadn't lost as many as 13 people, which we lost Thursday, in any of the last four years. In fact, our casualties since 2014 have been quite modest, quite modest. We lost more - I repeat - more of our military personnel last Thursday then we lost in any one of the last four years. So the balance has been dramatically reduced for American personnel. Remember, in the whole war, Chris, we have regretfully lost a couple of thousand of our people. We -- that's very regretful. But the Afghans have lost 65,000. They have been fighting and we've been in the background helping them with counterterrorism and the ongoing training of the military. The policy was working if you remember why we went there, which was to keep the Taliban out and the terrorists from being able to operate with impunity so they could attack us again here at home.

Questions Wallace didn't ask? 

• You say we lost more military personnel in last Thursday's attack than we lost in any of the last four years. But this data from the Defense Casualty Analysis System shows we had 13 'hostile' deaths in 2018, and 17 in 2019. What's the basis for your numbers?

• We did have four hostile deaths in 2020, but they were outside your 18-month window. Isn't the treaty that President Trump signed with the Taliban, which required our full withdrawal, the reason for that?

• Wouldn't breaking the treaty that was negotiated with the Taliban have escalated the terrorism threat in and of itself? 

• How much longer should we have stayed in Afghanistan, training their military to do what they are apparently still unable to do, after all these years? At what point should they be able to defend themselves?

• How much responsibility do the Afghans bear themselves for what's happening in their country? 

• Many people are pointing to the extreme religious beliefs of the Taliban, and how those will impact Afghan women. There's been a lot of publicity about an Afghan folksinger who was killed by the Taliban. How much should these, or do these, play in any decision we make regarding involving our military in other countries? 

Keep an eye out for anyone asking that kind of question, and let me know if you find anyone. 

See you around campus, assuming you haven't been disenrolled for not getting a vaccine.

Wondering on Wednesday 8/18/21

Ready... Set... Wonder!

We'll begin tonight's wondering in Missouri, the Show Me state, so named, it is said, "because of the devotion of its people to simple common sense." And let us wonder about the Second Amendment Preservation Act. As reported in this NY Times article, the law bars local law enforcement from working with the feds on gun cases, and "is already hampering joint drug and weapons investigations," according to the US Department of Justice.

The Second Amendment Preservation Act, which was passed by Missouri’s Republican-controlled legislature in May, is among the most extreme state gun rights bills enacted in recent years, imposing a $50,000 penalty on any local sheriff’s office or police department that “tries to enforce” federal firearms laws instead of abiding by less restrictive state statutes.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I were in Missouri, I'd want someone to show me why we wouldn't want our local LEOs to collaborate with the feds in keeping us safe. And I'd want someone to show me why the Republicans, who have fought against reforming police immunity laws, would pass a law that apparently strips immunity from police officers. Where's the simple common sense in that?

Moving on to the hottest hot topic out there - the US withdrawal from Afghanistan - there's this headline from Yahoo Finance:

'Real chance' Afghanistan withdrawal 'destroys' Biden presidency: Ian Bremmer

That's an eye-catcher, for sure, right? But here's what it means, according to that Ian Bremmer guy. He's the founder of the Eurasia Group, "the first firm devoted exclusively to helping investors and business decision-makers understand the impact of politics on the risk and opportunities in foreign markets."  From the Yahoo Finance article, we learn that

The crisis could severely undermine Biden's standing if Americans die or are taken hostage while the U.S. completes its withdrawal, Bremmer said.

"There are a lot of Americans that we want to get out of there," Bremmer says. "What if we have a hostage crisis? What if we have a firefight? What if Americans get killed? What if we end up not being able to get all these Americans out? That destroys Biden's presidency."

"There is a real chance of that happening," Bremmer adds. "It's not a 50% chance; maybe it's a 5% chance. But it is way higher than it should be."

A real chance? But it's not a 50% chance? And maybe it's a 5% chance? Come on. I wonder what the chances are anyone would have read that article if the headline had stated the actual risk of Biden's presidency being destroyed? 

