Ian Welsh – Page 215 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Because of this, the Taliban leadership and even its lower ranks is made up of competent people who are true believers…

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

The Taliban will rule Afghanistan effectively, in line with their beliefs and goals.

This week,

“I’m happy about the improved security situation,” said Qadiri, 40. He doesn’t worry about crime the way he did a few weeks ago. He said corruption, along with the gov’t, appeared to vanish overnight.

Both of these things: improved security AND no corruption should not be a surprise. If you are surprised, your mental model of the world was badly flawed. The US-backed government was massively corrupt and the Taliban are competent true believers.

As Stoller notes, the next problem will be the economy.

Without the US flying in pallets of cash, Afghanistan will have some real problems. If the US insists on sanctions and doesn’t provide aid, Afghanistan will more or less automatically go into the China/Russia/Iran/Pakistan/Turkey axis. (Oh, they don’t like Iran, but they’ll live with them.)

The Taliban, as I have noted, run on an ideology I absolutely loathe. But I try to live in the real world, and I acknowledge the strengths and virtues of my enemies.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 29, 2021

By Tony Wikrent

On August 29, 2021

21 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy
Chamathe Palihapitiya – Everyone is WRONG About China

[Youtube, via Mike Norman Economics, August 23, 2021]

This is extremely informative on two levels. First, former Facebook executive provides his assessment of the short term and long term in China. Short term, the CCP has unambiguously demonstrated that it is firmly in control and that “we will decide how money is made, and who makes it.” Long term, China’s current population of 1.4 billion people is expected to fall by half to 700 million people by 2200. Palihapitiya says that the CC’P’s response to this demographic “time bomb” is to reinforce socialism — which is similar to the argument I make that increasing automation, robotics, and AI in USA and other countries will require more and more “social spending” to support people who simply do not, and cannot, have the means to earn a decent income. Secondly, is to contrast the composure and temperament of Palihapitiya, who clearly sees that the CCP is exerting control over “markets” in a way not thinkable in USA and the West, with that of Palihapitiya’s interlocutor, who is so enmeshed in “free market” theology that he is flipping out over what the CCP is doing.

Who Has the Cure for America’s Declining Birthrate? Canada .

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 8-24-2021]

Over the last century, two moments that transformed America and positioned it as the global economic leader were the post-World War II economic boom and the I.T. revolution of the 1990s. In both cases, America tore down many forms of discrimination and other barriers to harness the talents of marginalized groups in the country and to welcome new ones, injecting demographic vitality into the economy. To continue America’s upward trajectory in the 21st century, the country must reverse its current demographic decline.

That last sentence especially shows that the writer is locked into the mainstream economic idea that declining population necessarily means a loss of national wealth. This thinking is based on the ideas of feudal mercantilism, which Alexander Hamilton overthrew by his design of the USA economy: “To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted;” and, “the intrinsic wealth of a nation is to be measured, not by the abundance of the precious metals, contained in it, but by the quantity of the productions of its labor and industry….” Mercantalism is zero-sum. What one nation gained in trade, another lost. But Hamilton’s emphasis on machinery and the inventive genius of the human mind meant that the real wealth of a society is based on its technology, and the application of that technology to the processes of production, transportation, and communication.

The U.S. could be on the verge of a productivity boom, a game-changer for the economy

[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 8-23-2021]

Rapid adoption of robots and artificial intelligence during the pandemic combined with a rebound in government investment is making some economists optimistic about a return of a 1990s economy with widespread benefits.

Neither WaPo writer or Ritholtz asks what should be an obvious question: If we can produce so much more with so many less workers, why do people need to work? In a republic, the ability of society to provide for human needs must be distributed in such a way that all citizens are guaranteed to decent life, with the material conditions needed for each to make their own, unique contributions.

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On August 28, 2021

34 Comments

Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. In particular, avoid Covid and Afghanistan please.

The Taliban, ISIS, & the Kabul Airport Attack

By Ian Welsh

On August 27, 2021

91 Comments

So, a group called ISIS-K attacked near the Kabul airport and killed people, including US troops.

