​The horrific ISIS suicide bomb attacks outside Kabul Airport that killed at least 13 U.S. servicemen and 95 Afghan men, women and children prompted President Biden to say that we will hunt the killers down and “make them pay.” At this writing, the National Security Council and the U.S. military’s Central Command are planning for how we will turn the President’s words into action. They need to factor in the following considerations:
 
ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), the version of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, is the mortal enemy of the Taliban. As amazing as this sounds, ISIS-K believes the reactionary Taliban are too “liberal” and do not adhere rigorously enough to Islamic law and principles. It is not far-fetched to imagine that the Taliban would welcome a U.S. initiative to rid Afghanistan of ISIS terrorists. It may be a stretch, but given that cleansing the country of ISIS is very much in the Taliban’s interest, there is a possibility that the Taliban might share intelligence regarding ISIS havens and hideouts. It is likely that they know better than we do where these jihadists hang out.
 
Our capacity to launch drone and/or manned air strikes on ISIS positions has been substantially reduced in recent years. In addition to relinquishing our bases in Afghanistan, we have also closed down the air bases we once maintained in neighboring countries. The closest U.S. base is in the Persian Gulf, almost 2,000 miles from Afghanistan, a distance increased by having to avoid Iranian air space. An alternative to conducting such long-distance operations would be to reposition one of the two carriers in the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet close to Pakistan’s Arabian Sea coast, which would place American air power within only a thousand miles of ISIS-K targets.
 
No ISIS-K hideout should be off-limits to American air strikes. Neighboring countries should be warned that if they allow the jihadists sanctuary in their lands, the U.S. will nevertheless seek them out and strike at them wherever they are. We know that ISIS-K fighters are concentrated in two small provinces just east of Kabul, bordering Pakistan. The days when we permitted groups such as the Taliban to slip over the Pakistan border to safe havens must be past.
 
Ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban’s mortal enemy should be viewed as an opening to get some concessions in return from the Taliban. For example, continuing to allow Afghans who aided the U.S. over the last 20 years to leave and authorizing the U.S. to use Afghan airports to fly them out. Any future agreements with the Taliban must be on a quid pro quo basis and not a repeat of the disastrous Trump/Pompeo deal where one party—the Taliban—got everything it wanted while the other party—the U.S.—received nothing in return.
 
The U.S. should do everything it can to forge a coalition of like-minded nations to go after ISIS-K. Multilateral support is always better than going it alone.
 
The need to respond powerfully to this ISIS attack is acute. We cannot allow atrocities such as this to go unanswered or unpunished.
 
Dick Hermann
August 27, 2021

Valid comparisons are being made about the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan and the disgraceful helicopter evacuation of U.S. personnel from the Saigon embassy roof 46 years ago at the end of the Vietnam War. What is happening in Afghanistan is far worse.
 
Before looking at the endgame, we should examine the background to our involvement in both distant places.
 
We had no legitimate security interests in Vietnam. Our initial reason for fighting there was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s refusal to allow elections that had been agreed to in the 1954 Geneva Accords because it was apparent that Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh would win in a landslide. The next two decades were an unmitigated disaster for the U.S. and the Vietnamese.
 
In contrast, we have vital security interests in Afghanistan. If the Taliban resurgence reconstitutes a safe haven for al Qaeda and ISIS, from which these terrorist organizations can plan new attacks on the U.S., we will be right back where we were on September 11, 2001. And given the abysmal performance of our intelligence agencies—their inability to predict that the Afghan government and armed forces were houses of cards that would collapse at the first hint of Taliban aggression once our token military presence ended—they will be unlikely to even know that the jihadists are back in the country, much less where they are and what they might be planning.
 
Blame for the Afghan debacle and the inevitable human tragedy that will follow—the execution of thousands of Afghanis who worked for the U.S. military and contractors and the total subjugation of women—rests with four U.S. presidents. Joe Biden does not “own” what is happening by himself. George W. Bush quite properly went into Afghanistan in order to neutralize al Qaeda and hunt down Osama bin Laden. Bush then foolishly rejected a negotiated surrender offer from the Taliban, instead unreasonably demanding unconditional surrender. Barack Obama subsequently succeeded in killing bin Laden because he appropriately ignored Pakistan’s protestations of a violation of its sovereignty.
 
