After four long years of Donald Trump wandering the halls of power with his pants down and flaunting his corrupt dealings, racist acts, and incompetence (not to mention the sedition), the nation's political press has finally found something to unite both sides of the political aisle. This something is the withdrawal of the United States from a two-decade war that was never able to build an Afghan government sturdier than a flower stem.
It's not that the press has strong feelings about continuing the war—the war Trump negotiated an end to, by the way—but there's been a national oath taken to not talk about that. It's that everybody agrees that Joe Biden is ending the war wrong. This assertion is according to a wide assortment of war architects whose strategies and preconceptions were so bumblefkingly misguided at every last turn, 20 years running, that not even a full generation's double-down efforts could produce their promised outcomes.
Again, for a Steadfastly Neutral Political Press, it's uncanny how swiftly the talking points of Republican opinion-havers turn into high-tide news cycles. Show after interview after broadcast after article, all featuring the same words. As for whether the press has learned anything in the 20 years beginning with terrorism-premised military expeditions and ending with an attempted fascist takeover of government, the speed with which news coverage has in all respects snapped back to its pre-Trump obsessions and foibles suggests not. We appear to remain, to use the academic term preferred by sociologists, boned.
A seditious attack on the United States led by a sociopathic failed president got headlines only until the Capitol windows had their glass replaced. Reporters grumbling that the “optics” of the U.S.’ hasty refugee evacuations have put a new presidency “in crisis” are attempts to make the news cycle, not to report it.
It is possible the withdrawal from Afghanistan was mismanaged. It is also possible that most or all of the war's dedicated experts were caught completely flat-footed by the sheer speed of Afghanistan’s government and military collapse. It is possible that the 300,000-strong Afghan military was even more of a paper tiger than their American coordinators could fathom. Whatever chain of events allowed an assemblage of violent zealots to sweep through the nation with a swiftness that seems hampered more refueling their trucks than by actual Afghan opposition, all of it seems to squarely support the charge that America's success in Afghanistan has always been fiction.
Behind the scenes, the true story seems to hinge on President Joe Biden's loss of trust and patience for the same arguments (and arguers) that have kept us impotently occupied in permanent war. The Daily Beast reports that Biden has been keenly aware of how the national security complex has gaslit and slow-walked previous presidents into abandoning attempts to wind down the war. He and his team, according to reports, felt it was long past time to reevaluate current missions and ditch those that weakened the nation. A new assertion that the withdrawal would have eventually worked if war planners were given another two, four, or ten years to prepare for it simply wasn't going to fly.
Rather than listing out the full panoply of ways the foreign policy experts of the press have padded their beats with strategic hysteria in place of thoughtful analysis, here are some press critics that slam the laziest of the reportage with approximately the disgust it deserves. Consider me in league with them all.
• From Eric Boehlert at Press Run, we get some suitable exasperation at the press "deliberately falling down a deep well of optics reporting" to craft the story they want to tell. "The media have gone all-in with the narrative that Biden's presidency sits on the precipice of ruin"—based on, primarily, the optics of the reporters' Republican sources saying so.
As Boehlert observes, it's a game similar to the coverage given Hillary Clinton's Emails; the political press covers even the most hyperventilating Republican claims and then repeats them ad nauseam. Why? Because hey, the "optics" of someone saying those things makes for a quick and research-light story that will turn public heads. In the end, a great many of the nation's problems come from media elevation of the political press over the facts and stuff press. Determining which infrastructure policies might best serve an urbanizing nation is complex and often boring, but when a well-heeled professional ideologue has said a thing, that can be written up as an "optics" story. In the span of a few hours, cue the gushing by literally any pundit that can find their way to a camera.
• From Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel comes a call-out of press efforts to rehabilitate national security sources with misleading claims that yes, the White House was warned of the probable near-instant collapse of the Afghan military. Wheeler remains an expert in source-pushed press or government gaslighting; she levels The Wall Street Journal here for a published ass-covering that relies on readers not understanding how calendars work. The gullibility of journalists, when approached by sources with bridges to sell, will never end.
