The bottomless idiocy of the governing establishment

 Steven Hayward:

The scale of failure in Afghanistan is hard to overstate. Our “intelligence” services (who deserve to be referred to in scare quotes until they display some actual intelligence some day) were incapable of picking up any signs that the Taliban were arming and organizing on a large scale for their swift takeover of the entire country, or if they did gather any on-the-ground signals, their interpretive process (a polite term for “groupthink”) prevented them from drawing accurate and meaningful conclusions. This is the opposite of intelligence: it is the product of an establishment that simply lacks the capacity to think at all.

Never mind the “finding” that the Taliban would take 90 days to reach Kabul. How about the reassurances that we had trained an Afghan army of 300,000 (and provided them with lots of materiel that is now in the hands of the Taliban)? Doesn’t inspire much confidence that our military knows how to train a foreign army at all. Perhaps our military should be excused to some extent, as the entire “training” program was politically driven by our genius foreign policy establishment, people like the Agency for International Development and similar goo-goo entities. Remember the huge federal budget last year that included $10 million in the State Department budget for “gender programs” in Pakistan? This is the kind of establishment that thinks what we need is a now-abandoned $700 million embassy in Kabul (and an even more expensive embassy in Baghdad), with a staff of 5,000.

Taxpayers should be furious not just about the profligate waste and extravagance of such an establishment, but at the bottomless idiocy of a class of credentialled people who think that the answer to every foreign problem is to spend absurd amounts of money, hire endless case officers and private contractors/consultants, outreach coordinators to tweet out rainbow flag celebrations, issue endless white papers analyzing the situation that bear little or no relation to reality, and an apparatus that has proven unable to process visas for the Afghans who worked for us, let alone have a plan for evacuating Americans. Despite Biden’s pathetic defense of the outcome, he ought to be furious with the whole upper echelon of our military-diplomatic complex. There ought to be mass firings. Of course, we all know that no one will be fired, and no senior person in this apparatus of disaster will have the honor to resign.

Finally there is the incompetence of the withdrawal itself. It is one thing to decide to end our presence in Afghanistan, and take your chances that the Taliban can be deterred or contained some other way (does anyone think our military-diplomatic complex has a serious plan to do this?). It is another thing to make the announcement that set the Taliban’s timeline in motion. So vagueness and misdirection were called for, but no one seemed to have the guile for it.

...

The only people more feckless than our military-diplomatic elite are the media, led, naturally, by CNN. One of CNN’s reporters actually said, “They’re chanting ‘Death to America’ but seem friendly at the same time. It’s just bizarre.” I suspect a university education is behind this level of cluelessness.

...

Some of us that have been warning about the incompetence of Biden et.al. are being proven right in large type.  I agree with Hayward that the problem goes much deeper than dementia Joe.  It resides within the Democrat party and its media cohorts.  They are just not intelligent people and they also appear to have been miseducated by the universities they attended.