This thinking has undermined our actions in every major war since then, with the exception of GWI. Gulf War One, we went in, did the job and got out. I'm not sure we should have gone in in the first place, but at least we didn't try to artificially change the government there.
It's disheartening to see the admins of Bush and Obama arrogantly and foolishly pursuing a transformational goal. It does not work.
A nation has to work out its own problems for itself. They have to experience an organic, sometimes violent, process of progression toward democracy for themselves.
Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars and give them sole war-powers with the exception of immediate threats.
This point being raised, it is time for the US to spend money on education to support its own democracy.
All of the people involved in these foreign war debacles were highly pedigreed. (Fun fact: the President of Afghanistan, who fled Kabul yesterday, is an Ivy League-educated professor who "literally wrote the book on fixing failed states.")
The education, in fact, the problem. Universities is where people learn hare-brained ideas like Wilsonianism. It's where people learn to view government as a set of laws and policies and boxes on org charts, rather than the manifestation of the culture and political tradition of people.
Coming from a traditional Muslim country ourselves, my family knew in 2001 that nation building in Afghanistan was an absurd idea. Our own country has a thousand-year head start on Afghanistan in terms of civilization, and has still struggled with democracy. It's not in the people. But Americans are so far separated from their culture--that is to say, their village won't die of starvation if they indulge in cultural experimentation--they can't even locate the wellspring of democracy in culture and traditions.
It needs to grow over decades organically for the people to get used to the idea and the institutions, for example, like in Hong-Kong. Singapore is another example and they yet don't have completely open democracy.
The ground must be fertile, as they say in allegorical terms, for democracy to take root. You can't impose it and then wish it to work and have it work. You can't throw money at it (as AF has shown us). It's a messy process. Sometimes, like Panama, you have the right accidents happen and it works --but at least then they could rely on the legacy of Marti (as they were part of Columbia during independence from Spain) and they had the US administer the Canal Zone till '00, I believe.
It's not economics--our PPP GDP per capita is about what the U.S. was at in the late 19th century (at which point it had been a successful multi-party democracy for 70-80 years).
That is not a clear cut in Afghanistan. Perhaps the US just invaded because the Russian tried and it was believed that its hub location could enact control on neighboring countries. Terrorism netted the needed excuse, but it continued after Bin Laden was out of the picture.
Many former USSR countries are doing quite well with their new democracies. Consider, for example, that Ukraine had basically as much democratic tradition as Poland had (big parts of it literally being parts of Commonwealth of Poland for centuries), and yet Poland’s democracy has been doing much better.
I agree that culture and traditions matter, but with your examples, you are overstating your case.
Nor does it help the Ukraine. All the industry was destroyed in the last 30 years. And agriculture is not enough: if you seed all available land of Ukraine, it would produce only about $40 bln of agricultural products, while Ukraine yearly imports from abroad are $60 bln. The country is unsustainable, it would eventually collapse. It's not the only country in the world that consumes more than it produces, but other countries have some kind of advantages allowing them to subsist while being netto importers. E.g. USA also consumes more than it produces, but it can freely print world reserve currency and buy whatever it needs. If someone objects, it has most expensive army with bases all over the world to suppress any discontent. Ukraine doesn't have a single possible way out.
Eventually people that have any skills and energy will migrate to Europe/Russia/other countries (I was constantly surprised how many there're Ukrainians working in every part of the world - even the most remote ones), existing population will wither. There's a conspiracy theory that Ukrainian government is afraid to organize population census (the last one was long time ago), because they know that results will be unpleasantly surprising.
Source: I'm a Ukrainian still staying in Ukraine because I believe the above is true. Otherwise I'd move to EU with very little effort or to Russia with no effort at all.
I'm not going to discuss all of your wrong assumptions, just mentioning "closing media". Do you know the narrative those media were spreading? Do you know who is Medvedchuk? These media were pro-russia propagandists.
Am I wrong that all the industry in Ukraine was destroyed (aviation, shipbuilding, cars and trucks, etc)?
Am I wrong that energy consumption in Ukraine is declining (means that industry and/or population are declining)?
Yes you are. You showed (without evidence but let's assume) that $40bn of agricultural exports don't cover the $60 of Ukraine imports. Only 15% of people there work in agriculture. The other 85% of workers are just as capable of creating value for export.
> Am I wrong that all the industry in Ukraine was destroyed
Yes, and it is so obvious a lie that it strains credulity. Even just ignoring the well known mining/iron ore/iron/steel/pipe industry that has at least a dozen well known big companies. Plus of course Ukraine manufactures a lot of other things from cars to armament to confectionary.
And if it came to an export/currency collapse people would and could adapt and buy the local food/cars/trucks (even if they don't have the same quality or variety as foreign goods).
It looks like you know nothing about Ukraine too.
IMO, taking a bit of an environmental hit or trading with Canada is far superior to spending trillions blowing up the middle east and causing more problems than were there to begin with in an already historically unstable region.
The factors are way more complicated then just that.
An authoritarian regime that liberalizes the underlying foundation of the country often creates the stage for a functional democracy. That happened in Germany, South Korea, Singapore, etc. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom
But you can’t go from being a tribal society based on kinship ties and the only rule of law being the decisions of village elders to democracy.
The Kaiserreich had a parliament. Weimar failed in the end and had plenty of problems but still it was a democratic government and that despite major challenges (Civil War, lost World War, bad economy).
And if you are willing to look into the many states and small countries that made up Germany before its unification you have 'democratic' city-states going back to the middle ages. Don't forget that Germany was and is deeply federal (Its official name is 'Federal Republic of Germany' after all).
Even right before the democracy was abolished by the Nazis the largest federal state was governed by the Social Democrats (Prussia).
Hell, our social democrats keep telling everybody that their party was founded on 23 May 1863 even if nobody cares.
Some debates and some representation does not constitute "democratic tradition".
And I am really curious what would constitute a "democratic tradition" in your opinion. By 1945 the German people had been organizing themselves for around a hundred years in different parties, unions, parliaments. They had newspapers discussing everything from politics, culture, society and democracy. They had organized countless nationwide strikes and participated in two revolutions. The first chancelor of Germany after 1945 had been a democratically elected mayor of Cologne for around 15 years. Was part of a political party since 1907.
Maybe look at the Kapp Putsch. Right wing politicians and militias occupied Berlin in 1920. The democratically elected government called for a general strike and for the next couple of days the whole country stood still. No trains. No work in any factory. No news paper. No telephone. In Berlin there was no water. No electricity. Absolutely nothing. This doesn't happen in a nation with an apathetic populace which has no democratic tradition and just wants it's Kaiser back.
Democratic tradition doesn't just consist of having a parliament as the highest authority in your country if you ask me.
Those things are the foundation for what becomes democracy. To use England as the clearest example, Democracy there evolved with feudal aristocrats creating a parliament to have input to the king’s decision making, and from there parliament taking on more and more power and eventually being turned over to popular control through elections.
Germany differs from Afghanistan in having had centuries of experience with bureaucratic society, e.g., implementing the world's first welfare state in the 1870s.
Way to ignore Bactria there, Khwarezmia, Kanishka, Mes Aynak, Mundigak, the Indo-Greeks. Do better. You should be ashamed.
Just like it does with health care... And apparently, it's just as effective in education.
What always astounded me was that even though the faculties are nuanced and respect both sides, the students are just blindly leftist or rightist when they graduate. For instance, teachers at the pro-markets university know that markets have failures so blindly free markets is usually not the answer. But students? Hell no.
So universities are indeed effective at imparting not just tools and teaching people how to learn, but at brainwashing maybe 90% of the students into following the beliefs they teach them. How do you break that? No clue. But I see the same thing with people consuming media, etc. so I guess it's just a human trait.
As a former academic myself, I can confirm that universities are unfortunately good at building cult-like followings - not only cult-like followings, thankfully, but still.
