Advance, Retreat, Resign | GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution

[Music] it's tuesday august 10th and welcome back to good fellows a hoover institution broadcast examining social economic political and geopolitical concerns in this time of pandemic i'm bill whalen i'm the virginia hobbs carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism here at the hoover institution i'll be your moderator today that means i have the high honor privilege of introducing the stars of our show three gentlemen we jokingly refer to as the good fellows that would be neil ferguson h.r mcmaster and john cochran hoover institutions senior fellows all hello gentlemen hi hey bill i i missed you guys me too neil obviously did not miss us he's silent it's been too long i agree as actually gentlemen i did the math on this it's been 46 days of the better part of about 1100 hours since we last convened we last recorded this show in the last week of june and a few things have happened in the time since beginning with breaking news today and that is the very sudden surprising abrupt resignation of andrew cuomo the governor of new york uh it wasn't too long ago last spring to be exact when andrew cuomo was a media darling he and his brother chris did uh these rather clever little one-on-ones on cnn that either you adored or you hated depending on your political views democrats are buzzing about cuomo being replacing joe biden on the ticket and here he is about 16 months later and now a political goner uh neil your thoughts on what this says maybe about this time of pandemic where you can quickly ascend and you can quickly descend well it's the ancient greek story of hubris and nemesis isn't it i mean to me it was always bizarre that andrew cuomo was lauded for his performance in the first wave of the covert 19 pandemic when in fact new york state did disastrously badly and in particular a really large proportion of the early fatalities in the pandemic were in elderly care homes which the state government had completely failed to protect from the new coronavirus so what goes around comes around whether there's a pandemic or not and i think the hubris reached a peak uh when cuomo published a book apparently portraying himself as having done a terrific job in defeating the pandemic so clearly his departure has nothing to do with that performance and everything to do with uh his metoo lapses but i i do think that he he had it coming because it was true hubris to portray himself in that light john your thoughts well if he had the hubris but hadn't been horribly shockingly misbehaved around women he'd still be that hero it is kind of interesting the vagaries of camps cancel culture olympic committee officials were immediately sacked because of jokes made in the 1990s and a lot of people stuck with cuomo through a lot of stuff way far beyond what would have gotten anyone else canceled but it is sad it's sad that uh you know we're talking about his abysmal personal behavior or people's cancellation as opposed to what neil brought up our paul i would rather we fired our politicians over horrendous policy incompetence and governance incompetence or or kept with them because they were good at such things and uh you know it makes for a nice salacious story but doesn't improve the quality of governance in the united states and h.r you think there's a cautionary tale in here about politicians who write books well i think maybe i mean of course here to form you know i'll be the optimist here to say that at least he was held accountable and i think that you know i think back to that great discussion we had with yuval levin from aei who had this great insight and wrote this great book about how politics has become performative rather than formative and and certainly you know andrew cuomo was what was uh so the the prime example of performative leadership with those long press conferences in which he would say the same thing in 20 different ways and everybody really thought it was wonderful uh and then as as neil said when you looked at the actual record it was quite disappointing and i i hope that that that poor performance as a leader had some effect right on this decision and and then maybe this week we could use this to inspire others to hold leaders accountable and to demand better better you know better policies uh rather than continue to perform for audiences uh gentlemen something else that's changed in the 1100 hours since we last convened is covet the war on covet we recorded our show at the end of june it was just a few days later that the president united states held an event at the white house a fourth of july celebration which he declared that we're winning the war on covet here we are a few weeks after that event and you now have to wear masks here in northern california there's talk of vaccine vaccine mandates nature i want to get your thoughts on how the military would do that it feels like we're regressing it feels here in california at least like we're going back to spring of last year john cochran you wrote a piece for your grumpy economist blog on this the title of which is called covent incompetence why don't you give us a distilled version of what incompetence is here i'll try to distill because i'm still frothing at the mouth about the whole business i i put the analogy like our public policy is like a toddler sent across the street to get a cup of sugar who gets to the front porch and then wanders away after following a puppy um we're not even talking about the competence the things we were talking about last spring like testing tracing uh effective non-pharmaceutical interventions the the entire thing seems to be let's talk about mask mandates the most symbolic and least effective god forbid we talk we shouldn't be doing lockdowns but at least maybe you know disco parties aren't the smartest thing in the world and of course vaccines and the way vaccines work we had a chance get everybody bloody vaccinated before it comes that's the basics of public health but our policy established just kind of wandered off and and we knew all along 30 of people were going to be really reluctant to do this god forbid the fda should make it actually approved uh you know the the anti-factors have an excuse the fda won't approve this thing so it might be dangerous but it just needed attention to the task at hand which was get us vaccinated to the point of hurt immunity and that attention just uh you know we went on to all the other things that washington and our political now we're talking about vaccines finally but the way this works is if you wait till in the middle of the spread to start doing something about it you get wave after wave after wave uh so then we talk about mandates without it you know let's start with uh you know just some incentive for people to get vaccinated um you know let people say you can't step on my private property you have a right to not get vaccinated but you can't step on my private property without a vaccine uh you know you we don't we seem to jump between everything must be either forbidden or or mandated but there's a whole spectrum of uh you know get in place incentives that if you want to participate in society you're going to need to get vaccinated all those policies had to get into place while we were talking last time and and everyone just kind of said oh well 30 don't want it the heck with that and let's hope for the best we knew this was not gonna work and just final point we seem to be way behind even when we were last spring nobody's talking about competent public policy to stop the spread of a vaccine we're talking about making six-year-olds wear masks and that's and that's about it maybe someday after this thing has all gone away we'll start putting in some mild vaccine requirements but uh you know we talked about getting an hr it is a wonderful report on how we should get ready for the next one well we're clearly not ready for this one we're even behind where we were last spring so i'll stop there but it's just uh it's america in retreat in uh in afghanistan and in covet we just kind of give up and let it