Quotes of the Day:
“Oh would someone the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us.”
- Robert Burns
"We have to finish this war and have a peaceful life."
- Captured Afghan Warlord Ismail Khan
“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” - Bertrand Russell 1935
1. Afghan abandonment a lesson for Taiwan’s DPP
2. Afghanistan Is Your Fault: The American public now has what it wanted.
3. Afghanistan. Urgent: What you can do.
4. Afghans Need an ‘Underground Railroad’
5. Taliban Return May Revitalize SEA Terrorist Groups
6. Worse Than Saigon by Senator Ben Sasse
7. Remarks by President Biden on Afghanistan
8. Afghanistan is now part of the post-American world
9. Officials Say Kabul Airport Is Secured; DOD Evacuating Americans, Afghans
10. The 1 Thing That Could’ve Changed the War in Afghanistan
11. You Can’t Buy a Cause: Examining the roots of the Afghanistan forces’ collapse.
12. A Moment for Soul-Searching
13. PLA holds joint live-fire assault drills near Taiwan island
14. Taliban announces 'amnesty,' urges women to join government
15. EXPLAINER: The Taliban takeover, what's next for Afghanistan
16. Informal group of troops, vets, working to help Afghans seeking refuge in US
17. "They took off my flag": Afghan journalist makes emotional plea to Pentagon
18. Opinion | Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home
19. Why is Biden only present in China, Russia? - analysis
20. US Engagement In South China Sea: Beyond FONOPS And Into ‘Grey Zone’
21. Biden Recognized Reality: The president made a difficult but necessary choice.
22. Inside Biden's defiant Afghanistan response
23. Biden’s South-East Asia Doctrine: Repairing Damage And Neglect From Obama And Trump Years – Analysis
24. At the Pentagon, US military officials bitter as they watch chaos in Kabul
1. Afghan abandonment a lesson for Taiwan’s DPP
To be expected from the Chinese Communist Party. While we play checkers China plays go.
We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.
-Sun Tzu
“If an enemy has alliances, the problem is grave and the enemy’s position strong; if he has no alliances, the problem is minor and the enemy’s position weak.”
- Sun Tzu
Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. Next
best is to disrupt his alliances by diplomacy. The next best is to attack his army. And the
worst policy is to attack cities.
-Sun Tzu
Afghan abandonment a lesson for Taiwan’s DPP: Global Times editorial - Global Times
Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
The US troops' withdrawal from Afghanistan has led to the rapid demise of the Kabul government. The world has witnessed how the US evacuated its diplomats by helicopter while Taliban soldiers crowded into the presidential palace in Kabul. This has dealt a heavy blow to the credibility and reliability of the US.
Many people cannot help but recall how the Vietnam War ended in 1975: The US abandoned its allies in South Vietnam; Saigon was taken over; then the US evacuated almost all its citizens in Saigon. And in 2019, US troops withdrew from northern Syria abruptly and abandoned their allies, the Kurds. Some historians also point out that abandoning allies to protect US interests is an inherent flaw that has been deeply rooted in the US since the founding of the country. During the American War of Independence, the US humbly begged the king of France, Louis XVI, to ally with it. After the war, it quickly made peace with Britain unilaterally and concluded a peace treaty with Britain that was detrimental to France's interests. This put Louis XVI's regime in a difficult position, giving cause for the French Revolution.
How Washington abandoned the Kabul regime particularly shocked some in Asia, including the island of Taiwan. Taiwan is the region that relies on the protection of the US the most in Asia, and the island's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities have made Taiwan go further and further down this abnormal path. The situation in Afghanistan suddenly saw a radical change after the country was abandoned by the US. And Washington just left despite the worsening situation in Kabul. Is this some kind of omen of Taiwan's future fate?
Tsai Ing-wen, who had sent a message of condolence to the US president for the death of his dog, did not mention even a word about the change in the situation in Afghanistan. Other DPP politicians as well as the media that tilt toward the DPP downplayed the shocking change as well. But they must have been nervous and feel an ominous presentiment. They must have known better in secret that the US is not reliable.
The geopolitical value of Afghanistan is no less than that of Taiwan island. Around Afghanistan, there are the US' three biggest geopolitical rivals - China, Russia and Iran. In addition, Afghanistan is a bastion of anti-US ideology. The withdrawal of US troops from there is not because Afghanistan is unimportant. It's because it has become too costly for Washington to have a presence in the country. Now the US wants to find a better way to use its resources to maintain its hegemony in the world.
Taiwan is probably the US' most cost-effective ally in East Asia. There is no US military presence on the island of Taiwan. The way the US maintains the alliance with Taiwan is simple: It sells arms to Taiwan while encouraging the DPP authorities to implement anti-mainland policies through political support and manipulation. As a result, it has caused a certain degree of depletion between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits. And what Washington has to do is only to send warships and aircraft near the Straits from time to time. In general, the US does not have to spend a penny on Taiwan. Instead, it makes money through arms sales and forced pork and beef sales to the island. This is totally a profitable geopolitical deal for Washington.
Once a cross-Straits war breaks out while the mainland seizes the island with forces, the US would have to have a much greater determination than it had for Afghanistan, Syria, and Vietnam if it wants to interfere. A military intervention of the US will be a move to change the status quo in the Taiwan Straits, and this will make Washington pay a huge price rather than earn profit.
Some people on the island of Taiwan hype that the island is different from Afghanistan, and that the US wouldn't leave them alone. Indeed, the island is different from Afghanistan. But the difference is the deeper hopelessness of a US victory if it gets itself involved in a cross-Straits war. Such a war would mean unthinkable costs for the US, in front of which the so-called special importance of Taiwan is nothing but wishful thinking of the DPP authorities and secessionist forces on the island.
In the past two decades, the Kabul government cost over 2,000 US soldiers, $2 trillion, and the majesty of the US against the "bandits." But how many lives of US troops and how many dollars would the US sacrifice for the island of Taiwan? After all, the US acknowledges that "there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China." Will the US get more moral support from within and from the West if it fights for the secession of Taiwan than it did during the Afghan War?
The DPP authorities need to keep a sober head, and the secessionist forces should reserve the ability to wake up from their dreams. From what happened in Afghanistan, they should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island's defense will collapse in hours and the US military won't come to help. As a result, the DPP authorities will quickly surrender, while some high-level officials may flee by plane.
The best choice for the DPP authorities is to avoid pushing the situation to that position. They need to change their course of bonding themselves to the anti-Chinese mainland chariot of the US. They should keep cross-Straits peace with political means, rather than acting as strategic pawns of the US and bear the bitter fruits of a war.
2. Afghanistan Is Your Fault: The American public now has what it wanted.
A brutal critique that might make many of us in the government, national security community, and military feel good.
However, regardless of the criticism here and whether it is valid or not, the American people have a right to demand better from their government and the military.
Afghanistan Is Your Fault
The American public now has what it wanted.
Kabul has fallen. Americans will now exercise their usual partisan outrage for a few weeks, and then Afghanistan, like everything else in a nation with an attention span not much longer than a fast-food commercial, will be forgotten. In the meantime, American citizens will separate into their usual camps and identify all of the obvious causes and culprits except for one: themselves.
Many Americans will bristle at the idea that this defeat overseas can be laid at their feet. When U.S. forces had to endure the misery of the retreat from North Korea back to the 38th parallel, no one made the argument that it had happened because of the voters. No one turned to the American people during the fall of Saigon and said, “This is on you.”
So why would I do that now?
Much of what happened in Korea and Vietnam—ultimately constituting a tie and a loss, if we are to be accurate—was beyond the control of the American public. Boys were drafted and sent into battle, sometimes in missions never intended to be revealed to the public.
Afghanistan was different. This was a war that was immensely popular at the outset and mostly conducted in full view of the American public. The problem was that, once the initial euphoria wore off, the public wasn’t much interested in it. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once a new adventure was launched in Iraq.
In post-2001 America, it became fashionable to speak of “war weariness,” but citizens who were not in the military or part of a military family or community did not have to endure even minor inconveniences, much less shoulder major burdens such as a draft, a war tax, or resource shortages. The soldiers who served overseas in those first years of major operations soon felt forgotten. “America’s not at war” was a common refrain among the troops. “We’re at war. America’s at the mall.”
And now those same Americans have the full withdrawal from Afghanistan they apparently want: Some 70 percent of the public supports a pullout. Not that they care that intensely about it; as the foreign-policy scholar Stephen Biddle recently observed, the war is practically an afterthought in U.S. politics. “You would need an electron microscope to detect the effect of Afghanistan on any congressional race in the last decade,” Biddle said early this year. “It’s been invisible.” But Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden all ran on getting out of the war, and now we’re out.
What the public does care about, however, is using Afghanistan as raw material for cheap patriotism and partisan attacks (some right and some wrong, but few of them in good faith) on every president since 2001. After the worst attack on U.S. soil, Americans had no real interest in adult conversation about the reality of anti-terrorist operations in so harsh an environment as Afghanistan (which might have entailed a presence there long beyond 20 years), nor did they want to think about whether “draining the swamp” and modernizing and developing Afghanistan (which would mean a lot more than a few elections) was worth the cost and effort.
Maybe it would have been worth it. Or maybe such a project was impossible. We’ll never know for certain, because American political and military leaders only tried pieces of several strategies, never a coherent whole, mostly to keep the costs and casualties down and to keep the war off the front pages and away from a public that didn’t want to hear about it. Today, many claim that they did not know what the military or the government were really up to, and they point to The Washington Post’s attempt to create a Pentagon Papers vibe around a set of revelations that were not nearly as shocking as the secrets of Vietnam—or should not have been, anyway, to anyone who read a newspaper during the past two decades.
Nor did Americans ever consider whether or when Afghanistan, as a source of terrorist threats to the U.S., had been effectively neutralized. Nothing is perfect, and risks are never zero. But there was no time at which we all decided that “close enough” was good enough, and that we’d rather come home than stay. Obama made something like this case during the 2011 surge, and Donald Trump tried to make a similar argument, but because Trump was too stupid or too lazy to understand anything about international affairs (or much else), he made it purely as a weaponized political charge and, as with his inane attempts to engage North Korea, in a search for a splashy and quick win.
Biden’s policy, of course, is not that different from Trump’s, despite all the partisan howling about it from Republicans. As my colleague David Frum has put it: “For good or ill, the Biden policy on Afghanistan is the same as the Trump policy, only with less lying.”
But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leaders—of both parties—that they were facing a no-win political test. If they chose to leave, they would be cowards who abandoned Afghanistan. If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing “forever war.” And so here we are, in the place we were destined to be: resting on 20 years of safety from another 9/11, but with Afghanistan again in the hands of the Taliban.
A serious people—the kind of people we once were—would have made serious choices, long before this current debacle was upon them. They would today be trying to learn something from nearly 2,500 dead service members and many more wounded. They would be grimly assessing risk and preparing both overseas and at home for the reality of a terrorist nation making its way back onto the international map.
Biden was right, in the end, to bite the bullet and refuse to pass this conflict on to yet another president. His execution of this resolve, however, looks to be a tragic and shameful mess and will likely be a case study in policy schools for years to come. But there was no version of “Stop the forever war” that didn’t end with the fall of Kabul. We believed otherwise, as a nation, because we wanted to believe it. And because we had shopping to do and television to watch and arguments to be had on social media.
But before we move on, before we head back to the mall, before we resume posting memes, and before we return to bickering with each other about whether we should have to mask up at Starbucks, let us remember that this day came about for one reason, and one reason only.
Because it is what we wanted.
3. Afghanistan. Urgent: What you can do.
Here is another way Americans can help. Spirit of America does important work supporting US national security and foreign policy.
(For transparency, I am on the board of advisors).
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Jim Hake, Spirit of America
Date: Mon, Aug 16, 2021 at 17:39
Subject: Afghanistan. Urgent: What you can do.
To: David Maxwell
Greetings,
The tragic situation in Afghanistan is heartbreaking—one that all of us Americans, regardless of our political stripes and our views on the two-decade-long conflict, can unite behind. Our Spirit of America team is committed to doing what we can to help those Afghans who worked with and supported our troops, and embraced the promise of a free and better life.
Today we are launching an Afghanistan Emergency Fund to assist Afghan families that will soon be transitioning to the United States. We are asking our supporters to contribute what they can so that we can create a rapid response fund of $500,000 to immediately meet the most urgent needs.
Families rush to Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan in a desperate attempt to evacuate the capital. (REUTERS/Stringer)Donate Now
As always, 100% will go to the assistance that is needed, and, if these funds are not needed to help the Afghans being evacuated, we will offer to refund them to you.Our initial focus is on helping those Afghans, including interpreters and their families, being evacuated by the United States to temporary locations outside Afghanistan. A Spirit of America regional director is in the Middle East now, side-by-side with our US military partners to assess the situation and provide humanitarian aid in real-time.
It is as dynamic and complex a situation as it is heartbreaking. Yet, we are more committed than ever to doing the right thing by our Afghan partners and demonstrating the best of America, even during these trying times.
Thank you,
Jim Hake
CEO
No endorsement of Spirit of America by the US Department of Defense, Department of State, or US personnel is intended or implied.
4. Afghans Need an ‘Underground Railroad’
Like any other element of unconventional warfare (and this is one - remember one of the traditional elements of UW was escape and evasion) something like this needs time to develop the supporting network. If someone was anticipating what happened this weekend we could have put a network in place over the past months/years. As Niel Young sang in his iconic anti-Vietnam War song: "Shoulda been done long ago."
This is another reason why we need people with UW expertise.
Also I received this report from someone in the region:
Speaking of Underground Railroad, Ahmad Masood, the son of Ahmad Shah Masood, has reportedly moved to the Panjsher Valley region to collect and organize ANA elements who haven’t surrendered or been captured. There is video of him boarding an ANA Mi-17 with an entourage (date unknown when it was filmed) and then of him and his team in some location outside of Kabul. Will have to see where this goes.
It seems they are living to fight another day. A continued UW mission for SF and the CIA? That is a rhetorical question as politically I do not think we have the stomach for this.
Afghans Need an ‘Underground Railroad’
As in Vietnam, the priority should be rescuing as many allies as possible.
It will be a moral stain if we leave behind those who fought alongside us, often in combat and at great risk to themselves and their families, who became targets for assassination. Leaving those courageous heroes behind will deter others from helping us in the future.
In April 1975, as Saigon was approaching collapse, Graham Martin, our capable but obstinate ambassador, was dragging his feet. Bing West, a Marine combat veteran then working for Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger, says Schlesinger called Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to report that he was sending aircraft to evacuate Vietnamese who had worked with the U.S. Mr. Kissinger sided with Schlesinger, who then informed the White House that he was ordering an air evacuation. Despite receiving no confirmation from the White House, Mr. West recalls, Schlesinger proceeded to act.
That April, the U.S. Air Force flew 201 C-141 missions and 174 C-130 flights evacuating more than 45,000 Vietnamese to Guam. In addition, 71 U.S. helicopters flew 660 sorties, evacuating more than 7,800 people to Thailand or to U.S. ships. The aerial evacuation of South Vietnam was the largest such operation in history, with more than 50,000 evacuees transported mainly on U.S. Air Force aircraft.
By contrast, official claims of the number of Afghan special-immigrant visa candidates evacuated so far range between 1,200 and 2,000. Neither figure comes close to the 20,000 or more who have been desperately waiting for visas for months and need to escape. No One Left Behind, a charity that assists Afghans who worked for the U.S., estimates there could even be tens of thousands more in need.
On Monday there were reports that evacuation flights had been suspended to give priority to American citizens—a strong indication that current airlift capacity is inadequate. Taking care of American citizens shouldn’t require us to ignore those who helped us.
Schlesinger showed what a determined defense secretary can do acting on his own authority. When the chips were down and others did nothing, he took action. The Pentagon should ask now whether it is doing all it can.
President Biden was right to deploy more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to secure the airport for evacuation flights. But four more actions are urgently needed:
• The Defense Department should be directed to assign all available aircraft to the effort except for those determined to be mission-critical elsewhere. Exceptions should require the approval of the secretary.
• U.S. service members on the ground should be trusted to decide who is qualified for evacuation flights, breaking the bureaucratic logjam of the visa-approval program.
• Our diplomats should be pressing countries in the region, particularly beneficiaries of U.S. security support such as Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates, to provide first asylum to evacuees. That would shorten flight times, significantly increasing airlift capacity. It also would permit evacuees’ immigration status to be determined before they travel to the U.S. or elsewhere for resettlement.
• Under the present chaotic conditions, even the most effective evacuation will leave many deserving people behind. Therefore, a covert-action directive should be issued to U.S. intelligence agencies, working with the Defense Department, to establish an “underground railroad” out of Afghanistan after our official military presence ends.
“Duty, Honor, Country” is the motto of West Point but it speaks to the moral code of all American service women and men. The many I have been privileged to work with would consider it an honor, and part of their duty to their country, to participate in such a mission.
Mr. Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, served as deputy defense secretary, 2001-05. He is on the advisory board of No One Left Behind.
5. Taliban Return May Revitalize SEA Terrorist Groups
When Dr. Abuza talks about terrorism in SE Asia, I pay attention.
