Afghanistan

While I have loosely followed the Afghanistan conflict for the last twenty years, most of the details usually came out in books years after the specific events transpired.  But as that American intervention comes to an end, it is getting more attention than it ever got while it was happening.  It is hard to imagine a worse outcome after all of the time, money, and blood that has been invested in that process.  It is now apparent that we should have left a long time ago, or never left.  Either would have been preferable to the current mess.  Probably a combination, drawing down to smaller numbers long ago, and leaving a persistent force to stabilize the area in the long term, and give us options in the future.  We have been in Korea for over 70 years, and we don't see any pressure to bring soldiers home from there.  And having an airbase between Iran and China would be a significant strategic benefit in any future conflict.

Hindsight is 20/20, but some of these things should have been foreseeable.  If we were set on leaving, the biggest single mistake, as I see it, was giving up Bagram Air Base a couple weeks ago.  That should have been the final point to withdraw from, as the last soldiers left the country.  That way if something unexpected happened, like the Taliban taking over the country over a weekend, we would still have some level of control over the situation, and some options available to us.  That would have avoided the stampedes at the civilian airport, and allowed evacuations to be conducted in a dignified fashion.  It is close enough to the capital to allow extractions by vehicle or helicopter, and outside the city far enough to allow extractions from other areas.  It would also have given us the option to delay the withdrawal when things went south.  We can't stay in the airport forever, but we could have held Bagram for months.  We could supply it by air if needed, like the Berlin Airlift, and use it as a base for whatever operations the situation dictated.

As it is, I have no idea how it will play out.  Either we will leave anyone who hasn't made it out by the 31st behind, which seems the most likely outcome, or any number of other things could happen, depending on how extreme the Taliban's response is to the situation.  We also need to destroy as much of the gear and weapons we left there as we can.  But I don't envision that happening anytime soon.  It will be interesting to see the political fallout of this fiasco.  It is obviously the crisis of the moment, but the big question is, will it blow over in a week, or will it linger long enough to motivate actual changes?  If there are a lot of people left when the military pulls out, and the Taliban takes a violent approach, it could have a significant impact.  And will those changes be enacted by Republicans, or Democrats?  Or the media could move onto something else, and all of this will be forgotten about by mid September.  Only time will tell.

Forcing People to get Vaccinated

I am in the middle of producing an episode about vaccinations for my online web series.  I wrote the script over a year ago, before COVID or a potential vaccine for it were even on the horizon.  Fortunately the principles I convey in the script are universal enough that they are just as applicable to a pandemic as they are to longstanding childhood diseases.  But there is no getting around the fact that the current situation have upped the stakes of the ongoing conflict over vaccinations.

I personally feel that this is a cut and dry issue, that has little do with science or the quantifiable effectiveness of vaccines.  It is either ethical to forcibly inject people with chemicals against their will, for the potential benefit of others, or its not.  If we want more people to get vaccinated, we need to have a strong case for why they should do so, which is not always true.  By my measure, you are more likely to die from the measles vaccine than you are to die of measles.  MMR vaccine that was given to my son listed a 1/450K chance of death as a side effect, (among other risks) so with 3.6Million births in the US, that would lead to about 8 deaths annually from the vaccine, before we even factor in that 2 doses are recommended.  The last person to die of measles in the US was in 2015, and I believe the total measles deaths since 2000 is in the single digits.  So it appears that statistically my son is more likely to die from the MMR vaccine than from measles, but neither is a likely outcome.  Now if there was a significant decrease in the number of people being vaccinated for measles, it is likely that eventually more people would start dying from measles, increasing the risk of not being vaccinated.  And this would motivate more people to get vaccinated, until an equilibrium was found.

COVID is a little different, due to the extreme variations in peoples reactions to the illness, and the unknown long term effects of both the disease and the potential vaccines.  Both sides can make all sorts of claims that can't yet be verified, and the stakes are much higher based on what has been sacrificed to combat the disease so far.  And because it has been so long since a disease of this severity has come around, that most people have nothing to compare it to, and have no reasonable sense of risk tolerance.

And since people also have trouble comprehending large numbers, the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have died from it can't be properly put into the context of hundreds of millions of people in your sample set.  All of this leads to a highly emotionally charge environment where we will soon have a debate between two already polarized factions, about whether or not to force people to get vaccinated.  While forcing people to get vaccinated is completely antithetical to the idea of being a free country, if the battle over masks is any indication, the media will be pushing it "for the greater good" because "it is not just about you."

Is it the end of the world to be forced to get a vaccine?  Hopefully not, although currently the side effects appear worse than the virus symptoms in younger people.  But it is a terrible precedent to set, against the principles of personal liberty, and according to those who fought the Revolutionary War, the principles of personal liberty are worth dying for.  So we shouldn't abandon them for a slight possibility that it might decrease our changes of getting a disease that has only the remotest chance of killing us.