Both presidents, however, made three disastrous mistakes:

1. Allowing the Taliban to have a safe haven in Pakistan. Whenever the Taliban came under U.S. military pressure, they slipped over the border to safety in Pakistan. The U.S. is Pakistan’s largest foreign aid donor. We provide billions in military, civilian and humanitarian assistance. What do we get in return? A country that actively aided and abetted our enemy. How we could allow that to happen is inexplicable. Bush and Obama should have gone into Pakistan with overwhelming military force to annihilate the Taliban.
2. Believing that Afghanistan was a candidate for nation-building. They should have understood from 2,500 years of history that Afghanistan’s intense tribalism, forbidding topography, and unrivalled corruption make the notion of nation-building a laughable pipedream. Alexander the Great couldn’t do it. The British in the 19th century failed to do it. The Soviet Union in the 1980s was forced out of the country, defeated by the rag-tag Afghan precursors of the Taliban despite its overwhelming firepower and military technology.
3. Throwing at least $88 billion at training the Afghan army. How could our presidents and their advisors have been so naive as to believe that the Afghan army would fight to defend a monumentally corrupt government that treated its soldiers with disdain and disrespect, often going months without paying them, instead diverting their pay into their own pockets. The lessons of Iraq, where an earlier ghost army vaporized when under attack because they had no stake or interest in defending a monster like Saddam Hussein and his corrupt dictatorship, were sadly never absorbed by either our leaders, their national security advisors, or our intelligence agencies.

 
Donald Trump’s major contribution to the Afghan mess was negotiating a disastrous deal with the Taliban. During the negotiations, he invited Taliban thugs to meet with him at Camp David on 9/11/2019, a terrible idea that his staff had to talk him out of. The “deal” had the U.S. pledge to leave Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 in return for…nothing. Trump followed it up with a phone call to Taliban leader and chief butcher, Mullah Barador, after which the easily duped president bragged about what a great guy the murderous mullah was and what a wonderful relationship he had developed with him. Shades of Kim Jong Un.
 
Don’t fault Joe Biden for pulling out of Afghanistan. All four war presidents wanted to do that. His three predecessors lacked the guts to bring it off. He also is not to blame for the bureaucratic mess that is the 13-year old Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghanis who assisted us. The State Department’s visa bureaucracy has a 90-year history of hostility to refugees. Heads should roll for this disgrace. But he is accountable for badly mismanaging the evacuation of Americans and our Afghan allies who may now pay with their lives.
 
When the failed Bay of Pigs invasion blew up in his face, President Kennedy immediately went on national television and said: “We intend to profit from this lesson. There's an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan… I'm the responsible officer of the Government…” Biden said “the buck stops with me” with respect to the pullout, then blamed everyone else for the botched evacuation.
 
What is also being lost amid the chaos at Kabul airport is that thousands of our Afghani helpers are nowhere near that facility and have no hope of getting there. They are in Kandahar, Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Jalalabad and other cities distant from Kabul. Nothing is being done to get them out.
 
Some of this tragic fiasco might have been avoided if our policymakers and their congressional overseers had ever bothered to read the hundreds of reports issued over the past thirteen years by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), especially the eleven “Lessons Learned” reports that warned of what actually ensued. SIGAR’s 200 employees sounded the alarm about Afghanistan countless times. Unfortunately, no one listened.
 
We now need something like an Afghanistan Review Commission to determine how and why our 20-year involvement in the Afghan quagmire went so terribly wrong and how we can avoid similar disasters moving forward.
 
Dick Hermann
August 20, 2021

​Forty years ago, a visionary with the wonderfully classical name of Marcus Bacchus made a mad dash down route A1A, the Florida state highway that runs along the state’s Atlantic beaches. He was on his way from Melbourne, Florida to a meeting with officials at Florida Power and Light (FPL) in Miami. Bacchus brought with him a detailed set of plans for a wave energy machine designed to harness ocean power and convert it into electricity. He was so excited that when he found himself stuck behind slow-moving vehicles, he passed them on the right shoulder. When he arrived for his meeting, FPL gave him short shrift, barely glanced at his detailed diagrams, and blew him off as a crackpot.
 
He was anything but.
 
Following his rejection by FPL, Marcus tried to pitch his idea to other utilities as well as the federal and coastal state governments. Their reactions mirrored that of FPL. They would not even consider his proposal.
 
His timing was unfortunate. It coincided with the beginning of the Reagan Era, when one of the first official acts of the new president was to order the solar panels that provided much of the White House’s energy needs removed, a symbolic tip of the hat to his climate change skeptical party.
 
