Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: A tragedy that clarifies what chaos means

[Brexiter]

A reminder that two Congressmen nearly walked right into yesterday’s carnage, as high recognition targets.

Also, a reminder that this was from Oct 2020, WaPo:

Our secret Taliban air force

Inside the clandestine U.S. campaign to help our longtime enemy defeat ISIS

So ISIS-K are the really bad guys and Taliban are just the regular bad guys, helping to thwart attacks but enemies of ISIS? (MSNBC reporting). You need a scorecard to keep the bad guys straight.

Here is a list of some of the factions active in Afghanistan from Congressional Research Service (.pdf, Aug 17, 2021 date).

Here from BBC is more on ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan Province).

David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:

America Took the Bait After an Attack 20 Years Ago. Not This Time.

We cannot and must not let the attackers achieve their utmost goal and capture the narrative of our exit nor can we allow them to remake our plans.


That is, after all, the objective of terrorists. It is their force multiplier. They, who are by and large weak, amplify the impact of their deeds by attacking highly visible soft targets in ways that generate media coverage and public reaction. And then they hope that those they attack respond in a way that further elevates them—by characterizing their threat as bigger than it is or by becoming bogged down in asymmetric conflicts that weaken them in terms of their public image and their resources.

I haven't tweeted nearly enough about the plight of our front line doctors, nurses and RT's. They are tired, traumatized, understaffed for the surge, frustrated by the preventable carnage, and instead of thank you's they sometimes face angry attacks from families. It is a crisis.

— Andrew Pavia (@AndrewPaviaMD) August 26, 2021

David Ignatius/waPo:

Good intentions and seductive illusions: Scenes from Afghanistan’s long descent

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was like watching the collapse of the twin towers. In an instant, the edifice crumbled into a pile of rubble.


But it didn’t happen quickly, really. The structure of the Kabul government has been rotting from within for all 20 years of the United States’ war. And every U.S. commander knew its weakness. They worried about the corruption and incompetence of the government, devised elaborate strategies to fix it, kept convincing themselves they were making progress. Hope is not a strategy, as every commander knows. In this case, it was.


Too often, the generals brought the media along with them in this exercise of self-delusion. Looking back over a dozen years of my own reporting from Afghanistan, that’s one painful recognition. These columns often expressed skepticism about the larger enterprise, but they kept recording, year after year, the generals’ ambitions for success. It wasn’t a big lie so much as a series of little bubbles of false optimism.

UPDATE: Pentagon on #Kabul explosions • 12 US service members killed • 15 wounded • US evacuated nearly 5000 Americans, nearly 1000 remain in Afghanistan • Total evacuated: 104,000 • "ISIS will not deter us from executing mission": Gen. McKenzie

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) August 26, 2021

Daniel Drezner/WaPo:

Could the Afghanistan withdrawal have been more competent?


Yes, Biden ignored his national security advisers. But about those advisers ...

Biden’s security team was correct about the dangers of a withdrawal, but none of them envisaged what actually happened. No one had gamed out a scenario as kinetic as this one.


Somewhere in the multiverse, Biden’s team, including the theater commanders, succeeded in persuading him to protect both Bagram and the civilian airport, facilitating a more rapid and functional withdrawal of allies and partners. In that corner of the multiverse, however, these advisers would have had to rely on a better track record in Afghanistan over the past 15 years.

This is why monoclonals are a linear tool in an exponential fight: - Hard to scale, esp when HCWs are in short supply, and linear relationship between patients:resources; and - They don't touch transmission, so exponential growth quickly outstrips treatment capacity. 1/ https://t.co/Wvl6lqlImQ

— Rajeev Venkayya MD (@rvenkayya) August 26, 2021

Jonathan Chait/New York:

Why the Media Is Worse for Biden Than Trump

Over the last week, the media has hammered Joe Biden with relentlessly critical coverage of his pullout from Afghanistan, resulting in noticeable drops in his approval ratings. Put aside for a moment whether this reflects failures by Biden or biases by the media. One conclusion we can draw is that this sort of dynamic is a regular feature of Democratic presidencies, and — as the Trump administration showed — a near impossibility during Republican ones.

But wait, you’re thinking. Didn’t the media hound Donald Trump for four straight years at least as hard as it’s hounded Biden over the last week?