rip seems to be the answer well yeah neil said so have we given up well of course we we are winning the war against covert i want to sound a more optimistic note than john because the definition of winning is the spread of vaccination and the reduction of hospitalizations and deaths and that is happening because of the extraordinary efficacy of the vaccines and particularly of the mrna-based vaccines produced by pfizer and moderna if you look at case numbers and states in the american south right now they're rising as rapidly as they did in the worst wave which was the one from around thanksgiving into the new year but if you look at uh the hospitalizations and deaths numbers they're really a lot better they could be even better if we could vaccinate more people and about this john is completely right everything else is noise mask wearing is is really not of enormous importance because of the extraordinary contagiousness of the delta variant we know how this will play out reasonably well in the us because we've seen it play out already in the uk huge surge in cases when i was in the uk back in june july a good deal of panic particularly amongst public health officials and then the case numbers peaked much sooner than people expected it ticked up a little bit in the last week or so but in reality things went much better in the uk in terms of hospitalizations than the models of the dreaded imperial college neil ferguson foresaw and and that's very comforting the uk has more of its population vaccinated than the us closer to 60 percent than 50 percent if the u.s keeps on going and can overcome vaccine hesitancy then the victory over covered can be achieved not that covert can be eradicated and it's very important that people understand this it's not something you can eradicate because it exists in animal hosts it will continue to mutate and it will continue to in effect and it will continue to make people sick all over the world even as we slowly and steadily increase the percentage of the population that's vaccinated it's not going away and in that respect it's important to say it is a bit like influenza do you remember how many silly people said oh it's just like influenza at the beginning which was uh which was sort of wrong in the sense that it was going to be much worse than influenza but it was right historically in that when influenza first really became a problem uh for the human race in the 19th century and into the 20th century there were huge waves of infections and hospitalizations and deaths then gradually over time we got better at managing influenza until it became endemic and manageable and a seasonal phenomenon which we could vaccinate the vulnerable against we're heading that way with covid and slowly but surely we will get there but one has to be realistic about the nature of a victory victory in this case is not eradication victory is getting the number of hospitalizations and deaths down to a manageable level so that like influenza it becomes background noise instead of front page news yeah and i know and i think yeah i think this and now the analogy works we talked about really across so many episodes of good fellows between really medicine's long fight against disease and just the nature of war as well right and and your war as as as the the the uh prussian philosopher of war said klaus was in the in in the early uh 19th century it's a continuous interaction of opposites right and and so you can you can gain the initiative with a vaccine but if you don't consolidate your gains there's going to be a counter-attack by the disease and this is you might say are the our equivalent of our dens offensive by the disease uh but i i i believe with as neil does and i think john does we all do that that we are winning uh but we we should actually be must be more effective at this point obviously in in uh in extending the extending the the vaccine in the united states but but globally because i think we all recognize that with the delta varian is a case in point right and and these other variants that are now emerging uh that we live in an interconnected world right and for us to get back to normal it's gonna it really takes a solution that that has much broader reach than our own country and then and then also that we do have this federal system right that is a con that is just a reality of this war and and so what we need is an informed populist to to make the the right decisions for themselves and and and this is where i i believe john is so right and the blo his blog is just dead on is that we you know we vacillate between you know a mandate and resignation right there's plenty of room in between uh to to you know to actually extend the vaccine to uh to do the kind of strategic testing that we know is also important to controlling the spread and then giving people confidence right in in a return to something closer to normalcy uh and protecting our children's schools and so forth so anyway i just think that uh that this is this award that's not over but the definition of victory is important as neil's saying uh and a recognition that it it's not going to be over for quite some time right we have to remain competitively engaged i want to bring us back to one of the topics that we talk about a lot so first what's going on the delta is as they say a pandemic of the unvaccinated vaccinated people are getting it but by and large they're not getting sick and with a reproduction rate of six what that just means is it it blasts through everything is in high speed so as i read what's happened in the uk take the 30 percent or unvaccinated delta blast through them you get to hurt immunity and that's when the wave goes down and that's hardly a victory that's basically they wiped out the 30 battalion while and then the rest uh the rest stayed there um and then as neil says see you next february when the next variant uh comes out when uh immunity uh starts starts fading and so forth it is amazing that the us uh suffered five trillion dollars on budget the worst uh recession a huge recession enormous costs in his own was unwilling to you know you take your antibiotics for a week after you feel better unwilling to do the smallest costs the smallest public health outreach to try to finish the vaccination problem and there is this phenomenon who's not getting vaccinated and why are they not getting vaccinated that the media narrative likes to say oh it's all those troglodyte republican anti-vaxxers but that's not true i looked up the numbers only 10 of blacks are vaccinated hispanics you know there's a a low income sort of a class uh thing as well it's not just blame it all on trump republicans and it's not just misinformation from the internet though that's that's something we need to talk about that i cite a survey that said basically 30 of people said they were skeptical of it um some of them were democrats who listened to kamala harris who said i'm not going to take a vaccine that donald trump put together so misinformation comes all around and uh you know we keep we keep talking about this effect of misinformation on the internet how do you get people i know some people say i'm not getting it because who knows whatever well it doesn't help that the fda hasn't certified it doesn't help that there's all these conspiracy theories why do people believe conspiracy theories well um you got to be a little sympathetic they've been lied to over and over again our agencies admit that they are shading things in order to uh to try to manipulate public psychology uh and when you know the internet is censored you start to believe that everything on the internet is false uh even the true stuff so i think there is a a deeper problem here and why we hit 30 percent and then people stop getting vaccinated even though it's it's free just walk in get the damn vaccine actually you know part of the problem with vaccine hesitancy is that covert 19 is not a sufficiently lethal disease to frighten people into getting vaccinated and this is a key point if it were smallpox that we were dealing with the anti-vaxx movement would uh would be gone pretty quickly because