Taliban Return May Revitalize SEA Terrorist Groups
Commentary by Zachary Abuza
2120-08-16
The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan was swift and thorough. The U.S. government’s $83 billion project of state-building failed spectacularly. And the U.S. military’s provision of $6 billion a year in security assistance proved meaningless, as Afghan security forces simply evaporated in the face of Taliban offensives, surrendering without a fight.
So what does this mean for Southeast Asian security? How will it impact Islamist militancy moving forward? Right now, there is no clear answer, but a look at recent history suggests the return of the Taliban could revitalize weakening terrorist networks in the region.
An intertwined history
Afghanistan has always played a part in the development of terrorist networks in Southeast Asia. Not many Southeast Asians traveled to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, but those that did returned to Southeast Asia and took over leadership of almost every militant Islamist group, including Jemaah Islamiyah, Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia, and Laskar Jihad. These returnees were placed on pedestals and established madrassas that they used as centers of recruitment and indoctrination for the next generation of militant jihadists.
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front broke away from the secular Moro National Liberation Front in 1984, and moved their headquarters to Lahore, Pakistan, where they deepened ties to transnational jihadists. By 1996, al-Qaeda was dispatching operatives to replicate at the local level their Afghan training camps.
Southeast Asian militants were increasingly being trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. And the results were devastating. One only has to look at the casualties of the 2002 Bali bombings to see the devastation that could be wrought by al-Qaeda-trained operatives.
Jemaah Islamiyah’s operations chief Hambali and al-Qaeda anthrax researcher Yazid Sufaat were in Afghanistan on 9/11 waiting to procure a virulent strain that could be produced in a Malaysian lab.
Southeast Asian militants played key roles in al-Qaeda operations, as well. A meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2000 reviewed the failed attack on USS The Sullivans (January 2000), planned the USS Cole attack (October 2000), and made final preparations for the 9/11 attacks the following year.
Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, al-Qaeda’s operational chief Khalid Sheikh Mohamed called for militants in Indonesia to launch a diversionary attack. The result was the Bali bombings that caused the death of 202 people.
Other attacks against U.S. interests were planned, including a bombing of U.S. naval vessels in the Singapore Strait. From 2002-2009, Jemaah Islamiyah was al-Qaeda’s most consistently lethal franchise.
With the initial defeat of the Taliban and much of al-Qaeda being driven from Afghanistan, in 2001-2002, the links between Southeast Asian militants and Afghanistan became more tenuous. Years of effective counterterrorist operations across Southeast Asia led to JI’s collapse as a militant organization. It launched its last terrorist attack in 2011.
By 2014, the Islamic State, which had swept across Syria and Iraq, was the new shiny thing to attract the interests of regional militants. Former leaders and cells of the pro-al-Qaeda Jemaah Islamiyah defected to the Islamic state, and Southeast Asian militants began to travel to Syria to wage jihad. By November 2014, there were enough to establish a Bahasa-language-speaking company.
Now what?
What does the Taliban’s takeover mean for militancy in Southeast Asia?
At one level, it’s a clear propaganda victory. The Taliban and their Mujahidin antecedents can claim to have defeated two superpowers. Islamists will rejoice in that fact, alone. And it will inspire them to set their sights back on their own corruption-ridden governments, which they view as being propped up by the West.
We do not know if Afghanistan will return to being a terrorist safe haven. Some argue that al- Qaeda never left, and that the Taliban have not moderated their stance on the group one iota. Others contend that after been driven from power for 20 years, the Taliban have an incentive to make sure that Afghanistan does not become a safe haven again.
But the most important factor is not what happens in Afghanistan, but the terrorist trajectory in Southeast Asia. For the past seven years, pro-Islamic State groups have been the most consistently lethal terrorist organizations in the region. JI has quietly let them absorb the body-blows of the region’s security forces, who have been far more proactive with the Islamic State, far more willing to cooperate with regional partners, and armed with far greater legal powers and authorities. Pro-Islamic State groups, especially in Indonesia, are significantly weakened.
And Jemaah Islamiyah is waiting to pick up the pieces. It certainly has the financial resources to do so. They are stronger than they have been in years, as the state gave them ample space to regroup, run their madrassas, mosques, businesses, and charities.
Jemaah Islamiyah never renounced violence, waiting patiently for the appropriate time to resume terrorist operations. And unlike in parts of South Asia and the Middle East, things are much more fluid in Southeast Asia. Groups and individuals can move between groups without consequence.
What is very telling is that by July 2021, Indonesian security forces had already arrested over 30 members of Jemaah Islamiyah.
And of course, things in Iraq and Syria remain far from settled. Though the Islamic State has suffered reversals, it is far from a defeated force. They too, could regroup, one again drawing support from Southeast Asia.
Arguably the greatest impact on regional security from the fall of Afghanistan will simply be a greater questioning of American reliability and commitment as an ally and security partner. The damage has been done, and this plays into the hands of Chinese propagandists who revel in sowing seeds of doubt regarding U.S. reliability.
Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or BenarNews.
6. Worse Than Saigon by Senator Ben Sasse
Excerpts:
It’s important to recognize the work that our special forces and intelligence operatives did after 9/11. The partnerships they built with our Afghan allies were premised on the idea that America isn’t capable of this kind of betrayal. I’ve had a dozen conversations with American intelligence officers and special operators over the past few weeks, and they’ve told me that they swore to their Afghan recruits that if they fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans, we’d protect their wives and children. Those promises are being broken. America is supposed to be better than this. The Biden administration is spitting in the face of all these heroes, but we owe them a debt of gratitude. The work they did mattered, and still matters.
Our troops didn’t lose this war. Politicians chose defeat. We never had to let the Taliban win, but a bipartisan doctrine of weakness has humiliated the world’s greatest superpower and handed Afghanistan to butchers. In the next few weeks, the situation in Afghanistan will get much worse. Americans need to pray for that troubled country. President Biden needs to man up, come out of hiding, and take charge of the mess he created. Secure the airfields and get as many souls out as possible. Time is short.
Worse Than Saigon
A member of the Taliban stands outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 16, 2021. (Stringer/Reuters)
In yielding Afghanistan to the Taliban, Joe Biden has engineered the worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation.
While President Joe Biden cowers at Camp David, the Taliban are humiliating America. The retreat from Afghanistan is our worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation. As the Taliban marches into Kabul, they’re murdering civilians, reimposing their vicious Islamist law, and preparing to turn Afghanistan back into a bandit regime. The U.S. embassy has told Americans to shelter in place. Refugees are fleeing to the airport, begging to escape the coming bloodbath. None of this had to happen.
America is the world’s greatest superpower. We ought to act like it. But President Biden and his national-security team have failed to protect even the American embassy in Kabul. They have broken America’s promises to the men and women who long for freedom — especially those thousands of Afghans who served alongside our military and intelligence services. They are turning their backs on the women and children who are desperate for space on the remaining flights out of hell.
Gross incompetence has given the Taliban a terrible opportunity to slaughter our allies. 88,000 of our Afghani allies have applied for visas to get out of the country, but this administration has approved just 1,200 so far. I’ve been among a bipartisan group of senators that has pushed Biden to expedite this process, but to no avail. At this point, it’s not clear how many we’ll be able to get out. Every translator and ally who stood by us is now at risk.
This bloodshed wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. For months, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have warned the Biden administration that this would happen. Now the administration is acting like this is a surprise. It’s shameful, dishonest spin.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been all over cable news pretending this isn’t a disaster. Administration apologists can bleat talking points all they want to, but they can’t drown out the screams of the women Taliban forces are systematically brutalizing.
The administration naively talked about a “diplomatic solution.” The Taliban were never interested, and have broken every agreement they have signed. Just look at recent headlines. Last week alone, 27 children were murdered at the hands of the Taliban. The Taliban executed 22 Afghani commanders as they attempted to peacefully surrender. They’ve made their intentions known — these butchers are bragging about the slaughter online.
The Taliban don’t give a rip about getting invited to the U.N.’s international cocktail party in Brussels. Bromides about the Taliban’s “role in the international community” aren’t going to call them off. The Taliban aren’t going to stop being the Taliban because Jen Psaki scolds them.
America’s retreat is a major propaganda coup for the jihadists. The Taliban will claim to be a “superpower-slayer.” The Taliban helped their allies stage the 9/11 attacks almost exactly 20 years ago, and after our retreat they’ll be able to brag about humiliating us again.
Make no mistake: The Taliban will exploit every image of American retreat. Pictures of desperate Afghans perilously crowded around the unguarded airport in Kabul are painfully reminiscent of images of Saigon — images that cemented communist victory in Vietnam and showed American weakness to the world. Jihadists are flocking to the “hallowed ground” where they have just defeated the “infidels.” Afghanistan will become a sanctuary for terrorist groups all over again.
China and Russia will look to capitalize on Biden’s weakness and incompetence, too. Their message is simple: Why should Ukraine or Taiwan put any faith in the United States after seeing how Washington has abandoned its allies in Afghanistan? America’s enemies are salivating at the thought of taking advantage of the president who surrendered in the War on Terror.
The sad thing is, many in my party are trying to blame-shift as if the last administration didn’t set us on this course. Here’s the ugly truth: Neither party is serious about foreign policy. For a decade now, demagogues have lied to the American people about our mission in Afghanistan. President Trump pioneered the strategy of retreat President Biden is pursuing, to disastrous effect.
The politicians and pundits who make excuses for this shameful retreat will dishonestly claim that it was this or fighting so-called “forever wars.” They pretend that our only choices were a massive occupation or an immediate withdrawal. They ignore the reality on the ground. Their cheap talking points have led to chaos, persecution, and death.
Politicians don’t tell this truth: America didn’t have a nation-building occupation force in Afghanistan. The last time we had 100,000 troops in the country was a decade ago. We’re not waging “endless wars” in Afghanistan any more than we’re waging endless wars in South Korea, Germany, or Japan — or Kosovo, or Honduras, or any number of other nations where we have forward-deployed forces. A relatively small number of troops has successfully supported our Afghan allies by providing the backbone for intelligence and special-operations missions. Americans weren’t building empires or fighting unwinnable battles. We were defending airfields and decapitating terror organizations while keeping a light footprint. Americans have heard of some high-profile goons, such as Qasem Soleimani and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. But our heroes in Afghanistan have killed a lot more Bin Laden wannabes whose names you don’t know — precisely because we killed them before they could take down a World Trade Center. We fought and won this war in Afghanistan, not on American shores. But you wouldn’t realize that from the isolationist rhetoric surrounding Biden’s choices.
It’s important to recognize the work that our special forces and intelligence operatives did after 9/11. The partnerships they built with our Afghan allies were premised on the idea that America isn’t capable of this kind of betrayal. I’ve had a dozen conversations with American intelligence officers and special operators over the past few weeks, and they’ve told me that they swore to their Afghan recruits that if they fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans, we’d protect their wives and children. Those promises are being broken. America is supposed to be better than this. The Biden administration is spitting in the face of all these heroes, but we owe them a debt of gratitude. The work they did mattered, and still matters.
Our troops didn’t lose this war. Politicians chose defeat. We never had to let the Taliban win, but a bipartisan doctrine of weakness has humiliated the world’s greatest superpower and handed Afghanistan to butchers. In the next few weeks, the situation in Afghanistan will get much worse. Americans need to pray for that troubled country. President Biden needs to man up, come out of hiding, and take charge of the mess he created. Secure the airfields and get as many souls out as possible. Time is short.
Ben Sasse is the junior United States senator from Nebraska.
7. Remarks by President Biden on Afghanistan
For those who did not watch this live.
The four most important excerpts. Our mission, our interests, accepting responsibility and a limited way ahead.
He did reveal one key point by saying this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. He is likely talking about the intelligence estimates he received that most likely said Afghanistan will fall and after our forces leave the Afghan government and military will collapse in the face of the Taliban campaign.
Excerpts:
1. We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.
We did that. We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him. That was a decade ago.
Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy.
Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.
...
2. I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.
That’s why we were still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency.
But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.
...
3. I’m now the fourth American President to preside over war in Afghanistan — two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibly on — responsibility on to a fifth President.
I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here.
I am President of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.
I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face. But I do not regret my decision to end America’s warfighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser-focus on our counterterrorism missions there and in other parts of the world.
...
4. If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.
Remarks by President Biden on Afghanistan
AUGUST 16, 2021
•
East Room
4:02 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. I want to speak today to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan: the developments that have taken place in the last week and the steps we’re taking to address the rapidly evolving events.
My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every constituency, including — and contingency — including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now.
I’ll speak more in a moment about the specific steps we’re taking, but I want to remind everyone how we got here and what America’s interests are in Afghanistan.
We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.
We did that. We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him. That was a decade ago.
Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy.
Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.
I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism — not counterinsurgency or nation building. That’s why I opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was Vice President.
And that’s why, as President, I am adamant that we focus on the threats we face today in 2021 — not yesterday’s threats.
Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan: al Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources.
We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence.
If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.
When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — just a little over three months after I took office.
U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country, and the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.
The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1.
There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.
I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.
That’s why we were still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency.
But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.
So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.
If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.
We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support.
We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.
There’s some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers, but if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that 1 year — 1 more year, 5 more years, or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would’ve made any difference.
And here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not. If the political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people, unable to negotiate for the future of their country when the chips were down, they would never have done so while U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan bearing the brunt of the fighting for them.
And our true strategic competitors — China and Russia — would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely.
When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June and again when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations. We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U.S. military departed, to clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people. We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically.
They failed to do any of that.
I also urged them to engage in diplomacy, to seek a political settlement with the Taliban. This advice was flatly refused. Mr. Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.
So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay: How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghans — Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives — American lives — is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery?
I’m clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past — the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces.
Those are the mistakes we cannot continue to repeat, because we have significant vital interests in the world that we cannot afford to ignore.
I also want to acknowledge how painful this is to so many of us. The scenes we’re seeing in Afghanistan, they’re gut-wrenching, particularly for our veterans, our diplomats, humanitarian workers, for anyone who has spent time on the ground working to support the Afghan people.
For those who have lost loved ones in Afghanistan and for Americans who have fought and served in the country — serve our country in Afghanistan — this is deeply, deeply personal.
It is for me as well. I’ve worked on these issues as long as anyone. I’ve been throughout Afghanistan during this war — while the war was going on — from Kabul to Kandahar to the Kunar Valley.
I’ve traveled there on four different occasions. I met with the people. I’ve spoken to the leaders. I spent time with our troops. And I came to understand firsthand what was and was not possible in Afghanistan.
So, now we’re fercus [sic] — focused on what is possible.
We will continue to support the Afghan people. We will lead with our diplomacy, our international influence, and our humanitarian aid.
We’ll continue to push for regional diplomacy and engagement to prevent violence and instability.
We’ll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people — of women and girls — just as we speak out all over the world.
I have been clear that human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments; it’s with our diplomacy, our economic tools, and rallying the world to join us.
Now, let me lay out the current mission in Afghanistan. I was asked to authorize — and I did — 6,000 U.S. troops to deploy to Afghanistan for the purpose of assisting in the departure of U.S. and Allied civilian personnel from Afghanistan, and to evacuate our Afghan allies and vulnerable Afghans to safety outside of Afghanistan.
Our troops are working to secure the airfield and to ensure continued operation of both the civilian and military flights. We’re taking over air traffic control.
We have safely shut down our embassy and transferred our diplomats. Our dip- — our diplomatic presence is now consolidated at the airport as well.
Over the coming days, we intend to transport out thousands of American citizens who have been living and working in Afghanistan.
We’ll also continue to support the safe departure of civilian personnel — the civilian personnel of our Allies who are still serving in Afghanistan.
Operation Allies Refugee [Refuge], which I announced back in July, has already moved 2,000 Afghans who are eligible for Special Immigration Visas and their families to the United States.
In the coming days, the U.S. military will provide assistance to move more SIV-eligible Afghans and their families out of Afghanistan.
We’re also expanding refugee access to cover other vulnerable Afghans who worked for our embassy: U.S. non-governmental agencies — or the U.S. non-governmental organizations; and Afghans who otherwise are at great risk; and U.S. news agencies.
I know that there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghans — civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier — still hopeful for their country. And part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, “a crisis of confidence.”
American troops are performing this mission as professionally and as effectively as they always do, but it is not without risks.
As we carry out this departure, we have made it clear to the Taliban: If they attack our personnel or disrupt our operation, the U.S. presence will be swift and the response will be swift and forceful. We will defend our people with devastating force if necessary.
Our current military mission will be short in time, limited in scope, and focused in its objectives: Get our people and our allies to safety as quickly as possible.
And once we have completed this mission, we will conclude our military withdrawal. We will end America’s longest war after 20 long years of bloodshed.
The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, and secure Afghanistan — as known in history as the “graveyard of empires.”
What is happening now could just as easily have happened 5 years ago or 15 years in the future. We have to be honest: Our mission in Afghanistan has taken many missteps — made many missteps over the past two decades.
I’m now the fourth American President to preside over war in Afghanistan — two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibly on — responsibility on to a fifth President.
I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference. Nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here.
I am President of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.
I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face. But I do not regret my decision to end America’s warfighting in Afghanistan and maintain a laser-focus on our counterterrorism missions there and in other parts of the world.
Our mission to degrade the terrorist threat of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden was a success.
