Quotes of the Day:
“My personal position on counterinsurgency in general, and on Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, could therefore be summarized as "Never again, but..." That is, we should avoid any future large-scale, unilateral military intervention in the Islamic world, for all the reasons already discussed. But, recognizing that while our conventional war-fighting superiority endures, any sensible enemy will choose to fight us in this manner, we should hold on to the knowledge and corporate memory so painfully acquired, across all the agencies of all the Coalition partners, in Afghanistan and Iraq. And should we find ourselves (by error or necessity) in a similar position once again, then the best practices we have rediscovered in current campaigns represent an effective approach: effective, but not recommended.”
- David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
“I want to scream again, and I remember that last time I felt this way, riding with Baba in the tank of the fuel truck, buried in the dark with other refugees. I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my leg blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away. There will be no other reality tonight.”
- Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
- William James
1. Opinion | The Taliban Were Patient. Now They Hold All the Cards. by Ryan C. Crocker
2. Perspective | Afghanistan is not the country the Taliban last ruled. Will that matter?
3. Department of Defense Activates Civil Reserve Air Fleet to Assist With Afghanistan Efforts
4. Miscue After Miscue, U.S. Exit Plan Unravels
5. Taliban photo appears to mock Iwo Jima flag raising in latest propaganda push
6. Justice Department Moves to Dismiss Bowe Bergdahl’s Case to Overturn His Conviction
7. Defense Secretary Orders US Airlines to Help With Evacuation
8. US credibility with military allies at risk over Afghanistan pullout
9. Column: The fall of Kabul doesn't need to spell the end of U.S. global power
10. The Taliban Takeover: Plan Now for the Next Crisis in Afghanistan
11. U.S. Considers Ordering Commercial Airlines to Help in Afghan Evacuation
12. Opinion | I Can’t Forget the Lessons of Vietnam. Neither Should You.
13. Atlantic Charter credibility crumbles; can an Indo-Pacific Charter give hope?
14. US special operations forces race to save former Afghan comrades in jeopardy
15. U.S. Military Veterans Rush to Help Afghan Interpreters Escape
16. Plan for Texas to host Afghan evacuees gets bipartisan support though experts are wary
17. Afghan Resistance Ready For Conflict But Prefers Negotiations
18. Colonel Maxwell is flawed
1. Opinion | The Taliban Were Patient. Now They Hold All the Cards. by Ryan C. Crocker
Excerpts:
It did not have to be this way. When I left Afghanistan as ambassador in 2012, we had about 85,000 troops in the country. The Taliban controlled none of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals. When President Barack Obama left office there were fewer than 10,000 U.S. troops. And when Mr. Trump departed there were fewer than 5,000. The Taliban still did not hold any major urban area. Now, they hold the entire country. What changed so swiftly and completely? We did. Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure. Even with a full withdrawal, we might have managed steps that would have protected our interests. The ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, and I suggested how in these pages a few months ago.
Now, the Taliban hold all the cards. They will determine whether evacuations through the Kabul airport can proceed. And whatever happens next, the image of this American capitulation is already etched indelibly in the world’s imagination. It is that U.S. Air Force C-17 taxiing for takeoff from Kabul surrounded by a desperate Afghan mob. Seconds later, at least one man falls to his death from the plane’s wheel well. It is eerily reminiscent of the people who jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11 rather than face death by fire. What a tragic and painful circle it closes two decades later.
Opinion | The Taliban Were Patient. Now They Hold All the Cards.
Guest Essay
The Taliban Were Patient. Now They Hold All the Cards.
Aug. 21, 2021, 11:00 a.m. ET
Taliban fighters on Aug. 15 after taking control of the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan.Credit...Zabi Karimi/Associated Press
By
Mr. Crocker served as ambassador to Afghanistan under President Barack Obama.
As Americans, we have many strengths, but strategic patience is not among them. We have been able to summon it at critical times such as the Revolutionary War and World War II, where, for example, Congress did not threaten to defund the war effort if it wasn’t wrapped up by 1944. In Korea, nearly seven decades after an inconclusive truce, we still have about 28,000 troops. But our patience is not the norm. And it certainly has not been on display in Afghanistan as the world watched the Taliban storm into Kabul.
As the enormity of the events in Afghanistan this past week sink in, the questions start. How did this happen? How could we not have foreseen it? Why didn’t Afghan security forces put up a fight? Why didn’t we do something about corruption? The list goes on. There is one overarching answer: our lack of strategic patience at critical moments, including from President Biden. It has damaged our alliances, emboldened our adversaries and increased the risk to our own security. It has also flouted 20 years of work and sacrifice.
The United States’ objective in Afghanistan has always been clear: to ensure that Afghan soil is never again used to plan attacks against the American homeland. It was not about nation building as an end in itself, or building a new democracy, or even regime change. The message from the Bush administration to the Taliban after 9/11 made this clear: If you hand over Al Qaeda leadership, we will leave you alone. The Taliban chose to fight instead. Once the Taliban were defeated, our fundamental mission of ensuring that Afghanistan was never again the base for an attack on the United States did not change. But the means to that end became much more complex. And the development of those means would require patience.
A child walking among destroyed tanks near the road to Bagram Air Base in 2002.Credit...Radu Sigheti/Reuters
When I arrived at Bagram Air Base in January 2002 to take charge of our reopened embassy, Afghanistan had nothing: essentially no government, no institutions, no army, no police — just a yawning vacuum, and vacuums in the greater Middle East tend to be filled by actors who do not wish us well. Hamid Karzai had arrived in Kabul just a few days before me as chairman of the Afghanistan Interim Authority. He and I spent a lot of time together in those initial weeks. He never seemed discouraged by the enormity of the task in front of him. He did not hesitate to make decisions, many good, some not so much. He had a vision of a stable and secure Afghanistan that threatened no one. It would be a long process, but he said he had the patience for it.
So did we, at least initially. Helping Afghans create a stable, open society could also be the best way to further our own national security objectives. This concept had strong bipartisan support on the Hill, as a wave of congressional visitors to Kabul would attest. The first of that wave was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden. We visited a girls’ school that had just opened thanks to U.S.A.I.D. Chairman Biden was a strong supporter. He understood the importance of societal change, and he understood that it takes time and requires patience. While statistics in Afghanistan have never been reliable, U.S.A.I.D. estimates that when the Taliban were defeated, there were some 900,000 children in school, all of them boys. When I left as ambassador in 2012, a decade after that first school visit, the number of students was nearly 8 million, about 37 percent girls. It is important to note that this progress was not by any means exclusively the result of U.S. or other international efforts. Afghans on their own launched private initiatives in education, especially for girls.
Clearly, there were also problems, chief among them corruption. Karzai, and later President Ashraf Ghani, presided over governments where corruption was rampant. When vast resources are poured into a country without established institutions and rule of law, corruption is likely to be a significant byproduct. This is not to excuse corrupt officials. It is to recognize the ubiquity of the problem and our role in it. A look at our own history is instructive. Corruption was endemic in New York, Boston and Chicago through much of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. It took us time to grow the institutions and legal structures that would eventually make corruption the exception rather than the norm.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., then chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, waving as he talked to Afghan children on a visit to the Ariana primary school in Kabul in January 2002.Credit...Enric Marti/Associated Press
And that returns me again to the central theme: time and patience. As our own history attests, societal change is a slow process. Witness the 11 years our new country spent moving from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. Even then, issues like slavery were papered over, only to erupt in a civil war 74 years later. Yet we seem unable to appreciate that other societies will find the challenge just as difficult and even more so if the engine of change is a foreign army.
I recall the comment attributed to a captured Taliban fighter from a number of years ago: You Americans have the watches, but we have the time. Sadly that view proved accurate — the Taliban outlasted us and our impatience. After the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S.-trained and armed mujahedeen in 1989, training that was facilitated by Pakistan, we decided we were done. We could see the Afghan civil war coming — the only thing holding the disparate Afghan groups together was a common enemy. But that was not our problem — we were leaving. On the way out, we stopped helping Pakistan in a key way: We ended security and economic assistance because of its nuclear weapons program, something we’d exempted before. So Pakistan, in its own narrative, went from being the most allied of allies to the most sanctioned of adversaries. That is why Pakistan threw its support to the Taliban when they started gaining ground in the 1990s: It could end a dangerous conflict along Pakistan’s own unstable borders.
