The Economics Of War: Clearly, The Afghanistan Lesson Was NOT Learned

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LONG TAKE

I will make a wild claim—and please chime in with a disagreement if you want to take yourself out of contention: any one of my readers would have made for a better, smarter, cable news “talking head expert” on Afghanistan in the past couple of weeks.

Man, the drivel that cascaded out of the mouths of all the people, who for many years, sometimes decades, have been cheerleaders for invasion, for war, for Pentagon big budgets in the name of “national security”, for global U.S. “American Exceptionalism”, with nary a moment of doubt or self-reflection, was just epic. Their entire frame of reference, in the blabbering about the Afghanistan withdrawal, was some version of “bad execution”, “poor planning” or “Biden was too stubborn to do something different that would have made withdrawal more successful”.

It would not be that hard, truthfully, to do better—you do not have to be a battlefield expert, or someone with an official diplomatic background or a skilled “evacuation manager”…