Quotes of the Day:
“You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tires of it”
- Ho Chi Minh (1969)
The United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn't work here. If it did, they would already have exterminated us with their airplanes.
- Gen Vo Nguyen Giap
"An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot."
- T.E. Lawrence
1. Statement by President Joe Biden on Afghanistan
2. U.S. Army Special Operations Command changes leadership
3. ‘It may never happen’: The $88 billion gamble on the Afghan army that's going up in smoke
4. The U.S.-Taliban Agreement and the Afghan Peace Process
5. U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Top Civil War's Toll
6. Biden still has a chance to save Afghanistan by learning the lesson of Operation Linebacker
7. Written in Taliban
8. The Return of the Taliban
9. Afghanistan’s lesson? Fight to win or stay home | Column
10. Taliban enter Kabul, await ‘peaceful transfer’ of power
11. Afghanistan’s Taliban Enter Kabul
12. Taliban seize Jalalabad, cut off Afghan capital from east
13. Afghanistan's New President Will be mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
14. From hubris to humiliation: America’s warrior class contends with the abject failure of its Afghanistan project
15. ‘A self-inflicted wound’: Former ambassador to Afghanistan, Spokane Valley native Ryan Crocker says Taliban rout was avoidable
16. Afghanistan Is a Wake-Up Call for ‘Major Non-NATO Allies’
17. US Capitol riot judges step up as the conscience of democracy while lawmakers squabble
18. Where Is America Diversifying the Fastest? Small Midwestern Towns.
19. ‘Why Omaha?’: DHS bets on Nebraska as the future of terrorism research
20. Escape from Kabul: Diplomats flee US Embassy in Chinook helicopters after setting documents on fire as Taliban fighters storm Afghan capital
21. No, the surge in Covid cases across the U.S. is not due to migrants or immigrants
22. Longest war: Were America's decades in Afghanistan worth it?
23. How the U.S. Navy SEALs Are Getting Ready for War Against Russia or China
1. Statement by President Joe Biden on Afghanistan
Statement by President Joe Biden on Afghanistan
AUGUST 14, 2021
•
Over the past several days, I have been in close contact with my national security team to give them direction on how to protect our interests and values as we end our military mission in Afghanistan.
First, based on the recommendations of our diplomatic, military, and intelligence teams, I have authorized the deployment of approximately 5,000 U.S. troops to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of U.S. personnel and other allied personnel, and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.
Second, I have ordered our Armed Forces and our Intelligence Community to ensure that we will maintain the capability and the vigilance to address future terrorist threats from Afghanistan.
Third, I have directed the Secretary of State to support President Ghani and other Afghan leaders as they seek to prevent further bloodshed and pursue a political settlement. Secretary Blinken will also engage with key regional stakeholders.
Fourth, we have conveyed to the Taliban representatives in Doha, via our Combatant Commander, that any action on their part on the ground in Afghanistan, that puts U.S. personnel or our mission at risk there, will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response.
Fifth, I have placed Ambassador Tracey Jacobson in charge of a whole-of-government effort to process, transport, and relocate Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghan allies. Our hearts go out to the brave Afghan men and women who are now at risk. We are working to evacuate thousands of those who helped our cause and their families.
That is what we are going to do. Now let me be clear about how we got here.
America went to Afghanistan 20 years ago to defeat the forces that attacked this country on September 11th. That mission resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden over a decade ago and the degradation of al Qaeda. And yet, 10 years later, when I became President, a small number of U.S. troops still remained on the ground, in harm’s way, with a looming deadline to withdraw them or go back to open combat.
Over our country’s 20 years at war in Afghanistan, America has sent its finest young men and women, invested nearly $1 trillion dollars, trained over 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police, equipped them with state-of-the-art military equipment, and maintained their air force as part of the longest war in U.S. history. One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.
When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our Forces and our allies’ Forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.
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2. U.S. Army Special Operations Command changes leadership
I look forward to LTG Braga providing ARSOF a focus on Asia. I saw his innovative views on China while he was at SOCPAC.
U.S. Army Special Operations Command changes leadership
| The Fayetteville Observer
FORT BRAGG — Leadership for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command has changed.
Friends, family and soldiers said goodbye to retiring commander, Lt. Gen. Francis Beaudette, and Command Sgt. Maj. Marc Eckard during a ceremony Friday at Fort Bragg.
The command’s successors are Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, who arrives from his recent assignment as deputy commander for U.S. Army Pacific, and Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Weimer, who arrives from the U.S. Special Operations Command Central at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
The U.S. Army Special Operations Command has more than 27,000 soldiers in its four subordinate commands – the 1st Special Forces Command, U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, U.S. Army Special Operations Aviation Command and 75th Ranger Regiment.
“You have been at the forefront in keeping our nation safe since 9/11 at a high cost and a time away from family and loved ones,” said Gen. Richard Clark, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command and the reviewing officer of Friday’s ceremony.
Clark said Beaudette has reminded him of what the U.S. Army Special Operations Command does to support the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Beaudette has upheld the Special Operation Forces No. 1 value that “humans are more important than hardware,” Clark said.
He thanked Beaudette for recruiting from the Army’s “deepest pool of talent,” and for caring for the command’s Gold Star families.
“It’s not lost upon any of us that you’ve personally volunteered to lead in Afghanistan during some ambiguous times,” Clark told Beaudette.
Beaudette, who has served in the Army for 32 years, has worn the Green Beret since 1995 and led the U.S. Army Special Operations Command since June 2018, thanked those who support the command.
“I can’t just package the past 38 months, never mind 32 years ... other than (to say) how blessed we’ve been to be a small part of it,” he said.
He thanked the Gold Star families for their sacrifices, thanked his own family, commanders, sergeants major, non-commissioned officers, warrant officers, other leaders in the command and the civilians who have supported it.
And, he thanked the soldiers.
“The self-belief in your exacting standards solve the nation’s hardest and most intractable problems — never say no, or I can’t do that or it’s not my job, challenge every assumption and frankly just giving it your all,” Beaudette said.
He encouraged the soldiers to remain ready.
“The enemy that you predict today I assure you will not be the enemy you fight tomorrow,” Beaudette said.
Included in Beaudette’s thanks was Eckard.
“Thank you for your stellar, disciplined and values-based leadership,” Beaudette said.
Clark told Eckard the Army has been fortunate that he’s led its formations for 34 years.
In welcoming the command’s new leaders, Clark said he is confident Braga will build on the momentum, as Braga has served during the past 30 years to include pre-9/11 and helping lead fights with special forces and special mission units.
Like Braga, Clark said, Weimer is no stranger to Fort Bragg or the U.S Army Special Operations Command.
Braga said he, Weimer and Chief Warrant Officer 5 Robert Davis are “honored to lead the men and women of the Army Special Operations Command.”
He thanked Beaudette, Eckard and their families for supporting the command during the past three years.
“Today’s about the legacy of this formation and our shared future,” Braga said.
Braga said he and Weimer understand the significance of the task to lead the command.
He said he is honored to represent what the pioneers of the command started along with the legacy of the 1,241 soldiers who have died while serving in it which is a reminder that “America’s finest don’t quit, they lead the way and they free the oppressed.”
“There are new challenges ahead for this nation that will absolutely rely on this formation as it has the last two decades and actually has since the creation of our Army,” Braga said. “The entirety of this formation will have a significant role to play in the ongoing competition of our adversaries, and we’ll be prepared to support the point force in high-end conflict if required.”
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3. ‘It may never happen’: The $88 billion gamble on the Afghan army that's going up in smoke
A fairly comprehensive assessment for a news report.
Excerpt:
The speedy U.S. and NATO withdrawal had a huge effect on rank and file Afghan troops, he believes. “Anybody who was a fence sitter on how hard they were going to fight in defense of the government has decided not to be a fence sitter anymore, but to go ahead and lay down their arms and either do a deal with the Taliban or blend in.”
Still, many others insist it is unlikely the persistent readiness problems could have been solved by more American training and financial aid.
“The Afghan force has been struggling with low degree of control, poor leadership, lack of recruitment, desertion and weak battlefield performances,” said Neha Dwivedi, a research analyst at Janes, a defense and intelligence consultancy. “While the Afghan security force boasts of sophisticated and technologically advanced weapons, it suffers from a lack of cohesiveness, corruption and mismanagement.”
“The Taliban, on the other hand,” she added, “lacks high technology weapons but appears financially stable with a stable cohesive group.”
‘It may never happen’: The $88 billion gamble on the Afghan army that's going up in smoke
08/13/2021 06:36 PM EDT
The Pentagon hasn't given up on its trainees but it can no longer hide the reality they're still largely a hollow force.
Afghan national army stand guard outside the house of acting defense minister, following an attack in Kabul, Afghanistan on Aug. 4. | AP Photo/Rahmat Gul
08/13/2021 06:36 PM EDT
The United States spent more than $88 billion to train and equip Afghanistan’s army and police, nearly two-thirds of all of its foreign aid to the country since 2002. So why are they crumbling in the face of the Taliban onslaught?
The breathtaking failure to mold a cohesive and independent Afghan fighting force can be traced to years of overly optimistic assessments from U.S. officials that obscured — and in some cases, purposely hid — evidence of deep-rooted corruption, low morale, and even “ghost soldiers and police” who existed merely on the payrolls of the Afghan Defense and Interior Ministries, according to current and former officials directly involved in the training effort.
Even the Afghan units who have fought valiantly in the face of a formidable enemy, suffering enormous casualties in the process, were never expected to operate without high-tech air and ground support from foreign allies, they say.
“How do we get the Afghans to fight for themselves? It may never happen,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a retired Army lieutenant colonel and member of the Armed Services Committee who opposed the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Ernst, who reviewed the training on several occasions, said the Americans in charge “were optimistic.”
“The special operations were really doing quite well,” she said in an interview. “But that’s always when they had Americans advising and assisting them."
In recent days, the country’s second- and third-largest cities, Ghazni and Herat, have fallen to the Taliban. On Friday, Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, was also in the militant movement’s control. There are now growing doubts among military officials that Afghan units assigned to defend Kabul will fare much better and Washington and its allies are anticipating the Taliban could soon be at the gates of the capital.
The Pentagon insisted it is not counting them out yet, even as 3,000 American troops are flowing into Kabul to evacuate U.S. diplomats, who were instructed Friday to destroy sensitive government documents before fleeing for their safety.
“We want to see the will and the political leadership, the military leadership, that's required in the field,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters on Friday. “We still want to see that, and we hope to see that, but whether it happens or not, whether it pans out or not, that's really for the Afghans to decide.”
He added that the Afghan forces’ “advantages,” citing their numerical superiority and the fact the Taliban lacks an air force, “are still there. You have to use it.”
But as Afghans are now tragically learning, numbers can lie.
An incomplete picture
The Afghan security forces have expanded substantially over the past two decades — from just 6,000 under the Ministry of Defense and no national police at all in 2003, to 182,071 and 118,628, respectively, as of April 2021, according to the latest Pentagon figures.
As the forces have ballooned, however, so have the claims of their prowess.
But the countervailing evidence that government forces were ill-prepared to take on any sustained conflict was often left out of public testimony or simply classified as secret.
Beginning in 2015, the Pentagon started shielding some data on the Afghan forces from the public, in a move that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction at the time called “unprecedented.”
The independent watchdog concluded that it was “unable to publicly report on most of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded efforts to build, train, equip, and sustain” the Afghan forces.
The Pentagon loosened some restrictions on data but since 2017, much of the previously available information about the size, strength and casualty rates of Afghan military units has remained hidden.
In a July 30 report to Congress, the special IG said that U.S. forces “continued to classify detailed ANDSF attrition information,” using an acronym for Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, and that some information was simply no longer available, including the “operational performance” of the Afghan forces, maintenance data, and “the impact of COVID-19 on ANDSF recruitment and attrition.”
The Pentagon’s secrecy, while perhaps defensible on security grounds, left a misleading impression of just how swiftly those forces might fold under Taliban pressure.
Efforts to limit public reporting have “contributed to a broad lack of understanding of the inadequacy of Afghan security forces,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has tracked the lack of disclosure. “That by itself should have been a warning sign. If they were highly capable and highly competent, that is not something you’d want to keep secret.”
Ground truth
But the signs have been mounting for years that the rosier assessments did not reflect the reality on the ground.
Infantry units face high turnover in any army, but that has been especially true for the Afghans, who have been plagued from the outset by troops abandoning their posts for reasons ranging from harvest schedules to combat losses to desertion.
The high rate of attrition has led to a lack of cohesion. “If you don't pump new energy and professionalism into the force constantly, it disintegrates pretty quickly and you won't recognize it two years later, much less often,” said Mike Jason, a retired Army colonel who commanded training units in Afghanistan.
A formidable Taliban has also exacted a heavy toll in recent years. “That’s caused huge losses for the Afghan army and they’ve had to start from scratch with a lot of recruits,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution who completed several research trips to assess the progress of the NATO training effort. “Almost every year they are having 20 or 20 percent attrition either from casualties or desertion.”
As for the U.S-trained Afghan air force, it is still flying dozens of bombing missions in support of the Afghan army.
But there is only so much a relative handful of propeller-driven planes and aging attack helicopters with few spare parts can accomplish, and the air force has struggled to respond to the multiple battles raging across the country.
The poor performance of the Afghan air force has in turn spurred ground troops to flee, said a former senior U.S. military commander in Afghanistan who wished to remain anonymous.
“They realized after fighting two to three days, being hit in various locations all around the country, that the Afghan air force would not deliver reinforcements, resupplies, air medevac, or close air support,” the former commander said, referring to medical evacuations. “I warned of this months ago, especially when we withdrew our maintenance contractors who kept the sophisticated U.S.-provided systems operational.”
Some also view the original conception of the training program as faulty.
Mark Jacobson, a former Pentagon official and combat veteran who was a senior NATO official in Afghanistan, believes too much focus was given to preparing the Afghan military to repel a foreign army rather than a home-grown insurgency like the Taliban.
“We failed in trying to make the Afghan army in our own image,” he said in an interview. “We tried to create regiments and brigades when we needed to create an army and police force that was basically special forces designed specifically to beat back an insurgency, not to defend the Afghan borders against outside conventional attacks.”
The Afghans’ inability to hold the line is also simply a function of geography, said retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East from 2016 to 2019.
“You have a lot of forces out away from the capital, and many of them are dispersed in smaller locations that are easy to be isolated and cut off,” he said in an interview. “They’re hard to reinforce.”
That also means the most effective Afghan units, which by definition can only be engaged in one battle at a time, are under especially heavy demand.
‘Corrosive effects’
But the problems have also been much more systematic. The special U.S. government watchdog for Afghan reconstruction, in its July report to Congress, cited the “corrosive effects of corruption” within the ranks, as well as “questionable accuracy of data on the actual strength of the force” and an inability to assess “intangible factors” such as “the will to fight.”
Outlining the continuing impact of corruption on personnel strength, for example, it cited problems “such as fake personnel records that corrupt actors used to pocket salaries” for both “ghost soldiers and police.”
Others who have been involved in the training, however, believe the events of recent days are largely the result of the United States leaving the Afghans in the lurch.
“They have stood and fought with us for many years and have taken casualty rates that are many times those of U.S. forces,” said Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War who was a member of the Strategic Assessment Group of then-U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
She complained it is “the abandonment of Afghanistan by the United States and its allies that has caused the dramatic change in the ability of the Taliban to accelerate its campaign to take territory” and in the process, "destroyed the confidence” of the Afghan security forces.
O’Hanlon, who served as an informal adviser to U.S. commanders, agreed that “one problem is just that we never expected an abrupt departure.
“We always assumed there would be a 12- to 24-month notification of a drawdown or a departure and that would have allowed for some adjustments,” he said.
The speedy U.S. and NATO withdrawal had a huge effect on rank and file Afghan troops, he believes. “Anybody who was a fence sitter on how hard they were going to fight in defense of the government has decided not to be a fence sitter anymore, but to go ahead and lay down their arms and either do a deal with the Taliban or blend in.”
Still, many others insist it is unlikely the persistent readiness problems could have been solved by more American training and financial aid.
“The Afghan force has been struggling with low degree of control, poor leadership, lack of recruitment, desertion and weak battlefield performances,” said Neha Dwivedi, a research analyst at Janes, a defense and intelligence consultancy. “While the Afghan security force boasts of sophisticated and technologically advanced weapons, it suffers from a lack of cohesiveness, corruption and mismanagement.”
“The Taliban, on the other hand,” she added, “lacks high technology weapons but appears financially stable with a stable cohesive group.”
4. The U.S.-Taliban Agreement and the Afghan Peace Process
Perhaps a useful review of the peace negotiations process through this past December. I think it is useful to see the agreement negotiated and how things have played out.
Again, just to be clear this is from December 2020 but it provides some interesting insights to the process and the agreements.
The U.S.-Taliban Agreement and the Afghan Peace Process
The United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in February 2020 that called for peace talks between the two Afghan sides to start in March. Negotiations have been beset by repeated delays but early this December, the Taliban and Afghan government teams reached an agreement on a set of rules and procedures. This procedural agreement is a small but important step that may allow the two sides to move forward in their pursuit of a political settlement to end decades of war.
Here, Mehdi J. Hakimi, the executive director of the Rule of Law Program and lecturer at Stanford Law School, reviews the current status of the U.S.-Taliban agreement and the peace negotiations including the potential for a U.S. military drawdown during the final weeks of the Trump Administration and the challenges for the incoming Biden Administration.
What are the principal commitments of the parties under the U.S.-Taliban agreement?
Under the February 29 agreement, signed in Doha, Qatar, the United States has committed to a phased, conditions-based withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan within 14 months of signing the accord.