And let's touch on what was once the hottest of hot topics - the origin of COVID-19. You remember: the wet market in Wuhan... or was it the government lab in Wuhan? And "everyone knows" the Chinese are covering up something, right?

Well, now someone is suggesting that maybe the answer has been right under our noses the whole time. It seems there's a study that conflicts with what the experts from the World Health Organization were told when they went to China and visited only one of two markets near Wuhan.

The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two vendors there regularly sold live wild animals... Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan involved a Huanan stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two markets.

Stephen Goldstein, of the University of Utah, thinks a link between the two would be "very intriguing," but he said it's not possible to determine whether the employee had contact with any infected animals, because they are "long gone." 

 Still, it seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately. It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face." 

I wonder how often that happens, that what we're looking for is right there, if only we didn't try so hard to make the story fit our agenda, and instead let it tell itself? It's long been true with COVID, and it's clearly true with Afghanistan, too.

What are you wondering about tonight?

Sunday School 7/4/21: Extra Credit

As promised in this week's Sunday School, here are highlights from Mike Emanuel's interview with Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) on Fox News Sunday. McCaul is the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Emanuel was sitting for Chris Wallace.

• McCaul agrees with an op-ed in the Washington Post that "rivals such as Iran, China, and Russia" could view our withdrawal from Afghanistan that "President Biden lacks the stomach to stand up for US allies."  He noted that the Intelligence Community's assessment that the Taliban could take over all of Afghanistan in as little as six months, including Bagram Air Base, which we just turned over to the Afghans last week. 
• He criticizes "the lack of planning and preparation" for the withdrawal, and for what's likely to come. According to a meeting he had with Afghan President Ghani, this is going to be "the year of the jihad," with "all the young males in Pakistan at the madrassas are poised with the Taliban to pour over into Afghanistan and you're going to see a major civil war take place." It won't be pretty, he feels, and he's worried about our embassy and he staff there. 
• We need to work on getting visas for the around 9,000 Afghani interpreters, contractors and their families who helped us during the war, he said; "we made a promised to them... we told them we'd take care of them and we can't turn our backs and leave them to die. They will be slaughtered by the Taliban. They're targeted by the Taliban. We have to get them out of there." He said he thinks, finally, there's some attention to the issue and we may be able to move them to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan while they wait for their visas. 
• Finally, on this subject: he thinks it's political that Biden's going to get everyone out and not leave a few troops behind. "If you talk to anybody in the national security realm or in the Defense Department, you know, they -- you mentioned Secretary Austin, the head of the DOD, nobody thought this was a good idea. A residual force of 2,500 troops is not a whole lot of a footprint compared to where we have troops elsewhere to provide stability in the region." 

I will give McCaul credit for consistency, something I can't say about most Republicans, or most politicians in general. Last November, when Former Guy put forth his plan to have all troops out of Afghanistan in the spring, McCaul joined many other Rs in pushing back against that plan. Here's part of what he said.

A premature U.S. withdrawal would not only jeopardize the Afghan government’s ability to negotiate but would endanger U.S. counterterrorism interests.

Other info from yesterday's chat? 

• The coverup of the origins of COVID-19 by the Chinese Communist Party he calls "the greatest human -- greatest cover-up in human history. And you don't cover-up something if you're not trying to hide something." He wishes "the Democrats would join with us on this very important investigations and what caused this problem," not mentioning that Biden has ordered  a full investigation and a determination of whether the virus came from an animal, or from the Wuhan lab.
• He calls Biden's canceling of Trump's 'remain in Mexico' border policy "a self-inflicted wound and a foreign policy blunder," and doesn't know how they're going to fix it without going back to the Trump-era policies.
• Infrastructure is both "popular" and "bipartisan," if you're talking about roads and bridges and rural broadband, and not any of that other stuff like the Green New Deal and health care and education. And he's not excited about That Guy from Vermont using reconciliation to "basically open up to a massive tax increase. And this is a Trojan horse syndrome that I think we're most worried about."

To be sure, there are things to worry about, just as there were in the previous administration, and the one before that, and the one before that. Endless wars, immigration, and infrastructure are just a few of the things that we've been kicking down the road. 

See you around campus.