The DoD, CYA, And The “Accountability For Afghanistan” Blame Game

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

Related Post Roulette

25 Responses

  1. InMD says:

    My speculation is that everyone in the military, foreign policy, and intelligence establishment thought Biden would blink once he was facing down the deadline. That’s what Obama did. I think none of them believed we were actually leaving then were caught flat footed and in their own lies when we it turned out we were.

    All of this illustrates the dangers of ‘the troops can do no wrong’ version of patriotism. In practice it acts as an accountability shield for what is in practice a big bureaucracy, just as capable of incompetence as any other. It’s also a pretty damning indictment of the military and civilian defense establishment that no one has even offered their resignation.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to InMD says:

      I cannot believe how awful the intelligence failure was for this.

      Not merely the “it fell in days instead of months” failure but the “I don’t think that we’re actually going to leave” failure.

      (And there might even be a “they don’t think we mean it” failure in there too.)Report

      • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

        (it wasn’t a failure)
        (they knew it was gonna go like this)
        (when people call it an Intelligence Failure they’re trying to claim that this was an inadvertent excess of optimism and hope instead of a cynical triage decision.)Report

        • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

          What we saw here was something to the effect of:

          (criticism of Afghanistan pullout)
          “But Trump! This is Trump’s fault! Stop putting this on Biden!”

          Like… dude. Who’s talking about Biden? This is about the awful and horrible intelligence failure that was the “oh, it’ll fall in half a year” that turned into “it fell in half a week”.

          Were there people trying to score political points with the whole “Fall of Saigon” thing? Yes, there were.

          Part of the reason that there were was because of the whole “debacle” thing. Debacles make it easier to score political points.Report

    • Philip H in reply to InMD says:

      or had their resignation drafted for them to sign.Report

    • Marchmaine in reply to InMD says:

      Yep.

      What surprises me a little is Biden agreeing to be a fall-guy. I mean, all he has to do to call the “Anonymous Top Pentagon officials'” bluff of leaking that Biden screwed the pooch is to kill the pooch by firing them.

      But, at the end of the day, Biden isn’t interested in this project… as Andrew said nicely, it’s in his DNA to want to ‘drive the machine’ rather than fix it. There’s no surprise there… unless the “Anonymous Officials” over-play their hand.Report

      • North in reply to Marchmaine says:

        Yeah, it doesn’t surprise me. Accepting the blame he’s going to inevitably get is kind of the default position. Taking the battle to the blob and collecting scalps won’t actually deflect blame off Biden- the buck stops with him like it or not- but it’d spread the pain. Taking on the blob, though, would take up a lot of administrative bandwidth and, bluntly, the voters likely wouldn’t reward it. Better to focus on things that might actually help next election.Report

      • InMD in reply to Marchmaine says:

        I am always hesitant to apply any sort of selflessness to a politician, particularly one in office. However if the reports of Biden being such a strong dissenter on this issue in the Obama administration are true it may be that he simply thinks it’s the right thing to do, damn the consequences. I also think it probably helps that getting out was and still is the hugely popular position. Maybe his calculation is simply that it will be of very little significance to his larger political fortunes, particularly if he lets it disappear from the headlines.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to InMD says:

      All the ship collisions over the last 10+ years should have made the incompetence question clear long ago…Report

  2. Marchmaine says:

    Agree with Andrew that this right here is the crux:

    “The evidence we have coming out of the Afghanistan conflict is the bedrock principle of American defense, the elected civilian control and oversight of a professional military, has become just one more unmanageable, unaccountable, and untouchable branch of bloated bureaucratic government by the design of the people within and benefiting from it.”

    Basically, the military wants/needs a low risk proving ground for career advancement, new tech, and post-career opportunities selling new tech for low risk proving ground escapades that don’t further national interests. The amount of money sloshing around DoD procurement is stupendous.Report

    • North in reply to Marchmaine says:

      I agree. Frankly, though, I don’t think that loose money in the DoD is going to change until/unless the US hits a debt crisis- by which I mean a real debt crisis rather than Republicans waking up one day, realizing they’re not currently running the show and rediscovering their faith in deficit hawkery.Report

  3. Slade the Leveller says:

    “Who lost Afghanistan?”

    Who give a flying fish? This backwater has occupied our attention for a solid 2 decades, to the profit of neither nation.Report

    • Slade the Leveller in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

      Yeah, the road to the Pacific certainly lies through Central Asia. (rolling eyeball emoji)Report

      • Greginak in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

        Lighten up Francis. Getting out of afghan helps us. Our strong allies aren’t afraid of us ditching them and we just made a move japan liked which was selling subs to the Aussies. Iran isn’t a threat to us and we are trying to get our sweet treaty back with them.

        Plenty of countries survived admitting a sink hole is in fact a sink hole and moving on.Report

  4. Michael Cain says:

    Related by way of competency, the ULA successfully launched one of their last 30 Atlas Vs yesterday. The remaining 29 are committed to customers, including a limited number of Boeing Starliner trips to the International Space Station. The Delta IV, ULA’s other operational big lifter, is not human-rated and is very expensive (about $400M per launch). Once the Atlas Vs are gone, the Boeing Starliner is grounded until the ULA’s Vulcan Centaur is flying and human rated. The Vulcan is dependent on Bezos’s BE-4 engine. No flight-rated BE-4s have been delivered yet and there are rumors of significant problems. The ULA’s single purpose design SLS will run at least $2B per launch, perhaps more.

    Sometimes I wonder if Musk has meetings with his SpaceX people and asks, “Can we really put the ULA out of business?”Report

    • Philip H in reply to Michael Cain says:

      If we still want to replace government run space programs with government contracted space programs the answer is yes. And its up to those contractors to come up with new vehicles, since the supply of “surplus” government rockets and motors was known when this all started. If they really wanted to commercialize space, Bezos and Musk would put some of their considerable personal fortunes into these supply chain problems, but I suspect they will begin agitating soon for NASA to solve this for them.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Michael Cain says:

      do keep in mind that the reason ULA had to make the Vulcan was people in Congress being Very Very Upset about the Atlas V using a Russian-built engine. If it hadn’t been for nationalist sentiment then Blue Origin would not be involved with ULA at all and they’d still be building Atlas V’s.Report

  5. Philip H says:

    Of note – the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) has new report out detailing a LOT of waste fraud and abuse in our 20 year occupation.

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/07/asia/us-afghanistan-spending-waste-intl-cmd/index.htmlReport