Do you think that this has an impact on the situation in Afghanistan?
I'd say the US elites are still somewhat in denial of what actually happened and that it didn't happen in a vacuum, but was years if not decades in the making. Remember that Bill Barr had the unitary executive theory in mind long before Trump came into power, but previous Republican leadership considered it too radical for the American public to accept.
Those times have changed...
The unitary executive dates back to the Federalists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory#Adopt....
You're invoking an anachronism--it wasn't until the 20th century that we even got the idea of "independent" bureaucrats insulated from accountability to the elected President. George Washington's original cabinet consisted of just four members: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. All of those were plainly intended to be subordinate to Washington as the President.
The same goes to millions of middle class employees of those entities. They might want to teach independent thoughts to their own kids but other than that they have zero incentive to promote independent thoughts to their customers because it's profit and power that feeds their family.
I really don't see an easy way out of this downward spiral.
You are mistaken. Social media and things like youtube, just like elections, provide the appearance of power and choice, but just safely let people to let out pent up emotions. Then they safely contain it without it being spilled to the real world to a certain extent, at the same time give the people who participate in them a certain feeling of "doing something", a fallacy that even I am committing right now while I write this comment down..
As Noam Chomsky said "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum".
We already know that youtube and other media like reddit even HN "strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion", and as you said, they also allow very lively debate withing the rest of the spectrum..
Like January 6th? Safe containment indeed.
> youtube and other media like reddit even HN "strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion"
Which results in an ever increasing number of extremist refugees. The Fediverse appears to be growing consistently and I think the systemic mechanisms that are concentrating extreme viewpoints there should be cause for concern.
On the plus side, if a particularly interesting video is removed from YouTube you can often find it mirrored there.
Also, YouTube (and Google in general) manipulates search results. E.g. in Russia you're fed by force with Navalny's channel. If you block his channel explicitly, YouTube starts to show you one of the thousand clones of it. Or other content with similar views. While content that contradicts the YouTube censorship policy will be well hidden from view.
It's not a freedom of speech.
I understand that US has the strongest propaganda and state of the art brainwashing techniques. So the usual reply is something like: "But it's the absolute truth! Anyone trying to refute it is a bigot!" But I know the only truth: there's no absolute universal truth. Imagine what science would be if it would be disallowed to refute theories?..
US bigotry is something resembling a religion: "We know better how people in country X should live!", "We know better how all the world should view same sex marriage!", "We know better how the country Y should be governed!", etc, etc. But the point is that most of the time people saying this don't know where the country is located, it's culture and traditions, why the people live the way they live, do they like it or not, etc. They just sure that everyone would be happy to eat hamburgers, drink Coca Cola and have Disneylands everywhere. It's such an arrogant dumb view, but it's ingrained in every western person by the best media and propagandists.
This point is about the only bright spot in an otherwise grim perspective. Just about everyone, and that appears to include Putin, wants to do well by their kids education-wise. The rest can fuck off and die, but the self-preservation in the sense of preserving genes by teaching the ability to think critically is important enough that at least there is a chance that spiral will hit a bump here and there.
However, they are also empire builders whose agenda requires weakening the power, wealth and stability of every entity that they consider targets and/or competitor. As someone who lives in one such entity, I consider this threatening.
Not glorious-nuclear-self-destruction dreadful, but still potentially life-threatening.
No, we didn't, we were perpetually militarily engaged in Iraq, at a lower level, between the 1991 war and the 2003 war.
We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either.
> Let's go back to congress needing to authorize wars
Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.
I mean, we never left Germany or S. Korea, so... Playing big brother to Q8? I'm not mad.
Like other countries, we can pick sides and aid whatever side we think has our interest. I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later.
>Both of the long wars started under Bush had Congressional authorization.
True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war), this open-endedness allowed Obama! to use the same AUMF to engage in further conflict.
Grave danger was cited by the President, and concurred in as justifying war by Congress, in both of the long wars commenced under Bush.
> True, but they gave him blanket authorization for use of military force (open ended) rather than a declaration of war)
The Supreme Court has long recognized exercise of Congress’ war powers without magic words as legitimate declarations of war, and also recognized conditional declarations of war (including, again, those without magic words) as declarations of war. Magic words may be relevant to the application of other domestic law (because Congress may have chosen to make them so), but it does not change the fact that any time Congress, with or without magic words, and unconditionally or conditioned on some other fact (including a Presidential determination) “authorizes” war, it is in fact exercising its Constitutional power to declare war. In fact, it first did so in regard to the Congressional authorization for the Quasi-War of 1798-1800, which was the very first Congressional exercise of its power to declare war.
Have you looked up polls of Afghanistan’s citizens on whether they want a democratic election process, whether they preferred life under the Taliban, etc? They overwhelmingly preferred the state of things under the US’s support and overwhelmingly support democracy. They can’t fight for it because they fear being shot or beheaded by Taliban terrorists. To read their lack of resistance as a rejection of democracy is to deny everyday Afghanis their agency just because they want to survive to see tomorrow.
Maybe there was some support for this in some areas of Kabul, but certainly not in the countryside.
That seems very arbitrary. I would say twenty years is not enough, because a longer time period would mean that older, experienced Taliban fighters and organizers would be too old to continue their activities or just dead. It also isn't enough time if we haven't done a good job managing our efforts there, and we needed better leadership and accountability around our efforts to establish the new government and their military (more at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-americ...).
I cannot understand why you think 2-5 years is the magic time to judge an effort like this by. Do you think that's true for everything in life? If a company can't IPO in 2 years they should just cut their losses and run?
> Maybe there was some support for this in some areas of Kabul, but certainly not in the countryside.
What's your evidence for this? Every poll I could find on Google suggests there is broad support for democracy in Afghanistan.
If anything, your points here only go to demonstrate how irrelevant the nominal power of congressional authorization is, in the current political climate (and for most of the history of the republic.)
What makes it mostly irrelevant is that almost any representative voting for caution will be tarred with the "soft on America's enemies" brush, marginalized, and quickly removed from office. That's democracy in action, and it has been that way, for the most part, since the founding of the nation.
What kept the USA in Afghanistan, and the USSR before, was a form of sunk cost fallacy (in blood more than dollars), in which nation-building became more of a prayer for a non-catastrophic exit than an arrogant goal of a self-appointed elite.
This short sightedness might cost more in lives globally and money loss from trade and resources being restricted.
Nation-building is hubris. Work with someone local who fits hand-in-glove.
Is the unstable "stability" worth 6T and thousands of soldiers' lives and many tens of thousands traumatized? Not to mention the losses from the locals. What was the human cost of Saddam in power vs the cost after toppling him?
Aside from ethical issues, the inevitable case is what they think is theirs and what you think is yours end up conflicting, which is how that strategy fell apart with the Soviets in Afghanistan. And with the US and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Among other places.
On top of that, "preventing the production of terrorists" (to paraphrase) was a stated goal of Afghanistan and it doesn't seem obvious how it can be fulfilled with either the current outcome or an "invade, accomplish, withdraw" operation unless we intended to just entirely massacre the populace to the point that the nation becomes a giant wildlife reserve.
There are relatively few (if any) cases of forced national reform lasting 40+ years with the intent to have a relatively "free democracy" at the end so I'm also having trouble considering your contention about transformation proven. (Though I definitely concur a single birth to adult score of years seems an unlikely interval for success with half-measures.)
Kosovo? Bosnia?
Let's say something came up in Puerto Rico... and then we have Europe come in and fix things instead of the US, does that seem the way it should work?
By the way Europe is in fact fixing American problems, by dealing with of refugees from american (and russian) wars, at the price of political and cultural turmoil.
It's the same for Russia or Ukraine as it is for Afghanistan or Libya. These people have been under a totally different form of government where they had very little agency. The hubris of thinking, yeah, the CPSU (or Bath, etc.) is dissolved, democracy will take over, it's people's destiny!
