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Apocalypse Not #10 Something is Happening Here

What it is ain’t exactly clear; and that’s an understatement. In the past national emergencies brought the country together, at least a for awhile. From the reaction to 9/11 to the legions of people conducting water rescues after Houston flooded a few years back, we have always come together as a people to face down a threat. When the COVID-19 virus was discovered it appeared to bean an existential threat. Based on modeling from epidemiological experts we expected millions, then hundreds of thousands, then tens of thousands of deaths and this with the extreme lock down measures included in the modeling.

The models were not just wrong they were not even close. We now know, based on COVID -19 antibody testing in California, Boston, and Iceland that the infection fatality rate (IFR) is somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3 percent. The more testing we do the lower the IFR drops as the number of positives (the denominator) increases.

Last week a trio of Silicon Valley legends (T.J. Rodgers, Joe Malchow, and Yinon Weiss) conducted a regression study to determine if the rate of lock down  in each state had a statistically significant effect on the number of reported cases. They found the correlation coefficient on early vs late (or no) lockdowns was 5.5%. That number is so low that it is essential no correlation. The lockdowns had no effect on the outcome in each of the 50 states.

One of the most eminent Professors of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Population Health, John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc  has again warned, we are making high-stakes decisions without reliable data. Yet the narrative marches on with the media and authorities using the case fatality rate (CFR), not the infection fatality rate (IFR) to justify their caution.

So what now?

Unfortunately there is no what now; instead there is a deeper polarizing division within the population. A good percentage of the population would agree with my timeline and assessment. But it is also apparent there is a large percentage of Americans who believe there is a deadly virus out there that will scythe through the population if we lift the various lockdowns affecting 43 of the 50 states.

There is no way forward if we cannot, as a nation, agree on or define the threat. The problem now is defining the threat becomes a threat to the reputations of the leading scientists running our public health system, powerful academic institutions like John Hopkins and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, as well as powerful philanthropists like Bill Gates and, of course, the legacy media.

The failure to adopt to the virus as it has presented itself is, according to physicians on the front line, costing lives. John Hinderocker from the Powerline blog explains the details in this post. He quotes from Dr. Paul Marik, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, Critical Care COVID Management Protocol

It is our collective opinion that the historically high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 is due to a single factor: the widespread and inappropriate reluctance amongst intensivists to employ anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant treatments, including corticosteroid therapy early in the course of a patient’s hospitalization. It is essential to recognize that it is not the virus that is killing the patient, rather it is the patient’s overactive immune system. The flames of the “cytokine fire” are out of control and need to be extinguished. Providing supportive care (with ventilators that themselves stoke the fire) and waiting for the cytokine fire to burn itself out simply does not work… this approach has FAILED and has led to the death of tens of thousands of patients.

As Powerline further notes:

The systematic failure of critical care systems to adopt corticosteroid therapy resulted from the published recommendations against corticosteroids use by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) amongst others.

It appears the most effective treatment for COVID-19 is a combination of very inexpensive, readily available drugs. This will prove catastrophic for reputations of those who continue to insist that mass testing and a proven vaccine or effective drug targeting the virus like remdesivir, the antiviral medicine from Gilead Sciences , are required before the lockdowns can end.

The lockdowns are going to end and they are going to end soon. Shelter in place  type orders have proved an incredibly destructive policy, and the harms have not been distributed evenly across the United States. Some people are suffering much, much more than others.

Yet the lockdown continues here in Texas with the Kabuki theater of partial openings. Restaurants cannot turn a profit when they are forced to run at 50% capacity. I’m not sure why you would open movie theaters but keep gyms closed given the co-morbidity associated with lifestyles of the large and lethargic.

Getting the population out into fresh air and sunshine to bolster their immune systems with some exercise would seem to be what public health officials should want to do. But what they are doing is pretending they can calibrate the economy to limit exposure to a nasty bug despite the fact that “science” in the form of epidemiologic  studies and regression analysis would tell you these steps are not helping – they are hurting.

As Texas and other states come out of lockdown there will be more positive tests because there will be more tests. What we will not see is a giant wave of critically ill patients needing ICU beds. That hasn’t happened yet and it is not going to happen now or in the future.  When what is not going to happen, happens, what are the elites and the press and all the politicians who have been crying wolf for months now going to do? Who know? Owning up and admitting their mistakes is not part of their DNA so we can rule being honest out.

The great and powerful Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach once wrote that America is a land so great that even fools cannot destroy it. We are in the middle of seeing his thesis tested. Let’s hope he was right.

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Apocalypse Not #9 What Happened to the Models?

It is now obvious the modeling driving the COVID-19 response was wrong. They caused the nation to overreact and now that we realize COVID-19 is not the threat we were told it was what do we do?  What theTrump Administration just did, right in front of you, was disappear the models, switch data sets, and start talking recovery. It was awesome to watch made more so by the fact that not many people realized what they were seeing.

During Thursday’s Corona Virus Task Force presser all mentions of modeling were gone, replaced with slides from the   US Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network. From the linked article:

Birx said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be relying on its existing surveillance practices for “influenza-like illnesses,” which will be attuned to look for coronavirus, and fielding more new tests even for asymptomatic people to get better fidelity about the pervasiveness of the virus.

It appears the death rate from this virus will not exceed the number of flu deaths from the 2018-2019 flu season. We are learning, through anti-body testing, that the China Flu bug arrived here earlier than thought and has already passed through a good percentage of the population.

This is fantastic news but we’re not celebrating, or relaxing the lockdown, or re-starting the economy.

In Texas our governor has just appointed a commission to look at how to open up the state. When he announced the members of the commission he included Ross Perot, who died a year ago, which is suspicious. We are weeks away from spring football practice and the governor, instead of acting on facts, is appointing dead people to commissions. That is not very Texan like and I wish we had a better leader like one of the seven governors who were not bullied into economic suicide by hysterical progressive elites.

Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota – An American hero for keeping her state up and running. Too bad she isn’t a Texan; we could have used her common sense down here last month.

On the very day Governor Abbot announced his strike force Governor Inslee of Washington State launched a tweet storm of unhinged ad hominem attacks on the President. He is convinced The Wuhan will mow down millions if we dare break the protocols established to flatten a curve that never came, predicted by models that were wrong.

