Monday, August 23, 2021

Biden Must Go


Joe Biden is unfit to be president of the United States. It was obvious when he was running for office that he lacks the physical stamina and mental acuity for the job. It has become increasingly obvious since January that the part-time president has either hidden from the media or stumbled through the kind of scripted press conferences that Americans rightly used to deride as the hallmark of banana republics.

The handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan has exposed Biden’s incapacity. The painful truth is now undeniable. He must go — even if that means Kamala Harris, who has been similarly wrong about Afghanistan and much else besides, taking over.

They say success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. This failure is a two-parent family. One is the mother of all institutional failures: the inadequacy of technocrats, so convinced of their intellectual and moral superiority that they respond to the intrusions of reality with snark and pique.

An administration exquisitely sensitive to pronouns, bathrooms and fictitious forms of self-identification has shown itself to be brutally insensitive to the fate of Afghans who have risked all by self-identifying as allies of the United States and everything it once stood for.

This is a disgrace to the United States. Hard as it may be to believe, people all over the world still look to the United States as the last, best hope. The administration’s response, blaming it on the media, only adds further shame.

Biden, the King Lear of the Beltway, is the father of this failure. Not because for decades he has tacked back and forth with the foolish wisdom of the hour in Washington, and thus bears responsibility for the misconceived war for imperial democracy. Not because his appeal last November, to his party and the voters, was heavy on old-school Scrantonite paternalism. Not even because he put his hand up with a risible ‘buck stops here’ speech that lobbed the buck at everyone else. But because on the occasions when he hasn’t been dozing at the switch, Biden has made decisions that have chronically worsened the situation.

The picture of arrogance and incompetence that is emerging would tax the painterly skills of a Hunter Biden. The President insisted on rapid withdrawal despite warnings from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence services — then repeatedly denied that he had been warned.

The President insisted that all American citizens and American-allied personnel would be extricated from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, as the hapless spokesmen of the State Department and the Pentagon admitted that no one had any idea of how many people needed extraction, scenes of unspeakable tragedy play out at Kabul airport.

The President claimed on Thursday that the US’s allies were forewarned and supported this precipitate flight, yet they are openly disgusted at being abandoned.

The President claimed on Friday that he’d heard ‘no questioning’ from allies — yet the British parliament made global headlines when it held the leader of its closest ally in contempt.

The President also claimed on Friday that anyone who waved an American passport at the gates of Kabul airport would be admitted. Meanwhile, we watched people being crushed to death, babies being passed over barbed wire, and tear gas being used by our side, along with reports of the Taliban, who are now, it emerges on our side, randomly beating and shooting people.

Biden’s evident incapacity to keep up with events — and his belligerent denial of the facts and his responsibility for them — have become so evident that even the media, which covered for his debility in the 2020 elections and have protected him since, have turned on him. CNN and the BBC are now fact-checking their savior. On Saturday night, ABC’s Jonathan Karl bluntly said that what Biden is saying ‘simply don’t comport with reality’.


Donald Trump would never have let this happen: he is too vain. If Trump had gifted Blackhawk helicopters and a lifetime supply of Humvees to our enemies, condemned thousands of our allies to the nastiest of fates and made the United States military and diplomats a laughing stock before the entire world, the media and the Democrats would be calling for impeachment and dusting off the articles of treason.

If Trump had confused his Vice President with a ‘general’ or fumbled with his cue cards because he couldn’t match a scripted question to a scripted answer, as Biden did at his press conference on Thursday; or shown the bizarre callousness and failure of short-term memory in his ‘That was four days ago, five days ago!’ outburst; or spontaneously abandoned the policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan in an interview with ABC, as Biden did with George Stephanopoulos on Thursday, the psychiatrists would be lining up outside the cable stations to explain why the 25th Amendment needed to be deployed now.

It’s that simple. The buck really does stop with the President. The world has always seen Biden’s incapacity, and now the American people can see it too. He carries direct responsibility for a disaster so undeniable that even a partisan media can no longer deny it. He can neither speak truthfully nor accurately. Not so much the emperor with no clothes, as Lear’s fool on the heath, naked and shivering as the kingdom comes to the ‘great confusion’.


X22, Christian Patriot News, and more-August 23


 



Evening folks. Here's tonight's news line up. (I got impatient last night and posted before last night's X22 report was posted. So I'll be posting BOTH yesterday's and today's report.)


What Afghanistan tells us about Team…

 


What Afghanistan tells us about Team Biden’s incompetence

Last year, during the presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised the American people his administration would be characterized by order, discipline, experience, and, above all, competence.

That has turned out to be spectacularly and obviously wrong.

As we watch the spiraling disaster that is the withdrawal – which, unlike its antecedent collapse in Saigon, is likely to get worse, not better in the coming weeks — fundamental questions arise about the competence of the Biden administration and what the answers might mean for the remainder of its agenda.

There is no way for anyone on the outside to know or be able to quantify with any precision whether and to what extent President Biden’s capabilities are reduced compared to his previous performance as a senator and vice president.