Our decades-long effort to overcome centuries of history and permanently change and remake Afghanistan was not, and I wrote and believed it never could be.
I cannot and I will not ask our troops to fight on endlessly in another — in another country’s civil war, taking casualties, suffering life-shattering injuries, leaving families broken by grief and loss.
This is not in our national security interest. It is not what the American people want. It is not what our troops, who have sacrificed so much over the past two decades, deserve.
I made a commitment to the American people when I ran for President that I would bring America’s military involvement in Afghanistan to an end. And while it’s been hard and messy — and yes, far from perfect — I’ve honored that commitment.
More importantly, I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn’t going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should have ended long ago.
Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan.
I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another President of the United States — yet another one — a fifth one.
Because it’s the right one — it’s the right decision for our people. The right one for our brave service members who have risked their lives serving our nation. And it’s the right one for America.
So, thank you. May God protect our troops, our diplomats, and all of the brave Americans serving in harm’s way.
4:21 P.M. EDT
8. Afghanistan is now part of the post-American world
The Great Game.
Excertps:
All of the countries bordering Afghanistan will be fervently hoping that the Taliban have learned some lessons from their last period in power from 1996-2001 and will not allow their country to once again become a base for international jihadis.
If the Taliban do not attempt to export violent Islamist fundamentalism, then its assumption of power in Kabul is likely to be a welcome development for China. The Chinese government’s foreign policy doctrine is based on the principle of “non-interference” — which essentially means that Beijing will take no position on the political system or human rights inside Afghanistan provided that the Taliban respects China’s “core interests”.
China has already signalled its willingness to work with the Taliban through a recent high profile meeting between Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar of the Taliban. The significance of this meeting was not just that it took place, but that Beijing saw fit to publicise it.
If China can establish a working relationship with a Taliban-led government in Afghanistan it would provide Beijing with economic benefits — such as the possibility of a transit corridor, across the country, to the Chinese-built port of Gwadar in Pakistan.
In strategic terms, China would also welcome the opportunity to increase pressure on India, ramping up Delhi’s fears of encirclement. Above all, Beijing will welcome further evidence that the post-American world is upon us.
Afghanistan is now part of the post-American world
The Taliban’s defeat of the US will be a boost to jihadis across the globe
The fall of Kabul to the Taliban — 20 years after it was driven out — will end American influence in Afghanistan, probably for decades. In that sense, it is comparable to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the fall of Saigon in 1975 or the Cuban revolution of 1959.
With the US out of the way, the Taliban will seek to build relations with an array of other actors, including China, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Afghanistan’s new rulers seem eager for international recognition, and the trade and aid that would flow from that. That desire might yet persuade the Taliban to moderate its more fanatical impulses.
The treatment of Afghan women and of the Taliban’s defeated enemies will be watched particularly closely outside the country. Some of the organisation’s spokesmen have suggested that, unlike in its first period in power, the Taliban will allow women to work and to get an education. But many Afghan women, currently involved in politics and civil society, are deeply sceptical.
Foreign governments are not the only international audience that might interest the Taliban. The fact that a violent Islamist movement has succeeded in defeating the US will be a boost to jihadis around the world — who may now look to Taliban-led Afghanistan for guidance and inspiration.
John Allen, a former commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan, now anticipates al-Qaeda “operating openly from the Hindu Kush with US forces gone”. The Biden administration has said it will hit back if that happens. But Gen Allen pointed out that counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan were a “very challenging undertaking without credible ground controllers”.
Afghanistan also borders China, Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia, and is a near neighbour of India. All of these countries will be concerned that Taliban-inspired violence could spill over.
India will be braced for more trouble in Jammu and Kashmir, its only Muslim-majority province. China has reason to worry that Uyghurs, fighting Beijing’s repression in Xinjiang, may find a base in Afghanistan. Iran will be delighted to see America defeated, but will worry about the fate of the Hazaras, a Shia minority group, who have been viciously persecuted by the Taliban. All of Afghanistan’s neighbours and the EU will be braced for an influx of refugees.
The neighbouring country in the most ambiguous and perilous situation is Pakistan. For decades, the government in Islamabad — and particularly the Pakistani intelligence services, the ISI — has allowed safe havens for the Taliban. This policy was half-denied and half-justified on the grounds that Pakistan needed “strategic depth” — which meant preventing Afghanistan falling under the sway of India. The influence of hardline Islamists within Pakistan itself also helped to create a permissive environment for the Taliban.
Islamabad’s tacit support for violent Islamism in Afghanistan even survived outrages committed on Pakistani soil — such as the massacre at a school in Peshawar in 2014, in which the Pakistani Taliban killed about 150 people, including 132 children.
The government of Pakistan continues to claim that it used “maximum leverage” to try and force the Taliban to negotiate. But it is widely disbelieved. One senior Afghan official complained to me recently — “I’ve never had a bad meeting with the Pakistanis. They just never keep their promises.”
Yet the Taliban takeover of neighbouring Afghanistan is also dangerous for Pakistan. Jihadis inside the country will be emboldened by the victory. The 1,600 mile border between the two countries is traditionally porous. The Pakistani Taliban already seems to be resurgent — and last month claimed responsibility for 26 terrorist attacks in Pakistan, including a suicide bombing that killed nine Chinese workers among others. Secular Pakistani officials could also become targets.
All of the countries bordering Afghanistan will be fervently hoping that the Taliban have learned some lessons from their last period in power from 1996-2001 and will not allow their country to once again become a base for international jihadis.
If the Taliban do not attempt to export violent Islamist fundamentalism, then its assumption of power in Kabul is likely to be a welcome development for China. The Chinese government’s foreign policy doctrine is based on the principle of “non-interference” — which essentially means that Beijing will take no position on the political system or human rights inside Afghanistan provided that the Taliban respects China’s “core interests”.
China has already signalled its willingness to work with the Taliban through a recent high profile meeting between Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar of the Taliban. The significance of this meeting was not just that it took place, but that Beijing saw fit to publicise it.
If China can establish a working relationship with a Taliban-led government in Afghanistan it would provide Beijing with economic benefits — such as the possibility of a transit corridor, across the country, to the Chinese-built port of Gwadar in Pakistan.
In strategic terms, China would also welcome the opportunity to increase pressure on India, ramping up Delhi’s fears of encirclement. Above all, Beijing will welcome further evidence that the post-American world is upon us.
9. Officials Say Kabul Airport Is Secured; DOD Evacuating Americans, Afghans
Officials Say Kabul Airport Is Secured; DOD Evacuating Americans, Afghans
Securing the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and evacuating Americans and Afghans with special immigration visas remains the goal of U.S. troops in that nation, an official of the Joint Staff said today.
Army Maj. Gen. Henry "Hank" Taylor, Joint Staff director of current operations, and Gary Reed, director of DOD's Afghanistan crisis action group, updated reporters at the Pentagon in the wake of the Afghanistan crisis.
Maj. Gen. William D. “Hank” Taylor
Army Maj. Gen. William D. “Hank” Taylor speaks at a press briefing on Afghanistan at the Pentagon, Aug. 16, 2021.
SHARE IMAGE:
Photo By: Lisa Ferdinando, DOD
VIRIN: 210816-D-BN624-0248
"We're actively monitoring the situation, what's happening on the ground, and we will continue to support the commander and adjust forces, as necessary, to allow the mission to be successful," Taylor said. "Our troops are trained professionals; they understand the complexity, the urgency and the importance of their mission. They remain agile."
About 2,500 U.S. troops have moved into Kabul within the last 72 hours, and more will arrive soon, the general said, adding that at the end of the day, nearly 3,000 to 3,500 troops are expected on the ground.
Hamid Karzai International Airport opened for operations shortly after 3:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time today; shortly afterward, the first C-17 aircraft landed with Marines on board. The next C-17 was preparing to land with members of the 82nd Airborne Division, he said.
More than 700 Afghans applying for special immigrant visas have departed Afghanistan in the past 48 hours by a combination of contract and commercial aircraft, Taylor said.
"[We're] in charge of air traffic control, and that includes commercial [and] contracted military [aircraft]," he noted. "We expect to maximize our throughput of all means of transportation over the next coming days."
Since DOD's Afghanistan Crisis Action Group was formed in July, its initial focus has been to relocate the SIV applicants, finalize their visas and resettle the immigrants into the United States with the help of nongovernmental organizations, Reed said.
39:36
"Today, nearly 2,000 Afghans have passed through this process, joining more than 70,000 that have participated in the SIV program since 2005, he told reporters.
U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Army North are mostly operating from Fort Lee, Virginia, and have provided arriving SIV applicants with housing, food, medical treatment, medical screening and other services, he added.
"As we prepare for even more arrivals, U.S. Northcom and the U.S. Army are working to create additional capacity to support refugee relocation in the [United States], including at temporary sites," Reed said, noting that Fort Bliss, Texas, and Camp McCoy in Wisconsin are under assessment. There may be other sites identified, he added, for 20,000 to 22,000 SIV spaces.
"With this operation underway [and] given the urgency of the situation in Kabul, our focus has shifted to supporting movement of our embassy staff, American citizens, allies and other partners out of Kabul," he said. "August 14, DOD began movement of these people on DOD aircraft, providing them transportation that had flown into Kabul delivering our troops and hauling cargo."
Afghanistan Briefing
Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby holds a press briefing on Afghanistan with Army Maj. Gen. William D. “Hank” Taylor and Director for Defense Intelligence Garry Reid at the Pentagon, Aug. 16, 2021.
SHARE IMAGE:
Photo By: Lisa Ferdinando, DOD
VIRIN: 210816-D-BN624-0092
That is an important point, Reed said. "The numbers today are in the hundreds; we certainly have a much greater requirement, [and] we are still in the process of bringing in forces. These aircraft, as space [is] available on the outbound, have been taking passengers and of course, this has been somewhat disrupted in the last 24 hours."
Reed said DOD has transported several hundred Afghan SIV applicants to countries in the region and has aligned them with the State Department and Department of Homeland Security colleagues for their onward transportation.
"We anticipate picking up the pace, provided we can stabilize conditions … as described by the general," Reed said. "Our military team in Kabul is working side-by-side with the ambassador and his staff to coordinate future airlift operations in the coming days."
The Departments of State and Homeland Security will facilitate initial processing and overseas transit points and prepare for onward movement for all of those transported by DOD, he said.
10. The 1 Thing That Could’ve Changed the War in Afghanistan
Now for the "what ifs."
Imagine if we had killed bin Laden and not invaded Iraq?
The 1 Thing That Could’ve Changed the War in Afghanistan
Had Osama bin Laden been killed or captured in December 2001, justice would have been served in the way Americans like: fast, hard, and cheap.
Had the United States caught and killed Osama bin Laden in December 2001, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would have faded away almost immediately afterward. I cannot prove that. It’s only an opinion from my vantage point as one of President George W. Bush’s speechwriters in 2001 and 2002.
Yet I strongly believe it. The U.S. stayed for 20 years in Afghanistan because first Bush and then his successors got trapped in a pattern of responding to past failures by redoubling future efforts. In the fall of 2001, the U.S. mission in Afghanistan was clear, limited, and achievable: find and kill bin Laden. After bin Laden escaped, that mission escalated into something hazy and impossibly difficult: to rebuild Afghanistan’s society and remodel the Afghan state.
Had U.S. forces succeeded against bin Laden in 2001, justice would have been served in the way Americans like: fast, hard, and cheap. Republicans could have campaigned in the elections of 2002 as the winners of a completed war—and pivoted then to domestic concerns. Remember, if George W. Bush learned one single lesson from his father’s presidency, it was that even the most overwhelming military success does not translate into reelection. In November 1992, the elder Bush won 37 percent of the vote against a Democratic nominee who had opposed the triumphant Gulf War.
Bin Laden’s survival doomed any idea of pivoting back to domestic concerns. Without a kill or capture of bin Laden to show, the swift overthrow of the Taliban government seemed very much a consolation prize.
The road opened to the Iraq War.
Again, this is only one man’s opinion, but I don’t believe Bush was yet committed to a ground war against Saddam Hussein when he delivered his “Axis of Evil” speech in January 2002. That speech identified Iraq’s weapons potential as a deadly serious security threat. It said the same of Iran’s and North Korea’s weapons potential, and Bush had no intention of fighting either of them. There were and are many ways to address weapons potential short of a ground war, whether sanctions or sabotage or air strikes.
Yet in the year after that speech, the decision for war coalesced. Something had to be done against Islamic terrorism that was not Afghanistan; the Iraq War became that something. A strange dichotomy split the U.S. foreign-policy elite. Prominent figures in the Bush administration—Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—wished fiercely to escape Afghanistan. This wish was partly because of their determination to finish off Saddam Hussein, but it was also a policy preference in its own right. (For what little it’s worth, that’s how I personally felt at the time: However steep the odds against a stable future for Iraq, that urbanized and literate country was a more promising terrain for U.S. strategic goals than hopeless Afghanistan.)
The logic that impelled Bush toward Iraq operated in reverse to impel his Democratic opponents deeper and deeper into Afghanistan. I doubt that either John Kerry or Barack Obama would independently have selected a ground war in Afghanistan as a sound foreign-policy undertaking. But having arraigned Iraq as the wrong war in the wrong place against the wrong enemy, they backed themselves into identifying Afghanistan as the right war in the right place against the right enemy.
It became Democratic Party doctrine to demand more and more for Afghanistan. Thus the Democratic platform in 2004 urged: “We must expand NATO forces outside Kabul. We must accelerate training for the Afghan army and police. The program to disarm and reintegrate warlord militias into society must be expedited and expanded into a mainstream strategy. We will attack the exploding opium trade ignored by the Bush Administration by doubling our counter-narcotics assistance to the Karzai Government and reinvigorating the regional drug control program.”
America’s Iraq-skeptical allies likewise committed more and more to Afghanistan. In January 2002, they pledged a comparatively modest $4.5 billionover five years to Afghan reconstruction, a little less than $1 billion a year. By 2004, they had doubled that rate of annual spend to $7 billion over three years.
Barack Obama had been even more against the Iraq War than John Kerry had been—and so the logic of “do something” pushed him to be even more in favor of the Afghanistan War than Kerry had been. In February 2009, President Obama approved a surge of 17,000 additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan. He ordered 30,000 more in December. Almost 65,000 U.S. personnel were deployed in the country by the end of his first term.
What were those troops in Afghanistan to do? It became progressively harder to say. America’s most important partner in Afghanistan was adjoining Pakistan. Without some cooperation from Pakistan, military operations inside Afghanistan could not be sustained. Yet at the same time, Pakistan was also the deadliest and most implacable enemy of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan—the ultimate patron of the Taliban against whom the United States was fighting. When bin Laden was finally killed, he was killed in Pakistan, where somebody had been hiding him for many years.
In 2001, bin Laden’s death would have concluded the war. By 2011, it concluded nothing.
Like President Obama, President Trump began his administration by deploying more troops to Afghanistan. By the end of his first term, Trump was looking for an exit at almost any price. The price he paid was a deal with the Taliban: final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after the 2020 election in exchange for a Taliban commitment not to inflict U.S. casualties before the 2020 election. Trump collected his political benefit—his boast of at least ending the “endless war”—while bequeathing an ugly dilemma to his successor: Renege on the Trump deal and relaunch a shooting war? Or stick with the Trump deal, accept the collapse of the Kabul government, and suffer ferocious pro-Trump abuse for continuing Trump’s own policy?
What’s coming next in Afghanistan will be grim and gruesome. What the U.S. can mitigate, it should mitigate, especially by helping those who helped U.S. forces and the international community. But in the cold calculus of state power, the impact upon the U.S. will likely be much less than many now worriedly anticipate. The U.S. smashed the military power first of al-Qaeda, then the Islamic State. Opinion surveys suggest that Islamic extremism is subsiding in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Bin Laden relocated to Afghanistan as a safe haven to fight for control of the Saudi state. But the strategic significance of the Middle East is also likely soon to subside. World oil consumption will likely peak sometime in this current decade, then decline. The U.S. and other developed countries are moving especially rapidly into a post-petroleum future. Even to the extent that they continue to burn oil, that oil will come from many more sources than in the past. The U.S. has been a net exporter of oil for nearly a decade now. Bin Laden’s vision of Afghanistan as the launching place for a world caliphate looks even stranger now than it did 20 years ago.
Instead, getting out of Afghanistan liberates the U.S. to confront more directly the security challenge presented by the Pakistani state’s support for regional and global jihadism. Since 9/11, the U.S. has developed new ways to strike terrorist enemies while putting fewer of its own military personnel at risk. The U.S. can exact very severe retribution against the new rulers of Afghanistan if they decide to return to the business of harboring anti-U.S. jihadis.
Maybe the most important lesson to take from the outcome in Afghanistan is the steep strategic cost of America’s fierce partisan polarization. Decisions in Afghanistan by Republicans and Democrats alike were driven much more by domestic political competition than by realities inside Afghanistan. George W. Bush couldn’t afford to quit Afghanistan when he should have, early in 2002. John Kerry and Barack Obama were compelled to overpromise about Afghanistan despite their own misgivings. Donald Trump backdated a debacle because he wanted a seemingly cheap win for 2020.