Well, sort of. The mainstream media certainly gave Trump harsh and even overtly hostile coverage. But the mainstream media only describes roughly half the media landscape. The other half of the media is a right-wing messaging apparatus that makes no effort to follow traditional journalistic norms. Republicans communicate to their base through a media that functionally operates as part of their party, while Democrats communicate to their base through a media that still exerts substantial independence.

Someone may be in for a rude awakening. Former President's have zero executive privilege. Historically it's sometimes been an issue because current President's defer to formers **and exercise it on their behalf**. So, have a good talk with Joe Biden. https://t.co/l6nBJgJuoq

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 26, 2021

NBC News:

South Dakota Covid cases quintuple after Sturgis motorcycle rally

Meade County, home to Sturgis, has had a more than 1,500 percent increase in cases in the past 14 days.

Two weeks after the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, reported Covid infections in the state have risen nearly sixfold.

South Dakota counted 3,819 new cases in the past two weeks, including seven deaths, up from 644 cases in the 14 days preceding it. That makes it the state with the largest percent increase in Covid cases in the past two weeks.

The state's rate of Covid-19 infections per capita in the past two weeks is in the bottom half of the country, but it's the sharp and sudden increase in case counts that sets it apart.

No one could have see.. well, actually, everyone did.

Just-out @WasonCenter poll shows #Va Democrats leading for all statewide offices. Gov: McAuliffe-Youngkin, 50-41% LG: Ayala-Sears, 52-42% AG: Herring-Miyares, 53-41% 800 registered, likely voters interviewed Aug. 15-23, via landline and mobile. Margin of error +/-3.6%.

— Jeff E. Schapiro (@RTDSchapiro) August 26, 2021

Adam Serwer/Atlantic:

Greg Abbott Surrenders to the Coronavirus

The Texas governor’s warped priorities are allowing an extremist minority to worsen the pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic should have been over by now, but instead the U.S. is facing what some medical experts have described as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Last week, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff held a press conference urging residents to get vaccinated, offering a dramatic chart showing that close to 90 percent of new infections are among the unvaccinated, who in turn make up 95 percent of hospitalizations. Out of the nearly 9,000 Texans who died of the coronavirus from February 8 to July 14, just 43 were known to be vaccinated. In other words, unvaccinated people constituted 99.5 percent of coronavirus deaths in Texas during that period.

Calling it a pandemic of the unvaccinated, however, may mislead some people into believing that the current wave is merely a problem for those who haven’t gotten the shots. The surge is straining the state’s hospital capacity, forcing Texans to delay medical procedures. Children under 12 remain unvaccinated, and some adolescents and adults who have gotten the shot, including those who are immunocompromised, remain vulnerable to infection and serious illness because of the Delta variant. The longer so many people go unvaccinated, the more likely the evolution of even-more-deadly strains of the disease becomes. And, put simply, you should care when the people around you are dying in droves of a preventable illness.

In the first D-aligned poll, McAuliffe +6, so R and D-tilting polls aren't showing much of a difference in the race. #VAGov is still Lean D. The race hasn't moved an inch throughout the year and that's not good for Youngkin. There's no narrowing. https://t.co/DQ5ca9HP6D

— Chaz Nuttycombe (@ChazNuttycombe) August 26, 2021

David Rothkopf/Twitter:

The intellectual dishonesty that we have seen in critiques of Biden's handling of the exit from Afghanistan has been spectacular.
That's not to say some critiques are not warranted. They certainly are. But, some of the arguments being used are so indefensible they require us to question the critics' motives or expertise. Here are some of the worst ones.
1. Biden owns this. (No. The authors of 20 yrs of war own this. The corrupt Afghan govt & the Afghan military who stood down own this. The Trump Admin that set the deadlines, drew down the troops, left behind the materiel & released 5000 Taliban own this.)
2. Well, at least he owns the chaos surrounding our exit. (No. There's no way that the Taliban regaining control would not have led to chaos w/many thousands of Afghans seeking to escape the rule of a thug regime. Whenever we started airlifting folks out, it would've started.)
3. Well, at least he should have been better prepared for the chaos. (Ok. I'm gonna give you this one. But having said that, efforts to prepare were rebuffed. The Afghan gov't did not want the US beginning mass evacuations for the reasons cited above.)

1. @AlanIAbramowitz has a great piece for us this morning about how swing voters are declining in presidential elections over time, but are still vital. A quick thread on what he found https://t.co/SLmXewJ8zD

— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) August 25, 2021