We can, however, say with some precision a few things about hisschedule, his apparent lassitude, and that of his administration.  For at least the last six months, the president’s daily schedule seems to have consisted of the Presidential Daily Briefing (usually in mid-morning rather than at the start of the day as is typical for presidents) followed by one internal meeting or perhaps a phone call or video chat with a small group of whoever.



Last Friday, for instance, Mr. Biden had his daily briefing, then a meeting in the Situation Room, then brief remarks (no questions scheduled) in the East Room.  Then a flight out to Delaware.  It is not clear whether any of the 10,000 Americans stranded in Afghanistan will be able to fly to Delaware this weekend.

There are seldom two meetings on the presidential schedule, and there have only been a handful of trips to places other than Delaware. Announcements of the closure of the news-making portion of the day (“lids”) have been called as early as 11 am.  During and after the fall of Kabul, the president was at Camp David, apparently by himself.

More disconcertingly, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division were placed on alert the morning of August 12th.  Yet five days later, the West Wing remained largely empty.  This egregious absence of senior staff, while our young soldiers try their best to extract Americans and allies under tough circumstances, is inexplicable and inexcusable.

Mr. Biden has given fewer than 10 in-person on-camera interviews so far, compared to the dozens both of his immediate predecessors had given at this point in their presidencies.

This leadership, or lack thereof, and its tempo dates back to the campaign and is exceedingly unusual for a sitting president.

Apart from calling into question Mr. Biden’s own personal involvement in the presidency, it has set the tone for his administration.  Vice President Harris, the chieftain of both Afghanistan and the southern border, has also been absent for most of the last two weeks, despite the concurrent crises in both of her domains.  If the chief of staff Ron Klain has been around, his footprints have been very light.  Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who always seems to be talking, has been scarce as well.

Maybe that is for the best.  Last week, when administration officials were allowed to speak, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and General Milley all said that the United States didn’t really have the capacity to get Americans trapped on the wrong side of the wire in Kabul.  This is even though the English and French military are doing just that for their own people.

If we cannot retrieve Americans from harm’s way, why do we even have a Department of Defense or a National Security Council?

Members of Congress must by now understand that Team Biden, despite the propaganda, is either fundamentally incompetent or lacking in a certain native energy.  It is difficult to see how anyone could, in good conscience, give this crew another few trillion dollars to spend. There is nothing in their record so far that suggests they will spend it wisely, carefully, or competently.

How much can anyone really trust the people who made and are making a hash from the withdrawal from Afghanistan?

A year ago, when asked his mental capacity, then-candidate Bidenresponded:  “Watch me.”  We have.  The results in Kabul, on the southern border, and in the West Wing have not inspired confidence.

• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to President Trump and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.


The Drossy Touch of Joe Biden - Victor Davis Hanson

A cognitively challenged Biden is pulled in every direction, 
by left-wing politicos collecting their debts, by his own spite, 
by his trademark narcissism, and by his hatred of all things Trump. 


Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.

The Afghan Catastrophe

 Seven months ago, Afghanistan was relatively quiet—with about 10,000 vestigial NATO troops, including 2,500 Americans, anchored by the Bagram Airfield. They were able to provide air superiority for the coalition and Afghan national army. With air power, NATO forces, if and when they so wished, could have very slowly and gradually withdrawn all its remnant troops—but only after a prior departure of all American and European civilians, coalition contractors, and allied Afghans. 

The transient calm abruptly imploded as soon as Joe Biden recklessly yanked all U.S. troops out in a matter of days. Many left in the dead of night, leaving no one to protect contractors, dependents, diplomats, and Afghan allies. In Biden’s world, civilians protect the last Western enclave while soldiers flee.

Three weeks ago, Joe Biden and a woke and politicized Pentagon were assuring us that Afghanistan was “stable.” Now the country is reverting to its accustomed premodern, theocratic, and medieval chaos. It will likely soon reopen as the world’s pre-9/11-style terrorist haven—an arms mart of over $50 billion in abandoned U.S. military equipment. Thanks to the president of the United States, terrorists and nation-state enemies can now shop for arms and train there without hindrance. 

The NATO coalition-builder Biden also dry-gulched his European allies, whose soldiers outnumbered our own. The humanitarian “good ole Joe from Scranton” deprecated the thousands of Afghan military dead who had helped the Americans. The families of the American fallen and wounded of two decades were all but told by Biden that the catastrophe in Kabul was inevitable—no other way out but chaos and dishonor. Why did he not tell us that earlier, when he was vice president, so many dead and wounded ago?

“Get over it,” was Biden’s messaging subtext. If Americans want to hear the blame game, he told us to scapegoat Barack Obama, or all prior presidents, or especially Donald Trump, or the intelligence services and military, or the Afghan army, or we naïfs who somehow think things are a mess right now in Kabul—or anything and everyone but Joe Biden.

Was Biden’s idea simply to get the United States “officially” out of Afghanistan and let the abandoned 10,000-plus Americans manage as they can? 

Was Biden angry over our 20-year presence and thinking the Afghans would deserve what followed? Was he so delusional that he really believed the NATO forces could easily deter the Taliban with sanctimonious lectures from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman? The latter is a former head of EMILY’s List and an architect of the Iran Deal, so were she and others especially scarifying to naughty theocrats when they warned they might lose their slot in the “rules-based world order”? Or did Biden believe the Taliban would be deterred by Sherman’s exclamations, such as her ominous warning, “This is personal for me!” 