Through the Cold War, the U.S. found methods to manage foreign policy that rose above party. Since 1990, the U.S. has succeeded less well at this essential nonpartisan task, and in the 21st century, even worse than that.
We are surely headed to another vicious round of foreign-policy partisanship after the fall of Kabul. For five years, pro-Trump voices have championed protectionism, isolationism, and the betrayal of allies such as Estonia, Montenegro, and the Syrian Kurds. Trump himself envisioned U.S. foreign policy as more or less a protection racket, with payments due from aspiring U.S. partners both to the United States Treasury and to his own enterprises. Now those advocates of a predatory “America Alone” will try to retcon themselves as defenders of U.S. strength and leadership.
Over the next weeks, pro-Trump critics of Biden will astonish the world with their shamelessness, as they convert from attacks on endless wars to laments for the last helicopter out of Saigon. That shamelessness will prove more effective than it deserves to—but less effective than it needs to. The brave lives lost in Afghanistan, the money squandered there: Those will haunt American society for a long time. But the new possibilities opened for the United States, the freedom of action recovered, the future waste now prevented—those will be realities too. The material, economic, financial, and moral assets that make America strong—the United States still possesses all of those. The domestic political dysfunction that leads to politics-instead-of-policy—that, and not the iconography of helicopters out of Kabul—that’s the weakness now to overcome.
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
11. You Can’t Buy a Cause: Examining the roots of the Afghanistan forces’ collapse.
Some supporting quotes:
“Guerrilla war must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 percent active in a striking force and 98 percent passively sympathetic.” T.E. Lawrence, The Science of Guerrilla Warfare
“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
T.E. Lawrence: “Irregular war was far more intellectual than a bayonet charge, far more exhausting than service in the comfortable imitative obedience of an ordered army.
"What bin Laden had hoped to achieve in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 period, which was to drag the United States into a protracted guerrilla war like the one he had fought against the Soviets, never happened. Instead, that protracted guerrilla war is now playing out in Iraq, in the heart of the Middle East."
- Peter Bergen
And from my own Eight Points of Irregular Warfare: "Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it. Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities."
You Can’t Buy a Cause
Examining the roots of the Afghanistan forces’ collapse.
The rout of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, or ANDSF, will go down in history as one of the greatest military defeats of the past century. Like the Iraqi Security Forces in 2014 and the French Army in 1940, these forces melted away in the face of numerically inferior forces and—France excepted—forces equipped with far inferior equipment. By any quantifiable measure, these armies should have easily held off the Taliban, ISIS, and the German Army. Instead, the French Army collapsed in seven weeks, the Iraqi Security Forces evaporated from the battlefield within days of the ISIS attack from Syria, and the recent Taliban offensive took less than eight days from the capture of Kunduz to the capitulation of Kabul.
It was not supposed to be this way. As recently as last month, President Biden noted that the Afghan armed forces were “as well equipped as any army in the world” and “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” The ANDSF were well equipped, numerically superior and superbly trained over the past two decades by the United States, NATO and its coalition allies. Billions of dollars were spent to train and equip hundreds of thousands of soldiers with modern weapons and aircraft.
Four reasons stand out for the collapse: the “hasty withdrawal,” the lack of a cause worth the sacrifice, pervasive corruption, and—perhaps least appreciated—the Taliban information operations.
Little doubt the “hasty withdrawal” contributed to the debacle, a withdrawal that was supposed to be safe and seamless. At his July 8 press conference, President Biden saw a swift departure as a virtue. “We need[ed] to move swiftly to conduct the main elements of the drawdown” he said. “And in this context, speed is safety.” In its place, the U.S. pledged to provide “over the horizon” close air, logistics, and maintenance support but questions arise whether this support was in place when the major offensive began. Presciently, Joe Votel —who led U.S. Central Command for several years—had said in May, “Whatever support we’re prepared to provide over the horizon, we need to be prepared” as “the Taliban will test the Afghan security forces very early on.” There is little evidence that the over-the-horizon air support had any effect in recent weeks, and plenty of evidence that the pullout of contractors hampered everything from maintaining ANDSF aircraft to delivering supplies.
One aspect of the collapse that has gone underdiscussed is the Taliban’s deft use of information operations. While many of the world’s armies struggle with this concept, the Taliban have mastered the core elements of public relations, psychological operations, and propaganda. Its brilliant public relations campaigners created sophisticated propaganda for its own forces, talking about inevitable victory, focusing on “messages to its soldiers and…maintaining unity among them by reminding them of their continuous series of conquests.” For the broader world, they have conducted an “image offensive” to convince the world of a more moderate “Taliban 2.0.” And against the ANDSF, they have been running an equally successful psyops operation to persuade large number of Afghan units to surrender or withdraw from the battlefield. Many commanders “just surrendered in return for amnesty, which the Taliban granted them and let them go home.”
But a hasty withdrawal alone does not explain why ANDSF soldiers won’t fight. At unit level, soldiers fight for each other, and they fight for a cause. While hundreds of thousands of Taliban have died over the decades, its fighters remain fused together by a powerful cause which portrays them as modern-day puritans, linked by the powerful forces of religion, tribal loyalty and, in recent years, hate for the U.S.-backed government in Kabul. By contrast, one wonders what cause the Afghan troops fought for. As Medal of Honor winner Col. Jack Jacobs has noted, “Without a cause, it is impossible to motivate people to fight, and a cause is essential.”
A cause is even more suspect when one operates within an environment of endemic corruption, and the ANDSF perfected the art. Poor logistics, ghost soldiers, corrupt leaders embezzling the pay of individual soldiers, commanders appointed for their political connections and noted for their incompetence—pervasive corruption within the ANDSF destroyed morale within units and among individuals.
There will be other factors cited to explain the extraordinary collapse of the ANDSF. Attempting to build an American-style Army in a third-world country, an unwillingness to sacrifice for a corrupt government, military service that was little more than a jobs program and a paycheck are but a few. Other studies will ask the question of how the international community could spend so much to man, train and equip the Afghan security forces and get so little. For both questions, the answer may be found on a monument in a corner of Arlington cemetery which states. “Not for fame or reward, not lured by place or for rank, or goaded by necessity, but in simple obedience to duty as they understand it, these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.” You can a pay a soldier’s salary, conduct the best training and provide the most modern equipment, but you can’t create commitment and you can’t buy a cause.
12. A Moment for Soul-Searching
I wonder if Professor Cohen will be updating Military Misfortune and Supreme Command? He certainly has a new case study to examine.
A Moment for Soul-Searching
Afghan people climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport in Kabul on August 16, 2021. WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images
Get all our news and commentary in your inbox at 6 a.m. ET.
The United States owes its Afghan allies careful scrutiny of its institutional and personal failures—without recrimination, but also without excuses.
|
August 16, 2021 07:00 PM ET
August 16, 2021 07:00 PM ET
My Afghanistan war lasted almost exactly two years, from the beginning of 2007 to the end of the Bush administration in January 2009. As counselor of the State Department, my job was to take on whatever portfolio Secretary Condoleezza Rice wanted an extra set of senior eyes on. From the first—in fact, before I was formally sworn in—Afghanistan was on her mind. And so, even before entering government service, I canceled my classes for one of the very few times in my career and hopped on a plane to Afghanistan.
In the ensuing two years I visited the country often, usually as part of a small delegation led by Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the deputy national-security adviser, and accompanied by several other senior State and Defense officials. In between trips was the grind of interagency meetings (the so-called “Deputies Committee”) and bureaucratic follow-up at Foggy Bottom. Watching the fall of Kabul brought back a collage of memories from those visits and from the bureaucratic skirmishing at home.
- First trip: a visit to Nuristan, the Kafiristan of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” a stark land of rushing streams and forested mountains, where I spoke with the governor, whose previous job had been running a pizzeria in northern Virginia. No signs of violence.
- A visit to Peshawar, in Pakistan’s then-named Northwest Frontier Province. A superb consul general praised a brilliant young diplomat who was fluent in Pashto but was being compelled to rotate out, against his will. Back home, I was curious about how many Pashto speakers the State Department had at its disposal. Answer: nine, most of them native speakers in some nondiplomatic role like information technology. How many in training? Two. Worst moment: describing this to a senior colleague who said, “That doesn’t sound too bad. Not much need for Pashto speakers anywhere else.”
- Bamyan, home of the great Buddhas blown up by the Taliban in a typically barbaric act of destruction. A beautiful and fairly peaceful province (you can tell by the level of security you need to move around, and by the way your escorts carry themselves—the Kiwis watching us were pretty chill), inhabited chiefly by Hazara Shi’a and persecuted by the Taliban. The governor was the only woman in that role in Afghanistan: a tremendously impressive person, a doctor. Her fate is surely sealed. The ruined city of Shahr-e Gholghola in the distance, silhouetted against the mountains. “Ah yes. The City of Screams.”
- Generals, diplomats, and intelligence officials briefing the president and the secretary of state reported that 75 percent of the violence in Afghanistan occurs in only 10 percent of the districts, implying that the violence was contained. At the advice of David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency expert, I probed a bit. Do we really know what goes on in every district? No. What counts as an incident of violence? Firefights involving our troops, whether we start them or not. But isn’t violence directed by Afghans against Afghans more important? Possibly, but it’s too hard to measure. Is violence the right metric anyway, given that a bit of judicious terror is what keeps the locals in line? Probably, but at least the number of firefights and IEDs discovered is something we can count.
- Meetings in Kabul. One of the few Afghans (or Americans) whose assessment of the situation I had come to trust, sad-eyed, hard-headed, unyielding Amrullah Saleh, the head of the intelligence services and later the first vice president of Afghanistan. There are reports that he is in Tajikistan and will lead a resistance movement from there.
- Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Islamabad. The cold-eyed Pakistani generals, who you knew—I mean, if you had the right sources you really knew—were lying to you, and assisting, if not directing, the guerrillas trying to kill Americans.
- Another briefing to the president and secretary of state, at which I learned that our own eminent soldiers and diplomats were prone not so much to lie as to convey primarily information that they knew would bring a smile to the boss’s face. Tales of successful ambushes and enemy body counts—and yet somehow we needed two more brigades. Smashing successes that were tactically brilliant and strategically meaningless.
- Walking through an Afghan suburb with Doug Lute, when his bodyguard, a wiry little long-haired southerner, stiffened like a bird dog and hissed “Wait.” Five minutes later, we moved on. He had noticed an Afghan soldier with the safety off his weapon: probably nothing more than slack discipline, but a warning that in this country, your own side sometimes shoots you.
- A visit to a military-training team consisting of half a dozen overweight National Guard members who knew nothing about Afghanistan, did not accompany Afghan soldiers on combat missions, and who themselves were patronized by the hardened paratrooper accompanying us. They meant well, but I would not have wanted them training me or my son.
- A shouting match with a senior State Department official in Washington. He was responsible for poppy eradication and insisted that counter-narcotics was what America’s Afghan policy was all about, not counterinsurgency. He was more than a little unstable. But he was politically well-connected.
- Flying in a helicopter with the local U.S. Army brigade commander, asking, What does it mean when you say, ‘Clearing the valley’? Well, sir, we go in and fight with the Taliban until they stop fighting. Are you acting on the basis of intelligence, going after particular people? No, we just patrol and then react as the situation develops. So, you’re basically walking around looking for fights, and this being Afghanistan, you get them? Pretty much.
- A district governor plaintively telling us that once again, American special forces had, without warning, swooped in in the middle of the night, snatched the son of one of his villagers, and vanished. The family demanded to know why, what he was being held for, where he was being held, and when he could return. The governor had no answers. So the special operators had another scalp, as it were, dangling from their belts, but they had undermined the local leaders upon whom success depended.
- Visiting a divisional headquarters. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the pattern was the same: These command elements rotate in their entirety every year, so that as a result, we fight the same war not for 20 years, but for one year 20 times. On the first visit, “This is tough—much tougher than anything we expected.” Six months later, “A lot of work to do but we’ve got a grip on it: Things are definitely improving.” And six months later, as they were packing up to leave, “We have achieved irreversible momentum.” And then, when a new general and his team arrived on the scene, the cycle began again.
- Madam Secretary, please look at these maps. They are made by the United Nations for the local NGOs: Green shows where they can move around pretty safely, yellow where there is danger, red where it is easy to get killed. Let’s flip through them year by year. You can see, the green is shrinking, and the yellow and red are growing.
- Meeting with village elders, who were extremely well-informed about the upcoming American presidential election. We tend to forget that they know a lot more about us than we usually do about them.
These are all snapshots, no more. They may not have been representative of Afghan realities everywhere at the time, or before, or after, but they are what I saw, which is why I became an Afghan pessimist. Which is not the same thing as considering the project doomed from the start. I fully recognize that my memories are now more than a decade old, but nothing I have learned since then makes me think that these phenomena, or others like them, vanished.
The Afghan War consisted of many choices, many decisions, many policies, many actions. It is entirely too easy to declare the whole thing doomed from the beginning. It is even easier and more pernicious to let ourselves off the hook by denouncing the failures of other tribes, so to speak: Obama people blaming the Bush people, Trump people blaming the Obama team, and Biden people blaming everyone; soldiers saying it’s the fault of the civilians; civilians insisting the soldiers screwed up; Americans disparaging Afghans.
The collapse of this past week came not despite our efforts of the past 20 years—it came, in part, because of them. Once the Afghans knew that we really—no kidding—were going, they cut their deals, because that was what experience had taught them to do. And let us not forget, the United States was not just pulling out a couple thousand American troops—it was also, in effect, ordering the withdrawal of many thousands more of our European and other allies, and the thousands of contractors who kept the Afghan military running. There may have been some cowardice in Afghan behavior in opening the gates of their cities to the Taliban, but there was a lot more prudence.
Now there will be plenty of room for meticulous soul-searching, for careful scrutiny of institutional and personal failures—without recrimination, one hopes, but also without excuses. We owe that much, at least, to the district official I met, to the Hazara governor, to Amrullah Saleh, and above all, to the students I saw attending a girls’ school and to the women working in a craft shop. I can’t bear writing about them today.
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
13. PLA holds joint live-fire assault drills near Taiwan island
From the CCP propaganda mouthpiece. Interesting timing. They want us to stop colluding and conducting "foreign interferences."
Excerpts:
Recently, the US and Taiwan authorities have been frequently colluding and making provocations, sending wrong signals that severely violates China's sovereignty and seriously damage peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits. They have become the biggest source of security risk in the region, Shi said.
The exercises are a necessary action taken based on the current security situation in the Taiwan Straits and the need to safeguard national sovereignty, and are a solemn response to the foreign interferences and the provocations by "Taiwan independence" forces, the spokesperson said.
The PLA Eastern Theater Command will continue to boost its war preparedness and related training, and is determined and capable of crushing any "Taiwan independence" secessionist activities and resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, Shi said.
PLA holds joint live-fire assault drills near Taiwan island - Global Times
PLA holds joint live-fire assault drills near Taiwan island
Published: Aug 17, 2021 12:34 PM
Warships attached to a destroyer flotilla with the navy under the PLA Eastern Theater Command steam in astern formation in waters of the East China Sea during the realistic training on April 23, 2021.Photo:China Military
The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on Tuesday launched joint live-fire assault drills in multiple locations near the island of Taiwan in response to recent collusion and provocations by the US and Taiwan secessionists.
The PLA Eastern Theater Command on Tuesday dispatched warships, anti-submarine warfare aircraft and fighter jets in surrounding maritime and aerial areas near the southwest and southeast of the island of Taiwan for military exercises including joint live-fire assaults, and also for testing the command troops' integrated joint operation capabilities, Senior Colonel Shi Yi, spokesperson of the command, announced on the same day.
Recently, the US and Taiwan authorities have been frequently colluding and making provocations, sending wrong signals that severely violates China's sovereignty and seriously damage peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits. They have become the biggest source of security risk in the region, Shi said.
The exercises are a necessary action taken based on the current security situation in the Taiwan Straits and the need to safeguard national sovereignty, and are a solemn response to the foreign interferences and the provocations by "Taiwan independence" forces, the spokesperson said.
The PLA Eastern Theater Command will continue to boost its war preparedness and related training, and is determined and capable of crushing any "Taiwan independence" secessionist activities and resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, Shi said.
Global Times
RELATED ARTICLES
Ground, air and naval teams of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) that are scheduled to participate in ...
The first group of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) fighter jet pilot cadets who trained with advanced trainer ...
China is reportedly building another batch of Type 054A frigates for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) ...
14. Taliban announces 'amnesty,' urges women to join government
I wish/hope this is true. But I fear the Taliban leopard cannot change his spots (much less his culture).
Taliban announces 'amnesty,' urges women to join government
AP · by AHMAD SEIR, TAMEEM AKHGAR, KATHY GANNON and JON GAMBRELL · August 17, 2021
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban declared an “amnesty” across Afghanistan and urged women to join their government Tuesday, seeking to convince a wary population that they have changed a day after deadly chaos gripped the main airport as desperate crowds tried to flee the country.
Following a blitz across Afghanistan that saw many cities fall to the insurgents without a fight, the Taliban have sought to portray themselves as more moderate than when they imposed a brutal rule in the late 1990s. But many Afghans remain skeptical.