• From Josh Marshall at TPM, there's a broader look that suggests that Actually (and even despite the complete evaporation of the Afghan military leading to the Taliban reaching Kabul long before any American planner seems to have predicted), the withdrawal and evacuation of asylum-seekers doesn't seem to be nearly the fiasco the press quickly painted it to be—and features more than a few figures trying to sell cures that are at present imaginary. "The loud voices are ones of evasion," says Marshall, and the "real charlatans are those staking out what amounts to a phony third option–getting out cleanly, without anything that felt bad."
• From Michael Hobbes at Rotten in Denmark we get a reminder of why blogs are an infinitely better medium than any op-ed page anywhere and will remain better forever, period, full stop. Stop reading op-ed pages, damn it. You’re just encouraging them. From a launch that ties past academic and press hysteria over Black American speech patterns to the current national inability to distinguish between intelligent ideas and stupid ones presented with "intelligent" veneer, we get a nice rundown of why savvy media punditry sucks, very, very much, and acts primarily as an optics-focused way for invested figures to say optics things to bend the optics however they want them bent. Bonus points to Hobbes for taking aim at one of my personal pet grievances: the insufferable emptiness of The Atlantic's recent slide to performative contrarianism.
Is the evacuation from Afghanistan "bad"? Of course it is. We lost a war—we can't claim otherwise if, after 20 years of half-hearted action, the enemy was able to road-trip their way back into regional and national government before we had even fully cleaned out our desks. We lost the war even more egregiously than we thought we had, resulting in a sea of people storming the airport hours after their propped-up president had fled the country for safer ground.
So now things are a mess, and now for all this nation's talk of defending Afghan women and children or putting the brakes on militant religious oppression worldwide, we remain where we began—almost entirely dependent on future diplomatic and economic pressures to enforce human rights that could not be enforced with military power.
Unless the United States was prepared to annex Afghanistan as a territory, make the country the 51st American state, or pursue the war with such violence that no notable number of Afghans allied with Taliban ideologies were left alive, the endgame was always destined to be something similar to this one. And it's terrible. Not just because we could not secure civil rights we pretended to care about, during two decades of taking the same actions and wondering why we were getting no better results, but because the aftermath suggests that our whole pursuit of the war was a farce to begin with.
Since none of the war's architects want an examination of those failures, we're left instead with grousing about how things would have worked out in the 22nd year, or the 27th year, or the 51st year if a president was willing to listen to them ... forever.
It's not that the press has strong feelings about continuing the war—the war Trump negotiated an end to, by the way—but there's been a national oath taken to not talk about that. It's that everybody agrees that Joe Biden is ending the war wrong. This assertion is according to a wide assortment of war architects whose strategies and preconceptions were so bumblefkingly misguided at every last turn, 20 years running, that not even a full generation's double-down efforts could produce their promised outcomes.
Again, for a Steadfastly Neutral Political Press, it's uncanny how swiftly the talking points of Republican opinion-havers turn into high-tide news cycles. Show after interview after broadcast after article, all featuring the same words. As for whether the press has learned anything in the 20 years beginning with terrorism-premised military expeditions and ending with an attempted fascist takeover of government, the speed with which news coverage has in all respects snapped back to its pre-Trump obsessions and foibles suggests not. We appear to remain, to use the academic term preferred by sociologists, boned.
A seditious attack on the United States led by a sociopathic failed president got headlines only until the Capitol windows had their glass replaced. Reporters grumbling that the “optics” of the U.S.’ hasty refugee evacuations have put a new presidency “in crisis” are attempts to make the news cycle, not to report it.
It is possible the withdrawal from Afghanistan was mismanaged. It is also possible that most or all of the war's dedicated experts were caught completely flat-footed by the sheer speed of Afghanistan’s government and military collapse. It is possible that the 300,000-strong Afghan military was even more of a paper tiger than their American coordinators could fathom. Whatever chain of events allowed an assemblage of violent zealots to sweep through the nation with a swiftness that seems hampered more refueling their trucks than by actual Afghan opposition, all of it seems to squarely support the charge that America's success in Afghanistan has always been fiction.
Behind the scenes, the true story seems to hinge on President Joe Biden's loss of trust and patience for the same arguments (and arguers) that have kept us impotently occupied in permanent war. The Daily Beast reports that Biden has been keenly aware of how the national security complex has gaslit and slow-walked previous presidents into abandoning attempts to wind down the war. He and his team, according to reports, felt it was long past time to reevaluate current missions and ditch those that weakened the nation. A new assertion that the withdrawal would have eventually worked if war planners were given another two, four, or ten years to prepare for it simply wasn't going to fly.