The Inflation Fiasco

In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink. Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for “infrastructure,” and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?

At the same time, he has alarmed employers with braggadocio threats that higher capital gains, income, payroll, and estate taxes are all on the way. More lockdowns only further eroded small businesses. The result was price inflation of all the stuff of life—homes, lumber, gas, food, appliances—as well as historic shortages of everything from cars and houses to the work of contractors and electricians. Any increase in wages due to labor shortages was soon erased by spirals in the consumer price index.

So, what was Biden thinking or, rather, not thinking? By paying workers not to work he would be evening out the ancient score with employers? Did workers need a vacation from the quarantine? Printing money was a way to spread the wealth—and diminish what the rich possessed? Was a $2 trillion deficit and $30 trillion in aggregate debt a way of bragging to Trump that he doubled the Trump red ink in less than a year? Would he pile up more debt than both Barack Obama and George W. Bush in half the time?

The Border Disaster

Biden took a secure border, along with increasingly legal-only immigration, and then destroyed both. He stopped construction of the border wall, encouraged an expected 2 million illegal entries over the current fiscal year, promised amnesties, and resumed “catch and release.” He did all that at a time of a pandemic, exempting illegal aliens from all the requirements of COVID testing and mass vaccinations that he had hectored his own citizens about getting. With planned mass amnesties and millions more invited to cross illegally in the next three years, was Biden seeking to found a new American nation within the now passé old American nation?

Did he believe that Americans did not deserve their citizenship and newcomers from south of the border were somehow more worthy? Did he see the 2 million new residents as instant voters under new relaxed rules of balloting? Did he think in a labor-deprived economy they would supply nannies, gardeners, and cooks to bicoastal elites? We strain to imagine any explanation because there is no logic to any. 

Energy Insufficiency

Biden did his best in just seven months to explode the idea of American self-sufficiency in natural gas and oil. He canceled the Keystone Pipeline, froze new federal energy leases, put the Anwar oil field off limits, and warned frackers their end days were near. 

So, what drove Biden? Did he object that motorists were saving too many billions of dollars per year in decreased commuting costs? Or was the rub that we had slashed too many imports of oil from the volatile Middle East and no longer would launch preemptive wars? Or perhaps the transition to clean natural gas instead of coal as a fuel for power generation had too radically curtailed carbon emissions? Did Biden feel that Middle East producers, the Russians, or the Venezuelans could better protect the planet while extracting oil and gas than could American drillers?

The Race Calamity

Biden blew up race relations by greenlighting the new hunt for the mythical “whiteness” monster. Were a few buffoonish white rioters who stormed the Capitol the tip of the spear of a previously unknown massive white supremacy movement, the most dangerous, he swore, since the Civil War?

Biden took affirmative action and the Civil Rights-era “disparate impact” and “proportional representation” ideas and turned them into disproportionate representation and reparations on the cheap. Biden made it acceptable to damn “whiteness,” as if all 230 million white Americans are guilty of something or other in a way that the other 100 million “nonwhite” are not. 

So why did Biden kick the sleeping dog of racial polarization? To stir up his left-wing base? To alleviate his own guilt over the Biden family’s long history of racist insults, from “clean” Barack Obama to “put y’all in chains” to the “Corn Pop” sagas to “you ain’t black” and “junkie” to Hunter’s n-word and Asian racism? Did Biden see countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia as positive models for diversity emulation?

The Crime Explosion

After Biden entered office, violent crimes ignited from the embers of the 120 days of mostly unpunished looting, arson, and organized violence in the streets of America’s major cities during summer 2020. Under Biden, jails were emptied. Federal attorneys and emulative local DAs exempted offenders. Police were defamed and defunded. Punishing crime was considered a racist construct. 

The result is that Americans now avoid the Dodge City downtowns of most of America’s crime-ridden blue cities. They accept that any urban pedestrian, any driver after hours, any commuter on a bus or subway can be assaulted, robbed, beaten, raped, or shot—without any assurance that the media will fairly report the crime, or that the criminal justice system will punish the perpetrators. In Biden’s America looters prance into drug stores and walk out with shopping bags of stuff, under the terrified gaze of security guards who guesstimate at least they did not steal more than $950 of loot. 

Was Biden’s plan to let the people redistribute ill-gotten gains? Or was he convinced that disproportionate criminal activity was karmic payback, or penance for the death of George Floyd? Did he really believe that we were far too overpoliced? Did he believe that the general public should experience, at last, the crime of the inner-city to ensure equity and inclusion?

So why does Biden so willfully exercise this destructive touch that blows up anything he taps?

There are several possible theories:

1) Biden is non compos mentis. He has no idea of what he is doing. But to the degree he is alert, Biden listens—sort of—only to the last person with whom he talks. And then he takes a nap. When Afghanistan blows up or inflation roars or the border becomes an entry door, his eyes open, and he becomes bewildered and snarly—like an irritable and snappy Bruce Dern waking up in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” 

Biden has no clue about the actual destructive implementation of his toxic policies, and no concern upon whom these destructive agendas fall. He vaguely assumes a lapdog left-wing media will repackage every Biden incoherence as Periclean, and every daily “lid” as Biden’s escape for presidential research, deep reading, and intensive deliberation. Biden appears to be about where Woodrow Wilson was in November 1919.