In return, the Taliban has pledged to prevent any group or individual from using Afghan soil to threaten the United States and its allies. The Taliban has also promised to sever ties with terrorist organizations including Al Qaeda—the group that perpetrated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 while harbored by the Taliban.
The February pact also envisioned, inter alia, a prisoner swap, the start of intra-Afghan negotiations, and sanctions removal. The Afghan government was not a party to the February agreement.
Has the United States implemented its military drawdown?
In accordance with the agreement, the U.S. initially reduced its military presence from 12,000 to about 8,600 troops, and closed several bases, by June. Any further military withdrawal was to be contingent on the Taliban’s compliance with its obligations. The Pentagon recently announced a further reduction down to 2,500 troops before President-elect Biden takes office.
What has been the Taliban’s response so far?
The Taliban has generally refrained from attacking American and coalition forces, although it did launch rocket attacks on U.S. bases in southern Afghanistan in July and August. Instead, the Taliban has intensified attacks against Afghan forces. This escalation of violence has been widely criticized, including by the United States.
In addition, despite its counterterrorism pledges under the February deal, the Taliban still seems to maintain close links with Al Qaeda inside Afghanistan. In fact, a very senior Al Qaeda leader was recently killed by Afghan security forces in a Taliban-controlled district in eastern Afghanistan.
That seems to complicate the task for the incoming Biden administration.
President-elect Biden and his administration will need to closely examine the Taliban’s conduct which, so far, seems to contravene its obligations under the February accord. A hasty withdrawal, while the Taliban maintains close links with terrorist groups, is very risky.
Another related issue is coordination with America’s allies. The February deal states that all foreign forces will leave Afghanistan within the stipulated timeline—a provision that poses a difficult dilemma for NATO and coalition partners especially in light of the actual conditions on the ground.
You mentioned that the February agreement envisioned a prisoner swap as well. Has that already been completed?
Yes. The February deal called for the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for 1,000 Afghan government captives as a “confidence building measure.” Despite questions over the legality of the Afghan government’s decision to release many Taliban convicts, the prisoner swap has been completed.
Unfortunately, contrary to the Taliban’s promises, reports indicate that many freed Taliban fighters have returned to the battlefield. The flawed process of releasing the Taliban prisoners, many of whom were convicted of grave crimes, may have other implications as well particularly in the context of the International Criminal Court’s investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan.
What about the intra-Afghan peace negotiations?
After the controversial release of the last batch of Taliban prisoners, the intra-Afghan talks officially commenced on September 12, 2020 in Doha, Qatar. With the recent agreement on the procedural rules, the two sides are now discussing the agenda for the formal talks.
A pressing agenda item should be a comprehensive ceasefire. Defying repeated calls for a ceasefire, the Taliban has ratcheted up violence throughout the country, likely in a bid to gain leverage at the negotiating table. Other core issues will revolve around a mechanism for the Taliban’s reintegration, constitutional amendments, and sanctions removal.
Key concerns include the meaningful participation of all Afghans, especially women and minority groups, in the peace process and preserving the hard-earned achievements of the last two decades.
Mehdi J. Hakimi is the Executive Director of the Rule of Law Program and Lecturer at Stanford Law School. His research focuses on international law, comparative law, and global development. An expert on Afghan law, Hakimi was the former Chair of the Law Department at the American University of Afghanistan.
5. U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Top Civil War's Toll
U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Top Civil War's Toll
On Saturday, the United States passed a new landmark in the fight against the novel coronavirus, when the death toll surpassed 620,000 people, the classic estimate for the number of deaths from the American Civil War. The grim comparison is telling, not only because of the sheer size of the death toll, but also because it carries a bleak secondary meaning.
The Civil War, infamous for having the highest American death toll of any war in history, was the last major American conflict before the greater public understood how diseases spread. It was therefore the last war where the bulk of the deaths—two-thirds, in fact—were not from bullets and bombs, but from viruses, parasites and bacteria. Unfortunately, today’s COVID-19 death toll shows that many have approached the virus with a medical attitude hardly updated from 160 years ago.
The impact of disease on the course of the Civil War began almost as soon as the conflict was sparked. Both Union and Confederate soldiers found themselves caked in mud and sleeping in tents in improvised encampments. Without knowledge of how diseases spread, these close quarters encouraged bacteria and viruses to run rampant through the ranks.
Measles, mumps, whooping cough and chickenpox ravaged the troops first while in training camps, spreading via exhaled respiratory droplets and aerosols from one soldier to the next as the germs found new paradise in the bodies of countrymen whose rural lives had largely isolated them from previous exposure. When the new soldiers finished training, they joined the armies in the field, where the so-called “camp diseases” of pneumonia, smallpox and the skin infection erysipelas quickly mounted a second wave of assault.
“Theoretically, all recruits were to be vaccinated [for smallpox] coming into the army,” says Robert Hicks, PhD, former director of the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and an expert in Civil War medical history. But in practice, he says, “that simply didn’t happen.” The Union enacted a blockade of all Southern ports early in the war, which limited the Confederates’ ability to import medical supplies. However, because every person at that time had an understanding of the power of disease, unprotected troops engaged in desperate attempts at home self-innoculations using pus from the oozing sores of infected friends and neighbors.
The other pathogens, completely unchecked by science, hit the soldiers with such rampant rates of spread that even the germs with low fatality percentages racked up impressive total body counts.
Lice, which spread typhus, were endemic, but perhaps the most infamous and preventable infections and diseases of the time were dysentery and typhoid fever. According to the accounts of both Union and Confederate officers, soldiers were resistant to even what little information the time period could provide about hygiene and sanitary practices. Confederate General Robert E. Lee tried without success to get his soldiers to bathe regularly to limit the spread of lice, but he recorded that soldiers were “worse than children [at keeping clean], for the latter can be forced.”
As the years of the epically miserable war ticked by, weary soldiers increasingly took to defecating wherever convenient in their camps. Without knowledge of the basics of germ theory, they routinely relieved themselves in their own water supplies. One army surgeon at the Battle of Vicksburg said that by late 1863, the soldiers had given up so much on basic hygiene that “human excrement has been promiscuously deposited in every direction.” This pattern caused regular outbreaks of dysentery, cholera and typhoid fever that sparked cliches still in use today: the troops most susceptible to these diarrhea-inducing ailments were said not to have the “guts” for soldiering.
Of the 349,944 enlisted Union soldiers who were killed in the war, 221,791 (63%) died of infectious diseases, not including gangrene from battle wounds. But even the simplest of adjustments to personal hygiene proved effective.
Robert Hicks, a former U.S. Navy officer himself, explains how the officers could essentially socially distance, as “they could frequently choose their messmate and essentially, their tent mate. They were allowed far more personal space for living conditions.” Fewer officers died of dysentery because they were in less crowded encampments, had access to cleaner water and, at least according to their own accounts, had better hygiene. Only 29% of the officers who died were killed by disease.
Then, as now, health measures worked, but only for those both willing and able to take them. Today, high mask use has repeatedly shown to be a factor in decreasing community mortality rates from COVID-19—but masks only make a difference if you wear them. And, with the availability of vaccines, many news sources are now quipping that this has become a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The soldiers of the Civil War may not have had sufficient scientific knowledge to stop their myriad plagues, but modern Americans have no excuse for achieving our current rate of disease-induced fatalities.
But, while the American Civil War raged, and the invisible “Third Army” of viruses and bacteria stacked the bodies like cordwood for both sides, Louis Pasteur was also figuring out how to stop it. By the late 1800s, his pasteurization process would not only make milk safer, but also emphasize why future troops needed to boil potentially contaminated water before drinking. By 1885, Pasteur would take his ideas one step further, injecting slurried concoctions containing attenuated rabies virus into the stomach of a young boy to save the boy’s life, and inventing the first lab-made vaccine. Using Pasteur’s methods, by 1896 there were also vaccines for typhoid and cholera, and by 1897, the plague fell too. By WWI, these ground-breaking discoveries formed a far more powerful medical arsenal with which armies could attack how diseases spread within troop encampments. The numbers prove the efficacy. During the winter of 1914-1915, the French Army experienced 11,000 deaths from typhoid in the cold, densely populated, mud-filled trenches that characterized that war. But after implementation of a typhoid vaccination program, by 1917-1918, the same army had only 615 cases of typhoid. Meanwhile, without a flu vaccine, the 1918 influenza pandemic became the only mass event in American history to outstrip the Civil War in terms of deaths—until now.
At the onset of the Civil War, South Carolina senator James Chestnut bragged proudly that he would drink every drop of blood spilled as a result of secession, because he was so baselessly confident there would be none. Not only did the war drag on for four miserable years, but frequently, the largely unmitigated spread of infectious diseases caused such high rates of attrition that both armies had to delay or change their battle plans, lengthening the war by an estimated two years.
Again, the declarations of today’s politicians are all too often woefully unfounded. And in an eerie historical parallel, because so many have chosen to willfully ignore the accomplishments and discoveries of the scientists of the late 1800s, we have pushed ourselves back to the disease-spread patterns of the Civil War and lengthened our own war against this inanimate virus by an incalculable amount.
Recent academic research has suggested that the human toll of the four-year Civil War may have been even greater than the 620,000 that has so long been cited. Perhaps as many as 513 people died, on average, each day, for a total closer to 750,000. Even though we have 160 more years of medical and scientific knowledge, the refusal of some Americans to accept any of the multiple available measures against disease spread has forced us to an average death rate of 1,200 per day over the first 17 months of the pandemic. As of today, in its battle against disease, America has not only repeated history, but surpassed it.
Historians’ perspectives on how the past informs the present
6. Biden still has a chance to save Afghanistan by learning the lesson of Operation Linebacker
Although as my good friend noted this is not a Taliban insurgency I was thinking about Mao's 3 phases of protracted warfare.
I was thinking what if we are allowing the Taliban to mass its forces and maneuver conventionally as in moving to the third stage of Mao's protected warfare model? They could be defeated in detail in a conventional fight if there was anyone competent left to fight them.
Biden still has a chance to save Afghanistan by learning the lesson of Operation Linebacker
USA Today · by James S. Robbins | Opinion Columnist
Seeing Taliban convoys rolling down a highway might intimidate Afghans, but US defense planners should see them as targets begging to be destroyed.
However, the situation on the ground looks uncomfortably more familiar by the day. Taliban forces are on the march, overrunning nine provincial capitals in the last week. Refugees are crowding the streets in the capital of Kabul, and the Biden administration has expanded the number eligible for permanent resettlement in the United States.
Learning military tactics from 1972
According to a new US military assessment of the Afghan situation, “everything is moving in the wrong direction.” Comparisons to the Vietnam War’s endgame are apt, but defeat is not inevitable if US policymakers learn the right lessons. They should focus less on 1975 and more on 1972.
In the spring of 1972, with the bulk of US ground forces out of South Vietnam and peace talks ongoing, North Vietnam launched a massive surprise attack to decide the outcome of the war in one stroke. The “Easter Offensive,” as it was dubbed, was a massive conventional invasion on a scale not seen since Tet in 1968.
South Vietnamese forces at first buckled under the ferocity of the assault, but President Nixon responded by launching Operation Linebacker, an intensive, coordinated air campaign that destroyed communist forces, disrupted their supply and communications lines, and gave South Vietnamese troops the opportunity to rally and push back the invaders.
Catching the Taliban's vulnerabilities
To its credit the Biden administration has been ramping up airstrikes in Afghanistan, though this effort has not yet stalled the Taliban advance. President Biden still believes that the Taliban are “not remotely comparable in terms of capability” to the 1975-era North Vietnamese army, but they hardly need to be that powerful if the Afghan army is collapsing in front of them. Renewed commitment from the United States in words and deeds could stiffen the resolve of Afghan forces who must by now realize they are fighting for their survival. Afghan ground troops combined with Coalition special forces, strike capability and intelligence support would present a formidable challenge to the Taliban. The tactics used successfully in 2001 – as well as 1972 or against ISIS – could be repeated. The alternative would be once again to abandon an American ally, allow the Taliban to seize Kabul, and put America’s longest war firmly in the “lose” column.
James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of "This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive," has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University and served as a special assistant in the office of the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. He is a senior fellow in National Security Affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council. Follow him on Twitter: @James_Robbins
USA Today · by James S. Robbins | Opinion Columnist
7. Written in Taliban
A powerful piece. I hope we can all reflect on this.
Written in Taliban
The first time I saw you was in the Khyber pass. You came with your technology, elite fighters fueled by revenge, and the hubris to believe you could disprove history.
This was a war that you didn’t have the stomach to fight. But I’m glad you tried.
We bled you the same way we bled the Soviets in our Holy Land. We bled you the same way the Vietnamese bled you in their home land. We did it patiently and deliberately.
Patience. Something Westerners never learn.
Our history is millennial. We don’t yearn for an early victory when the Infidel ravages our Holy Land. Our victory is celebrated decades from now. We’ve endured, then ravaged every standing military that crossed our borders. Why? How? We’re patient.
In 30 days, we’ll be stronger, richer, and have control over precious natural resources that you need for your pathetic life that’s dictated by comfort. We will have women, riches, land, guns, and ownership of one of the greatest chapters in military history.
You lose.
If you want to try again, we welcome the challenge. You will fail regardless of how much money you burn in our deserts. For pity, here is free advice that may contribute to your future success; should you ever decide to invade again.
You recruit your warriors and supporters from a drug addicted, distracted, disillusioned population that’s obsessed with comfort and entertainment. A population obsessed with altering their mundane reality. Alcohol, marijuana, pills, and our new favorite -- Tide Pods. Every time your doctors prescribe opiate painkillers, you line our coffers with gold. Your population’s thirst for our pristine heroin has never been more lucrative for our warrior tribes. We will keep feeding you poison for as long as you keep your hands out.
If your population wasn’t so spineless, undisciplined, and self loathing, then you might be able to compile a raiding party with enough tenacity to outthink ours.
Our fighters are born into war. Raised in it. It’s a way of life that evades your “first world” nations. They live a life of such immense misery and pain that they’re willing to fight barefoot in the snow for the opportunity to martyr themselves. They yearn for the opportunity to die. When they do have the blessed opportunity to sacrifice themselves, they sit above Mohammed at the right hand of God. Blessed in Allah for eternity
What honors do your fighters receive? Their empty sacrifice is remembered in the form of a “three day weekend.” The majority of your population uses this sacred time to get drunk and grow more fat as a way to celebrate their fallen warriors. Sadly, we pay tribute to their death more honorably.
The colored pieces of cloth you pin on their chests are similar to the jewelry worn by our women. What good are accolades and vanity if you don’t have the stomach to endure a fight? We don’t offer the burden of healthcare to our fighters as they often want to die for Allah. Your fighters fight to live. Their inability to reconcile the inevitable outcome of our patience leads them to kill themselves. Your medications, counselors and non-profits will never undo the pain and suffering you’ve forced them to endure. It will never remove the pain we’ve caused your broken nation. You are your own worst enemy.
We will give your fighters credit. Some are creative, tenacious, and fierce. They outgun us in every way possible. But again, we simply wait them out. Allah is patient. You cycle them through our Holy Lands every 3 to 12 months for their combat rotations. After their tour is complete, they return to the comfort of their warm beds and endless entertainment. If you left them here, in our Holy Land, with no way out but to win, then you might of have had a chance of success. The longer you poisoned our Holy Land with your presence, your “rules of engagement” only strengthened our position. There is only one rule in war - that is to win.
Your commanders made you fight with your hands tied behind your back. Your rules also confused our fighters too. “We’re clearly the enemy, why are they letting us go?” Thank you for your compassion as it allowed our fighters to kill more Infidels. We began to feel as if your commanders were on our side. We’re thankful your most vicious dogs were never allowed off their leash.
Your showcase Generals make us laugh. You spend millions of dollars flying them around our country inventing new ways to win, while ignoring the guidance of our most capable foes. Your Generals make decisions to minimize risk to their fragile reputation with the ultimate goal of securing a lucrative retirement--jobs with suppliers that fuel your losing force. A self-serving circle that’s built on the backs of your youngest and most naive fighters.
Your retired Generals “earn” tens of thousands of dollars talking to your political, industrial, and financial leaders about “teams, winning, and discipline.” It’s a mockery of the war they refused to fight. It’s a mockery of the Infidel warriors who died in our lands. We urge you to continue following their vacuumous personalities so we can further watch your once great nation collapse.
Your statesman and elected officials are spineless, narcissistic, and more cowardly than your Generals. They crave power over you above all else. They come to our country, hide behind blast walls, and only heed the word of the indiginous leader they put in power. I believe your soldiers call this a “self licking ice cream cone.”
They’ve burned billions of dollars in a wasted effort to bring clean water, electricity, business, education, agriculture, and exports to a region that didn’t ask for it. You should have saved yourself the effort and simply given the money directly to us. Don’t worry, your diplomatic friends gave us plenty of your American tax dollars. If you want to give it another shot with your “soft power,” send those with real experience, not fancy degrees and silver tongues.
Over the next few months, we will make the world understand that you failed worse than any fighting force that’s ever invaded our lands. Today we celebrate victory.
As you evacuate your embassy, our fighters will be standing in the shade. We thank you for the parting gifts. You’ll find surface-to-air missiles staged in the back of Toyota pickup trucks that you purchased for us. Our marksmen will be patient.
We saw what Extortion 17 did to your nation and the morale of your fighting force. Do your citizens even remember that victory? We’ll be repeating and improving upon our victory while your citizens and sympathizers evacuate in disgrace. Every one of your foes around the world will know exactly how to break you.