When you've known nothing of democracy, it's a foreign concept. You need the culture around democracy to form for it to be successful.
I know the house voted to end them but the Senate didn't act?
The issue there is the massive conflict of interest and legal bribery.
Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions". Their bank accounts want more wars.
The constitution grants congress the power to declare war, congress being the representatives of the people of the states. It was never intended that a single person, the president, has the authority to launch an offensive war with another country.
I agree with you that the campaigns are financed in the U.S. amounts to legal bribery. Most other civilized countries outlaw or greatly curtail campaign donations from corporations, unions, and trade associations. Many also limit donations to offices you can vote on, subsidize donations with tax credits, limit the lengths of campaigns, and/or publicly fund political parties.
Until we get the big showdown about this in the Supreme Court, both the Executive and Legislative will continue to claim they have ultimate authority here.
Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table.
I'm familiar with how campaign contributions work and the legal regulations involved, including what they're allowed to do - and not do - with the money. How do campaign contributions from military industrial complex firms translate into Congressional members getting obscenely rich?
Every single Congressional member would have been better off buying any number of dozens of various traditional tech stocks than any of the military industrial stocks (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc.).
Amazon/Netflix/Apple/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Tesla/etc. > Northrop
Cloudflare is up more since its IPO than Boeing is over ~15 years. Watch out for those CDN campaign contributions?
There are two aspects to this.
The first is campaign contributions. Recent US Presidential election campaigns have exceeded a billion dollars. House and Senate races have been millions to hundreds of millions, per election. The people "giving" this money are not doing so out of altruism. It's not secret money under the table, it's all open and disclosed, but nobody thinks it has no effect on behavior. At best the representatives are entirely scrupulous and never allow the money to affect their positions, but then the candidates with pro-corporate positions find it easier to raise money, the money allows them to buy more advertising, and the candidates who want to shovel tax dollars into corporate coffers win more elections.
The second is the revolving door. You go serve some time in Congress, do what the corporations want, and when you retire or fail to win re-election because your constituents got fed up with what you were doing, you have a cushy job paying six, seven, eight figures a year waiting for you after. Or that job goes to a member of your family while you're still in office.
They did not "comply". They came to realize it was better to emulate the US:
> This is not to say that Japan remained fascist (as some left-wing commentators assert). It most obviously and manifestly did not remain fascist. Instead, various leaders who had earlier supported and even participated in fascism decided that liberal democracy was better for the country. One reason they made this decision is that the U.S. had just proven liberal democracy’s economic and military effectiveness by winning WW2. They almost certainly could have restored dictatorship in Japan — the U.S. was clearly willing to tolerate dictatorships among its Cold War allies in Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere — but they chose not to. Instead, they drew from a liberal democratic trend that had existed in Japan well before the military takeover of the 1930s.
* https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-afghanistan-occupation...
Both Japan and Germany had liberal democratic histories before they got taken over by fascists, so it wasn't a stretch. Cultures based on clan/kinship tend to have higher corruption and lower stability:
* https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp17-17.html
* https://www.u4.no/publications/the-kinship-in-public-office-...
* https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
You though, but you did not did.
In both prior cases US ran moderately competent occupation government, and by some accounts one better than their own.
The model US followed in Vietnam was not this. Ngo Dinh Diem was a Syngman Rhee 2.0, but even worse. Here, you can say Karzai was Syngman Rhee 3.0.
All shared a history of being overthrown because of progressing nationalist drift within their own power bases.
The only remarkable thing is that we treated Japan so well, considering how its fellow far east countries were treated as client states or worse for so long.
I think it was latent guilt of using the nuke on them.
So they had an industrial base. No so much for (S) Korea and VietNam. They were very agrarian (like Japan before they built up their war machine). So their problem was peasant farmers with no land + a growing population on the brink of starvation.
US advisors made recommendations to alleviate this problem by doing land redistribution for tenant farmers. South VietNam would have none of that. Korea did appease the peasants albeit reluctantly so they avoided the worst.
The US has a pretty good track record when it comes to building insurgencies though, remember that the Taliban were built and trained by ISI and the CIA. Iran had islamic groups that the Shah used to silence opposition forces. There's no way their training and equipment wasn't done in coordination with their US partners given how much of a puppet the Shah was. Or take a look at a lot of the groups that were part of the opposition in Syria.
I wonder if there's any analysis why the US has been so good at building and training insurgency groups, but so bad at making local armies to protect their own territorial borders.
The Gulf War did not take place.
(It was a police action marketed as a war.)
We should open up to voluntarily annexing states like Afghanistan and Puerto Rico instead of continuing to drool over some fuedal age government philosophy. Invite people in. The current system of fight-and-flight is looking a bit dated.
The partisan bickering over just 1.6 trillion in infrastructure spending, after having lit another 3 trillion on fire to prop up the stock and housing markets for another few years, losing money hand over fist, electric grids going down at the slightest breath, and overall decay and mismanagement of all our common infrastructure...America is past its peak, stumbling now, and all that remains is angry tribalism and finger-pointing. We can't even unite against a deadly enemy that is impossible to love or anthropomorphize--a virus.
We failed to invest in fundamentals for so long....
On some days I find myself, as an American, hoping we split up. We don't really want to live together anymore. We hate each other. Not a dollar for those bastards' kids!
But yes. The US has been in decline for a while, possibly propped up by tech and financial markets but there too is a paper fire. The rest of the world has the skills to run their own financial markets and tech but without the excess central bank printed money that passes as capital in that part of the world.
The solution really is simple though. Stop spending so much money on the military, get your house in order, and make some real friends. Sortie when a real war is threatening peace. Might take a while to do but its simple and easy.
True universal healthcare would more than likely save the USA money, not require more spending. That European countries have universal healthcare at all is that after WA2 they couldn’t afford accessible private systems like the USA has been able to dump a lot of money into.
The USA will get universal healthcare when they can no longer afford their crazy healthcare system anymore. So maybe this excessive spending on wars will bring us closer to, not farther away from, universal healthcare.
A few years ago China pledged to invest trillions into environmental protection over the next decades. We can only hope that the USA takes similar steps. Both countries can afford it and both have access to know how other countries have build up in this effort.
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
Also China is the workbench of the world, other nations just shift their GHG load there, first and foremost the US.
Although at that scale, you wonder if you could get down to $10/ton... in which case you'd have removed all of the carbon emissions from 2001 until now.
Human adversity pushes buttons in our brain stem that natural processes or random threats do not.
It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resourced than what went into creating it in the first place.
That's the problem.
We don't have it.
Energy, resources or time.
You are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix climate change.
Lots of fossil fuel aligned people have pivoted from "everything is fine" to "there's nothing we can do now", and echoing the latter might be factually correct, but in the context it smacks of disingenuity.
There's a better term for this rather than "escape velocity", because a similar problem exists for interstellar travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
But I don't necessarily believe in it. The point here is that, IMHO, for every, motto-like, populist data-less claim why we should fight pollution, one can easily come up with equivalently populist data less claim why we should not bother with clime change. In isolation from supporting data these two claims are equally unsubstantiated. If there is some concrete data to share please do so, otherwise it's an echo chamber where people would just upvote what they agree with and downvote what they disagree, without any concern for the actual facts brought out in the claim, it's not a argument taking place in the comments it just people preferences showing up in their votings.
What I heard from the news is that they claim the temperature will raise by 1.5 degree in a near future. Unfortunatly I didn't read the report and don't know what are the proposed policy steps. If you or someone else can summarize (without populism or moto like claims), what's their proposed solutions are and what are the risks, that might be of a big service to the community. Since then we ca exchange data based opinions if the proposed solution seems viable or not and that can move a discussion forward.
Last time, I had a vacation and was able to listen to a in depth discussion of political steps to solve climate change was this https://youtu.be/nNIcHIjFNxs At the time my impression was that it is very hard to make a real progress in this.