uh you would see the absolutely catastrophic consequences of of letting your child contract smallpox uh my friend jared cohen just published a nice piece in the boston globe pointing out that uh smallpox was the problem for the founding fathers and they had the same arguments for and against what was then called variolation but those arguments ultimately were won because the alternative the the catching of smallpox was so horrendous the reason that there can be credible vaccine hesitancy is that particularly for younger people getting curved is not lethal other than in a pretty tiny proportion of cases and i think this explains vaccine hesitancy people aren't very good at probabilities they don't really understand what vaccine efforts he means in fact quite a significant proportion of educated people define what the uh efficacy percentages mean and so they they do a very rough thing in their head which is to say well there's a risk of getting vaccinated and there's a risk of of getting the disease so it's kind of a wash so i'll just not get vaccinated but actually they're getting that wrong because the risk of getting the disease is really much much higher than the risk of getting the vaccines which have been through phase 3 trials and people don't understand that they can contract covid have symptoms but then be stuck with it for a very long time one of the things that one of the many things the public health authorities have singularly failed to do is to explain what a large percentage of people have been infected have long covered and according to some of the studies that have been done it's up to a third of people have long lasting symptoms and this includes young people so i think the great failure has been to clarify to the public that the risks of getting this disease regardless of your age are really far far higher than the risk of the vaccine and that has been one of the failures that we've seen on both sides of the atlantic and it explains i think a lot of the vaccine hesitancy and i'll just just point out that it's all foreseeable right and you guys remember extolling the the virtues and capabilities of gus purna right general gus perna who was put in charge of the logistics effort for the vaccine much pilloried in like the first 48 hours of the vaccine rollout uh but then of course now recognized that that he and the task force did a phenomenal job in getting the vaccine out to everybody but when he was asked i think it was on 60 minutes uh just prior to the vaccine rollout what are you most worried about and he said what i'm most worried about is we're going to do a great job getting this developing this vaccine producing it at scale getting it out and not enough americans will accept it you know and and so i think this was a problem from the beginning it didn't help the mixed messages from you know across the political spectrum it didn't help as neil said that people weren't educated in the way that that would have persuaded them right to take the to the vaccine and hopefully now we can play catch-up right i mean this is i hope you're wrong about your point john and your block you know that we've just we've quit i don't we can't quit yet and um and but i i think that this was all foreseen sadly well let me add to neil's point too uh you have to take the vaccine not when there are bodies in the streets even if it were smallpox you have to get the vaccine while it's the quiet moment beforehand it takes a month to get your own immunity and it's public health matter we got to get it the vaccine before it comes if a military analogy you know if you wait until the enemy has breached your uh has breached your defenses in order to wake up and get going it's going to be a bad war you got to watch when they're getting there when they're getting their uh they're marshaling their troops on the other side of the lines is when you got to wake up and start doing things and and then as i uh you brought up smallpox and other things uh as i listen i tend to listen to npr while i'm driving i've heard more references to the tuskegee experiment as awful as it has been than i have to the miraculous victory over smallpox polio influenza all the things that vaccines have done that make our lives so much better than the misery of our ancestors and part of this national narrative is not helping when you know that when they interview people why do you not take it well they'll say things they'll say tuskegee quickly but nobody seems to remember about the the tremendous history of public health so um that national narrative going on is not helping either to understand uh how useful how wonderful these vaccines are a couple more military metaphors because i think i know where we're going with this but it's actually a useful way to think about the problem one is that the vaccines are like training uh your body and military training is what makes armies effective in combat right hr you wouldn't want to be commanding untrained troops in battle a body that hasn't been vaccinated that encounters the virus is essentially an untrained army encountering the enemy and that that's an important way to think about vaccination uh again i don't think that uh we've done a at all a good job of explaining to people how vaccination works i'm really struck by when i encounter friends who are resistant to the vaccine how poor their understanding is this is a kind of basic failure of of education but let me uh let me do one of those things that people don't do nearly enough admit that i was wrong about something it's quite a while ago now that i had a conversation with my old friend nicholas christakis at yale one of the great authorities on on pandemics whose book apollo's arrow i highly recommend and i asked him where he thought we were and he said uh quoting churchill uh this isn't the uh beginning of the end but it might be the end of the beginning and i said oh oh come on nicholas you're being far too pessimistic it's surely the beginning of the end uh this must have been uh early this year but he was right and i noticed larry brilliant another extraordinarily influential figure in the field of epidemiology making the same point in a piece in in foreign affairs about the forever virus or the forever pandemic and i've come round to the view that this is actually going to be a much longer war than i thought it would be when i was finishing my book doom which uh shockingly enough was a year ago when i had to put that book to bed my assumption then was that we were that the end was in sight because of of the efficacy of the vaccines but it turns out i was wrong about that this is going to take much much longer in just the same way that it took us more than a century to master influenza in so far as we've been able to master it this i'll just punctuate with there's a race between uh evolution with exponential growth and bureaucratic inertia and uh put put your money on evolution part of what delta is doing is evolving around societies that have put into place uh distancing in vaccines because you can transmit it with delta and so look for evolution to come back with uh with something interesting for us around next february okay so needless talked about messaging on covet and he's right but here's the question gentlemen what about covet messengers as we uh hr uh mentioned the beginning of the show yuval 11 who was on good fellows uh several months ago you've all talked about lack of confidence in institutions who can come forward and offer a credible message to reluctant cynical americans on vaccinations let me also throw this at the three of you if i test each of you with convincing americans to get a vaccination what would be your quick pitch how would you sell this gosh well i'll just i'll tell you first i mean i think that that that people have to recognize that it is more than a personal decision it's a decision that that uh that if they don't take the vaccine can place others in jeopardy right and we talked about this at the beginning of the pandemic as well is the social responsibility associated with you know if you have for example you know elderly people with