You are welcome to fly your empty drones, target our cell phones, and send your spies. But they, too, will ultimately fail. We’ll use their failures to show the world that you’re not all-powerful. You’re a false front. An empty shell. You lie, cheat, steal, and are easily defeated because you lack the spine to fight. This is your history now. We’re grateful Allah gave us the opportunity to show the world how to defeat the Infidels.
We look forward to seeing you again across the battlefield.
Praise be to God,
The Taliban
***Authors’ Note***
If you’ve read this far. Thank you. I’ve spent the past week trying to find a way to communicate this to the American people in a manner that would cause anger, rage, action, and understanding. Writing in the voice of a Taliban felt right.
If this made you angry, cry, or contemplative--then our goal is achieved. Our hope is that it inspires you to take action with your elected officials. They’ve been repeating the same failing playbook since World War II with your sons, daughters, and tax dollars. If you want this to keep happening, do nothing. If you don’t, then do something. If we all do a little, together we do a lot.
About the Authors:
Matthew Griffin is a 2001 United States Military Academy Graduate, Army Ranger, Combat Veteran with the 75th Ranger Regiment (3x Afghanistan, 1x Iraq), CEO of Combat Flip Flops, author, and 2019 Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Global Leadership Institute.
Scott Chapman is a 2000 Murray State University Graduate, Army Ranger Fire Team Leader from Alpha Company 2/75th Rangers (‘01 - ‘05), OGA Blackwater Alumni, entrepreneur, and author. Combat Veteran ( 21x Afghanistan, 1x Iraq)
8. The Return of the Taliban
Excerpts:
There is a conceit that today’s Taliban is different from the Taliban of 2001. This is certainly an idea that some senior Taliban officials have sought to propagate in recent years. Facts on the ground suggest otherwise. They claim to have moved on from their old alliance with Al Qaeda, for instance, but over the years they have partnered with other jihadist groups operating, as they have done, out of sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, such as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for scores of suicide bombings and so-called complex attacks—involving gunmen and suicide bombers acting in tandem—and for causing hundreds of civilian deaths.
The Taliban have rendered Afghanistan unworkable as a country; unworkable, that is, without them. And the truth is that they were never really beaten. They merely did what guerrillas do in order to survive: they melted away in the face of overwhelming force, regrouped and restored themselves to fighting strength, and returned to battle. Here they are.
The Return of the Taliban
Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition
by John Lee Anderson
Watching Afghanistan’s cities fall to the Taliban in rapid succession, as the United States completes a hasty withdrawal from the country, is a surreal experience, laced with a sense of déjà vu. Twenty years ago, I reported from Afghanistan as the Taliban’s enemies took these same cities from them, in the short but decisive U.S.-backed military offensive that followed the 9/11 attacks. The war on terror had just been declared, and the unfolding American military action was cloaked in purposeful determinism in the name of freedom and against tyranny. For a brief moment, the war was blessed by that rare thing: public support, both at home and abroad.
In the wake of the horror of Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, most Americans polled believed that the country was doing the “right thing” in going to war in Afghanistan. That level of support didn’t last long, but the war on terror did, and so did the military expedition to Afghanistan, which stretched on inconclusively for two decades and now ends in ignominy. Donald Trump set this fiasco in motion, by announcing his intention to pull out the remaining American troops in Afghanistan and begin negotiations with the Taliban. In February, 2020, an agreement was signed that promised to withdraw all U.S. military forces in return for, among other things, peace talks with the U.S.-backed Afghan government. The American troops were duly drawn down, but, instead of engaging in real discussions, the Taliban stepped up their attacks. In April, President Joe Biden announced his intention to carry on with the withdrawal, and pull out forces by September 11th. However much he says that he does “not regret” his decision, his Presidency will be held responsible for whatever happens in Afghanistan now, and the key words that will forever be associated with the long American sojourn there will include hubris, ignorance, inevitability, betrayal, and failure.
In that regard, the United States joins a line of notable predecessors, including Great Britain, in the nineteenth century, and the Soviet Union, in the twentieth. Those historic precedents don’t make the American experience any more palatable. In Afghanistan—and, for that matter, in Iraq, as well—the Americans did not merely not learn from the mistakes of others; they did not learn from their own mistakes, committed a generation earlier, in Vietnam.
The main errors were, first, to underestimate the adversaries and to presume that American technological superiority necessarily translated into mastery of the battlefield, and, second, to be culturally disdainful, rarely learning the languages or the customs of the local people. By the end of the first American decade in Afghanistan, it seemed evident that the Western counterinsurgency enterprise was doomed to fail, and not only because of the return of the Taliban in many rural parts of the country: the Americans and their NATO allies closed themselves off from Afghans in large regional bases, from which they operated in smaller units out of combat outposts, and distrust reined between them and their putative Afghan comrades. “Green-on-blue attacks,” in which Afghan security forces opened fire on their American and European counterparts, became alarmingly frequent. The Taliban, meanwhile, grew inexorably stronger.
During a visit to the tense, embattled, eastern province of Khost, in the winter of 2010, a senior American military commander there, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Lutsky, acknowledged to me the lack of trust with his Afghan counterparts, several of whom he suspected of working with the Taliban. “The cultural complexity of the environment is just so huge that it’s hard for us to understand it,” he said. “For Americans, it’s black or white—it’s either good guys or bad guys. For Afghans, it’s not. There are good Taliban and bad Taliban, and some of them are willing to do deals with each other. It’s just beyond us.”
Ten years on, as Afghanistan’s provincial capitals are falling to the Taliban and Kabul itself becomes encircled, the litany of exotic place names—Sheberghan, Taloqan, Kunduz, Kandahar, Herat—must mean little to most Americans, except for those who were once deployed in them. But a generation ago, as Afghan mujahideen, or holy warriors, of the so-called Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban coalition commanded by warlords, battled alongside American Special Forces to free these same towns from the Taliban, they were in the news constantly, as commonplace to Americans then as Benghazi or Raqqa became in later years. (In war, as in life, perhaps, people and places can become briefly and often intensely familiar, only to be discarded from memory when their apparent relevance has ceased. Who today remembers Hamid Karzai? Or Mullah Omar?)
When Kunduz and Sheberghan, adjacent cities in northern Afghanistan, fell within a day of each other, last weekend, I wondered how many Americans recalled that these were the sites of some of the bloodiest early episodes of the war, in 2001. In the desert outside Kunduz, hundreds and possibly thousands of Taliban and suspected Al Qaeda prisoners of war, who had surrendered to the Northern Alliance after the fall of the city that November, were locked in shipping containers and shot or left to die by forces led by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was working with the C.I.A. and with Special Forces commandos. Some of the survivors of that ordeal were selected for rendition by American agents on the ground, and ended up as prisoners in Guantánamo, beginning a controversial new chapter in American judicial history.
At the same time, an uprising by captured Taliban and foreign jihadis, at a nearby fortress named Qala-i-Jangi, resulted in the killing of Johnny Micheal Spann, an American C.I.A. officer—the first American to die in combat in Afghanistan. After days of fighting, during which at least three hundred prisoners died, the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, a twenty-year-old Muslim convert from California who had become a volunteer with the Taliban forces and had been questioned by Spann, was recaptured, after Dostum flooded the compound’s underground chambers. Lindh was returned to the U.S., tried in federal court for providing support to the Taliban, and sentenced to twenty years in a high-security federal prison. His presence at the fortress, though there is no evidence that he participated in the revolt, provoked strong feelings in the United States and led to an ongoing debate about national identity and loyalty in the modern age. In 2019, Lindh was released three years early, for good behavior, and he is on probation for the remainder of his sentence.
I was on the scene for the fall of Kunduz, in 2001, and was part of a small group of foreign journalists ambushed by Taliban fighters who had remained in hiding and attacked, even as most of their comrades were in the process of surrendering. Fortunately, none of us was killed, but the following night, after we returned to the nearby provincial capital, Taloqan, which had already been retaken by the Northern Alliance—and which also fell to the Taliban last weekend—a Swedish journalist was shot and killed by gunmen at the house where he was staying. After his death, and considering the lingering presence of numerous Taliban in Taloqan—along with that of allied Uzbek fighters, a group of whom we had seen engaged in last-minute deals with the Northern Alliance—the foreign journalists soon fled the city. I joined an armed convoy headed for Kabul, a four-day journey through the Hindu Kush mountains. Along the way, we were accosted by Afghan gunmen—perhaps Taliban, perhaps merely highwaymen—but, again, we were lucky, and arrived without loss of life.
Kabul had already fallen, supposedly. At least, the Taliban were visibly gone and, with them, their Al Qaeda friends. But, on subsequent days, as I moved around the devastated city, I had reason to wonder how genuine the Western-assisted Northern Alliance victory had been. One morning, a group of four women concealed in blue burqas approached me on the street, and one asked if I knew of any work opportunities. I was accosted by a furious shopkeeper for daring to communicate across the gender divide. The women scattered. It was as if a malady lingered in the Afghan air, despite the Taliban’s retreat.
Most of the Afghan men whom I met and who led battles against the Taliban two decades ago are now dead. Almost all were killed, in separate assassinations, as part of the Taliban’s plan to return to action. Their comeback has taken twenty years, but it is a classic example of a successful guerrilla war of attrition, and has involved all the usual elements of guerrilla strategy: a stealth campaign of hit-and-run military attacks, selective assassinations to demoralize their adversaries, and acts of terror that both weakened the government and created an atmosphere of abject compliance from local populations. A public campaign of hearts and minds followed, accompanied by decoy negotiations with the government and its allies in order to promote the idea that, as a force, the Taliban are not really extremist and are, in fact, open to dialogue, even to internal change. But the Taliban, by their very nature, are fundamentalists, believers in a strict Quranic credo.
In the pre-Taliban days of the late eighties, when I spent time with the mujahideen of Kandahar, who were then fighting the Soviets, a pair of local Islamic scholars banned music after consulting their sacred texts; this rule was added to their list of severe prohibitions, which included death for adulterers and the amputation of hands for thieves. In a court, set up in the middle of a battlefield, the two judges explained their sentencing system and told me how many murderers and adulterers they had put to death, after which one of them said, “We adhere to the Sharia in all cases.” Patting a pile of holy tracts next to him, he added, “All the answers are here.”
It was this same kind of earnest devotion to Islamic law that earned early popularity for the Taliban, when they emerged in the same area a few years later, after the Soviet retreat, under the leadership of Mullah Omar, a particularly devout mujahideen commander. Various mujahideen warlords who had emerged ascendant were fighting one another for power, and some were abusive toward civilians in the areas that they controlled. Mullah Omar’s Taliban presented themselves as a moralizing force and made swift headway against the warlords. Within a couple years, they controlled most of Afghanistan, and Kabul fell to them in 1996.
With no opposition except for a rump group of Northern Alliance warlords, who held out in the northern mountains for the next few years (until the Americans came along to assist them, in 2001), the Taliban imposed their strict version of Sharia law. Afghan women were all but excluded from public life, with many girls prohibited from attending school; the freedom to work for female teachers, doctors, and nurses was drastically circumscribed. The Taliban zealotry grew so great that children were forbidden to play with dolls or to fly kites, in favor of prayer sessions, while ethnic minorities and members of religious sects other than the extreme Sunni version of Islam that the Taliban espoused were persecuted. In one incident, it is estimated that the Taliban killed at least two thousand ethnic Hazaras, who are Shiite. Public executions became a norm, as well, often of women accused of various moral offenses. The killings were often carried out on sports fields or in stadiums, with the condemned sometimes stoned to death, or summarily shot in the head, or hanged, or, in the case of homosexuals, crushed and suffocated by mud walls toppled onto them by tanks. Before ISIS, in other words, there was the Taliban, showing how to do things.
In March, 2001—a few months before their Al Qaeda comrades carried out the 9/11 attacks—the Taliban, as a testament to their supposed iconoclastic purity, destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas. These were a pair of giant, fifteen-hundred-year-old sandstone statues, regarded as one of the man-made wonders of the ancient world. Taliban officials also took sledgehammers and axes to priceless artifacts in the Kabul Museum, destroying anything that predated Islamic civilization. The outside world did little to prevent any of these crimes.
The list of atrocities that the Taliban committed while they were in power goes on and on, and in the two decades since their ouster they have murdered again and again, in a war aimed at anyone who opposes them or even represents a potential challenge to them. The other day, a Taliban spokesman took credit for the murder, in Kabul, of his government counterpart, in what he called “a special attack.” Women have also been among the Taliban’s most consistent victims, from schoolteachers and television presenters to female parliamentarians and judges. In March, in the eastern city of Jalalabad, the Taliban killed three young female media workers; a female journalist was killed in June, in Kabul, by a car bomb. If the Taliban do sweep back into power in Kabul in the coming weeks, which seems a strong possibility, women will again be among their foremost targets.
There is a conceit that today’s Taliban is different from the Taliban of 2001. This is certainly an idea that some senior Taliban officials have sought to propagate in recent years. Facts on the ground suggest otherwise. They claim to have moved on from their old alliance with Al Qaeda, for instance, but over the years they have partnered with other jihadist groups operating, as they have done, out of sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, such as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for scores of suicide bombings and so-called complex attacks—involving gunmen and suicide bombers acting in tandem—and for causing hundreds of civilian deaths.
The Taliban have rendered Afghanistan unworkable as a country; unworkable, that is, without them. And the truth is that they were never really beaten. They merely did what guerrillas do in order to survive: they melted away in the face of overwhelming force, regrouped and restored themselves to fighting strength, and returned to battle. Here they are.
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9. Afghanistan’s lesson? Fight to win or stay home | Column
It can't be any more direct than the headline. Enough said.
Robert Bruce Adolph
Afghanistan’s lesson? Fight to win or stay home | Column
As the U.S. leaves and the Taliban march on, here’s what we should learn.
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03:16
On Aug. 6, 2021, an Afghan militiaman stands on a vehicle keeping a vigil along a road on the outskirts of Herat. [ -/AFP | AFP ]
Published Earlier today
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America and its allies lost the war in Afghanistan. The expenditure of blood and treasure was extraordinary and, in the end, shed and spent for little reason. There is no denying it. The clear winner is the Taliban, which is capturing one provincial capital after another as the U.S. troops finish pulling out. There are many reasons for the humiliating loss.
Robert Bruce Adolph is a former US Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel and United Nations Chief Security Advisor, who holds graduate degrees in both international affairs and national security studies and strategy. His previously published works have appeared in nearly every US military publication of note. Most recently, he penned the commentary series “Dispatch from Rome” for the Military Times. Adolph also recently published the book entitled “Surviving the United Nations: The Unexpected Challenge.” [ Courtesy of Robert Adolph ]
The Taliban fought a total war for the existence of their way of life. America did not. Our goal was to force the Taliban to quit sheltering Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, but that objective later morphed into “winning Afghan hearts and minds.” The former objective was possible. The latter was wildly improbable, reflecting mission creep gone mad. That led inevitably to America’s longest war.
America assiduously follows the Law of Land Warfare, which reflects our humanitarian values. The Taliban did not. America desperately attempted to avoid civilian casualties in the conduct of the conflict, especially during the Obama administration. The Taliban did not. The Taliban knew an essential old-world war-fighting truth: The winner triumphs by embracing the idea that the ends justify the means — and the end is ultimate victory.
Back to basics: The most important principle of war is “objective.” A winning combatant must first define the desired end, and then select the most suitable means necessary to achieve clear goals. Do it poorly, and precious soldiers’ lives and resources are wasted. The Bush administration established few feasible objectives in Afghanistan.
The key mistake made, though, was in staying. It was outrageous arrogance coupled with incredible naiveté that made the Bush White House wrongly assume that America and its allies could bestow democracy and liberal order on a fragmented tribalized country that had no experience with either. That administration left a foreign policy catastrophe in its wake that was inherited by subsequent commanders-in-chief.
We need look no farther than World War II for conflicts that had successful outcomes but were fought resolutely by an America that embraced the objective of the unconditional surrender of our enemies in both Europe and the Asia-Pacific. America won and subsequently dictated terms to the vanquished. The result? The birth of two of the most dynamic democracies in the world.
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If we consider ourselves to be morally superior to the Taliban — and we certainly aspire to be — then the only acceptable ethical arc is the one leading to victory. Attempting compromise with the Taliban was always absurd. They never cared one whit about the deaths of women and children caught in collateral crosshairs. Tragically, if those deaths served their interests — they often did — the innocent died horribly.
War may indeed be hell. But losing a war might be worse. The only other honorable and humanitarian alternative is to choose not to fight such limited conflicts at all. Upon reflection, this seems. like a promising idea, and one worth remembering. Popular commentator and retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters recently suggested to me that we should “Either fight to win or stay home.” Given recent history, it’s hard to disagree.
Robert Bruce Adolph is a former senior Army Special Forces soldier and United Nations security chief, who holds graduate degrees in both international affairs & strategy. He is the author of the new book entitled, “Surviving the United Nations: The Unexpected Challenge.”
10. Taliban enter Kabul, await ‘peaceful transfer’ of power
Probably a smart PSYOP move. Most of the journalists are in Kabul. They probably think a "peaceful transition" will legitimize them and if there is a fight they think they can fall back on the argument that they wanted peace. And if things go peacefully in Kabul they think it will cover all the atrocities they have committed throughout the rest of the country.
Taliban enter Kabul, await ‘peaceful transfer’ of power
By AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, TAMEEM AKHGAR and JON GAMBRELL
10 minutes ago
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban fighters entered Kabul on Sunday and sought the unconditional surrender of the central government, officials said, as Afghans and foreigners alike raced for the exit, signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.