The media is in a full hand-wringing “Blame Biden” mode, which is fair in a sense (the buck stops at the top) and ridiculous in that it is still a war zone, and people die and evacuating traitors and collaborators after the country has fallen was always going to be a difficult job.

The Taliban was responsible for security outside the airport and failed, but given the mob scene, the only way they could have succeeded was to clear all the people clustered around the airport looking to get out, and pushed checkpoints back. Perhaps they should have done it, but it would have looked very bad and been used to suggest they were keeping people in the country.

Some people think this means a hard war for the Taliban against ISIS, but I rather doubt it: ISIS-K is a truncated terrorist group, not a full-fledged guerilla movement. They may be able to carry out some suicide attacks and bombings, but they aren’t a real threat to the Taliban. That doesn’t mean that cleaning them up entirely will be easy, but I don’t expect them to control any large amount of territory.

This is the sort of nonsense being spewed by “experts.”

The Taliban is overwhelmed,” Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown and the Council on Foreign Relation, tells Politico. “They are very effective at bullying and victimizing civilians, but they are incompetent at battling groups that look like themselves.”

This is the American disease, again. “The people who just kicked our ass are only good at beating up civilians, which is why we lost to them.” And “our murder squads are morally superior to them.” The main strategy in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, other than bribing untrustworthy people, was drone murders and special forces kill squads. We know that the drones killed about 90 percent civilians, and I’d be very surprised if the kill squad numbers were much better.

Broken countries are hard to rule. Iraq still has regular bombings to this day (unknown under Saddam). But the Taliban will be no worse than the US and its proxy government was at stopping them, and I suspect rather better, because they have what the US and the proxy government never had: legitimacy. Remember, most cities, including Kabul, did not fall to military force; the Taliban negotiated entry. In Kabul’s case, they were asked in by Karzai, the ex-President, because the “government” forces couldn’t maintain order.

When going after terrorists, which is what ISIS-K is, what you need to is informants. The Taliban will have more of them than the US ever did because, again, the Taliban has the legitimacy the US and its proxy forces never had.

As for the idea that the Taliban want or needs US help…

…Amira Jadoon, an ISIS-K expert at the U.S. Military Academy, told the Post. “Without U.S. support or Afghan security forces,” she added, “I don’t think we can realistically expect the Taliban to constrain ISIS-K” alone.

No. They will get help from Pakistan, and probably China, not the US, which has already started slapping on sanctions.

And, again, the idea that the US is good, or even remotely competent at shutting down terrorist groups in overseas nations is ludicrous. The US presence and “help” increases terrorist strength.

Afghanistan’s a mess. Over five million refugees were created during the occupation. We don’t know how many people died or wound up with PTSD and other mental or physical issues, but this isn’t going to be an easy country to govern.

What the US can do is bugger off and stay out of Afghanistan’s affairs. No sanctions, and no “help” except maybe reparations (which we all know the US won’t pay, because the US always thinks of themselves as the “good guys”).

And do remember, absent the US invasion of Iraq, ISIS would never have happened. Absent the US support for the Mujahideen fighting against the USSR, the Taliban and Al-Q’aeda would never have happened.

If the US actually wanted to help, which is beyond laughable, the best way would be to just stop interfering in other nations’ affairs.

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The Beautiful Stupidity of Ukraine’s Massive Sell-off

By Ian Welsh

On August 26, 2021

27 Comments

So, the Ukraine has a plan.

Kyiv is planning a selloff of more than 3,000 state companies reminiscent of the ’90s rush in Moscow.

If you go read the full article, it’s beautiful, truly. This sell-off is about de-oligarchicization! It is about reducing corruption! Foreigners are flooding in to buy these companies up, but Russians aren’t allowed.

The ’90s Russian sell-off is what created the oligarchs, of course. It was done at the urging of American economists, the idea was to subject the Russian economy to “shock therapy.” Similar to “shock and awe,” it was just as good at impoverishing people.

The Nation wrote about this back in ’98:

Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia’s economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of “shock therapy” to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock – not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent–than therapy.