whom you're interacting to be responsible to make sure that you minimize the chances of you contracting the disease back in the pre the pre-vaccine periods so that you don't place others at risk i think the same is true and the same is true because you don't want to infect children obviously and others that that we don't know you know what what the effect might be of of uh you know of the delta variant and so forth but also you don't want to risk going back to kind of you know the the drag on our economy you know the the changes in our lifestyle that we all abhor so you know neil mentioned the uh kind of the training metaphor what training does in in military units is it gives you confidence what the vaccine i think can do in our society is give us confidence to return to something closer to normal life and normal economic activity and normal education experiences for our children and so i think the appeal that i would make is hey we owe it to each other right to get to get beyond this and and to maybe maybe uh ask them to inform themselves to learn more about it give them access to you know to the the vast body of evidence that that the vaccine works it's safe and just do it you know um would be my message okay john um i think our uh public authorities are making a mistake in focusing on recommendations which are clearly politically influenced as opposed to facts and data they're quick to tell us uh you know we think six-year-olds playing foosball uh should uh put on masks and eight-year-olds who are um playing poker should put on n95 masks uh and oh wait i just heard something from a politician who doesn't like that no we're going to change it what we what we're dying for what i can't find is facts and data uh we're is we still don't have random testing so we don't know what's the prevalence of various kinds of things how much does a mask help either protect me or protect somebody else tell us how much the vaccines help with with numbers that people can actually digest uh just telling us facts and data rather than treating us like children who can't understand and the uncertainties of facts and data rather than treating us like children who can't be told that sort of thing but instead passing down politicized recommendations i think would make people much more trustworthy uh of what's going on i've been thinking a lot about this question bill because i've been trying to persuade people i know to get vaccinated including someone who works for me and i've realized that nothing works because they've actually been vaccinated against the vaccine by things that they've seen on the internet and this brings me to the terrific work our colleague at stanford rene de resta did on the anti-vaxx network which existed long before covert was heard of and has been a really pernicious source of disinformation online for years uh leading to vaccine hesitancy even with respect to diseases like measles that we thought long ago we'd brought under control through vaccination so the terrible problem is that none of the arguments that you might think would work do work example uh there have been lots of recent videos of people uh almost expressing as their dying wish regret that they didn't get vaccinated and these are not elderly people necessarily often there's stories of people in their 40s or 50s were healthy but resisted getting the vaccine and then died of covert this doesn't work it ought to work you'd have thought that it's a straightforward inference this person resisted getting the vaccine they were in perfect health they died surely i should therefore avoid that fate this doesn't work because people have been inoculated against this kind of argument by the things that they've read online so we have a very problematic uh story here that i know we've debated in the past what do you do when there's a really powerful source of disinformation and misinformation online now that the impulse which is often uh heard around the world is well take it down start censoring uh this harmful content have to go after the groups on facebook that disseminate anti-facts propaganda this is the very much the wrong approach to take because that only adds to the sense that uh that there's censorship at work that's trying to shut down the legitimate information that you need about the real truth about the dangers of the vaccine and so one of the things i talked about with audrey tang in taiwan was this fundamental problem what do you do about disinformation and her answer was interesting she said you have to mock it he said you don't take it down but you ridicule it uh and we we've been very poor at making fun of anti-vaxx our arguments we're never going to get them to go away it's an extremely potent source of memes but but we could do a better job of of ridiculing this frightening people into getting vaccinated doesn't seem to work we we know that from quite a lot of history of other diseases let me add one final point that i've been thinking a lot about imagine if there were no vaccines imagine if we were dealing with covert 19 and none of the vaccines had worked think how the future would look at this point and how high how much higher the death toll already would be hiv aids a pandemic that occurred in our lifetime could not be defeated by a vaccine and as a result more than 30 million people have died that's 10 times roughly 10 times the number we've died of of covert and that's to me a really powerful point that in a counterfactual world without vaccines the outlook for this war would be absolutely horrible and most of us in fact would be waiting to contract covert uh become very ill or die of it as we aged thank god that's not the world we're in and thank god for vaccines i would just add another another element of persuasion might be to point out how uh adversaries rivals and enemies are taking advantage of the anti-vaxx movement to magnify this the these points i mean uh we know the china state-run media for example uh is magnifying the anti-backs movement putting out more disinformation why do they want to do it because they want to bring us down right they want to continue to polarize our society they want us to continue to be sort of stuck in uh you know in in the economic doldrums associated with the uh with the pandemic at least in certain sectors of the economy so so i i really i really think tracing you know really the anti-vaxx movement back or showing the connections uh with uh with adversaries can help maybe as well let me just uh uh plug both of your point and add one um i read early on that one of the places with the most vaccine has agency is russia because they were told by their government you should take it this works that's safe and everybody in russia knows that everything in the news is a lie so everyone immediately assumes the exact opposite this is going to kill you uh censorship has exactly the opposite effect on the anti-vaccine movement but let me put a plug in and neil i want to ask you too uh you know let's try with your friends how they might respond to just mild incentives now i had a case uh recently a young uh i knew a young flight instructor was who was oh well you know i've heard about myocarditis so i'm not getting the vaccine the answer to which was that's fine you have every right not to get the vaccine but you're not setting foot on this airport until you get the vaccine it took about one day to come around to well i guess you know i'll get it too you know if you can't you're you have every freedom not to get the vaccine if you want let's not mandate it because then of course people get all upset about politics and government so forth but you want to set foot in a bar get a vaccine uh you know you want to set it said any indoors indoor let's say let's make it just private property indoor public spaces you want to set foot in there you got to get a vaccine it's going to cost you something uh all of a sudden i think people might discover that that maybe this isn't that they're counting right even why are we paying for people's health insurance who refuse who refuse to get vaccinated why are we paying for you know people's