Rather than listing out the full panoply of ways the foreign policy experts of the press have padded their beats with strategic hysteria in place of thoughtful analysis, here are some press critics that slam the laziest of the reportage with approximately the disgust it deserves. Consider me in league with them all.
• From Eric Boehlert at Press Run, we get some suitable exasperation at the press "deliberately falling down a deep well of optics reporting" to craft the story they want to tell. "The media have gone all-in with the narrative that Biden's presidency sits on the precipice of ruin"—based on, primarily, the optics of the reporters' Republican sources saying so.
As Boehlert observes, it's a game similar to the coverage given Hillary Clinton's Emails; the political press covers even the most hyperventilating Republican claims and then repeats them ad nauseam. Why? Because hey, the "optics" of someone saying those things makes for a quick and research-light story that will turn public heads. In the end, a great many of the nation's problems come from media elevation of the political press over the facts and stuff press. Determining which infrastructure policies might best serve an urbanizing nation is complex and often boring, but when a well-heeled professional ideologue has said a thing, that can be written up as an "optics" story. In the span of a few hours, cue the gushing by literally any pundit that can find their way to a camera.
• From Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel comes a call-out of press efforts to rehabilitate national security sources with misleading claims that yes, the White House was warned of the probable near-instant collapse of the Afghan military. Wheeler remains an expert in source-pushed press or government gaslighting; she levels The Wall Street Journal here for a published ass-covering that relies on readers not understanding how calendars work. The gullibility of journalists, when approached by sources with bridges to sell, will never end.
• From Josh Marshall at TPM, there's a broader look that suggests that Actually (and even despite the complete evaporation of the Afghan military leading to the Taliban reaching Kabul long before any American planner seems to have predicted), the withdrawal and evacuation of asylum-seekers doesn't seem to be nearly the fiasco the press quickly painted it to be—and features more than a few figures trying to sell cures that are at present imaginary. "The loud voices are ones of evasion," says Marshall, and the "real charlatans are those staking out what amounts to a phony third option–getting out cleanly, without anything that felt bad."
• From Michael Hobbes at Rotten in Denmark we get a reminder of why blogs are an infinitely better medium than any op-ed page anywhere and will remain better forever, period, full stop. Stop reading op-ed pages, damn it. You’re just encouraging them. From a launch that ties past academic and press hysteria over Black American speech patterns to the current national inability to distinguish between intelligent ideas and stupid ones presented with "intelligent" veneer, we get a nice rundown of why savvy media punditry sucks, very, very much, and acts primarily as an optics-focused way for invested figures to say optics things to bend the optics however they want them bent. Bonus points to Hobbes for taking aim at one of my personal pet grievances: the insufferable emptiness of The Atlantic's recent slide to performative contrarianism.
Is the evacuation from Afghanistan "bad"? Of course it is. We lost a war—we can't claim otherwise if, after 20 years of half-hearted action, the enemy was able to road-trip their way back into regional and national government before we had even fully cleaned out our desks. We lost the war even more egregiously than we thought we had, resulting in a sea of people storming the airport hours after their propped-up president had fled the country for safer ground.
So now things are a mess, and now for all this nation's talk of defending Afghan women and children or putting the brakes on militant religious oppression worldwide, we remain where we began—almost entirely dependent on future diplomatic and economic pressures to enforce human rights that could not be enforced with military power.
Unless the United States was prepared to annex Afghanistan as a territory, make the country the 51st American state, or pursue the war with such violence that no notable number of Afghans allied with Taliban ideologies were left alive, the endgame was always destined to be something similar to this one. And it's terrible. Not just because we could not secure civil rights we pretended to care about, during two decades of taking the same actions and wondering why we were getting no better results, but because the aftermath suggests that our whole pursuit of the war was a farce to begin with.
Since none of the war's architects want an examination of those failures, we're left instead with grousing about how things would have worked out in the 22nd year, or the 27th year, or the 51st year if a president was willing to listen to them ... forever.