Economists are ideological shock troops, intent on making the world look like their ideology says it should. They are little different from Communist cadres, except the deaths they inflict are done second-hand: They don’t have the honesty to kill themselves, but just set up “markets” to do the job for them. (Note that the idolized Jeffrey Sachs was the architect of a huge die-off and impoverishment of Russians. A truly despicable man.)

The Ukraine is making the same mistake, again, and the result will be the same, except with a lot more foreign ownership (just not Russian!). This is bad, because local oligarchs are easier to control than international ones, who are protected by much more international law and American sanctions. Russia still has an oligarch problem, to be sure, but it is much less than it was, because Putin was able to effectively threaten them.

If you want to introduce private enterprise into your mostly state run country you do it Chinese style, not Russia/Harvard ’90s style. Anyone with sense knows this, since the records of what happened in the two countries are a matter of public record, and within living memory.

Big uncontrolled sell-offs are bad, sell-offs to foreigners are worse.

Part of this is corruption in drag because a lot of the people involved in the sell-off will get rich; part of it is ideology similar to the Harvard boys’s depraved actions in Russia, and some of it is genuine belief that foreigners are superior to Ukrainians. That seems…unlikely. It’s what the Russians believed in the ’90s -— “Americans have a huge surplus of consumer goods, surely, they will help and teach us to have it too!”

But, as the bitter Russian joke about the late ’90s stated, “Everything the Communists told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was true.”

Ukraine will, as a result of this, wind up even worse off. The corruption will be less visible to the extent it is foreign corruption, but will be no less real, and oligarchs who don’t even live in the Ukraine will be no kinder to the Ukraine than oligarchs who do live in it.

Sad.

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China is “Totalitarian,” We Couldn’t Do Zero-Covid

By Ian Welsh

On August 25, 2021

55 Comments

Oh?

Here’s a report on how New Zealand handled their latest outbreak. Their contract tracers contacted 13,000 people and stopped 110 chains of transmission (in a week.) They tested ten percent of Auckland’s population in a week.

The outbreak has been going on for only ten days, which means they caught it early and jumped on it. They tested wastewater and found infections only in two cities; those two cities get a 14 day lockdown (because that’s the virus cycle) and the rest of the country ten days, which is long enough for anyone who has it to show symptoms.

There is some opposition, but overall support is very high. Communications are clear and not constantly changing and, most importantly, are backed by success: The government says what it will do, does it, and it works.

New Zealand is not yet high-vaccination. The doctor whose account I am summarizing notes that Taiwan has also done very well against Delta.

So, we now have accounts of three countries that have done well: China (yesterday’s post), New Zealand, and Taiwan. All used the same essential playbook: Jump hard on the first reports of infection, lockdown, and quarantine. China’s lockdown was more local than New Zealand’s but China is a much larger country.

China is totalitarian, and Taiwan and New Zealand are democracies, but they are all following essentially the same playbook, because it is the playbook that has been proven to work.

As with much of what is wrong in the world, Covid is a problem because we refuse to do the right things that we know work, and, in this case, that are proven to work.

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Herd Immunity & Multiple Covid Waves Is a Monstrous Policy

By Ian Welsh

On August 24, 2021

58 Comments

Folks, what your leaders are doing to you (us), and what many of you think is necessary or good, is monstrous. Long Covid in people aged 16-30.

Researchers at Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, have followed 312 Covid-19 patients for an entire year. 247 of them home-isolated, while 65 were hospitalized.

The results of their study were recently published in an article in Nature Medicine.

At six months, 61 percent of all patients had persistent symptoms, the researchers found.

Among those who home-isolated, 52 percent still experienced various symptoms after half a year.

Only sixty days, rather than six months, total population, not just 16-30.

Our team just published a paper on this subject out of our Arizona cohort, led by Dr. Melanie Bell. We found that 60 days post-SARS-CoV-2 infection, a total of 77 percent of participants were still reporting symptoms. None were hospitalized for their infection. https://t.co/qDTMx9boMR

For all that we squeal about China, and bad, and fascist, and so on, here is the Chinese response to their latest “wave”. (We wouldn’t even call this a wave, the number of infections are so small. Remember, Chinese population is 1.4 Billion.)