hospital stays who refuse to get vaccinated why are we paying for their rent if they refuse to get vaccinated all sorts of incentives can be given and allowed before you know government gives allow private parties to give incentives to make it uh you know inconvenient not to be vaccinated i think that would make it and uh much i hate the word little nudges can help um i have relatives in the uk who report that how it works in the uk is the nhs calls you up and says your appointment is friday at three o'clock for your vaccine show up and and that seems to be effective on people who can't get around to actually doing that so i do think that um one there's a lot of bluster when it is free for people to bluster but as it starts to cost them even in just minor conveniences uh i i think you could make a lot of progress okay there's a lot more we can talk about covet and i think we're gonna probably get into it the next show so let's move on to our final topic today and that's afghanistan which has also changed considerably in the last 1100 hours um let's start with the historians taking this on neil and hr i'd like you to offer two things here first of all just kind of briefly walk us through the u.s experience in afghanistan versus those of other world powers who've gone in there and exited and the second hr this is a question for you i went back and looked at the vietnam timeline it's about two years and three months between the ceasefire and us pulling people out of the embassy in saigon is there any way to avoid the same outcome in kabul so take it away historians well i'll go first it's a familiar enough story successive empires uh going back centuries even millennia have tried to govern the country that we now call afghanistan it's incredibly difficult because it really isn't a nation-state uh waiting to be called into being its terrain makes it extraordinary difficult to govern uh its social or ethnic fragmentation makes it extremely difficult to govern in truth governance in afghanistan is is tribal or plan based and all attempts to impose uh a model of governance whether it be colonial or national have have failed britain did a good deal better than the soviet union the united states has sort of fallen somewhere in between those two imperial experiences i think the problem in each case is clear if you give up uh on afghanistan it becomes an even bigger problem than it was when you were trying to run it and this is i think the central uh american uh problem that uh we're abandoning afghanistan twenty years after uh it became a really serious problem uh foreign that produced the 911 attacks and and we're deciding to sort of sedate our memories and be the united states of amnesia and act as if that could never happen again where it's very obvious that if you let the taliban take over afghanistan and restore their tyrannical theocratic regime the place will be at the headquarters of al-qaeda uh pretty quickly once again and we'll be waiting for the next 9 11 to happen look the united states is bad at empire i wrote about that nearly 20 years ago in a book called colossus and nothing that's happened uh since i wrote that book in 2003 uh has has changed my mind if anything the u.s has lived up entirely to my anticipation that a combination of deficits would lead it to abandon iraq and afghanistan but the manpower deficit the fact that people just don't want to spend terribly long in places like that even if they're in the military six months is enough thanks very much can i go home now uh the fiscal deficit we've we've talked about on this show many many times but which is larger than ever uh in in time of uh of of peace uh and then that kind of attention deficit disorder that american voters suffer from which leads them to lose interest in these enterprises after about after about four years and i i'd add to that the history deficit we just don't like thinking historically in the united states and so we just struggle to imagine that that this could be just another familiar story of imperial failure with a likely cost coming down the pike towards us hr yeah i'd just say i'd agree with you the only thing worse than ignorance of history is the abuse of it and if you don't know the history then you can readily abuse it and i think that's what has occurred with the misframing of the nature of the war in afghanistan and our involvement there we weren't there as an imperial occupying power in recent years there's an elected afghan government not a particularly effective afghan government as as neil mentioned all afghan governments have struggled to try to consolidate power centrally but that's okay right afghanistan has been a decentralized state that worked well enough for afghanistan since at least the middle of the 18th century you know and and for long stretches until you know the sour revolution really began uh really to to admire the afghan people and his society into decades of of conflict it's a society that is certainly that is traumatized uh from those decades of conflict especially the soviet occupation the mujahideen era resistance the soviet occupation of 80 to 1988 the devolution of security there from 92 to 96 into a very destructive civil war and then the brutal occupation of i would say the taliban was an occupying force against the afghan people and so what americans just didn't seem to understand and our leadership did a really terrible job of explaining it to the american people is that the stakes are high for some of the reasons that neil alluded to is that to get to a you know to a sustainable outcome uh that that secured our main interest which is to prevent jihadist terrorists from again gaining access to safe havens and support bases there we know that makes them orders of magnitude more dangerous uh the the american people heard a narrative uh that like you know that hey we failed in afghanistan because afghanistan as i mentioned before has it become denmark yet but it didn't need to become denmark i think it's important to to recognize that in 2019 at the time of the capitulation agreement to the taliban we had 8 500 troops there you know who were advising afghans who were taking the brunt of the fight we're taking very few casualties there at the time uh and and and have taken none uh since then and and we were enabling afghanistan's fight against the taliban which made it impossible for the taliban to really make significant military gains and so what i thought of our sustained commitment there is an insurance policy against what we are seeing now uh a a a a defeat of of the afghan security forces uh underway that is already leading to a humanitarian catastrophe of colossal scale that will lead to a return of the islamic emirate of afghanistan in the form of a taliban government over at least large portions of the country and an organization that is completely intertwined you know with uh with other jihadist terrorist organizations including uh al-qaeda and so it really was frustrating to me is it was the misunderstanding of the nature of the war and and the level of commitment you know we weren't ex i don't think the american people were exhausted you know i think you know this mantra of endless wars it was kind of catchy uh and it was parroted by all of our major news media uh but but it didn't reflect the level of effort i mean 8 500 troops you know that's a lot if you're ecuador you know but it's not a lot if you're the united states um 22 billion dollars a year and going down is not a lot uh if you're united states especially when you consider the burden sharing of other coalition countries that had more troops than we did in afghanistan and we're sharing the cost as as well so was afghanistan going to be denmark no was it going to be a violent place hell yes uh but but was it worth the commitment in the long term i think yes and i think the american people would have supported it if if any of our leaders across three successive administrations had made the case president trump made the case and people forget in august of 2017 and and uh and then i think you know people talked him in uh to this capitulation uh