2) Or is Biden a rank opportunist and thinking he will ride woke leftism as the country’s new trajectory? He resents his prior subservience to Obama, and now feels he can trump past signature leftist administrations as the one true and only socialist evolutionary. He is not so much the manipulated as the manipulator.

Biden fantasizes himself as a hands-on dynamic leader who bites at reporters, snaps from the podium, and issues his customary interjections. He is therefore “in command” for four or five hours a day. He enjoys acting more radical than Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or “the squad.”—and especially being far more leftwing than his old and now passé boss Barack Obama. Joe is in control and that explains the dross touch. For the first time in his life, such an incompetent has complete freedom—to be powerfully incompetent. Biden is then not demented as much as delusionally running things.

3) Biden is unfortunately what he always was: a rather mean-spirited plagiarist, liar, and nihilist, from his Clarence Thomas character assassination infamy and Tara Reade groping to his foul racist talk and his monumental habitual grifting. His disasters are the same old, same old Biden trademark, performance-art screw-ups. 

Biden likes the idea of conservative outrage, of chaos, of barking at everyone all the time. Biden accepts that no omelets can be made without broken eggs, and sort of enjoys screwing up things, as Robert Gates and Barack Obama both warned. “Wokening” the Joint Chiefs of Staff, encouraging hundreds of thousands to pour across the border, and abandoning our NATO allies in Afghanistan—who cares when tough guy, brash-talking Joe on the move jumbles stuff up? The disasters in the economy, foreign policy, crime, energy, and racial relations? Biden is just shaking things up, stirring the pot, baiting people to watch Mr. “Come On, Man” in action, as he blusters and preens and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake.

4) Biden is nothing much at all. He’s just a cardboard-cut out, a garden-variety Democratic Party hack, who is against anything conservatives are for. He assumes he will undo all that Trump did, on the theory it is simple and easy for him in his lazy, senior moments. And he is tired anyway of thinking much beyond such Pavlovian rejectionism. A closed border is bad; presto, open borders are good. Improving race relations is bad; deteriorating relations must be good. Energy independence bad; dependency good. Biden works on autopilot in his minimalist day job: just cancel anything that Trump did and worry nothing about the effects on the American people.

5) Biden is a hostage of both the Left and Hunter Biden. His task is to ram down a hard Left agenda, in the fashion of a torpedo that itself blows up when it hits the target. The Left ensured the base would not bolt in 2020. So, he owes them. Biden, more or less, signed his presidency over to the squad, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and the Obama holdovers. They hand him a script; he tries to read it; and they follow up with the details. He is the old “Star Trek’s” tottering John Gill.

The Left may hope their own nihilist agenda sort of works. When it inevitably does not, then Joe, the delivery man, is blamed: so much more quickly, then, will be Biden’s necessary exit. They kept their part of the bargain by getting the basement denizen elected. Now he keeps the deal by handing over the presidency. Biden’s utility had about a six-month shelf life. 

Now ever so slowly the leaks, the West Wing backstabbing, the furrowed anchor brows, and the unnamed sources will gently ease him out with 25th Amendment worries (e.g., “Perhaps President Biden might find taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment of some value after all, for his own benefit, of course.”) Kamala Harris is not so inert as we are led to believe.

Hunter Biden, smeared and ruined with scandals of every imaginable sordidness, now embarks on his masterpiece con: peddling his kindergarten art at a half-million dollars per painting to “anonymous” quid pro quo rich foreign grifters. Why does Hunter pose such brazenness and unnecessary danger to his father, the president? Because the former addict can, and just for the f—k of it?

Hunter’s malicious behavior is an implied threat that if Joe’s staff slaps Hunter’s hand, he threatens to spill the “beans” on the “Big Guy” and “Mr. 10 Percent”—given he plays the wounded fawn as the underappreciated bad boy. Hunter was the bad-seed family money man without whose grift none of them would ever have lived in such mordida-generated splendor. 

A cognitively challenged Biden then is pulled in every direction, by his own senility, by left-wing politicos collecting their debts, by his own spite, by his trademark narcissism, and by his neanderthal hatred of everything Trump was and did. 

The problem for America is that theories one through five are not always mutually exclusive, but more likely force multipliers of the present insanity. At some point, some brave congressional representative or Senator will finally have to say to Biden, in the spirit of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”


What China wants from Afghanistan

 What China wants from Afghanistan

Beijing has had an uneasy relationship with the Taliban for decades.

What China wants from Afghanistan

The fall of Kabul has led to fears that Afghanistan will come under the influence of China. Taliban representatives met with Chinese officials in July. And since the Taliban’s takeover, Beijing has made friendly gestures towards Afghanistan’s new rulers. 

Chinese influence in Afghanistan has not come out of nowhere. Its involvement in Afghanistan goes back decades. China’s interests here are both geopolitical and economic. 