And that is why a decade later after 9/11, Pakistan welcomed the return of the United States — and U.S. assistance. It would work with us against Al Qaeda. But we soon learned that the Taliban were a sticky matter. I was ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007. I pushed Pakistani officials repeatedly on the need to deny the Taliban safe havens. The answer I got back over time went like this: “We know you. We know you don’t have patience for the long fight. We know the day will come when you just get tired and go home — it’s what you do. But we aren’t going anywhere — this is where we live. So if you think we are going to turn the Taliban into a mortal enemy, you are completely crazy.”
We have again validated their skepticism.
The Washington Post notes that “as the Taliban swept across neighboring Afghanistan, some Pakistanis saw it as a reason to celebrate.” Yet I doubt there are many high fives being exchanged in Islamabad today. The American disaster in Afghanistan that Mr. Biden’s impatience brought about is not a disaster just for us. It has also been a huge boost for the Taliban, whose narrative now is that the believers, clad in the armor of the one true faith, have vanquished the infidels. That is resonating around the world, and certainly next door in Pakistan where the T.T.P. — the Pakistani Taliban, which seeks the overthrow of their government — has certainly been emboldened, as have Kashmiri militant groups created by Pakistan but that threaten Pakistan itself as well as India. Mr. Biden’s strategic impatience has given a huge boost to militant Islam everywhere.
We need to be engaged with Pakistan on ways to assess and deal with this enhanced threat. The prospect of violent destabilization of a country with about 210 million people and nuclear weapons is not a pretty one. The same is true in Iran. It’s always good to see the Great Satan take a kick in the face, and it’s worth a little gloating, but the Islamic Republic and the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate almost went to war in 1998. A region is worried, and it is right to be so.
It was not only the current president showing impatience. President Donald Trump announced that peace talks would convene in Qatar between the United States and the Taliban. But those took place without the Afghan government. We had caved on a longstanding Taliban condition. We therefore delegitimized the government we had pledged to support. The Taliban did eventually allow government representatives into the room, but the talks went nowhere. As that painful process unfolded, we added injury to insult, forcing the Kabul government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners.
That didn’t matter to Mr. Trump. He was done with patience and just wanted out, whatever the consequences. He reached an agreement with the Taliban for that complete withdrawal, but left office before he could execute it.
Enter Mr. Biden. To my shock, he embraced Mr. Trump’s Afghanistan policy. We have betrayed our promises to interpreters, women and children, and others who are now trapped in an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban. I fear many will lose their lives because of Mr. Biden’s impatience. We had their backs. Until Mr. Biden decided we didn’t. They will pay for it.
It did not have to be this way. When I left Afghanistan as ambassador in 2012, we had about 85,000 troops in the country. The Taliban controlled none of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals. When President Barack Obama left office there were fewer than 10,000 U.S. troops. And when Mr. Trump departed there were fewer than 5,000. The Taliban still did not hold any major urban area. Now, they hold the entire country. What changed so swiftly and completely? We did. Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure. Even with a full withdrawal, we might have managed steps that would have protected our interests. The ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, and I suggested how in these pages a few months ago.
Now, the Taliban hold all the cards. They will determine whether evacuations through the Kabul airport can proceed. And whatever happens next, the image of this American capitulation is already etched indelibly in the world’s imagination. It is that U.S. Air Force C-17 taxiing for takeoff from Kabul surrounded by a desperate Afghan mob. Seconds later, at least one man falls to his death from the plane’s wheel well. It is eerily reminiscent of the people who jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11 rather than face death by fire. What a tragic and painful circle it closes two decades later.
Ryan C. Crocker was a United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon, serving both Republican and Democratic administrations.
2. Perspective | Afghanistan is not the country the Taliban last ruled. Will that matter?
Excerpts:
Maybe the Taliban is not prioritizing those things. But it should — if not for the good of ordinary Afghans, then for its own. Moderation and inclusivity would help secure its place as a credible player in the region and help ensure its durability far more than whips and guns and gallows.
In all likelihood, this is an exercise in wishful thinking. A few days ago, I saw images of “thieves,” faces painted black and nooses around their necks, paraded by the Taliban through the streets of Herat. Those photos might as well have been snapped in 1996. And on Wednesday, the Taliban shot into a small crowd of protesters in Jalalabad and killed three people.
Nevertheless, for the last few days, Taliban leaders have been saying the right things on TV, on occasion even to female Afghan broadcasters. The Taliban claims it has changed. It insists it will honor the essential human rights of Afghans. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid vowed that the regime will respect women’s rights — though, he was careful to qualify, within the norms of sharia law. Still, despite the Taliban’s recent pledges, those people clinging to American military airplanes as they took off clearly didn’t believe them.
The Taliban has a golden chance to prove them wrong. I hope it does. I doubt it will.
Perspective | Afghanistan is not the country the Taliban last ruled. Will that matter?
Khaled Hosseini on the vastly changed cultural landscape the new regime faces
By Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini, author of "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns," is a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Refugee Agency. His Khaled Hosseini Foundation delivers aid to Afghan women and children.
August 19, 2021 at 3:00 p.m. EDT
And just like that, in a matter of days, the Taliban is back. Its flag flies proudly over major Afghan cities, including my birthplace, Kabul — in stunning contrast to American intelligence assessments that the capital would take months to fall. The chaotic events make it hard to trust anything American officials say about Afghanistan. The question is, can anything the Taliban says be trusted?
In interviews since the takeover of Kabul, Taliban leaders have insisted that Afghan citizens have nothing to fear, even as searing images of desperate Afghans chasing airplanes on the tarmac of Kabul’s airport were going viral.
Why are Afghans terrified? Allow me to refresh the memory.
For more than 20 years, the Taliban has systematically terrorized, brutalized, maimed and murdered its own people. It has bombed schools and hospitals. For two decades, it has slaughtered countless fellow Afghans — men, women and children, many of them poor, ordinary villagers. The last time the Taliban ran the country, it chopped hands for petty theft and executed accused adulterers publicly. The regime virtually imprisoned women, denied them proper health care and stole their right to education. It whipped them for daring to show their faces in public and beat them for walking outside without a male companion. It struck men publicly for the inadequate length of a beard. It robbed Afghans of the simple pleasures of life: music, art, dance, even kite fighting. It destroyed priceless historical artifacts. Who could forget the shouts of “Allah u Akbar” as the Taliban fired rockets at the beautiful Buddhas of Bamian, which dated to the 6th century?
Others, too, played their part in the tragedy that is Afghanistan today. Neighboring countries, particularly Pakistan, are complicit. Afghan leaders deserve great blame for their greed and corruption, for their inability to deliver services, and most important, for their failure to protect Afghan civilians against attacks from the Taliban and other insurgent groups. Then there are the Americans. The United States shares blame as well — and not merely for the strategic missteps and miscalculations that doomed Operation Enduring Freedom. Remember the terrible 2015 bombing of the Doctors Without Borders trauma center in Kunduz that killed 42 people? Or the July 2008 airstrike in Nangahar that killed 47 members of a wedding party — including the bride — and the children who were leading the procession? If the Americans don’t remember, the Afghans do.
But the Americans are gone and the Taliban is back. And the Afghan people are frightened.
Is there a remote possibility that they don’t have to be? Maybe the Taliban has noticed that the country it has conquered in 2021 is not the one it decamped from in 2001 — nor is it the quiet, pre-Soviet-era Afghanistan I grew up in, where women wore short skirts, hippies lounged in teahouses, and you could drive across Kabul in minutes unencumbered by checkpoints or barricades fortified with concertina wire. Still, while the Taliban was busy launching RPGs at police cadets, the country was transforming. Over the last 20 years, Afghanistan formed a robust base of educated urban professionals. Young Afghans, male and female, went to school and learned to code. They became software engineers and programmers. Via social media, they engaged with the outside world on human rights, the environment, and racial and social justice. While the Taliban occupied itself firing at Afghan soldiers, young Afghans learned guitar and drums and formed alt-rock garage bands. They bought millions of cellphones and texted their votes for their favorite performers on “Afghan Star,” the country’s version of “American Idol.” By 2020, more than 9.5 million children were enrolled in school, 39 percent of them girls — compared with only 900,000 in 2001, overwhelmingly boys. Young women entered the workforce to help rebuild a country the Taliban left decimated and bankrupt. Afghan life expectancy rose from 56 in 2001 to 65 in 2021. The mortality rate for children under the age of 5 dropped by 50 percent. Thousands of miles of road were built — hospitals, schools and mosques, too. The Taliban knows them. It bombed many of them.