DOE: Solar hits 6 cents per kWh in 2017, three years ahead of an ambitious goal, down from 28 cents per kWh in 2011. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030
Solar costs per kWh are unambiguously less than nuclear:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
I love wind and solar. I built a 13 kW array on our property and will likely expand it to 20 kW next year.
However, even if we deploy the most optimal forms of wind and solar energy at a global scale --forms that have yet to be invented-- this will not be enough to stop or reverse atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, even if we do this, it will continue to increase exponentially until such time as the planet --through weather-- sticks its finger on the problem.
This is NOT my conclusion. This came out of a study where Google researchers --who were convinced renewable energy sources was the way to go-- set out to once-and-for-all show the world the path. They were stunned when they discovered just how wrong they were. To their credit, they published the paper and admitted just how wrong they were. This is real science, not hand-wavy stuff. Anyone with the appropriate science background can go through the paper, study the data and reproduce their claims. I certainly did. This paper is what opened my eyes to the nonsense we are being sold. It led to spending over a year trying to understand the reality of the problems we face.
It is well worth reading. Here it is:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk
There's a number of other pieces of the puzzle that need urgent action. Cleaning up international shipping is a big one which comes to mind... And reducing driving is another big one.
https://phys.org/news/2018-12-cargo-ships-emitting-boatloads...
There's no silver bullet, and we need urgent action on many fronts. But things will be worse if we simply despair and do nothing.
The study including looking at deploying solar and wind world-wide with the most advanced versions of these technologies. They determined that not only would this not stop atmospheric CO2 concentration increases, it would continue to rise exponentially.
Arguing for solar and wind to "save the planet" is the equivalent of being an anti-vaxer and not taking a vaccine in the face of a global pandemic. Even worse than that, it's like believing that drinking bleach will battle the virus. In other words, if you do the math, the real science, it is complete nonsense. The idea simply isn't supported by the scientific realities of the matter.
On the other items.
Yes, container ships burn bunker fuel, perhaps the nastiest stuff you can burn. It's amazing to me that politicians wage battles against straws and NOBODY talks about bunker fuel. It goes to show you that the only things that matter at the political matter are simple messages for simple-minded voters who can keep the politicians floating this nonsense in office through their easy-to-buy votes. Once you detach from ideology the whole thing looks like a big huge stinking mess.
> There's no silver bullet, and we need urgent action on many fronts. But things will be worse if we simply despair and do nothing.
I would put it differently.
First, we need to stop thinking we have the ability to control a planetary-scale problem. We cannot do it. At all. Even if we left the planet --all seven billion of us-- it would take about 50,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm.
These X prizes are neat and all, but, in this case, they are far more likely to be marketing opportunities for those getting behind them than anything else. If they are even mildly intelligent they likely know the score. Nobody is going to win any of these prizes unless there's marketing value --rather than a scientifically sound actual solution.
Driving our limitation are things like the principle of conservation of energy. Put in relevant terms: We can't fix a mess with less energy than that which went into creating it.
We have people claiming we can reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm in just 50 years. That is a thousand times faster than the natural rate of change. I am not sure we have the energy and resources needed to make something like that happen, even if it were possible. The whole thing is almost laughable.
I urge you to get on Amazon and order a CO2 meter. Then go around taking reading. What you will learn will astound you. In a nutshell, we have been living in 600 to 1,000 ppm CO2 environments, likely for centuries. The ~400 ppm number quoted by those pushing a sky is falling narrative are average atmospheric readings at who knows what location and altitude. Measure CO2 in your home, apartment and office. Measure it at your neighbors and friends. You will most-definitely be surprised. And then, the question you should ask is simple: We have been living in high CO2 ppm environments all of our lives...the sky has not fallen and people have not turned into mush. Why are we being misled?
"That realization prompted us to reconsider the economics of energy. What’s needed, we concluded, are reliable zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over soon—say, within the next 40 years."
In other words, it's absolutely an economics question. It's also a policy question: Subsidies and penalties can radically change the economic realities for power plant operators. They're saying it's a very hard road. But notably, their graphs are not delta functions: There's paths between the best case and worst case scenarios, and excellent progress on the renewables front can, indeed, change the direction of the curve. Pulling carbon back to pre-industrial levels absolutely requires active sequestration, though, and there are efforts on that front, though the second law of thermodynamics tells us it's a hard road. But again, some progress is better than none.
Your last 'graf sounds like unmitigated tinfoilhat-ism, I'm sorry to say. We should absolutely expect fluctuations in co2 measurements based on geography and proximity to large volumes of co2-spewing vehicles. There are standards for the calculation of average co2 ppm, which are helpful for knowing the overall state of things, and trends over time.
They set out to prove that renewables was the way. They discovered they were wrong. That is a paradigm-shattering conclusion. To this day we hear incessant talk about renewables "saving the planet". This is nonsense.
The only problem I have with the paper is that they did not follow this conclusion with a real study of the plausibility of any solution on a human time scale. They say things like having to capture carbon and have better power plants in 40 years. None of it is correlated to actual realizable effects at scale.
> Your last 'graf sounds like unmitigated tinfoilhat-ism
That isn't MY graphic! That's from the 800,000 ice core atmospheric sample data. Here:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
It's the first link in the "Graphics" section.
If you are going to all this tin-foil it means negating all science on the subject. This data is incredibly accurate and reliable. One of my first questions when finding this data set was the simplest of inquiries: Can ice core atmospheric data from 800,000 years ago be accurate? Well, it turns out, yes, it is. I found and read papers on the subject. It's fascinating technology actually.
The statement I made was that solar and wind --renewables-- can't help us and are pretty much an empty pursuit as it pertains to "saving the planet". These researchers went into it CONVINCED renewables was the way and conducted this research to, as they said, once and for all show the world. What they discovered is they were as wrong as one could be. Renewables are a waste of time, money and resources. They are good and very much justified for other reasons, just not anything related to climate change or atmospheric CO2 concentration.
As I said, I have a 13 kW solar array, soon to grow to 20 kW. I am under no delusion about what it is for. It serves no purpose whatsoever as it pertains to climate change. This is particularly true if you consider the entire installation, which includes a large ground-mounted structure, concrete footings, etc. I sometimes wonder how much carbon was produced to go from minerals on the ground to a structure on my property with a theoretical 13 kW peak generation capacity. Different subject.
Well, being that the argument is grounded in physics and the math that accompanies the analysis, this is a time-independent truth.
To state the problem more accurately: We cannot do a thing about climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentration at anything even remotely resembling a human time scale.
The numbers being thrown about for some of these would-be solutions are just plain silly. 50 years? For a planetary scale problem? Yeah, sure.
Again, one must understand that it was absolutely possible for us to add massive amounts of CO2 in short order. Removing it isn't quite as simple. We were able to add it because burning tens of billions of barrels of oil every year is easy. Any fool with a match can start a forest fire. It takes millions --billions-- of times more energy to reverse the effect of what started with a simple match.
That's the context. Every purported solution must pass the physics test. None of them do. Small scale, sure. Planetary scale. Not one.
Every time I look at this I am reminded of the joke one of my physics professors used to tell us with sometimes annoying frequency. He would start on a new problem, chuckle, and say: Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter. His point was that reality was always far more complex than what we had to do in order to learn and explore principles.
The very first problem is that we know, without a doubt, what the baseline is for affecting a (roughly) 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2: 50,000 years. However, this baseline has a pretty tough requirement: Humanity has to leave the planet or the clock does not start.
If humanity left the planet tomorrow, we know that, on average, it will take about 50K years for that 100 ppm drop. This is roughly what people are saying they can do in just 50 years with various magical solutions. In other words, they are claiming that they can do a THOUSAND times better than the rate of change that would correspond to humanity not existing at all.