For instance, Beijing has had a clear interest in mineral rights in Afghanistan since the early days of the US-backed regime. Shortly after the 2001 invasion, China learned that the new regime was looking for bids on mining rights for the Aynak copper mine. The Afghan government wanted cash and mining royalties were a good way to get it. 

The Aynak mine contains one of the world’s largest copper deposits. Its use stretches back to ancient times. The Soviets once attempted to develop the mine, but mujahideen attacks prevented this. The state-owned Metallurgical Corporation of China and Jiangxi Copper Company won the contract in 2007, amid allegations of bribery. Even without bribes, the Chinese bid would have been hard to turn down. Royalties were set at an extremely high 19.5 per cent and the consortium surpassed other bidders on almost every financial account. It was estimated that production at the mine would boost Afghan government revenue by 50 per cent.

But there was another factor behind China’s successful bid: Pakistan. The Afghan government hoped that China’s good relations with Pakistan would shield the mine – and the regime – from Taliban attacks. As Andrew Small puts it in The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics, the thinking was that ‘any insurgent advance on Kabul would now worry Beijing too, with the mine barely 20 miles southeast of the capital’.

The Aynak deal was just one of China’s commercial investments under the US-backed regime. Chinese technology companies ZTE and Huawei set up telephone services in Afghanistan in the 2000s. ZTE later won a major contract to construct a fibre-optic cable network in Afghanistan. Chinese companies also worked on road and irrigation projects. At one point, it looked as if China would become one of post-Taliban Afghanistan’s biggest investors. 

These investments caused outrage in the West. At the time, author Robert Kaplan said that ‘while America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, China will reap its benefits’. But China’s interests in Afghanistan were never purely commercial. And Beijing’s relationship with the US-backed regime was always uneasy. The Aynak mine, for instance, proved a constant source of tension. China kept delaying production, blaming the presence of archaeological sites nearby. In response, the Afghan government repeatedly threatened to put the mining rights back out for tender. And despite its engagement with the US-backed regime, Beijing never felt comfortable with the presence of American troops in Central Asian states on the Chinese border. 

China has viewed Afghanistan as a geopolitical battleground since the 1970s, specifically since the 1979 Communist takeover and subsequent Soviet invasion. In China’s view, a Soviet-dominated Afghanistan posed a serious danger. It meant that Soviet soldiers were on China’s borders. As a result, China was one of the central backers of the anti-Soviet insurgency and was the biggest supplier of weapons to the mujahideen until 1984. In 1986, China played a key role in the mujahideen’s acquisition of stinger missiles, which proved to be a turning point in the war. Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping said he wanted to turn Afghanistan into a ‘quagmire’ for the Soviets. 

China’s interest in Afghanistan dissipated once the Soviets left. Following rocket attacks on its embassy, China ended its diplomatic presence in Afghanistan. But the rise of the Taliban, supported by China’s long-standing ally, Pakistan, changed that. 

Initially, China was not keen on the Taliban. China already recognised the indirect threat that Islamists posed to Xinjiang – even in the early days of pan-Islamism. Taliban-run Afghanistan even played host to Uyghur militants. At this point, China went along with the condemnatory line taken by the wider international community towards the Taliban, particularly after the violence that accompanied the capture of Kabul in 1996.

However, as the Taliban regime became more geopolitically isolated and desperate in the late 1990s, Pakistan managed to convince China to pursue closer relations. This process began in 1999, when several Chinese diplomats went to Kabul for a meeting with Taliban representatives. The result was the start of diplomatic and economic ties, flights from Kabul to Urumqi in China and promises of Chinese food aid.

Neither side was completely happy with the relationship. Despite Taliban requests, China didn’t veto UN sanctions against Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Taliban failed to expel Uyghur militants from Afghanistan. Nonetheless, an uneasy working relationship was established.

When the US ousted the Taliban regime, the Chinese government was reportedly relieved. Of course, it was concerned about the growing friendship between Pakistan and the US. But in the early post-Taliban years, China opted to stay out of security matters. It focused instead on seeking out commercial gain where possible. 

This judgement, Andrew Small says, changed in 2006. By then, the Taliban had regrouped and the insurgency was in full swing. This presented a dilemma for China. On the one hand, the return of civil war or even a reversion to Taliban rule could mean more space for Uyghur armed groups in Afghanistan. On the other hand, China remained concerned about the US military presence in Central Asia, particularly following the so-called Colour Revolutions in the region. As tensions over the South China Sea picked up and the US announced its foreign-policy pivot towards Asia, China felt encircled. In Beijing’s ideal world, neither side would win the Afghan War. 

At times, this simply meant China maintaining the relations it had established with the Taliban pre-9/11. According to Small, former Chinese officials claimed that a mutual understanding had been reached between China and the Taliban: the Taliban was to ‘keep [its] distance from Uyghur militant groups and China would treat the Taliban as a legitimate political grouping rather than a terrorist outfit’. There have also been allegations that China supplied the Taliban with arms. 

Of course, China never cut off relations with the US-backed Afghan government either. It even offered some aid to the regime. From 2011 onwards, China actually ratcheted up its diplomatic engagement with the Afghan government, keeping one eye on the planned 2014 NATO withdrawal date, after which Beijing could increase its influence over the regime. 