Older generations remember the Taliban’s ultraconservative Islamic views, which included severe restrictions on women as well as stonings, amputations and public executions before they were ousted by the U.S-led invasion that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
ADVERTISEMENT
While there were no major reports of abuses or fighting in the capital of Kabul as the Taliban now patrol its streets, many residents have stayed home and remain fearful after the insurgents’ takeover saw prisons emptied and armories looted. Many women have expressed dread that the two-decade Western experiment to expand their rights and remake Afghanistan would not survive the resurgent Taliban.
The promises of amnesty from Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, were the first comments on how the Taliban might govern on a national level. His remarks remained vague, however, as the Taliban are still negotiating with political leaders of the country’s fallen government and no formal handover deal has been announced.
“The Islamic Emirate doesn’t want women to be victims,” Samangani said, using the militants’ name for Afghanistan. “They should be in the government structure according to Shariah law.”
That would be a marked departure from the last time the Taliban were in power, when women were largely confined to their homes.
Samangani didn’t describe exactly what he meant by Shariah, or Islamic, law, implying people already knew the rules the Taliban expected them to follow. He added that “all sides should join” a government.
It was also not clear what he meant by an amnesty, although other Taliban leaders have said they won’t seek revenge on those who worked with the Afghan government or foreign countries. But some in Kabul allege Taliban fighters have lists of people who cooperated with the government and are seeking them out.
Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, noted both the Taliban’s vows and the fear of those now under their rule.
“Such promises will need to be honored, and for the time being — again understandably, given past history — these declarations have been greeted with some skepticism,” he said in a statement. “There have been many hard-won advances in human rights over the past two decades. The rights of all Afghans must be defended.”
Notably, a female television anchor on the private broadcaster Tolo interviewed a Taliban official on camera Tuesday in a studio. Meanwhile, women in hijabs demonstrated briefly in Kabul, holding signs demanding the Taliban not “eliminate women” from public life.
On Tuesday, Kabul’s international airport, the only way out for many, reopened to military evacuation flights under the watch of American troops.
All flights were suspended on Monday when thousands of people rushed the airport, desperate to leave the country. In shocking scenes captured on video, some clung to a plane as it took off and then fell to their deaths. At least seven people died in the chaos, U.S. officials said.
Stefano Pontecorvo, NATO’s senior civilian representative to Afghanistan, posted video online showing the runway empty with U.S. troops on the tarmac. What appeared to be a military cargo transport plane could be seen in the distance from behind a chain-link fence in the footage.
“I see airplanes landing and taking off,” he wrote on Twitter.
Overnight, flight-tracking data showed a U.S. military plane taking off for Qatar, home to the U.S. military Central Command’s forward headquarters. A British military cargo plane also was flying to Kabul after taking off from Dubai. Other military aircraft remained in the air in the region.
Still, there were indications that the situation was still tenuous. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, now operating from the airport, urged Americans to register online for evacuations but not come to the airport before being contacted.
The German Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said a first German military transport plane has landed in Kabul, but it could only take seven people on board before it had to depart again due to continued chaos at the airport.
A special military flight with some 120 Indian officials separately landed in the western state of Gujarat after taking off from Kabul’s main airport on Tuesday, the Press Trust of India and state TV reported. Another flight made it off the ground Monday as well.
Sweden’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that the staff from the Swedish Embassy in Kabul had returned to Sweden. Japanese diplomats evacuated, and Spain sent military planes to pull people out as well.
Across Afghanistan, the International Committee of the Red Cross said thousands had been wounded in fighting as the Taliban swept across the country in recent days. However, in many places, security forces and politicians handed over their provinces and bases without a fight, likely fearing what would happen when the last American troops withdrew as planned at the end of the month.
A resolute U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday said he stood “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw American forces and acknowledged the “gut-wrenching” images unfolding in Kabul. Biden said he faced a choice between honoring a previously negotiated withdrawal agreement or sending thousands more troops back to begin a third decade of war.
“After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces,” Biden said in a televised address from the White House.
Talks continued Tuesday between the Taliban and several Afghan government officials, including former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, who once headed the country’s negotiating council. Discussions focused on how a Taliban-dominated government would operate given the changes in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, rather than just dividing up who controlled what ministries, officials with knowledge of the negotiations said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential details of the talks.
President Ashraf Ghani earlier fled the country amid the Taliban advance and his whereabouts remain unknown.
___
Akhgar reported from Istanbul, Gannon from Guelph, Canada, and Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez in Istanbul, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Jan Olson in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Aya Batrawy in Dubai contributed to this report.
AP · by AHMAD SEIR, TAMEEM AKHGAR, KATHY GANNON and JON GAMBRELL · August 17, 2021
15. EXPLAINER: The Taliban takeover, what's next for Afghanistan
EXPLAINER: The Taliban takeover, what's next for Afghanistan
AP · by JOSEPH KRAUSS · August 16, 2021
The Taliban have seized power in Afghanistan two weeks before the U.S. was set to complete its troop withdrawal after a costly two-decade war.
The insurgents stormed across the country, capturing all major cities in a matter of days, as Afghan security forces trained and equipped by the U.S. and its allies melted away.
Here’s a look at what happened and what comes next:
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN AFGHANISTAN?
The Taliban, a militant group that ran the country in the late 1990s, have again taken control.
The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 ousted the insurgents from power, but they never left. After they blitzed across the country in recent days, the Western-backed government that has run the country for 20 years collapsed. Afghans, fearing for the future, are racing to the airport, one of the last routes out of the country.
ADVERTISEMENT
___
WHY ARE PEOPLE FLEEING THE COUNTRY?
They’re worried that the country could descend into chaos or the Taliban could carry out revenge attacks against those who worked with the Americans or the government.
Many also fear the Taliban will reimpose the harsh interpretation of Islamic law that they relied on when they ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Back then, women were barred from attending school or working outside the home. They had to wear the all-encompassing burqa and be accompanied by a male relative whenever they went outside. The Taliban banned music, cut off the hands of thieves and stoned adulterers.
The Taliban have sought to present themselves as a more moderate force in recent years and say they won’t exact revenge, but many Afghans are skeptical of those promises.
___
WHY ARE THE TALIBAN TAKING OVER NOW?
Probably because U.S. troops are set to withdraw by the end of the month.
The U.S. has been trying to get out of Afghanistan, its longest war, for several years now.
American troops ousted the Taliban in a matter of months when they invaded to root out al-Qaida, which orchestrated the 9/11 attacks while being harbored by the Taliban. But it proved more difficult to hold territory and rebuild a nation battered by repeated wars.
As the U.S. focus shifted to Iraq, the Taliban began to regroup and in recent years took over much of the Afghan countryside.
Last year, then-President Donald Trump announced a plan to pull out and signed a deal with the Taliban that limited U.S. military action against them. President Joe Biden then announced that the last troops would leave by the end of August.
As the final deadline drew close, the Taliban began a lightning offensive, overrunning city after city.
___
WHY DID THE AFGHAN SECURITY FORCES COLLAPSE?
The short answer? Corruption.
ADVERTISEMENT
The U.S. and its NATO allies spent billions of dollars over two decades to train and equip Afghan security forces. But the Western-backed government was rife with corruption. Commanders exaggerated the number of soldiers to siphon off resources, and troops in the field often lacked ammunition, supplies or even food.
Their morale further eroded when it became clear the U.S. was on its way out. As the Taliban rapidly advanced in recent days entire units surrendered after brief battles, and Kabul and some nearby provinces fell without a fight.
___
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRESIDENT OF AFGHANISTAN?
He fled.
President Ashraf Ghani hunkered down and made few public statements as the Taliban swept across the country. On Sunday, as they reached the capital, he left Afghanistan, saying he had chosen to leave to avoid further bloodshed. It’s not clear where he went.
___
WHY ARE PEOPLE COMPARING AFGHANISTAN TO THE FALL OF SAIGON?
The Fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War. It became an enduring symbol of defeat after thousands of Americans and their Vietnamese allies were airlifted out of the city on helicopters. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has rejected any comparisons to Afghanistan, saying: “This is manifestly not Saigon.”
___
WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT IN AFGHANISTAN?
It’s not clear.
The Taliban say they want to form an “inclusive, Islamic government” with other factions. They are holding negotiations with senior politicians, including leaders in the former government.
They have pledged to enforce Islamic law but say they will provide a secure environment for the return of normal life after decades of war.
But many Afghans distrust the Taliban and fear that their rule will be violent and oppressive. One sign that worries people is that they want to rename the country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which is what they called it the last time they ruled.
___
WHAT DOES THE TALIBAN TAKEOVER MEAN FOR WOMEN?
Many fear it could mean a severe rollback of rights.
Afghan women have made major gains since the overthrow of the Taliban. Many are worried they will once again be confined to their homes. The Taliban have said they are no longer opposed to women attending school but have not set out a clear policy on women’s rights. Afghanistan remains an overwhelmingly conservative country, especially outside major cities, and the status of women often varied, even under Taliban rule.
___
WILL THE TALIBAN ONCE AGAIN HARBOR AL-QAIDA?
That’s anyone’s guess, but American military officials are worried.
In the peace deal signed with the United States last year, the Taliban pledged to fight terrorism and prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a base for attacks. But the U.S. has little leverage to enforce that.
Technological advances over the last 20 years allow the United States to target suspected militants in countries like Yemen and Somalia where it does not have a permanent troop presence. The Taliban paid a heavy price for their role in the Sept. 11 attacks and likely hope to avoid a repeat as they seek to consolidate their rule.
But earlier this year, the Pentagon’s top leaders said an extremist group like al-Qaida may be able to regenerate in Afghanistan, and officials are now warning that such groups could grow much faster than expected.
Afghanistan is also home to an Islamic State group affiliate that has carried out a wave of horrific attacks targeting its Shiite minority in recent years. The Taliban have condemned such attacks and the two groups have fought each other over territory, but it remains to be seen whether a Taliban government will be willing or able to suppress IS.
AP · by JOSEPH KRAUSS · August 16, 2021
16. Informal group of troops, vets, working to help Afghans seeking refuge in US
I am not surprised at the commitment of our veterans and troops. Not the tweet about what may be happening to the Afghan Special Forces. Surely the Taliban considers these soldiers (Special Forces and Commandos) to be the greatest threat if they live to fight another day and begin to mobilize and organize opposition. If we provided them with any training on unconveitonal warfare they could give the Taliban a very hard time.
Informal group of troops, vets, working to help Afghans seeking refuge in US
Chaos at Kabul airport
Crowds swarmed the runway at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul as people desperately tried to get flights out of the country in the hours after the Taliban took over the Afghanistan capital. US forces secured the military side of the airport amid tense scenes of Afghans doing anything they could to get on a plane, including rushing aircraft and clinging to landing gear.
For nearly a year, “Nadia,” who worked as an interpreter for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has been desperately trying to leave, fearful of revenge by the Taliban.
Sunday night, as the insurgent group took control of that war-torn nation, her pleas for help reached a fever pitch.
“Me and my family are in trouble,” she wrote in a WhatsApp message. “The Taliban is very bad people.”
Nadia and others who worked with U.S. forces during the nearly 20 year now-lost war in Afghanistan are seeking a way for they and their families to come to America, the place for which they risked it all. They’ve shared their stories with Military Times, hoping against long odds to be evacuated. Nadia requested anonymity out of fear of retribution by the Taliban.
“Today it was very chaotic and crowded I couldn’t reach [the airport] and besides there is a Taliban checkpoint that checks the people,” Safar Ali Paiam, an interpreter who worked with the Army, told Military Times in an email Monday morning from Kabul. " I decided to go to the airport near the evening.”
Paiam said he’s heard reports that the Taliban started checking homes of people who were government employees or worked with NATO allies. In a tweet, Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin reported that “the Taliban have already started going house to house in Kabul to look for any Afghan Special Forces who fought alongside the US military.”
Just received a first hand account that the Taliban have already started going house to house in Kabul to look for any Afghan Special Forces who fought alongside the US military. The Taliban have all the records of those who served from the KKA (AFG Special Forces).
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) August 16, 2021
An Afghan translator talks about being taken captive by the Taliban.
Safar Ali Paiam
August 6
As the Taliban took over Sunday, raising their flag over the Afghan presidential palace, the Pentagon and State Department announced a ramp up of efforts to evacuate thousands of U.S. personnel, Afghan embassy employees, families and those seeking SIVs.
But as Afghans rush toward the airport, chaos has ensued. media around the world have posted images of desperate Afghans clogging runways and clinging to at least one massive U.S. military cargo jet as it was taxiing for takeoff on the lone runway in the country available for what is turning into a massive effort as the U.S. and allies try to fly thousands of people out in the ensuing days.
Nadia felt a glimmer of hope Sunday night. A group of active-duty service members, who have their own list of former interpreters, Afghan military personnel and others they are trying to get out of the country, provided details about a checkpoint at HKIA where people enter. Hours after getting the information, Nadia messaged Military Times that she had arrived at the airport.
Helping hands
Joe Saboe, a former U.S. Army infantry officer who served in Iraq, is the spokesman for about a dozen individuals who have served in the U.S. military and various government agencies. The group is attempting to find a way out for more than 50 individuals.
“Our group is working on about 51 individuals right now in Afghanistan who are either passport holders, U.S. citizens, U.S. green card holders, Special Immigrant Visa applicants, or people that have partially completed SIV applications,” Saboe told Military Times. “We’ve been in direct communication with everyone on the ground in Kabul for about 48 hours or more now.”
The situation is rapidly deteriorating, Saboe said. He communicates with people on the ground in Kabul through WhatsApp and other secure messaging apps. He told Military Times that U.S. diplomatic staff is no longer at Kabul international airport. As a result, not only are SIVs not being processed, but U.S. citizens aren’t either.
“No one’s processing anyone, so U.S. passport holders are being turned away by American troops on the ground, green card holders are being turned away by American troops on the ground,” Saboe said.
A screenshot from an email turned over to Military Times. The email details the frustration encountered by Joe Saboe's group as they seek to help Afghan and American citizens leave Afghanistan.
Matt Zeller, who served in Afghanistan as a U.S. Army intelligence officer, now works with the Association of Wartime Allies, a group seeking to evacuate Afghans that supported U.S. involvement in the country. Zeller, who is also in regular communication with both Americans and Afghans attempting to flee the country, told Military Times that chaos at the airport prevents Americans and Afghans alike from leaving.
“These are American citizens who are showing their passports to the United States Marines, and they’re not being admitted entry,” Zeller told Military Times.
State Department officials declined to answer questions about whether staff remain in Kabul, instead referring all questions to a briefing to follow remarks by President Joe Biden scheduled for this afternoon. Additionally, Saboe and Zeller say they are receiving reports from those they’re attempting to shepherd to safety stating that the Taliban controls the airport perimeter and has been firing on those attempting to find safe passage out of the country.
“The perimeter of the airport is completely controlled by Taliban on all entrances to the airport. Both the civilian side and the military side,” Saboe said. “The Taliban have been firing on all of the family groups that we’re working with. Accurate fire, that’s the pinned them down, in some cases for hours at a time.”
For months The Association of Wartime Allies has been attempting to work with elements of the U.S. government to fly Afghans and their families. Zeller says warnings that the Afghan government could collapse, as it is doing now, were ignored by officials in Washington.
“[Department of] State, DoD, the White House, you name it - we reached out to the whole of government,” Zeller said. “The only people who got back to us were members of Congress who at first said, ‘Well, this is terrifying because this is not what we’re hearing from the Biden people.’ And Congress then started looking into it, and what they learned was, oh my goodness, the advocates are right. That’s exactly what’s transpiring here. There doesn’t seem to be a plan to save these people.”
Saboe explained the unofficial process by which he and other members of his group attempt to help people flee the country. As information is sent from those in Kabul they’re attempting to lead to safety, Saboe’s group identified the best ways to get to the airport and on a flight. This involves mapping out Taliban checkpoints around the airport and keeping tabs on which routes are the most effective. He says the group has been doing this due to the State Department’s seeming inability to do so.
A screenshot of a conversation from an Afghan interpreter, who is now an American citizen, who was turned away from Hamid Karzai International Airport.
“There’s not any coordination involving [DoS] at this point from what we can see on the ground, and it’s, preventing those who most need [to leave the country] from doing so,” Saboe said. The result of this lack of coordination is panic and a rush of people attempting to flee the country at any cost. As a result, Saboe’s group advises those trying to flee to take their chances sheltering in place.
Fear among those who helped
Speaking to Military Times via his son, who translated the confersation, Afghan Col. Mohammad Noor Qadri expressed fear for his safety. He hopes he can evacuate.
“I locked myself in my house with my family last night we didn’t sleep for all night worrying what will happen,” said Noor, a deputy inspector general for the Afghan military. “There was some gun firing and U.S. helicopter[s] were flying all night. I’m very scared and worried about my life and my children life’s.
“Anything happens no one is responsible and accountable ... I hope everything gets better soon but I’m not sure I know it is difficult . Now I just want to save our life. I don’t know what to say and what to do and where to go.”
For Nadia, the trip to HKIA was not easy. She said she and her family were stopped at a Taliban checkpoint in Kabul and had their car searched, she said.
“I hid my phone,” she said.
Outside the airport, the Taliban were firing off weapons, Nadia said.
She eventually made it inside the airport, but there were no flights available, so she turned around and went home.
