Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Ian Welsh Page 146 of 437

What I Wrote April 9th About Afghanistan

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On August 18, 2021

50 Comments

Because sometimes it is important to say you said it.

This does mean the Taliban will almost certainly wind up ruling the country again; the Kabul government is not going to stand without US and NATO support.

That’s unfortunate, but the Taliban is the natural ruling party of Afghanistan. That’s just how it is. Probably the US shouldn’t have supported Islamic hardliners even before the Russian invasion (under Carter), but that’s a long-ago decision.

Biden’s going to be under immense pressure from the military and much of the media to not withdraw. He needs to hold firm. It would be best to do this as quickly as possible.

And yeah, this means there will be a “fall of Saigon” moment some time after the US leaves.

Nobody gets everything right (I’m bad on elections, in particular), but there are reasons its worth reading me: I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like this, and I’ve spent decades working on my models of the world so that I’m more likely to get stuff like this right.

Contrary to what I’m seeing that “no one could have predicted,” this was easily predicted. It was obvious.

Nor was I the only one. Two others.

June 21st: Moon of Alabama.

May 11th, The Saker.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

 

A Few Words About the Taliban

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On August 17, 2021

43 Comments

One of the cardinal sins of American propaganda and thinking is that they often seem to want to assume their enemies are stupid, cowards, corrupt, immoral, blah, blah, blah. (This is weird, because if your enemies are shit, then there’s little to be proud of if you win and a lot to be ashamed of if you lose.) My favorite was calling the 9/11 bombers cowards, when they were willing to die. (Insert idiots talking about virgins in heaven here.)

One thing to understand about the Taliban is that they’ve been at war now for decades. The US military has the best e-lint in the world, a fleet of drones, bombers and an army of special force assassins.

You fuck up even once as a member of the Taliban and you may get dead. Since the US likes bombs and doesn’t care about how many people they kill to get one “terrorist,” you won’t just get dead, you’ll take some of your friends and family with you.

You fuck up serially, and you WILL get dead, and you WILL cause the death of your friends and family. (Being captured, of course, is much worse. If anyone reading this thinks the US doesn’t still torture, well…)

Because of this, the Taliban leadership and even its lower ranks is made up of competent people who are true believers. It’s a harsh life in which you cannot make mistakes. Only brave, competent, true believers sign up and survive.

The Taliban, like Hezbollah, does not tolerate people who are serial fuck-ups. In this they are the exact opposite of US elites, who not only tolerate serial fuck-ups, but promote them.

The Taliban will rule Afghanistan effectively, in line with their beliefs and goals. Before the invasion they ended 99 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy production in areas they controlled. These are serious people, in ways that American leaders haven’t been since the ’50s.

I say this without any pleasure. The Taliban are my ideological enemies and I want religious fundamentalism wiped from the world. But it is what it is, and people need to take their blinkers off.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Taliban Take Control Of Afghanistan

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On August 16, 2021

35 Comments

As I noted recently, once the US left Afghanistan, the Taliban would rule. This was obvious, and only completely delusional fools thought otherwise. Anyone who thought so should never say anything about military affairs ever again. Yes, the government army was larger and better equipped, but they have zero legitimacy and the Taliban are better fighters.

Not that being better fighters was needed, in most cases there was hardly any fighting and “government” forces just surrendered because of that whole “zero legitimacy” thing. (Also, they’re corrupt from bottom to top. They weren’t in it to fight, they were in it to be on the take.)

There is a lot of hand wringing among the usual liberal suspects about the bad shit that is now going down: collaborators being killed, women being beaten, the end of women’s rights, and so on.

All of this is true, and not irrelevant, but not sufficient to argue the US should have stayed in Afghanistan indefinitely, and let a guerilla war rage on while Americans used drones to kill 90 percent innocents.

It’s hard to say how many Afghans have PTSD and depression, but it’s certainly a large number. In 2002, PTSD was 42 percent (thanks to the war with the USSR, and the period of civil war, and the anarchy afterwards). As the linked article says, it’s hard to imagine that further war and invasion has lessened.

As for deaths, we’ll never know. The US, as in Iraq, deliberately never counted and I haven’t been able to find a good population study. One very careful analysis from 2015, by Physicians for Social responsibility, came up with 1,400 a month, but noted that number was almost certainly an under-count. (It seems low to me. Remember deaths in war/occupation are rarely, to use the modern world’s lovely euphemism, “kinetic.’)