But perhaps, in these 20 years, the Taliban changed as well. Perhaps it sees the wisdom of inclusive, more moderate methods. After all, it is one thing to conquer a nation but a whole other matter to govern it. In the 1990s, too, the Taliban took control of the struggling country with ease, but it left Afghanistan in 2001 in near-total economic collapse. Today, wouldn’t the know-how and education of young Afghans serve the Taliban well to rebuild civil society and steer the nation toward a more stable and prosperous future? Couldn’t it use the grit of determined young women like education activist Pashtana Durrani, 23, who vows to start an underground school if the Taliban limits teachers? Wouldn’t women like her make for formidable partners? Wouldn’t inviting them to play a meaningful part in rebuilding the country win the Taliban lasting good will at home and eventually even abroad?
Maybe the Taliban is not prioritizing those things. But it should — if not for the good of ordinary Afghans, then for its own. Moderation and inclusivity would help secure its place as a credible player in the region and help ensure its durability far more than whips and guns and gallows.
In all likelihood, this is an exercise in wishful thinking. A few days ago, I saw images of “thieves,” faces painted black and nooses around their necks, paraded by the Taliban through the streets of Herat. Those photos might as well have been snapped in 1996. And on Wednesday, the Taliban shot into a small crowd of protesters in Jalalabad and killed three people.
Nevertheless, for the last few days, Taliban leaders have been saying the right things on TV, on occasion even to female Afghan broadcasters. The Taliban claims it has changed. It insists it will honor the essential human rights of Afghans. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid vowed that the regime will respect women’s rights — though, he was careful to qualify, within the norms of sharia law. Still, despite the Taliban’s recent pledges, those people clinging to American military airplanes as they took off clearly didn’t believe them.
The Taliban has a golden chance to prove them wrong. I hope it does. I doubt it will.
Twitter: @khaledhosseini
3. Department of Defense Activates Civil Reserve Air Fleet to Assist With Afghanistan Efforts
CRAF ordered.
Department of Defense Activates Civil Reserve Air Fleet to Assist With Afghanistan Efforts
Immediate Release
Aug. 22, 2021
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has ordered the Commander of U.S. Transportation Command to activate Stage I of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF). CRAF activation provides the Department of Defense access to commercial air mobility resources to augment our support to the Department of State in the evacuation of U.S. citizens and personnel, Special Immigrant Visa applicants, and other at-risk individuals from Afghanistan.
The current activation is for 18 aircraft: three each from American Airlines, Atlas Air, Delta Air Lines and Omni Air; two from Hawaiian Airlines; and four from United Airlines. The Department does not anticipate a major impact to commercial flights from this activation.
CRAF activated aircraft will not fly into Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. They will be used for the onward movement of passengers from temporary safe havens and interim staging bases. Activating CRAF increases passenger movement beyond organic capability and allows military aircraft to focus on operations in and out of in Kabul.
CRAF is a National Emergency Preparedness Program designed to augment the Department’s airlift capability and is a core component of USTRANSCOM’s ability to meet national security interests and contingency requirements. Under CRAF, the commercial carriers retain their Civil Status under FAA regulations while USTRANSCOM exercises mission control via its air component, Air Mobility Command.
This is the third CRAF activation in the history of the program. The first occurred in support of Operations Desert Shield/Storm (Aug. 1990 to May 1991), and the second was for Operation Iraqi Freedom (Feb. 2002 to June 2003).
The DOD’s ability to project military forces is inextricably linked to commercial industry, which provides critical transportation capacity as well as global networks to meet day-to-day and contingency requirements. Utilizing commercial partners expands USTRANSCOM’s global reach as well as access to valuable commercial intermodal transportation systems.
The Secretary greatly appreciates the support of our industry partners in this critical mission.
Subscribe to Defense.gov Products
Choose which Defense.gov products you want delivered to your inbox.
4. Miscue After Miscue, U.S. Exit Plan Unravels
Long read.
RE: the excerpt below.
Vulnerability of troops during withdrawal increases as the withdrawal winds down to the end and fewer and fewer troops remain for security. One principle in the military is speed and security. The faster you drawdown particularly at the end the less vulnerable you may be. Furthermore withdrawing tow months prior to the stated deadline may negate any plans that they expected to execute during those two months. So it was a "successful" military operation to withdraw all the military forces without suffering an enemy attack.
I am sure there were intelligence, military, and diplomatic estimates that assessed that Americans, foriegn nationals, and at-risk Afghan civilians would be at risk following the US military withdrawal. I am sure there were recommendations to conduct a NEO to protect these people.
However, there were two assumptions made that led to this debacle. Number one is that it was assumed the Afghan government, military, and security forces would hold and adequately defend the Afghan territory they controlled. The political assumption was that to withdraw Ameiricans, 3d country nations and at-risk civilians would undermine the legitimacy of the Afghan government and military and cause them to collapse because it would send the signal the US was cutting and running and would no longer support the Afghans. We executed the withdrawal based on two erroneous assumptions.
Excerpt:
First, Pentagon officials said they could pull out the remaining 3,500 American troops, almost all deployed at Bagram Air Base, by July 4 — two months earlier than the Sept. 11 deadline Mr. Biden had set. The plan would mean closing the airfield that was the American military hub in Afghanistan, but Defense Department officials did not want a dwindling, vulnerable force and the risks of service members dying in a war declared lost.
Miscue After Miscue, U.S. Exit Plan Unravels
President Biden promised an orderly withdrawal. That pledge, compounded by missed signals and miscalculations, proved impossible.
President Biden promised an orderly withdrawal. That pledge, compounded by missed signals and miscalculations, proved impossible.
Credit...
- Published Aug. 21, 2021Updated Aug. 22, 2021, 3:53 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top national security officials assembled at the Pentagon early on April 24 for a secret meeting to plan the final withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. It was two weeks after President Biden had announced the exit over the objection of his generals, but now they were carrying out his orders.
In a secure room in the building’s “extreme basement,” two floors below ground level, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with top White House and intelligence officials. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken joined by video conference. After four hours, two things were clear.
First, Pentagon officials said they could pull out the remaining 3,500 American troops, almost all deployed at Bagram Air Base, by July 4 — two months earlier than the Sept. 11 deadline Mr. Biden had set. The plan would mean closing the airfield that was the American military hub in Afghanistan, but Defense Department officials did not want a dwindling, vulnerable force and the risks of service members dying in a war declared lost.
Second, State Department officials said they would keep the American Embassy open, with more than 1,400 remaining Americans protected by 650 Marines and soldiers. An intelligence assessment presented at the meeting estimated that Afghan forces could hold off the Taliban for one to two years. There was brief talk of an emergency evacuation plan — helicopters would ferry Americans to the civilian airport in Kabul, the capital — but no one raised, let alone imagined, what the United States would do if the Taliban gained control of access to that airport, the only safe way in and out of the country once Bagram closed.
The plan was a good one, the group concluded.
Four months later, the plan is in shambles as Mr. Biden struggles to explain how a withdrawal most Americans supported went so badly wrong in its execution. On Friday, as scenes of continuing chaos and suffering at the airport were broadcast around the world, Mr. Biden went so far as to say that “I cannot promise what the final outcome will be, or what it will be that it will be without risk of loss.”
One day after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, thousands of people who were desperate to flee the country rushed to the airport in Kabul.
A helicopter leaving the United States Embassy in Kabul on Sunday, which was shut down by the end of the day, its flag lowered and removed.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
American soldiers trying to restrain the crowds on Monday at the Kabul airport.
An Afghan family sitting on the tarmac on Monday. Flights were eventually suspended temporarily for safety reasons.
Interviews with key participants in the last days of the war show a series of misjudgments and the failure of Mr. Biden’s calculation that pulling out American troops — prioritizing their safety before evacuating American citizens and Afghan allies — would result in an orderly withdrawal.
Biden administration officials consistently believed they had the luxury of time. Military commanders overestimated the will of the Afghan forces to fight for their own country and underestimated how much the American withdrawal would destroy their confidence. The administration put too much faith in President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, who fled Kabul as it fell.