The beleaguered central government, meanwhile, hope for an interim administration, but increasingly had few cards to play. Civilians fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. Helicopters buzzed overhead, some apparently evacuating personnel at the U.S. Embassy. Several other Western missions were also preparing to get staff out.
In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.
Instead, the Taliban swiftly defeated, co-opted or sent Afghan security forces fleeing from wide swaths of the country, even though they had some air support from the U.S. military.
On Sunday, the insurgents entered the outskirts of Kabul but apparently remained outside of the city’s downtown. Sporadic gunfire echoed at times though the streets were largely quiet.
Workers fled government offices, and smoke rose over the city as embassy staff burned important documents.
Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen told Qatar’s Al-Jazeera English satellite news channel that the insurgents are “awaiting a peaceful transfer of Kabul city.” He declined to offer specifics on any possible negotiations between his forces and the government.
But when pressed on what kind of agreement the Taliban wanted, Shaheen acknowledged that they were seeking an unconditional surrender by the central government.
Taliban negotiators headed to the presidential palace Sunday to discuss the transfer, said an Afghan official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. It remained unclear when that transfer would take place.
The negotiators on the government side included former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, an official said. Abdullah long has been a vocal critic of President Ashraf Ghani, who long refused giving up power to get a deal with the Taliban.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the closed-doors negotiations, described them as “tense.”
Acting Defense Minister Bismillah Khan sought to reassure the public that Kabul would remain “secure.” The insurgents also tried to calm residents of the capital, insisting their fighters wouldn’t enter people’s homes or interfere with businesses. They also said they’d offer an “amnesty” to those who worked with the Afghan government or foreign forces.
“No one’s life, property and dignity will be harmed and the lives of the citizens of Kabul will not be at risk,” the insurgents said in a statement. But they also warned no one to enter the area around the capital.
Despite the pledges, panic set in as many rushed to leave the country through the Kabul airport, the last route out of the country as the Taliban now hold every border crossing. Rapid shuttle flights of Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters near the U.S. Embassy began a few hours later after the militants seized the nearby city of Jalalabad — which had been the last major city besides the capital not in Taliban hands. Diplomatic armored SUVs could be seen leaving the area around the post.
The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to questions about the movements. However, wisps of smoke could be seen near the embassy’s roof as diplomats urgently destroyed sensitive documents, according to two American military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation. The smoke grew heavier over time in the area, home to other nation’s embassies as well.
Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which typically carry armed troops, later landed near the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. decided a few days ago to send in thousands of troops to help evacuate some personnel from its embassy.
At Kabul International Airport, Afghan forces abandoned the field to Western militaries, said a pilot who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss security matters.
Ghani, who spoke to the nation Saturday for the first time since the offensive began, appeared increasingly isolated. Warlords he negotiated with just days earlier have surrendered to the Taliban or fled, leaving Ghani without a military option. Ongoing negotiations in Qatar, the site of a Taliban office, also have failed to stop the insurgents’ advance.
Earlier in the day, militants posted photos online showing them in the governor’s office in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province.
Abrarullah Murad, a lawmaker from the province told The Associated Press that the insurgents seized the city after elders negotiated the fall of the government there. Murad said there was no fighting as the city surrendered.
The militants also took Maidan Shar, the capital of Maidan Wardak, on Sunday, Afghan lawmaker Hamida Akbari and the Taliban said. Another provincial capital in Khost also fell to the insurgents, said a provincial council member who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Afghan officials said the capitals of Kapisa and Parwan provinces also fell.
The militants also took the land border at Torkham, the last not in their control, on Sunday. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told local broadcaster Geo TV that Pakistan halted cross-border traffic there after the militants seized it.
Later, Afghan forces at Bagram air base, home to a prison housing 5,000 inmates, surrendered to the Taliban, according to Bagram district chief Darwaish Raufi. The prison at the former U.S. base held both Taliban and Islamic State group fighters.
___
Akhgar and Faiez reported from Istanbul and Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Kathy Gannon in Guelph, Canada, Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem and James LaPorta in Washington contributed to this report.
11. Afghanistan’s Taliban Enter Kabul
Now we have to explain to our other allies why this will not happen to them.
Excerpts:
Few in the city, however, have the appetite for a last stand against the Taliban. Kabul’s defenses are easily penetrated, and security officials estimate that hundreds of Taliban fighters are in the city, ready to rise up and seize neighborhoods. While Mr. Ghani wants to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with the Taliban, at this stage of the war nothing short of a thinly veiled surrender is likely to satisfy the insurgents.
For the U.S., the priority now is to persuade the Taliban to hold off until the evacuation of Americans and other foreigners from Kabul is complete. Mr. Biden said the U.S. has told Taliban representatives in Doha that any action on the ground in Afghanistan against U.S. personnel “will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response.”
The Afghan military began to unravel soon after Mr. Biden’s April decision to pull out U.S. troops, taking away the logistical and air support on which Afghan soldiers depended. Mr. Biden said Saturday that the withdrawal, which was required under the February 2020 Doha agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration, was the right decision.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” he said.
Afghanistan’s Taliban Enter Kabul
Insurgents said they wouldn’t take the city by force
WSJ · by Yaroslav Trofimov
Until the transition of power is done, the government would remain responsible for the security of the capital, it said, while adding that a general amnesty was announced for all.
A senior Afghan official said President Ashraf Ghani was at the U.S. Embassy to consult with the U.S. ambassador. Both the U.S. and Afghan government have asked the Taliban not to enter the city for two weeks until a transitional government could be agreed to, he said. “I do not think the Taliban will accept the offer,” he said. He added that negotiations were under way with the Taliban to choose a new head for the transitional government that would be acceptable for all sides.
A checkpoint in Kabul on Saturday.
Photo: wakil kohsar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Sporadic gunfire erupted in central Kabul in the late morning as the administration of Mr. Ghani told all employees to go home. Many checkpoints were abandoned as panicked residents clogged the streets.
Long lines formed outside banks and at the few functioning ATMs in Kabul as residents, fearful that the city may fall to the Taliban within hours, rushed to withdraw their cash.
“The other provinces have already collapsed, so there is no reason to think it won’t happen here soon,” said Samsur, a student originally from Jalalabad, as he took his place in a line outside a Kabul mall that contained a working cash machine. He said he hoped to be able to withdraw his savings, a total of 5,000 afghanis, or $58, before the money ran out.
“Everyone is in panic,” added Aman, a money changer, as he waved a thick wad of the Afghan currency that he traded for dollars. “If the government is afraid, of course the people are even more afraid.”
In a message to followers Sunday, the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, urged his fighters to treat conquered cities with a benevolent hand. “The victories are coming, do not be arrogant and conceited, do not betray the spoils of war, and treat well those who surrender to you,” he said. “Do your best to avoid civilian casualties.”
With the Taliban at the Afghan capital’s door, the U.S. has rushed 5,000 troops to Kabul to secure the airport and help evacuate American diplomatic personnel. Overnight, the near constant buzz of helicopters hung over central Kabul as the Green Zone that contained much of the foreign presence emptied out. Many embassies have closed or relocated to the military base in the airport. The U.S., which is in constant contact with the Taliban’s political leadership in Doha, Qatar, has urged the insurgents to hold off on taking Kabul until after the evacuation is complete and all Americans have left the city, according to people familiar with the talks.
On Sunday, there was no sign of the U.S. military in the city itself. Streets were jammed by traffic as residents rushed to put their affairs in order before an expected Taliban takeover, and as people from areas that have fallen to the insurgents sought refuge in the capital. “We have no idea what will happen from one moment to the next in this situation,” said Mohammad Nasim, a worker at a nongovernment organization. “But what can we do? There is nowhere for us to go. There is no chance to leave the city anymore.”
Afghans Flee to Kabul as Taliban Advances
Tens of thousands of people escaping fighting in the provinces gather in the Afghan capital, sleeping in city parks and mosques
Taliban flags fly in the city of Ghazni, southwest of Kabul, on Saturday.
Gulabuddin Amiri/Associated Press
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Taliban flags fly in the city of Ghazni, southwest of Kabul, on Saturday.
Gulabuddin Amiri/Associated Press
Afghans also mobbed Kabul’s passport offices, seeking to secure valuable travel documents while an internationally recognized Afghan government still exists—and while the airport continues operations. Not many were lucky.
In the line that snaked past blast barriers outside Afghanistan’s central bank, opinions were divided over who was to blame. Poet Samdel Banwa, originally from the eastern Kunar province, said President Biden’s April decision to withdraw all American forces was the reason for the country’s unfolding tragedy. “It’s because of you that we are suffering. Why did you have to leave like this?” he asked.
A Kabul schoolteacher who stood in the same line, Mirwais, vented his anger at the infighting and incompetence within the Afghan government. “The government has betrayed the people,” he said. “This is why I am standing here today.”
Abdul Wahid, a 23-year-old youth activist, said he had been trying unsuccessfully to get a passport for the last 20 days.
“We cannot trust the Taliban,” said Mr. Wahid. “I heard that all the embassies in Kabul are closed and it means I cannot get a visa. That makes me more scared, I can’t sleep at night.”
Milad Anwari, a 38-year-old businessman also at the passport office, said he had already shifted many family members to Turkey. He said he had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Afghanistan over the past decade.
“I never expected that the Taliban would come again. Now everything is going to collapse,” said Mr. Anwari. “With the Taliban here, I don’t have any hope for the future of my country.”
While there were days of fierce combat before Afghanistan’s other major cities of Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the Taliban, Jalalabad changed hands without much of a fight during the night.
Rahat Gul Ziarmal, the deputy mayor of Jalalabad, said the insurgents had complete control of the city, which sits on the main road connecting Kabul to Pakistan. Pictures circulating on social media showed the Taliban’s new governor sitting with the Kabul-appointed provincial governor in his compound. Locally brokered deals between the Taliban and regional officials have seen many of the country’s other provinces change hands without major battles in recent days.
Kabul, a metropolis of six million people, is the last remaining target—and the biggest prize—for the Taliban. Mr. Ghani on Saturday appointed Brig.-Gen. Sami Sadat, a highly regarded commander who held the Taliban at bay in the southern province of Helmand for weeks and in recent days assumed command of Afghanistan’s special-operations forces, to lead the defense of the capital.
Few in the city, however, have the appetite for a last stand against the Taliban. Kabul’s defenses are easily penetrated, and security officials estimate that hundreds of Taliban fighters are in the city, ready to rise up and seize neighborhoods. While Mr. Ghani wants to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with the Taliban, at this stage of the war nothing short of a thinly veiled surrender is likely to satisfy the insurgents.
For the U.S., the priority now is to persuade the Taliban to hold off until the evacuation of Americans and other foreigners from Kabul is complete. Mr. Biden said the U.S. has told Taliban representatives in Doha that any action on the ground in Afghanistan against U.S. personnel “will be met with a swift and strong U.S. military response.”
The Afghan military began to unravel soon after Mr. Biden’s April decision to pull out U.S. troops, taking away the logistical and air support on which Afghan soldiers depended. Mr. Biden said Saturday that the withdrawal, which was required under the February 2020 Doha agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration, was the right decision.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” he said.
—Saeed Shah contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Yaroslav Trofimov
12. Taliban seize Jalalabad, cut off Afghan capital from east
Yes this is some good PSYOP. Found on social media so I cannot verify this. But if it is accurate it is smart PSYOP.
Apparently released overnight:
"Statement of the Islamic Emirate regarding no engagement in a fight in Kabul city:
Due to will of Allah the great and cooperation of out people, Alhamdullellah, all parts of the country has been taken under control of the Islamic Emirate. This is a great victory for our people, and we congratulate everyone.
As Kabul, the capital of the country is a great city, Mujahiddin of the Islamic Emirate do not intend to enter the city with force and fight, but in order to enter Kabul city in a prosperous way, discussion is underway with the opposition side, so that the transition process completes in a secure way. No one's property or pride will be harmed, and life of Kabuli citizens will not encounter any issue or danger.
Islamic Emirate instructs all its forces to stop at entrance gates of Kabul, and do not attempt to enter the city. Likewise, until completion of the transition process, securing Kabul city is responsibility of the other side who has to fulfill it.
We once again repeat that the Islamic Emirate is not thinking of revenging from anyone, those who worked in military or civilian departments of Kabul administration, all are pardoned and are safe. No one will be behaved in an avenging way. Everyone should stay own country, in their own home, and do not intend to run from the country.
We want all Afghans, in various divisions [backgrounds] and generations to see themselves in an Islamic government, such a responsible government that shall be in service of all. Inshallah.
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”
Taliban seize Jalalabad, cut off Afghan capital from east
AP · by AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, TAMEEM AKHGAR and JON GAMBRELL · August 15, 2021
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban on Sunday seized the last major city outside of Kabul held by the country’s increasingly isolated central government, cutting off the capital to the east and tightening their grip on the nation as tens of thousands fled their rapid advance.
The collapse of Jalalabad, near a major border crossing with Pakistan, leaves Afghanistan’s central government in control of just Kabul and seven other provincial capitals out of the country’s 34. In a nationwide offensive that has taken just over a week, the Taliban has defeated, co-opted or sent Afghan security forces fleeing from wide swathes of the country, even with some air support by the U.S. military.
President Ashraf Ghani, who spoke to the nation Saturday for the first time since the offensive began, appears increasingly isolated as well. Warlords he negotiated with just days earlier have surrendered to the Taliban or fled, leaving Ghani without a military option. Ongoing negotiations in Qatar, the site of a Taliban office, also have failed to stop the insurgents’ advance.
As the U.S. speeds troops into the country to protect its embassy, Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters could be seen taking off and landing near the diplomatic outpost Sunday morning. Wisps of smoke rose from the embassy’s roof as diplomats urgently destroyed sensitive documents, according to two American military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the situation.
Thousands of civilians now live in parks and open spaces in Kabul itself, fearing the future. While Kabul appeared calm Sunday, some ATMs stopped distributing cash as hundreds gathered in front of private banks, trying to withdraw their life savings.
Militants posted photos online early Sunday showing them in the governor’s office in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province.
Abrarullah Murad, a lawmaker from the province told The Associated Press that the insurgents seized Jalalabad after elders negotiated the fall of the government there. Murad said there was no fighting as the city surrendered.
The fall Saturday of Mazar-e-Sharif, the country’s fourth largest city, which Afghan forces and two powerful former warlords had pledged to defend, handed the insurgents control over all of northern Afghanistan.
Atta Mohammad Noor and Abdul Rashid Dostum, two of the warlords Ghani tried to rally to his side days earlier, fled over the border into Uzbekistan on Saturday, said officials close to Dostum. They spoke on condition of anonymity as they weren’t authorized to publicly speak about his movements.
Writing on Twitter, Noor alleged a “conspiracy” aided the fall of the north to the Taliban, without elaborating.
“Despite our firm resistance, sadly, all the government and the Afghan security forces equipment were handed over to the Taliban as a result of a big organized and cowardly plot,” Noor wrote. “They had orchestrated the plot to trap Marshal Dostum and myself too, but they didn’t succeed.”
In his speech Saturday, Ghani vowed not to give up the “achievements” of the 20 years since the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks.
The U.S. has continued holding peace talks between the government and the Taliban in Qatar this week, and the international community has warned that a Taliban government brought about by force would be shunned. But the insurgents appear to have little interest in making concessions as they rack up victories on the battlefield.
“We have started consultations, inside the government with elders and political leaders, representatives of different levels of the community as well as our international allies,” Ghani said. “Soon the results will be shared with you,” he added, without elaborating further.
Many Afghans fear a return to the Taliban’s oppressive rule. The group had previously governed Afghanistan under a harsh version of Islamic law in which women were forbidden to work or attend school, and could not leave their homes without a male relative accompanying them.
Salima Mazari, one of the few female district governors in the country, expressed fears about a Taliban takeover Saturday in an interview from Mazar-e-Sharif, before it fell.
“There will be no place for women,” said Mazari, who governs a district of 36,000 people near the northern city. “In the provinces controlled by the Taliban, no women exist there anymore, not even in the cities. They are all imprisoned in their homes.”
In a statement late Saturday, however, the Taliban insisted their fighters wouldn’t enter people’s homes or interfere with businesses. They also said they’d offer an “amnesty” to those who worked with the Afghan government or foreign forces.
“The Islamic Emirate once again assures all its citizens that it will, as always, protect their life, property and honor and create a peaceful and secure environment for its beloved nation,” the militants said. “In this regard, no one should worry about their life.”
___
Akhgar and Faiez reported from Istanbul and Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem and James LaPorta in Washington contributed to this report.
AP · by AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, TAMEEM AKHGAR and JON GAMBRELL · August 15, 2021
13. Afghanistan's New President Will be mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
From a friend in the region.
The Taliban really has its act together. If this is true they really know what they are doing
Not yet verified:
Afghanistan's New President Will be mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. He Just Arrived in Kabul via military plane from Doha
And Negotiation is underway.
Taliban Says It Will Not Enter Kabul by Force
The Taliban ordered its members to wait near the Kabul gates and not try to enter the city.
RELATED NEWS
Amid uncertainty in Kabul and fears that the city will collapse, the Taliban in a statement on Sunday said it will not enter the city of Kabul by force.
The group said that talks are underway with the other side to negotiate entering Kabul in a way to prevent harm to the people.
The Taliban ordered its members to wait near the Kabul gates and not try to enter the city.
The Taliban said the government will be responsible for the security of Kabul until "the transition process" is done
Taliban said it is not seeking revenge and that all civilian and military officials will remain safe.
Acting Interior Minister Abdul Sattar Mirzakwal said Kabul will not be attacked and that the transition will happen peacefully.