How much China will engage with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan remains to be seen. No doubt it will continue to pursue mining rights. But the bigger question will be how to keep the Taliban on-side in the post-occupation era.

The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan shows that the West lacks clear goals in the region. In contrast, China knows exactly what it wants. 

Tom Bailey is a financial writer.


The China Question

 Preface AuntiE: The debacle in Afghanistan has brought information that China has much to gain, specifically, access to a vast array of natural minerals. The following is from May 2020; however, worth consideration as China, yet again, may have an advantage. 


The China Question

In matters of trade and manufacturing, the United States has not been the naive victim of cunning Chinese masterminds. We asked for this.

On May 25, 2000, President Bill Clinton hailed the passage of legislation by the House of Representatives establishing permanent normal trade relations with China: “Our administration has negotiated an agreement which will open China’s markets to American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers. Today the House has affirmed that agreement. … We will be exporting, however, more than our products. By this agreement, we will also export more of one of our most cherished values, economic freedom.”

Two decades later, the chickens—or rather, in the case of the novel coronavirus that spread to the world from China, the bats—have come home to roost. In a recent press conference about the pandemic, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York complained: “We need masks, they’re made in China; we need gowns, they’re made in China; we need face shields, they’re made in China; we need ventilators, they’re made in China. … And these are all like national security issues when you’re in this situation.”

We should not be shocked to discover that many essential items, including critical drugs and personal protective equipment (PPE), that used to be made in the United States and other countries are now virtually monopolized by Chinese producers. That was the plan all along.

Politicians pushing globalization like Clinton may have told the public that the purpose of NAFTA and of China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was to open the closed markets of Mexico and China to “American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers.” But U.S. multinationals and their lobbyists 20 years ago knew that was not true. Their goal from the beginning was to transfer the production of many products from American soil to Mexican soil or Chinese soil, to take advantage of foreign low-wage, nonunion labor, and in some cases foreign government subsidies and other favors. Ross Perot was right about the motives of his fellow American corporate executives in supporting globalization.

The strategy of enacting trade treaties to make it easier for U.S. corporations to offshore industrial production to foreign cheap-labor pools was sold by Clinton and others to the American public on the basis of two implicit promises. First, it was assumed that the Western factory workers who would be replaced by poorly paid, unfree Chinese workers would find better-paying and more prestigious jobs in a new, postindustrial “knowledge economy.” Second, it was assumed that the Chinese regime would agree to the role assigned to it of low-value-added producer in a neocolonial global economic hierarchy led by the United States, European Union, and Japan. To put it another way, China had to consent to be a much bigger Mexico, rather than a much bigger Taiwan.

Neither of the promises made by those like Clinton who promoted deep economic integration between the United States and China two decades ago have been fulfilled.

The small number of well-paying tech jobs in the U.S. economy has not compensated for the number of manufacturing jobs that have been destroyed. A substantial percentage of those well-paying tech jobs have gone not to displaced former manufacturing workers who have been retrained to work in “the knowledge economy” but to foreign nationals and immigrants, a disproportionate number of whom have been nonimmigrant indentured servants from India working in the U.S. on H-1B visas.

The devastation of industrial regions by imports from China, often made by exploited Chinese workers for Western corporations, is correlated in the United States and Europe with electoral support for nationalist and populist politicians and parties. The Midwestern Rust Belt gave Donald Trump an electoral college advantage in 2016, and the British Labour Party’s Red Wall in the north of England cracked during the Brexit vote in 2016 and crumbled amid the resounding victory of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019.

The second implicit promise made by the cheerful advocates of deep Sino-American economic integration like Bill Clinton was that China would accept a neocolonial division of labor in which the United States and Europe and the advanced capitalist states of East Asia would specialize in high-end, high-wage “knowledge work,” while offshoring low-value-added manufacturing to unfree and poorly paid Chinese workers. China, it was hoped, would be to the West what Mexico with its maquiladoras in recent decades has been to the United States—a pool of poorly paid, docile labor for multinational corporations, assembling imported components in goods in export-processing zones for reexport to Western consumer markets.

But the leaders of China, not unreasonably, are not content for their country to be the low-wage sweatshop of the world, the unstated role assigned to it by Western policymakers in the 1990s. China’s rulers want China to compete in high-value-added industries and technological innovation as well. These are not inherently sinister ambitions. China is governed by an authoritarian state, but so were Taiwan and South Korea until late in the 20th century, while Japan was a de facto one-party state run for nearly half a century by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which was neither liberal nor democratic.

Even a democratic, multiparty Chinese government that sponsored liberalizing social reforms would probably continue a version of the successful state sponsorship of industrial modernization in order to catch up with, if not surpass, the U.S. and other nations that developed earlier. That is what China’s neighbors, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, all did following WWII. Indeed, when the United States and Imperial Germany were striving to catch up with industrial Britain in the 19th century, they employed many of the same techniques of national developmentalism, including protective tariffs and, in America’s case, toleration of theft of foreign intellectual property. (British authors visiting the U.S. often discovered that pirated editions of their works were as easy to purchase then as pirated Hollywood movies and knockoffs of Western brands are to obtain in Asia today.)