And although Biden White House officials say that they held more than 50 meetings on embassy security and evacuations, and that so far no Americans have died in the operation, all the planning failed to prevent the mayhem when the Taliban took over Kabul in a matter of days.
Only in recent weeks did the administration change course from its original plan. By then it was too late.
A protest in front of the White House on Sunday. President Biden’s top intelligence officers privately offered concerns about the Afghan abilities but predicted that a complete Taliban takeover was not likely for at least 18 months.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
A Sinking Feeling
Five days after the April meeting at the Pentagon, General Milley told reporters on a flight back to Washington from Hawaii that the Afghan government’s troops were “reasonably well equipped, reasonably well trained, reasonably well led.” He declined to say whether they could stand on their own without support from the United States.
“We frankly don’t know yet,” he said. “We have to wait and see how things develop over the summer.”
The president’s top intelligence officers echoed that uncertainty, privately offering concerns about the Afghan abilities. But they still predicted that a complete Taliban takeover was not likely for at least 18 months. One senior administration official, discussing classified intelligence information that had been presented to Mr. Biden, said there was no sense that the Taliban were on the march.
In fact, they were. Across Afghanistan the Taliban were methodically gathering strength by threatening tribal leaders in every community they entered with warnings to surrender or die. They collected weapons, ammunition, volunteers and money as they stormed from town to town, province to province.
In May, they launched a major offensive in Helmand Province in the south and six other areas of Afghanistan, including Ghazni and Kandahar. Back in Washington, refugee groups grew increasingly alarmed by what was happening on the ground and feared Taliban retribution against thousands of translators, interpreters and others who had helped the American war effort.
Leaders of the groups estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghans and family members were now targets for Taliban revenge. On May 6, representatives from several of the United States’ largest refugee groups, including Human Rights First, the International Refugee Assistance Project, No One Left Behind, and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service logged onto Zoom for a call with National Security Council staff members.
Displaced families in Kandahar early this month. Refugee groups estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghans and family members were now targets for Taliban revenge.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Long lines in July for the passport department in Kabul. Members of advocacy groups pleaded with White House officials for a mass evacuation of Afghans.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The groups pleaded with the White House officials for a mass evacuation of Afghans and urged them not to rely on a backlogged special visa program that could keep Afghans waiting for months or years.
There was no time for visas, they said, and Afghans had to be removed quickly to stay alive. The response was cordial but noncommittal, according to one participant, who recalled a sinking feeling afterward that the White House had no plan.
Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, veteran and ally of Mr. Biden, echoed those concerns in his own discussions with the administration. Mr. Moulton said he told anyone who would listen at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon that “they need to stop processing visas in Afghanistan and just get people to safety.”
But doing what Mr. Moulton and the refugee groups wanted would have meant launching a dangerous new military mission that would probably require a surge of troops just at the moment that Mr. Biden had announced the opposite. It also ran counter to what the Afghan government wanted, because a high-profile evacuation would amount to a vote of no confidence in the government and its forces.
Instead, the State Department sped up its efforts to process visas and clear the backlog. Officials overhauled the lengthy screening and vetting process and reduced processing time — but only to under a year. Eventually, they issued more than 5,600 special visas from April to July, the largest number in the program’s history but still a small fraction of the demand.
The Taliban continued their advance as the embassy in Kabul urged Americans to leave. On April 27, the embassy had ordered nearly 3,000 members of its staff to depart, and on May 15, officials there sent the latest in a series of warnings to Americans in the country: “U.S. Embassy strongly suggests that U.S. citizens make plans to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.”
President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan meeting with Mr. Biden in Washington in June. They expressed mutual admiration even though Mr. Ghani was fuming about the decision to pull out American troops.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
A Tense Meeting With Ghani
On June 25, Mr. Ghani met with Mr. Biden at the White House for what would become for the foreseeable future the last meeting between an American president and the Afghan leaders they had coaxed, cajoled and argued with over 20 years.
When the cameras were on at the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Ghani and Mr. Biden expressed mutual admiration even though Mr. Ghani was fuming about the decision to pull out American troops. As soon as reporters were shooed out of the room, the tension was clear.
Mr. Ghani, a former World Bank official whom Mr. Biden regarded as stubborn and arrogant, had three requests, according to an official familiar with the conversation. He wanted the United States to be “conservative” in granting exit visas to the interpreters and others, and “low key” about their leaving the country so it would not look as if America lacked faith in his government.
He also wanted to speed up security assistance and secure an agreement for the U.S. military to continue to conduct airstrikes and provide overwatch from its planes and helicopters for his troops fighting the Taliban. American officials feared that the more they were drawn into direct combat with the militant group, the more its fighters would treat American diplomats as targets.
Mr. Biden agreed to provide the air support and to not make a public show of the Afghan evacuations.
Mr. Biden had his own request for Mr. Ghani. The Afghan forces were stretched too thin, Mr. Biden told him, and should not try to fight everywhere. He repeated American advice that Mr. Ghani consolidate Afghan forces around key locations, but Mr. Ghani never took it.
Afghan commandos in July in Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan that Taliban insurgents have cut off on all sides.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Afghan Air Force providing air support during the offensive in May in Helmand Province.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Militia members and Afghan National Army soldiers in the Dehdadi district of Balkh Province, near the front line with the Taliban, in July.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
A week later, on July 2, Mr. Biden, in an ebullient mood, gathered a small group of reporters to celebrate new jobs numbers that he said showed that his economic recovery plan was working. But all the questions he received were about news from Afghanistan that the United States had abandoned Bagram Air Base, with little to no notice to the Afghans.
“It’s a rational drawdown with our allies,” he insisted, “so there’s nothing unusual about it.”
But as the questions persisted, on Afghanistan rather than the economy, he grew visibly annoyed. He recalled Mr. Ghani’s visit and said, “I think they have the capacity to be able to sustain the government,” though he added that there would have to be negotiations with the Taliban.
Then, for the first time, he was pressed on what the administration would do to save Kabul if it came under direct attack. “I want to talk about happy things, man,” he said. He insisted there was a plan.
“We have worked out an over-the-horizon capacity,” he said, meaning the administration had contingency plans should things go badly. “But the Afghans are going to have to be able to do it themselves with the Air Force they have, which we’re helping them maintain,” he said. But by then, most of the U.S. contractors who helped keep the Afghan planes flying had been withdrawn from Bagram along with the troops. Military and intelligence officials acknowledge they were worried that the Afghans would not be able to stay in the air.
By July 8, nearly all American forces were out of Afghanistan as the Taliban continued their surge across the country. In a speech that day from the White House defending his decision to leave, Mr. Biden was in a bind trying to express skepticism about the abilities of the Afghan forces while being careful not to undermine their government. Afterward, he angrily responded to a reporter’s comparison to Vietnam by insisting that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Card 1 of 5
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
But five days later, nearly two dozen American diplomats, all in the Kabul embassy, sent a memo directly to Mr. Blinken through the State Department’s “dissent” channel. The cable, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, urged that evacuation flights for Afghans begin in two weeks and that the administration move faster to register them for visas.
By late July, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command who oversees all military operations in the region, received permission from Mr. Austin to extend the deployment of the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima in the Gulf of Oman, so that the Marines on board could be close enough to get to Afghanistan to evacuate Americans. A week later, Mr. Austin was concerned enough to order the expeditionary unit on the ship — some 2,000 Marines — to disembark and wait in Kuwait so that they could reach Afghanistan quickly.
By Aug. 3, top national security officials met in Washington and heard an updated intelligence assessment: District capitals across Afghanistan were falling rapidly to the Taliban and the Afghan government could collapse in “days or weeks.” It was not the most likely outcome, but it was an increasingly plausible one.
“We’re assisting the government so that the Talibs do not think this is going to be a cakewalk, that they can conquer and take over the country,” the chief American envoy to Afghan peace talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Aspen Security Forum on Aug. 3. Days later, however, that is exactly what happened.
Taliban fighters in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sunday on a Humvee seized from Afghan forces.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The End Game
By Aug. 6, the maps in the Pentagon showed a spreading stain of areas under Taliban control. In some places, the Afghans had put up a fight, but in many others, there was just surrender.