agreement with the taliban uh which was which is lamentable not only because of the severe humanitarian political and security consequences uh but but also because we actually empowered the taliban on our way out and and to get to your point you know i i think that you know with the withdrawal from from vietnam um you know was was demanded by the american people i don't think this was demanded by the american people uh and also it was it was a long process of of negotiation but also trying to structure the south vietnamese armed forces uh to be able to continue to combat the the vietnamese communist forces and they were successful in doing that uh to a certain extent until congress pulled the plug completely uh from the effort and that was really in the form of support from american air power so contrast the defeat of the easter offensive in 1972 with american air power uh to to the communist defensive in 1975 after the u.s cut off all support i think that there is an analogy to be made their uh bill uh but sadly it's happening on an even more compressed timeline uh and and you know are there consequences to losing wars yeah i i think so you know i think there are and and i think our adversaries and rivals will be emboldened by this i think it's worth remembering you know that it was at the height of of us popular opposition to the vietnam war uh that kim il-sung said hey it's time to start an insurgency in south korea and americans i think forget that in 1967 to 1968 there were over 300 attacks uh in in south korea uh uh committed by by the by the north korean special forces 15 americans died and 65 were wounded in those attacks far more than the casualty numbers in afghanistan in recent years and that was in south korea and we've used this analogy before we talked about it in the last episode is that we had a sustainable uh commitment in afghanistan a sustainable commitment that was preventing what we're seeing happening unfolding before our eyes now it was well worth the effort uh but we talked ourselves into defeat there john uh this is why i love goodfellas because it gives me a chance to nail my friend's feet to the floor and ask them questions that have been bugging me for a while and so i wanna i there's a sort of three ranges of questions that i want to ask and i'll tee them up and you guys can you don't have to answer you can just tell me what you think is interesting to comment on here first of all what's what's remarkable in the last couple weeks is not so much um the us defeat uh you know we we said we were gonna cut and run on a certain date and we can't run a certain date it's kind of predictable what happens here but the afghan uh defeat the afghan government the surprise is how quickly the afghan government forces are folding in the face of the taliban even though as i understand it they have numbers they have equipment they have all sorts of advantages so you know neil can go back into history and hr to military history but i'm i'm interested here in the psychology and mechanism of defeat even when you are a superior force i asked neil to tell us about uh alexander beating darius of persia who was clearly much better equipped but then maybe we don't have to go back into history that's clearly what's going on uh even if you an individual afghan soldier are sitting out there at your checkpoint uh and you've got a good gun and you know you're you know your your team has more stuff if you can sense the defeat coming and the barbarity on the other side and you can sense that the guy next to you is going to turn and run as soon as he can you turn and run as soon as you can as well uh i was listening to uh one commenter on an npr was kind of a defender of the current administration saying well they just don't have the will to fight they have the means but not the will well it's not about will it's about having something worth fighting for and have having the organization how do you we study victories and i want to know what our military historians can tell us about defeats even from a position of strength second this is i i would just say quickly and maybe we'll take this one at a time john but you know i i think you know this is this is always been the case in in in war and i'm thinking of john keegan's book neil the face of battle and what he what he found is he looked at war really warfare in in in battles in the same sort of piece of terrain across four centuries is he he concluded that what that what battles have in common is human uh the struggle of men attempting to reconcile their instinct with self-preservation with the achievement of some aim over which others are trying to kill them and and you know anyone who's ever fought knows that you know as napoleon said right the morals to the physical is ten to one as as clausewitz you know said that that that winning in in war means convincing your enemy that your enemy has been defeated and and i think that what we did is everything we could do to defeat ourselves and our afghan allies psychologically you know over the years right announcing the timeline for our withdrawal saying we're leaving we're leaving and then ultimately you know really kind of pulling the carpet out uh from underneath them by going from sustained air support for their operations to now probably two aircraft us aircraft over afghanistan at any at any one time now why were the afghans not able to get something they're worth fighting for let's just tip in let me chip in with an answer to this yeah sure i wrote an article years ago about prisoner taking and prisoner killing and this gets us back to incentives john to yes in your language uh the key to getting an army uh to surrender uh is essentially giving them incentives to lay down their weapons and making it clear that the the cost of surrender is relatively low and the cost of fighting on is going to be very high and the taliban have been doing that successfully but in order for the collapse of morale to happen there has to be a fundamental shift in the objective constellation of forces and that has also happened for the reason hr has said american withdrawal the final abandonment of the project by the united states has removed that thing on which the afghan security forces could could rely my good friend richard engel the reporter brave man has often put himself in the line of danger to report on wars told me uh just a couple of weeks ago but what he saw when he was last at bagram uh the uh the huge uh uh air base which was crucial to the us effort in afghanistan uh and he was there just uh about a month ago and bagram is is a deserted uh a demoralizing place uh a huge dumping ground of american uh material of of uh vehicles of ration packs and the afghans security personnel there guarding the air base were mainly engaged in going through the rations to remove the candy from the rations he said it was a site of such utter demoralization that no longer surprised him that the afghan security forces were laying down their weapons this this i think is the key it is now very obvious to the average afghan soldier that the costs of continued fighting exceed the uh the costs of surrender yeah if we know we're going to lose and the only question is when why should i bother putting my life on i would tell you guys i would tell you guys though and and i i co-authored an op-ed on this i mean it doesn't have to be over right now i you know i i think what is important to note is that the taliban's regenerative capacity had been in pakistan but but as we disconnected from the fight against the taliban this is going back to 2019 when we signed this capitulation agreement with them they began to stockpile weapons arms pre-position of fighters across the north in particular because they wanted to take away really the option of the resurrection of a northern alliance again a tajik and uzbek based northern alliance against the the the push to majority taliban and uh and so they they launched the sauna taste offensive in the north and they also stockpiled weapons across the country for what they they want to to take over the population centers now they're concentrating