“We are scared,” she said, making yet another desperate plea for answers on how to escape a dire fate.
“Don’t know what will happen to us,” she said. “Please sir, give me accurate information.”
17. "They took off my flag": Afghan journalist makes emotional plea to Pentagon
The human toll of the war. This was painful to watch. (video at the link HERE) I wonder what will happen to this Afghan journalist. Surely she cannot return to Afghanistan. Will she ask for and receive asylum? What is happening to all the Afghan diplomats and staff and other Afghan officials working in the US? Will they be offered and granted asylum?
"They took off my flag": Afghan journalist makes emotional plea to Pentagon
Amid roiling fear and pleas for help from Afghanistan, Afghan journalist Nazira Karimi demanded answers from the White House at a press briefing Monday.
What she's saying: "I'm very upset today, because Afghan women didn't expect that overnight all the Taliban came. They took off my flag," she said, motioning to a face mask with the Afghanistan flag's design. "And they put their flag. ... Afghan people, they don't know what to do."
- "Where is my president?" she asked Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby. "People expected that he would stand by with the people. And immediately, he ran away. ... He should answer to Afghan people."
- "President Biden said that [Afghanistan] President [Ashraf] Ghani knows he has to fight for us people. ... But we don't have any president, we don't have anything," she said, visibly in distress.
- Women have made strides in Afghanistan since the Taliban was first expelled, she added. "I had a lot of achievement," she said, her voice breaking. "I left from the Taliban like 20 years ago. Now we go back to the first step again."
Kirby said he couldn't speak to Ghani's location but added that "nobody here at the Pentagon is happy about the images that we've seen coming out in the last few days."
- "So, a heartfelt respect to what you're going through," he said. "We, too, have invested greatly in Afghanistan and in the progress that women and girls have made."
- He reiterated that the administration's priority is to assist U.S.-affiliated Afghans and "honor that obligation to all those who helped make all that progress possible."
The big picture: In an address earlier in the day, President Biden said he stands by his decision to pull out U.S. troops and cast blame on the Afghan government for failing to defend the country.
-
The Taliban's siege leaves Afghan women and girls in a vulnerable position, as they stand to lose hard-won rights to education, employment and everyday freedoms.
- The Biden administration has faced sharp criticism over its response to the rapid collapse and the U.S.'s chaotic evacuation effort.
18. Opinion | Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home
But Afghanistan is not Korea and I wish people would stop making the comparison.
Excerpts;
But didn’t we have to leave Afghanistan sometime? So goes a counterargument. Yes, though we’ve been in Korea for 71 years, at far higher cost, and the world is better off for it.
But wasn’t the Afghan government corrupt and inept? Yes, but at least that government wasn’t massacring its own citizens or raising the banner of jihad.
But aren’t American casualties unacceptable? They are surely tragic. But so is squandering the sacrifice of so many Americans who fought the Taliban bravely and nobly — and, as it turns out, for nothing.
But is there any reason we should care more about the fate of Afghans than we do of desperate people elsewhere? Yes, because our inability to help everyone, everywhere doesn’t relieve us of the obligation to help someone, somewhere — and because America’s power and reputation in the world are also functions of being a beacon of confidence and hope.
Now these arguments belong to the past. The war in Afghanistan isn’t just over. It’s lost. A few Americans may cheer this humiliation, and many more will shrug at it. But the consequences of defeat are rarely benign for nations, no matter how powerful they otherwise appear to be. America’s enemies, great and small, will draw conclusions from our needless surrender, just as they will about the frighteningly oblivious president who brought it about.
Opinion | Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home
Bret Stephens
Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home
Aug. 15, 2021
By
Opinion Columnist
What on earth was Joe Biden thinking — if, that is, he was thinking?
On July 8, the president defended his decision to withdraw all remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan. After assuring Americans that “the drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way” and that “U.S. support for the people of Afghanistan will endure,” he took some questions. Here are excerpts from the White House transcript.
Q: Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
The president: No, it is not.
Q: Why?
The president: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable. …
Q: Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling ——
The president: None whatsoever. Zero. … The Taliban is not the South — the North Vietnamese Army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy. …
Q: Mr. President, how serious was the corruption among the Afghanistan government to this mission failing there?
The president: Well, first of all, the mission hasn’t failed, yet. There is in Afghanistan — in all parties, there’s been corruption. The question is, can there be an agreement on unity of purpose? … That — the jury is still out. But the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
*
Biden’s heedlessness, on the cusp of a sweeping Taliban blitzkrieg that on Sunday saw them enter Kabul, will define his administration’s first great fiasco. It won’t matter that he is carrying through on the shambolic withdrawal agreement negotiated last year by the Trump administration, with the eager support of Trump’s isolationist base, and through the diplomatic efforts of Trump’s lickspittle secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.
This is happening on Biden’s watch, at Biden’s insistence, against the advice of his senior military advisers and with Biden’s firm assurance to the American people that what has just come to pass wouldn’t come to pass. Past presidents might have had a senior adviser resign in the wake of such a debacle, as Les Aspin, then the secretary of defense, did after the 1993 Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia.
This time, Biden owns the moment. He also owns the consequences. We should begin to anticipate them now.
Women will become chattel. There are roughly 18 million women and girls in Afghanistan. They will now be subject to laws from the seventh century. They will not be able to walk about with uncovered faces or be seen in public without a male relative. They will not be able to hold the kinds of jobs they’ve fought so hard to get over the last 20 years: as journalists, teachers, parliamentarians, entrepreneurs. Their daughters will not be allowed to go to school or play sports or consent to the choice of a husband.
“The relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda will get stronger,” Saad Mohseni, the head of the Afghan news and media company Moby, told me on Saturday. “Why should the Taliban fear the Americans anymore? What’s the worst that could happen? Another invasion?
“These guys are going to be the most belligerent, arrogant Islamist movement on the planet,” Mohseni added. “They are going to be the Mecca for any young radical of Islamic heritage or convert. It’s going to inspire people. It’s a godsend for any radical, violent group.”
What happens in Afghanistan won’t stay there. The country most immediately at risk from an ascendant Taliban is neighboring Pakistan. After years of Islamabad giving sanctuary and support to the Afghan Taliban (as long as they attacked coalition forces), Pakistan must now fear that the next regime in Kabul will give sanctuary and support to the Pakistani Taliban. There may be poetic justice in this, but the prospect of fundamentalist forces destabilizing a regime with an estimated 160 nuclear warheads is an unparalleled global nightmare.
Short of this, the calamity in Afghanistan is a recipe for another wave of migrants, one that will wash over Europe’s shores and provoke a populist backlash. “We’re going to see 20 Viktor Orbans emerge,” warned Mohseni, referring to the Hungarian strongman and Tucker Carlson BFF.
America’s geopolitical position will be gravely damaged. What kind of ally is the United States? In the last several years, the United States has maintained a relatively small force in Afghanistan, largely devoted to providing surveillance, logistics and air cover for Afghan forces while taking minimal casualties. Any American president could have maintained this position almost indefinitely — with no prospect of defeating the Taliban but none of being routed by them, either.
In other words, we had achieved a good-enough solution for a nation we could afford to neither save nor lose. We squandered it anyway. Now, in the aftermath of Saigon redux, every enemy will draw the lesson that the United States is a feckless power, with no lasting appetite for defending the Pax Americana that is still the basis for world order. And every ally — Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Israel, Japan — will draw the lesson that it is on its own in the face of its enemies. The Biden Doctrine means the burial of the Truman Doctrine.
*
But didn’t we have to leave Afghanistan sometime? So goes a counterargument. Yes, though we’ve been in Korea for 71 years, at far higher cost, and the world is better off for it.
But wasn’t the Afghan government corrupt and inept? Yes, but at least that government wasn’t massacring its own citizens or raising the banner of jihad.
But aren’t American casualties unacceptable? They are surely tragic. But so is squandering the sacrifice of so many Americans who fought the Taliban bravely and nobly — and, as it turns out, for nothing.
But is there any reason we should care more about the fate of Afghans than we do of desperate people elsewhere? Yes, because our inability to help everyone, everywhere doesn’t relieve us of the obligation to help someone, somewhere — and because America’s power and reputation in the world are also functions of being a beacon of confidence and hope.
Now these arguments belong to the past. The war in Afghanistan isn’t just over. It’s lost. A few Americans may cheer this humiliation, and many more will shrug at it. But the consequences of defeat are rarely benign for nations, no matter how powerful they otherwise appear to be. America’s enemies, great and small, will draw conclusions from our needless surrender, just as they will about the frighteningly oblivious president who brought it about.
19. Why is Biden only present in China, Russia? - analysis
Are they really being downplayed? There is a lot going on in the world! Every one of our pet national security issues cannot always be at the top of the priority list.
But this article provides some interesting analysis and perspectives.
Excerpts:
So there will be three real tests that will lead to history's judgment of this first act of the Biden era.
Will the Taliban and other jihadi groups now leave the US be and focus on their own local conflicts or will they use the lack of American pressure abroad to bring conflict back to the US mainland?
Will Iran, North Korea, and other nuclear or regional threats create new crises because they are being ignored or dealt with from a weaker position?
Will Biden be more effective than Trump in rolling back Chinese and Russian global moves seeking global and technological influence?
Why is Biden only present in China, Russia? - analysis
Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and global terror are all being downplayed by the Biden administration.
There is plenty of time for the second and third acts for the Biden administration, but the first act has now been clearly framed.
The US has been razor-focused on confronting both China and Russia across the board, including much closer coordination with European allies.
US President Joe Biden is convinced that the country could lose out in both geopolitical and technological influence races if anything distracts it from barreling forward in cyber, 5G, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and forming a united wall of free democratic countries to resist Chinese and Russian influences.
But it has made a clear choice to refocus nearly all energies in these areas, while entirely dropping or mostly ignoring Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the global war on terror.
Washington's calculation has been one of the most brutal versions of realpolitik.
Biden does not want to use force in almost any way against Iran to slow its march toward a nuclear weapon - including covert or cyber - so he wants to return to the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal at nearly all costs.
America has done close to nothing, whether exerting pressure or engaging, to reduce the nuclear dangers posed by North Korea.
This is despite clear signs that Pyongyang is on course toward new nuclear tests, a larger nuclear arsenal incrementally rising to rival some other medium nuclear powers, and eventually intercontinental ballistic missiles which could hit the US.
There are no good or easy choices so why invest time and energy?
Ending combat operations in Iraq? Most of the soldiers who were there before Biden's big announcement remained thereafter, simply their mission changed to passive advisers.
The important thing for Biden was to inform Americans, Iraq and others that the US was no longer responsible for what went on there and would not be investing any more "blood", only limited amounts of "treasure."
Afghanistan, where the pro-Western government fell on Sunday, is only the latest and most dramatic version of Biden's doctrine not to invest in anything that he views as secondary to confronting China and Russia.
In Biden's vision, the only difference between Afghanistan and the other countries like Iraq, where there is still some very limited US investment of power, was that it had zero geopolitical value for future US interests as long as he convinced the Taliban to stay away from attacking the US in the future.Banking on the Taliban leaving the US alone and the fall of ISIS a few years ago, Biden has also starkly reduced US investment in the global war on terror - once again to devote more resources to confronting China and Russia.
It is unclear whether these moves will be a political win for Biden considering that a majority of both Democrats and Republicans supported withdrawing from Afghanistan and foreign conflicts in general, but also do not like to be seen as losing.
In foreign policy and defense circles, Biden has received heavy criticism from interventionist Republicans and Democrats either concerned about America's reputation globally or protecting human rights using force.
Former Trump administration and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster said over the weekend, “Another lesson to learn here from 9/11 and I would say from COVID, is that challenges to our security that develop abroad can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. That, I think, is the strongest and most important argument for remaining engaged with partners who are sharing the burden against this jihadist terrorist threat.”
“We set an unrealistic objective, I think in the minds of Americans… The narrative was: ‘We failed in Afghanistan because Afghanistan wasn’t Denmark.’ Afghanistan doesn’t need to be Denmark, it just needs to be Afghanistan. Was it still a violent place? Heck yes. Was it still dependent on international support? Heck yes…Was it worth it, with that relatively small effort, to prevent what’s happening now? I’d say the answer to that has to be hell, yes it was,” said McMaster.
So there will be three real tests that will lead to history's judgment of this first act of the Biden era.
Will the Taliban and other jihadi groups now leave the US be and focus on their own local conflicts or will they use the lack of American pressure abroad to bring conflict back to the US mainland?
Will Iran, North Korea, and other nuclear or regional threats create new crises because they are being ignored or dealt with from a weaker position?
Will Biden be more effective than Trump in rolling back Chinese and Russian global moves seeking global and technological influence?
It is unclear given that China and Russia focus single-mindedly on a complex mix of carrots: giving individual countries, including Democratic ones like Germany, major economic deals and boosts. and sticks: threatening the security or economic stability of countries becoming dependent on them.
If refocusing resources makes the difference in those critical competitive races, he may yet be given a pass - at least by Americans - for going lighter on Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and global terrorism.
In contrast, if any of these ignored "secondary" problems blow up, it will be a major challenge to his legacy.
Meanwhile, Israel is just one of many countries which may be left fending for itself with its local "secondary" challenge - Iran - and the Afghanistan collapse cannot have made that more clear.
20. US Engagement In South China Sea: Beyond FONOPS And Into ‘Grey Zone’
Excerpt:
For decades now, the PAFMM has been crucial to China’s construction of sovereignty in the SCS. Without a US presence in the region, the SCS effectively becomes a Chinese lake, allowing Beijing to project power in the Indo-Pacific. For Washington to be able to maintain a balance of power in the region, it must be willing to challenge the validity and centrality of this very nebulous ‘reserve force’ in both letter and spirit.
US Engagement In South China Sea: Beyond FONOPS And Into ‘Grey Zone’ – Analysis
By Janhavi Pande*
The April 2021 standoff between the Philippines and China’s maritime militia in and around the Whitsun Reef in the South China Sea (SCS) is just one example of China clashing with a claimant state in the region. With the growth of Beijing’s national power, and its deteriorating ties with the US and its regional allies, the SCS dispute has become increasingly intractable.
Real-time US engagement in the SCS has been largely limited to its Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS). There is minimal engagement with the asymmetric tools or ‘grey zone tactics’ China deploys for the assertion of its sovereignty over the sea. Indeed, the maritime militia is among its most important assets. For the US to be able to successfully deter China, it is the challenge of this militia that it will have to ultimately confront.
Understanding China’s Naval Militia
Known as the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM), China’s naval militia is composed of civilian fishermen trained and operated under the direct control of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The only other country with a fishing militia is Vietnam, which has developed its force in response to China’s use of what is effectively an army of insurgent maritime vessels. The use of such militia is also peculiar to the region and without precedent. Consequently, defining its precise character as either a civilian or military object is a challenge.
The PAFMM helps enforce China’s maritime claims and is now also a tool for low-level hostilities and access denial against US vessels in the region. It is deployed in a way that makes resorting to retaliatory force difficult. Additionally, Chinese fishing boats have frequently been accused of indulging in indiscriminate deep sea fishing, well beyond the SCS. This makes the PAFMM even more threatening given its propensity to exploit global commons without hindrance. From the point of view of US strategy, the PAFMM is a formidable challenge that is yet to be addressed beyond the official discourse around “grey zone” warfare.
Nature of US Engagement
The US’ primary engagement in the SCS has been via the FONOPs which began under the Reagan administration. They are now being used to challenge China’s excessive claims to the SCS. The problem with FONOPs is that they don’t address the core problem of China’s salami slicing strategy. They are aimed instead at all countries with excessive claims and restrictions on access to Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ).
China’s ability to use control-gaining tactics that fall just below the threshold of an outright war is at the heart of the regional quagmire. This ability is only somewhat matched by the Vietnamese. Given Beijing’s economic muscle, no other claimant is in a position to challenge this slow and steady ‘sovereignty grab.’ To effectively address China in the SCS will involve challenging the assets it employs to establish de facto presence in, and dominance of, disputed waters.
Case for More Proactive US Engagement
The US has indicated that it may treat the PAFMM as part of the Chinese armed forces. The question is whether the current Biden administration is actually willing to take that step. The pandemic has considerably weakened the US economy and called into question even its domestic governance systems.
So far, the new administration has made the right noises on the Indo-Pacific. It has attempted to reestablish US goodwill in the region through a relatively open framework for the Quad and active engagement with its allies. However, the time to act in the SCS is running out as President Xi Jinping has long gone back on his promise of not militarising the sea. The longer it takes to sanction the PAFMM, the more confidence it gives Beijing to control large portions of the maritime space without any deterrence.
The US cannot intervene militarily after China has established effective control. This could be construed as interventionism and disproportionate ‘use of force’, risking miscalculations. It would also, in all probability, not be welcomed by members of the ASEAN who have thrived around maintaining a delicate peace with China, and don’t want to be dragged into a high-intensity great-power rivalry.
Some analysts have already argued that the US should begin using its Coast Guard forces to counter the asymmetry. Even if this isn’t an immediate possibility, the US needs to categorically identify the PAFMM’s legal status instead of using euphemistic terminology. It must characterise PAFMM deployment as both threat and use of force under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. One, this would give the US navy itself a clearer picture of how it needs to act in the event of an attack by the militia and Chinese Coast Guard ships. Second, it sends a more decisive but less interventionist signal about US intent in the region.