The question, then, is not why China pursued its own variant of classic state-sponsored industrial development policies in its own interest. The question is why the U.S. establishment did not retaliate against China’s policies for so long, given the damage they have done to American manufacturing and its workforce.

The answer is simple. American politics and policy are disproportionately shaped by the rich, and many, perhaps most, rich Americans can do quite well for themselves and their families without the existence of any U.S. manufacturing base at all.

We are taught to speak about “capitalism” as though it is a single system But industrial capitalism is merely one kind of capitalism among others, including finance capitalism, commercial capitalism, real estate capitalism, and commodity capitalism. In different countries, different kinds of capitalism are favored by different regimes.

Recognizing that there are, in fact, different kinds of capitalism, not only among nations but within them, allows us to understand that the different variants of profit-seeking can interact in kaleidoscopic ways. National economies can compete with other national economies or they can complement them.

The United States could decline into a deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion.

America’s economic elite is made up mostly of individuals and institutions whose sectors complement state-sponsored Chinese industries instead of competing with them. It is pointless to try to persuade these influential Americans that they have a personal, financial stake in manufacturing on American soil. They know that they do not.

The business model of Silicon Valley is to invent something and let the dirty physical work of building it be done by serfs in other countries, while royalties flow to a small number of rentiers in the United States. Nor has partial U.S. deindustrialization been a problem for American financiers enjoying the low interest rates made possible in part by Chinese financial policies in the service of Chinese manufacturing exports. American pharma companies are content to allow China to dominate chemical and drug supply chains, American real estate developers lure Chinese investors with EB-5 visas to take part in downtown construction projects, American agribusinesses benefit from selling soybeans and pork to Chinese consumers, and American movie studios and sports leagues hope to pad their profits by breaking into the lucrative China market.

For their part, many once-great American manufacturing companies have become multinationals, setting up supply chains in China and other places with low-wage, unfree labor, while sheltering their profits from taxation by the United States in overseas tax havens like Ireland and the Cayman Islands and Panama. Many of these so-called “original equipment manufacturers” (OEMs)—companies that outsource and offshore most of their manufacturing—are engaged as much in trade, marketing, and consumer finance as they are in actually making things.

We should not be surprised that multinational firms, given the choice, typically prefer to maximize profits by a strategy of driving down labor costs, replacing well-paid workers with poorly paid workers in other countries, rather than by becoming more productive through replacing or augmenting expensive labor with innovative machinery and software in their home countries. Labor-saving technological innovation to keep production at home is hard. Finding cheaper labor in another country is easy.

In short, the United States has not been the naive victim of cunning Chinese masterminds. On the contrary, in the last generation many members of America’s elite have sought to get rich personally by selling or renting out America’s crown jewels—intellectual property, manufacturing capacity, high-end real estate, even university resources—to the elite of another country.

A century ago, many British investors did well from overseas investments in factories in the American Midwest and the German Ruhr, even as products from protectionist America and protectionist Germany displaced free-trading Britain’s own unprotected manufacturing industry in Britain’s own markets. By building up China’s economy at the expense of ours, America’s 21st-century overclass is merely following the example of the British elite, which, like a bankrupt aristocrat marrying a foreign plutocrat’s daughter, sells its steel plants to Indian tycoons and state-backed Chinese firms, sells London mansions to Russian gangsters and Arab aristocrats, and sells university diplomas to foreign students including Americans and Chinese.

When asked whether the rapid dismantling, in a few decades, of much of an industrial base built up painstakingly over two centuries has been bad for the United States, the typical reply by members of the U.S. establishment is an incoherent word salad of messianic liberal ideology and neoclassical economics. We are fighting global poverty by employing Chinese factory workers for a pittance! Don’t you understand Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage?

Some of the profits made by rich Americans in the modern China trade are recycled as money flowing to universities, think tanks, and the news media. The denizens of these institutions tend to be smart and smart people know who butters their bread. Predictably, intellectuals and journalists who benefit from the largesse of American capitalists with interests in China are inclined to please their rich donors by characterizing critics of U.S. China policy as xenophobes who hate Asian people or else ignorant fools who do not understand that, according to this or that letter in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times signed by 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 economics professors, free trade always magically benefits all sides everywhere all at once.

All of this idealistic verbiage about the wonders of free trade and the moral imperative of ending global poverty by replacing American workers with foreign workers cannot muffle the click of cash registers.

The dangerous dependence of the United States and other advanced industrial democracies on China for basic medical supplies has been exposed by the current pandemic. The U.S. and other industrial democracies now confront a stark choice. Western countries can continue to cede what remains of their manufacturing base and even control of their telecommunications and drone infrastructure to Beijing and specialize as suppliers of technological innovation, higher education, agriculture, minerals, real estate, and entertainment to industrial China. Or they can view Western economies as competitors of the Chinese economy, not complements to it, and act accordingly.

Rejection of the view that our economy should compete with, rather than complement, that of China in key sectors does not require us to endorse demagogic claims that the Chinese regime is a crusading ideological enemy hell-bent on world domination like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. On the contrary, a strategy of U.S. industrial independence informed by sober realism would entail recognition of the legitimate interest of China, under any regime, in building up its own advanced industries—on the condition that China in return recognize America’s legitimate interests in preserving its own domestic supply chains in the same key industrial sectors.