In the intervening years, the United States half-heartedly pursued a range of alternative, renewable energy initiatives despite the clarion calls of scientists that the day of climate reckoning was fast approaching. Fossil fuel industry lobbyists dropped oceans of money into politicians’ pockets in a successful effort to ward off the renewable threat to their paymasters’ lucrative livelihoods and luxurious lifestyles. The downsides of continued reliance on high-polluting and carbon-emitting energy sources were suppressed by both industry and the craven politicians that did its bidding, no questions asked. Consequently, American renewables research and development has been late to the table. Opportunities to lower costs and create jobs were irretrievably lost. Renewable industries that could have positioned America in the forefront of global climate leadership were suppressed. Instead of leading the world into the future and reaping the rewards of so doing, we wallowed in the fantasy world of climate change denial.
 
Meanwhile, other nations jumped into the vacuum created by American indifference and now own the climate change opportunity space. China is, of course, our principal rival in the race to corner and profit from climate change technologies. But it is hardly the only country that has left the U.S. in the dust. The UK, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland and even Portugal and Chile are also beating us.
 
Wave energy has tremendous potential. Almost three-quarters of the Earth is covered by oceans. Wave energy is green. It does not emit carbon or harmful gases. It is renewable. One meter of wave along the shore can produce enough electricity to power the average American home. Wave energy is reliable. Unlike solar, which needs the Sun to shine, and wind towers, which needs the wind to blow, waves are always in motion and never interrupted.
 
Until now, the downsides have been cost and the corrosive effects of salt water, but those are on the cusp of being solved. Scotland announced last month that it is deploying wave energy machines in the Orkney Islands that will provide electricity to 20,000 homes at costs comparable to fossil fuels.
 
Meanwhile, the U.S., which has the potential to meet more than 75 percent of our energy needs via wave energy, sits on the sidelines, distracted by still having to do battle with congressional and other climate change deniers.
 
Dick Hermann
August 15, 2021

​We have arrived at a decision point in our history. One path is to continue moving forward as a country grounded in our democratic values where the will of the majority prevails. The other is to descend into the darkness of fascist authoritarianism. By its fealty to the “Big Lie” about the last election and other untruths, the Republican Party has committed itself to the latter path, seeing in it its only hope of clinging to power. If democracy endures, the GOP believes it has no hope of ever winning a future election. Thus its relentless push to suppress votes, gerrymander in the extreme, make sure vote counting is in the hands of partisan hacks, and if all else fails, for Republican-controlled state legislatures to overturn results that don’t favor its candidates.

​What this means is that the most important issue before the President, Congress and the country at this moment is voting rights. Absent the ability to conduct free and fair elections in which every eligible citizen can cast a ballot, democracy is doomed.

A growing number of concerned citizens seem to believe that vigorous political organizing—registration drives, making sure everyone has a valid voter ID, and getting every voter to the polls, can overcome the Republican effort to undermine the vote. They are mistaken. The reality is that the GOP tactics—essentially the legalization of cheating—work. Political organizing and voter activism cannot overcome them.

As the Republican Party views it, if it doesn’t cheat, it will never win an election for two reasons: (1) It is out of sync with the majority of voters, as evidenced by its abandoning even the pretense of putting forward a policy platform in 2020; and (2) Only 28 percent of voters identify as Republicans, a number that is steadily declining. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. 

Currently, the Republican Party’s only hope is minority rule. If it prevails in 2022, it will instantly morph into the tyranny of the minority. The party has no platform, no policies, and now that it has abandoned even lip service to responsible governing and become the Trump cult, no principles. For it, democracy is an existential threat.

Thus far, President Biden has been preoccupied with other issues: getting past the pandemic and promoting infrastructure. Both are worthy of attention, but not at the expense of the very political structure that made this nation the last best hope on Earth.

The time has come for him to take to heart the lessons of his predecessors who effectively used the bully pulpit that attaches to the presidency to get voting rights legislation through Congress.

That necessitates the whole or partial elimination of the filibuster. This was an artificial, undemocratic Senate construct that first arose in order to perpetuate Jim Crow laws in the South. Since its emergence, it has been used most often to defeat positive legislation that the vast majority of Americans favor.

The argument against dispensing with the filibuster—that once Republicans regain power in the Senate, they will exploit its disappearance to undo all the positive legislation that Democrats enacted—is irrelevant. If the filibuster remains and Republicans are allowed to destroy our suddenly fragile system, both Democrats and democracy will be historical footnotes.

If he does not want the history books to mark him as the man who presided over the United States’ descent into authoritarianism, President Biden needs to take a proactive role in saving democracy and the country.

​Dick Hermann
August 7, 2021