China’s health authority reported on Monday that there were no new locally-transmitted cases of COVID-19 for the first time since July, offering more signs that the current outbreak which began late last month may be tapering off soon.

The latest outbreak was driven mainly by infections first detected among a few airport workers in the eastern city of Nanjing on July 20. Since then, more than 1,200 people in China have been confirmed to be infected.

The outbreak has spurred local authorities across the country to impose tough counter-epidemic measures including mass testing for millions of people to identify and isolate carriers, as well as treat the infected.

No one has died in the current outbreak, which has largely focused on the cities of Nanjing and Yangzhou in the province of Jiangsu, near the financial hub of Shanghai.

Across China, new local cases fell to the single-digits last week, after peaking in early August.

But over the weekend, Shanghai placed hundreds of people under quarantine after infections were found in cargo workers at one of its two airports, sparking concerns of a fresh outbreak in the city.

Shanghai has reported no new local infections since then. (my emphasis)

This is what properly done zero-Covid looks like. You quarantine, lock down when necessary, and so on.

On August 23, 2021 (one day), according to the New York Times, the US had over 150K new cases. During the entire last outbreak China had under 1,300.

The “Fascists” in China take better care of their people in a pandemic than the “free” Americans (or Canadians or Brits or Germans.) Even places like Australia have fucked up, because they do not properly quarantine or close soon enough when quarantine fails.

Covid is a test of nations, and virtually no western nations have passed. We are incapable of collective group action to protect our societies, even from a plague.

And because this is not the cold, because it cripples a lot of people for some period afterwards (we don’t know how many, or for how long, but we know it is not a trivial number) the idea of just letting multiple waves rip through society until everyone is sort of immune, even if that would work, is monstrous.

Indeed, because immunity to Covid, both from vaccines and from natural infection wanes over a period months, herd immunity as a policy probably won’t work; all that’s really going on is praying that eventually the dominant Covid strain becomes one that is mild, and then we just live with it.

Your lords and masters run societies in ways mean to kill you or hurt you terribly. They are acting worse than the totalitarian CCP.

As long as this set of elites stays in power in the developed world, you can expect you and those you care about will suffer and die, so long as it makes elites richer (which Covid does) or helping you inconveniences you (which is why enhanced employment benefits were cancelled in so many states when bosses whined).

It’s you, or it’s your elites. So far, in vast numbers, it is you.

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America Decides to Ensure Afghanistan Will Be a Chinese and Russian Ally

By Ian Welsh

On August 23, 2021

28 Comments

I mean, honestly, they probably would have been anyway and yes, I’m getting tired of writing about Afghanistan, but the time to say things about a subject which need to be said is when people are paying attention.

Anyway.

Squeezing Afghanistan some more after spending 40 years destroying it in so many different ways https://t.co/xNhumefL77

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) August 21, 2021

Sanctions don’t work to get countries to do what you want: They haven’t worked with North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, or Cuba. But what they will do is force Afghanistan to get help where it’s available, from the same countries willing to help Iran, which is to say the US’s geopolitical enemies: Russia and China.

If you take a look at a map you can see that both Russia and China really want Afghanistan to be friendly, and willing to let through trade and traffic, plus there are all the minerals, and so on.

If the US had not kept treating the Taliban as enemies, they might have been able to to avoid a tight alliance: All it takes is spending some of the war cash on Afghanistan even though the war has ended. But Americans so often don’t do realpolitik, they just pretend to. So much is about feelings, not interests.

China was always the rising power, but there was no need for Russia or Iran to be its ally. Likewise, the rise of sanctions as the US’s favorite weapon, even above drones, is essentially forcing half the world to create an alternate payments system and end the dollar’s role as world reserve currency, though it may keep that status in part of the world.

Dollar hegemony is a large part of American hegemony, so this seems foolish, but the same elites who couldn’t understand why occupying Afghanistan was stupid, or why using murder squads and drones which kill 90 percent civilians was just making the Taliban stronger, are also incapable of actually managing US interests, even in the coldest, hardest, evil, but semi-pragmatic, terms.

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