That same day in Washington, the Pentagon reviewed worst-case scenarios. If security further deteriorated, planning — begun days after Mr. Biden’s withdrawal announcement in April — led by Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the president’s homeland security adviser, called for flying most of the embassy personnel out of the compound, and many out of the country, while a small core group of diplomats operated from a backup site at the airport.
On its face, the Kabul airport made sense as an evacuation point. Close to the center of the city, it could be as little as a 12-minute drive and a three-minute helicopter flight from the embassy — logistics that had helped reassure planners after the closure of Bagram, which was more than 50 miles and a far longer drive from Kabul.
By Wednesday, Aug. 11, the Taliban advances were so alarming that Mr. Biden asked his top national security advisers in the White House Situation Room if it was time to send the Marines to Kabul and to evacuate the embassy. He asked for an updated assessment of the situation and authorized the use of military planes for evacuating Afghan allies.
Families saying their goodbyes in the parking lot of the airport as their relatives headed for what became the last commercial flight to leave Kabul on Sunday.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times
Passengers at Kabul’s international airport on Sunday before the Taliban swept the city.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times
Overnight in Washington, Kandahar and Ghazni were falling. National security officials were awakened as early as 4 a.m. on Aug. 12 and told to gather for an urgent meeting a few hours later to provide options to the president. Once assembled, Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, told the group that the intelligence agencies could no longer assure that they could provide sufficient warning if the capital was about to be under siege.
Everyone looked at one another, one participant said, and came to the same conclusion: It was time to get out. An hour later, Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, walked into the Oval Office to deliver the group’s unanimous consensus to start an evacuation and deploy 3,000 Marines and Army soldiers to the airport.
By Saturday, Aug. 14, Mr. Biden was at Camp David for what he hoped would be the start of a 10-day vacation. Instead, he spent much of the day on dire video conference calls with his top aides.
On one of the calls, Mr. Austin urged all remaining personnel at the Kabul embassy be moved immediately to the airport. It was a stunning turnaround from what Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, had said two days earlier: “The embassy remains open, and we plan to continue our diplomatic work in Afghanistan.” Ross Wilson, the acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who was on the call, said the staff still needed 72 hours to leave.
“You have to move now,” Mr. Austin replied.
Mr. Blinken spoke by phone to Mr. Ghani the same day. The Afghan president was defiant, according to one official familiar with the conversation, and insisted that he would defend Afghanistan until the end. He did not tell Mr. Blinken that he was already planning to flee his country, which American officials first learned by reading news reports.
Later that day, the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan sent a message saying it would pay for American citizens to get out of the country, but warned that although there were reports that international commercial flights were still operating from Kabul, “seats may not be available.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken went on Sunday talk shows this week to manage the diplomatic fallout from the deepening crisis.Credit...Pool photo by Brendan Smialowski
When Mr. Biden made plans on Sunday to return to Washington to address Americans the next day, the American flag was lowered over the abandoned embassy.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
On Sunday, Mr. Ghani was gone. His departure — he would eventually turn up days later in the United Arab Emirates — and scenes of the Taliban celebrating at his presidential palace documented the collapse of the government. By the end of the day, the Taliban addressed the news media, declaring their intention to restore the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The evacuation of the Kabul embassy staff was by that point underway as diplomats rushed to board military helicopters for the short trip to the airport bunker.
Others stayed behind long enough to burn sensitive documents. Another official said embassy helicopters were blown up or otherwise destroyed, which sent a cloud of smoke over the compound.
Many Americans and Afghans could not reach the airport as Taliban fighters set up checkpoints on roads throughout the city and beat some people, leaving top F.B.I. officials concerned about the possibility that the Taliban or criminal gangs might kidnap Americans, a nightmare outcome with the U.S. military no longer in the country.
As Mr. Biden made plans Sunday evening to address Americans the next day about the situation, the American flag was lowered over the abandoned embassy. The Green Zone, once the heart of the American effort to remake the country, was again Taliban territory.
Outside the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Sunday night after the Taliban seized the capital.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Mark Mazzetti, Adam Goldman and Michael Crowley contributed reporting.
5. Taliban photo appears to mock Iwo Jima flag raising in latest propaganda push
Taliban may be a 7th century force but they have been doing pretty good at modern IO exploiting social media.
Taliban photo appears to mock Iwo Jima flag raising in latest propaganda push
The Taliban’s media wing has wasted little time releasing droves of new propaganda in the wake of its ascension to power.
In one particular image released this week, members of the Taliban’s Badri 313 Battalion appear to mock Joe Rosenthal’s iconic 1945 image of the flag raising atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Taliban propaganda photo.
In the Taliban image, fighters belonging to the Badri 313, which some are calling the Taliban’s elite commando unit, are shown wearing full camouflage uniforms, combat boots, tactical gear and night vision goggles.
Similar photographs released in recent days show Taliban fighters carrying weapons and equipment issued by the United States or allied nations, including M4 carbines and what appear to be Trijicon advanced combat optical gunsights, or ACOGs.
The images are a noticeable departure from traditional depictions of Taliban fighters, who seldom appeared with heavy weaponry or in full military garb, spoils left behind by the Afghan army.
“When an armed group gets their hands on American-made weaponry, it’s sort of a status symbol,” Elias Yousif, deputy director at the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, told The Hill Thursday. “It’s a psychological win. ... Clearly, this is an indictment of the U.S. security cooperation enterprise broadly. It really should raise a lot of concerns about what is the wider enterprise that is going on every single day, whether that’s in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia.”
Yousif added that much of the equipment would likely go unused, given the group’s dearth of training when it comes to piloting a collection of aircraft that, as of July, included 45 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and four C-130 transport planes, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters last week.
“And obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”
In an Aug. 17 video shared to Twitter depicting the Badri 313 fighters, Qari Saeed Khosty, a well-known pro-Taliban social media influencer, claimed the the Afghanistan-based detachment is merely in Kabul to ensure peace.
J.D. Simkins is a writer and editor for Military Times, and a USMC veteran.
6. Justice Department Moves to Dismiss Bowe Bergdahl’s Case to Overturn His Conviction
He did it. He admitted it. He pleaded guilty. It seems to me the judge made the right decision (which he of course based his decision on the law while I make my comment based on emotion).
Justice Department Moves to Dismiss Bowe Bergdahl’s Case to Overturn His Conviction
The U.S. government has filed a motion to dismiss Bowe Bergdahl's petition to have his military conviction and sentence overturned.
Attorneys with the Justice Department's civil division filed a motion Aug. 2 asking U.S. District Court Senior Judge Reggie Walton to throw out the case of the former Army sergeant, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy after leaving his post in Afghanistan in June 2009.
Bergdahl was a private first class on July 30, 2009, stationed at Observation Post Mest, Afghanistan. Assigned to guard duty the following day and a convoy to a nearby forward operating base, he left the post. He later said that he wanted to call attention to poor leadership in his unit and his observations of the situation in Afghanistan.
He was captured by the Taliban and held captive for five years. His departure from the remote observation base set off a massive search-and-rescue mission that involved thousands of U.S. troops, some of whom were injured in the effort.
Bergdahl has been back in the headlines since the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan. One of the leaders allegedly responsible for orchestrating the takeover, Khairullah Khairkhwa, was one of five prisoners freed from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and exchanged for Bergdahl's release in 2014, various media outlets have reported.
Bergdahl first appealed his case in 2019, arguing that negative remarks made by President Donald Trump and Sen. John McCain constituted unlawful command influence and may have unfairly swayed the court-martial proceedings.
In a 3-2 decision in August 2020, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces upheld his conviction, saying the comments did not invalidate his prosecution and pointing out that he had pleaded guilty.
In requesting that the case be dismissed, Julia Heiman, senior counsel for the Justice Department, argued that the military courts have "exhaustively considered" the unlawful command influence issue.
Heiman noted that Bergdahl raised the issue of unlawful command influence three times during court-martial proceedings and at least five times during his appeal.
"It would be an understatement to say that the military courts 'fully' considered plaintiff's claims of unlawful command influence," she wrote in the motion to dismiss.
Bergdahl also argued that the judge in the original case, Jeffrey Nance, should have recused himself from the court-martial because he had applied for a job with the Justice Department as an immigration judge.
But Heiman said that point was moot because Bergdahl waited two years after Nance was employed as an immigration attorney in Trump's Justice Department to raise the issue in his defense.