on the outsides of the cities and they are extremely vulnerable to air power at this point i mean i i if we wanted to we could knock the crap out of the taliban right now if we had the will to do it and and i think because they have violated you know every sort of you know hopeful uh you know wish i guess by zal khalilzad and the others who went uh to sign this capitulation agreement um that we ought to not feel bound in any way by an agreement that they're not adhering to so anyway i just wanted to to mention that it all is not over if we had the will to commit the resources it's more difficult obviously because we don't have aircraft on station there now in bagram and it's a long transit flight which means you you have to refuel it means you have long you have shorter station time in terms of pilot duty day and so forth um but we have the means to apply our asymmetrical advantage against the taliban everybody always wants to talk about well you know the our enemies are fighting us asymmetrically hey we have asymmetrical advantages ourselves and and sadly we're just not using them uh against this enemy let me follow up on both of those uh actually one of the most heartbreaking things i heard on the psychology of it was uh afghan soldiers who weren't so sad about our the offensive air capacity going but the medevac helicopters no longer working uh was really on their mind if if they got shot there's no they're gonna just bleed to death out there in the middle of nowhere no one can come get them anymore uh that that seems psychologically important but you you get here hr right to the central paradox i think of the american imperial adventure uh we were not fighting ever to defeat the taliban and when the taliban set foot in pakistani territory well with that that's when we stopped and and and we let them yet we if hitler had gone down into switzerland which called itself neutral i doubt we would have said well i guess we got to stop here right now and not prosecute this this war anymore it was you know you you keep telling us the point of war is to defeat an enemy and we stopped uh we we then became the standard american thing well we want to restore the status quo come to the negotiating table begin the peace process which of course the taliban is completely uninterested and that seems to be the central problem well i would say maybe they would maybe they would have been interested in it uh you know if if we had convinced them they couldn't accomplish their objectives for the use of force but how does it work you know john i mean you're an economist you understand incentives right we say hey we want we want a peace agreement with you and by the way we're leaving right i mean that doesn't work it doesn't work so so that's that's what we did i mean we did exactly the opposite and i would say you know and of course you know this this might be biased and so forth because you know i helped present this option to president trump in august of 2017. the sustained and sustainable commitment we had was sufficient i think to really inflict a significant amount of losses in a sustained manner on the taliban but what was important about that is that it also removed the time constraint right to say that we're leaving on this timeline and what was also important is is we said we're no longer going to allow pakistan to have it both ways and i do believe the shift in the approach toward pakistan was beginning to bear fruit i think the pakistanis were faced with a hey your future could be a pariah state with a single state sponsor namely china that looks like north korea to me pakistan and pakistani army leadership is that what you're going for because that's the choice you have now but we backed off that again remember when president trump had imran khan in the oval office i mean this is one of these moments when i wanted to jump out the window i mean i couldn't believe it you know it was a complete reversal of what we had presented and the president understood as the best option i will also say that in august of 2017 when we presented the options to the president it was not my job to advocate i saw as national security advisor for a particular course of action it was my job to give the president multiple options and when we presented those to him we started with withdrawal because that's what he was predisposed to do and when we laid it out we said okay if we do this here's what happens and what we laid out in connection with what what happens is hap is unfolding right now and faced with that reality he made a much difficult decision than the decision to wish he was predisposed and so i i think after that of course there are many iago figures others in his ear trying to convince him otherwise you have the resurgence of of kind of a neo-isolationist sentiment this is the charles koch funded think tanks and we're trenchers and so forth and i think they carried the day you know but but again they didn't think it through these people don't think through the consequences and they didn't see our involvement there as already winning right because we were preventing this outcome from occurring uh and afghanistan was on a long slow multi-generational path maybe uh to no longer being awarded the international community but it was a sustainable level of commitment that that is this is the classic problem we're not really fighting to win to defeat an enemy and we are not able to put in place something that people are willing to fight for the afghan government is not something that its soldiers are willing to fight for in the end the south vietnamese government was not something its soldiers were aware i would i wouldn't i wouldn't say that john okay so so let me tell you the story of major azimi okay uh whose father uh was a mujahideen fighter a renowned mujadine fighter out of herat uh and and uh and he fought with ishmael khan you know against uh against the russians um and and uh you know you walk into his house in herat there's a big mujahideen ira mural of him and his son was inspired to go into the afghan military to help to help uh to help uh preserve the the freedoms that the afghan people enjoyed after 2001 after they lived under the hell of the taliban which he lived in as a you know grade school you know a high school student so he joins the military he goes to turkish military academy uh he joins the army and then gets into the into the very selective afghan special forces and he is leading a team of about 30 special forces uh soldiers in faryad province um where the taliban had after we stopped uh you know stopped our our reconnaissance and intelligence capabilities stopped going after them marshalled major forces who then attacked them and they fought to the death right all of them all of his unit including major azimi fought to the death uh you know so i would just say john that they that these are people who do have the will to fight they were worthy of our support and we abandoned them is what i would say and ultimately the biggest cost of this decision will be borne by the afghan people in just uh the way that the cost of the abandonment of south vietnam was borne by the people of south vietnam we forget that extraordinary harshness with which the north vietnamese communists imposed their will on south vietnam after 1975 and we're going to turn a blind eye to the appalling way in which the taliban will avenge themselves once they have control of a significant part of of afghanistan and this is one of the most shameful features of modern american history interventions that are not sustained that are wound up for essentially domestic political reasons often frivolous domestic political reasons and the consequences which play out in the countries that we abandon we basically don't pay any attention to and i do feel a terrible pang of of shame and indignation when i think about what is going to befall the men women and children and especially the the girls of afghanistan for whom education is no longer going to be a possibility for whom child marriage forced marriage and all kinds of forms of abuse are going to become the reality as the taliban