The Immaculate Exit dodge

As Paul observed yesterday Yglesias has been doing valiant work taking on the Blob and the reporters who repeat their opinions as fact in straight news reports despite their having been wrong about everything. This might be his most important thread yet, taking on the “we’re just criticizing how the withdrawal was handled” argument, which is really just “we should have stayed forever” without the courage of its convictions:

Now obviously the people pushing this line have an answer — don't withdraw troops, send more, and keep fighting for another decade or four.

But a lot of reporters have let themselves get duped into the idea that there's some other debate.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 21, 2021

It's a perfectly legitimate thing to debate — many influential people in Washington believe that 20 years and $1 trillion was not enough resources poured down the drain and they wanted more.

What I object to is the pretense that there's some *other* debate happening.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 21, 2021

Imagine the reaction if the US military had started destroying Afghan National Army military equipment on our way out the door *and then* they'd surrendered without a shot to the Taliban. It's an absurd idea. https://t.co/K3wFBp5uFW— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 21, 2021

Remember that up until very recently, there were regularly scheduled commercial flights from Kabul to Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Delhi, Istanbul etc. — westerners weren't trapped in the city in need of evacuation, they were just there working.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 21, 2021

I’m sure mistakes have been made because they always will be, but the idea there could be a way of ending the war with the Afghan-not-actually-a-government-in-the-Weberian-sense instantaneously collapsing without substantial chaos is silly. And the reason for this middle ground position is that the honest version — “the fact that the first twenty years and trillion dollars accomplished literally nothing while we lied our asses off about it is all the more reason to stay for another 20 or 40 Friedman Units” is self-refuting.

Meanwhile, this rationalization is, to put it mildly, unpersuasive:

I understand there’s frustration saying media coverage of Afghanistan withdrawal might make another POTUS loathe to end a war.

But consider: Might also compel a future POTUS to rethink launching a war without cleer goals and minimally disruptive exit strategy.— Alex Ward (@alexbward) August 21, 2021

“George W. Bush would have had second thoughts about invading and staying in Afghanistan if he knew that his second Democratic successor got the blame for it being a bad idea horribly executed because he ended it, while he and the two successors who continued the war in total futility got off scot-free”…why, exactly? The perverse incentives created by the fact that the media is unwilling to declare wars a failure* until they’ve ended are a major problem. And the idea that the people who have been wrong about Afghanistan for 20 years, often with major conflicts of interests, should continue to be treated uncritically as credible experts makes no sense at all.

*The Iraq War was a partial exception here, but that’s because the Bush administration was dumb enough to focus the case for war on claims about Saddam’s scary, scary WMD capacity that could be falsified while the war was ongoing. As long as you have objectives that whose achievement can’t be clearly disproven until the war ends, you’re golden.