Girl Power in Action

Two weeks ago I opined, solemnly, that the Biden Afghanistan surrender and withdrawal seemed to have been managed by girls. I was referring to an enlightening article by one Andrew Stiles, to the same effect.

As it happened, and as commenters quickly pointed out, the Stiles article was labeled satire. This could have meant two things. One, that it was being offered tongue-in-cheek. Two, that branding it satire was a good way to keep the cancel culture mobs from your door.

Now, we have an intriguing anatomy of the Afghanistan failure, offered by one Matt Stoller. According to Stoller, the war effort failed because it was conducted by McKinsey consultant types and people who had learned leadership skills from our best business schools. 

And, today’s business schools are all-in with enhancing the awesome power of empathy. As one Yao Puzong discovered while attending the Stanford version, instruction had nothing to do with competing to win, but was all about how charitable work was the only real work. Worse yet, students were supposed to learn how to get in touch with their feelings.

As though to prove the point, a recent Harvard Business Review article claimed that professors now decamp in major corporations in order to teach the assembled drones the power of wonder and awe. Say what? In truth, I am all for wonder and awe. They are especially useful as descriptions of what we can feel when in the presence of great art. Yet, if you put them on the battlefield, alongside empathy, your troops are in for some serious trouble. It is a good thing not to think that what works in the theatre or  museum is also a principle that you can use for conducting a war. And yet, that is precisely what we did in Afghanistan.

If you recall the picture of the earnest feminist trying to explain the principles of gender equity to a group of Afghan women by teaching about Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal work, you know what I mean.

Anyway, Stoller does not emphasize the fact that the military is now being run by men whose minds have been girlified. And yet, his analysis leads inexorably to that conclusion. America is now fully in touch with its feminine side. It oozes empathy and wants nothing more than to care for people. When the going gets tough, it cuts and runs.

Stoller begins by describing a film about the Afghanistan War. I have not seen the movie, so I will rely on his description:

In 2017, Netflix put out a satirical movie on the conflict in Afghanistan. It was titled War Machine, and it starred Brad Pitt as an exuberant and deluded U.S. General named Glen McMahon. 

In War Machine, McMahan comes to Afghanistan with a spirited can do attitude and a frat house of hard-partying yes-men, after having ‘kicked Al Qaeda in the sack’ running special operations in Iraq. He is obsessed with inspirational speeches and weird bureaucratic box-ticking, under the amorphous concept of leadership. This kind of leadership, though, isn’t actually working with wisdom and foresight, but is more like management consulting. Prior to arriving in Afghanistan, for instance, McMahan created a system, with the acronym SNORPP to coordinate military assets. At night, he cozies down to read books on management excellence, the kind that Harvard Business Review publishes as sort of Chicken Soup for the Executive’s Soul. He is also the author of a fictional book with the amazing title, “One Leg At a Time: Just Like Everybody Else.”

This is precisely the point. People who have never exercised leadership pretending to be leaders by applying what they read in fatuous books. And yet, relying on the awesome strength of empowered women, McMahan concludes that killing is bad:

McMahan constantly makes awkward speeches that make no sense, with the tone used by untrusted executives at corporate retreats. “We are here to build, to protect, to support the civilian population,” he told his troops. “To that end, we must avoid killing it at all costs. We cannot help them and kill them at the same time, it just ain’t humanly possible.” 

Stoller continues:

I bring War Machine up because of today’s debate over Afghanistan. While there is a lot of back and forth about whether intelligence agencies knew that the Taliban would take over, or what would happen if we left, or whether the withdrawal could be done more competently, all you had to do to know that this war was a shitshow based on deception and idiocy at all levels was to turn on Netflix and watch this movie. Or you could read any number of inspector general reports, leaked documents, articles, talk to any number of veterans, or use common sense, which, polling showed, most Americans did. 

Afghanistan was war by management consultants. In truth, I have nothing against management consultants, but most of them have very little experience on the ground. They opine and meditate. Surely, the group currently running American policy fulfills that expectation:

In other words, the war in Afghanistan is like seeing management consultants come to your badly managed software company where everyone knows the problem is the boss’s indecisiveness and cowardice, except it’s violent and people die.

Our military leaders are all in with wokeness. They were in with it before it became fashionable. And also, they do not believe in facts. They did not believe in objective reality. They made it up as they went along. It was not a battlefield problem; it was a public relations and mind control problem:

I mean, U.S. military leaders, like bad consultants or executives, lied about Afghanistan to the point it was routine. Here are just a few quotes from generals and DOD spokesmen over the years on the strength of the Afghan military, which collapsed almost instantly after the U.S. left.

In 2011, General David Petraeus stated, “Investments in leader development, literacy, marksmanship and institutions have yielded significant dividends. In fact, in the hard fighting west of Kandahar in late 2010, Afghan forces comprised some 60% of the overall force and they fought with skill and courage.”

In 2015, General John Campbell said that the the Afghan Army had “proven themselves to be increasingly capable,” that they had “grown and matured in less than a decade into a modern, professional force,” and, further, that they had “proven that they can and will take the tactical fight from here.”

In 2017, General John Nicholson stated that Afghan security forces had “prevailed in combat against an externally enabled enemy,” and that the army’s “ability to face simultaneity and complexity on the battlefield signals growth in capability.”

On July 11, 2021, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said that the Afghan army has “much more capacity than they’ve ever had before, much more capability,” and asserted, “they know how to defend their country.”

Anyway, when the Netflix movie appeared, one of Stanley McCrystal’s aides took serious offense. Her name was Whitney Kassel:

In this review, Kassel noted the movie made her so upset that she started cursing, because, while there were of course mistakes, the film was totally unfair to McChrystal and demeaned the entire mission of building a safe Afghanistan. Kassel, like most of these elites, didn’t get the joke, because she is the joke.

I see the discourse on the withdrawal as a super-sized version of this Kassel’s review. The ‘Blob,’ that loose network of diplomats, ex-diplomats, generals, lobbyists, defense contractors, fancy lawyers, famous journalists, and insiders see the obvious desire for withdrawal as similar to how Kassel saw the truth-telling of Hastings and the Netflix movie.

They are angry and embarrassed that they can’t hide their failures anymore. Their entire sense of self was bound up in the idea of an illusion of an unbeatable all-powerful America, even when they, like General Glen “the Glanimal” McMahon were the only ones who believed it.

Stoller takes no prisoners:

None of these tens of thousands of Ivy league encrusted PR savvy highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. They can write books on leadership, or do powerpoints, or leak stories, but the hard logistics of actually using resources to achieve something important are foreign to them, masked by unlimited budgets and public relations. It is, as someone told me in 2019 about the consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble, where “very few white-collar workers at P&G really did anything” except take credit for the work of others.

And finally:

More fundamentally, the people who are in charge of the governing institutions in our society are simply divorced from the underlying logistics of what makes them work. Everything, from the Boeing 737 Max to the opioid epidemic to the waste inside most big corporations to war, has been McKinsey-ified. And it’s all covered up with moral outrage, partisanship and culture warring, public relations, and management wisdom bullshit.

Q. E. D.