How do we know this? We have 800,000 years of very accurate atmospheric data taken from ice core samples. In other words, we can see what the planet was doing when humanity's influence on CO2 and the climate was so insignificant we might as well have been on Mars.
If, for example, someone claims that we can "fight" climate change (I love the hubris) by installing solar panels and wind power generator everywhere, well, they have to show how this is better than humanity leaving the planet. No hand-wavy stuff, real science, math, physics. These ideas do not survive the test of hitting the realities of physics inside an Excel spreadsheet.
You don't have to take my word on it for this particular case:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
This is the paper that launched me into a year-long quest to understand what was going on. It is real science, reproducible by anyone with the skill set, and nothing even close to hand-wavy bullshit. To paraphrase, the conclusion they reached goes something like this:
"Even if we deployed the most optimal versions of all renewable energy technologies. Meaning, versions of all technologies that have yet to be invented. Not only would this not reverse or stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. CO2 levels would continue to increase exponentially."
These researchers went into this work convinced renewables were the way to do it and they set out to prove it once and for all. I give them huge credit for having the guts to communicate that their bubble was popped by their own research and that, no, this idea is nothing less than utopia.
We don't even have to stop there. The chart in this article, when combined with the other data, absolutely made the issue crystal clear for me:
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
Remember what I said about the baseline? 100 ppm in 50,000 years, if humanity left the planet? Anything less than that is pointless as it will be in a range between never affecting CO2 concentration to taking far longer than 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction.
The chart in this article shows each country's contribution to the CO2 problem.
US 15%
China 28%
India 7%
Russia 5%
Europe about 7%
The rest close to 40%
In other words, if someone were to propose that we install solar panels on every single home in the US. The question they have to answer is:
How is that going to be better than if the US simply evaporated and we stopped contributing 15% to the global problem?
It isn't! Which means it isn't a solution. It is, at best, hubris and, at worst, criminally negligent or irresponsible to propose consuming a nation's treasure on something that is as pointless as can be.
OK, now China and the US are beamed-up by Captain Kirk. Same issue. Now we are down to 57%. Won't fix the problem at all.
If we all left it gets down to 0% and it takes 50,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction.
Anything LESS than that scenario will take longer or do nothing at all.
That's where the impossibility of things like "save the planet" or "affect climate change" or "become carbon neutral" come into the proper lens. These are all fantasies. Sorry. Anyone wishing to challenge this has to prove their purported solution can pass the physics test at a planetary scale. Showing that it works when we assume a cow to be a uniform one meter diameter sphere of milk isn't equivalent to planetary scale in the real world.
In the real world we have things like the massive forest fires burning in nearly every continent every year. In California we now have a fire that is likely to contribute more carbon in a few weeks than the entire gasoline-based ground transportation fleet in the US in an entire year. Last I checked it was only 31% contained. There are massive underground coal fires that have been burning for decades, even centuries in some cases. That's reality. Not the utopia we are being sold.
What to do then?
Well, we clean-up our act for other reasons. No, we are not going to "save the planet" at all. We don't have that power. We clean-up our act because it is better than being absolute pigs and causing more damage. We also clean-up our act because this is part of learning to live with what we cannot alter.
I urge anyone who think they know anything about this subject to get on Amazon right now and buy a CO2 meter. I have several. Go around your home, apartment, your friends and neighbors places, the mall, your car, etc. Measure and take notes. What you should discover is that, while atmospheric CO2 concentration is --depending on how and where you measure it-- in the order of 400 ppm, we have been living with much higher levels for a very long time, likely centuries. You will discover levels in the order of 650 ppm in your home and other homes. You will measure somewhere around 1,000 ppm in your car. It will be similar at the office and at the store.
The interesting thing is that the sky hasn't fallen and we have not turned into goo. We can, apparently, live just fine in higher CO2 content. Ideal? Perhaps not. I'd like to see a study that determines if we have an evolutionary adaptation for an optimal CO2 concentration range. I don't know of any, other than fear-mongering stuff that twenty years ago, was claiming we would suffer mass extinction by now.
None of this is to say that climate change isn't real and that we have not contributed to make things worse. It is very real. It has been for billions of years. And, yes, we managed to accelerate the rate of increase by burning the equivalent of perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 years of trees and bio matter in just a few centuries. That's how we did it. And we can't reverse that, not on a human time scale.
I continue to be baffled by how otherwise intelligent people just take what they are told --about any subject really-- and do not bother to confirm before parroting the stuff far and wide. This is not how we solve problems.
Probably the only way that could potentially fix things is direct temperature manipulation schemes. There's a lot of them that have been proposed.
Worth noting that the major economies in Asia aren't doing much of anything tangible for co2 reduction. The EU has basically the world's smallest petroleum industry so it's no sacrifice for them to push climate change measures. The US will effectively be transferring huge amounts of its economic wealth to other petroleum countries who don't care. Ugly all around.
Point is entrepreneurs should focus on direct temperature manipulation at this point if we really want to solve the problem.
While I appreciate your perspective, the hard and cold reality of the situation is that it is illusory to think we can affect something of this magnitude. Not only is it a planetary scale problem, it is also something that, just from the standpoint of conservation of energy, is impossible for us to address.
The principle is brutally simple. To state it in relevant terms: It cannot take LESS energy to solve a problem than that which went into creating it.
To further lend context, it is important to understand how the planet dealt with this when humanity was insignificant. We have this data going back 800,000 years. This comes from highly reliable ice core atmospheric sample data. Here:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
The charts:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
And this is my curve fit to try and measure the rate of change:
https://i.imgur.com/37AKa8L.png
And so, in rough terms, it took about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and about 50,000 years for the same decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Any inquisitive mind would want to know how this happened. How did CO2 concentration increase and decrease? The answers are relatively simple. We were not around (or we were insignificant), so it wasn't humanity, not going back 800,000 years.
The increase, among other things, was caused by massive forest fires rolling through entire continent. Without modern fire fighting technology, these fires burned and rolled through the land constantly. The only thing that would stop them would be running out of fuel or heavy rains.
The decrease was mostly a combination of having burned off enough carbon stores that rains, hurricanes, cyclones --the weather-- over tens of thousands of years, precipitated CO2. Forests grew once more, capturing more carbon...only to burn again at some point and repeat the cycle.
How, then, were we able to influence this in a few centuries?
Again, simple: We burned the equivalent of unimaginably massive forests at a much faster rate than the natural order of things. We did this by burning oil. One gallon of petroleum is said to have required about 100 tons of plants and biomatter. Today we are burning oil at a rate of nearly 100 million barrels per day, or 35 billion barrels per year. One barrel is equivalent to just over 31 gallons. Which means that burning a barrel of oil is like burning 3,100 tons of plants and biomatter. This isn't an exact calculation, of course. It does serve to get a sense of proportion about what we are discussing. The scale is absolutely unimaginable.
And so, while the planet experienced these ~100K year cycles without us around, when we started to use oil we got to the point where we effectively burned the equivalent of entire forests in a single day...every day...every year...for decades, centuries. That's how we were able to change the upward rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Reversing it is a very different story. Making a mess is easy. Any fool can light up 30 gallons of gasoline and make an absolute mess. All it takes is a match. In sharp contrast to that --and going back to the concept of conservation of energy-- you simply cannot reverse the process by expending less energy than what it took to create it in the first place. Except that this energy isn't the energy of the match, but rather the energy stored in the 30 gallons of gasoline that went up in smoke. In reality, once dispersed, the byproducts of this combustion are nearly impossible to contain and revert. It would take an unimaginable amount of energy and resources to reverse the effects of 100 million barrels of oil used per day. And we do that each and every day and have been burning this stuff for centuries at an increasing rate.
This isn't to say we should do nothing at all. What I am saying is that we are having the wrong conversations because we have allowed politicians and various forces to make a cult out of this thing. Very little of what is being put out on this every day is true. We can't reverse this in 50 years. We can't do it in a century. This will take tens of thousands of years. In other words, it is likely outside a human time scale.