He assured Kabul residents that security forces will ensure the security of the city.
Meanwhile, on Sunday former President Hamid Karzai met with Abdullah Abdullah, head of the reconciliation council, Karzai’s office said.
In the meeting, they discussed the necessary requirements to send an authoritative delegation to Qatar for negotiations with the Taliban.
President Ghani and political leaders on Saturday agreed to appoint an authoritative delegation to negotiate further steps in the transition with the Taliban.
14. From hubris to humiliation: America’s warrior class contends with the abject failure of its Afghanistan project
We are hanging our collective heads in shame.
Why was our "military bureaucracy" unchecked? Was it unchecked?
Conclusion:
“We know what happens when we fall to imperial hubris. What does one do with imperial heartbreak?” asked John Gans, who served as a civilian in the Pentagon during the Obama administration.
...
“After 9/11, everyone raced to become a Middle East or counterterrorism expert,” said Gans. “After covid, you don’t see many foreign policy people racing to become global health experts.”
On one subject most foreign policy experts agree: America needs to temper its faith in its armed forces. “We had so much faith in our military that we were inevitably going to overstep,” said Dempsey, the Afghanistan veteran. “A military bureaucracy unchecked never yields good outcomes.”
From hubris to humiliation: America’s warrior class contends with the abject failure of its Afghanistan project
Twenty years ago, when the twin towers and the Pentagon were still smoldering, there was a sense among America’s warrior and diplomatic class that history was starting anew for the people of Afghanistan and much of the Muslim world.
“Every nation has a choice to make,” President George W. Bush said on the day that bombs began falling on Oct. 7, 2001. In private, senior U.S. diplomats were even more explicit. “For you and us, history starts today,” then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told his Pakistani counterparts.
Earlier this month, as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, retired Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey, a two-time veteran of the war, stumbled across Armitage’s words. To Dempsey, the sentiment was “the most American thing I’ve ever heard” and emblematic of the hubris and ignorance that he and so many others brought to the losing war.
“We assumed the rest of the world saw us as we saw ourselves,” he said. “And we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.” Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong.
The near-collapse of the Afghan army in the space of just a few stunning weeks is prompting the military and Washington’s policymakers to reflect on their failures over the course of nearly two decades. To many, the roots of the disaster go back to the war’s earliest days, when the Taliban was first driven from power and the United States, still reeling from the shock of the 9/11 attacks, set about building a government in Kabul.
Some two dozen prominent Afghans met in Bonn, Germany, with officials from the U.S. government, NATO and the United Nations to form a new Afghan government crafted in the image of the United States and its European allies.
“You look at the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and it was trying to create a Western democracy,” said Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010. “In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.”
Flournoy acknowledged in hindsight that the mistake was compounded across Republican and Democratic administrations, which continued with almost equal fervor to pursue goals that ran counter to decades — if not centuries — of the Afghan experience.
By 2009, when Obama took office, it was clear to just about everyone that the United States was losing the war.
To reverse Taliban momentum and give U.S. officials a chance to build up the Afghan government and security forces, Obama signed off on a surge of troops that more than doubled the size of the American force in Afghanistan.
Flournoy said she was initially hopeful that the plan could work. On trips to Afghanistan, she met frequently with young Afghans, including women’s groups, who shared America’s vision for the country. They wanted to send their daughters to school, serve in government, start businesses and nonprofits. They wanted women to be full participants in society and craved a predictable political and legal system. “We found all kinds of allies,” she said.
But those individuals were no match for the rot that had permeated the Afghan government. She and other U.S. officials understood that with all the U.S. money floating around in Afghanistan, there would be “petty corruption,” she said. What U.S. officials discovered in 2010, after the surge was already underway, was a corruption that ran far deeper than they had previously understood and that jeopardized their strategy, which depended on building the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
“We realized that this is not going to work,” Flournoy said. “We had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten.”
Now, as Taliban fighters race toward Kabul and the Afghan military crumbles, Flournoy said her thoughts often turn to the Americans who sacrificed for the mission and to those “wonderful allies” who shared the U.S. hopes for a democratic Afghanistan. “That’s what makes me so sick to my stomach,” she said. “We invested in this whole generation that is about to suffer through this very horrible chapter.”
Meanwhile, current and former U.S. officials are trying to make sense of why a government and security forces built over two decades at a cost of more than $100 billion dollars are collapsing so quickly.
Carter Malkasian, a longtime adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, has pegged the weakness of the Afghan forces on their lack of a unifying cause that resonates with Afghans, as well as their heavy dependence on the United States. By contrast, Taliban members were fighting for their culture and Islam. They “exemplified something that inspired, something that made them powerful in battle, something closely tied to what it meant to be an Afghan,” Malkasian writes in his new book, “The American War in Afghanistan.”
It’s an observation that speaks to the limits of American power and raises the broader question of how the catastrophic and embarrassing failure in Afghanistan might constrain U.S. foreign policy moving forward.
“We know what happens when we fall to imperial hubris. What does one do with imperial heartbreak?” asked John Gans, who served as a civilian in the Pentagon during the Obama administration.
So many of today’s rising military commanders and foreign policy experts were drawn into government service by the 9/11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan. After the relatively low-stakes peacekeeping missions of the 1990s, America and U.S. foreign policy suddenly seemed to be at the center of the world in the years after 2001. A whole generation of leaders driven “by ambition, ego and a desire to shape world events” ran toward the action, Gans said.
Their numbers include lawmakers such as Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who joined the CIA, and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who signed up for the infantry, as well as top Biden foreign policy officials, such as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
It seems certain that in coming years the use of military force will be informed by this searing experience. U.S. foreign policy will be guided by more modest ambitions, especially when weighing the use of military power. Flournoy imagines a future in which military force is limited to more sharply defined objectives and informed by far greater humility when it comes to spreading democracy or changing societies.
In many cases, it’s a vision in which force is used to manage chronic problems, rather than solve them.
Another possibility is a U.S. foreign policy that is increasingly focused more on issues such as pandemics or climate change, which require U.S. leadership and a global response. Gans noted that more than 600,000 Americans have died of covid-19, far more than the number of U.S. lives lost to terrorism and war over the past 20 years.
For now, though, it seems unlikely that these threats will take center stage in U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon, with its $740 billion budget, still sucks up a larger share of discretionary spending than any other government agency. Meanwhile, the foreign policy establishment has shifted its focus increasingly to the competition with the likes of Russia and China.
“After 9/11, everyone raced to become a Middle East or counterterrorism expert,” said Gans. “After covid, you don’t see many foreign policy people racing to become global health experts.”
On one subject most foreign policy experts agree: America needs to temper its faith in its armed forces. “We had so much faith in our military that we were inevitably going to overstep,” said Dempsey, the Afghanistan veteran. “A military bureaucracy unchecked never yields good outcomes.”
15. ‘A self-inflicted wound’: Former ambassador to Afghanistan, Spokane Valley native Ryan Crocker says Taliban rout was avoidable
A brutal conclusion from Ambassador Crocker:
“I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander-in-chief,” Crocker said. “To have read this so wrong – or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.”
‘A self-inflicted wound’: Former ambassador to Afghanistan, Spokane Valley native Ryan Crocker says Taliban rout was avoidable
WASHINGTON – With Taliban forces rapidly seizing territory across Afghanistan and Americans rushing to evacuate the besieged capital, a decorated former diplomat who twice headed the U.S. embassy in Kabul said the United States could have avoided this disastrous coda to its longest war.
Spokane Valley native Ryan Crocker arrived in the Afghan capital to reopen the shuttered embassy in January 2002, weeks after the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime, and returned to serve as ambassador from 2011 to 2012. In an interview with The Spokesman-Review on Friday, Crocker said while the pace of the insurgents’ advance has surprised him, the Biden administration should have seen it coming.
“I think the direction was predictable; the trajectory was not,” he said. “What President Biden has done is to embrace the Afghan policy of President Trump, and this is the outcome.”
During a four-decade career in the Foreign Service that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, Crocker served as U.S. ambassador to six countries, most recently when President Barack Obama called him out of retirement in 2011 to serve as America’s top diplomat in Kabul.
Since Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal in April, Taliban insurgents have overrun much of the country, taking control of key border crossings and most provincial capitals. As of Saturday, the Taliban controlled roughly two-thirds of Afghanistan’s territory, according to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a foreign policy think tank.
Crocker said the rapid collapse of Afghan security forces, in which the U.S. government has invested roughly $83 billion to train and equip since 2001, is largely due to cratering morale and the loss of U.S. air power.
“We’ve spent the last almost two years delegitimizing the Afghan government and its security forces,” he said. “It has destroyed the morale of the government and certainly of its security forces.”
While the U.S. troop level declined from about 12,000 in March 2020 to roughly 3,500 when Biden announced the withdrawal in April, Crocker said even that limited presence gave Afghan allies symbolic and practical support.
By cutting the Afghan government out of the peace talks, while agreeing to terms that included the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners, Crocker said the U.S. government “effectively sided with the Taliban” in the eyes of Afghan forces, who have reportedly deserted in large numbers.
“It is not exactly a climate in which these young troopers can be reasonably expected to hold that line, having been sold out by us,” he said.
Despite that indignity, Crocker said Afghan security forces largely did what the U.S. government asked of them and maintained garrisons throughout the country, but those deployments were only viable with the help of U.S. airstrikes. The predictable collapse of Afghan forces without that air support, he said, suggests “a total lack of coordinated, post-withdrawal planning on our part.”
“That’s why this is all so sad,” he said. “It is a self-inflicted wound.”
The administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, arrived in Qatar on Monday to press Taliban representatives to halt their offensive and ask diplomats from other countries in the region not to recognize a Taliban government without a peace deal.
But Crocker said the Islamist group cares far less about diplomatic relations than it does about the idea that it has defeated the world’s strongest military, a narrative he fears will embolden other Islamist militants around the world.
“We’re going to pay for that for a long time to come, and that’s why it is insane – just idiotic – to think that we can tell the Taliban that if they don’t stop taking over territory and play nice, the international community will withhold recognition and support,” he said. “The Taliban really doesn’t care, because they’ve got something far more valuable.”
Crocker said he also worries the Taliban could again harbor terrorist groups, while U.S. intelligence agencies will be less capable of tracking threats in the country after the withdrawal.
“We have seen this movie before,” he said. “This would be the Taliban of the 1990s that gave safe haven to al-Qaida, except they’re meaner and tougher than they were then because of what they’ve been through.”
Khalilzad began his role under the Trump administration in 2018 and shepherded the negotiations that led to the U.S.-Taliban deal in 2020. Crocker said Biden’s decision to retain the veteran diplomat was unusual and signaled he intended to stick with his predecessor’s approach to Afghanistan.
“By keeping the envoy of the previous administration, he was keeping the policy of the previous administration,” he said. “That’s how these things work.”
In addition to evacuating embassy staff and other Americans, the 4,000 additional troops who began arriving in Kabul on Friday are charged with evacuating Afghans who have worked for the U.S. government and are now being targeted by the Taliban. The White House has said it will take thousands of Afghans who have applied for the Special Immigrant Visa program to safe locations outside the country, but that daunting effort is in even greater jeopardy with most of the country under Taliban control.
Crocker said the U.S. government should move those Afghans out of the country quickly and “sort out the red tape later.”
“But even with all of that, I’m afraid a lot of people are going to die,” he said. “As the Taliban moves into different cities and towns, they’ve got their hit list. So it’s going to be messy, it’s going to be incomplete and more people are going to die, but we’ve got to make our best possible effort.”
While Trump spurned international alliances and advocated a more insular U.S. foreign policy, the Biden administration has sought to reassert a leadership role on the global stage. As a senator, Biden chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and was the first U.S. lawmaker to visit Kabul when the embassy reopened in 2002, but Crocker said Biden’s haste in leaving Afghanistan has made him question the president’s leadership.
“I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander-in-chief,” Crocker said. “To have read this so wrong – or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.”
Orion Donovan-Smith's reporting for The Spokesman-Review is funded in part by Report for America and by members of the Spokane community. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper’s managing editor.
16. Afghanistan Is a Wake-Up Call for ‘Major Non-NATO Allies’
I do not envy US diplomats around the world having to explain this.
We can make promises and give assurances but many will question our strategic reassurance and strategic resolve.
The problem is allies will want proof to show that we back up our words. The only test of US resolve they are witnessing is in Afghanistan. We will likely never recover their confidence until we are tested again.
Afghanistan Is a Wake-Up Call for ‘Major Non-NATO Allies’
From Afghanistan to Hungary, there is confusion about what alliance means and what steps the United States is prepared to take on behalf of those it considers allies. These matters need resolution because the United States cannot allow any doubt about what commitments it is prepared to enforce, especially with great power competitors more prepared to test any ambiguity in America’s stance.
A point that I have tried to make in these pages for the last two decades is the importance of clarity in language, particularly when it comes to commitments. Back in 2003, I worried that the careless bandying-about of terms like partner or ally “increasingly muddle policy, especially when they create assumptions or expectations that are then unfulfilled.” In the aftermath of Russian actions taken against Georgia (in 2008) and Ukraine (in 2004), I warned about the dangers of blurring the line between an ally with a Senate-confirmed mutual defense treaty and concrete contingency planning for security, and a “partner” who received U.S. security assistance funds and basked in presidential speeches and non-binding Congressional resolutions promising support.
Commitments matter, because the reliability of one’s guarantees directly influences the deterrent power that they exercise over a challenger’s strategic calculus. Over the last seven years, we have seen how Russia has tested, most notably with Ukraine, the gap between rhetorical promises of support for Kyiv with what the United States was actually prepared to put on the line. In addition, the U.S. ability to get other key allies to adopt its rhetorical commitments as binding on them has waned. Germany, pursuing its own national security imperative of securing unimpeded access to energy supplies at a price and quantity that allows its economy to remain competitive (and, in turn, to pull along the overall economies of the European Union member states), has successfully pushed back against U.S. efforts to stop the construction of the Nord Stream II pipeline that will allow Russian natural gas to be sent directly to Germany—without the need to transit states which have difficult relations with Moscow. From Germany’s perspective, Ukraine is a European partner (which is why Berlin offers to use its good offices to ensure some Russian energy transit continues across Ukrainian territory, and to invest in modernizing the Ukrainian energy infrastructure)—but not a treaty ally, meaning that Germany does not believe it is obligated out of any sense of formal alliance commitments to prioritize Ukrainian concerns as part of the bilateral German-Russian relationship.
Moreover, as the United States seeks to get consensus from its NATO allies to expand the focus of the alliance to consider the Chinese challenge, negotiating within the alliance in order to bolster America’s ability to recommit to its formal Asian allies, starting with Japan and South Korea, takes precedence. Ukraine, like Georgia before it, is receiving an unpleasant reminder that, no matter how many members of Congress use the term “ally” to describe Ukraine, there is in fact a clear, sharp, and bright dividing line in U.S. foreign policy between treaty allies and “everyone else.” Recent studies also indicate that “foreign policy experts in the United States consider treaty alliances to be the most important type of relationship” and draw distinctions between states with formal treaty commitments versus states that may be described on the floor of the U.S. Senate as an ally but lack any documents that have been signed on the dotted line.
A number of years ago, seeking to remedy this deficiency, there was a push within Congress to formally designate Ukraine as a non-NATO ally of the United States. In theory, this would put Ukraine at the same level as countries like Israel (another state which lacks a formal treaty of alliance with the United States). However, watching events unfold in Afghanistan, Ukrainian policymakers might reconsider the value of such a declaration. After all, with much ballyhoo, in 2012 Afghanistan was so designated as a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States, a step that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared represented “a powerful commitment to Afghanistan’s future” through which “a number of benefits” would accrue to Kabul. At the time, this declaration was seen as significant given that such a status continued to be denied to Ukraine and Georgia but also was not even being considered in the context of the India-U.S. strategic dialogue. It also seemed to suggest that the United States was invested in the success of Afghanistan as a keystone for U.S. power and influence in the region.
Over the last two weeks, in all of the discussions of what is going to happen to the government of Afghanistan as the United States completes its withdrawal, I have not come across any discussion of how Afghanistan’s status as a designated “ally” of the United States is playing out. In other words, the erosion of the power of the recognized government in Kabul—with predictions of complete collapse now increasingly being heard—is discussed without any reference to its status as a formally designated ally of the United States.
In retrospect, giving that designation to Afghanistan nine years ago was not strategically sound, given the problems that the Afghan government faced, but reflected a view that Colin Dueck has pointed out about “getting things right verbally” and “thinking that the words in themselves are self-executing”—that making the designation of Afghanistan as an ally would somehow either lock in the U.S. public commitment to the Afghan mission or cause the Afghans themselves to change their behavior. And yet, the formal designation of Afghanistan as an ally has not captured the U.S. public imagination. As the most recent Chicago Council surveys show, some 70 percent of Americans support the withdrawal of U.S. forces—and this support spans partisan affiliations, and in fact may be one of the few issues where large numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree.
But what it also suggests is that the non-NATO ally designation—which can be done by the Executive Branch and is not confirmed or ratified by Congress, but also does not formally commit the United States to anything—may not be worth as much. Moreover, because it lacks Senate ratification, there is less buy-in should the U.S. public not support taking action. Watching events in Kabul, a government in Kyiv, or Tbilisi, or Chisinau would wonder whether getting even the non-NATO status would bring much benefit. (I assume that they would still lobby for such a status, both for the possibilities for enhanced partnerships in the development and purchase of advanced military equipment, and even because the non-NATO designation would allow the claim of being an “ally” of the United States to rest on an actual U.S. government designation on official letterhead, even if it did not rise to the level of a mutual-defense commitment.)