According to court documents, several soldiers were injured in the massive manhunt that ensued following Bergdahl's capture by the Taliban, including Cpl. Jonathan Morita, who was shot in the hand with a rocket-propelled grenade; Senior Chief James Hatch, who was shot in the leg with an AK-47; and Master Sgt. Mark Allen, who died in 2009 as the result of his wounds during the search, having been shot in the head.
Bergdahl's attorney, Eugene Fidell, declined to comment on the most recent filing. Bergdahl has until Oct. 4 to respond to the Justice Department's motion to dismiss.
7. Defense Secretary Orders US Airlines to Help With Evacuation
i had no idea this is only the 3d time. Perhaps we are starting to move toward a whole of society approach to the Afghan problem.
Defense Secretary Orders US Airlines to Help With Evacuation
It's only the third time in history that the U.S. airlines have been mobilized by the military.
By MARCUS WEISGERBER and TARA COPP
AUGUST 20, 2021
Updated: Aug. 22, 8:26 a.m. ET
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered the Civil Reserve Air Fleet to activate, requesting 18 aircraft from the U.S. airlines to help in the evacuation of Afghans and Americans.
It marks the third time in history that the military has mobilized the U.S. airlines to help with a military evacuation, and may become part of the largest airlift evacuation in U.S. history. Some 22,000 Americans and Afghans have been flown out of Afghanistan since July; 17,000 in the past week alone.
Austin’s order calls for American Airlines, Atlas Air, and Delta Air Lines to provide three aircraft, the Pentagon said in an emailed statement on Sunday morning. Omni Air and Hawaiian Airlines must each provide two aircraft. United Airlines will provide four planes.
The civilian airliners will not go into Kabul. Military aircraft will continue to airlift passengers out of Afghanistan’s capital to staging bases in the Middle East. The commercial airlines will take the second leg, flying them to the U.S. or other temporary housing locations, such as Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
The Civil Reserve Air Fleet is "a cooperative, voluntary program involving the [Transportation Department], DoD and the U.S. civil air carrier industry in a partnership to augment DoD aircraft capability during a national defense related crisis," as the Transportation department's website puts it. "Air carriers volunteer their aircraft to the CRAF program through contractual agreements with U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), located at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. In return, the participating carriers are given preference in carrying commercial peacetime cargo and passenger traffic for DoD."
On Friday night, U.S. Transportation Command told U.S. airlines that it might activate the CRAF.
“A warning order informs industry partners of a potential activation but can be rescinded if the Defense Department deems additional aircraft are not required to meet mission requirements. Working with military and industry leaders, U.S. Transportation Command is supporting efforts to transport U.S. citizens, Special Immigrant Visa applicants, and other at-risk individuals from Afghanistan,” said Transportation Command spokesman Navy Capt. John Perkins.
Earlier on Friday, Brig. Gen. Dan DeVoe, the commander overseeing U.S. Air Force aerial refueling tankers, acknowledged in a call with reporters that flying planes directly to the United States would require multiple refuelings and reduce the number of aircraft going in and out of Afghanistan.
“I’m taking [the C-17s] out of the proverbial fight, if you will, for a longer period of time before I get them back in,” DeVoe said. “[That], in the longer run, reduces the number of evacuees that I can get out of Afghanistan.”
The C-17s had been flying to Al Udeid Air Base, a large base outside of Doha, Qatar, used by the U.S. military, but the processing facility there reached capacity Friday.
Germany said the U.S. could ferry evacuees through Ramstein Air Base—another facility already used by the U.S. military—as a stop on the way back to the United States. The Air Force posted pictures on its Facebook page showing Ramstein being readied for Afghan refugees. The Pentagon said Friday that it was preparing to house 22,000 Afghans at three U.S. Army bases in the United States.
The Civil Reserve Air Fleet is made up of commercial aircraft that the airlines, cargo, and charter carriers make available to the military during an emergency. The consortium was created in the 1950s to assist the military in an emergency by flying people and supplies. The Pentagon has only activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet twice: in the leadups to the 1990 and 2003 Iraq wars.
All of the major U.S. airlines—including United, American, and Delta—are part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet.
“The DoD’s ability to project military forces is inextricably linked to commercial industry, which provides critical transportation capacity as well as global networks to meet day-to-day and contingency requirements,” the Pentagon said Sunday. “Utilizing commercial partners expands USTRANSCOM’s global reach as well as access to valuable commercial intermodal transportation systems. The DoD’s ability to project military forces is inextricably linked to commercial industry, which provides critical transportation capacity as well as global networks to meet day-to-day and contingency requirements.”
In addition to Civil Reserve Air Fleet mobilization, the U.S. government has other options for getting the evacuees back to the United States on commercial airliners, according to current and former military and defense officials.
One is through what officials call commercial augmentation, where the Pentagon hires an airline, or airlines to fly their own planes. Another is for the State Department to contract directly with commercial airlines. Unlike the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, which exclusively uses U.S. air carriers, the State Department can contract with U.S. or foreign airlines. The State Department did this when it airlifted 15,000 American citizens out of Lebanon during the 2006 war.
Some large airlines have grounded their largest, widebody aircraft, the type most useful for this mission, due to international travel restrictions put in place fordue to the COVID-19 pandemic. Emirates, the Dubai-based airline, has grounded dozens of its Airbus A380 super jumbo airliners during the pandemic. Etihad, the Abu Dhabi-based carrier, has grounded all 10 of its A380s, as has Qatar Airways. It’s unclear how quickly they could return to service if the U.S. contracted either carrier.
8. US credibility with military allies at risk over Afghanistan pullout
As someone tweeted on the interwebs "credibility is not a thing in international relations, only interests are."
Excerpts:
The Biden administration has sought to separate U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific from the reality in Afghanistan, but the symbolism of the American military pullout is still likely to impact the calculation for American partners over whether they can trust the U.S. in the long run.
That message is almost sure to be reinforced with this week’s visit to Singapore and Vietnam by Vice President Harris, whose trip was previously scheduled and announced last month.
“I think most people… observing this understand the different challenges in different regions and, frankly, that there's a difference between ensuring open sea lanes in Asia, which is a priority for the United States, and the continued involvement in another country’s civil war,” a senior administration official stressed in response to reporters' questions about the optics of the vice president’s trip amid the turmoil in Afghanistan, in a call held Thursday.
“So, I think, for all of those reasons, we are confident that our partners throughout the Indo-Pacific see the United States as a steadfast partner.”
US credibility with military allies at risk over Afghanistan pullout
The Hill · by Laura Kelly · August 22, 2021
The messy withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and the subsequent scramble to protect civilians who aided the American war effort, is triggering a ripple effect of concern among allies who rely on the United States for military protection.
The Pentagon has thousands of troops stationed in South Korea, Japan, Germany and elsewhere around the world. Asian allies in particular have indicated some concerns in recent days over whether the quick military exit from Afghanistan could one day happen in their country.
Those concerns have been exacerbated in places like Taiwan: Not only is there the looming threat of Chinese military action, but some now worry Beijing could be emboldened by the events in Afghanistan.
In a sign of how the anxiety has broken through, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan faced questions this past week about what the Afghanistan withdrawal means for Israel, South Korea and Taiwan. Reporters also questioned State Department officials about the potential fallout for U.S. allies and the possible decline in credibility.
President Biden and his top officials have been put on the defensive, emphasizing that the U.S. stands behind its commitments to allies while fielding questions from reporters about whether American national and political interests trump stability and security partnerships with foreign allies.
“I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world,” Biden said during a Friday press conference.
Sullivan, in a briefing with reporters two days earlier, argued that 20 years worth of commitment to Afghanistan, costing thousands of U.S. lives and billions of dollars, underscored America’s willingness to stand by its allies, but that it was eventually time for the Afghan people to “stand up for themselves.”
“We believe that our commitments to our allies and partners are sacrosanct and always have been,” Sullivan said. “We believe our commitment to Taiwan and to Israel remains as strong as it's ever been.”
Such pronouncements by the administration — bluntly blaming Afghan security forces for the Taliban takeover — have elicited striking pushback in the United Kingdom, arguably America’s closest ally and key partner over the two-decade war in Afghanistan.
“To see their commander-in-chief call into question the courage of men I fought with – to claim that they ran – is shameful,” U.K. MP Tom Tugendhat, the conservative chair of the foreign affairs committee and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, said during a contentious Parliamentarian session on Wednesday.