What to do then? Well, we need to start having the right conversations. We need to start figuring out how to live with this and survive. We are not going to fix it. We need to adapt to it. That's where our technological focus should be, not in magic pixie dust to "save the planet". If we persist, we will not only lose the opportunity to adapt, we will likely risk killing all life on earth through a hairbrained scheme to save a planetary scale ecosystem that we have the hubris of thinking we can control.
Every time I post about this I get eviscerated with downvotes and sometimes comments. And yet, not one person ever takes the time to read and review the sources I provide, go through some super simple math and come back with something like "Hey, I think you missed this point". I want to be wrong about this. Personal insults and downvotes don't serve any purpose at all other than to reveal the intense indoctrination people have been subjected to. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we made it worse. No, we can't fix it.
Think. Don't be drones.
What is impossible about direct temperature manipulation schemes? I'm referring to proposals like building reflectors to directly lower the earth's temperature. There's nothing in principle preventing this from directly cooling the planet.
Also, what do you know about the physics of CO2 absorption/re-emission? CO2 absorbs what exactly? To start it's the 15 micron band. It is infrared radiation on the longer, weaker side of IR. How much heat does 15 microns contribute to, and what types of molecules [eg ice or water, or only atmosphere?] can actually interact with 15 microns vs. being transparent to it? Since water vapor already absorbs at 15 microns, how does that modulate the effect of CO2? Does CO2 even re-emit 15 microns back to earth, or does it just cause co2 to wiggle a little bit (it definitely causes it to wiggle, but what frequency does it re-emit, if any?) Quantifying heat caused by 15 microns is not something you will find information on, even though the entire carbon based global warming arguments depend entirely on it. But there is another relevant point to be made:
15 micron is in the terahertz spectrum specifically. This spectrum is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to build any sort of transmitter or receiver for, mainly because the air/water vapor simply absorb it in a short distance. To this effect I've heard one college physics professor who publishes his lectures on youtube argue that 15 microns is 99.9% already absorbed in the atmosphere by such effects [1] [eg adding more CO2 will make effectively no difference at all; it's all absorbed already]. We do know the main atmospheric window where energy can reflect back into space does not include the 15 microns band [e.g. CO2's absorption profile doesn't fall in the main atmospheric window]. My question for you is how much time have you spent thinking about absorption/EM spectrum based arguments that get at the actual mechanism of how carbon based global warming is supposed to work? Most people have not. I don't have all the answers, but the physics actually seems to imply it's possible if not likely we could be completely wrong in our assumptions about CO2 and global warming. I would challenge you to come up with a rebuttal to that, in the same way folks have not come up with a rebuttal to the argument you posted. So yes, we're having the wrong conversations.
As an alternate potential explanation consistent with the physics, CFCs do absorb in the atmospheric window, and even though they were banned decades ago it turns out they are on the rise again [2]
I don't think anyone can name even one project of non-trivial scale that successfully controlled a natural environment. I am talking about something of the scale of a small to mid island. Something that might give support for a project hundreds of thousand, millions, tens of millions of times larger.
Wanting to control anything at a planetary scale is pure hubris. C'mon. As I like to say, if we listen to the fools pushing these ideas we are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save it.
And then there are truly perplexing every-day things that provide further proof that controlling anything is hopeless. Our town is going through and repaving a bunch of streets and avenues. There's nothing --absolutely nothing-- wrong with them. I've lived here over 30 year. The streets are damn-near perfect.
Just a block from my house, they tore-up about half a mile out of this avenue and replaced it with a black tar covering. Black as can be. The prior surface was mid gray. I used to take walks down that avenue. Not any more. The heat emanating from the black surface is impossible to describe. Every single street being repaved is getting the black tar treatment. How can we possibly hope to improve anything at a planetary scale when we fuck up neighborhoods just by repaving streets.
I have always wondered, from an evolutionary perspective, what is the underlying thing that encourages the emergent collectivism of unicellular oragnisms that eventually gave rise to us? Could that be something related to consciousness in a way we do not yet understand?
Would it be possible to replicate a phenomenology similiar to that which drives billions of cells to collaborate (and act together to help "the organism" to stay alive) to occur at the species level so there'll be no more wars and conflicts as we help one another to live more fulfilling lives? (e.g. through the utilization of psychedelics and BCI?)
I think what made humans special is that perhaps we're already half-way there. Unlike other animals, we collabrate with one another at a much greater scale, and have accomplished so many unthinkable things so far.
We are perhaps at a unique point in history after enjoying so long the state of being post-animals that we're finally starting to reflect what it means to go beyond all the humans conflicts and shenanigans.
Mention infrastructure, healthcare, or clean energy and suddenly a million special interests pop up and the deficit suddenly starts to matter.
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeche...
Sad.
If you didn't have strong enough army to protect you, then you might loose, schools hospitals and what not... Unfortunatly, in a real world a war is not a maybe question but a when question. The question is what amount of defense expenditure is adequate? And that a political question, with no right or wrong answers that for the voters to decide.
I hope humanity lives in peace some day and there will be no more need for armies but that is a distant future. Until then, you do need an armed force to protect all the good things the free society has created, how much force you need vs civilian infra? An open question...
Who the hell is going to attack us before we can mount a response?! We lost a mere 3000 people and launched into 20 years of madness and insanity, all because we were unwilling to blame a president and a political party who was asleep at the wheel, who didn't even bother to pay attention to the terrorist attacks just a few years earlier. And then we let them overreact and waste how many more lives, for nothing? For absolute nothing?
I'm sorry, but your comment makes me absolute furious. It's so completely thoughtless and ignorant and exists only to service those who get wealthy off the blood of our soldiers.
We have lost more than a half million Americans to a pandemic that--given our prior leadership in the area--shouldn't have taken more than a few thousands, where the hell is our response to stop that tragedy again?
We need to cut the military to a tiny time fraction of its current level, almost nothing. Certainly no more than any other country. Redirect allll that spending into something productive.
https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
This is so far beyond overkill it's sickening.
I'm not sure how well the federal government reflects the will of the people, given how campaigns are funded here, using means which are illegal in most other countries. Not to mention the gerrymandering, where politicians are choosing voters instead of the other way around. I don't know if the federal government was originally meant to be responsive to the people. That's why there's no facility for the people to directly propose amendments or vote on referendums at the federal level, like there is in other more democratic countries. For a long time state legislators elected members of congress and the president, not the people.
You mentioned U.S. voters... Perhaps it is a good idea to have a national referendum before launching a war. Democracy is a good thing, right? I believe other countries would do this, Switzerland for example. Maybe even go one better, and have a GoFundMe to pay for it. And volunteer soldiers to fight. It would then be interesting to see how many people want to waste their money and lives halfway across the world killing people who just want to be left alone, but are in the way of someone over here making more money.
Yes, referendums etc.. could be a reasonable propose, things evolve so maybe one day we will have something of this sort in the US as well. Time will show!
Actually you don't need US's level of spending if you are not "actively" into wars like ones in the middle east.
That's your believe but sorry, I don't want to take this claim on the face value. Maybe you're right, maybe not, I believe that's a complicated issue for sure...
One could claim you would need to spend much more were you not involved in these conflicts... each war has it's own reason and own goals and the decision to enter a war is weighted in geopolitically economically etc..and then the elected president makes this decision. Now, what I do have an evidence for, is that politically, the votes are probably split since there is pretty much status quo on that for many years and many administrations...
I think we agree.
"China Outspends the U.S. on Defense? Here’s the Math."
"Factoring in purchasing power and personnel costs leads to a surprising conclusion."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-25/china-...
Let's assume for a second that there is a dollar amount to "underwriting global free trade" (spurious to begin with). What actually is that dollar amount? Is it 3x more than what we're spending? 10x less? How could we ever know?