Another option would be to legally challenge China’s distant water fishing, which is the largest of its kind, through international resolutions, and allow entry of Chinese vessels into its maritime zones on the basis of strict reciprocity.
Conclusion
For decades now, the PAFMM has been crucial to China’s construction of sovereignty in the SCS. Without a US presence in the region, the SCS effectively becomes a Chinese lake, allowing Beijing to project power in the Indo-Pacific. For Washington to be able to maintain a balance of power in the region, it must be willing to challenge the validity and centrality of this very nebulous ‘reserve force’ in both letter and spirit.
*Jahnavi Pande is a Research Intern with IPCS’ South East Asia Research Programme (SEARP).
21. Biden Recognized Reality: The president made a difficult but necessary choice.
Excerpt:
Biden faced a set of bad options. He ultimately made the difficult but necessary choice to preserve American lives. That decision will have devastating consequences for Afghanistan, and we will learn more in the coming days regarding how the administration might have executed its plans better. But as I saw for myself in 2017, and as many others had also observed, the government we supported never truly controlled the country it governed. Biden did not decide to withdraw so much as he chose to acknowledge a long-festering reality, one accelerated by the previous administration’s withdrawal announcement.
Biden Recognized Reality
The president made a difficult but necessary choice.
BY DANIEL SILVERBERG
FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR TO THE HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER
In 2017, I arrived at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Airport as part of a congressional staff delegation. Even though the U.S. embassy stood a mere four miles away, safety concerns necessitated our helicoptering from a recently constructed multimillion-dollar transit facility instead of traveling by road. As we flew over Kabul, I realized that the Afghan security forces, backed by thousands of U.S. personnel, could not even secure the heart of Afghanistan’s capital.
Kabul was not lost yesterday; the United States and our Afghan partners never truly had control of the country, nor of its capital. Once the Taliban had secured an agreement that the United States would be pulling out and that forces would be reduced to minimal numbers before Joe Biden’s presidency began, they merely had to wait.
The dozens of congressional briefings I attended over 14 years of working on Capitol Hill underscored this dynamic. The intelligence community would commence each briefing with a stark assessment regarding the fragility of conditions in Afghanistan. Senior defense leaders would then provide a far more optimistic view, one that often gave a sense of progress, despite the Herculean challenge with which they had been tasked.
Various critics of President Biden are engaging in fantasies amid Kabul’s collapse: if only we’d used more force, demonstrated more will, stayed a few months longer, then the Taliban would have adopted a different strategy. John Allen, a retired Marine general and former commander of forces in Afghanistan, argued last week that Biden “should issue a public redline” and that “just this announcement will help the Afghan government and give the Taliban pause.” Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, was sharply critical of the withdrawal of the last 3,500 troops. Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, argued that “keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely” would be “worth it.”
These criticisms ignore the developments of the past decade and downplay the impact of last May’s announcement. Even the Biden administration’s harshest detractors mostly concede that the United States would eventually have had to withdraw from Afghanistan. According to the U.S. military, the Taliban was stronger this year than it had been since 2001, while the Afghan defense forces were suffering from high rates of attrition. At some point, the attack on the Afghan government would have come, and U.S. troops would have been caught in the middle—leaving the U.S. to decide between surging thousands of troops or withdrawal.
Some critics also argue that the United States should have preserved a residual force in Afghanistan, much as we have in South Korea. There are any number of ungoverned spaces today, however, which pose as great a threat, if not greater, to U.S. security as Afghanistan, and few are calling for U.S. deployments to those areas. There is a cost—financial and military—to tying forces down in a project that was ultimately doomed to fail.
Finally, critics are lobbing the usual refrain that the withdrawal has damaged U.S. credibility. “Afghanistan’s Unraveling May Strike Another Blow to U.S. Credibility,” read a headline in The New York Times; “Afghanistan’s Collapse Leaves Allies Questioning U.S. Resolve on Other Fronts,” echoed The Washington Post. The United States has spent billions of taxpayer dollars, fought for more than 20 years, and suffered thousands of casualties in this war. If that sort of commitment lacks credibility, our allies will never believe we are doing enough. Critics likewise argued that withdrawal from Vietnam would hurt our credibility. In reality, Japan and other allies questioned our ability to protect them not because we withdrew from Vietnam, but because the United States was militarily overstretched. Withdrawal did not undermine our credibility; by consolidating our efforts, it might enhance it.
The United States had multiple opportunities over the past 20 years to pursue an end to its involvement in Afghanistan. Shortly after the initial invasion, the U.S. rejected a reported offer of surrender. In 2011, peace negotiations were suffocated in their infancy by political opponents and a wary Pentagon. President Biden has demonstrated courage in finding a path forward where others merely fought to preserve the status quo.
Now policy makers should focus on mitigating the fallout of this disaster. First, Congress—led by advocates such as Representatives Jason Crow and Seth Moulton—should redouble its efforts to allow for the immigration of vulnerable Afghans.
Second, Congress and the administration should revitalize engagement with Pakistan and our regional partners in order to contain the fallout from Afghanistan. Pakistani leaders rebuffed both the Bush and Obama administrations’ efforts to cooperate on counterterrorism and instead played a dangerous double game, providing succor to terror groups like the Haqqani Network while accepting billions as part of our counterterror effort. U.S. officials should approach Pakistan in a bluntly transactional manner by asking its leaders to assess the cost of preventing terror groups from using its borderlands as a refuge.
Finally, the United States should repurpose the international-coalition framework used during combat operations in Afghanistan, turning it into the basis of a sustained diplomatic mission. The coalition should keep eyes on the ground in Afghanistan, engaging with Taliban officials where appropriate. This will be challenging without military forces in the country, but it is not impossible, and even a minimal level of observation would be better than the neglect we chose after 1995. The coalition should also collaborate on measures to encourage the Taliban to prevent its territory from being used as a launching point for terrorist attacks. Last, the coalition should maintain UN-based sanctions on the Taliban to pressure the new government to preserve the rights of women and minorities, including the Shiite Hazara population.
Biden faced a set of bad options. He ultimately made the difficult but necessary choice to preserve American lives. That decision will have devastating consequences for Afghanistan, and we will learn more in the coming days regarding how the administration might have executed its plans better. But as I saw for myself in 2017, and as many others had also observed, the government we supported never truly controlled the country it governed. Biden did not decide to withdraw so much as he chose to acknowledge a long-festering reality, one accelerated by the previous administration’s withdrawal announcement.
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
22. Biden’s Chamberlain Moment
Perhaps. But there could also be a rapid correction if a revisionist or rogue power acts out because they think they can exploit this or this somehow provides them with greater freedom of action. Of course that could be very costly for all concerned.
Excerpts:
The U.S. security establishment dithered for 20 years, unwilling to confront Islamabad effectively or to recognize that failure and change its Afghan policy to accommodate its consequences. As it is, Pakistan—a nuclear power with a record of promoting proliferation and deep ties both to China and to the most hate-filled and murderous jihadist groups—has faced down America and achieved its long-term goal of reinstalling a friendly regime to its north. Whether Pakistan will be happy with its radical neighbor in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Pakistani hard-liners are celebrating the greatest single win in their history.
Nothing is more vain than the hope that somehow this debacle will help the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific. For more than 70 years India, whose massive population and economy make it a linchpin of any American strategy in Asia, has seen the world through the lens of its competition with Pakistan. Now, as Islamabad cements its ties with Beijing, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan hands Pakistan a strategic victory and strengthens the most radical anti-Indian and anti-Western forces in its government. Few in New Delhi will perceive this catastrophe as a sign of Washington’s competence or reliability. If a third-tier country like Pakistan can tie the U.S. in knots, Indians will ask: What chance does Washington have against China?
Perhaps the biggest winner in this dismal week was former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who wrote in his 2014 memoir that then Vice President Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Those lines may not have the Churchillian flair, but they are unlikely to be forgotten now. We must all hope that Mr. Biden can claw his way out of this hole into which he so heedlessly and unnecessarily leapt.
Biden’s Chamberlain Moment
The fall of Kabul has been heard around the world, to the dismay of our allies and delight of our enemies.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
U.S. soldiers stand guard as Afghans trying to flee the new Taliban rule wait at the airport in Kabul, Aug. 16.
Photo: wakil kohsar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
‘You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Winston Churchill’s words to Neville Chamberlain following the Munich agreement echo grimly across Washington this week as the Biden administration reckons with the consequences of the worst-handled foreign-policy crisis since the Bay of Pigs and the most devastating blow to American prestige since the fall of Saigon.
Joe Biden believed two things about Afghanistan. First, that he could stage a dignified and orderly withdrawal from America’s longest war. Second, that a Taliban win in Afghanistan would not seriously affect U.S. power and prestige world-wide. He was utterly and unspinnably wrong about the first. One fears he was equally wrong about the second.
The bipartisan scuttle caucus of which President Biden is a founding member—and former President Trump an eager recruit—argued that withdrawal would enhance rather than undermine American credibility. Ending a war in a remote country of little intrinsic interest to the U.S. does not, one can argue, make America look weak. If anything, the two-decade U.S. intervention testifies to an American doggedness that should reassure our allies about our will. At the same time, cutting our losses after 20 years of failing to build a solid government and military in Afghanistan demonstrates a realism and wisdom that should reassure allies about Washington’s judgment.
Defenders of the withdrawal argue this is one way that America can reduce its footprint in peripheral theaters to focus on the principal threat in coastal East Asia. Why should the U.S. government pay the heavy price—in military resources and in the political costs at home of defending an endless engagement in a remote part of the world—required to contain the Taliban? Isn’t the jihadist group a more direct threat to both Russia and China than to America? Why are U.S. soldiers fighting and dying so that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have one less headache to worry about?
A well-executed withdrawal that visibly served a coherent national strategy might have accomplished what Messrs. Trump and Biden hoped. But that is not what we have, and the Biden administration is facing a major test of credibility. The president’s tragically misguided press-conference remarks of July 8, in which he doubled down on naively optimistic predictions that would have embarrassed Baghdad Bob, cast a shadow over the president’s judgment that will not be easily or quickly dispelled.
The Taliban’s sweeping military victory should not have surprised Mr. Biden. The core of the argument for withdrawal, an argument he has embraced for more than a decade, is that the Afghan government and military are so irredeemably weak and corrupt that it is pointless for America to support them. To expect that such a government and such an army would cohere long enough to provide its vanishing betrayers a dignified retreat is magical thinking of the silliest kind.
The fall of Kabul has been heard around the world. In Europe, where allies had no say in either the substance or the timing of the president’s decision this looks like yet another instance of the incoherent U.S. unilateralism that marked President Obama’s reversal of his Syrian red line and much of Mr. Trump’s policy. It is not just that America’s scuttle threatens to produce a massive refugee crisis in Europe. After 9/11 our allies invoked Article 5 of the NATO mutual defense treaty to come to the aid of the U.S. They deserved some real input into the decision and the planning of any end to the war and are right to resent the arrogant incompetence that presented them with a disastrous fait accompli. In the future, Mr. Biden must expect even less European deference and respect than he has so far received.
China, Russia and Iran surely interpret this shambolic performance as a sign of exploitable weakness and poor judgment. From the peaks of Pakistan to the sands of the Sahel, fanatical jihadists discouraged by the failure of ISIS sense a fresh and favorable turn of events with the arrival of their greatest victory since 9/11. Recruitment will prosper and resources will flow—fed by the sophisticated weapons and tech we left in the field. The president may be finished with Afghanistan, but Afghanistan may not be finished with him.
A multitude of cooks collaborated to spoil this broth. The George W. Bush administration invaded Afghanistan with no clear idea of what to do next. Through the Bush and Obama years, American war aims inexorably and witlessly widened as Congress and private advocacy groups got into the act. Afghanistan was going to be a modern democratic country. Its women would have equal rights. Religious freedom would be guaranteed by a U.S.-inspired constitution. Pride flags floated in the Afghan skies. Kabul University opened a master’s degree program in gender studies.
As America’s war aims reached ever loftier and less feasible heights, the U.S. military studiously ignored the gaping flaw in its strategy: unrelenting support for the Taliban from our “ally” in Islamabad. As long as the Pakistanis offered the jihadist group sanctuary and support, it could not be destroyed. Worse, after any American departure, the Taliban’s Pakistani backing would give it an insurmountable advantage over the democratic Afghan government.
The U.S. security establishment dithered for 20 years, unwilling to confront Islamabad effectively or to recognize that failure and change its Afghan policy to accommodate its consequences. As it is, Pakistan—a nuclear power with a record of promoting proliferation and deep ties both to China and to the most hate-filled and murderous jihadist groups—has faced down America and achieved its long-term goal of reinstalling a friendly regime to its north. Whether Pakistan will be happy with its radical neighbor in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Pakistani hard-liners are celebrating the greatest single win in their history.
Nothing is more vain than the hope that somehow this debacle will help the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific. For more than 70 years India, whose massive population and economy make it a linchpin of any American strategy in Asia, has seen the world through the lens of its competition with Pakistan. Now, as Islamabad cements its ties with Beijing, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan hands Pakistan a strategic victory and strengthens the most radical anti-Indian and anti-Western forces in its government. Few in New Delhi will perceive this catastrophe as a sign of Washington’s competence or reliability. If a third-tier country like Pakistan can tie the U.S. in knots, Indians will ask: What chance does Washington have against China?
Perhaps the biggest winner in this dismal week was former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who wrote in his 2014 memoir that then Vice President Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Those lines may not have the Churchillian flair, but they are unlikely to be forgotten now. We must all hope that Mr. Biden can claw his way out of this hole into which he so heedlessly and unnecessarily leapt.
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
22. Inside Biden's defiant Afghanistan response
This will be studied deeply for years to come. How a single focused world view, overconfidence, and erroneous assumptions can lead to catastrophic consequences. His speech should have included saying "I got the assumptions wrong," rather than try to deflect or spread blame.
Excerpts:
Biden has long exuded self-assurance both in his foreign policy views and political strategy, honed over his many years in Washington. Aides say while he welcomes dissenting views and robust debate, he is most likely to abruptly shut down a conversation if he feels his knowledge of a situation -- particularly on international affairs -- is being questioned.
That stubbornness was on fully display in his speech from the East Room, during which the President devoted far time defending his decision to withdraw American troops than acknowledging his administration's admitted miscalculations. While briefly acknowledging that the Taliban's advance and the collapse of the government took place "more quickly than we anticipated," Biden made clear that his intent to end the war hadn't changed.
"I am the President of the United States of America," Biden said. "The buck stops with me."
Inside Biden's defiant Afghanistan response
CNN · by Kevin Liptak, Jeff Zeleny and Kaitlan Collins, CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN)By the time images of desperate Afghans clinging to American warplanes began emerging from Kabul on Monday morning, President Joe Biden had conceded to aides he had little choice but to interrupt his stay at Camp David to return to the White House.
He had been facing calls, even from his political allies, to speak out on the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. His top aides had begun publicly admitting they were caught off guard by the speed with which the Afghan military would collapse but wanted the situation in Kabul to stabilize before Biden addressed the nation. And his own words from earlier this summer describing a Taliban takeover as "unlikely" were aggravating the sense of a commander-in-chief caught badly off guard.
During briefings, the President quizzed his team about how they could have misjudged the time it would take for the Afghan army to collapse, according to people familiar with the matter. He has also voiced dismay at the failure of Ashraf Ghani, the ousted Afghan president who fled the country on Sunday, to adhere to a plan he laid out in the Oval Office in June to prevent the Taliban from taking over major cities.
Throughout the weekend, Biden had remained at the presidential retreat, receiving briefings on screens or over the phone while sitting alone at conference table. Advisers huddled separately to discuss when and how he should address the situation. When he returned to the White House midday Monday, many of his aides assumed he would at least spend the night.
Yet almost as soon as Biden touched down in Washington, word went out that his stay at the executive mansion would be brief. After his 18-minute speech, Biden quickly decamped again for the mountains.
Read More
As advisers worked feverishly on Monday to calibrate the President's speech, there was far less worry about the predictable criticism from Republicans than about how Biden's own words and calculations over the last several months had been so wrong. The episode puts into sharp relief two of Biden's most marked political traits: A stubborn defensive streak and a fierce certainty in his decision-making that allows little room for second-guessing.
Those traits led to an air of defiance hanging over the White House on Monday, but remarkable images of the chaos in Kabul -- which the President called "gut wrenching" -- stood as irrefutable evidence of failure. The task of what to do next will be left to Biden.
Fareed Zakaria: This withdrawal is a stain on Biden's foreign policy 02:59
Scenes in Kabul are 'way worse than Saigon'
Inside the White House and national security agencies, there has been fierce debate over how the current catastrophe unfolding in Afghanistan came to be. Officials who have built entire careers on issues related to the country have found it hard to fathom the blunt end to the 20-year conflict.
But the defiant message in Biden's Monday speech reflected conversations he had with advisers over the last 48 hours. Officials were aware the situation that ultimately unfolded was possible -- the Taliban overwhelming the civilian government in Kabul once US forces left -- but had counted on it being unlikely.
Biden's top aides have been candid this week in admitting they did not expect it to happen so quickly.