“Those who have not fought for the colors they fly should be careful about criticizing those who have,” he added.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price, during a briefing with reporters at the State Department on Wednesday, appeared caught off guard when questioned on the remarks coming from U.K. officials, at first confusing criticism coming from British lawmakers at their government and not the U.S.
“I’m going to let the British Government speak to their decisions when it comes to their presence on the ground,” Price said in response to reporters' questions. “What I can say is that our coordination with the British Government, with all of our NATO allies, has been consistent, it has been clear, and there has been a consensus on this.”
Still, the question of American commitments and credibility, is particularly prescient for South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, where U.S. military partnerships are seen as a bulwark against China’s regional ambitions and the persistent nuclear threat from North Korea.
In a timely coincidence, the State Department on Friday announced that its special envoy for North Korea, Sung Kim, would travel to South Korea in the coming days to demonstrate close coordination between Washington and Seoul.
Such public statements of commitments and personal visits impact how allies view the U.S., and they need to be done regularly, said James Person, lecturer of Korea Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
“I’ve spoken with folks in [the Defense Department] who tell you, ‘This is the type of thing you have to do on a regular basis, just to provide these reassurances… It’s important every now and then to reaffirm, more than in the one-on-one meetings between diplomats and military officials, but just to more publicly demonstrate that continued commitment,” he said.
There is historical precedent for how a crisis in U.S. credibility can have real-world consequences, Person noted.
The withdrawal from Vietnam and the fall of Saigon had a direct impact on South Korea expressing its intent to develop a domestic, nuclear weapons program — looking to prepare itself against the U.S. possibly abandoning them.
“The withdrawal from Vietnam demonstrated to the South Koreans that the U.S. was not a credible ally and that if push came to shove, they may actually betray the South Koreans as well,” Person said.
Some experts argue the influence of Afghanistan on its Asian allies is overstated.
Michael Green, who focused on Asian affairs during his time in the George W. Bush administration, said the way the evacuation of Afghanistan is unfolding, paired with an apparent lack of consultation among allies before it started, has likely “rattled” officials in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
But he noted the Biden administration has made clear that part of its rationale for getting out of Afghanistan was so it could focus on more pressing foreign policy issues like China’s growing influence.
“The administration is focused like a laser on competition with China,” Green said, adding that the White House has staffed up on Asian affairs personnel compared to when he worked in the Bush White House.
The Biden administration has sought to separate U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific from the reality in Afghanistan, but the symbolism of the American military pullout is still likely to impact the calculation for American partners over whether they can trust the U.S. in the long run.
That message is almost sure to be reinforced with this week’s visit to Singapore and Vietnam by Vice President Harris, whose trip was previously scheduled and announced last month.
“I think most people… observing this understand the different challenges in different regions and, frankly, that there's a difference between ensuring open sea lanes in Asia, which is a priority for the United States, and the continued involvement in another country’s civil war,” a senior administration official stressed in response to reporters' questions about the optics of the vice president’s trip amid the turmoil in Afghanistan, in a call held Thursday.
“So, I think, for all of those reasons, we are confident that our partners throughout the Indo-Pacific see the United States as a steadfast partner.”
The Hill · by Laura Kelly · August 22, 2021
9. Column: The fall of Kabul doesn't need to spell the end of U.S. global power
And the same comment applies to this article as well: As someone tweeted on the inter ebs "credibility is not a thing in international relations, only interests are."
Excerpts:
There’s repair work to do beyond Afghanistan, too.
“We’ve got to show that it would be wrong to see American foreign policy through the lens of Afghanistan,” Richard N. Haass, president of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations and a former top State Department official, told me.
The United States has more important interests that need attention and allies that need reassurance, he said.
“The most important thing is to deter our major foes,” he said, referring to China, Russia and Iran.
“This is a moment to strengthen forces in Europe, mount more freedom of navigation operations [by the U.S. Navy] in the South China Sea,” he said. “This is a good time to say we’re serious about our commitment to Taiwan,” which China periodically threatens.
If anything, Haass and other foreign policy veterans say, the questions about American credibility are likely to make Biden react more strongly to the next few challenges overseas.
Column: The fall of Kabul doesn't need to spell the end of U.S. global power
WASHINGTON —
Amid the chaos in Kabul, politicians and pundits have declared the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan a defeat from which U.S. influence may never recover.
“Biden’s credibility is now shot,” wrote Gideon Rachman, chief oracle of Britain’s Financial Times.
“A grave blow to America’s standing,” warned the Economist.
But take a deep breath and remember some history.
When South Vietnam collapsed after a war that involved four times as many U.S. troops, many drew the same conclusion: The age of U.S. global power was over.
Less than 15 years later, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War began to end, and the United States soon stood as the world’s only superpower.
The lesson: A debacle like the defeat in Kabul — or the one in Saigon two generations earlier — doesn’t always prevent a powerful country from marshaling its resources and succeeding.
I’m not dismissing the tragedy that has befallen the Afghans or the damage that U.S. credibility has suffered. When President Biden told a news conference that he had “seen no questioning of our credibility from allies,” he sounded as if he was in denial — or, perhaps worse, out of touch.
No questioning? How about the question from Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the British Parliament’s defense committee: “Whatever happened to ‘America is back’?”
Or the complaint from Armin Laschet, the German conservative who could be his country’s leader after elections next month: “The greatest debacle NATO has experienced since its founding.”
Whether he likes it or not, Biden has repair work to do.
The first step, already underway, is making sure the endgame in Kabul doesn’t get any worse.
That means keeping U.S. troops on the ground until every American is out, as Biden has promised. It also requires an energetic effort to evacuate Afghans who worked with the U.S. government and other institutions, even if that requires risking the lives of some American troops. Those Afghans trusted us; if we abandon them, it will be a long time before we can credibly ask the same of anyone else.
And, of course, the administration needs to prevent Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups from replanting themselves in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. If the United States fails at that — the original reason we invaded the country almost 20 years ago — Biden’s decision to withdraw will justly be judged a fiasco.
There’s repair work to do beyond Afghanistan, too.
“We’ve got to show that it would be wrong to see American foreign policy through the lens of Afghanistan,” Richard N. Haass, president of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations and a former top State Department official, told me.
The United States has more important interests that need attention and allies that need reassurance, he said.
“The most important thing is to deter our major foes,” he said, referring to China, Russia and Iran.
“This is a moment to strengthen forces in Europe, mount more freedom of navigation operations [by the U.S. Navy] in the South China Sea,” he said. “This is a good time to say we’re serious about our commitment to Taiwan,” which China periodically threatens.
If anything, Haass and other foreign policy veterans say, the questions about American credibility are likely to make Biden react more strongly to the next few challenges overseas.
“The most intriguing question is what effect this episode has on Biden’s thinking,” suggested Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Will he think: ‘I’ve got to be tougher with the Iranians now? Do I have to signal to a country like Taiwan that I’m prepared to protect American interests there?’”
But the notion that American influence has been fatally damaged is overblown, he argued.
“There have been many other instances in which U.S. credibility has been diminished, but our phone continues to ring,” Miller said.
Biden and his aides already know most of this. The premises of his foreign policy — reviving U.S. domestic strength, revitalizing U.S. alliances, and focusing on vital interests like China and Russia — provide a foundation for recovery.
“My dad used to have an expression: If everything is equally important to you, nothing is important to you,” the president said last week. “We should be focusing on where the threat is the greatest.”
The test Biden faces now is whether he can execute that strategy — and show that he’s credible where it matters most — more successfully than in his botched withdrawal from an unwinnable war.
10. The Taliban Takeover: Plan Now for the Next Crisis in Afghanistan
Anticipate.
Excerpts:
No one can be sure what elements of the Taliban will take real power as it consolidates it rule, but all of these factors make it likely that it will quickly learn it needs outside trade and investment, a reasonable degree of international recognition, and substantial aid to deal with the challenges it faces at even a minimal level. A U.S. effort to support an aid plan might well give the U.S. substantial considerable leverage, particularly if the U.S. provides such aid in an international context, and it does not try to impose all of its values.
Such an effort will have to be conditional on the Taliban being willing to compromise in some areas and its agreement to avoid any links to active international terrorism. This may well prove to be impossible, but the U.S. should at least try.