The insistence of progressives politicians in believing the obviously flawed models of elite academics is going to, without question, kill Americans. And we don’t need models to know how many. Citizen Journalist Betsy McCaughey points out:

No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing and drinking. Researcher Michael French from the University of Miami points out the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job. It is obvious that the unwarranted and unnecessary lockdowns come with a butchers bill that is larger than the COVID-19 threat.

Why can’t our leaders see this? There are dozens of pieces coming out daily pointing out the same thing yet the narrative continues on as if the pandemic is performing as predicted. 

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 our country went through a spasm of federal government action to “make us safe”. What came of that was the TSA. The TSA is in the business of ‘Security Theater‘; it fails, over 95% of the time, security tests. They routinely allow weapons and ammunition to be unintentionally carried onto aircraft, something I’ve done myself. No security professional mistakes the TSA as anything other than Kabuki Theater. If you want safe air travel screening you need to do it like the Israelis do, but we won’t do that because of Muh Racism.

The Kabuki theater being generated by this crisis is going to be continued  ‘social distancing’ and mask wearing. As Dr John Lee, joining hundreds of other reality based front line physicians like Keith Rose and Jonathan Greach, point out there is no direct evidence the lockdowns are working. The argument that social distancing and mask wearing slows the spread of the Wuhan virus makes sense, but then again so does the argument for developing  herd immunity.

It is impossible to evaluate scientific data when the credentialed experts working the data do not agree on what it is saying. Occam’s Razor is a solid approach and it was the reason I have said at the start of the Pandemic, that we were too slow and bug had long ago escaped into the population. I had no way of knowing it would prove mostly benign but it did and here we are.

The truth about the threat of COVID-19 is obvious. The reluctance of progressive democrats to accept that their academics, experts, and pundits were wrong is fascinating to watch, but this isn’t funny. Lives are now in jeopardy by continued forced unemployment and forced loss of assets on the part of local and state governments.  If this does not end quickly we are going to lose more than the 2020 NCAA football season.

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Apocalypse Not #8 South Texas Lockdown

The Rio Grande Valley consists of four counties Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Willacy. The population is almost 90% hispanic, and the majority of the folks born and raised here, whites included, speak fluent Spanish. Despite the prevalence of Spanish speaking It’s still an unmistakably American place. The infrastructure is new as the population has grown significantly over the last 20 years. The VA system here is excellent as military service is and always has been popular with South Texans.

The migration pressure on the border comes from Central Americans who muster at collection points on this side of the border for speedy processing. Once processed and released they are taken to Catholic Relief shelter, given food and a bus ticket to the interior and dropped off at the Greyhound station. Mexican citizens can cross the border and stay in the valley as long as they want but they can’t go inland without a visa. A significant percentage of the local economies in cities like McAllen comes from Mexican tourism, especially during Christmas and Easter.

The McAllen/Edinburg area has a serious public health problem; we are (according to a recent Grub Hub ranking) the fattest metro area in the United States.  Morbid obesity leads to type II diabetes and hypertension, and all three are the principal comorbidity factors contributing to fatal outcomes from COVID-19.

The counties have all issued shelter in place orders and masks must be worn in public except when exercising. Cameron County has issued the most draconian mandates which include prohibiting more than two in a vehicle, which will be a problem for lawn maintenance crews, and children under age 14 have been confined to quarters. These measures are exactly the wrong ones to take if we are concerned about the health and welfare of our fellow citizens.

One of the known characteristics of COVID-19 is that hypertension, diabetes and being overweight dramatically increase hospitalization and fatality rates. It seems to me the perfect vehicle for public health officials to attack the epidemic of obesity in the population. If there was ever a time to start messaging about the necessity of a balanced diet combined with regular outdoor exercise that time is now.

Instead local officials have done the exact opposite. When the schools and non-essential businesses closed the local parks and play grounds were active. They were not crowded, there were no social distancing issues, but you would see groups of half dozen cross-fit folks working out together, families using the picnic benches, and others running or using exercise stations.

I would think the city leader would be encouraging people to get out of the house and into the many city parks to let their kids burn up some energy. Instead the city placed barricades around all jungle gyms, removed every picnic bench, closed all the park parking lots, and made it clear it doesn’t want people exercising in the parks.

Remember the purpose of flattening the curve was not to shelter in place until the bug was gone, the assumption that we will all eventually be exposed remains in place. If we are all going to get the bug eventually should we not be strengthen our immune systems now when we have all this time on our hands? Getting people, especially children, outside and active strengthens immune systems. Being immobile and sedentary indoors, passively watching television while eating highly processed food decreases immune systems.

The Land Shark is a lock down essential. It’s flat here, the streets are empty and this old school custom bike can fly. Getting outside to exercise instead of using an indoor gym has been the surprise of the COVID quarantine. I had forgotten how good it felt to train outside – and its good for the immune system too.

The local hospitals are empty so the curve has flattened which was the purpose of social distancing and mask wearing. Now that we accomplished the goal of the shut down why are we continuing the shut down?

The reason to open the economy is it will save more lives than it will cost.  There is little question that the lives lost to the economic catastrophe following an extended shut down and collapse of the economy would dwarf the numbers of lives lost from  COVID-19.

The alternative to relaxing the quarantine and allowing the virus to run its course is to remain locked down until there is a vaccine or cure. This is why prominent health policy types like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel are talking about an 18 month lockdown. That is flat out insane. How can American look herself in the mirror and call herself the land of the free without NCAA football this fall? The question answers itself.

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Apocalypse Not # 6 Reality is Disrupting the Legacy Media Narrative

I started the Apocalypse Not series because I do not trust computer modeling nor do I trust any experts warning of apocalyptic doom based on computer modeling. As Richard Fernandez who writes the Belmont Club blog observed: “My dear old statistics teacher used to say that relying on any model however good but founded on past data was like driving by looking at the rearview mirror; fine as long as the future looked like the past“.

It is now clear the future does not look like the past. I knew a flu virus, that had the same symptomology as the Wuhan flu, swept through the Rio Grande Valley last December/January,  Given the reported virulence of the Wuhan strain, it made sense to conclude what had swept the valley was the Wuhan flu. This mild form of Wuhan was no picnic, my wife has never been so sick, for so long, as she was around Christmas.

I went on to note that on March 3rd scientist has identified two strains of the Wuhan virus, one that spreads quickly but is relatively mild, and one that spreads slowly that is dangerous. That explained to me what we experienced last Christmas, but my speculation was met with alarm by my liberal friends (and I have many who I value and respect) who responded with arguments from authority  that stressed I was no expert and should not be commenting on topics I do not understand.

But then I remembered I was an expert, one of the few people who has ever deployed ashore off naval shipping into a combat zone to hunt down a microscopic pathogen that was turning into a killer. I mentioned this tongue in cheek, I was a navy corpsman, trained as a advanced medical laboratory technician, sent ashore to obtain and process samples identified by environmental health officers who were the real experts.  It is on such thin gruel claims of expertise are often made.

HM2 Tim ‘Doc’ Lynch ashore in Beirut in February 1984 hunting down the source of a nasty typhoid outbreak at the Beirut Airport

Despite not being a real expert it now seems the rest of the world is catching up to me. This morning USA Today published an article saying there are 8 strains of the Wuhan circulating the globe. Plus the fatality numbers in the USA are not adding up (as I have been pointing out for a month now) with most of our cases being confined to New York City.

Existential  crises reveal the character of both our leaders and the people. The governors of Washington State, Michigan, and Nevada have been revealed to be not only incompetent, but cowardly. The Governor of New York and the mayor of New York City have been revealed as opportunistic. They are cooperating with the Trump administration to cover for their gross incompetence in emergency management preparation. It is no coincidence that New York City is getting slammed by the flu, they were completely unprepared.

Our country has unprecedented wealth, leisure, economic freedom, and security because men who are the antithesis of Mayor de Blasio  and Governor Cuomo have eradicated every existential  threat to the people of the United States. Those two men are directly responsible for the lack of preparation in New York.  As Julie Kelly, writing in American Greatness observed;

A public policy researcher in 2015 detailed long waits in New York City emergency rooms. The head of the emergency department for the Mount Sinai hospital system quit in 2018 after less than a year on the job.

“I had to follow my moral compass and leave and decide this is not an organization that cares for patients,” Dr. Eric Barton told the New York Post.

Last year, city nurses threatened to strike due to overcrowding at three major hospital systems. “Nurse Anthony Ciampa said he had to choose recently between feeding an elderly patient at New York Presbyterian and treating several acutely ill patients because there weren’t enough other nurses on duty,” according to a March 2019 report in the Daily News.

And the outcry about ventilators? State officials were informed several years ago that the stockpile of ventilators was woefully inadequate to handle a severe pandemic. But instead of preparing for a looming crisis and buying 16,000 ventilators, the state’s health commissioner formed a task force to develop a system to ration the life-saving equipment. The task force “came up with rules that will be imposed when ventilators run short,” the New York Post reported last week.

I expect gross incompetence from big city governments and democratic governors. They have been focused for years on ramming through their progressive agenda while painting all opponents as virulent racists or stupid hicks who don’t understand the need to eviscerate our traditional relationship with governmental organizations. What is alarming to me is the new intolerance of dissent on display in the chattering classes. As Brandon O’Neil observed;

…the implacable rage against anyone who deviates from the Covid-19 script and asks if shutting down society really is the right thing to do. Like medieval scolds, they brand such people dangerous, insane, a virus, accessories to manslaughter. ‘Shut them down!’, they cry, thinking they are signalling their concern for the public’s health when really they are advertising their profound contempt for freedom of thought and critical debate.

We do not know how badly the over-reaction to this virus will hurt our economy. We do not know how many citizens will be financially ruined by the heavy-handed response. What we can safely assume is that measures to control the public (smart phone tracking for one) will be part of our lives from this day forward. That is not good.

What is also not good is our crappy main stream media. Here is the perfect example of how crappy they can be (hat tip to the Mark Margolis at PJ media):

Here are the top six countries by confirmed cases (based on the case numbers from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University as of 2:30 pm ET March 27) in descending order:

  1. USA (94,238)
  2. Italy (86,498)
  3. Spain (64,059)
  4. Germany (49,344)
  5. Iran (32,332)
  6. France (29,593)

Now, here are the top six countries by confirmed cases per capita (based on population numbers from the CIA World Fact Book):

  1. Italy (1386.13)
  2. Spain (1280.78)
  3. Germany (615.57)
  4. France (436.17)
  5. Iran (380.72)
  6. USA (283.30)

The United States’ confirmed cases are the lowest of the top six countries affected by the virus. Yet the media and the shitbird democrats want you to believe we are far behind the curve because Orange Man Bad. This nightmare will end sooner than you think.  When it does, the public officials who displayed gross incompetence, who used this crisis for personal gain, and who refused to work with the federal government because Orange Man Bad, should be voted out of office. The politicians who loaded the stimulus bill with traditional DC pork should become social pariahs.

The MSM is  trying to make you believe that the coronavirus in the United States is spiraling out of control. They want you (you dumbasses) to understand Orange Man Bad when the majority of us think he’s doing a good job. But the most ergregious crime of this crisis is the destruction of our economy. For that the press, the alarmist governors, and the so-called “experts” who continue to cry wolf in the face of solid evidence they are wrong should pay a steep price.   

No matter what happens de Blasio, Schumer, Pelosi and that strange  looking woman who is now the governor of Michigan (wasn’t she a he before and a olympic decathlon winner)?  will do fine because they have no skin in the game. Destroying our economy will cause no disruption in their lives, they don’t stand in line for toilet paper, they know there will always be a respirator and hospital bed for them, they will always get a paycheck, and they will always have well compensated employment.

This crisis should spell the end of virtue signaling politicians. As this lockdown continues we shall see what the consequences are for shills who ruined millions of American families for their own vanity. If this lasts for months, without the massive numbers of deaths we are being told are inevitable; there will be blood.

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Apocalypse Not # 5 Argumentum ab Auctoritate

Argument from authority is defined as “Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered.” It is a classic logical fallacy that is used to stifle conversations that are becoming uncomfortable to those in authority.  There are technical areas that I know little about, and in those areas my observations are worthless, we all have that problem. One of the areas where I am not rank amateur is epidemiology, thus I feel comfortable weighing in on this important topic.

HM2 Tim Lynch ashore in Beirut hunting down the source of a nasty typhoid outbreak in early 1984. How many men do you know with real world pathogen hunting experience?

In fact, back when combat helmets were made of steel (as were the men who wore them), I was dispatched ashore at the Beirut International Airport to find the source of a para-typhoid bug that had damn near killed several artillerymen. I was an advanced lab technician  and my job was to obtain samples from sources the Environmental Health officers ashore had identified as potential problems. I obtained the samples, put the them in transport medium to take back to the ship (USS Guam LPH-7).  I then attempt to isolate the pathogen so we could target it with effective antibiotics instead of shotgunning every antibiotic we had into the fallen Marines.

I never isolated the bug, about a week into my attempt we pulled out of Beirut and headed for liberty call in Haifa, Israel.  Once we pulled the plug on the Beirut I autoclaved all the samples and prepared to fly back home. We clearly knew the problem Salmonella Paratyphoid but we never isolated or identified the strain.

I had forgotten all this until I started the Apocalypse Not series and got so much pushback from my liberal friends that I concluded I might be an asshole for writing what I was thinking. But I know a lot of assholes and I also know I’m not like any of them, so I’m continuing my attempt to explain why what you are seeing, has little resemblance to what the experts are telling you is happening.

The pushback from my earlier posts can all be summed up with “are you an authority? No? STF up then”.  The classic argument for authority response. Turns out I am an authority, I even have a degree (associates but still a degree) in medical technology and had mad, cutting edge, microbiology skills back in 1984. So, from this point forward remember that everything I say comes from a position of authority.

Now look at this:

Graph by John Hinderaker at Powerline

And this:

I believe what we are about to experience demonstrates the limitations of modeling. I have never believed the man-made climate change hysteria because it was based on models. The United States Marine Corps is about to become completely irrelevant as it sheds infantry, tube artillery and attack helicopters in favor of missiles, and that plan is based exclusivly on modeling. The lesson we are all about to learn is that modeling and reality are different things. In reality there are too many unknowns we cannot explain or anticipate that are never captured in computer models.

A relevant example of this can be seen in the reality of our current heavy handed public health measures. The biggest concern of every emergency management official when discussing the implementation of quarantines is public unrest. Yet around the country the public has accepted these extreme measures, have cooperated with authorities, and have caused no unrest (yet). The public unrest may yet surface but to date the American public is handling the destruction of their lives and livelihoods with remarkable equanimity.

What happens in two or three weeks when the crisis we have been told is eminent fails to materialize? What about the citizens who have been ruined by lockdowns and forced closures for a bug that was no worse than a flu bug? How will we look at “the experts” in the future when, once again, they were not a little wrong, but dead wrong about the nature of this pandemic?

The overreaction to this flu should drive a stake through the heart of man made climate change because the models supporting that theory are based on more speculative data then epidemiological models. That may be the only silver lining in this crisis.  I doubt identity politics, political correctness, open borders, and encouraging homelessness have long shelf life now either.  Those are issues of concern for affluent, educated people who have the time and resources to spend a lifetime worrying over shit they can’t change or understand.

I forgot where I found this but it speaks truth to current progressive power

My 1 virus 2 strain theory is surfacing again as people who are not experience virus hunters like myself catch up.  People are starting to understand the Pandemic has failed to materialize outside of New York City and the Pacific Northwest. The fatality rate in those two areas remains low, well below the morbidity and mortality of a regular flu bug. I understand that those numbers can shoot up and the bug suddenly start killing people in Ghenghis Khan type numbers because the New York Times told me so in this nifty graph they made to explain a complex event you cannot see out in flyover country.

What the experts cannot explain is how a virulent pathogen arrived in the country last November but waited until now to start replicating.

Even the Huffpo took a break in their 24/7 Trump Derangement Syndrome outbursts to publish “Is It Possible That You Had The Coronavirus Earlier This Year?” This article mirrors comments I’ve been seeing on Facebook as thousands of people speculate the flu bug that burned through the population in December/January was most likely the Wuhan flu. We will not know if that theory is true until we develop a test for COVID-19 antibodies. But the observations of my fellow citizens matches mine and I have to remind you I am an authority. My 1 virus 2 strain (which I’m unilaterally modifying to a 1 virus multiple strains because of expert reasoning I can’t explain to you damn laymen)  theory has more fact behind it than the NYT’s graph.

I am concerned about the millions of Americans who are stuck at home with no money, no food, no job, and bored children. The measly 1400 bucks that may show up in a few weeks is too little, too late to help them. What happens when the people understand that we have been fooled again by charlatans who will weather the storm they created without a problem or concern in the world? The people who are posing the unreasonable restrictions on every aspect of your life do not have to worry about getting tested, access to a ventilator if they fall ill, not having any money in the bank, or food in the house.  In fact they will make money buying stock at fire sale prices and (of course) rewarding themselves by allocating more tax money to themselves.

This analysis by the ever prescient Kimberly Strassel, writing in the Wall Street Journal, which you can now read because the paywall is down, sums up the new stimulus package nicely:

‘Missing from their list is an important category, which underlines an inescapable fact: Government mostly “Cares” for government. Bills that hand out money are written by appropriators. And appropriators never miss an opportunity to expand departments, agencies, bureaus and commissions. A rough calculation suggests the single biggest recipient of taxpayer dollars in this legislation—far in excess of $600 billion—is government itself. This legislation may prove the biggest one-day expansion of government power ever.”

Talk about never letting a crisis go to waste.

There is good news from this crisis; celebrates, professional athletes, and social influencers are no longer important or relevant. I like that because I find celebrity and pro sports culture unappealing.

Joe Rogan the actor/comedian is now irrelevant, Joe Rogan the podcaster is very relevant.   On the 10th of March he had on Michael Osterholm, an internationaly recognized expert on infectious disease, and the podcast was downloaded 17 million times. It unquestionably freaked out a large proportion of his vast audience. Here are some quotes from the interview:

First of you have to understand the timing of it in the sense that is just beginning and so in terms of what hurt pain suffering death is account happened so far is really just beginning. I think what people don’t quite yet understand and is this really is acting like an influenza virus something that transmits very very easily through the air we now have data to show that you’re infectious before you even get sick….I brought some numbers and we estimate that this could require 48 million hospitalizations, out of 96 million cases actually occurring and  over 480,000 deaths over the next three to seven months with this situation so this is not one that to take lightly.

Seventeen days later do any of those predictions sound likely to you? Granted maybe we dodged the bullet because of the lock downs and social distancing. My expert opinion is that is unlikely, the bug has been here since November and not one expert I know of can explain the curious lack of bilateral pneumonia cases that should be evident around the country given the virulence of the pathogen and delay in its detection (thanks to China, not Trump).

My county in South Texas is now on lock down,  if you leave the house for an unofficial reason and you could be fined 1000 bucks.  We have no Wuhan Virus cases in the county and the “shelter in place order” is scheduled to last two weeks. President Trump said he wanted to get the country back to work by Easter Sunday but we are on lockdown until the day after Easter Sunday….. maybe that is a coincidence, or maybe that is a dig at a President the elites despise, but who is growing more popular with the people by the day…you decide.

For now the only thing we can do is “shelter in place”, cooperate with the authorities and watch out for our neighbors. This is the land of the free which is why we should support our civic leaders but at the same time express our alarm at the destruction of our economy. Arguments from authority are a cowards way out of explaining what is increasingly obvious, cannot be explained.

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Apocalypse Not: The Fear of COVID-19 is Unwarranted

There is something about the current Wuhan virus response that is not adding up. The first case appeared in America on 17th of January, we then stopped direct flight from China on the 31st of January. From the time this pathogen surfaced in November until the end of January, there were daily flights from the Wuhan area to Seattle, LA, San Francisco, New York and Toledo, Ohio. This flu strain is unusually virulent and if that is true (which is not in doubt), by the time it surfaced in America it had already spread across the land.

Farr’s Law, named for British epidemiologist William Farr in 1840, states that epidemics, develop and recede according to a bell-shaped curve. This happens with or without human intervention. Farr’s Law undoubtedly is in play for the Wuhan virus.

Last Christmas my wife and several neighbors had a horrible flu bug that mimicked the Wuhan virus symptoms exactly.  She was miserable and did not respond to a Z-pack or a course of Levaquin our family doctor prescribed. The bug she had was no joke, and when she mentioned my theory that the Wuhan had already washed through the population last Christmas her friends saw it immediately. She started hearing other stories about the Christmas bug that ravaged the Rio Grande Valley for a good four weeks. The stories all matched up to the symptoms for Wuhan virus.

The President’s early attempts to calm the situation were ridiculed as was his suspension of air travel to China. Then the narrative changed on a dime and the cancelations started with the Ivy League Universities cancelling their basketball seasons. Once they did that every other major sports league (with the exception of the UFC) did the same. 

But  Ivy League role in starting the current chain reaction of closing public venues is not a coincidence. The very experts who are on the TV daily had just  staged a Pandemic table top exercise. The response we are seeing is based off the dire predictions made in that exercise.

On the afternoon of Friday, 18 October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosted  a Virtual Exercise Called Event 201 and described as:

“a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic”.

The pathogen used for the exercise was a COVID virus with properties similar to COVID-19. The exercise predicted that the virus would overwhelm the medical systems in North America resulting in catastrophic loss of life. Tabletop exercises like Event 201 happen all the time, the fact that this one was played out a month before COVID-19 surfaced in Wuhan China is not that significant. What is significant is how different the current crisis is playing out compared to the one our experts war-gamed.

There were a seven recommendations made following the exercise (they can be found here). Every recommendation focused on the need for international cooperation with the free flow of information and people across national borders which is consistent with the ethos and vision of globalists like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other major donors, like Open Philanthropy .

But our response to the Wuhan virus has been the exact opposite of the “viruses know no borders” narrative of Event 201.  Instead we (and the rest of the world) have closed the borders, rebuffed international offers of help and turned to the private sector to fight the virus ourselves.

The Centers for Disease Control was not up to the task of testing for or tracking the Wuhan virus and they were rapidly sidelined by the President. This was the exact opposite of  Event 201 in which the CDC and every other similar international organization performed flawlessly. The ‘experts” may have been surprised the CDC failed so spectacularly but this is expected from those of us who know and understand government bureaucracies.

When the CDC failed the President  went straight to the private sector, suspended regulations inhibiting the development and production of test kits and protective wear, and solved the testing problem rapidly. He then held a press conference with these Titans of industry and did a good job of calming frayed nerves. After his poor start briefing the nation last Wednesday night watching him get back into the grove was gratifying.

This is not playing out as the experts who ran Event 201 thought. Then, in another move a blatant dishonesty, on the same day that China launches an IO campaign to deflect criticism from them onto the USA, our legacy media decides the Wuhan virus is now to be called COVID-19.  Any mention of the word Wuhan was now racist and news anchors were getting apoplectic about this new muh racism.

As events across the land started to close. Governors and DC mandarins ran to the TV cameras to announce the draconian measures they were going to take. These pronouncements have to moldy scent of Virtue Signalling. The men and women making these decisions have themselves, no skin in the game.  Regardless of how long this lasts or how bad it gets the people running Ivy League institutions, the federal legislatures, state governors and the media infotainment complex insiders – all of them will weather the storm just fine. In fact, most of them will make millions off  low interest rates while buying blue chip stock at a significant markdown.

You and your family? Not so much.

“I don’t claim to know what’s motivating the media, but, my God, their reporting is absolutely reprehensible. They should be ashamed of themselves. They are creating a panic that is far worse than the viral outbreak. The bottom line, everybody, is to listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC [Centers of Disease Control and Prevention]. Do what he tells you, and go about your business.… Stop listening to journalists! They don’t know what they are talking about!” Dr. Drew Pinsky commenting on the media yesterday (17 March 2020)

An anonymous  source quoted in The Spectator points out the only salient (and obvious) fact now which is:  “We know the numerator (the number of deaths), but we don’t know the denominator, which is the number of people who have been infected by COVID-19. And without the denominator, we have no way of estimating either the spread or the fatality rate of COVID-19.”

That bothers me and it should bother you too, but at the moment there is nothing to be done except hunker down, avoid panic shopping, and wait to see what happens. How long Americans will tolerate these measures will be interesting to see.

There is no reason to think that this time the experts warnings about a catastrophic event are correct. They have a perfect record of being wrong with every prediction in the past because their models are incapable of predicting complex events reliably.

When the people discover that once again, they were manipulated by a partisan press, compromised academic shills, and virtue signalling politicians there is going to be hell to pay.  When the dust settles maybe we will de-couple science from politics and even dismantle the narrative driving legacy media.

It is time to keep your head down, and your powder dry. Courage and cowardice are contagions and few of our elected leaders seem to operate with an abundance of courage. Their default is finger pointing, name calling, and blame shifting. The rest of us should refrain from that behavior and focus on helping, not panicking our neighbors. When this emergency passes we may be able to hold incompetents to account but for now all we can do is what we do best; refuse to panic.

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Assessing Trust in The Afghan Peace Deal

Editor’s Note: Chim Chim is back with a post on FRI. It has been over a decade since we last heard from him  He is a friend of mine with years of experience in Afghanistan at the higher levels of the U.S. Intelligence community. It is fitting that he once again reaches out to Free Range International to weigh in with some thoughts on the Afghanistan peace deal.

 

Trust. It’s a mysterious term and rarely understood. Per its definition, key attributes exist such as reliability, truth, ability, and strength. Contrary to popular belief, trust is not earned but rather obtained through a leap of faith. It is natural and can easily be broken. When it comes to the Afghan Peace Deal, trust is non-existent amongst the three players involved—The US Government, the Afghan Government, and the Taliban.

But should one look closely at the situation from an historical perspective, how can trust exist? More importantly, who can be trusted most? Better yet, who SHOULD be trusted most?

During the Russian-Afghan War, the United States was heavily involved in supporting multiple Afghan militias fighting against our greatest adversary. We gave and gave and gave but then, once the Russians were defeated, we put on the brakes. It was arguably one of the most devastating moments in US National Security that would inevitably come back and bite us hard.

We made countless promises to the Afghans and never came through with any of those promises which led to a major civil war between dozens of local tribes and militias. This civil war allowed the Taliban to blossom into a major organization which ruled Afghanistan for many years.

Immediately following 9-11, the United States went into a reactionary mode and was quick to invade Afghanistan on the logic that the Taliban were harboring Al Qaeda. Few realize during this time several nation states were providing safe haven to Al Qaeda during this time as Al Qaeda cells were spread across the globe. Another point of contention is the fact that the Taliban were in talks with Al Qaeda in an attempt to push them out of country instead forcing them into safe-haven in western Pakistan.

Our decision was made and teams of special operators infiltrated Afghanistan initiating America’s longest war. We did this with virtually zero ground truth, meaning, we had no sources or assets for intelligence on the ground prior to our invasion. Many whom we initially engaged in combat operations were nothing more than localized militias whom had little if anything to do with the Taliban (Central) meaning we were fighting tribesmen who would later turn to the Taliban due to our own actions.

Immediately following 9-11, Russia became an American strategic partner. We actually relied on Russia’s past to procure our initial network on the ground in Afghanistan.  The one country Afghans despise most, we became strategic partners with.

As time unfolded and upon immediate successes in achieving two goals set forth from US SOF elements (eliminate Al Qaeda’s safe-haven and rid Taliban of government control), a new force was inserted shortly after—the US Conventional military and State Department.

During this time, the United States threw billions of dollars into Afghanistan. It was during this period which continues even today, the United States implementation of a “quantifiable” approach to warfighting which completely overshadows anything qualitative.

America spent billions on programs that had virtually zero oversight. One example is based on school text books in which the United States and our coalition threw an estimated $30 million into the contract however it is estimated less than $1 million worth of product ever entered the country. HeraldExtra.com shows just a portion of the issue in their article titled, Textbooks not arriving in Afghan school.

The vast majority of funds displaced were not displaced. They were handed to local warlords, provincial governors, tribal leaders, etc. But if people want to see who the vast majority of individuals pocketed these funds, just walk down “Millionaire Row” in Kabul where you will find Afghan mansions vacant—vacant because those whom had such homes built have now fled the nation in fear of a Taliban takeover.

Prior to leaving, these local Afghans milked every last penny they could from the United States. It was the easiest way for anyone to get rich fast and rich as in millionaire rich. Simply put, the Afghan power-players created a racket and the United States didn’t care. More interesting is why we did not care.

We did not care about the misappropriations of funds because of the quantifiable war which we created. Those who held the money needed to get rid of it. And they did. And in doing so, they wrote their own tickets of success be it military personnel boasting numbers on OPER’s/EPR’s or State Department, NGO’s, etc fluffing resumes for permanent hire needs upon completion of their time in country.

What the United States did in Afghanistan does not demonstrate reliability, truth, ability, and strength hence, our inept methods in Afghanistan demonstrate how untrustworthy we are in our Afghan mission.

As bad as we were, the locals and politicians also demonstrated a lack of trust.

Afghan leaders saw how much money was going into Afghanistan. They witnessed their pockets flood with cash. They were empowered on a level most Americans should be jealous of. And as crazy as this sounds, many of these Afghans were closely aligned with Russia and Iran.

The Afghan Government was and continues to be incredibly corrupt.

In 2008, an Afghan warlord once said, “You expect us to believe in your own Rule of Law? You want us to trust the newly established Afghan Government’s Rule of Law which you, the Americans implemented? Do you not see how corrupt your own nation is? Look at the case of OJ Simpson.”

Think about this sentiment for a moment. Reflect on what this warlord was saying. You do not need to agree with what was said but think of the perception held. Perception is reality.

Another warlord once explained why the United States tactical intelligence was flawed. He explained that we would hand out cash to “walk-ins” for information about potential Taliban. We would take that information and execute a mission to kill or capture that individual. But what we seldom knew was the “walk-in” was merely in a tribal dispute with the target. And oftentimes, the “walk-in” was actually the one more aligned with the Taliban than the target itself.

The Afghans manipulated the United States every waking chance they could. And, they succeeded in doing what they wished on individual levels as well as within different political parties. Simply put, the Afghan politicians as well as local leaders demonstrated virtually zero reliability or truth which showcases why they were and remain untrustworthy.

The United States knew the Taliban were our enemy in Afghanistan. The Taliban ensured we were never to forget this. Through video’s published online, a plethora of kidnappings, to constantly attacking our assets, the Taliban and the array of Anti-Afghan Forces never led up.

If early warnings existed pertaining a potential attack, the Taliban came through with it. If the Taliban claimed they would allow for a temporary ceasefire, that ceasefire pretty much always happened. If a break of the ceasefire was sent through the air waves, expect the attack. They TOLD us pretty much every single move they were going to make. Their information was reliable, it was constantly set in truth, and they demonstrated over and over again their ability to do what they said. And, their strength came from not just their numbers but rather the constant support they obtained through the Pakistani ISI, Iranian assets, and the Kremlin itself.

If you watch the evening news and see a report on a serial murderer then take a walk in the woods and come across that serial murderer, do you trust the serial murderer’s potential? You would be a fool not to. The point is, trust in an entity you do not like does not mean trust should not exist. Bad people and bad organizations should be trusted to do bad things.

What is difficult to swallow is when we possess trust in something we cherish and realize that which we cherish most should be the least trusted. In the case of the Afghan Peace Deal, maybe, just maybe, it is not the Taliban who should NOT be trusted. Rather, maybe we should be skeptical over the amount of trust we place in the Afghan Government and that of our own.

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Peace in Afghanistan Inshallah

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo landed in Qatar’s capital city, Doha today for the signing of a peace deal with the Taliban. In a rare demonstration of presenting both sides of a contentious deal the Washington Post opinion section featured dueling pieces that capture this unique moment in time. The peace deal is a clear win for both the Trump administration and the Afghan people. As usual the devil is in the details but it appears we are on the way out of Afghanistan.

Barnett Rubin who is a senior fellow and associate director of the Center on International Cooperation of New York University and non-resident senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, outlines the agreement in his WaPo OpEd.

The agreement provides a timetable for troop withdrawal, counterterrorism guarantees, a path to a cease-fire and a process for political settlement. Implementation would also require dismantling Taliban infrastructure in neighboring Pakistan and assurances by external powers that none will use Afghanistan against others.

Mr. Rubin has considerable time on the ground in the region and his take on the peace deal (which is it is a good deal)  is identical to mine.

Max Boot, who is a Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, took the opposite view. In his WaPo OpEd he outlines three different scenarios for the near future in Afghanistan. He then goes onto to predict the worst case scenario (the Taliban rolling into Kabul and taking over the country) as the most likely. I can tell you unequivocally that is the least likely scenario.

Many of our foreign policy experts and more than a few of my friends caution that the Taliban is not a cohesive monolithic organization, and that negotiators are only speaking for the Quetta, Peshawar, and Miranshaw Shura’s. This is a fact that is true, but means nothing now. The Taliban were able to enforce the peace during last years Eid celebration across the country and I believe they can do so again. Regardless of what I and my friends believe the only thing that counts is how the Afghans feel about the deal.

Taliban fighters taking selfies with Afghan army troops during the Eid ceasefire last year.

The Senior Vice President-elect of Afghanistan, Amrullah Saleh, published his opinion on the Time website. I Fought the Taliban. Now I’m Ready to Meet Them at the Ballot Box is the title of his piece and that’s a strong endorsement of the process. Amrullah Saleh is the former head of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), a former Interior Minister and he survived a serious assault on his election headquarters last July. That assault started with a car bomb and was continued by suicide vest equipped assault teams. Amrullah Saleh survived by jumping off the roof of his four story headquarters onto the roof of a neighboring building.

It is reasonable to assume Mr. Saleh had engaged in a running gun battle before escaping to safety, he is that kind of guy.

In another fascinating development the Military Times published an article today with the headline ISIS taking a beating in Afghanistan setting  the stage for a potential a U.S. troop withdrawal.  Buried deep in the article is this:

The recent campaign in Nangarhar is one example. Effective operations by US/Coalition & Afghan security forces, as well as the Taliban, led to ISIS-K losing territory & fighters. Hundreds surrendered. ISIS-K hasn’t been eliminated but this is real progress,” Khalilzad tweeted Tuesday

Remember a few posts back I highlighted this article in the Washington Post about the defeat of ISIS because it failed to mention the Taliban’s direct role? It seem like the first draft of history is up for grabs regarding the defeat of ISIS-K in Eastern Afghanistan.  There is little to gain but much to lose in suppression of the truth. I doubt an experienced reporter would have not known about the Taliban’s role in fighting ISIS-K so it is hard to figure out why the WaPo would print such obviously fake news.

Regardless, ISIS is now gone in Eastern Afghanistan and the remaining pockets in the north now the problem of the Taliban. Who seem to be very efficient at rooting them out.

What I cannot determine is how many troops will stay and what those troops will be doing. If the plan is to leave the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force – Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A) in place to hunt down ISIS and al Qaida that is not going to work. ISIS doesn’t need to be serviced by us any longer and separating al Qaida trainers from Taliban students is impossible.

If Amrullah Saleh is willing to give the Taliban a chance, and they reach an agreement, men like Sirajuddin Haqqani, who have been at the top of the JPEL for years, will be allowed to go in peace. The JPEL is the Joint Prioritized Effects List which is essentially a lethal version of the FBI’s most wanted. Allowing the men on that list to walk free, get passports and travel  is going to be a bitter blow to the people who have been hunting them. But that may be the price of peace.

I have to add that CJSOTF-A is not going to be able to operate behind the back of the Senior VP. Mr. Saleh has decades of experience working with the CIA and CJSTOF and he will have a say on what the Americans can and cannot do if they leave CJSTOF-A in Afghanistan.

This deal with the Taliban is how it ends. It is the only way it can end. The only question in Afghanistan was when, not if, we were leaving. The Taliban cannot beat the Kabul government in battle. The Kabul government cannot beat the Taliban in battle. The continued presence of American SF teams, tactical aircraft and trainers brought the Taliban to the negotiating table which is the best they could do.  It is up to the Afghans to decide what happens next. It is also time for us to leave.

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Brookings Institute Fires a Broadside at Haqqani and Misses

General John Allen, USMC (ret) who is the president of the Brookings Institute, lashed out at the New York Times for publishing an  Op-Ed  Sirajuddin Haqqani. His article, Sirajuddin Haqqani, Terrorist was an unfortunate response that reinforces a growing narrative regarding incompetence in the elite, ruling class.

The most glaring mistake in General Allen’s  attack on the New York Times was repeating the thoroughly debunked “very fine people on both sides” hoax. That hoax was spread by the legacy media despite the fact that President Trump was talking about people protesting the removal of Confederate battle monuments.  He specifically condemned the white supremest’s if you listen to the whole quote.  General Allen is the direct descendant  of a Confederate Cavalry officer (I forget his name but remember he fought at Culpepper), for which is he justifiably proud and I suspect he , too was not happy about the removal of confederate battle monuments.  I know General Allen, he was my boss at the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course, I respect and admire him greatly so it is disturbing  to see him trafficking in hoaxes.

Worse was his endorsement of Forever War by implying we should renege on our Peace Agreement with the Taliban. This is his discussion of the Haqqani group:

This organization was and continues to be a central component of the Taliban, a major connecting file into al-Qaida, and a darling of Pakistan’s ISI. The Haqqanis, the Taliban, and al-Qaida endorse a radical interpretation of sharia that deprives women of any meaningful rights, to include the right to an education, and the freedom to pursue their own wants and interests, such as, for example, the legal profession. Countless lives were lost – and many, many more were wounded and otherwise terrorized – at the hands of this group and its peer terrorist entities, and had they not been formally designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, we would have had little means to diminish their influence and stop their violent activities. And at the very center of this violence was Sirajuddin Haqqani, operational commander of the Haqqani network as well as the #2 of the Taliban.

All of that is true and every bit of it irrelevant if we intend to sign a peace deal with the Taliban. It is none of our business if the Afghans decide to reconcile withTaliban leaders including Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani is a bad man, so is Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, who reconciled years ago, and ran in the recent Presidential election. The notorious warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who has been a member of the Kabul government when he wasn’t in exile dodging human rights tribunals, is a bad man. He was nominally on our side, so he’s a good, bad man, but to the Afghans he’s little better than Haqqani.

What the Afghans do to reconcile the rift in their civil society is their business. If they want to reconcile with and guarantee the freedom of warlords like Haqqani it is their right to do so. There are reasons to doubt Taliban commitment to a more inclusive civil process, but again, it is no longer our concern.

It is important to acknowledge the reality on the ground and that reality is the Taliban cannot win militarily and the same holds true for the Central Government. Given that context I believe it is time to let the Afghans work this out for themselves.

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Taliban Stakeout the Moral High Ground Announcing a Peace Deal with the United States

Sirajuddin Haqqani  wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday where he explained the Taliban’s expectations and goals in signing a Peace Agreement with the United States. The piece was professionally written and I do not believe Sirajudin can write so well in English so I doubt he wrote himself. Regardless, the Taliban statement clearly stakes out the moral high ground with sentences like:

“I am confident that, liberated from foreign domination and interference, we together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity.”

Sirajudin Haqqani represents the Miranshah Shura and the fact that he’s doing the writing indicates that the various factions in the Taliban are presenting a unified front. Haqqani is also directly responsible for scores of car bombings in Kabul and a laundry list of other attacks that targeted innocent Afghans. There is more than a little hypocracy in his statement but who cares? This communique was addressing the Afghan people and if they want to allow men like Haqqani to reconcile with the government it is their business, not ours.

While the MSM component of the national media waited to see what President Trump would say so they could take the opposite position, the conservative press pounced on this sentence to dismiss the entire missive.

“We did not choose our war with the foreign coalition led by the United States. We were forced to defend ourselves.”

Becket Adams, writing in the Washington Examiner called the claim of self defense “a damnable lie”. Mr. Adams went on to state that “The Taliban 100% chose this conflict with the U.S.” That was true in 2001 but that is not what Haqqani is talking about and from the Taliban perspective we did indeed force them to fight us.

In 2002 the majority of Taliban had surrendered and returned to their villages. There was one group of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters holed up in the mountains of Shah-i Kot which we attacked, willy nilly, with no intelligence or fire support preparation of the battlefield, and no idea how many adversaries we faced. The remainders were turning in their weapons and going home which is exactly what Karzai, when he accepted the surrender of the Taliban government, asked them to do.

What do you do when you are part of a Special Operations Task Force with no enemies to identify or target? What we did was target the enemies of the warlords who cooperated with us and in the south of the country the Warlords we supported would be Karzai and his bitter rival Haji Gul Agha Sherzad. The village of Khas Uruzgan provides a perfect example of how we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by relying on those two men.

When the Taliban were routed in an epic battle pitting a Special Forces A-team headed up by Maj. Jason Amerine and dozens fast movers (jets) vs. a couple thousand  Taliban just outside the provincial capitol of Tirin Kot the local Afghans held jirga’s and agreed to candidates for the positions of district mayor, district chief of police, etc… Unfortunately, the acting president (Karzai) sent one of his friends named Jan Muhammad, to be the provincial governor and Jan Mohammad intended to put his fellow tribesmen (Popalzai) into every paying billet in his province.

In towns like Khas Uruzgan the men selected by the people to govern them moved into the district center and started accepting weapons from surrendering Taliban. Jan Mohammad, who had just been released from the Taliban prison by Karzai himself, moved into the provincial governors compound and promptly appointed his tribesmen  to every district governor and police chief billet in the province.

In Khas Uruzgan the man elected by the jirga occupied the district governors compound. Next door was a schoolhouse where Jan Mohammad’s men (representing the Kabul government)  set up shop.  Both groups were busy dis-arming Taliban and there were a ton of weapons in both buildings.

In late 2002 the U.S. Army conducted a raid on both buildings (which they thought held Taliban), killing several men in the process and yoking up several more for interrogations at the Bagram airbase. Anand Gopal, in his excellent book No Good Men Among the Living describes the results of this raid:

Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies. People in Khas Uruzgan felt what Americans might if, in a single night, masked gunmen had wiped out the entire city council, mayor’s office, and police department of a small suburban town: shock, grief, and rage.

It would be years before the United States admitted they had raided the wrong place. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (the current senior Taliban negotiator) had gone to ground near Khas Uruzgan and our Special Forces decimated not one, but two wedding parties (with AC-130 gunships) in an attempt to catch him. Dozens of children and women were killed in these raids and this is important to acknowledge – to the Afghan people there were two wars, one that drove the Taliban from power quickly and a second one that started when we stayed on in the country to “capture senior Taliban and al-Qaida”.  The responsibility of this second war rest solely on the National Command Authority of the United States who failed to define Phase four (what happens when we win).

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, second from left, with members of a Taliban delegation in Russia in 2019.Credit…Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press

If you want to read an infuriating account of our own incompetence making us enemies among people who wanted to be allies during that second round of war, read Chapter 5 of No Good Men Among the Living. It is a detailed description of how we were tricked into detaining and/or killing the entire anti-Taliban leadership of Band-i-Timor in the Maiwand district of Khandahar. You cannot make some of this stuff up.

The opinion peace by Sirajudin Haqqani was a masterstroke of Information Warfare and will be hard to refute by the United States. The Taliban leadership, unlike the American leadership, has skin in the game. There is no reason to doubt their commitment to participate in establishing an Afghanistan free of foreign troops and moving towards a consensus on who is governing what. It is now time for the United States to move out of the way and allow the Afghans to determine what their country will become.

In 2002 the Taliban were defeated and al-Qaida already gone to Pakistan. All the fighting since then has not changed a thing on the ground.  It is time to pull out, reduce funding to Afghanistan and let them sort out the situation among themselves.