The point here is that what Afghanistan needs is peace.

It will be a bad peace for a lot of people, there is no question. The Taliban are nasty and medieval. But it will be peace and people will mostly be safe. If the US decides to stop shooting stuff up, maybe Afghans can even have safe weddings and funerals.

The US occupation of Afghanistan was not, ever, in any way comparable to the US occupations of Germany, Japan, or Korea because in none of those cases was there any ongoing multi-decade guerilla war.

Instead, the US occupation was the cause of an ongoing war against invaders.

It is true, that as usual, the US has betrayed the collaborators who helped it rule Afghanistan. They should have shipped them out and to the US before leaving.

The vast majority will be fine, mind you: the Taliban knows how to rule and is just telling almost everyone to go back to work (unless they are a woman). But the key collaborators will be killed or otherwise punished.

This is exactly what Americans would have done if the USSR had invaded and conquered America, then left. Translators and Vichy collaborators would not be treated kindly.

But it’s not in the US’s interest. After all, no doubt the US will need collaborators for its next overseas war and occupation, and they will be less willing seeing how Afghan collaborators were treated.

As for Americans, I’m extremely disheartened though entirely unsurprised to see prominent liberals arguing for forever-war. There’s this weird idea in the US that you are somehow, still, in any way, “good” when it comes to invading and destroying other people’s countries, that you have a right to take such actions and that the US doesn’t need its own Nuremberg trials.

Finally, it was never possible to leave “well.” The US military-political complex is incompetent to its core. You can’t do stupid smart, and Afghanistan has been stupid all the way through. (The smart policy would have been to follow the Clinton plan of going in, then leaving.)

Afghanistan’s peace will suck. It’s better than endless war.

For an American Veteran’s perspective I found compelling, see: “Afghanistan Meant Nothing.”

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

 

 

 

 

Open Thread

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On August 13, 2021

65 Comments

Use for topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax in this thread.

The Labor Shortage And the New Criminalization

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On August 12, 2021

51 Comments

The level of stupid in what passes for “discourse” in the Western world never ceases to amaze. Employers are shocked that they are having trouble filling low wage jobs and blame enhanced unemployment benefits, but even when half the states stop the unemployment benefits, still have trouble filling those jobs.

Supposedly a little over 600K people have died in the US from Covid (the actual toll is higher). The largest group is old people, driven by psychopaths like Cuomo killing them either deliberately or through vast criminal negligence.

But Covid has also hit the poor disproportionately, and it hit kitchen workers hard. If you’ve ever even seen a restaurant kitchen, let alone worked in one, you know why: they’re cramped, generally hotter than hell, and people have to be in each other’s faces.

While modern economics in its macro form is essentially astrology (but let’s not insult astrology), the core insight of marginal economics, that it’s the next customer, or widget, or worker that matter: the marginal cost, is important. If you go from having 2 people apply for every job to one person for every 2 jobs, the price point changes massively.

So there less people willing to work shit jobs at minimum wage (or below, for waiters, etc…)

It has been so long since the bottom end of the economy was hot in most places that few employers even remember it. The Massachussets Miracle of the 90s, for example. Local resource booms, etc… But for the majority of people there haven’t been tight markets for low-end workers since the 70s. In such markets you have to compete for workers; they set the prices,  you don’t.

Probably should have cared about poor people dying, if  you wanted to keep your wages down. Hard to have much sympathy for employers, who seem to have mostly not given a damn.

But most employers don’t realize that excess labor is something that was very carefully engineered, over two generations now, so that they would have low wages. It isn’t “natural” (or unnatural, to be fair) it’s a social choice. Cheap labor isn’t God-given, and it varies by place and time.

Meanwhile we have two other interesting events.

1) The decriminalization of marijuana, which is going to lead to a lot less people in prison.

2) The criminalization of homelessness, which is going to lead to a lot more people in prison.

The prison industry is a good gig for a lot of firms and people and even still provides a lot of jobs to towns that would otherwise have very few. You charge people huge rates to make calls, for anything in the commissary, even for books these days. Meanwhile you pay them a couple bucks a day to work, and on the back end, if you’re a private prison, you charge the government.

Any slowdown in the flow of prisoners is a slowdown in profits (and prisoners died in large numbers to Covid, too.)

America, fuck’yeah!