As it turns out, whatever we are currently spending, that's the amount required. We could double the number of aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, jet fighters, missiles, spy satellites, military bases; we could start another war, another engagement, another "peacekeeping mission," do another few "surgical strikes"... And yep, that would be exactly what's required for freedom.
Setting that aside, to put it in HN terms: imagine nontechnical people at your company comparing the wildly disproportionate relative costs of two IT projects, but without comparing the relative scopes of said projects. That would make for a poor foundation from which to either justify or criticize existing budget allocations.
That's what happens on HN every single time the subject arises.
'American military budgets are bigger than everyone else's' ergo 'American military budgets are far too big.' But it doesn't logically follow.
Power projection is exponentially more difficult and complex than homeland defense.
Yes, there's waste, and yes, it could be run more efficiently and at a lower cost, but it's worth noting that the other points of comparison (other nations) also contain no shortage of waste, and in some cases proportionally more. And slashing overhead to the absolute bare minimum possible is not the kind of risk management one would prioritize first in a system with an incredibly damaging failure state. (Disclaimer so it's more difficult to misstate my position: I believe that waste that is illegal should be punished criminally, and all other bad-faith waste that is political should be punished politically, and we should consider enacting laws to make such bad-faith waste illegal.)
Meaningful conclusions can't be reached by virtue of looking at relative costs while wrongly assuming you have a working knowledge of what they respectively achieve. This is what non-technical people do to technical people all the time, HN laments it, and then turns around and does it in many other spheres.
The military budgets of most nations are to provide some degree of homeland security, sometimes a little regional policing, and sometimes whatever extra is required to satisfy the political needs of their alliance leader. And tthat's about it.
Nobody else comes remotely close to being able to guarantee that an oil tanker can transit the Strait of Hormuz and sell barrels across the globe to multiple nations which have hated each other for centuries (or longer), and worse: to multiple nations which have competing and conflicting geopolitical imperatives. And it's not just oil, this applies to virtually all (non-sanctioned) nations and goods that aren't manufactured in their nation of consumption, using domestically-sourced materials and processes.
It simply isn't comparable.
It's worth remembering what the world looked like when countries which depended heavily on raw materials and trade developed their military capabilities precisely to secure those things, because without it their survival was in jeopardy. When a nation depends on those things for mere survival, its use of force doctrines eventually evolve resemble those of a cornered animal.
With the notable (and now obsolete) exception of securing an oil supply and the thread of the Soviet Union, the US does not depend on anyone else for its survival.
I think that we have a lot of people either unaware of how things worked prior to 1944, or holding the mistaken assumption that the underpinnings of our global framework exist either by happenstance or as the result of some kind of global enlightenment, as if human nature has finally changed for once.
There's also an implicit assumption made that one merely spends more money to beat other countries at shooting wars, countries which spent less and were therefore ill-equipped to compete. That assumption is reasonable in that it's based on millennia of recorded history, but faulty in that it ignores how the world has worked since 1944.
Yes, the United States has required countries to develop their military capacity sufficient to alleviate relatively minor regional issues (e.g., JSDF), or to create a shared purpose (e.g., NATO), but for the last ~77 years the United States has almost single-handedly created the conditions in which global free trade has been achieved for the first time ever, and the military has been central to imposing the conditions necessary to achieve it.
And before anyone asserts that pirates are a relic of centuries past, or that nations no longer desire to even engage in such tactics, this kind of thing regularly happens even under trade conditions imposed by the world's only superpower:
In that regard I'd see the current situation as a success, not a failure. It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing widescale reprisals.
They haven't "chilled out", they've just won.
No, I would say that the Afghanis were literally told that they were going to eventually lose the war and that the Taliban would eventually win. The people put in the position to fight the Taliban made the sensible choice to lose peacefully, as opposed to risking their lives for a lost cause.
I wonder how long they cashed their checks, knowing full well they were going to surrender immediately as soon as the US was going to pull out. Or better, despite not ever having the intention of fighting (or even agreeing with the Taliban), claiming persecution to hustle a western visa/passport when they would inevitably lose.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/16/afghanista...
Consider:
- the Taliban that G.W. Bush knew are gone. Most of them have died,
- OBL and most of his partners are dead,
- almost anyone who helped OBL and is still alive remains a target and lives in fear for their life,
IOW who "won" might be considered to depend on what we mean by the word "Taliban". The Taliban today is not the Taliban of yesteryear. If there is someone who was Taliban during G.W.'s term and is still Taliban today, ask him whether this feels like victory. He might say yes, but then ask him about his old fighting buddies who weren't as lucky as he.
The term "winner" can also mean someone who is still standing when the game ends. In this sense today's "Taliban" has won.
I think we made our point and overstayed our welcome. And now we're going home. We're late but we are leaving Afghanistan.
Well it certainly wouldn’t include UBL or anyone in Al Qaeda, since they are two totally different groups with totally different goals. We could have gone in 20 years ago with the goal of destroying Al Qaeda and their ability to organize terror attacks. We chose to also overthrow the Taliban “government” and install a new government in Afghanistan.
> If there is someone who was Taliban during G.W.'s term and is still Taliban today, ask him whether this feels like victory. He might say yes, but then ask him about his old fighting buddies who weren't as lucky as he.
"The days of the Taliban are over. The future of Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan. And the future of Afghanistan belongs to freedom." -President Bush 2006
“I am considering two promises. One is the promise of God, the other is that of Bush. The promise of God is that my land is vast. If you start a journey on God's path, you can reside anywhere on this earth and will be protected... The promise of Bush is that there is no place on earth where you can hide that I cannot find you. We will see which one of these two promises is fulfilled…As for the United States' future in Afghanistan, it will be fire and hell and total defeat, God willing, as it was for their predecessors - the Soviets and, before them, the British.”- Mullah Mohammad Omar, 2001
Mullah Mohammad Omar died of natural causes. Jalaluddin Haqqani died of natural causes, and Sirajuddin Haqqani and the other Haqqani senior leaders of today were around in 2001. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, “the Butcher of Kabul”, and a key senior ally to the Taliban pre and post 9/11 is alive and pardoned. Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder of the Taliban, is out of prison, and signed the agreement on behalf of the Taliban for the US withdrawal. The Taliban of 2001 and the Taliban of today are the same Taliban, just 20 years apart.
I don’t find your “considerations” at all compelling.
For all we know that was the idea of our own military or intelligence community & now we are conveniently placing the blame for our mistakes on a government that no longer exists
But even more, no matter what group was making the decision, no one could have admitted, no matter how much they expected it, that the whole structure was going to rapidly disintegrate. Because the structure was their product - they produced and managed the thing.
The dumbest thing we did in Iraq was to do the functional equivalent of the Taliban doing reprisals by disbanding the military, government, and Ba’ath party. It created a mass unemployment problem and swelled the ranks of the opposition with listless now unemployed people.
Instead the US had to attempt to rebuild all of those structures of command largely from the ground up anew, which takes years of time and tremendous resources. During those build years, you get constant intense chaos and instability fighting you while you attempt to make progress. It was exceptionally stupid.
The problem is exactly that it didn't.
Instead the US mounted all kinds of compromised personas into power, hoping that they can do without proper state institutes
1. Remove the diplomats, embassy staff, translators and other Afghani helpers who were promised safety in return of helping the Americans first.
2. Remove the military equipment - guns, drones, choppers, humvees etc second so that it doesn't fall in the Taliban's hands. At least destroy these equipment if it can't be logistically brought back. Destroy the bases so Taliban can't use them.
3. Lastly pull out the droops as all the important soft targets have already been taken out.
These 3 should have been done in winter before May (original deal was for May) because the Taliban has problems in the winter weather.
