On March 3, US president Donald Trump spoke (via telephone) with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, chief of the Taliban’s Doha diplomatic office and signer, on behalf of his organization, of the recently concluded Afghanistan “peace deal.”

“The direct contact between an American president and a top Taliban leader would once have been unthinkable,” writes Michael Crowley at the New York Times.

Why? Crowley doesn’t elaborate, but in my opinion the claim of unthinkability goes a long way toward explaining why the US government spent nearly two decades unsuccessfully attempting to wrest control of Afghanistan from the Taliban before coming to its senses — in the person of Donald Trump — and seeking to bring the folly begun by George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama to an end.

It was, in a word, “unthinkable,” for the longest time, that a bunch of Central Asian hillbillies might successfully resist the will of Washington for five times as long as Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia did.

It was “unthinkable” that US forces better armed, better trained, and more lavishly funded than those who landed at Normandy or took Okinawa could possibly be brought low by light infantry with no air force, no artillery, and no safe logistical haven, wielding weapons scavenged from a war which ended 30 years ago.

But that’s what happened.

When a war ends, it’s reasonable to expect that the losing regime’s head of state will talk to and treat with whomever the winning team designates as its representative, if that’s what the winning team demands.

The word isn’t being openly used by either side, but let’s call it what it is: Surrender.

The US government has surrendered in Afghanistan.

No, not unconditionally. But it has surrendered nonetheless.

And that’s a good thing.

The war became obviously doomed to go down as a fiasco within weeks of the US invasion, when the Bush administration stopped pretending the US presence was about liquidating al Qaeda and started in with a bunch of “nation-building” nonsense.

Eighteen years — not to mention several thousand American and more than 100,000 Afghan deaths — later, the Taliban controls more of the country than it did those few weeks after the invasion.

The US was never going to win the war.

The only question was how long the US would spend losing the war before admitting it had lost the war.

That question has now been answered: Eighteen years, four months, and 25 days.

If part of the price of extricating the US armed forces from the Afghan quagmire is a phone call between the losing side’s president and the winning side’s chosen representative, that’s not just “thinkable,” it’s a price we should all applaud Trump for paying.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Writing at the Florida Politics blog, A.G. Gancarski reports on three sales tax “holiday” bills working their way through the state’s legislature. Two of the bills would lengthen existing holidays on school supplies and storm preparedness products. The third would expand the holiday habit to hunting and fishing items.

According to the Sales Tax Institute,  at least 16 states have sales tax holidays scheduled this year on goods ranging from clothing to school supplies to generators to guns.

I’m all for lower taxes, but tax holidays aren’t about lower taxes. They’re about three things: Social engineering, political grandstanding, and special interest pandering.

Social engineering entails using the tax code to encourage some particular spending versus other kinds of spending.

If I offer a tax deduction for contributions to your favorite church, but not for payments to your favorite liquor store, I’m trying to encourage you to go to church and/or discourage you from boozing. Requiring you to pay  sales tax on a lawn mower, a container of motor oil, or a bottle of Vitamin C no matter when you buy them, but not on a pack of ball-point pens, an emergency generator, or an AR-15 if you buy them between Date X and Date Y, has the same effect.

The politicians grandstanding on these holiday proposals are hoping you’ll notice, and credit them for, the small tax breaks on a few things at particular times — and not think to ask why everything else is taxed all the time. They’re trying to buy your vote, but they don’t want to pay full price for it.

And it should come as no surprise that the biggest supporters of tax holidays on Product X (and likely the biggest campaign contributors to politicians proposing those holidays) are the makers and sellers of Product X.

If the legislators proposing these tax holidays were serious about cutting taxes, they’d propose reducing tax rates on everything, all the time, not on a few things now and then. That would be good for all taxpayers, including lower-income citizens who don’t have as much discretionary income to waste on the politically favored item of the week.

Florida’s general state sales tax rate is 6%. Instead of reducing it to 0% for laptops this week and storm windows next week and ammunition the week after that, I’d like to see my state’s holiday-happy politicians propose cutting the general rate to 5% on everything, year-round.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

US president Donald Trump “Has a Problem as the Coronavirus Threatens the US,” assert the authors of a New York Times analysis: “His Credibility.”

In the tagline and elsewhere in the article, the authors imply that the spread of COVID-19, aka “the coronavirus,” constitutes a “public health crisis” and a “national emergency” which Trump’s “history of issuing false claims” handicaps him in selling plans to address.

If they’re right about Trump’s credibility, they’re pointing to a feature, not a bug. The last thing we need is an impetuous political response to COVID-19.

The coronavirus is neither a national emergency nor a public health crisis in the US. Absent heavy-handed government involvement it’s unlikely to become either.

What is COVID-19?

It’s a regional epidemic in China, with a fairly low — and continuously falling as more and more asymptomatic cases are discovered — mortality rate even there.

It’s likely to be far less deadly in the US, which has better air quality than, and about 1/5th the percentage of smokers as, China. Like other “common cold” type viruses, it’s more likely to kill those with compromised lungs and/or immune systems.

Yes, COVID-19 is coming to America. In fact, it’s already here, and it’s going to spread.

It will spread whether Trump appoints vice-president Mike Pence to stop it or not.

It will spread whether federal government and state governments impose draconian but ineffectual measures like travel restrictions and large-scale quarantines or not.

Political grandstanding over the coronavirus and “emergency measures” versus the coronavirus will almost certainly kill more people — in the US and abroad — than the coronavirus itself.

Every “emergency measure” imposes costs in the form of drag on economic activity.

We’ve already seen what happens to the stock market when business gets nervous about the Chinese nodes in its supply chains.

Travel and trade restrictions mean higher prices and lost jobs, both of which discourage Americans from seeing doctors when they get sick.

Treating COVID-19 as a genuine American public health emergency instead of as an understandable but unjustified panic means  medical resources get mal-invested in fighting COVID-19 instead of the other real, existing health problems they’re needed to fight.

Higher prices, lost jobs, and medical mal-investment are a recipe for dead Americans.

You probably won’t get the coronavirus. If you do get it, it probably won’t kill you. But politicians and bureaucrats trafficking in panic just might succeed where it fails.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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