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Humanity’s Completely Broken Feedback Systems

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On August 10, 2021

44 Comments

If you want to understand how we got where we are, it’s simple: our strongest feedback systems to our decision making people are telling them “everything’s great, stay on course!”

For over 40 years now the rich have gotten richer. Politicians have gotten richer. Corporate officers, CEOs and executives have gotten richer.

Money is reward, and the reward centers for our elites are going off like a slot machine that constantly pays millions. BLING! BLING! BLING!

Whenever someone says “you should do less of this thing that makes you more money and power”, which is essentially everything that needs to be changed from Covid (making them richer) to climate change (still more oil to pump, baby) to ending pharma patents (Bill Gates says NO) to fixing inequality or feeding hungry people or housing the homeless, well, their fortunes (or bribes) come from making these things worse.

Capitalism is supposed to provide a feedback system. It isn’t the best feedback system, but if forced or allowed to work (and only government can enforce it, which is why rich people can’t be allowed, as they always purchase the government) it makes individuals and corporations who can’t even make a real profit go bankrupt.

But in 2008, Bernanke, whose entire intellectual opus was “how do we make sure another FDR doesn’t happen by making sure the rich never lose their money and power again” started the process of shoveling money down the gullets of the rich. (Greenspan had been piping it in too, but maintained some pretense he wasn’t and tried not to actually print money obviously.)

Every major central bank in the world followed course and all the economic feedback systems broke. No matter what rich idiots did, they would never as a class be allowed to go bankrupt, or even not keep getting richer. Vast money funneled to the rich and inflation showed up exactly where one would expect it, in things the rich were bidding up (yachts, art, luxury apartments) and in whatever they were buying up to get a new revenue stream (housing, most recently, so rent will soon /really/ go thru the roof.)

Now, as I pointed out at the time, the problem with all of this is that the real world exists, and so does a real economy in which items must be manufactured, food grown and products delivered. All of that has to be done in a world with weather, climate, animals, plants and an atmosphere.

Since all the feedback systems put in place by humans had broken (no one in power cared or cares about UN climate reports), we then had to wait for the world to start smacking us around.

That has started, with wildfires and northern hurricanes and so on (and Covid, to some extent), and the logistics system has proven itself to be fragile and easily disrupted exactly as many of us pointed out, while power and water systems and so on show their fragility as well.

But it’s not enough yet, this is all stuff the rich can ignore: have more than one home, have them off the grid, travel by private jet, etc, etc…

So the feedback will continue until it becomes so severe either the Proles do a Versailles on unresponsive elites or the elites feel more endangered than their bank accounts can make up for. (A hundred million+ dollars can buy a LOT of immunity. You may be dead before they feel it.)

This story isn’t new to regular readers, though, but I want to splice it with another thread.

Incentives.

I hate incentives. Loathe them. Every place I ever worked, the incentives did more harm than good. But it’s the mantra, the mindless ideology of our age that incentives work and you should align incentives.

Since we re-engineered our entire society to appear to do that, our societies have gone to shit for everyone but the one to three percent or so, but since feedback to anybody but them doesn’t matter, we continue.

I recently read John Ralston Saul’s “The Unconscious Civilization.” Or, rather, re-read it, but last time I looked at it was in the nineties.

Saul wrote a bunch of non-fiction books and they’re all bad except “The Unconscious Civilization”, which is brilliant. (They’re bad because Saul is of the old humanist tradition that insists on putting in as many references to the greats of the past as possible.)

But Unconscious Civilization is the publication of a series of five lectures by Saul and the limited time forced him to get to the fucking point. So, read it. (It’s scarily right about almost everything.)

One point Saul makes over and over again is the “value of disinterest”. Social decisions cannot be made properly by people who have an interest in them. Cannot be. We have run a 40 year (arguably 200 to 500 year) experiment on this, and it has failed and failed and failed. Elites need moderate negative feedback and to be insulated from the effects of their decisions which benefit groups.

Our society, as Saul points out, is all organized into interest groups, which half the audience is probably thinking is insane, because they think of interests group as things like environmentalist and people who want food aid, and not as corporations. (Though NGOs are definitely corporatist by Saul’s definition.)

People who have a strong interest can’t make good decisions for anyone but themselves about anything they have a strong positive interest in. It’s that simple.

If we want out of this mess, we have to break strong positive incentives. No stock options, for example. No surgeons flying around in private jets.