tighten their grip and this is the kind of thing my wife ayan hersey ali cares passionately about it's awful what is going to happen uh to afghanistan and although we use phrases like humanitarian disaster i believe they've been largely stripped of their meaning by overuse we have to think about what this means uh for people like us who just have the misfortune uh to have been for a time uh allies of of the united states is not a great advertisement for the commitment of the united states to peoples in countries where it intervenes so gentlemen again the signal we're running out of times but we do have time to tuck in one last question and it is simply this if i could task each of you with being in charge of american foreign policy briefly tell me what a sensible afghanistan policy would look like uh john why don't you start well hey can i just answer something from neil just quickly uh the afghan people did not suffer the misfortune of american intervention in afghanistan uh the the afghan people benefited from the end of taliban rule in a way that in ways they don't agree no no no i i know you would i know you would but but i think this is a story it's a story that's not told neil and i think it's one of the reasons why we didn't sustain our will there you know are the transformations in afghan society but but but i i want to get to bill's question i just wanted to i know you didn't mean that i just wanted to clarify that that uh you know that that none none of the afghans that i knew and i believe you know certainly 90 of them would say that that it was a misfortune that taliban rule ended in 2001. absolutely interestingly a left-leaning economic historian adam twos recently published statistics on the improvements in the afghan quality of life during the period of of the american presence and so even people on the left can see just how much afghan society benefited uh from the intervention after 9 11. my my point is just that we're throwing all of that away and condemning the population of afghanistan to uh renewed misery on the taliban rule and that that is the thing that's deplorable now bill your question is what what do we do now i mean it's terrible thing to to be asked i mean uh i mean if hr uh who actually had the role of advising a president on foreign policy was suddenly to find himself it must be a nightmare of yours hr back in that job uh offering a president options after the wrong decision has been made i mean what options are there at this point i think we heard hr say that there still is an option to try to slow the advance of the taliban using air power that makes a lot of sense to me uh but but we're really at the point of of having only terrible options to to choose from and that that is in itself an illustration of how bad a policy error this is let's get john's thoughts and then we'll close out with hr john what i don't have any answers i have questions today on this one and my next question was going to be how does this resonate in the rest of the world how does this resonate in iraq iran israel saudi arabia china is you know is this is this do we believe we have something worth fighting for are we the next afghanistan uh and i think the answer to bill's question is uh not what i can do in 30 seconds but we keep doing this sort of thing over and over again we keep saying don't do it unless you're going to do it seriously and and and then we bail out at the last moment with horrendous results both for the people involved and for our reputation in in trying to steer other things in the right direction so uh we got to rethink the whole project and uh and and how we get out as well as how we get in so hr john asks a good question why don't you close the show by answering that what about the collateral effects of this well i think there are there are they're going to be massive collateral effects right and and and those effects are i think in bolding your adversaries as i mentioned i mentioned you know this the the analogy of kim sung taking advantage of u.s discontent or the vietnam war in the 60s but i think you see adversaries emboldened just broadly and i think that includes china it includes russia but it also particularly includes jihadist terrorist organizations we have to remember that after our disengagement from iraq in december 2011 that set conditions for the rise of al qaeda in iraq 2.0 isis isis within several short months found itself in control of territory the size of britain it recruited 40 000 fighters and it became the most destructive terrorist organization in history conducting attacks not only across the middle east but all across europe inspiring attacks in the united states shooting down a russian airliner right so so we are in for i think an intensification of the hottest terrorist threat and an emboldenment of of our enemies if i were advising you know uh the president uh on this i would say you know talk to the american people and say that all all of the assumptions on which our policy was based have proven to be false the taliban is not going to share power and enter into a negotiated agreement in fact all these people all the time say oh there's no military solution in afghanistan well the taliban seems to have one in mind right the the the uh the other uh the other element of self-delusion is that there's this bold line between the taliban and al-qaeda don't take the us government's word for it just look at the un report that just came out last week that says these organizations are utterly intertwined uh with one another well how about the assumption that the taliban you know maybe they'll just impose a more benign form of sharia ask you know the government officials who are being lined up and summarily executed how about my friend's unit that was surrounded and their bodies mutilated after they were killed in faryad province ask you know the girls who were who were bombed out of their school and then were blown up with secondary devices uh you know by by the taliban in the in the uh in the zara community so i mean you know i i think all of the all of this is just self-delusion and and these assumptions turned out to be false so what the hell do you do now what you have to do is recognize there are no short-term solutions to a long-term problem and what you have to to do i think is do whatever you can to stabilize the situation militarily and secure a multinational international agreement to support the afghan government uh in a way that gets us slowly on the path to sustainable security and stability okay easier said than done but it is doable and i think that case can be made to the american people as a better alternative to what we're seeing now i don't think that's going to happen okay all right but but you asked me what i would advise okay but sorry that's all right hr uh that's it for this episode of good fellows fear not we'll be back soon in a couple of weeks and we're going to devote the next episode to you our loyal viewers we're going to dig into our mailbag and answer your questions so if you have a question for neil or hr or john all three of the good fellows send it to us here's how you do that go to this website go to this url hoover.org forward slash ask good fellows let me repeat that for you hoover dot org forward slash askgoodfellows send in your questions and we'll get them to you and we'll do our next show on viewer mail we're looking forward to it on behalf of my colleagues neil ferguson h.r mcmaster john cochran all of us here at the hoover institution we wish you and yours the very best stay safe stay healthy and we'll do our best here at the hoover institution to help you stay informed we'll see you later this month [Music] if you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring h.r mcmaster watch battlegrounds also available at hoover.org

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 56,779

Rating: 4.3711338 out of 5

Keywords: COVID, Afghanistan, Vietnam, vaccination, masking, institutional confidence, incompetence, Andrew Cuomo, resignation

Id: pLfEVa3ihGw

Length: 65min 49sec (3949 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021