On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver castigates all four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden) and the members of their administrations as well as the US military and intelligence agencies for the disaster that they created that has led to massive tragedy for the long-suffering Afghan people.
This appalling situation reveals once again that when your basic policy goals are flawed, you start on a road which eventually leads nowhere, however many resources one assigns to it.
They hanged the nazi brass at Nuremberg for committing offensive wars.
Some people say that, if sent to prison, on your first day, you should attack the toughest guy there. By proving that you are crazy, people will leave you alone, the theory asserts.
This was the Bush/Cheney logic after 9/11. That is, our goal was not to get Bin Laden or Al Quaeda, but to show the world that we were insane, and willing to attack viciously for decades. So, despite various cover stories, our goal was never to improve Afghanistan. Because we successfully proved we are amoral and insane, we can now leave Afghanistan proudly, with our head held high, just as Nixon empowered us to do after Vietnam in 1973, and just as the Dulles brothers enabled after our coup against the elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953.
Problems from blowback or revenge never worried us, just as such things never happen in prison.
Unless that theory is wrong.
How can a government that is ideologically committed to minimal government and to eliminate bureaucracy set up a functioning government and bureaucracy?
The inevitable result was a state riddled with corruption. As one Taliban leader said -- every poor farmer who has to bribe a corrupt official is a potential recruit for us.
People bad mouth bureaucracy a lot, but the function of a bureaucracy is to ensure that there are fixed rules that everyone has to follow and no one receives special privileges to circumvent the system.
Like every process a bureaucracy can be made more efficient, but to declare that bureaucracy is itself the problem is to demand special treatment and therefore to condone and promote corruption.
In Afghanistan live another 35,6 million people for whom the last American presidential elections made exactly zero difference.
@3: “How can a government that is ideologically committed to minimal government and to eliminate bureaucracy …..”
Wrong question. The USA usually have governments that are committed to maximal government and bureaucracy when it comes to the armed forces. For the small government advocates of the Republicans this is ideological (the property rights of companies that exploit their employees and roll off the costs like pollution to communities need protection), for the others this is pragmatism, because that’s were the donations come from.
American national elections are a charade, comparable with Russia. That’s why conventions of both parties resemble a circus so much -- something that doesn’t happen actual democracies. The party of former Surinamese dictator DD Bouterse also likes such conventions.
John Oliver castigates all four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden) …
So he left out Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton? Pffft.
If the armed forces in the United States were committed to bureaucracy then everyone would be treated fairly and by the same rules. Is this really the case with contract negotiations -- or do some contractors get some unfair advantages?
It has become so fashionable to criticise bureaucracy that people have almost forgotten that it serves an indispensable purpose in a democracy.
There is one party in particular here in Germany who are obsessed with cutting down bureaucracy. No should be surprised to learn that it is the neo-liberal FDP.
I am still searching for a party committed to increasing bureaucracy -- and of course to making it more efficient. This is where automation can help, if the rules are built into computer programs then decisions can be made not only more quickly but also more impartially. The algorithms are less open to corruption and backhanders than human beings. Of course it should always be possible to appeal against decisions and the algorithms must be capable of tracing how they arrived at the answer (but any good piece of software should be written to do that).