But while other non-NATO allies may look at the fate of the Kabul government as an unpleasant reminder that their status as partners of the United States is not as far-reaching as they might hope, there is another trend currently in play: countries that are fulfilling the letter of their formal alliance commitments but who are pursuing domestic or foreign policies at odds with U.S. preferences being cast out, at least in terms of public and elite discourse, from the ranks of U.S. allies. I do not wish to discuss the specifics or merit of any steps taken in recent months by governments in Turkey, Hungary, or Poland, but as of August 2021, all three were still formal members of NATO and carrying out the terms of their specified commitments to the alliance. In particular, Turkey still continues to provide its personnel for a variety of NATO missions across the alliance. And yet the fraternal bonds of the alliance are fraying because of the sense that Ankara, Budapest, and now Warsaw may increasingly be at odds with the ethos of the other NATO members. This speaks to a larger problem that NATO must resolve: is it a security community aligned against concrete geopolitical threats or is its purpose to strengthening democratic values? In writing for this journal on the seventieth anniversary of the signing of the Washington Treaty creating the North Atlantic alliance, I quoted Ahmet Berat Conkar, the then-head of Turkey’s NATO parliamentary assembly, who noted that the alliance would have “to come to terms with those divergences.”
From Afghanistan to Hungary, there is confusion about what alliance means and what steps the United States is prepared to take on behalf of those it considers allies. These matters need resolution because the United States cannot allow any doubt about what commitments it is prepared to enforce, especially with great power competitors more prepared to test any ambiguity in America’s stance.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a contributing editor at the National Interest.
Image: Reuters.
17. US Capitol riot judges step up as the conscience of democracy while lawmakers squabble
Judge Amy Berman Jackson's quote will go in my quote book: "Patriotism is loyalty to country, loyalty to the Constitution -- not loyalty to a head of state. That is the tyranny we rejected on July Fourth."
There should be no argument with this quote. No American can refute its clear meaning and that it is the essence of American political philosophy.
US Capitol riot judges step up as the conscience of democracy while lawmakers squabble
CNN · by Tierney Sneed, CNN
(CNN)A "disgrace to our country." "The tyranny we rejected." "An embarrassment to every American."
In presiding over the cases of hundreds of people accused of breaching the US Capitol on January 6 in support of then-President Donald Trump, federal judges have not held back when describing the unprecedented nature of the events of that day.
"You called yourself and everyone else patriots, but that's not patriotism," Judge Amy Berman Jackson told defendant Karl Dresch earlier this month. "Patriotism is loyalty to country, loyalty to the Constitution -- not loyalty to a head of state. That is the tyranny we rejected on July Fourth."
As the congressional investigations grow more partisan -- and Democratic and Republican viewpoints on the significance of the Capitol attack grow farther apart -- it's notable that judges appointed by presidents of both parties have described the riot as an existential danger to American democracy.
"It means that it will be harder today than it was seven months ago for the United States and our diplomats to convince other nations to pursue democracy," Judge Randolph Moss said at a July 19 sentencing hearing. "It means that it will be harder for all of us to convince our children and our grandchildren that democracy stands as the immutable foundation of this nation. It means that we are now all fearful about the next attack in a way that we never were."
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There have been various points in the judicial process in which judges have stepped back to elaborate on what the January 6 riot was, fundamentally, about. Sometimes it's when a judge is knocking down defenses that downplay the seriousness of the breach. On other occasions, a judge is explaining why she is not willing to free a defendant who allegedly was part of the mob. The most striking examples come during sentencing hearings, when judges put into context the punishments they're handing down.
The willingness to opine on the broader circumstances varies from judge to judge, Michael McConnell, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former federal appellate judge, told CNN.
"The sentencing is a public event and when the underlying justice has been challenged, even indirectly, I think many judges consider it part of their civic responsibility to speak to the public," he said. "They're talking to the defendants nominally, but they're really speaking to the public -- to restore and protect the rule of law."
That includes in situations, like in the sentencing of Dresch, where the penalty -- six months in prison, which was effectively time served -- may seem light for how starkly the judges describe the crimes
"The sentences have not been incredibly putative, which is why their comments, putting the sentence in context, are so important," said Nancy Gertner, a former federal district judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School.
Replacing 'the will of the people' with 'the will of the mob'
Time and time again, judges have made the point that the defendants were not ransacking just any federal building, nor was it a typical proceeding that they were disrupting.
What they were able to interrupt was "a critical function required by the US Constitution for a peaceful transition of power in our democracy," as DC Chief Judge Beryl Howell put at a February 23 hearing with a Proud Boys member.
At his August 4 sentencing, Jackson said that Dresch, who pleaded guilty to illegally demonstrating in the Capitol, was an "enthusiastic participant" in an effort "to subvert democracy, to stop the will of the people and replace it with the will of the mob"
Moss, a nominee of President Barack Obama, said that the attack "threatened not only the security of the Capitol, but democracy itself," as he sentenced Paul Hodgkins, a rioter who pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding.
"Our elected representatives from both political parties came together that day to perform their constitutional and statutory duty to declare, in the word of the statute, the person elected president," Moss said at the July 19 hearing. "The mob's objective was to stop that from happening. They were prepared to break the law to prevent Congress from performing its constitutional and statutory duty. That is chilling for many reasons."
District Judge Randolph Moss presides as defendant Paul Hodgkins is at the podium with his attorney Patrick Leduc on July 19, 2021, in Washington, DC.
The judges don't just have a symbolic viewpoint on the insurrection. Their courthouse sits only a half mile from the Capitol complex and is on the route that the rioters took from the rally in front of the White House. Howell has said that from her chamber window she could see the National Guard stationed at the Capitol in the wake of the attack.
"I teach in various countries and I'm always touting the greatness of America. It's going to be difficult for me to convince people in other parts of the world that we are that shining light upon a hill because of what happened that day," Judge Reggie Walton said at a Capitol riot plea proceeding that unfolded as the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack held its first hearing in late July.
"It's an embarrassment to me," he added. "It should be an embarrassment to every American."
'Gullible enough' to believe Trump
Judges have cited Trump's continued promotion of the same election fraud lies that propelled the riot that day as a reason that defendants should not be released from detention. Further, judges have rejected the justification put forward by some of the rioters who have argued that they deserve mercy because of how Trump encouraged the riot.
Howell, in her February 23 hearing with Proud Boys member William Chrestman, who is pleading not guilty, said that if that defense were recognized, it "would undermine the rule of law."
"Because then, just like a king or dictator, the president could dictate what is legal and what isn't in this country, and that is now how we operate here," said the judge, an Obama appointee.
But regardless of the legal conclusion they're making, judges have not shied from acknowledging the role that Trump played on that day -- even if they have not said his name explicitly.
"The defendant came to the Capitol because he placed his trust in someone who repaid that trust by lying to him," Jackson, an Obama appointee, said in her sentencing hearing for Dresch.
Earlier in Dresch's case, Jackson had denied his bond, in part because Trump "continues to propagate the lie that inspired the attack on a near daily basis," according to her May 5 opinion.
Likewise, during a plea hearing for Lori and Thomas Vinson, a couple who had stormed the Capitol, Walton said that Trump "is still making those statements" and the rioters "were gullible enough" to believe him then.
"Why should I believe they aren't prepared to do it again?" said Walton, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. "Why should I believe, if there's some type of uprising again in response to what is still being said by the former President, why should I believe they won't join in again?"
He called the situation "threatening to our democracy."
The directness and the candor may be, in part, because federal judges are seated on the bench for life. Still, former judges told CNN that they believed those judges had put thought into their comments and the public should take notice of how they view January 6.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson
"At times when the nation is being torn apart, it's especially useful that the branch of government that still commands the highest trust of the American public -- and, I think most of the time, does behave in the less partisan, less divisive ways -- for that branch to speak up and remind the American public the principles underlying this," said McConnell, the former appellate judge.
Even though, in theory, the federal bench occupies a place above the partisan fray on Capitol Hill, at least once a judge has felt the need to address that fray directly. Alluding to a remark made by Republican Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, Judge Royce Lamberth, a President Ronald Reagan appointee, said that he was "especially troubled by the accounts of some members of Congress that January 6th was just a day of tourists walking through the Capitol."
At a June 23 hearing, Lamberth described the attack as a "disgrace to our country" and referenced the videos from the Capitol riot that the court was working to release publicly.
"We are getting them out as best we can now and it will show the attempt of some congressmen to rewrite history and say this was all just tourists walking through the Capitol is utter nonsense," the judge said.
CNN's Joe Beare, Marshall Cohen, Katelyn Polantz and Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.
CNN · by Tierney Sneed, CNN
18. Where Is America Diversifying the Fastest? Small Midwestern Towns.
Very interesting. I guess we should not be surprised just look at our Olympic athletes and the diverse areas they come from throughout the US. So many hail from "flyover country."
Where Is America Diversifying the Fastest? Small Midwestern Towns.
Columbus, Ind., hometown of Cummins and Mike Pence, embodies a new kind of immigrant melting pot far from the big city; ‘a snowball effect’
The first detailed data released from the 2020 Census on Thursday showed that the non-Hispanic white population declined for the first time in the nation’s history as growing numbers of Hispanics and Asians pushed the share of residents who identify as a minority to roughly four out of every 10 people.
Those changes are most apparent in pockets of the Midwest and northern Great Plains, which diversified at a faster rate than the rest of the nation during the past decade, a Wall Street Journal analysis of the new census data shows.
The Journal calculated a diversity index for each of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties using a standard statistical method deployed by social scientists, with a score that measures the chance two randomly selected people in an area have different races and ethnicities.
Nationwide, the diversity index rose 22% during the past decade. Bartholomew County, which includes Columbus, recorded a 67% gain and was among the fastest in the nation to diversify.
The county, which saw its share of non-Hispanic whites drop to 78% from 87% a decade ago, now has diversity levels rivaling those in suburban areas of large metropolitan areas such as Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Denver, the Journal’s analysis shows, though nowhere near the levels in their central districts.
Jobs in agriculture, meat processing, manufacturing and other sectors—as well as a lower cost of living than in many larger metropolitan areas—are attracting immigrants to middle America.
Andrew Lee and Genevieve Curry work in manufacturing at Cummins.
The political influence of these newer arrivals could grow in the coming decades as more immigrants become voting citizens. For now, these trends generally favor Democrats.
Nonwhites backed President Biden in November, with exit polls showing the Democrat winning the support of 87% of Blacks, 65% of Latinos and 61% of Asians. Former President Donald Trump improved his standing slightly with Latinos, boosting his share to 32% in 2020 from 28% in 2016.
Across the Midwest, other clusters of counties with rapid recent diversity growth can be found along major highways or near areas with strong employment growth. Some counties in western North Dakota, where fracking for oil and gas have boosted jobs, saw their diversity index scores more than double during the past decade.
In Indiana, other south-central counties connected to Interstate Highway 65 like Bartholomew also recorded significant gains in diversity, including nearby Brown and Decatur counties. The road, Indiana’s primary north-south freight and passenger corridor, links Louisville and Chicago and connects older manufacturing areas around the Great Lakes with newer ones in more southern states, and serves as a catalyst for warehousing and manufacturing jobs.
Much of Bartholomew County’s diversification has been driven by engine manufacturing giant Cummins Inc., the top employer here. As the company recruited global talent to a place encircled by corn and soybean fields, other companies followed.
Vignesh Ganesan at a Cummins plant.
Efforts to create a diverse workforce at Cummins started more than a half-century ago when J. Irwin Miller, then the company’s chairman, began actively recruiting, hiring and promoting Black workers. Mr. Miller, who was among the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr. , saw the initiative as crucial to Cummins’ ability to broaden its talent pool.
That thinking later became an effort that encouraged the hiring of immigrants, including engineers from India and elsewhere in Asia.
Jennifer Rumsey, a Columbus native who is president and chief operating officer for Cummins, said the city is much more diverse than when she was growing up and that her company has worked with government and nonprofit groups to try to make it a welcoming place.
“We continue to work on how do we make sure we’re hiring and attracting diverse talent and retaining them, and that work in the community is just a key piece because if you don’t have a community environment that people want to come and live in, they’re not going to come work for you and stay,” she said.
Fred Armstrong, who served as Columbus mayor from 1996 to 2011, said efforts to broaden the area’s economy after tough times in the 1980s further spurred the area’s diversity. City and economic development officials made annual trips to Asia to pitch the community’s workforce while offering economic incentives to move production to the area.
The efforts paid off and now more than 30 international companies from countries such as Japan, China, India, Germany and Canada have located operating facilities in the community, according to the Columbus Area Multi-Ethnic Organization. Those companies include Faurecia Clean Mobility, NTN Driveshaft and Toyota Material Handling.
Demographic shifts helped Bartholomew grow about 7% during the last decade to 82,208. Hispanics now account for 8.8% of the population, while Asians represent 6.6% and Blacks are 2.2%. The census asks if someone is “Hispanic or Latino or Spanish origin,” combining groups with different definitions. “Hispanic” includes anyone from or tracing roots to a Spanish-speaking country, including Spain. “Latino” refers to origins in Latin America, including Portuguese-speaking Brazilians.
Nicolas Prada, left, and David Rodriguez chat as they wait for their food at Cafe do Vava, a Brazilian restaurant in Columbus.
After losing population in the 1980s, Bartholomew grew in the 1990s and has continued to do so. The county also recorded one of Indiana’s larger percentage gains in population during the past decade outside the Indianapolis metropolitan area.
Census Bureau estimates not included in Thursday’s decennial release show about one in 10 of the county’s residents is foreign-born, with roughly 18% of that group being citizens. Some of those who work for Cummins and other employers in the area do so on temporary visas and green cards.
Among the foreign-born in the county, 57% are from Asia. About one person in eight speaks a language other than English at home.
The mix of cultures now present has seeped into many facets of daily life. Numerous ethnic restaurants dot the streets, international specialty food items are stocked by many groceries and home-improvement retailers label some items in both English and Spanish. The high school attended by former Vice President Mike Pence, who grew up here, is almost a third nonwhite.
The county’s public library has more than 3,700 non-English books, including titles in Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and three Indian languages (Hindi, Marathi and Tamil). There are also more than 800 non-English digital magazines and more than 1,400 ebooks.
In 2019, Columbus elected a majority Democratic city council for the first time in close to four decades. That same city council earlier this year passed an ordinance adding Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, to the list of dates when fireworks can be lighted by residents.
“It was not like I was going to a place that had no Indian community,” said Kanoo Sahajwala, a 37-year-old who had been commuting between India and Indiana before he decided to move to Columbus in 2019. “If I want Indian food, I can get it. I had no reservations about the move.”
Kanoo Sahajwala and his wife, Deepti, go for a walk around their apartment complex in Columbus.
Mr. Sahajwala, president of the Indian Association of Columbus and a salesman for an information technology company, had since 2014 visited Columbus and the Midwest roughly a half dozen times a year from his previous home in Delhi. His wife, a recruiter for another IT firm, also made the move.
Leo Portaluppi, an Argentina-born president of a car dealership chain in Columbus, said about 20% of his sales staff can speak Spanish. He moved to the area close to a decade ago after living in a less-diverse Kentucky county.
“My kids felt different there,” he said. “Here they can see others like themselves.”
Miguel Aranda and his wife, Luz Elena Michel, were drawn to Columbus by Cummins. Mr. Aranda, a mechanical engineer who also has an M.B.A., started working for the company in his native Mexico shortly after finishing college and moved to Indiana in 2009 following a stop at another company facility in North Carolina.
Miguel Aranda, Luz Elena Michel and their son, Eduardo, share a meal of enchiladas at the family’s home in Columbus.
He described his residential neighborhood on the west side of town as a sort of international melting pot, where the smells and sounds of different cultures often fill the air. “People are used to accents here because their brains are used to it,” he said.
Elaine Hilber, a 35-year-old Democrat who in 2015 became the first Asian elected to the Columbus City Council, said there was more racism in the city when she was growing up. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants whose mother worked for Cummins, Ms. Hilber said there were only about five other Chinese families then, a number she now estimates at 100.
“It makes your life really rich because of the diversity we have here,” said Ms. Hilber, who is one of two nonwhites on the seven-member city council.
Still, there have been some tensions in the community. After the pandemic began unfolding, Tom Linebarger, chairman and chief executive for Cummins, heard that workers of Asian descent said they were concerned about heated rhetoric in the U.S. surrounding the origin of Covid-19 in China.
Nobody points to any threatening incidents in Columbus, but Mr. Linebarger said Asian employees expressed concern about visiting public places and had stopped taking their children outside for walks. “They were fearful,” he said.
In March, he wrote a memo to the company’s roughly 60,000 global employees addressing the issue head on.
“We need to be clear; Asian Americans, Chinese expatriates working in the U.S., or for that matter, any other member of our communities of Asian descent, had nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic,” he wrote. “We must do our part to speak out against these false associations and against acts of aggression and violence.”
Downtown Columbus, Ind.
Some longtime residents say they are concerned that the influx of newcomers includes people who entered the country unlawfully, although there’s no reliable data to measure that for a county as small as Bartholomew.
Columbus resident Lawrence Dale, who is retired after serving 20 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, said he supports Mr. Trump’s goal of building a wall along the southern border with Mexico because he believes there are too many immigrants in his city who have entered the U.S. illegally. “As long as it’s done legally, I don’t have a problem with it,” he said of immigration.
Whitney Amuchastegui, executive director of a local nonprofit called Su Casa, which seeks to boost Latino health, economic independence, education and safety, said Latinos sometimes have to endure “bigoted, crude comments in the grocery line.”