'Almost comical': Sciutto criticizes Biden adviser over Afghanistan answer 01:27
"It is certainly the case that the speed with which cities fell was much greater than anyone anticipated," Sullivan said Monday on NBC's "Today."
At the same time, Biden has been confronted with his own past statements downplaying the notion the Taliban would overrun Kabul and outright rejecting the prospect the US embassy there would be evacuated.
Part of that approach -- to downplay the prospect of the Taliban taking control of the country -- was meant to avoid further erosion of morale among the country's defense forces, one adviser said. And Biden said during his remarks that the now-deposed Afghan government had encouraged the United States to hold off on orchestrating a mass exodus "to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence."
Still, in retrospect, Biden's comments about how the war would end -- including a rejection of comparisons to the fall of Saigon in 1975 -- appeared badly misguided.
"For the administration to say this isn't going to be Saigon as we look at those sorts of images -- well maybe they're right. Because they're way worse than Saigon," said Ryan Crocker, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan under former President Barack Obama.
'Where is the President?': Keilar presses White House official over Afghanistan 00:57
Questions left unanswered
Biden has long exuded self-assurance both in his foreign policy views and political strategy, honed over his many years in Washington. Aides say while he welcomes dissenting views and robust debate, he is most likely to abruptly shut down a conversation if he feels his knowledge of a situation -- particularly on international affairs -- is being questioned.
That stubbornness was on fully display in his speech from the East Room, during which the President devoted far time defending his decision to withdraw American troops than acknowledging his administration's admitted miscalculations. While briefly acknowledging that the Taliban's advance and the collapse of the government took place "more quickly than we anticipated," Biden made clear that his intent to end the war hadn't changed.
"I am the President of the United States of America," Biden said. "The buck stops with me."
23. Biden’s South-East Asia Doctrine: Repairing Damage And Neglect From Obama And Trump Years – Analysis
Excerpts:
One of the biggest threats to the Biden doctrine is happening right now. The fall of Kabul in Afghanistan, and the pictures coming out are following the fall of Saigon script. This could dent the prestige of the US, and injure perceptions of Biden as a superpower leader. A lot will depend upon how the media portrays the Taliban takeover of the country.
For decades now, the US has on an ad hoc basis cooperated and developed relations with South-East Asian nations. It is really difficult to see how the Biden doctrine will bring to the US more friends than they already have, and make much difference to the Chinese position within the region. What the Biden doctrine may do, is to help prevent the deterioration of the US position anymore than it is now in the region.
Biden’s South-East Asia Doctrine: Repairing Damage And Neglect From Obama And Trump Years – Analysis
When Joe Biden took over the United States presidency last January, South-East Asia appeared to be low on his list of priorities. After setting the direction within the European and East Asian regions, the Biden administration has set sight on repairing the damage during the Obama era, and the neglected, somewhat transactional nature of relationships that endured during the Trump years. Biden has begun to re-engage the region with a lot of work to do.
The timing of Biden’s South-East Asia re-engagement is unfortunate, with most governments within the region concerned with Covid-19 spikes, within their respective nations. Myanmar is in the grip of a military Junta, after a coup earlier this year, Thailand is in the hands of an unpopular milocracy, Malaysia is in the midst of a political crisis, the Philippines will have a transition to a new administration next year, while some countries have edged closer to China. China is much more influential and militarily stronger than during the Obama era, and even the Trump years.
However, the pandemic has provided the Biden administration with the opportunity to participate in vaccine diplomacy, a well-received gesture, as all South-East Asian states are facing vaccine shortages. The Biden administration can also take advantage of the weaknesses in Chinese diplomacy. China’s growing aggressiveness on the South-China Sea, often abrupt demeanour in bilateral relations, and “wolf-warrior” diplomacy is not aiding its position in the region with member states.
Nevertheless, no South-East Asian nation subscribes to the concept of containing China in the classical ‘cold war’ sense. Any philosophical ‘cold war’ era approaches to the region, just won’t work. There is a measured admiration for China and its achievements over the region. China has developed respect among many quarters.
Nations of this region feel comfortable with a neighbour they have shared the region with for centuries, where family and clan ties overlap the region. Many of the elite families within the region are only a couple of generations away from Chinese ancestors, links that have become important for commerce, more than anything else. There is a large business orientated Chinese diaspora in the region as well.
One of the most telling things about the Biden administration’s South-East Asian initiative is that it was delivered by former army general and now defence secretary Lloyd Austin at the Fullerton Lecture in Singapore, six months after the Biden inauguration.
The policy narratives closely resemble those espoused by Kurt Michael Campbell, who was appointed National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, and was a former assistant secretary of state under the Obama administration. The US state department assembled a think-tank of academics and diplomats for this purpose.
The China Emergence
China is becoming diplomatically and militarily more aggressive. This reflects a deep political change within China, over the last decade, where Chinese premier Xi Jinping consolidated his power. The bureaucracy and leadership have been taken over by Xi loyalists from the New Zhijiang Army, and Shuang Xi Gang, apparatchiks in pursuing the “China Dream”, and “China Rejuvenation.”
Thus, the Chinese ideological situation is vastly different from the Obama years. This presents a great challenge to any rule-based economic, and military world order. This is particularly the case when China has a completely different vison of what the world should be like than the US.
The old Keenan containment doctrine of the Cold War cannot be applied to the region, as South-East Asian states cannot be simply classified as taking any “us or them” ideological orientation. South-East Asian states won’t necessarily take sides like most did in the Cold War. We are not witnessing a clash of ideologies, rather the process of China moulding the region, better suited to its own interests.
In 2019, a China defence white paper mapped out a strategic masterplan of creating a community of common destiny (CCD), within the philosophy of building a community with a ‘shared future of mankind.”
China is not the only concern for the US. Overtly, Myanmar is of concern, while covertly the situation within Thailand is silently noted, both issues where the US has no control over any outcomes. Nurturing the Vietnam relationship, and building a strong Singapore, appears to be of prime importance. The US lacks any significant relationship with Cambodia, and a spasmodic relationship with the Philippines. The US aims to build further on its relationship with Indonesia. The US hopes Malaysian concerns over Chinese incursions within its EEZ will lead to more cooperation within the South China Sea. Finally, the effectiveness of ASEAN would be of concern.
This is all within a backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, where the public health resources of South-East Asian nations are thoroughly stressed.
The Biden Doctrine
Austin outlined the US belief on the importance of partnerships within the region. This is particularly important in the areas of (1) the Covid-19 pandemic, (2) climate change, (3) coercion from rising powers, (4) the North Korean nuclear arsenal, and (5) the Myanmar crisis.
Austin emphasised that the US is not expecting South-East Asian nations to be forced to make a choice between the US and China. The US intends to seek areas of mutual interest in bilateral and multilateral relations, rather than pursuing US interests. The US is seeking a stable and constructive relationship with China, within the South China Sea.
The US also sees a central role for ASEAN to play within the region, pointing to its diplomatic efforts on Myanmar. Austin’s vison is that ASEAN can complement the QUAD, where members are domiciled on the peripheries of the region. Although, what specific initiatives the US would like to see were left out. Austin just espoused the theme common security as underpinning cooperation.
Austin outlines three phases in the doctrine, (1) Covid recovery, where the US has already donated 40 million vaccine doses to Indonesia, Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, (2) investing in cooperative partnerships across the region, through diplomacy and military means to create integrated deterrence through coordination and networking, and (3) developing a long-term coming together in partnership within a rules-based order in the region.
Austin mentions areas within the rules-based order that will have priority; freedom of the sea, human rights, and the resolution of community disputes. Although, the US affirms its desire for a stronger relationship with China, it disputes the nine-dash line.
Kurt Campbell clearly states that these initiatives must be tested and fine tuned as they are developed and implemented. This strategy will be challenging and a learning experience for the administration.
This is a clear departure from Trump’s unilateral and transactional nature of his administration’s approach to the region. The Biden administration has indicated a strong aspiration to be involved within the region. However, it has so far left out any return to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the centrepiece of the Obama pivot to Asia, that Trump cancelled upon coming to office.
The doctrine recognizes US weaknesses with some South-East Asian state relationships, and with a realization that any security initiatives within the region, cannot be US responsibility alone. Thus, a cooperative approach is sort, underpinning the need to engage China’s influence with both soft power and a military presence.
This acknowledges an era where China is recognized as a major influence within the region, with two-prong-diplomacy. In a good cop-bad cop routine, US secretary of state Antony Blinken dressed down China at their summit in Alaska on issues of human rights, regional aggressiveness, economic malpractices, while the US is working on issues with mutual interest with China, with US climate envoy John Kerry’s visit to China to discuss common ground for the upcoming UN climate change summit in Glasgow, later in the year.
The Biden administration is taking a team approach. Vice president Kamala Harris is set to play a major symbolic role with her forthcoming visit to long-time ally Singapore and to further serenade Vietnam. This is following on the footsteps of secretary Austin’s visit to Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines, and deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman’s visit to China, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, and Indonesia.
A brief situational audit
Singapore is the strongest ally of the US in the region today. Singapore supports a strong US presence within the region, and thus is providing logistical support for US military aircraft and navel vessels, as well as rotational deployments. The US supports Singapore armed forces training overseas, where Singapore has a number of squadrons of aircraft in the US.
Austin’s latest visit saw both parties strengthen cooperation in AI, cyber defence, and strategic communications, and the establishment of a multilateral terrorism information facility, which the US is a partner. The Biden administration just announced the nomination of philanthropist Jonathan Kaplan as US ambassador to Singapore, a post left vacant under the Trump administration, since 2017.
US relations with Indonesia are strong, where the US has substantial commercial investment in the country. Indonesia is strategically important due to the Malacca Straits, which is the busiest shipping lane in the world. The US and Indonesia share a new joint coast guard facility in Batam, focusing on marine security and anti-piracy operations. The two countries also carry out regular joint naval exercises, and an annual joint military exercise designated Garuda Shield. Indonesia also carries out joint exercises with China, conducting good relationships with both China and the US.
The US has a good relationship with Malaysia, with strong commercial, and military links. Malaysia has become weary of China of late due to PLA air force incursions into Malaysian territorial waters, in the South China Sea. The US has also had a long relationship with Thailand. Although the US was critical of the 2014 coup by the military, which ousted an elected government, both countries are still participating in good military cooperation, with many joint military exercises. The US is using U-Tapao Naval Airfield as a key refuelling stop between the US, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Like Indonesia, Thailand also has good relations with China.
Vietnam is a priority for the US. Bogged down with legacy issues involving the remains of MIAs from the Vietnam war, and suspicion of US intentions by Vietnam, the relationship has been slow to develop. Chinese aggression in the South China Sea maybe influencing better relations between the US and Vietnam. To date there has been bilateral cooperation with maritime law enforcement and capacity building. There are rumours that Harris will sign a General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), which would set the stage for the exchange of classified military information between the parties.
Philippine relations with the US have been a little erratic during the Duterte presidency. There may still be some disappointment at the US handling of the Scarborough Shoal issue back in 2012, where China broke an agreement brokered by the US. However, Austin went away from his recent visit to the Philippines with the US-Philippine Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) renewed, after the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte threatened to terminate it.
The increase of tensions with China in the South China Sea, with PLA soldiers disguised as fishermen within the Philippines EEZ, has possibility assisted in the softening of president Duterte’s attitude towards the US. There will be a new president in the Philippines next year, which the US is waiting for.
The US relationship with Cambodia remains poor. Former president Obama’s meeting with the Cambodian leader Hun Sen back in 2012, was reported to be very tense over human rights issues. US naval ship visits, joint military exercises, counter terrorism training, and joint human trafficking work has done little to improve relations. The US relationship with Laos is transactional, but cordial.
After the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, Biden imposed sanctions on Myanmar military leaders and their business associates. Like Cambodia, Myanmar will be a low priority for the US, as it is difficult to see how the Biden strategy can bring these countries closer to the US.
The Biden strategy places an importance on the role of ASEAN within the region. However, since the passing of the former secretary-general Dr Surin Pitsuwan, and Covid-19 travel restrictions across the region over the last 18 months, ASEAN appears to be irrelevant. The AEC exists in name only, and important partnership mechanisms like the EU-ASEAN Strategic Partnership have not been activated.
ASEAN, by default has given legitimacy to the Myanmar Junta. The appointment of Brunei’s deputy foreign minister Ergwan Yusof as ASEAN’s special envoy to Myanmar, lacks the weight and experience of other potential choices. There is really a lack of any real political will for ASEAN to promote any return to democracy in Myanmar, as most ASEAN members are authoritarian governments in their own right.
There doesn’t seem to be any political willingness, on the part of its member countries to change this, so US hopes for the grouping may be unfulfilled.
The Biden doctrine has many tests and challenges ahead. Obama found his pivot to Asia very difficult to implement than was anticipated. Obama’s pressing of human rights went largely unheeded, causing more friction, if anything. Biden’s value-based partnerships maybe found just as easily testing in many circumstances.
Chinese premier Xi Jinping has consolidated his position in China, just as Putin has in Russia. China and Russia are getting closer together. Personal relationships may do more to shape the region, than reliance on a doctrine thought out in a state department think tank. Thus, future Biden-Xi, and Putin meetings will be most important.
Kurt Campbell himself concedes that this doctrine is only work in progress and will need change and modification as time goes along. The third part of the doctrine is most important, which to date, the administration has been largely silent upon. Economic growth is going to be of paramount importance, when the region is on the other side of the pandemic. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or some new initiative is missing from the doctrine, as Campbell admits. This is still being developed.
One of the biggest threats to the Biden doctrine is happening right now. The fall of Kabul in Afghanistan, and the pictures coming out are following the fall of Saigon script. This could dent the prestige of the US, and injure perceptions of Biden as a superpower leader. A lot will depend upon how the media portrays the Taliban takeover of the country.
For decades now, the US has on an ad hoc basis cooperated and developed relations with South-East Asian nations. It is really difficult to see how the Biden doctrine will bring to the US more friends than they already have, and make much difference to the Chinese position within the region. What the Biden doctrine may do, is to help prevent the deterioration of the US position anymore than it is now in the region.
24. At the Pentagon, US military officials bitter as they watch chaos in Kabul
At the Pentagon, US military officials bitter as they watch chaos in Kabul - RFI
Advertising
Washington (AFP)
The mood was sombre Monday in the corridors of the Pentagon, where US military personnel watched helplessly as chaos erupted at Kabul airport and privately criticized the slow pace of Joe Biden's administration in evacuating US-allied Afghans who fear Taliban retribution.
Some criticized the State Department, which has sole authority to grant visas to former interpreters and other US military support staff and their families, for waiting more than two months to begin the process for Afghans in fear of their lives.
Videos posted on social networks showed scenes of panic and fear in Kabul, including crowds running next to a US military transport plane as it taxies to take off, with some trying to desperately cling to its sides.
"We warned them for months, for months" that the situation was urgent, said one military official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
A US soldier points his gun towards an Afghan civilian as US forces secure the Kabul airport Wakil KOHSAR AFP
"I am not angry, I am frustrated," another officer remarked. "The process could have been handled so differently."
Biden decided in mid-April that all US troops must be out of Afghanistan by September 11, though he later moved that date up to August 21.
The State Department however waited months to set up an ad hoc structure to get US allies to safety.
Another Pentagon official interviewed by AFP said that diplomats had tried to speed up the visa process -- but the process was too long and complicated under the circumstances.
Many Afghans have been unable to secure exit visas in time to flee the country, but have rushed to the Kabul airport hoping to leave ahead of Taliban rule Wakil Kohsar AFP
The Biden administration assumed that the US embassy in Kabul would remain open and that the Afghan government would retain control of the country for months after the US withdrawal, he said.
- It's 'personal' -
As soon as Biden announced the withdrawal, the Pentagon said it was making preparations for a mass evacuation.
But by mid-June the administration still did not consider an evacuation necessary and favored the granting of special visas -- a process that can take up to two years.
It was only at the end of June that the White House raised the possibility of evacuating the Afghan interpreters before the end of the military withdrawal, and asked for the Pentagon's help.
A child rests on an airport luggage conveyor belt as Afghan families wait for a chance to escape Taliban rule Wakil Kohsar AFP
A crisis cell was then set up to organize the reception of Afghan refugees on US bases as they waited for their visas to be issued.
Asked during a press briefing on Monday about the delay of more than two months between the announcement of the withdrawal and the creation of the crisis cell, its director Garry Reid stressed that the Pentagon could only act in "support of the State Department."
State Department spokesman Ned Price said that, when the administration realized that the situation was "quickly evolving," it launched what Operation Allied Refuge, which he described as "a gargantuan US effort not only to process, adjudicate and to grant visas to so-called Special Immigrants but to actually bring them to the United States with a massive airlift operation."
He said 2,000 Afghans have been brought to the US through the airlift so far.
The action group, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said, got stood up in July.
"But you can go back to the spring and hear the Secretary (of Defense Lloyd Austin) himself talk about interpreters and translators and the sacred obligation that we know that we have to them," said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.
"Many of us have spent time in Afghanistan over the years and feel a deep sense of connection to the current events," General Hank Taylor, the US military's chief of logistics, told the same news briefing.
But, he added, "we are focused on the safest evacuation of Americans and Afghans."
© 2021 AFP
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.