When someone’s interest is so strong it makes sense for them to burn the world down (and be clear, it did, because most wouldn’t still be here, and many figure their wealth will protect them), interest has failed. Incentives have failed.

Elites must be subject to the effects of their decisions, yes, but primarily on the downside.

It’s hard to see a way out of this now, because there isn’t one.

Instead the way out will be forced. When fear rises to the necessary level, those who betray society as a whole for their own interest will be dealt with. If they’re lucky it will be thru democratic norms, if they aren’t lucky, it will be the justice of the mob. In either case it will be too late to stop the worst of climate change and ecological collapse.

For you, a reader, the point is to internalize what went wrong and why, so you understand the conditions in which it will change and do not waste time on actions which won’t help. Moral ‘suasion will not work. The elites will respond to power and fear and nothing else.

If you can’t apply enough of that, or any movement asking for your help indicates their strategy doesn’t involve power and fear, then you need to prepare in other ways. In fact, as an ordinary person, you just need to prepare, because while you can do  your bit you do not have enough power to be determinative.

Politics is unlikely to save you and what you do will not determine if it does. So you must, with others, save yourselves.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The New Age Of Vertical Integration

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On August 9, 2021

37 Comments

When I was very young, conglomerates which controlled the entire chain of production were still somewhat popular. Companies didn’t like outsourcing or offshoring; if a widget went into their product, they wanted to own the factory, or eat least effectively control the supplier. Toyota had lots of suppliers, sure, but they were close the factories and they were under Toyota’s thumb: subsidiaries in all but name.

But business fashion changes, and the mantra of the day became “concentrate only on core business, get an expert to do everything else.” It often did reduce costs, but at the price of losing control. It didn’t work for everyone, General Electric under the over-praised but actually incompetent Jack Welch gutted itself. Following GE’s lead, other companies like the Big 3 auto producers started thinking they were financial companies and in the business of making money, not products.

Didn’t work out well for those who followed the fad whose business model didn’t actually support it.

But it did work well for many, at least in terms of increasing CEO and executive stock compensation. Growth actually slowed in the economy overall, but the economy in neoliberalism exists for companies, not companies for the economy, let alone society.

This era is now ending. Climate change is here, and infrastructure in foolish countries like America is failing repeatedly. China and the US are gearing up for a Cold War, Covid revealed that world shipping is fragile and not always cheap, and that no one can actually understand modern supply chains.

Supply officers panicked and started stockpiling goods, putting further pressure on supply chains and driving up prices for both shipping and materials, BUT if we didn’t have an era where trade and shipping and even production will become more and more subject to shocks, it would just be a passing fad.

But smart CEOS will now be reeling in their supply chains: rationalizing them so they know exactly where all the parts are made; the parts are made close to where they are assembled (if not in the same plant complex) and insulating them from problems with  3rd party shippers. The smart ones will pursue both vertical integration AND will have some geographic distribution (but not too much) so that geographical problems (wildfires, marine inundations, hurricanes, food riots) don’t shut them down entirely.

Those who don’t stand to lose their business entirely if a shock takes out a key part of their supply chain they don’t control or understand, or which supplies generally and is not bound to them.

We’ve been thru a very stupid era, and it’s not over yet, but it’s ending. Central banks can print money, but they can’t print machines parts, oil or food, and the limits of their power to deal with actual, real, non-financial shocks to the system are about to become evident.

Indeed, central banks, by funneling money to rich people and corporations which would have otherwise gone bankrupt have done almost everything within their power to make the system more fragile and worse run.l

When the food riots hit your country, remember to pay a visit to the central bank officers, past and present, to see how they are doing and to express your appreciation for their service. Perhaps you could also see the welfare of neoliberal politicians.

(Accurate job feedback has been removed from our elites, and they need it badly. When you have the chance, remember to help them out by providing it.)

Midas was a fool, but electronic bits are even more worthless than gold when the real world comes knocking.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Open Thread

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On August 6, 2021

58 Comments

For topics unrelated to recent threads. (No Covid, in particular.) Do not bring your fights from other threads here, either.

Play nicer folks. This is just a comments section, what you say in it changes nothing large, but how you act to other commenters matters because they are people.

I’d rather not bring back pre-approval comments moderation; among other things often you’ll have to wait 12+ hours for comment approval or dismissal. Sometimes longer.

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