Econ 101 to the contrary, the purpose of international trade should not be to maximize the well-being of global consumers by means of a global division of labor among countries that specialize in different industries, but to allow sovereign states to pursue industrial policies in their own long-term interest, as they define it. Trade, investment, and immigration policies should be subservient to national industrial strategy. The purpose of trade negotiations should be the modest one of reconciling different, clashing, and equally legitimate national industrial policies in a mutually acceptable way.

National industrial policies are like national militaries—essential local public goods provided by a sovereign government to a particular people. The model for trade negotiations should be bilateral and multilateral arms control, which are based on the premise that all parties have a perpetual right to their own militaries, rather than global disarmament, which seeks the utopian goal of eliminating all militaries everywhere.

All modern economies are mixed economies, with public sectors and private sectors, and all modern trade should be mixed trade, with wholly protected sectors, partly protected sectors with managed trade, and sectors in which free trade is not dangerous and is therefore allowed. In a post-neoliberal world, it would be understood that the legitimate self-interest of sovereign nations and blocs inevitably imposes strict limits on the acceptable flow of goods, money, and labor across borders. Institutions which limit the right of sovereign states to promote their own national industries as they see fit, like the World Trade Organization (WTO), should be reformed or abolished.

All major countries like the United States, China, and India and all major trading blocs like the EU should insist on having their own permanent domestic supply chains in medicine, medical gear, machine tools, aircraft and drones, automobiles, consumer electronics, telecommunications equipment, and other key sectors. They should have the right to create or protect these essential industries by any means they choose, at the expense of free trade and free investment if necessary.

If China and India want to have their own national aerospace industries in addition to the United States and European Union, more power to them—as long as the United States and European Union can intervene to preserve their own national aerospace supply chains on their own soil employing their own workers. If this approach means accepting that Western-based aerospace firms like Boeing and Airbus cannot hope to enjoy a permanent shared monopoly in global markets for large jets, well, too bad. Boeing and Airbus cannot claim in good times to be post-national global corporations to justify offshoring policies and then claim in bad times to be national champions when they need bailouts.

The alternative—deepening the complementarity among China’s industrial and America’s postindustrial economies—would be much worse for the United States. The same American overclass whose members have profited the most from transferring national assets to China in the last generation has also been far more insulated from the effects of imports from China, both manufactured goods and viruses. The United States, which has always had features of a Third World country as well as a First World country, could decline into a deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion, with decayed factories scattered across the continent and a nepotistic rentier oligarchy clustered in a few big coastal cities.

It would be ironic as well as tragic if the strategy of Sino-American economic integration which American elites in the 1990s hoped would turn China into another Mexico for the United States ends up turning the United States into another Mexico for China.



Sunday Spin #3 - SecState Tony Blinken Gets Afghanistan Crisis Assist from Chris Wallace


Anthony Blinken is a highly political operative, now the figurehead and public face of the U.S. State Department.  However, the Dept. of State is an independent bureaucratic system inside the U.S. government that is outside the control of any functioning governmental process.  Essentially, the State Department is the U.S. branch of the United Nations, and they act unilaterally exactly like that.

The unelected operators, bureaucrats within the Department of State (DoS), make U.S. foreign policy from within the executive branch.  There is a pretense promoted by media that the executive branch, specifically the President of the United States, is controlling the internal mechanism of the U.S. State Department, but that’s a ruse.  If it were true, the State Department would act like they had accountability to someone or something; they do not.

The modern U.S. State Dept is an independent, bureaucratic, and massive foreign policy institution that does not accept any oversight.  They are able to accomplish their independent position by partnering with intelligence agencies.  The Dept of State use the U.S. Intelligence Branch as a weapon against any individual or entity who would attempt oversight.

When a Secretary of State is appointed to the role as head of the agency, the arbitrary nature of the institution around them is accepted.  In the modern political dynamic, the Secretary of State position is customarily given to a key political figure by the President as a payback or compensation for support.  The SoS then uses their position for leisure, personal graft, a life of indulgence and a position to repay the interests of their tribe.

During any Democrat term in office; and in addition to funding the family of the President who appointed them; as long as the Secretary of State appropriately and adequately funds the members, families and friends of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then they are perceived to be doing their job correctly.  The SoS keeps that institutional mechanism working, and in return the unilateral operations of the department are supported.

[Reference – Former Senator John McCain did not like Anthony Blinken because the Arizona senator feared Blinken would tilt the DoS coffers in favor of the Clinton syndicate.  Cindy McCain was not about to take a position in line at Tiffany’s behind Chelsea; this became an issue between the two dynasties.  Mitch McConnell replaced McCain with Mitt Romney]

Foreign countries know how the nature of the position has evolved, and they no longer respond to the U.S. secretary of state with any level of respect.

From the perspective of foreign governments, the Secretary of State is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.  Any conflict between their interests and the U.S. state department is like getting a strongly worded letter from Lindsey Graham.  And therein lies the problem when a major international crisis erupts, and the Secretary of State is in the global spotlight.

To prevent a harsh public perspective against Joe Biden’s State Department appointee, the guardian of the DC swamp gates, Chris Wallace is called into action: