The Lie Detector Isn't

The "Lie Detector Machine" was popularized by William Moulton Marsden, who styled himself "the father of the polygraph".  "Polygraph" is the formal name for the device.  "Poly" means "many" and "graph" means "to draw a line".  So a polygraph is literally any device that simultaneously draws several lines.

But we are going to restrict ourselves to the common usage of the word "polygraph".  In common usage, a polygraph is a device that makes several simultaneous physiological measurements of a "subject" and charts the results with the intent of separating true statements from lies.

The polygraph has featured prominently in countless movies and TV episodes.  There, a serious person, the "operator",  hunches over a "chart recorder", on which several squiggly lines spool out onto a long sheet of paper.  Various gadgets are connected to the subject.  The output of each gadget drives the activity displayed by one of the lines.

The operator asks the subject a series of questions and periodically makes makes cryptic marks along the edge of the chart.  When the session ends, he declares either "he's lying" or "he's telling the truth".  He does this by interpreting the squiggles on the chart.  So, what's going on?

Let's start with what's being measured.  One line tracks heart rate.  Another tracks blood pressure.  Still another tracks the rate of respiration.  Another common measurement is skin conductivity.  In this latter case, the idea is that perspiration increases skin conductivity.  So the intent of the measurement is to determine whether the subject is sweating or not.  The operator's cryptic marks are used to indicate when various questions were asked.

Marsden didn't invent the polygraph.  The invention is generally credited to James Mackenzie, a cardiologist.  But many people, including Marsden, contributed to the design that eventually moved into widespread use.  In 1938, for instance, he published a book called The Lie Detector Test.  And it is Marsden who deserves the bulk of the credit for the device becoming a tool used commonly by law enforcement and allied disciplines.

It helped that he was a credentialed scientist.  He received both a Law degree and a PhD in Psychiatry from Harvard.  He went on from there to teach and do research at the college level for many years.  All this preceded his efforts to introduce and popularize the Lie Detector.

So when Professor Marsden later opined on the Lie Detector, it is not surprising that people listened.  Finally, he was a born showman.  He had something to say and a way of saying it that attracted attention while also sounding completely credible.

All in all, he was a fascinating character.  There is a very interesting movie called Professor Marsden and the Wonder Woman that is an easy way to learn more about him.  Yes!  He's also the guy who invented the Wonder Woman of comic book and now movie fame.  And he spent most of his adult life living under the same roof with two women and their children.  Like I said, fascinating.

But back to the device itself.  Marsden succeeded in convincing large segments of law enforcement and the public that the polygraph was an accurate way to determine whether a person was lying or telling the truth.

But the actual device is more wish fulfilment than reality.  We wish that there is an infallible way of determining whether a person is being truthful or not.  So, if "experts" tell us that the polygraph can perform that feat, we want to believe them.  But does it?

The potential effectiveness of the device depends on an assumption.  The assumption is that your level of stress is higher when you are lying than when you are telling the truth.  Telling the truth is easy, so the assumption goes, so that you will remain calm while doing so.  Lying leads to agitation.  Agitation leads to stress.  If this assumption of a correlation between lying and stress is true then the device should work as advertised.

The device does do a pretty good job of measuring stress.  And that led to a considerable amount of early success.  Back then, few people knew much about the machine or what it actually did.  Marsden and other proponents would spit out a bunch of authoritative sounding mumbo jumbo.  Both members of law enforcement community and people suspected of a crime had every reason to believe what they were saying.  And that led to a self fulfilling prophesy.

If a suspect believed that the Lie Detector worked, and why wouldn't he, then all of a sudden it becomes very dangerous to lie while hooked up to the machine.  And danger is closely associated with elevated levels of stress.  If follows that an attempt to lie is likely to increase the suspect's pulse rate, quicken his breathing, cause him to start sweating, etc.

Not all the indicators changed significantly every time.  But enough of them did for a skilled operator to detect the changes that signaled a lie.  The polygraph's ability to detects changes in the level of stress a suspect was experiencing actually did correlate reasonably well with whether he was lying or telling the truth.

But all this depends on the subject not knowing much about the machine or how it works.  The widely held belief of the time that the machine performed as advertised completed the chain of causation that made the machine work much of the time.

But the device has now been around for a hundred years.  Far more is now known about the machine by anyone who has looked into it.  But also and more importantly far more is now known by criminals and others who have a vested interest in learning how to reliably "beat" the machine by lying without the machine catching them at it.

They now know that the machine can be beaten, and it can be beaten fairly easily.  How often is it actually beaten?  We don't know because the people who are in a position to keep track don't.  They have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that Lie Detectors work and are highly accurate.  So they go out of their way to avoid keeping track of how often and by whom the machine has been beaten.

The basic way to beat the machine is to break the correlation between lying and stress.  Even in the early days some people were able to beat the machine.  Back then nobody understood how they were able to do so.

We now know that anyone who doesn't find lying stressful can easily beat the machine.  Many con artists fall into this category.  The very attributes that contribute to fooling potential victims contribute to fooling the machine.

Early on, the mechanism didn't matter.  What mattered was that in criminal circles the news got out that some people were able to successfully and repeatedly beat the machine.  That led to a general decrease in fear of the machine by the criminal element.  And that led to a decline in the machine's effectiveness.

And over time the mechanisms that allowed the machine to be beat became clearer.  That led people who were not natural con men to wonder if there were methods they could use to beat the machine.  And it turned out that there are several.

Various forms of meditation aimed at calmness can be used.  Alternatively, techniques used by actors can be used.  One technique actors use is to inhabit their character.  If the mind can be fooled (or trained) into believing that the actor is actually the character being portrayed then the body takes its queues from the mind and responds accordingly.

If the character believes something is true then the physical responses of the body will react accordingly.  Pulse and respiration will be low and steady.  Palms will be dry so skin resistance will be high.  The Lie Detector will indicate that the response is true.

Early on it was hard to determine which group should be believed, the "it works" group, or the "it doesn't work" group.  But since then the "it works" case has gotten progressively weaker and the "it doesn't work" case has gotten progressively stronger.  In fact, no evidence to support the "it works" position has emerged since those early days.  However, the evidence that it doesn't work keeps piling up higher and higher.

In fact, a quick web search will turn up numerous "how to beat a Lie Detector" courses.  Trust me, if these courses didn't deliver results, they would have long since been hounded out of existence by unhappy students.  And the fact that many of these courses are run by people who have retired from the communities that routinely use the machines tells you everything you need to know.

But by now the people who have long championed the routine use of Lie Detectors are heavily invested in their continued use.  They really didn't want to the general public to know how often they fail.  The early failure rate was low.  But it kept increasing and increasing and increasing.  And that just made it more and more important for the Lie Detector's supporters to keep the myth alive.

Distressingly, another group that has become heavily invested in the Lie Detector is the intelligence community.  They have a desperate need to know which of their employees can be trusted and which can't.  Decades ago they pinned their hopes on the Lie Detector.

Yet it is routine for people who turn out to be untrustworthy to pass multiple routine Lie Detector tests.  Pretty much all of the high profile espionage cases you can think of fall into this category.  But efforts to do away with it's use within the intelligence community keep failing.  It still remains in routine part of employee screening.

If I was teaching a "how to beat the Lie Detector" course I would have a Lie Detector on hand.  That way I could keep testing students until it became apparent to them that they could reliably beat the machine.  That would be the best way to show them that they were getting value for their money.  It would also have the additional benefit of making the taking of "real world" Lie Detector tests far less stressful.  (If they couldn't become proficient in beating the machine I would refund their money.)

Lie Detectors are inexpensive and easy to get hold of.  They consist entirely of standard electronic/medical components.  You can find one that substitutes your computer for the chart recorder on Amazon for from $100 to $200, depending on how fancy you want.  For instance, the "Police" version will set you back $140 plus tax and shipping.

It's bad that anyone can easily get their hands on one so that they can play around with it.  It's even worse is that pretty much anybody can become a "Polygraph Examiner".  All you need to do is get a job administering polygraph tests.

Many organizations that use polygraphs require no training or accreditation for the people that they hire to operate them.  After all, it's not very hard.  You can figure out most of what you need to know by watching a few movies or TV shows.

Oh, there is an organization, the American Polygraph Association, that provides a certification service.  And many organizations do require their operators to graduate from an APA certified course.  Doing so allows you to be able to call yourself a "Certified Polygraph Examiner".

But it is harder to get a license to sell real Estate than it is get your APA certification.  This seems like the sort of thing a Community Collee would want to provide.  But there are no colleges, community or otherwise on the APA list.  The whole thing is so sketchy that even for profit colleges won't touch it.

And this is a big problem because it is relatively easy for the examiner to cook the results so that the guilty look innocent and the innocent look guilty.  To make an innocent person look guilty, for instance, all the examiner has to do is to use various techniques to bias the results in that direction.

He can change his tone of voice.  He can vary the timing of his questioning.  He can emphasize or de-emphasize various words or phrases.  Or he can just crank up the sensitivity of the machine whenever the subject is asked a key question.  That will make the needles swing wildly even though the subject is completely calm.  The possibilities for mischief are endless.

This sort of manipulation is forbidden by the APA guidelines.  But the enforcement of the guidelines is completely ineffective.  And there are often incentives present for biasing results in the direction of the outcome preferred by whoever is paying for the examination.  Is conscious manipulation rampant?  No one knows.  I suspect the big problems are incompetence and overreliance on ambiguous results.  But I don't know.

It should be no surprise that there is no scientific validation for the idea that a polygraph examination functions as an effective test for the honesty of the subject.  In fact, to the extent that careful studies have been undertaken,  they confirm the unreliability of the method.  James "the Amazing" Randy, the late noted magician and debunker, has beat a Lie Detector under controlled circumstances.  It's just not that hard to do.

So why are they still in widespread use?  Follow the money.  There is no money in admitting that they are bunk.  There is, however, lots of money in pretending that they work.  This is one of the many situations where money talks.  And what it has to say makes things worse, not better.

Windows 11

 The last time I posted on updating to a new version of Windows was way back in 2014.  Here's the link:  Sigma 5: Windows 8.1 - try 1.  Microsoft has a mixed record when it comes to Windows versions.  Many of them are successful, but some of them are failures.

Windows 7 was a big success.  Then Microsoft made a giant leap with Windows 8.  It flopped.  They tried to recover with Windows 8.1.  It too flopped.  As I noted in my long ago post, I ended up giving up on Windows 8.1.  I test drove it briefly, then I went back to Windows 7.  (I never even tried Windows 8.)

Windows 8 was supposed to be a "swings both ways" release.  It was supposed to work well on desktops and laptops, machines that come with a keyboard and a "pointing device" (mouse or touchpad).  Windows 7 worked very well on those kinds of machines.  Windows 8/8.1 was supposed to work equally well on them.

But it was also supposed to work well on tablets, touch screen devices that lack a keyboard and use a the touch screen as a substitute for the pointing device.  Windows 7 worked less well on those kinds of devices.  The idea with 8/8.1 was to provide a common software environment that software developers could write to that would smoothly span both environments.

Windows 8/8.1 was a technical success but it was a commercial failure.  Developers could now write to a common standard.  But, since customers stayed away in droves, why bother?  Microsoft eventually recovered with Windows 10.  It dropped the annoying features of 8/8.1.  It added some improvements, but, for the most part it was perceived as a refresh of Windows 7 that contained little new.

That was an accurate perception.  Windows 10 was a popular success.  I upgraded my machines to it, and so did lots of other people.  That success left Microsoft wondering how to move to a version of Windows that would succeed where 8/8.1 had failed.

It would work well, both in a keyboard/mouse environment, and in a touch-screen environment.  But what they came up with this time also had to be popular with customers.  Microsoft has spent several years trying to come up with such a solution.

But before moving on to the solution that Microsoft has finally come up with, it is worth while looking at a very substantial change that Microsoft made with Windows 10.  It wasn't a technical change.  It was a change in the way they did business.

Previously, if you wanted to move to the new version of Windows, you had to pay an upgrade fee.  For instance, if you were running Windows 7 and wanted to move to 8/8.1 you had to buy an "upgrade" license.  The upgrade version, which was much cheaper than the regular version, included code that validated that you had an authentic Windows 7 license before permitting the installation to proceed.

This business of offering a full price "regular" version and a heavily discounted "upgrade" version of each new release had been the way Microsoft did business all the way back to the days of the DOS 1.1 upgrade to DOS 1.0.  But with Windows 10, Microsoft decreed that if you had a license for Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 you could upgrade for free.

That's not what Microsoft initially said.  They initially said, "if you upgrade within the first six months - it's free.  But if you wait, it will cost you."  But Microsoft never enforced the "it will cost you" part.  Even if you performed the upgrade long after that original offer had expired, you were allowed to upgrade for free anyhow.  Why would Microsoft do that?  It turns out that there are sound business reasons for what they did.

Most people get their Windows license by buying a new computer.  New PCs always come with one or another version of Windows pre-installed.  You used to need to enter an "Activation Code" the first time you used the PC, but not any more. It is now preloaded into BIOS at the factory.  Now, the installation process checks for it, finds it, validates it, and that's that.

You used to need to enter a special "upgrade" Activation Code as part of the process of upgrading to a new version of Windows.  But no more.  The Activation Code for the older version of Windows works for the newer version of Windows.  That makes it easier (and cheaper) to upgrade Windows to a newer version.  But most people don't bother..  And that leads to a lot of people running older versions of Windows.  And that has financial implications for Microsoft.

This new way of doing business means that Microsoft is losing some revenue, the money brought in by selling upgrade licenses.  But it also means that there are lots of customers out there that expect Microsoft to support two, three, or even more versions of Windows.  That entailed substantial cost, likely considerably more than the revenue brought in by selling upgrade licenses.

But wait, there's more.  Viruses and malware started out as a modest problem.  But it has grown and grown and grown.  And Window developed a reputation for being easy to hack.  That was bad for Windows' (and Microsoft's) reputation.

And that hit to Microsoft's reputation had a detrimental effect on Microsoft's earnings over the long term. This has caused Microsoft has put more and more effort into making Windows harder to hack as the years have passed.  Windows is now far harder to hack than it used to be.  But, in many cases the "fix" to Windows involved a substantial rewrite.  Microsoft had plenty of money, so cost wasn't the problem.  But the necessary changes had a ripple effect.

No problem.  Release a "new and improved" version of Windows.  But what if lots of people stick with the old, flawed version?  Eventually, the business case for giving the "upgrade" version of Windows away for free became compelling.  Microsoft put the original version (1511) of Windows 10 out in 2015.  Since then, if you had a PC that ran Windows 7, or anything newer, upgrades to Windows have been free.

That had not caused everyone to upgrade to the new version.  But it has caused a lot more people to do so than otherwise would have.  And Microsoft invested a lot of effort in making sure that old hardware could run the latest version of Windows 10.  I recently did some work on a PC that was built in about 2007 and was originally loaded with Windows Vista.  (That's the version that came after "XP" and before "7".)  Windows 10 runs like a top on that machine.

And we can see this playing out all over the place.  Hackers need a way in to, for instance, install Ransomware.  Time after time their way in has involved exploiting a well known weakness in an older version of Windows.  They wouldn't have been able to get in if the computer was running Windows 10, but it wasn't.

Many organizations (schools, hospitals) don't have the staff necessary to keep on top of upgrades.  Profitable corporations, especially ones that use computers to control machinery, have the money and staff necessary to keep their PCs up to date.

But they use some of their PCs to run vendor supplied software that is used to control the vendor's hardware.  And if the vendor doesn't update its software to work on the newest version of Windows, something that happens far too often (and here I can speak from personal experience), then the corporation is forced to run an old version of Windows on some of its PCs.

This is a widespread problem that no one talks about.  The computers on the Deepwater Horizon, the oil drilling platform that blew up and sunk in the Gulf of Mexico more than a decade ago, was running a very old version of Windows out of necessity.  That disaster spilled millions of gallons of nasty crude oil into the gulf of Mexico.

Hacking was not involved in that disaster.  But computer problems did contributed to the disaster in a big way.  The vendors who provided most of the machinery used on the platform didn't update their drivers.  And that meant that key computers were running an old version of Windows that crashed regularly.  When things started to go wrong the key computer was in the middle of crashing.

Ransomware attacks, not exploding oil drilling platforms, have been much in the news recently.  But often the root cause is the same.  Hackers need a way to get inside and install their malware.  And old versions of Windows have often been their way in.

Once they are in, they can steal data and encrypt files, even if the data and files are located on servers running the latest version of Windows.  Stolen data and encrypted files are the foundation of a successful Ransomware attack.

But back to the subject at hand.  This problem of forcing corporations to sometimes run older versions of Windows on some of their computers has put Microsoft in a bind.  The "the upgrade is free" change in busines practice has at least let Microsoft can say "we provided you with a free upgrade to a version that didn't have the vulnerability".

Unfortunately, although the statement is true, it that only goes so far.  Microsoft does not want to badmouth their customer base any more than necessary.  So, Microsoft ends up sometimes having to step in and help companies that get hit.

But their costs (and reputational hit) are still lower than they otherwise would be.  Since the upgrade is free, many businesses have upgraded many computers that would otherwise still be running old versions of Windows.  And that brings us to Windows 11.

Upgrading to Windows 11 is free to anyone who is currently running Windows 10.  Eventually, all Windows 10 customers will be offered the free upgrade through Microsoft's "Windows Update" feature.  If you don't see that option, and you don't want to wait, then click on this link:  Download Windows 11 (microsoft.com).  There, you will be given several options.

The simplest is to click the "Download Now" option in the "Windows 11 Installation Assistant" section.  This will download a small "helper" program.  If you run that program and select the correct options it will download Windows 11 from the Internet and use it to upgrade your computer.  Warning:  You will need Administrator privilege to do this.  No intermediate steps will be required.  (BTW, for thirty days Windows 11 will include a "Revert" option that will let you revert your machine back to Windows 10.)

However, there is a catch.  A wide variety of hardware could be upgraded to Windows 10.  On paper, it looked like the same would be true for Windows 11.  The "specs" that were widely bruited about before Windows 11 was released were modest.  A Windows 11 capable machine must have  4 GB of RAM and about 70 GB of free disk space on the "C:" drive.  A CPU speed requirement was also listed, but it was so modest that any kind of PC would qualify.

But when Windows 11 became available on October 5, 2021, it turned out that there were additional, far more stringent requirements.  One was easy enough to meet.  From the start, hard disks could be divided into "partitions".  Each partition functioned like an independent disk drive.  This capability required a "Partition Table" to tell the software where things started and ended.  The Partition Table had to be put somewhere.

The early version put it in a place called the MBR - Master Boot Record.  The good news / bad news is that the MBR could hold software.  For instance, this was a handy place to put "Device Driver" code that might be necessary to handle the particular make and model of the Hard Disk on your computer.

But hackers quickly figured out that the MBR was also a great place to put malware.  Placing malware in the MBR let it load and put protections in place before the operating system (Windows) got loaded.  For technical reasons I am not going to go into, that made the malware both harder to detect and harder to dislodge.

For that and other reasons, a new method was created called GPT - GUID Partition Table.  It has better security and some other advantages.  Windows 11 requires that a GPT be used instead of an MBR.  If the Hard Disk on your computer currently uses an MBR then this sounds like a big problem, but it isn't.

First, for many years now the BIOS on PCs have supported both MBR and GPT (or just GPT).  Second, there are utilities that will convert an MBR Hard Disk into a GPT Hard Disk.  So, if your PC has an MBR Hard Disk, all you have to do is to run the utility and convert your Hard Disk from MBR to GPT.  Your PC has to be pretty old for it to not support GPT.

A much bigger problem is that, for reasons I can't figure out (but I have a suspicion), Windows 11 requires that your PC have a relatively new CPU.  If you have an Intel CPU it must be "Coffee Lake" or newer.  Intel started shipping Coffee Lake CPUs in late 2017.

So, if your "Intel Inside" PC was built on or after 2018, you should be okay.  If your PC was built on or before 2016, you are out of luck.  If your PC was built in 2017 your chances are not good.  (There are similar requirements for AMD and other brands of CPU, but I didn't dig into them.)

I think the third new requirement drives the processor requirement.  Your PC must support TPM 2.0.  To do so, a custom Crypto chip must be incorporated into the motherboard.  The required chip supports onboard crypto and some other security related features.  With Windows 10, TPM 2.0 was optional.  With Windows 11, it is required.

I suspect that any PC that has a new enough processor also supports TPM 2.0.  And it does it in such a way as to prevent hackers from interfering with its proper functioning.

Microsoft runs a WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) every year.  That's where hardware issues are hashed out.  The year's results are boiled down and incorporated into a document.  Each annual document provides "new and improved" guidance to the hardware community regarding Windows and hardware requirements.

Microsoft can then shorthand the hardware requirements of a particular version of Windows as "WinHEC version nnnn".  One of these versions laid out how TPM 2.0 was to be implemented.  Windows 11 requires conformance to a much newer version of the WinHEC document than Windows 10 did.

Back in the day, Microsoft used to provide a "Compatibility" utility every time it released a new version of Windows.  You ran the utility and it told you whether you had any hardware issues associated with running the new version of Windows on your hardware setup.  Sadly, they stopped doing that several years ago.  With Windows 11, it's back.  The Windows11 Compatibility utility is called "PC Health Check".

To find out if your PC has any hardware issues that will prevent it from running Windows 11 go here:  Upgrade to the New Windows 11 OS | Microsoft.  Then scroll all the way down to a banner that says "Check for Compatibility".  Then click on the text that says "DOWNLOAD PC HEALTH CHECK APP".

Once the download completes, open the file and install the application.  Warning:  You will need Administrator privileges to do this.  (If you have trouble finding the file, it should be in your "Downloads" directory.)  It will tell you if you're good to go or not.

If you decide to upgrade to Windows 11, what can you expect?  I reviewed the "what's new" articles in the technical press prior to it becoming available and I was underwhelmed.  Microsoft is characterizing it as a major upgrade.  That's why they changed the name from "Windows 10" to "Windows 11".  But, as far as I can tell, that's an exaggeration.  But then I might not be in a position to judge.

I run desktop PCs.  If you run a laptop with a built in keyboard and touch pad then your experience should be similar to mine.  The changes are minor.  But remember that the whole point of Windows 8/8.1 was to provide an operating system that worked well for people like myself, but also for people with touch screen machines.

Windows 11 takes another shot at doing just that.  Since all my PCs have keyboards, and I like it that way, I have no experience with the touchscreen environment.  So, maybe the touch screen crowd are seeing big differences that I am not aware of.

In any case, I was a bit leery of Windows 11 going in.  But my opinion has completely turned around.  Prior to experiencing Windows 11 for myself I grouped the changes into two groups.  Group one consisted of all the changes that I didn't care about (i.e. touch screen changes).

Group two consisted of all the changes I cared about that looked like they replaced something I liked with something I would likely not like.  But I'm a techie.  I have a responsibility to try new things out.  So, with some trepidation, I did.

And I find that I quite like Windows 11.  It does look beautiful.  And I find that they did what I expected.  They changed some thing from something I liked to something I didn't.  But I also found something they changed where the new version looks like an improvement to me.  So, what did they change?  It turns out, not as much as I thought.

One thing that often bedevils upgraders is drivers.  As far as I can tell, Microsoft did not change the driver model.  That means that Windows 10 drivers also work on Windows 11.  So, if you have a Windows 10 PC where the drivers for all your hardware work fine, then the same will be true after you upgrade to Windows 11.  Since driver issues are the source of most upgrade issues, for you, the update process should be a smooth one.

BTW, for planning purposes you should know that it took about 45 minutes to upgrade my machine.  But it is a high-end PC with an SSD disk drive.  If you are lacking in one or the other (or both) of these then the upgrade may take considerably longer on your PC.  And all my non-Windows software came over without a hiccup.  And all my data was all still there, just where I expected it to be.  So, what did change?

The most obvious change is to the Task Bar.  The stuff that was on the left end is now in the center.  I don't know why they did it, but everybody's guess is that they wanted to move closer to how Apple does it.  I wish they hadn't done it, but it is not a big deal.

The change they made to how the right end of the Task bar works is more problematic.  Apparently Microsoft doesn't know what to call that part of the Taskbar, so they refer to this area as the "Taskbar corner".  Lame.  This is where, among other things, some Icons that belong to running applications and services reside.  They are still in roughly the same place.

But there used to be a setting that caused them all to always display.  Without the "all" setting being ON some of them may get hidden under a "^" Icon.  The "all" setting is gone.  And I miss it.  Can I live with the new rules?  Yes!  But I liked the old rules better.  Anyhow, this is a bigger deal but not that big of a deal.

Then there is "Settings".  This has gotten completely reengineered.  Settings seems to be something that Microsoft can't stop themselves from changing every chance they get.  Back in the day there was the "Control Panel" (and something else before that).  The default was groups.  You could then drill down within a group and get to whatever you wanted to fiddle with.  But they gave you a way to "show everything at the same time".  I took advantage of that option.

With Windows 10 they hid (it's still around if you know where to look, even in Windows 11) the Control Panel and replaced it with the "Settings" gear.  Was Settings a big improvement?  No!  It was just a different way of doing the same thing.  It was functionally equivalent to the old Control Panel in the Groups configuration.  Well, with Windows 11 they have now redone Settings to make it more like the old Control Panel with the "show everything" option turned on.

They have made a lot of changes here and there with specific settings.  But the general idea is the same.  It's another of those "change for change sake" things.  But I have been though many generations of "change for change sake" in this area.  So, I have become adaptable.  It took me about fifteen minutes to get used to the new version.  Is it an improvement?  I wouldn't go so far as to say that.

You soon encounter the big change.  What comes up when you click the "Start" button has been completely redone.  With Windows 10 you had columns.  The left-most column contained critical controls like "Power" and "Settings".  Next over, you had a column with an alphabetical list of all the normal applications.  Finally, to the right of these you had the "Wing".  This layout has been changed completely.

The division into vertical columns has been replaced by a division into horizontal sections.  The top section contains the "Search" box that used to be located next to the "Start" button on the Task Bar.  I never used it much, so I don't much care where it is.  But I do appreciate getting the real estate this used to take up on the Task Bar back.

The next section down is a box into which all the stuff that used to be on the Wing has been moved.  The Icons on the Wing came in various sizes, which could be changed.  Wing Icons could also be animated, if the application chose to do so.  For instance, a weather report would continuously update within the "Weather" Icon.  I never liked the Wing.  I always got rid of it by deleting all the Icons on it.

Now all the Icons are small, standard sized squares that are not animated.  I now find this to be a handy place to put links to Applications I frequently use.  (You can still put shortcuts on the Task bar, and I do.)  But, for instance, this is where I now go to find the Settings Icon.  And there is now an "All Apps" link in this area that lets you get to the full alphabetical list of applications.  That works for me.

Below that is another section.  It lists all of the files that you have accessed recently.  I might come to like this.  So far, I just ignore it.  And at the bottom is a section containing a "User" ("User" is replaced by the username you are logged into Windows with) Icon and a "Power" Icon.  So, the three Icons, (Power, Settings, and User) that I used from that left-most column are still easily accessible.  I am very happy with what they have done to the Start Button.

That's it for noticeable differences.  I think that a not-so-noticeable difference will loom large over time.  TPM 2.0 looks like the foundation of a big improvement in security.  With Windows 10 applications developers had to allow for the possibility that it was there and also that it wasn't.  With Windows 11, they can count on it always being there.

And, in this context, Microsoft is a developer.  They develop applications like Office.  Over time they can change Office so that, if it detects that it is running on Windows 11, then it does security a different and more effective way.

Other developers can do the same.  And, in this context Windows itself is an application.  Microsoft can rework more and more of Windows to depend on the presence of TPM 2.0.  This release of Windows 11 was delivered on deadline, so they likely only made the change to a dependance on TPM 2.0 in a few critical places.

But over time Microsoft can update more and more components of Windows to use security based on TPM 2.0.  These updates can be rolled out in an incremental fashion using the Windows Update process.  In many cases, the change may not even be apparent to users.  But let's hope that these changes make life more and more difficult for hackers.

I think that over time incremental updates to Windows 11 will make it much more secure than even Windows 10 was.  If this is not what Microsoft was thinking, then it was stupid for them to obsolete so many computers by making TPM 2.0 required rather than optional.  But, if that's the plan, then the new hardware requirement is one I applaud.

Finally, a note on versioning.  Microsoft has been using a standard way of naming versions of Windows 10 for a couple of years now.  The first two characters are a number.  They represent the last two digits of the year in which the version is released.  The third character is an "H".  It stands for "Half", as in the half of the year the version was released in.  The final character is another digit.   "H1" stands for "first half of the year".  "H2" stands for second half of the year.

The version name of the last Windows 10 release was 21H1 because it was released in the first half of 2021.  The version number of this first release of Windows 11 is 21H2, the version name that would have been assigned to the next update of Windows 10.  Windows 11 version 21H2 represents an incremental improvement to Windows 10 version 21H1, rather than a radical departure.

But that has been the announced plan for Windows for years.  Instead of a big disruptive upgrade very few years Windows would evolve by taking small to medium steps twice per year.  No one step would be a dramatic change from the previous one.  The name change might suggest otherwise, but Microsoft is actually sticking to the incremental evolution plan.  I, for one, am grateful.

D.C. Brinskmanship

As I write this the news out of our nation's capitol is all about gridlock and other variations on the concept of gridlock.  The "debt ceiling" is being hit in a few days.  Legislation appears to be hopelessly stalled on every front.  The big $3.5 Build Back Better bill seems to be in trouble.  Efforts to do something about voting rights are stalled.  Immigration reform is stalled after the Senate Parliamentarian said it was not a "primarily fiscal" issue".   We are squabbling about what to do about the thousands of Haitians who magically appeared on our borders a few days ago.  Angst about the Afghanistan Withdrawal blankets everything.  I could go on.

So, it's all hopeless, right?  No!  First of all, the roadblock standing in the way of progress on each and every one of these issues is a man-made one.  (If I could pin even one blockage on a woman I would use different language.  The only possible candidate is Nancy Pelosi.  It's hard to come up with a credible reason to blame her for any of this.)  All these impasses can be resolved by a simple change in the behavior by the appropriate people.

Beyond that. there's this.  It's how the system works.  All the people involved in these impasses have constituencies they are responsible to.  Someone is not going to get everything they want.  So how do the losers tell their supporters that they failed to deliver?  They say "I tried - really hard.  I strove mightily, but in the end I was unsuccessful."  If their supporters don't believe this statement then they are in big trouble.  It helps if they are seen to be publicly striving mightily before they give up at what everybody agrees is the last possible second.

The debt ceiling is somewhat of an outlier in this list.  Most of the items are new initiatives.  The debt ceiling crisis is a routine crisis.  It involving a routine piece of obscure bookkeeping.  It has reached crisis state many times before.  It will no doubt do so again a few years down the road.

It is also a crisis that shouldn't even exist.  I am indebted to Rachel Maddow for bringing to my attention the origin story of this idiotic piece of anti-governance.  (She relied upon, and credited the sources she used, but I am going to spare you.)

It turns out that World War I is the culprit.  When World War I started in 1914 there was a broad isolationist consensus in this country.  From Washington's "beware of foreign entanglements" to the time when War broke out, the U.S. had found it advantageous to sit on the sideline of major conflicts. The President at the time, Wilson, was a committed isolationist.

And isolation worked to the advantage of the U.S.  The country made a bloody fortune selling Apples, Zinc, and everything in between, to the combatants.  On the other hand, all the major European powers of the time pretty much bankrupted themselves.  They spent what they had and what they could borrow in an effort to win, or more importantly not lose, the War.

The U.S. ended up with a much larger economy and a greatly expanded manufacturing capability.  It also ended up holding a large part of the debt these countries had run up, so our financial and banking segments were much larger by the end of the war.  This transfer of wealth between nations was on a previously unheard of scale.  It single handedly vaulted the U.S. from being a second or third rate power to being a first rate power.  And the change took only a few years.

Before the War the British had the economic and financial resources necessary to maintain the British Empire, still the largest empire ever to exist in the entirety of recorded history.  By War's end they no longer did.  They also sacrificed a generation or more of manpower to the slaughter that was trench warfare.  To a substantial extent, the same story applied to all the European powers.

That left them short of the economic and financial resources necessary to maintain their various foreign  empires.  It also left them with a critical manpower shortage.  It takes a large number of men to populate the various colonial armies necessary to maintain control over foreign holdings.  It also requires a substantial number of men to operate the bureaucracy that is critical to keeping the machinery of empire running smoothly.

By the end of the war, the British Empire in particular was a dead man walking.  It's just that it took a another generation and another war for this to become obvious.  Meanwhile, the fat foreign contracts had caused a giant growth spurt in U.S. industry and agriculture.  In the U.S. jobs were plentiful, the pay was good, and the country was at peace.

But the U.S. did eventually enter the War.  So, what caused the U.S. do a "180"?  It turns out that this is a subject that I have never delved into deeply.  I am not going to do it now.  If you want to take a deep dive on your own, I recommend three books by Barbara Tuchman.  They are The Guns of August, The Proud Tower, and The Zimmermann Telegram.  She is a good writer.  If you have an interest in history, you will find them well worth your time.

Wilson was a two term President.  His reelection campaign relied heavily on the slogan "he kept us out of war".  Nevertheless, he subsequently changed his mind and supported the U.S. entry into the War.  Even without the specifics, it is easy to imagine that this was a controversial decision.  One way he blunted criticism to his change of heart was by addressing a key issue head on.

Wars cost money.  As I have just noted, they often end up costing far more money than anyone predicted at their start.  The financial travails of various European powers were well documented in U.S. newspapers of the time.  The possibility of the U.S. going down the same rabbit hole could not simply be waved away.  Wilson's response to this legitimate concern was to propose a law that limited the absolute amount of debt the U.S. government could run up.

That proposed law eventually went into effect.  It's implementation is where the current debt ceiling crisis all started.  It was a sop to the people opposed to the U.S. entry into World War I.  It was supposed to be a temporary measure that could be let lapse when the War ended.  But it has never been allowed to expire.  The reason is simple.  No benefit accrues to a politician campaigning for its elimination.  What does accrue is a lot of grief.

The whole process has been streamlined over the ensuing decades.  Now, a single sentence in a single clause in a single law in the many thousands of pages of laws that make up the United States Code, is now all that needs to be tinkered with.  (If you see a reference to something like 21 USC 1243.1.a(3), the "USC" part stands for United States Code, the Federal law of the land.  It is organized into volumes, so "21 USC" refers to volume 21.  The rest just drills down deeper and deeper until you end up at a single specific clause.)

Raising the debt ceiling simply requires updating that one sentence.  It now comes in one of two forms.  The sentence most often specifies a single number like "the debt shall not  exceed 29 Billion dollars".  In an alternate form the sentence specifies a specific date like "the debt ceiling is suspended until July 31, 2021".  This latter version shows just how ridiculous the whole process has become.

Whenever we are approaching whatever the current limit is, the standard response is to modify the sentence to allow the debt to go higher.  This charade serves no practical purpose.  The debt limit has always been raised in the past.  What it does serve, then and now, is a political purpose.

Some group uses the occasion as a reason to accuse another group of "profligate" and "irresponsible" spending.  And that's just the start of the nonsense that gets spewed.  The responsible thing to do is to pay what you owe.  Not raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible.  And the profligacy, if such exists, is located elsewhere.

The U.S. government has hit, or come close to hitting, the debt ceiling something like 78 times since that first version of the law was passed more than a century ago.  The sensible thing, assuming getting rid of it entirely is off the table, is to just change the sentence to put off for a few more years the time when the Federal Government will again hit this entirely artificial barrier.

And it is important to remember that, with or without a debt ceiling law, the Federal Government can't spend money absent an "authorization", a special kind of law that must be passed by Congress and signed by the President.  Of course, we could tie the two together by having authorizations automatically raise the debt ceiling by the appropriate amount, but that would be too sensible.

While the debt ceiling has no practical purpose, it can, and often does, serve a significant political purpose.  It can be used to score political points on your opponent.  This time around the Republican believe that they can score political points on the Democrats.

So they have decided that they will not support an increase in the debt ceiling.  "Democrats are in charge.  Let them do it all by themselves."  That's their argument.  The problem is that it will take 10 Republicans in the Senate to help out due to the equally idiotic "Filibuster" rule that currently controls Senate procedure.

We've been to this particular rodeo several times in the recent past.  To change metaphors in mid stream, as with a remake of a movie that came out only a few years previously (Spider Man, anyone), we know how the movie ends before we even buy our ticket.  If the remake of the debt ceiling crisis follows the same plot as the older version version, then we know how this version will end too.  Here's a peak at the script for "debt ceiling crisis" movies.

Act one starts with important people (politicians, the press) noticing that we are getting perilously close to reaching the debt ceiling.  Sides are chosen and the expenditure of vast quantities of hot air begins.  But at this point there is insufficient pressure to blast either side loose, so everybody digs in.  This act concludes when the debt ceiling is reached.

Hitting the debt ceiling starts act two.  In the past the Treasury Department has been able to use several tricks and accounting gimmicks to stave disaster off for a while.  They have now become expert at doing this.  So, from the audience's perspective not much changes.  In fact, the early stages act two look pretty much like act one.

In writing parlance what happens in act two is called a "try - fail cycle".  The hero tries a few different things.  They all fail.  We applaud him for trying, but are disappointed with the lack of success.

He fails because the pressure is still insufficient to budge anyone.  Some details change but the general picture stays the same.  The public continues to observe the expenditure of vast quantities of hot air and not much else.

Act three starts when the Treasury runs out of gimmicks and tricks.  Now the pressure starts to really build.  But a lot of gimmickry continues.  The government does not shut down completely.  By mutual consent "essential services" continue to be provided.  There is no legal foundation for this but it happens anyway because nobody objects.  This is the point when pressure starts to build enough to eventually force movement.

This forces the climax, which leads to resolution and the denouement.  The debt ceiling finally gets raised and the curtain descends on this particular iteration of this particular drama.  Key to all this is the blame game.  Whichever side ends up getting blamed the most is eventually forced to cave.  That resolves the climax and we can get on with wrapping things up.

The last couple of times around blame eventually fell most heavily on the Republicans.  This is one occasion where Democrats reap a substantial advantage from the fact that they actually believe in governance.  The won the blame game battle before.  They are geared up to win it again.

So, were are we currently?  We are already in act two.  (See - I told you that it differed little from act one.)  The current version of the debt ceiling specifies that the money ran out at the end of July.  That was almost two months ago.  The Treasury has been using the now standard bag of tricks to keep things going.  This has become so routine that it has garnered zero press attention.

It is expected that we will move to act three on the first of October.  What's special about that date?  The Federal Fiscal year runs from the first of October to the end of September.  (I have no idea why.)  That means that the current budget authorizations expire and presumably a new ones replaces them.  Experts say that will have the side effect of using up all the gimmicks and forcing the Treasury to stop paying some bills.

The House, which is controlled by the Democrats, has already passed a bill to increase the debt ceiling.  Within the next day or so Senate Democrats are poised to bring that same bill to the floor for a vote.  The expectation is that all the Democrats (and the two independents that caucus with them) will vote for it.  But, due to the Senate Filibuster rule, it will require 60 votes to proceed.  If, as is widely expected, all Senate Republicans vote against it, then passage will be blocked.

That, in general terms, is what happened the last couple of times.  The Democrats made "we want to raise the debt ceiling and keep the government open" noises, but Republicans blocked them.  Eventually the press and the public came down heavily on the side of the Democrats and against the Republicans.  After a shut down of greater or lesser duration (the duration depends on which one you want to talk about) the Republican caved to pressure and the debt ceiling got raised.

I don't know why Republicans don't see this issue as a loser for them and for their party.  One argument in their favor is that their bad behavior hasn't caused them to suffer much.  Their supporters get mad at them when Social Security checks stop getting delivered.  But they either forgive or forget shortly thereafter.

There is some reason to believe that this time it might play out a little differently.  The Filibuster rule is just one of many rules that govern how the Senate goes about its business.  Since it's just a Senate rule, it can be changed to eliminate the Filibuster completely.  All that is required is for the Senate to vote on it.  A simple majority of Senators will carry the day.

Theoretically, Democrats could do it on their own as they have exactly enough votes within their caucus.  But that is true only if everybody goes along.  Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Christian Sinema of Arizona, and perhaps other members of the Senate Democratic caucus, have publicly opposed getting rid of the Filibuster.

There are ways to modify the Filibuster without eliminating it entirely.  This has actually been done several times.  The most recent modification was implemented only a few years ago.  The Republicans were in the majority at the time.  They decided that votes on Supreme Court nominees would no longer be subject to being Filibustered.

Senator Manchin has indicated that he might support modifying the rule instead of eliminating it.  But his current position is "not now".  That, and no GOP support for a change, means that the status quo ante continues.

A prolonged shutdown combined with a lack of sufficient movement on the GOP side could cause Senator Manchin and others to change their current positions.  If they do, I expect that we will see a revision of the Filibuster rather than its elimination.  Several "talking Filibuster" options sound interesting.  So, modifying the Filibuster rules is one possibility for dealing with the debt ceiling.  There are others.

Democrats can't really change their stand on increasing the debt ceiling even if they want to.  They have nowhere else to go.  In the past the press has been reluctant to point out the obvious, that the problem is unjustified Republican obstruction.

If the press changes its tune and blasts the GOP from the start, then that might cause the GOP to pay a higher penalty than usual.  And the penalty may kick in more quickly and more completely than it has in the past.

The press has spent decades providing cover for GOP bad behavior.  GOP bad behavior is excused, or more commonly ignored.  Evidence of the slightest Democratic misstep causes the press to immediately go into full cry.

We are currently into heavy navel gazing when it comes to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the handling of the Haiti Refugees on the Texas border, and any number of other causes.  Compare this to the press coverage of GOP recalcitrance on raising the debt limit and much else.  There we see not a peep.

No political reporter who is worth her or his salt should harbor any illusions about what is going on with the debt ceiling fight.  They just need to say out loud what is apparent to all.  If they do that then it is possible that several GOP Senators will peel away from the current GOP obstructionist position and change their votes.

GOP Senators changing their votes is unlikely to happen.  (It is also unlikely that a fight over the debt ceiling will result in a change to the Filibuster rules.  But it IS possible.)  Most likely the GOP will cave as a whole at some point, and some face saving "compromise" will be engineered instead. 

The debt ceiling impasse will eventually be broken.  I have characterized it as the one crisis that is different from the other examples of gridlock and deadlock.  But the debt ceiling crisis does provide a template for how other contentious issues get resolved.

The loser is not going to toss in the towel until the story of their valiant but ultimately unsuccessful effort can believably be told.  Right now everybody thinks that they still have a chance of getting everything they want.  Even if that chance is slim, "it ain't over till it's over", as Yogi Berra once put it.  So, they fight on.

And for the present that means that everything is now gridlocked up.  The pressure has not yet built up to a high enough level to force some of the players to toss in the towel.  How the debit ceiling fight will play out is guided by recent history and restricted to only a few possible options.  Any of the options are possible, but it is already clear what the most likely option is (GOP cave).  With the other issues, the eventual outcomes are harder to predict.

I don't believe that the Biden economic agenda is dead.  The usual way these things are settled is that some horse trading is done.  Everybody gets something but nobody gets everything.  Progressives have made their bid.  They want the whole enchilada.  They want the 1.1 trillion dollar (actually only about half that represents new spending) "infrastructure" bill.  And the also want the 3.5 trillion dollar Build Back Better bill.

I suspect that if the BBB bill was trimmed back to something like 2.5 billion, they would still be happy.  As long it contained most of what they wanted, perhaps funded at lower levels, or spread out over more years, they would be well content.

But so far, the "moderate" faction within the Democratic Party has not made a counteroffer.  (Neither have the Republicans, but they get a pass, because the rules the game is currently played by, say they are.)  I suspect that the "moderates" would be happy if the whole BBB bill went away and only the "infrastructure' bill was left.  But the progressives have said "hell no" to that option.

Past experience predicts that the progressives will blink.  But progressives say that they are acutely aware of that history.  They are not going to be denied this time around.  They point to a decades long history of GOP behavior.

It teaches that you can do wildly irresponsible and unpopular things.  You can, for instance, shut the government down, then cave without getting anything for your trouble.  Later, you pay little or no price for your irresponsibility.  What progressives want to do is both responsible and widely popular.  Their mistake, as they see it, is in not adopting GOP "Scorched Earth" tactics sooner.  

Nobody believes that the progressives will take a page from the Mitch McConnell playbook.  But that's exactly what progressives say they are going to do this time around.  It's just that nobody believes them due to a previous history of routinely caving.  Their strategy looks sound to me, except for one thing.  The people who can throw a monkey wrench into their playbook are, of all people, House Republicans.

"Moderate" Democrats (I keep using scare quotes because in many cases they aren't moderate - instead they are in the pocket of the powerful, pharmaceutical companies in the case of three wayward House Democrats, and the coal industry in the case of Manchin) have demanded that the infrastructure bill come up for a vote on Monday, September 27.

Pelosi has promised that they will get their vote, and it is currently scheduled to happen.  House progressives have vowed to vote "no" if that vote is not preceded by a vote on the BBB bill.  Since as I write this the BBB bill is not ready for a vote, that's not going to happen.  

Normally, "no" votes by the progressive caucus would torpedo the infrastructure bill, at least temporarily.  (There are procedural ways to revive it.)  The strategy should work because all the House Republicans are expected to vote against it.

But what if a bunch of GOP House members vote for it.  It is, after all, a "bipartisan" bill.  And it's full of pork that both Democratic and Republican House members can brag about when they return home to campaign in their district.  If that happened then the bill would pass and progressives would be stuck holding the bag.  We will soon know how this issue plays out, at lest in the short run.

In general, however, it is necessary for extreme pressure to build before various gridlocks get broken.  We are not there yet.  D,C. politicians are too good at performing the "canoe over the falls" trick.  Once the canoe has gone over the falls (i.e., we hit the debt ceiling) the canoe's occupants (i.e. the bill) are doomed, right?

Well, it turns out that politicians are good at playing the trick where the occupants end up clinging to a rock on the lip of the falls.  From there a "miraculous rescue" is effected.  A "date certain", like the one currently associated with the debt ceiling, turns out to not be all that certain after all.

But "drop dead" dates do have value.  They ratchet up the pressure.  By themselves, they are not enough.  But they are a key component of the standard process for breaking gridlocks.

If nothing else, the press likes to hang gridlock stories on drop dead dates.  They then later profess childlike surprise when the problem gets resolved in spite of the fact that the drop dead date was passed.  It would of considerable help if they could be bothered getting riled up well before the drop dead date instead of waiting until it is upon us.

I want to wrap things up by focusing on a broad issue.  Pretty much all of the Biden agenda is currently said to be in trouble.  The main problem is GOP intransigence.  The press doesn't want to talk about that based on the dubious premise that it is "old news".  (The fact that it has been around a long time makes this behavior by the press worse, not better.)

The press can reduce anything to two sides, the "good guys" and the "bad guys".  Since they refuse to shine a light on the GOP, they have instead selected a Democratic bad guy.  At this point, the designated bad guy should come as no surprise.  It is Senator Manchin.  There is considerable justification for this designation.

There are several ways to navigate around the various impasses.  Manchin blocks all of them.  If the Filibuster was history then the Democrats could pass everything with just Democratic votes.  But, as noted above, he is unwilling to eliminate the Filibuster, or for the time being even significantly modify it.

A large part of the Biden agenda can be passed using another arcane Senate Rule, "Budget Reconciliation".  This rule provides a way around the Filibuster.  But Manchin is opposed to all the Democratic bills that can use the Reconciliation process for one reason or another.

So even using Reconciliation to pass legislation is currently impossible.  And Reconciliation is another of those Senate rules that can be changed with by a simple majority.  But he opposed changing the Reconciliation rule.  And that means that the rest of the Biden agenda is DOA due to the Filibuster rule.

So it's all doomed, right?  No!  No one wants to be the bad guy.  Let's say one or more canoes go over the falls.  Then let's say Manchin says "I've had enough.  I'm going to change my position."  That's all it would take for Manchin to flip from being the bad guy to being the hero.

Democrats know that they are in big trouble if the Biden agenda goes down in flames.  They are in especially big trouble if it is an "own goal", if they are widely seen as doing it to themselves.  That spells trouble for lots of them, but especially Manchin.  He is up for re-election in 2022 and his popularity in West Virginia has been plummeting recently.

It will take tremendous pressure to do this.  That pressure will likely build and build as various canoes go over the falls.  There are ways to arrange things so that various pieces of the Biden agenda don't go over the falls with the canoe.  Instead they are found to be clinging to a rock.  From there, heroic activity (always popular with the voters at home) can be employed to rescue them and shepherd them safely into law.

Expect a very intense thirty days.  The political landscape will have changed considerably by then.  For the better or for the worse?  That I can't predict.

Afghanistan versus ???

I thought I was done with Afghanistan for a while, but I keep being drawn back to the subject.  Afghanistan is evolving roughly along the lines I outlined in my recent post (see:  Sigma 5: Afghanistan - A Geopolitical Perspective).  So I see no need to "revise and extend" those remarks.  But I want to continue to provide perspective on the situation.

It has been widely noted that the U.S. effort at nation building in Afghanistan has been a complete, utter, and abject failure.  The conclusion commentators almost without fail leap to is that "nation building is impossible".  But is it?  I want to take a look at a couple of cases from history.  I want to start with Japan, specifically post World War II Japan.

There are a lot of parallels that can be drawn.  As with Afghanistan, Japan has a culture that is drastically different from what passes for culture in the U.S.  It has a different religion, Shinto, which is completely separate from our Judeo-Christian religious tradition.  The Islamic tradition that dominates Afghanistan is actually culturally much closer to our Judeo-Christian tradition than is the case with Shinto.

Japan speaks a different language, Japanese.  Again, there is no connection between Japanese and English (or any other European language).  The Afghans speak several languages.  Some are at least distantly related to European languages.  Some are not.  Japan is a "monoglot" society.  Both the U.S. and Afghanistan are "polyglot" societies.  So, for these reasons an American led effort to nation build in Japan was doomed to failure, right?

Yet America succeeded in Japan while failing in Afghanistan.  Why?  Let's start with what I think are most important attributes of a successful government:  honesty and competence.  The Japan of 1945 was governed honestly and competently.  And Japan had been governed honestly and competently for hundreds of years by that time.  There is lots to object to when it comes to the direction and policies of various Japanese governments across the centuries.  But Japanese leaders were not corrupt hacks.

It is hard to find a period in Afghan history where the country has been governed honestly and competently.  Governance in Afghanistan has always been riddled with factionalism.  And the leaders of the various factions seem to have valued power over pretty much everything else.

There was often little or no effort expended on improving the general welfare.  Instead, most effort was dedicated to to getting into power, staying in power and, if there was anything left over, to increasing the power of whichever factional leader we choose to focus on.

Now, if a Bismarck had arisen in Afghanistan, things might have taken a different path.  Bismarck was power hungry.  But he had a goal, to unite the factions of what became Germany into a single coherent whole.  And he was competent enough to succeed.

It is not that hard to win a battle here or there.  And the fruits of victory on the battlefield often include the control of additional territory.  But, to do what Bismarck did, he have to succeed in integrating that additional territory into the territory he already controlled.  And that integration has to be successful enough and complete enough so that the recently acquired territory didn't just split back away the first time an opportunity presented itself to do so.

Bismarck's genius was not in acquiring territory.  It was in keeping the territory he acquired.  The Bismarck consolidation was a one way street.  There was no back sliding.  In Afghanistan, this or that warlord has been able to win this or that battle.  That has allowed him to expand the amount of territory he controls.  But often control of that additional territory turns out to be fleeting.  No warlord has ever been been able to truly unite Afghanistan the way Bismarck was able to unite Germany.

Japan was united many centuries ago.  There has been no serious effort to break Japan up for so long that the idea is now unimaginable.  With Afghanistan, creating and maintaining a sufficient degree of national unity was and continues to be a problem demanding attention and effort.  For U.S. forces occupying Japan, it was not something they had to worry about.

Factionalism in Afghanistan was just a fact of life in 2002.  Nothing has changed since.  We see it playing out right now.   The Taliban is in nominal control of the entire country.  But there are powerful regions and groups all over the place who seem to have no interest in in remaining subservient to the Taliban for long.

There is another giant difference between 1945 Japan and 2002 Afghanistan.  In 1945 Japan had been engaged into a "turn to the west" for most of a century.  In 1853 U.S. Commodore Perry told the Japanese in no uncertain terms that they needed to open up to the West.  And he demonstrated military might sufficient to force compliance.  At the time Japan was a society that had deliberately closed itself off from outside influence.  Why?

Japan has operated within the sphere of influence of China for well over a thousand years.  China has been a big dog on the world stage for roughly 3,000 years.  That is more than ten times as long as the U.S.  A neighboring country like Japan must choose between only two options:  Accede to China's wishes or resist them.  If you wish to have a distinct cultural identity you must resist.  Japan decided that it wanted its own cultural identity, so it resisted.

Japan had the same benefit the U.S. shared in its efforts to put distance between itself and Europe, a large body of water.  The body of water that separated Japan from China was much narrower than the Atlantic Ocean.  But back in the day nautical technology wasn't as good as it is today, so for a long time it sufficed.

By 1853 Japan had been able for centuries to put significant distance, both politically, culturally, and economically, between itself and China.  But that distance came at a cost.  The cost could be paid in one of several ways.  The method of payment the Japanese had settled on at that time was to strictly enforce a policy of isolation from the outside world.

The policy had its initial impetus as a method of fending off China.  But by the early 1800's Japan's strategy of strict isolationism had expanded to cover everybody, including the U.S.  But when Perry showed up with a fleet of modern naval vessels, Japan realized that it no longer possessed the military might necessary to make isolation stick.

Once Japan's defenses had been breached, there were a number of paths it could have chosen.  The one it chose was that of engagement with the western world.  It embarked on a long term strategy of westernizing its military and its civilian economy.  The balance tilted from rabid "not invented here"-ism to a wild embrace of all things western.

This was particularly true of their military.  In less than fifty years their military went from being unable to deal with the relatively small force Perry had shown up with, to being every bit as capable as many western powers.

They proved this by decisively winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1904/5.  By 1940 they proved to be at least on a par with the British Navy, and at worst, only slightly inferior to the U.S. Navy.  They lost World War II, but it was a close run thing.

So, when the U.S. and the allied powers occupied Japan in late 1945 the Japanese had already westernized considerably.  Further westernization of the country involved pushing on a door that was already open.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, has never wavered from its position of strong resistance to outside, particularly western, influences.  That is an important difference.  Another one is that we took nation building seriously in 1945 and resourced the project accordingly.

The U.S. flooded Japan with both military and civilian resources.  We intruded deeply into the guts of the country.  Japan had been bombed heavily.  We had literally nuked two of their cities.  But we had also burned many cities to the ground the old fashioned way, by dropping massive amounts of incendiaries on them.

The conventional bombing of Tokyo killed far more Japanese than the combined total resulting from the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The percentage of the population of Japan that died in Japan as a result of World War II was far higher than the equivalent percentage in Afghanistan.  The physical destruction was also far greater.

Interestingly enough, unlike with Afghanistan the U.S. made some key accommodations to Japanese culture.  We let them keep their Emperor.  We reduced him from a person with significant political power to a figurehead.  But he retained his traditional place in Japanese society.

And, while we dealt harshly with various Japanese political and military leaders, we left most of the political, economic, and cultural leadership in place.  We just adjusted their priorities and changed their marching orders.

A big reason that this policy choice was adopted for Japan is now known only to history buffs.  The Cold War started pretty much as soon as the War ended in '45.  It quickly became obvious that weakening Japan would weaken the western alliance.  It was much better to get Japan back on its feet as quickly and as completely as possible.  (The same logic also applied to Germany, at this point just "West" Germany, as the Russians controlled "East" Germany at the time.)

So the Japanese economy was quickly put back together.  And the old guard was left in control in spite of the fact that they had been rabid imperialists who had wholeheartedly supported the War against the U.S. and other western powers.  Necessity makes for strange bedfellows.

There was little or no leadership cadre or business establishment to fall back on in Afghanistan.  And, to the extent that such people existed, we made no effort to connect up with them.  Afghanistan has always been an economic basket case.  It struggles to feed its own population in the best of times.  The only business that Afghanistan has been able to keep going for any length of time has been the growing, processing, and exporting of opioids.

Afghanistan has vast mineral wealth, at least according to western experts.  But it has never been politically stable enough and well governed enough to take advantage of this.  And the bar for "enough" is really low.  Large stable diamond industries, oil industries, and mining industries, to name a few, have thrived for decades in some of the most badly run countries in the world.  Yet Afghanistan has never been able to duplicate that feat. 

So, the U.S. was facing a monumental task in Afghanistan in 2002.  So, what did it do?  It immediately took its eye off the ball.  Osama bin-Laden could have been caught/killed within the first few months of the War if only the U.S. had deployed enough soldiers to successfully bottle up Tora-Bora.  But they didn't.  So, he escaped to Pakistan.

Instead of immediately flooding the country with military and civilian people tasked with running a Japan-1945-style operation, in those critical early years we never staffed the military up to a level high enough to be capable of gaining effective control of the country.  In fact, we started drawing military force levels down before we even got them fully built up to the extremely modest initial levels that had been targeted.

BTW, the early successful part of the War, was not run by the military.  By the time the military was able to get its act together in country, a CIA operation had already won the shooting phase of the War.

The civilian side of the operation was even less robust than the "too small by half" military side.  Instead of inserting a large number of civilians into what there was of a functioning civilian government, economy, and society, we never even tried to staff up a robust civilian operation.

As soon as the shooting died down the Bush Administration pivoted to focusing on the war they really cared about, the one they were about to start in Iraq.  Afghanistan should have been resourced at a much higher level than the Japan effort was resourced at, because the task was much more difficult.  But it was always a skeleton staff sized operation in those early critical years.

That's on the Bush Administration.  They ran the show for the first six years.  They screwed it up for the entire time they were in charge.  The argument is often made that subsequent Administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden) should have fixed things.  But there was never the political will necessary to devote the resources that would have been necessary to have a chance of turning things around.

So, with the exception of the Biden Administration, they all did the expedient thing.  They threw lots but not enough money at the problem.  They spent almost all of that money on the military (or on bribes, again mostly of a military nature, to Pakistan).

No effort was ever made to staff up and resource a robust civilian operation.  What "civilian" money was spent, was poured into the massively corrupt Afghan government.  No effort was ever made to do anything about that corruption.  President Biden finally put an end to the insanity.

Next I want to turn to Vietnam.  Much has been made of the parallels between how the Vietnam War ended and how the Afghan War ended.  Many of the parallels are apt.  But the subject has been well dealt with elsewhere.  I want to focus on the aftermath.

First of all, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon, as Ho Chi Minh City was then called, there was a tremendous amount of hand wringing.  "The U.S. will never recover from this crippling blow to our prestige."  "No one will ever trust the U.S. again when it come to a promise we make."  But it all ended up just being hand wringing.  Neither prediction turned out to be true.

As I have observed elsewhere, countries hold to agreements as long as it is in their national interest to do so.  If there is a compelling national interest in breaking an agreement, it gets broken.  The U.S. tries to pretend that it is special and these kinds of rules don't apply to it.  But they do.

U.S. prestige recovered.  The U.S. has since made many agreements and kept to most of them.  And we had enough prestige and were considered a reliable enough partner to get involved in Afghanistan roughly twenty-five years after all the pious pronouncements were so solemnly made.  Although that's interesting, what I want to focus on is the relationship Vietnam has since had with the rest of the world, and particularly with the U.S.

Vietnam is another of those countries that has had to exist in the shadow of China for more than a thousand years.  Vietnam did not have the advantage Japan had of a substantial body of water between it and China.  Vietnam has a land border with China.  So, for Vietnam, the problem of creating and maintaining any kind of political, cultural, or economic distance from China was much harder for them to do than it was for Japan.

And in 1975 it was the height of the Cold War.  It was us against them.  And the "them" included China and Russia.  That made North Vietnam, which was run at the time by a "communist dictator", the very same Ho Chi Minh, part of the "them" camp.  So, not surprisingly, the Russians and he Chines both supported the "communist" north against the "capitalist" south (our side).  And in 1975 the north unambiguously and definitively prevailed over the south.

So, in the post-1975 era the "bad guys" are firmly in control of the entire country.  Not surprisingly. we wanted nothing to do with Vietnam at that point.  And it should have been all sweetness and light between the members of the "them" coalition, right?

Well, "should have been" and "is" often differ greatly.  And so, not that long after the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam the Chinese invaded.  I don't remember what set the conflict off.  What I do remember is that the Vietnamese quickly and easily sent the Chinese packing.  Apparently, if you are good enough to beat the U.S., you are good enough to beat the Chinese.

But wait.  There's more.  Ten years later we get to the middle of the '80s and Russia is falling apart.  The whole "Soviet Empire" is falling apart.  And that leaves Vietnam hung out to dry.  So, who do they turn to?  The U.S.!

This time around it's strictly business.  Vietnam wants to make and sell stuff to the U.S. as a way to get their economy going.  We say "Okay".  And since that time the U.S and Vietnam have had a very cordial relationship.

It doesn't hurt that Vietnam is still concerned about encroachment, cultural or otherwise, by China.  They recognize us as the natural counterbalance to Chinese influence.  Their national interest required them to distance themselves from their old comrades in arms and cozy up to the enemy.  So, they did.

Afghanistan could go down a similar path.  After a certain amount of turmoil the U.S. - Afghan relationship could settle down to a strictly commercial one that becomes in the national interest of both sides.  That could work.  Is this a likely outcome?  I wouldn't go that far.

One of the things Vietnam inherited from China is a mercantile sensibility.  Culturally, China has been supporting business, especially small business, for its entire history.  There is a large, old, well established mercantile segment in the Vietnamese cultural identity.  Doing business with the U.S. is just doing business.

Afghanistan does not have that same long history of mercantilism baked into its cultural identity in the way it is in China and Vietnam.  And that mercantilist way of thinking goes against the grain of Taliban ideology.

Mercantilism also went against the grain of the "communist" ideology that governed both China and Vietnam.  But, the communist era is recent history while the mercantilist era spans most of the long history of each country.  Afghanistan does not have the luxury of being able to sell a policy shift toward mercantilism as a "return to the old ways".

So we find yet another example of something that will be much harder to pull off in Afghanistan than it was elsewhere and else-when.  On the other hand, things now move faster than they used to.  The Afghan economy is already collapsing.  Theoretically Pakistan, Russia, and China could swoop in to the rescue.  If they did it would be like Vietnam in the immediate post-1975 period.  Russia propped their economy up for several years.  Then they stopped.

But so far no one has swooped in to save the Afghan economy.  The current situation is bad for the population.  It is about to get worse, a lot worse.  How will the Taliban react?  How will Pakistan, Russia, and China react?  We don't know.

We do know that the U.S. (and likely its allies) will be slow to move back in.  And the cost to the Taliban of U.S. assistance will be high.  Unacceptably high?  That remains to be seen.  Watch this space.

Afghanistan - A Geopolitical Perspective

This column became an inevitability when it became clear that President Biden was serious about exiting Afghanistan.  Well, the post 9/11 Afghani government that the U.S. backed is out and the Taliban is in.  The press is doing its usual thing.  Republicans are doing their usual thing.  Even Democrats are, to a great extent, doing their usual thing.  Most of what is out there at the moment is hot air.  President Biden is being criticized.  He deserves some of it.  But he doesn't deserve most of it.

Rather than piling on, I am going to take a longer and wider perspective.  My interest in Afghanistan goes way back.  I started writing this blog in 2010.  In 2011 I posted this:  Sigma 5: Pakistan.  It was my first foray into a subject I would often return to.  One line in that post summarizes it nicely:  "Lots of countries have an army.  Pakistan is an army that has a country".

Understanding Pakistan is key to understanding Afghanistan.  And Pakistan is not a real country.  It's motivating concept is "we are not India".  That's not enough.  So, what Pakistan has done is work the foreign aid grift for its entire history.  One way or another, it gets billions from various countries.  This is the only thing that keeps the country afloat.

But unfortunately, most foreign aid these days is of the military kind.  As a result, the military, and it's closely associated Spy Service, the ISI are not under the control of Pakistan's civilian government.  Nor are large swaths of what is labeled "Pakistan" on maps.  These swaths are euphemistically called "autonomous regions".  In reality, the central government of Pakistan exerts little or no control over these regions.

In spite of the fact that it is not a country, Pakistan has imperial aspirations.  Specifically, it aspires to make Afghanistan a vassal state.  Their vehicle of choice is the Taliban.  Pakistan, through the ISI, has provided material, financial, logistical, and other kinds of support to the Taliban since its formation decades ago.

Pakistan has also provided safe havens for both the senior leadership and the rank and file of the Taliban.  These safe havens have mostly been located in the autonomous regions.  But a lot of Taliban infrastructure is located in the parts of Pakistan that the government does control.  Bin-Laden lived peacefully for years in such a place.  The Taliban is Pakistan's cat's paw, or so the Pakistanis hope.

I discussed a related topic, counterinsurgency, here:  Sigma 5: Counterinsurgency.  The occasion for the post was the end of U.S. military activity in Iraq.  Unfortunately for all of us, that got reversed not long afterward.  The mission in Afghanistan was counterinsurgency.  Go in.  Root the bad guys out.  Leave.  That's the idea.  But it is very hard to do.  The post includes my thoughts on how it should be done.

The very next post (Sigma 5: Iraq) includes a link to how an "expert" says it should be done.  General David Patraeus was, for a time, a wunderkind who was an expert on Counterinsurgency.  He was responsible for the U.S. Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the "how to" manual that guided the U.S. military's approach to counterinsurgency missions.  I included a link to the manual in that post but it no longer works.  Here's an updated link:  The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (freeinfosociety.com).

Patraeus got into trouble a few years later and fell out of favor.  One reason for this was that his vaunted "expertise" did not produce results in Afghanistan.  For whatever reason, it looks like the military has since replaced Patraeus's document with something else.  I haven't read the new version.

Anyhow, I had some good things and some bad things to say about the manual Patraeus produced.  They are included in the post.  And I followed this post up with another post:  Sigma 5: Afghanistan.  In that post I promised that it would be the last one on counterinsurgency.  It was my last post in my "Counterinsurgency" series, but not my last post on Afghanistan.

I think my analysis of the situation as it was back then (2012 - 11 years into the war) was good.  I said this:  "Progress under Obama seems limited to me".  So far so good.  But I also said:  "I think politics in Afghanistan will combine with politics in the U.S. to result in a nearly complete U.S. withdrawal in 2014, if not sooner".  That, of course, turned out to be completely wrong.  U.S. political conditions made exiting Afghanistan impossible.  As a result. politics in Afghanistan turned out to be irrelevant.

I did, however, demolish the "ten more years" argument.  I said:  "There is very little evidence that we could fix Afghanistan in those ten years given the situation both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan."  And it turns out that we didn't.  We didn't even seriously try.

The next post that is relevant to this discussion was:  Sigma 5: Vietnam - Lessons Learned.  Unlike pretty much everybody else, I felt it was important to review the U.S. experience in Vietnam to see what could be learned from it.  Unfortunately, few others bothered to do the same.  And, unfortunately, Vietnam should have taught us the lessons we needed to learn in order to get Afghanistan right.  Here is the bottom line.

For complicated reasons Vietnam got partitioned into a North and a South.  We got deeply involved in South Vietnam, from its creation to its ultimate demise.  We felt that it was important to stand up an anti-communist government there.

Unfortunately, even though we tried several times, we were never able to stand up an honest, competent government there.  As a result, it never garnered significant support from the people it governed.  The opposition, operating out of North Vietnam, was honest and competent.  The North Vietnamese government was also seen as being run by native Vietnamese.  Our government, the one running South Vietnam, was seen as the puppet of foreign interests.  Never underestimate the power of nationalism.

Things actually ended up moving at about the same speed in Vietnam and in Afghanistan.  We got seriously involved in Vietnam in about 1955 and the U.S. backed South Vietnamese government fell twenty years later in 1975.  The military rout played out a little more slowly in Vietnam (months rather than weeks) but it was equally decisive.

You can check out Sigma 5: ISIS - Do Something Stupid Now, and Sigma 5: The Art of the Deal, if you want to.  They are at least marginally related.  As, I supposes are Sigma 5: Middle East Update, and Sigma 5: Balance of Power.  But it's okay if you skip them.  Directly on point, however, is this recent post:  Sigma 5: The ISI War.  That is one you want to review.

Looking forward, what now?  Well, as I indicated in my "ISI War" post, things now get interesting.  The gridlock that has constrained U.S. policy in Afghanistan has now been broken.  We  no longer have to tiptoe around the delicate sensibilities of the old Afghan government.  It doesn't exist any more.  One excuse the Biden Administration has put forward for publicly downplaying the rate of advance of Taliban forces is that they didn't want to further undermine a government that was already teetering on the brink.

The U.S. is now moving forward rapidly.  They moved in and seized control of the Kabul (capital of Afghanistan) Airport.  That would have been an unthinkable move a couple of weeks ago.  They have also frozen assets to cut the Taliban off from whatever money was left behind by the old government.  They are also cutting off the money fire hose that has flowed into Afghanistan for twenty years with nary a pause.

Control of Kabul airport has made it possible to start moving refugees and foreign nationals out of Afghanistan at a rapid pace.  The Biden Administration has been rightly chastised for not moving more quickly and more effectively to get Afghanis who have been friendly to our cause out of the country.  They are now doing their best to get on track.

In the mean time the Taliban is now in control of the entire country.  The sixty-four dollar question is:   how are they going to comport themselves?  Are they going to be the bad old Taliban they were when a U.S. led operation staffed almost entirely by Afghans drove them out of the country in six months?  This was possible because the Taliban had managed to make themselves extremely unpopular.

The Taliban claims that it has learned its lesson.  This time around, they say, they will be kinder and gentler.  They will also focus more heavily on governance.  There is some evidence that they are serious.  But the preponderance of the evidence is that this is a pretense they plan to only maintain for a short time in order to make the transition go more smoothly.  I think that it is very likely that it is a pretense.  But let's assume for the moment that it is not.

In the post-Vietnam era I looked into why some governments succeed and others fail.  I am a pro democracy guy.  But sometimes democracies fail and sometimes undemocratic governments succeed.  I have found that the keys to success are not democracy or openness or any of that.  Instead they are honesty and competence.  Is the government reasonably honest and reasonably competent?  If so, then it has a good chance of success.  If not, the only way it can succeed is if there is an outside power propping it up.

A classic example of this is the Castro government in Cuba.  When Fidel took over the country was impoverished.  It is still very poor.  But he put in a good education system, a good medical system, and he has kept the infrastructure operating, if only in the most basic way.  No one starves in Cuba, or lacks for clothes on their backs, or a roof over their heads.  As a result, the Castro regime has remained relatively popular over a period spanning many decades.

"Communist" China is another example.  The economy got an early boost when they first took over due to the ending of the Japanese occupation and a return to peacetime conditions.  Things went backwards during the Cultural Revolution period.  They later bounced back with the ascendency of technocrats primarily interested in boosting the economy.  Over a period of decades China has gone from being an economic basket case to being the second largest economy in the world.  It continues to have a higher economic growth rate than the U.S. does.

All countries feature a certain amount of corruption.  All countries feature a certain amount of incompetence when it comes to their government officials.  But governments that are extremely corrupt are incapable of being competent.  And that means that the economy goes backwards.  And that makes people unhappy.

The Taliban have shown themselves to be both honest and competent.  But the Taliban suffers from ideological problems that may interfere with its ability to boost the economy.  Their adherence to a rigid ideology will make it impossible to make some moves that are good for the economy.

Castro's Cuba faced similar problems to a lesser extent.  But Cuba was very poor when they took power.  It didn't take much economic growth to make things better for their people.  It also helped that they were heavily subsidized by Russia for the first couple of decades of their existence.

The Taliban faced a similar situation when they first came to power.  Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world.  Not much economic improvement would have translated to a lot of public support.  But they hewed closely to their ideology and the already bad economy got worse.  That made them very unpopular.  It didn't help that many of their ideologically driven policies were wildly unpopular.

So, they stand a chance.  Afghanistan is still very poor.  Very little economic improvement would be necessary for the populace to see progress.  But things have changed since the last time around.  When the U.S. first moved in after 9/11 the amount of aid we poured into Afghanistan was greater than the GDP of the country.  Sure, corruption was rampant.  But even if 80% or 90% of the money we poured into Afghanistan was siphoned off, that still left 10% or 20% going in to build the economy up.

Construction jobs abounded.  Security jobs abounded.  A large Afghan army and multiple government police/security organizations were stood up and paid on time.  This led to an increase in retail.  And services like banking, accounting, legal services, and the like, grew.  This put a lot of money into the pockets of ordinary Afghanis.

And a lot of Afghanis found they liked the open society approach of the Americans.  Finally, there are more guns in the hands of Afghani civilians than are in the hands of Americans, if you measure things on a per-capita basis.  That's a lot of guns pre-positioned into the hands of ordinary Afghanis all over the country.  If you can recruit them then you have an instant well armed guerilla force.

So, the Talban could follow the Cuban model, if they chose to.  They could even follow the modern Chinese model, if they chose to.  But will they?  The modern Chinese model is antithetical to their entire ideology.  Even following in the footsteps of the Cuban model would require a radical direction change, ideologically.  That seems unlikely in the extreme.

And they have a much higher hill to climb.  They start with the Afghan economy as it was a few weeks ago.  If everything remains the same then they will get a bump from the cessation of the fighting.  But, if there is anything Americans know how to do, it's juice up an economy.

The Taliban won't have to deal with the incompetence and corruption of the old government gumming things up.  But they lack the natural instincts necessary to promote economic development.  But it gets worse.

The Chines had thousands of years of cultural history as a mercantile society when Chinese leaders turned to boosting the economy as their top priority.  Afghanis have never had anything resembling a decent economy.  And they have long standing cultural norms that stand in the way of developing one.  (They are not as bad as the Taliban norms.  But they are bad.)  Even Cuba had a long capitalist tradition that preceded the Castro takeover.  But it is even worse.

Unlike twenty years ago, the Afghani economy is now an artificial one.  It is almost exclusively organized around the idea of absorbing all of that money flowing in from the U.S. and  other foreign countries. The U.S. is shutting the money spigot off as quickly as it can.  Many countries will do the same.  That will leave only a few countries like India, Russia, and China, that might want to step in to fill the vacuum.

Under the best of circumstances things would look grim for the Taliban on the economic front.  Assuming, for the moment, that they actually intend to focus on economic development.  It is impossible to imagine Russia, China, and India stepping up and replacing most of the money that will be lost.

Neither Russia nor India can afford it.  And I don't see China wanting to make that level of commitment.  Money will continue to flow.  But it will be, at most, 20-30% of what was coming in before.  At worst, the flow of money into the country, other than to buy Opium, could drop to near zero.

On the other hand, the Taliban may soon revert to Taliban 1.0.  This will cause the economy to crash quickly and hard.   And part and parcel of Taliban 1.0 are the harsh (by western standards) social policies that they previously implemented.  Another possible scenario has the Taliban trying Taliban 2.0, having it fail, and then reverting to Taliban 1.0.

All roads, except the Taliban going with Taliban 2.0 and managing to somehow make it work, lead to the same place.  Some roads just takes a little longer to get there than others.  How is the Afghan populace likely to respond to this?  Not well.  But at that point it will not be our problem.

We got into Afghanistan in the late '70s and early '80s in an effort to tweak the Russians.  it worked.  And we got out.  We got into Afghanistan in the post 9/11 era in order to put down Osama bin-Laden.  Then we let him escape into Pakistan.  Then we decided to remake Afghanistan.

The British have described Afghanistan as "the place empires go to die".  The American empire, such as it is, will not be killed by Afghanistan.  But recent American efforts to remake Afghanistan into something it isn't and doesn't want to be, did die.

We did push the people who had designs on doing grievous harm to America out of Afghanistan.  We pushed them into Pakistan.  That's where bin-Laden was when we finally killed him.  That's where the Taliban has been headquartered with the aid and the assistance of the Pakistani Spy Service, the ISI.

The Taliban are busy relocating back to Afghanistan.  That will turn the problem of keeping an eye on them from a hard one to an easy one.  It will be easy to see, for instance, if they keep their promises.  One promise they made was to stay out of the business of harboring terrorists bent on doing harm outside of Afghanistan.

And that leaves Pakistan.  Pakistan has long had a knife to the American jugular.  They arranged things so that anything the U.S. wanted to deliver to Afghanistan (U.S. soldiers, arms, humanitarian aid, both human and material) had to go through Pakistan.  The Pakistanis have been able to extract very high tolls from us year after year after year.  But the U.S. will be out of Afghanistan soon.  That removes the knife from our jugular.

There will no longer be a reason for us to put up with that.  As soon as we are out of Afghanistan we need to completely turn off the money spigot that feeds Pakistan.  Let Russia and China take up the slack.  Based on Pakistan's unblemished track record, a dollar invested in Pakistan is a dollar wasted.  So, let's hope they waste a lot of them.  India has a long standing hate-hate relationship Pakistan, so they can be counted on to have nothing to do with any effort to prop up Pakistan.

And stopping the money flow to Pakistan opens up an opportunity.  At the beginning of the Cold War the U.S. adopted a policy of dividing the world into two camps.  There was camp USA and camp Russia.  Countries were expected to join one of the two camps.  Hopefully, most would join camp USA and few would join camp Russia.

That would make it easy to "contain" Russia.  (The threat of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction stemming from the use of large numbers of nuclear weapons - took the preferred option of wiping them off of the face of the earth, off the table.  So containment was the next best option.)

The problem was that India didn't want to play along.  They decided that they were part of the "third world", neither rich nor poor, but more importantly, neither camp USA nor camp Russia.  That pissed the U.S. foreign policy establishment off.  So, they looked for a way to put pressure on India.

The British had been forced to devest themselves of India in the late '40s.  Portions of what was then India had populations that were, for the most part, Muslim.  But in most of India Muslims constituted at best a small percentage of the population.

So, what became Pakistan decided to split off from India as soon as the British were gone.  (Another heavily Muslim section also split off at the same time.  It eventually became Bangladesh.)  This caused a civil war.

Pakistan was successful enough, given that they only had to contend with India at this point, to win independence from India, both for themselves, and for what eventually became Bangladesh.  This was the foundation of the hate-hate relationship between the two countries.  (India and Bangladesh get along just fine.)

The U.S. saw an opportunity.  The Pakistanis were happy to play along in exchange for a large bribe in the form of foreign aid.  And thus began the Pakistani foreign aid grift.   They have not victimized just the U.S.  They are an equal opportunity victimizer.  They grifted the Chinese out of the technology necessary to create an atomic bomb.  They grifted other countries into making large contributions of one kind or another for one reason or another.

At the beginning they grifted the U.S. our of large quantities of foreign aid by pretending to be team USA.  This annoyed India, which was the point of the U.S. doing it.  Pakistan reliably voted with the U.S. in the U.N. general assembly.  Frankly, I don't know how much else the U.S. got out of the deal.  But they deemed the deal successful enough that they looked the other way when China was turning Pakistan into a nuclear power.  And, after that, Pakistan was a nuclear power, so were due a certain amount of respect and deference.

The successful U.S. effort to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan that happened forty years ago was run out of Pakistan.  That got Pakistan some more brownie points.  By the time Pakistan put the squeeze on the U.S. by temporarily shutting down trade into Afghanistan about fifteen years ago, it was too late.  We were well and truly stuck in Afghanistan.  And that meant we were well and truly stuck putting up with a whole lot of bad behavior from Pakistan.

But that all ends as soon as the U.S. mission in Afghanistan ends.  Then the Pottery Barn rule ("If you broke it.  That means that now you own it.") will apply to them, not us.  Pakistan will own Afghanistan.  Whatever happens there will become Pakistan's responsibility.  And they will have to manage Afghanistan without having all that lovely U.S. money and arms flowing their way.

Meanwhile, the U.S. will be in a position to substantially improve their relationship with India.  Looking forward to the middle of the twenty-first century, the smart money sees three great powers:  The U.S., China, and India.  India is far more valuable to the U.S. than Pakistan ever was.  India is a democracy.  It is a bit shaky these days.  Modi is not the greatest believer in democracy that India has ever had.  But he could be tossed out by unfavorable election results at any time.  Still, there is a lot to build on.

In effect, switching Pakistan for India is a big win for the U.S.  And India and China are rivals.  So, a strong relationship with India strengthens our position with respect to China.  That too is a plus for the U.S.  And let China be stuck with the likes of Afghanistan, North Korea, and Pakistan.  It's not a good look for them.

And maybe we can finally do something about the Jihadi pipeline.  Not all terrorist groups are closely tied to a nation state.  But it is a mistake to believe that large and long standing terrorist groups can exist without substantial and consistent backing from a nation state or two.

And this is doubly true for Muslim terrorists.  And the location of the head waters for many of them is no secret.  Everybody who has spent any time seriously studying the problem knows what the story is.  It is just politically inconvenient to say so publicly and directly.

I have gone over this several times before, so I am going to keep it short and sweet.  Another "not a real country" is Saudi Arabia.  The case is not as extreme as it is with Pakistan.  As far as I know, Saudi Arabia controls all of the land that a map says belongs to them.  But in other ways it's all smoke and mirrors.

Saudi Arabia is run by the "House of Saud", a large, extended family of people connected by blood or marriage.  Normally a country like Saudi Arabia would need a nation state sponsor to stay in business.  It turns out that large fields of oil that is cheap to extract are able to stand in for a the support of foreign country.

The Saud family maintains control of the country by using the massive revenues its oil fields throw off to buy off the population.  Luckily for them, the native population of Saudi Arabia is relatively small, so the problem remains manageable.  The gusher of money oil produces also allows the Saud family to import foreign labor to do everything the natives can't do or don't want to do.

They have managed to retain control for close to a hundred years.  But the control the Saud family maintains is tenuous.  Early on they brokered a deal.  The deal was with the religious leaders of the Wahhabi sect of Islam.  Like Christianity, Islam comes in a variety of flavors from moderate to extreme.  The Sunni flavor is relatively moderate.  The Shiite sect is more extreme.  The Wahhabi sect is much more extreme than the Shiite sect.

If what happens in Saudi Arabia stays in Saudi Arabia, none of this would matter.  But it doesn't stay in Saudi Arabia so it does matter.  Money and power unchecked by something like regular and fair democratic elections leads to, among many things, hypocrisy.  The rich and powerful in Saudi Arabia are not religious.  In fact, many of them are libertines.  The way they get away with their bad behavior is through bribery.  They make large donations to Wahhabi institutions.

Not being immune from hypocrisy disease, the religious leaders take the money and look the other way.  "It's for the greater good", they tell themselves.  And, there is something to what they say.  Because they spend the money on missionary work.  Specifically, the fat contributions they rake in enable Wahhabi officials to build and maintain a large number of Madrassas all around the world.  A Madrassa is a compound containing a mosque, a school, and frequently a social services center.

The school teaches the three r's, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic.  But the curriculum also includes mandatory religious instruction.  And the religious instruction is, what else, the extremist Wahhabi form of Islam.  In many parts of the Muslim world, and definitely in Pakistan, the public school system is terrible.  Poor parents end up choosing between sending their children to Wahhabi Madrassas and their children getting no education at all.

Some parents and children are able to resist getting sucked into the extremist aspects of Wahhabi, but many aren't.  If you want to know where all the Islamic extremists come from, the main source is Wahhabi Madrasas spread all across the poorer (either economically poorer, or poorer in terms of good government) Muslim countries.  And it all comes from the internal dynamics of Saudi Arabia.

For many decades the west has been dependent on oil.  And the oil supply has been tight a lot of the time.  This has put Saudi Arabia in the cat bird seat.  That has forced U.S. officials, and officials from all over the developed world, to cast a blind eye at what has been going on.  Muslim extremists are just an unavoidable part of the price we pay to run our economies on oil.

But we are better positioned than we have been in more than a hundred years to break the cycle.  We don't need Saudi Arabia the way we have in the past.  And that means that we have the capability to deal with Saudi Arabia as it is, rather than Saudi Arabi we are forced to pretend exists.

One problem is that even if we were able to get Saudi support for Madrassas to end immediately, the problem will drag on for many years.  Many Madrasas will likely continue in business for some time after Saudi support is cut off.  And they have been turning out crop after crop of extremists for many years now.   It will take twenty to forty years for those extremists to get old enough to age out of their extremism.  But, as they say, step one is to stop digging.

With that let me turn to Iran.  The U.S. and Iran go back to the '50s.  Back then a democratically elected government was going after the British oil concession.  The British turned to the U.S. for help.  The U.S. elbowed the British out of the picture, and engineered a coup d'état that replaced the democratically elected government with the Shah.  This is only one of several examples of the U.S. engineering the downfall of democratic governments for one reason or another.

Anyhow, decades later a home grown revolution kicked the Shah out and put the current religiously based government in control.  Needless to say, there was bad blood on both sides by this point.  Like the Chinese, Iran is based on an ancient and long standing culture, the Persians.  And no culture endures without knowing how to build and nurture an economy.

The largest component of the current Iranian economy is oil.   But, unlike the Saudis, Iran has a large population and a multi-faceted economy.  Iran has supported extremists in many parts of the Middle East.  But here it is in furtherance of a long term goal.  Iran aspires to be a regional power, just as Persia has been at many times in the past.  And these periods of regional dominance sometimes lasted for a century or more.   That's how the Great Game is played, if you are dealt a hand like the one the Iranians have been dealt.

Do I like a lot of the things Iran has done and is doing?  No!  But the right question is:  can we work with them when our areas of interest align?  I think we can.  One reason is that the Iranians know how to govern and they know how to keep corruption within bounds.  The popularity of the current government has waxed and waned, mostly in synchrony with how well the Iranian economy is doing.  They have maintained firm control through it all.

And they did a nuclear deal with the U.S.  They kept to the terms of the deal until Trump unwisely cancelled it.  It may not be possible to put the Humpty Dumpty of the deal back together.  That will likely eventually result in Iran becoming joining  the club of countries that control nuclear weapons.  This possible outcome, and the history of conflict between the U.S. and the current regime, has  supposedly been the reason the U.S. has been unwilling to work with the Iranians on anything outside the nuclear deal.

One consequence of that stand has to do with Afghanistan.  Shortly after 9/11 the Iranians offered to help with the Taliban problem.  We said "no thanks".  Iran shares a border with Afghanistan that is of some length.  And they have been a consistent foe of the Taliban.  They haven't been able to do much.  They keep them out of Iran.  But they also do not operate on Afghani territory.  That was in deference to the large U.S. presence in Afghanistan.  That will soon be gone.

That opens up the possibility of the U.S. moving closer to Iran.  There are many reasons people will object to this.  Let me start with the nuclear objection.  Horrible things are supposed to result if Iran gets the bomb.  But Pakistan has had the bomb for a long time.  Bad things have happened.  But they are the result of non-bomb related activities of the Pakistanis.  Yet we have somehow managed to remain allied with Pakistan.

Then there is North Korea.  They have had the bomb for several years now.  Whatever bad things you can think of to say about the Iranians (or the Pakistanis, for that matter), they apply double or triple to North Korea.  Yet somehow they have the bomb and life goes on.  And the fact that both the Pakistanis and the North Koreans are members of the nuclear club has not really changed the regional balance of power in either of their spheres.

I conclude from this that joining the nuclear club is vastly overrated.  I think that Iran joining the nuclear club will turn out to be far less consequential than any of the "experts" predict.  I think it will be a big nothing.  It used to be that being a nuclear power was a big deal.  I don't think it is any more.

Then there is the much more serious problem, the fact that Iran has been, and continues to be, a supporter of various extremist groups around the Middle East.  I do NOT like this behavior by them.  But I have spent a long time documenting the sins of our "allies" Pakistan and Saudi Arabia at this point.  Are the Iranians really so much worse?

Yes, according to the Israelis.  No, according to me.  And, if we give them a chance to be economically successful by removing sanctions, and by taking other steps, then they might find it worth while to change to tactics we find less problematic.  And they are natural opponents of Saudi Arabia.

Iran aspires to be the leader of the Shiite faction of Islam.  Saudi Arabia aspires to be the leader of the Sunni faction of Islam.  The Sunnis are much more populous, but the Saudis are such poor leaders they haven't been able to gain a definitive advantage.  And, as far as I can tell, Iran is not building and supporting the horrible Madrassas that the Saudis are so fond of.

Just like I see the possibility of beneficial improvements in our relations with India, I see the possibility of beneficial improvements in our elations with Iran.  We need to "trust but verify", but I think there are deals to be had.  I think we can trade away opposition to the Iranian bomb for a lot.  And, since we can no longer stop it anyhow, we are trading away something of very limited value.

Finally, let me address the Afghanis, and to a lesser extent, the Pakistanis.  Afghanistan has been governed badly for more than a century, and perhaps far longer.  The Taliban is now in control.  If, as most people expect, they will go back to their bad old ways then they will soon be wildly unpopular in Afghanistan.  And, if we cut off the money spigot to both Afghanistan and Pakistan, this will put Pakistan under tremendous pressure.

What that means in the short run is that they will find it hard to continue to support the Taliban.  That will make it more likely that they will fail at governance, and especially at stewarding the economy forward.

In relatively recent times, the Russians tried to impose change on Afghanistan from the outside, and failed.  The Americans tried to impose change from the outside and succeeded.  But they immediately withdrew.  The Pakistanis tried to impose change from the outside.  They succeeded then failed as the Taliban was driven out of power after 9/11.  Then the Americans tried again.  They again initially succeeded, but this time they stuck around.  That caused them to eventually fail.  The Pakistanis are at it again when it comes to imposing change from the outside.  What do you think their long term prospects are?

How about trying to initiate change in Afghanistan from the inside?  What if a home grown opposition to the Taliban grows up in Afghanistan.  Trying to impose regime change from the outside fails.  But working with and supporting a true indigenous uprising has a good track record of success.

One of the reasons the U.S. succeeded forty years ago was that the Afghans did all the fighting and dying.  If an indigenous opposition comes into being.  And if it is honest and competent.  And if it can find Afghanis who are willing to die (finding Afghanis who are willing and able to fight is easy) then many things become possible.

We will have to wait and see.  If is possible that the Afghanis will decide that they are okay with the Taliban running things.  And if they are not okay with that, no competent and honest opposition movement may arise.  And even if it arises failure is always a possibility.  But this approach provides the best chance for a good outcome for Afghanistan in the long run.  It is important to remember that there are many difficulties ahead.  And one or another of those difficulties may turn out to be insurmountable.

And all of this pertains to Pakistan, although to a lesser extent.  Pakistan is closer to Iran in that it does have a diverse economy.  But the largest component of the Pakistani economy is the one dedicated to the siphoning off of foreign aid/investment and diverting it into the pockets of the rich and powerful.  If the foreign money spigot gets turned off then I don't know how much of a functioning economy will remain.

So, I do feel a sense of long term optimism as a result of the U.S. exiting Afghanistan.  The short term result is truly horrendous for many if not most Afghanis.  But we have been heading toward this day of reckoning for a long time.  I think it has been unavoidable for something like fifteen years.  And I refuse to let the Afghanis dodge blame for much of what is now happening.  They have worked long and hard to avoid standing up an honest and competent government.