“Indiana is a state built on small, insular communities,” she said. “There’s an underlying culture that has strong fears and concerns about immigration and that leads to racism.”
Buoyed by strong wages among manufacturers like Cummins, which employs about 9,000 in the county, Bartholomew’s proportion of residents living below the poverty level is lower than the statewide average. The county’s median household income, $72,555, is about 25% higher than Indiana’s average.
Cindy Frey, president of the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce, said recruitment of companies from outside the U.S. to the area has become easier over the years because of the growing diversity.
“It’s been a snowball effect,” she said. “The more diversity you have in your community, the easier it is to sell global companies.”
19. ‘Why Omaha?’: DHS bets on Nebraska as the future of terrorism research
‘Why Omaha?’: DHS bets on Nebraska as the future of terrorism research
OMAHA — One humid afternoon this summer, the Kiwanis Club of Greater Omaha got an unusually high turnout for its weekly meeting at a sports bar in a local strip mall.
The topic was violent extremism, and the gathering took place on the eve of the first hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. After a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, the club members settled in to learn about the scope of the threat — and, to their surprise, how Nebraska is now a hub in the government’s fight against it.
Their guest was Gina Ligon, 42, a terrorism researcher at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, who caused a ripple in the field last year when her team won a long-shot bid for a multimillion-dollar federal project. The result is the newly opened NCITE, the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center, one of 10 specialized centers funded by the Department of Homeland Security to study urgent security concerns.
NCITE is the second in the Midwest, a dot in the middle of the map Ligon showed the audience. She told them it offends her when people ask, as they often do, “Why Omaha?”
“You don’t want another center on the coast,” Ligon said. “You want it right here.”
Housed in a gleaming new wing of the university’s business school, NCITE is the steward of more than $36.5 million in Homeland Security research and prevention money over the next decade. It funds a slew of projects across 18 partner universities, including a gigantic database of Jan. 6 defendants, as well as a study on how to safely repatriate the American families of Islamic State fighters. Students are also experimenting with technology and artificial intelligence, testing robots and hologram models for counterterrorism use.
Put another way, NCITE is an ideas factory for the transformation that’s happening in the U.S. counterterrorism realm. National security analysts say the post-9/11 fixation on militant Islamist networks made officials slow to recognize a resurgent extreme right, now the most lethal and active domestic threat. The Capitol attack added pressure for a course correction, and in June the Biden administration released the country’s first national strategy to address domestic terrorism.
For researchers like Ligon, the challenge is formidable: how to remake U.S. counterterrorism without the never-ending conflicts and civil liberties violations that are a legacy of the War on Terror. Skeptics doubt it can be done. The American Civil Liberties Union already said, “Biden’s strategy fails to address these wrongs, let alone reverse them.” The right portrays the shift as an attack on ideology rather than crime; the left worries any expanded powers eventually will be used against marginalized communities.
The debate has become yet another front in the culture wars, which is why Ligon invokes her Oklahoma roots and Air Force pilot husband when she speaks to groups like the Kiwanis Club, mostly White men of retirement age in a red state. Typically, the first question Ligon gets is: “What about antifa?” This time, there was more concern about military and police involvement in the Capitol rioting, an issue NCITE researchers are examining.
“People will say, ‘Well, proportionally, there weren’t that many.’ Even one is too many, right?” Ligon said, as heads nodded in the crowd. “If you are wearing the badge or you are in national security and you are trying to overthrow our government and break into our symbol of democracy, then that’s too many.”
Another man asked: “Neo-Nazism, is that a big thing?” Ligon explained that today’s white-power militants don’t have Klan hoods or shaved heads — they’re more like the preppy torch-carrying crowd from the deadly rally in Charlottesville, in 2017.
“They look like guys I dated,” Ligon said, to laughter. “They look like clean-cut guys from Western Oklahoma and you don’t know that they’re part of the underground movement because of how they have been coached to look and comport themselves.”
After Ligon wrapped up, the talk continued around tables of burgers and fries.
Vince Pille, a 63-year-old who works in banking, praised Ligon for luring top tier researchers to Omaha but said he wanted to hear more explicitly about the drivers of radicalization: “She didn’t get into the Trump versus Biden stuff.”
Dale Kaisershot, a 75-year-old retiree sitting with Pille, said he appreciated how Ligon drew a line between “extremism” and “violent extremism,” the move from beliefs to action.
“I have a problem with that word,” Kaisershot said. “Everybody’s called an extremist these days — ‘you’re an extremist, you’re an extremist’ — and nobody knows what it means.”
“It’s a fine line,” Pille said. “Someone thinks something but they aren’t acting on it, so they’re cool. But at what point are they going to act on it? I don’t remember who this quote is from, but ‘if you can get people to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities.’ ”
The road to Omaha
Right before a Homeland Security delegation arrived in Omaha in December 2019 for a site visit, a crucial final audition in the grant process, Ligon ditched her planned speech and decided to speak from the heart about the Oklahoma City bombing.
Facing the selection panel as well as the governor and other Nebraska luminaries, Ligon opened with the memory of visiting the bombing site with her high school history class a few weeks after the attack in 1995.
If DHS picked Omaha, Ligon pledged, her team would work relentlessly to stop “the next Timothy McVeigh.” She urged officials to build their center “here, in the middle of the country,” the region he had targeted in a landmark act of domestic terrorism.
“I’m not very spiritual, but it felt divine,” Ligon recalled. “It just came out.”
At the time, her approach was risky. The Trump administration was still in power, and it was taboo to dwell on far-right extremism, at least not without a quick “both sides” caveat. But the gamble paid off and the University of Nebraska at Omaha won the grant, beating out many bigger East Coast schools.
“I’m trying to bring outside views to the government so that they don’t keep hearing from the same voices. And not that I’m denigrating those voices — there’s important work to be done by experts in the Beltway who’ve been doing this work for a long time,” Ligon said. “But I think to be creative and stay ahead of it, you have to get that outsider view.”
The sunny new NCITE offices have the buzz of a start-up. One day last month, construction crews were installing screens and taking measurements as faculty members met to video-chat with far-flung research partners.
Austin Doctor, a new hire who previously taught at Eastern Kentucky University, said it’s vital to enlist academics outside of big cities to understand the extremist forces gaining traction across the country.
In Kentucky, Doctor said, he worked out at the local YMCA with guys whose shirts and tattoos signaled membership in a Three Percenters armed group. Doctor, whose research has focused on Islamist extremists in Africa, said it was jarring to watch radicalization in real time, four days a week at the gym. He said it has shaped how he studies conflicts abroad.
“It makes me want to do more field work — to continue seeing the faces, hearing the voices of the people caught up in this,” Doctor said.
NCITE represents what some analysts have described as a “sea change” in counterterrorism. The researchers take a dim view of old tactics such as profiling or the stigmatizing of certain groups — namely, Muslim communities — in government-funded efforts claiming to prevent radicalization. Instead, they look at threats across ideologies, tracking processes and data rather than, as Ligon puts it, “admiring the nature of the problem.”
Sam Hunter, head of NCITE’s Leadership and Innovation Lab, said the idea is to “shake loose the boogeyman perspective if we can.” He said the blank slate is part of what drew him to Omaha this summer from a tenured position at Penn State.
“None of us are coming in with this playbook that we’re putting on the table, crossing out ‘jihadi’ and writing in ‘domestic extremist,’ ” Hunter said. “We’re writing our new playbook, here, from very different perspectives.”
Ligon herself is symbolic of the change. Terrorism research remains a rarefied field; just this month, female analysts collectively rolled their eyes at yet another “manel” — an all-male panel — at a high-profile conference. When Ligon was named NCITE director, she was the only woman to head one of the 10 DHS centers. (A second woman has since been added.)
“Sometimes I get weird FOMO [fear of missing out] on social media because you see the big 9/11 events or panels and they’re all men, and you feel like, ‘I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Can I get invited?’ ” Ligon said.
In separate interviews, women described how Ligon had recruited them from nontraditional fields to study terrorism at NCITE. Lauren O’Malley, 23, was pursuing a degree in finance when Ligon suggested she use her skills to examine the corporate-like structure of the Islamic State. O’Malley said she found herself looking at terrorists’ receipts while her friends were studying to be stockbrokers.
“Where’s their revenue coming from? How are they organized?” O’Malley said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, this is actually up my alley,’ but it was something I never would’ve thought of.”
Students at NCITE joke about how their cloak-and-dagger research bumps up against normal campus life, where everything is documented on social media. Those with security clearance said they’ve learned to be “super vague” when talking to roommates or at parties. Three of them had just returned from a trip to Washington, where they were embedded in different DHS offices, getting to know “our special agents.”
Some students, particularly people of color, said that at first they wrestled with the idea of working with federal law enforcement. On one hand, there’s the thrill of conducting cutting-edge research to keep the nation safe. On the other, the work is for the same agencies that separated migrant children from their parents or whisked away civil rights protesters in unmarked vans.
“I basically said, ‘I know these things are happening now. How can I do this and still hold true to my own values?’ ” said Khylie Kight, a 24-year-old Black graduate student who had a heart-to-heart with her parents during racial justice protests last year. “We talked about ways you can give back and things you can focus on, how to make things change.”
Now, Kight said, she sees her work with the government as being part of that change, a chance “to help in some way.”
“My dad gets a kick out of it,” Kight said. “He’s always like, ‘Khylie’s working with special agents. She can’t talk much.’ He always says I work with ‘Men in Black.’ ”
Brandon Lai, 24, the Omaha-born son of immigrants from Vietnam, is another graduate student designing a DHS tool. Lai said he stumbled into counterterrorism work at NCITE and enjoyed it because he felt like he was “contributing to a good cause.”
“I hate to have to worry about whether or not he’ll come home safely,” Lai said.
Ligon said she has counseled students through their ethical dilemmas, reminding them that the federal government is full of career personnel who have fought to protect their work from the whims of political appointees who come and go as administrations change.
NCITE must do the same, Ligon said, if there’s any hope of building a research center with a sober, long-term view of threats to the nation.
“After Jan. 6, people said, ‘How does this change your work?’ And my whole thing was, well, we were already funding projects on those groups,” Ligon said. “It’s made it more important, but we’re not going to take away money from our ‘ISIS in America’ project or our cyberattacks project, because those are also still important.”
Ligon said her team isn’t distracted by what’s “popular or politically en vogue.” She said NCITE will neither cater to a Trump agenda nor position itself as “Biden’s center.”
“We will outlast this administration,” Ligon said. “We will still be here.”
20. Escape from Kabul: Diplomats flee US Embassy in Chinook helicopters after setting documents on fire as Taliban fighters storm Afghan capital
Eerie photos at the link. Deja vu.
Escape from Kabul: Diplomats flee US Embassy in Chinook helicopters after setting documents on fire as Taliban fighters storm Afghan capital - in stark echoes of the Fall of Saigon
- Helicopter - believed to be US Air Force Chinook - seen flying over Kabul today from the US Embassy in Kabul
- It comes as Taliban closes in on the Afghan capital with shots heard on outskirts before fighters stormed city
- Around 3,000 US troops have been sent into city to aid with US evacuation, while British troops also deployed
- It is believed around 500 British staff needed to be evacuated and by Saturday the number was in 'the tens'
PUBLISHED: 04:39 EDT, 15 August 2021 | UPDATED: 09:07 EDT, 15 August 2021
Daily Mail · by James Robinson for MailOnline · August 15, 2021
This is the moment US diplomats are seen being evacuated from Kabul as Taliban forces stormed the Afghan capital.
In a scene mirroring that of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, a US Air Force helicopter was seen taking off from the US embassy earlier today.
The Chinook helicopter was seen taking to the skies above the city - just like in 1975 when a US Marine helicopter was seen evacuating embassy staff from Vietnamese capital.
Today, smoke was also seen rising from near to the US embassy earlier today as security staff work to burn any important documents, including CIA information, or material that could be used 'in propaganda efforts'. The US flag is soon expected to be lowered, signalling the official closure of the embassy.
It comes as the US steps up its evacuation of Kabul with Taliban fighters quickly moving in 'from all sides'. Shots were heard on the outskirts of the capital earlier today, much earlier than first anticipated, before fighters poured into the city.
US Intelligence officials had expected Kabul to hold out for three months, while UK ministers were hoping they had until the end of the month.
Leaders of the extremist group have today demanded the Afghan government surrender the city to them in a bid to avoid bloodshed - adding the chilling warning 'we've not declared a ceasefire'.
As many as 10,000 US citizens are being evacuated from the city. Around 3,000 US troops are being sent to aid the mission.
Meanwhile, Special Forces units are joining 600 British troops from the 16 Air Assault Brigade, including 150 Paratroopers, while RAF planes are being scrambled from around the world, to airlift more than 500 British Government employees out of Kabul.
It is believed that by Saturday night that the number of UK officials still in Afghanistan had been reduced to the 'low tens' - including ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow.
The UK Government says it aims to get British ambassador Sir Laurie and his remaining embassy staff out by Sunday night - amid fears the Taliban could seize Kabul airport within days.
There are also fears about the safety of thousands of translators who are concerned they may be viewed as 'traitors' by the extremist Taliban.
It is understood the plans is to evacuate the translators and their families, though there are concerns that the evacuation efforts may be hampered if fighters quickly reach Kabul airport.
Taliban officials today demanded foreigners who don't leave to register their presence with Taliban administrators in the coming days. While western countries such as the US and UK have opted to evacuate staff, Russia today confirmed that it did not intend to evacuate its embassy staff in Kabul.
A twin-rotor US Air Force Chinook was seen taking off from the US Embassy earlier today, as the evacuation efforts rapidly pick up pace
The Chinook helicopter was seen taking to the skies above the city - just like in 1975 when a US Marine helicopter was seen evacuating embassy staff from Vietnamese capital (pictured)
The US Embassy in Kabul has been ordered to destroy sensitive materials and evacuate as Taliban fighters move in on the capital
Anti-missile decoy flares are deployed as U.S. Black Hawk military helicopters and a dirigible balloon fly over the city of Kabul, Afghanistan
Security Engineers will stay behind as they continue to burn, shred and pulverize 20 years worth of intelligence stored on electronics and in documents. Pictured: Smoke rises next to the US Embassy in Kabul today
The US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan has been the intelligence hub of the US's war on terror
Special Forces units are joining 600 British troops from the 16 Air Assault Brigade, including 150 Paratroopers, to begin airlifting more than 500 British Government employees out of Kabul. Pictured: Members of Joint Forces Headquarters get prepared to deploy to Afghanistan
The Taliban is now closing in on the capital of Kabul from all sides, now controlling territories in the north, south, east and west
The UK Government says it aims to get British ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow (pictured) and his embassy staff out by Sunday night - amid fears the Taliban could seize Kabul airport within days
As the Taliban advance continues, following the decision by the US to pull its troops out, gunfire was today heard near the presidential palace in Kabul.
The militants were seen in the districts of Kalakan, Qarabagh and Paghman hours after taking control of Jalalabad, the last major Afghan city to fall to the insurgents.
The terror group said in a statement they do not intend to take the capital 'by force' after entering the outskirts of the city.
An Afghan official earlier confirmed Jalalabad fell under Taliban control without a fight early Sunday morning when the governor surrendered, saying it was 'the only way to save civilian lives.'
Its fall has also given the Taliban control of a road leading to the Pakistan city of Peshawar, one of the main highways into landlocked Afghanistan.
Jalalabad is close to the Pakistani border and just 80 miles from Kabul - the Afghanistan capital home to more than four million people and currently the only remaining major city still under government control.
Besides Kabul, just seven other provincial capitals out of the country's 34 are yet to fall to the Taliban.
Concerns are mounting over how long Kabul can stave off the Taliban insurgents as they have captured the northern stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif, the second-largest city Kandahar and third-largest city Herat all within the last 48 hours.
The Taliban are now closing in on the capital from all sides, controlling territories to the North, South, East and West and advancing to just seven miles south of the city.
Hoda Ahmadi, a lawmaker from Logar province, told The Associated Press that the Taliban have reached the Char Asyab district on the outskirts of the capital, which was gripped by blackouts, communications outages and street fighting overnight Saturday as the country descends into chaos.
A US defense official has warned it could be only a matter of days before the insurgent fighters take control of Kabul.
A Taliban fighter sits inside an Afghan National Army (ANA) vehicle along the roadside in Laghman province on Sunday
Taliban fighters drive the vehicle through the streets of Laghman province Sunday - the same day Jalalabad fell
Residents and fighters swarm an Afghan National Army vehicle on a roadside in Laghman province as the insurgents take control of major cities
Today the Taliban said they aim to take the city, but say they have no plans to take Kabul 'by force'.
Leaders of the extremist group say they don't want a 'single Afghan to be injured or killed' during the hostile takeover - but warned 'we've not signed a ceasefire yet'.
Just last week, US intelligence estimates expected the city to be able to hold out for at least three months.
A senior US official told the New York Times the Taliban have warned the US it must cease airstrikes or else its extremist fighters will move in on US buildings.
Joe Biden has vowed that any action that puts Americans at risk 'will be met with a swift and strong US military response.'
Meanwhile, in the UK, Boris Johnson is facing calls for a last-ditch intervention to prevent the complete collapse of Afghanistan.
The lead elements of the British force sent to evacuate the remaining UK nationals were understood to be in the capital amid fears it could fall within days or even hours.
But amid a hurried scramble for safety, helicopters were seen landing at the US embassy to ferry away remaining personnel.
In the UK, there was deep anger among many MPs at the way - 20 years after the first international forces entered Afghanistan - the country was being abandoned to its fate.
The chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Tugendhat said it was 'the biggest single foreign policy disaster' since Suez, while Defence Committee chairman Tobias Ellwood said it was a humiliation for the West.
Despite the decision of the Biden administration to withdraw the remaining US troops which triggered the collapse, Mr Ellwood said it was still not too late to turn the situation around.
He called for the despatch of the Royal Navy carrier strike group to the region and urged the Prime Minister to convene an emergency conference of 'like-minded nations' to see what could be done.
'I plead with the Prime Minister to think again. We have an ever-shrinking window of opportunity to recognise where this country is going as a failed state,' he told Times Radio.
'We can turn this around but it requires political will and courage. This is our moment to step forward.
'We could prevent this, otherwise history will judge us very, very harshly in not stepping in when we could do and allowing the state to fail.'
Daily Mail · by James Robinson for MailOnline · August 15, 2021
21. No, the surge in Covid cases across the U.S. is not due to migrants or immigrants
True but the narrative that it is shows the power of Russian and Chinese influence operations and how they are trying to exploit the political divide in America. Unfortunately a lot of people do believe this narrative that is being magnified by Russian and /or Chinese influence operations.
No, the surge in Covid cases across the U.S. is not due to migrants or immigrants
NBC News · by Ronny Rojas, Noticias Telemundo
As the delta variant contributes to a surge of Covid-19 cases around the United States, different voices have emerged blaming people entering the country — in particular, migrants crossing the U.S. border — for the spread.
Among the most vocal are Republican Govs. Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida.
“You have over 100 different countries where people are pouring through,” DeSantis said Aug. 4. “Not only are they letting them through, they’re then farming them out all across our communities across this country, putting them on planes, putting them on buses.”
Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds voiced a similar view in late July, claiming that while Americans grapple with Covid restrictions, there are "people coming across the border that haven’t been vaccinated."
Last week, while discussing the possibility of ordering the use of masks in schools, members of school boards from two counties in North Carolina accused undocumented immigrants of causing the increase in Covid-19 cases in the country, The Charlotte Observer reported.
But there's no evidence to support these types of accusations. While it is true that people entering the country without permission could be contributing to the overall number of Covid-19 cases — as has been the case recently in McAllen, Texas — experts believe the impact of these cases does not make a difference in the American health situation.
It is not migratory patterns that explain the recent outbreaks of Covid-19, but the low vaccination rates in certain states, Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University School of Medicine, told Noticias Telemundo.
"In some states, it isn't clear that there is very much migration right now at all, although there are big outbreaks," Caplan said. "As far as I know, the migration patterns in the past month are more north than south. That does not correlate at all."
The 10 states with the highest rates of Covid-19 infections in the past seven days are located in the South, including in Florida and Texas, where DeSantis and Abbott are preventing schools from mandating masks amid rising Covid-19 cases among children — though some schools and districts are defying the governors and requiring masks.
Although immigrants may be contributing to the overall Covid-19 case numbers, Caplan said the increase in infections and current outbreak patterns across the country are actually in response to policies that discourage the use of masks, vaccinations and the isolation of Covid-19 patients.
Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that contrary to what DeSantis has said, the state's Covid-19 surge is due to its low vaccination rate.
"Florida is really one of the worst in the sense of the number of new cases and the number of hospitalizations," Fauci told a CBS local newscast in Tampa, Florida. "This is fundamentally an outbreak, a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and given the relative lower level of vaccinations in Florida compared to some of the other states, you are much more vulnerable."
For Caplan, blaming immigrants — undocumented or not — for the recent outbreaks of Covid-19 is not only wrong, but “racist.”
"There is a very long history in the United States, sadly, of blaming recent immigrants," Caplan said. "They are always trying to blame outsiders for 'diseases,' and there isn't any evidence, particularly right now, when we know why there are big outbreaks in the South."
"I don't see anything except racism and bigotry behind pointing the finger at immigrants," Caplan added.
William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, recently told PolitiFact that given the extensive transmission already in the U.S., "the immigration contribution is akin to pouring a bucket of water into a swimming pool."
"It’s hard to measure and pretty trivial," Schaffner said.
Another false claim that's been repeated around Covid-19 is that the country’s borders are wide open and anyone can enter, just as DeSantis put it. That is not the case.
In March 2020, the U.S. closed its land borders with Mexico and Canada to nonessential travel such as tourism. The measure has been extended on a monthly basis since then.
In addition, since the end of January, federal health authorities have required a negative Covid-19 test for international travelers, including citizens and residents, who arrive in the United States by air.
The number of people currently arriving at the southern border is the highest in decades. Border Patrol detained nearly 180,000 migrants in June, the highest number since March 2000.
The Biden administration has expelled fewer people who have migrated to the U.S. than the Trump administration: While in December, 85 percent of those who were detained were expelled from the country, in June that figure was 58 percent, the lowest since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
But this does not mean all the people who managed to stay continue their way into the country. Of the 75,000 immigrants without legal status detained in June who were not expelled, just over half remain in the custody of federal or local authorities; some are transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and others end up under police or sheriff custody, as they had pending matters with the justice system.
The rest are released with the order to appear before an immigration court months later.
NBC News · by Ronny Rojas, Noticias Telemundo
22. Longest war: Were America's decades in Afghanistan worth it?
Longest war: Were America's decades in Afghanistan worth it?
AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · August 14, 2021
Here’s what 19-year-old Lance Cpl. William Bee felt flying into southern Afghanistan on Christmas Day 2001: purely lucky. The U.S. was hitting back at the al-Qaida plotters who had brought down the World Trade Center, and Bee found himself among the first Marines on the ground.
“Excitement,” Bee says these days, of the teenage Bee’s thoughts then. “To be the dudes that got to open it up first.”
In the decade that followed, three more deployments in America’s longest war scoured away that lucky feeling.
For Bee, it came down to a night in 2008 in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. By then a sergeant, Bee held the hand of an American sniper who had just been shot in the head, as a medic sliced open the man’s throat for an airway.
“After that it was like, you know what — ‘F—k these people,’” Bee recounted, of what drove him by his fourth and final Afghan deployment. “I just want to bring my guys back. That’s all I care about. I want to bring them home.”
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For Biden, for Bee and for some of the American principals in the U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan, the answer to whether it was worth the cost often comes down to parsing.
There were the first years of the war, when Americans broke up Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida in Afghanistan and routed the Taliban government that had hosted the terrorist network.
That succeeded.
The proof is clear, says Douglas Lute, White House czar for the war during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and a retired lieutenant general: Al-Qaida hasn’t been able to mount a major attack on the West since 2005.
“We have decimated al-Qaida in that region, in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Lute says.
But after that came the grinding second phase of the war. U.S. fears of a Taliban rebound whenever Americans eventually pulled out meant that service members such as Bee kept getting sent back in, racking up more close calls, injuries and dead comrades.
Lute and some others argue that what the second half of the war bought was time — a grace period for Afghanistan’s government, security forces and civil society to try to build enough strength to survive on their own.
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Quality of life in some ways did improve, modernizing under the Western occupation, even as the millions of dollars the U.S. poured into Afghanistan fed corruption. Infant mortality rates fell by half. In 2005, fewer than 1 in 4 Afghans had access to electricity. By 2019, nearly all did.
The second half of the war allowed Afghan women, in particular, opportunities entirely denied them under the fundamentalist Taliban, so that more than 1 in 3 teenage girls — their whole lives spent under the protection of Western forces — today can read and write.
But it’s that longest, second phase of the war that looks on the verge of complete failure now.
The U.S. war left the Taliban undefeated and failed to secure a political settlement. Taliban forces this past week have swept across two-thirds of the country and captured provincial capitals, on the path of victory before U.S. combat forces even complete their pullout. On many fronts, the Taliban are rolling over Afghan security forces that U.S. and NATO forces spent two decades working to build.
This swift advance sets up a last stand in Kabul, where most Afghans live. It threatens to clamp the country under the Taliban’s strict interpretation of religious law, erasing much of the gains.
“There’s no ‘mission accomplished,’” Biden snapped last month, batting down a question from a reporter.
Biden quickly corrected himself, evoking the victories of the first few years of the war. “The mission was accomplished in that we ... got Osama bin Laden, and terrorism is not emanating from that part of the world,” he added.
Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for Central Asia during much of the war’s first decade, says the criticism was largely not of the conflict itself but because it went on so long.
“It was the expansion of war aims, to try to create a government that was capable of stopping any future attacks,” Boucher said.
America expended the most lives, and dollars, on the most inconclusive years of the war.
The strain of fighting two post-9/11 wars at once with an all-volunteer military meant that more than half of the 2.8 million American servicemen and women who deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq served two or more times, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University.
The repeated deployments contributed to disability rates in those veterans that are more than double that of Vietnam veterans, says Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University.
Bilmes calculates the U.S. will spend more than $2 trillion just caring for and supporting Afghanistan and Iraq veterans as they age, with costs peaking 30 years to 40 years from now.
That’s on top of $1 trillion in Pentagon and State Department costs in Afghanistan since 2001. Because the U.S. borrowed rather than raised taxes to pay for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, interest payments are estimated to cost succeeding generations of Americans trillions of dollars more still.
Annual combat deaths peaked around the time of the war’s midpoint, as Obama tried a final surge of forces to defeat the Taliban. In all, 2,448 American troops, 1,144 service members from NATO and other allied countries, more than 47,000 Afghan civilians and at least 66,000 Afghan military and police died, according to the Pentagon and to the Costs of War project.
All the while, a succession of U.S. commanders tried new strategies, acronyms and slogans in fighting a Taliban insurgency.
Kandahar’s airstrip, where Bee was quickly put to work digging a foxhole for himself over Christmas 2001, grew into a post for tens of thousands of NATO troops, complete with Popeyes and Burger Kings and a hockey rink.
Over the years, fighting forces such as Bee’s 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into hot spots to fight the Taliban and build ties with local leaders, often only to see gains lost when their unit rotated out again. In Helmand province, which proved the turning point for Bee in 2008, hundreds of U.S. and other NATO forces died fighting that way. Taliban fighters recaptured the province on Friday.
Bee’s Afghanistan tours finally ended in 2010, when an improvised explosive device exploded 4 feet from him, killing two fellow service members who had been standing with him. It was Bee’s third head injury, and for a time left him unable to walk a block without falling down.
Was it worth it?
“The people whose lives we affected, I personally think we did them better, that they’re better off for it,” answered Bee, who now works for a company that provides autonomous robots for Marine training at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune and is co-writing a book about his time in Afghanistan.
“But I also wouldn’t trade a handful of Afghan villages for one Marine,” he added.
Ask the same question in Afghanistan, though, and you get different answers.
Some Afghans — asked that question before the Taliban’s stunning sweep last week — respond that it’s more than time for Americans to let Afghans handle their own affairs.
But one 21-year-old woman, Shogufa, says American troops’ two decades on the ground meant all the difference for her.
The Associated Press is using her first name only, given fears of Taliban retribution against women who violate their strict codes.
When still in her infancy, she was pledged to marry a much older cousin in the countryside to pay off a loan. She grew up in a family, and society, where few women could read or write.
But as she grew up, Shogufa came across a Western nonprofit that had come to Kabul to promote health and leadership for Afghan girls. It was one of a host of such development groups that came to Afghanistan during the U.S.-led war.
Shogufa thrived. She deflected her family’s moves to marry her off to her cousin. She got a job and is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
For Shogufa today, the gratitude for what she’s gained is shadowed by her fears of all that she stands to lose.
Her message to Americans, as they left and the Taliban closed in on Kabul? “Thank you for everything you have done in Afghanistan,” she said, in good but imperfect English. “The other thing was to request that they stay with us.”
___
Knickmeyer covered the 2001 Afghan Northern Alliance and U.S. air campaign that routed the Taliban, and the first weeks of the U.S. military presence at Kandahar in 2002.
AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · August 14, 2021
23. How the U.S. Navy SEALs Are Getting Ready for War Against Russia or China
How the U.S. Navy SEALs Are Getting Ready for War Against Russia or China
Earlier this year, Navy SEALs and Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen operators worked with conventional Navy forces in the final certification exercise of the USS Eisenhower Strike Group before it deployed.
During the exercise, Navy special operators were the eyes and ears of the carrier strike group, assisting with over-the-horizon targeting, strategic reconnaissance, and close air support.
As great-power competition with China and Russia heats up, Naval Special Warfare is looking for ways to remain relevant after two decades of counterterrorism operations.
“It’s a race for relevancy and showing up in a way that makes the fleet more survivable and more lethal,” Adm. Hugh Howard, the commanding officer of Naval Special Warfare Command, said during the 2021 West Conference at the end of June.
Howard offered insight into how SEALs and Special Boat Teams are looking to be an asset both in “gray zone” competition and in a potential conflict.
“We’re the Navy’s naval commandos. That’s what we are, and we understand our roots” and are able “to evolve new concepts of how we can contribute,” Howard said.
Back to the Future
Before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, SEAL platoons would regularly deploy aboard “Big Navy” ships, usually aircraft carriers, on six-month deployments. If a crisis erupted somewhere around the world, the carrier and its SEAL contingent would deploy there.
Although hard on morale, these deployments allowed Naval Special Warfare to be relevant to the Navy in day-to-day operations.
As the counterterrorism fight slows, Naval Special Warfare is looking to be valuable to the Big Navy again by excelling at the missions that distinguish it from the rest of the US special-operations community — namely, maritime special-operations underwater and on the surface, Howard said.
“It’s about complicating our adversaries’ targeting, undermining their confidence, setting the conditions early inside denied areas … to attrit the enemy,” Howard said. “This is really back to the future.”
When it comes to the underwater domain, the SEAL teams have a great asset in the form of the SEAL Delivery Vehicle.
These mini-submarines are hard to detect, enabling SEAL operators to approach enemy harbors and coasts clandestinely to attack enemy vessels, insert and extract a small team to conduct reconnaissance, or carry out ambushes or raids. SDVs can be launched from regular submarines, surface vessels, and even helicopters.
Naval Special Warfare is equally capable in the lateral domain. The Special Boat Teams operate a fleet of small special-operations surface craft that can stealthily maneuver close to enemy shores, inserting or extracting special-operations teams, conducting strategic reconnaissance or direct-action raids and ambushes.
Naval Special Warfare must “set the conditions to undermine adversary confidence” and provide civilian leaders with diplomatic leverage and flexible response options in a crisis or conflict, Howard said last month. “We’ve got to be up inside our adversaries in a way that complicates their targeting and extends the reach of joint long-range fires.”
China has 18 of the 25 biggest megacities (population of more than 10 million) in the world, several of which are near coasts or close to waterways.
Naval Special Warfare’s capabilities can also increase the fleet’s survivability by disrupting or tracking enemy targeting capabilities, such as anti-ship missiles and radars.
“If we plan to be successful in addressing nation-state anti-access/anti-denial capabilities, we need to rely on [special-operations forces] and advanced technologies to understand where they are, what they do, and how best to develop kill-chain techniques close up and remotely,” Herm Hasken, a partner and senior-operations consultant at MarkPoint Technologies with extensive special-operations and intelligence-community experience, told Insider.
New Technologies for New Challenges
Naval Special Warfare is also investing in new technologies and equipment, including unmanned aerial and maritime systems, artificial intelligence, and electronic warfare. These investments seek to increase the survivability of commandos and platforms but also increase their lethality.
SEALs and Special Boat Teams aren’t the only ones pursuing such technologies.
The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act permitted US Special Operations Command, of which Naval Special Warfare is part, to authorize electronic warfare and cyberwarfare activities to support missions.
So now US special-operations units are looking at how to better leverage those new capabilities and authorities and include them in their missions.
One such effort is the hyper-enabled operator initiative, which aims to give commandos better access to data analytics on the battlefield and improve their situational awareness to enable them to make better, faster decisions.
The HEO initiative also seeks to increase the ability of commandos to understand what is going on around them without adversely affecting their cognitive load or electronic profile.
Passive reconnaissance systems would also give commandos the ability to better operate in contested and congested environments while maintaining tactical situational awareness and gathering data without advertising their presence.
“If I’m a commander that’s being directed to put in a SEAL team to conduct low-profile operations in maritime areas, I would be sending requirements to SOCOM for a combination of passive reconnaissance and situational awareness capabilities that do not bring with it unwanted scrutiny to the team,” said Hasken, who spent time at the National Security Agency as SOCOM’s chief cryptologist.
Most major adversaries are “prolific” surveillance states that use commercial ships, buoys, or even man-made islands for monitoring inside and near their territory, Hasken added.
“At some point or another, SOF teams will encounter an adversary nation’s internal security personnel and capabilities, even in open-water areas,” Hasken said.
In a conflict with Russia or China, the US military won’t necessarily enjoy the military superiority it has had against terrorists and insurgents.
ATLANTIC OCEAN (Aug. 7, 2021) Electronics Technician 2nd Class Sara Head fires a M240B machine-gun during a live-fire proficiency qualification event aboard the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), Aug. 7, 2021. Kearsarge is underway to support Large-Scale Exercise (LSE) 2021. LSE 2021 demonstrates the Navy’s ability to employ precise, lethal, and overwhelming force globally across three naval component commands, five numbered fleets, and 17 time zones. LSE 2021 merges live and synthetic training capabilities to create an intense, robust training environment. It will connect high-fidelity training and real-world operations, to build knowledge and skills needed in today’s complex, multi-domain, and contested environment. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Gwyneth Vandevender)
As the US military prepares for such a conflict, SEALs and Special Boat Teams are searching for ways they can remain assets to the Navy in the face of new threats. Their strategic-reconnaissance and direct-action capabilities mean they will still be quite useful.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