Instead of this order, they did the exact opposite. US sat on its ass, didn't remove the soft targets or even take care of those who helped the US. US just pulled out the troops and we ended up with videos of Afghanis running and falling off of aeroplanes and Taliban getting hold of humvees and choppers. And now to take out the soft targets, they have sent 9000 troops back in along with the UK. The Afghanis who had helped Americans for 2 decades got abandoned. And since summer time is when Taliban is at its easiest to move around, the airports have also been taken over.
Assuming they didn't harbor double allegiances.
A sister comment already noted the mineral resources, but don't forget the main function of Afghanistan as a nation: production of heroin. Narcopolitics are so fantastically more significant than ever gets any attention from "surface" media, but this is the name of the game. Chinese fentanyl has taken over the global opiate black market, so they have every incentive to support the Taliban who will repress the rival heroin trade over the US-backed government who supported it.
But, China probably still has the upper hand in the opiate business here, because fentanyl is far easier to smuggle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanis...
> The opium trade spiked in 2006 after the Taliban lost control of local warlords
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
> Ironically, the only power that has demonstrated an ability to cripple the Afghan drug industry is the Taliban.
> In July 2000, when the Taliban controlled most of the country, its reclusive one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, declared that opium was un-Islamic and imposed a ban on growing poppies.
> Much to the surprise of the rest of the world, the ban worked. Afraid to cross the Taliban, Afghan farmers immediately ceased planting poppies. The United Nations estimated that poppy cultivation plunged by 90 percent from 2000 to 2001.
In bad years, they don't expect any taxes.
(It does look like the Taliban has lightened up a bit, but time will tell. Every news station is bashing every aspect of the Taliban.)
Indeed! The speculation is that there are people very high up in Chinese system who are cashing up on industrial scale fentanyl production.
Syrian Assad family now makes more money on captagon than they were doing before the war from all their businesses.
Putin Vladimir, the Russian president, made his early fortune on providing legal cover to drug trade in Saint Petersburg, and later delved into the business himself. Russia now runs a state business of drug smuggling through its military missions abroad, and diplomatic missions.
And of course, most famously, Great Britain used to be the biggest narcostate in history. Fortunes of many modern day British elites were built in these times.
They have also invested heavily in their relationship with Pakistan. Pakistan protected Bin Ladin and are deeply involved in Afghanistan. China can lean on Pakistan to compliment its direct relationship with the Taliban.
Not to mention that the Chinese are significantly more motivated to make Afghanistan work.
As a sign of their influence, the Taliban has said that whatever happens in China’s borders is their business. This was in response to questions about the Uighurs, which, you know, if you’re an Islamic regime you might at least pretend to care about.
And let’s say China does somehow befriend the Taliban and build all this infrastructure, and import hundreds of thousands of workers that somehow the Taliban doesn’t decide are yet another empire to kick out. What do you think they do with these resources? They make iPhones. That westerners buy.
And again, even if they do somehow make this happen. Why should anybody care? It’s not like the US is losing these resources or something. And why would China, as large of a country as it is, need these resources? Is it even profitable to extract?
I keep seeing this narrative and it seems to me to be hugely superficial at best. China and Russia would probably prefer the U.S. just keep wasting money and attention in Afghanistan.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/21/china-taliban-afghanist...
I hate to be flippant here but this really shows a continued western misunderstanding of how people in places like Afghanistan live.
And even if they did all of that, what good is it exactly? Is China out of resources in China and now will build mountain passes and teach Afghanis how to drive trucks and all of that to mine resources? Sure sounds like nation building to me.
And why would the Taliban agree to this anyway? They could just do the mining themselves.
I agree with you. It is not a straightforward and foregone conclusion. Taliban has clearly shown that it can play a very long game. That said, so can Chinese.
US can barely handle one news cycle lately.
in the same way that the klu kluk klan are american but America isn't the klan.
> It also seems like the Taliban have chilled out a bit, since we're not seeing widescale reprisals.
Yeah, all those people are totally safe now. /s
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/18/cia_death_squads_afg...
* Diplomats -- needed to show support for the government we put in place until it fell. It was always going to fall, so there was always going to be a scramble to get them out. This dynamic has happened before and it will happen again. It's a function of diplomacy, not planning.
* Afghani Allies -- we have to draw the line somewhere at who we evacuate, the line was always going to leave some people out who thought they should be evacuated, and that was always going to be a tragedy. The tragedy is a function of line drawing, not planning.
* Equipment -- we left equipment for the Afghani government. We could have taken it or destroyed it, but that would have been a vote of no confidence in the government we notionally supported, so diplomacy says we leave it and the taliban gets it. Again a function of diplomacy, not planning.
If you try to throw planning and resources at problems that are actually fundamental, what happens is that you announce a troop surge and then 8 years later your presidency is over and you are no closer to leaving Afghanistan.
The complain is that current line is roughly "no one". And the people there had not had even time to prepare, organize hiding places or run away.
Collaborating with America should not come with a promise of a Green Card. It sets up conflicting motivations - if the 'nation building' fails, the collaborators can bug out to a much better country anyway.
"The drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way"
"I also assured Ghani that U.S. support for the people of Afghanistan will endure"
"I intend to maintain our diplomatic presence in Afghanistan, and we are coordinating closely with our international partners in order to continue to secure the international airport"
"the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable."
"The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
The proper order to pull out is to:
1. Remove the diplomats, embassy staff, translators and other Afghani helpers who were promised safety in return of helping the Americans first.
2. Remove the military equipment - guns, drones, choppers, humvees etc second so that it doesn't fall in the Taliban's hands. At least destroy these equipment if it can't be logistically brought back. Destroy the bases so Taliban can't use them.
3. Lastly pull out the droops as all the important soft targets have already been taken out.
These 3 should have been done in winter before May (original deal was for May) because the Taliban has problems in the winter weather.
Instead of this order, they did the exact opposite. US sat on its ass, didn't remove the soft targets or even take care of those who helped the US. US just pulled out the troops and we ended up with videos of Afghanis running and falling off of aeroplanes and Taliban getting hold of humvees and choppers. And since summer time is when Taliban is at its easiest to move around, the airports have also been taken over. And now to take out the soft targets, they have sent 9000 troops back in along with the UK. The Afghanis who had helped Americans for 2 decades got abandoned and are now gonna get killed by the Taliban.
The public is often easily manipulated. Like you said, the U.S. has been at war pretty much constantly for 75+ years, and empire building for at least 50 years before that, without ever really being in danger, exaggerating and dehumanizing every enemy along the way. To question this is un-American.
Many people don't seem to be able to imagine other perspectives. I guess that's true of both the school yard bully and the nation state bully. When you can bully someone there's no reason to care what they think.
Nice to make Nazi talking points while calling someone else Nazis.
Of course, civilization ends at American borders, and everyone else is unclean, barbaric or evil.
So all of this money could have sustained the US healthcare system for barely 18 months.
https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
Offhand, the entire broadband portion of the budget for the next 5-20 years was 65B.
Maybe healthcare lacks effective resource management. I sure as heck know I always hear quoted prices in other first world countries that are far less, often 1/10th of what we pay in the US.
If you extrapolate that out to a nation of 328 million, that's about $1.5T CAD / $1.1T USD a year.
For a larger population comparison, let's use the UK. NHS budget for 2018 was 114B UKP, or ~$158B USD. For a population of about 66 million people, that works out to about $2.4k USD per person per year and about a $775B USD/year budget.
$3.8T a year on health should pay for universal on demand health care for 100% of the population. Crazy that it's not.
According to the US Gov "Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services", in 2019 (pre pandemic) the US was already spending 3.8 trillion (~3.5x the estimate) or $11,582 per person and not fully serving everyone in the process. Maybe the medical bickering/billing departments raise the price 2-3 times.
1: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
In a strictly limited sense, I’d rather get my cross of iron at 66% off than for the full $6.4T. Better yet would be universal healthcare, enough homes to go round, clean, sustainable energy production systems, and bridges that keep on bridging.