The U.S. should also accept the fact that it too will have to make awkward compromises – some of which will be unpleasant to say the least. The role of women is only one such issue. The future of all Afghan youth and almost all Afghans with modern secular education is likely to be difficult regardless of gender. The United States does, however, need to be realistic, it needs to accept some such compromises, and it needs to find the best way it can exert some degree of influence in ways that can protect the Afghan people and lead the Taliban to evolve as soon as possible. Treating the Taliban as an isolated enemy will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will ensure that the Taliban not only is hostile, but that the end state will involve the worst possible results for all of the Afghan people.
The Taliban Takeover: Plan Now for the Next Crisis in Afghanistan
Anthony H. Cordesman
Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy
csis.org · by Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy · August 20, 2021
August 17, 2021
The U.S. already faces a crisis over managing its evacuation from Afghanistan, over how to treat Afghans that aided the U.S. in the war, and over which refugees it should allow to enter the United States. This crisis, however, is only the prelude to a far more serious crisis: How will the Taliban govern and what can be done to protect the nearly 38 to 40 million people that will now remain in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s rule.
Humanitarian aid is clearly not the answer. Such aid is necessary, and it can be an important bridge to a more stable future for those caught up in the actual fighting and in the immediate social and economic impact following the collapse of the previous Afghan government. The real challenge, however, is what can be done – if anything – to moderate the way in which the Taliban governs, shapes the Afghan economy, creates a new justice system, and enforces its interpretation of Islamic law and customs. It will be to limit repression, violence, and the tolerance of terrorism and attacks on targets outside Afghanistan.
Here, U.S. leverage is clearly limited. It is the defeated enemy. It is the symbol of the reforms and changes the Taliban rejects. It is not a major trading partner or source of commercial investment, and its definition of human rights and the rule of law is fundamentally different from the values the Taliban has lived by and has shown so far as it takes power. The U.S. also has already shown signs of turning away from any further involvement or challenges in the country. It never proposed any credible peace plan or future options for its involvement in Afghanistan after the first peace agreement in February 2020, and President Biden has rejected “nation building” without mentioning any need to consider how the U.S. will treat – or try to influence the new regime.
There are some forms of negative leverage open to the United States. It can threaten to attack any terrorist groups that launch attacks outside Afghanistan. It can withhold recognition of the new government. It can pressure other states, including Afghanistan’s neighbors. It can cut off the aid that funded some 80% of the former government’s operations and security efforts. And, it can introduce yet another mix of sanctions to put maximum pressure on whatever power structure emerges out of the Taliban conquest.
These negative options can be useful tools when they are used in moderation and tied to more positive options. So far, however, they have largely failed. Sanctions and “maximum pressure” have hurt much of the population of Iran (80 million) and North Korea (26 million), but they have done nothing to force these regimes to halt their repression and military build-ups or to compromise with the United States. Historically, they have been a way of avoiding difficult states, although generally at the cost of making them more active enemies. They also lead to a U.S. focus on security options and empty rhetoric about legitimacy and human rights with little – if any – benefits for the people of the country.
The alternative is to take a more positive approach, although one that is clearly conditional and has an actual impact on Taliban behavior. One approach is to carefully plan and execute diplomatic recognition. Dialogue alone is highly unlikely to change much, but it does help to produce better understanding even if it only results in small compromises and changes in Taliban behavior – small changes can still help many Afghans. Such relations will need to be conditional and frank. Twenty years of reassuring illusions did not help with a friendly client regime. Glossing over differences regarding security policy and human rights with the Taliban are more likely to make thing worse for the Afghan people than better.
Economic aid is perhaps the most important option, and the Taliban will inherit a failed state in a deep economic crisis. The Ghani government often issued statements and claims with all the right intentions and advanced good plans in outline form, but it was a corrupt, incompetent, and a self-seeking economic disaster.
There are few reliable figures, but the World Bank reports that the poverty rate had zoomed after 2014 and increased by over 50% by 2019 – putting more than half the population below the poverty line. The current data on the economy do not adequately reflect the impact of Covid-19 or the drought, but the CIA World Factbook reports that the trade deficit was nearly a third of the GDP. Far too little has been done to reduce barriers to the private sector’s development and the size of the government has been sharply inflated and was dependent on outside aid for 80% of its funds.
The rule of law was only marginally functional, and the government and law enforcement did more to extort than support. A corrupt government and elite disguised the fact that real GDP per capita was some of the lowest in the world (ranking a low 213th out of 228 rated countries). Unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment, could not be measured accurately but were obviously critical problems. Public debt had reached one of the highest percentages of any country (202nd out of 228). Drought and narcotrafficking were critical problems, large amounts of aid were wasted and stolen, and many claims of progress had no real justification.
The Taliban may have governed in the past, but it was forced to seriously govern even at the local District levels for two decades. It has no cadres that have practical experience in dealing with these problems in today’s Afghanistan – and this is a very different Afghanistan.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that Afghanistan had a population of only 21.6 million in 2000. Today, 41% of its population is under 14 years and has had far better education for both sexes and will seek far better living standards. It is also increasing at very high levels in spite of war and will rise to 45.5 million by 2030. To the extent that Afghanistan has a modern economic sector, its urban population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2021, and Kabul alone had well over 10% of the entire population before the sudden Taliban conquest began.
No one can be sure what elements of the Taliban will take real power as it consolidates it rule, but all of these factors make it likely that it will quickly learn it needs outside trade and investment, a reasonable degree of international recognition, and substantial aid to deal with the challenges it faces at even a minimal level. A U.S. effort to support an aid plan might well give the U.S. substantial considerable leverage, particularly if the U.S. provides such aid in an international context, and it does not try to impose all of its values.
Such an effort will have to be conditional on the Taliban being willing to compromise in some areas and its agreement to avoid any links to active international terrorism. This may well prove to be impossible, but the U.S. should at least try.
The U.S. should also accept the fact that it too will have to make awkward compromises – some of which will be unpleasant to say the least. The role of women is only one such issue. The future of all Afghan youth and almost all Afghans with modern secular education is likely to be difficult regardless of gender. The United States does, however, need to be realistic, it needs to accept some such compromises, and it needs to find the best way it can exert some degree of influence in ways that can protect the Afghan people and lead the Taliban to evolve as soon as possible. Treating the Taliban as an isolated enemy will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It will ensure that the Taliban not only is hostile, but that the end state will involve the worst possible results for all of the Afghan people.
Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has served as a consultant on Afghanistan to the United States Department of Defense and the United States Department of State.
Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).
© 2021 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.
csis.org · by Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy · August 20, 2021
11. U.S. Considers Ordering Commercial Airlines to Help in Afghan Evacuation
The headline and article is old news, except for this excerpt regarding terminal location for the flow of Afghan refugees.
Dulles International Airport, outside of Washington, D.C., is expected to become the central processing site for a surge of Afghan evacuees, officials said.
Pentagon officials are preparing at least one more U.S. base, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, to begin to receive Afghan refugees. But as the crisis in Kabul unfolds and other nations have grown wary of housing large numbers of Afghan evacuees, the U.S. has begun taking a harder look at its own facilities in the U.S. and overseas, officials said.
A tent city is being erected at the New Jersey base and medical supplies, food, water, restrooms, lighting and other equipment are being installed there now, officials said. Evacuees could be there by next week, they said.
Other bases being studied as potential housing sites include Fort Pickett, Va., Camp Atterbury, Ind., Camp Hunter Liggett, Calif., and Fort Chaffee, Ark. Pentagon officials are also looking at American bases in Japan, Korea, Germany, Kosovo, Bahrain and Italy, officials said.
The Pentagon earlier had identified Fort Lee, Va., Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin as bases that were to begin housing refugees.
The overseas locations might cause some diplomatic friction.
U.S. Considers Ordering Commercial Airlines to Help in Afghan Evacuation
The Biden administration is making preparations to invoke an emergency civil aviation program, while adding to the number of U.S. bases that can house Afghan evacuees
WSJ · by Gordon Lubold and Alison Sider
Officials are considering alternatives for ramping up the evacuation effort, which include expanding the number of bases in the region to reduce overcrowding, officials said, a move that could augment the use of civilian airlines or avert the need for them. Additional military bases in the U.S. also are being designated to provide housing for arriving Afghan evacuees.
The civilian planes wouldn’t fly in or out of Kabul, which fell to Taliban rule Aug. 15, officials said. Instead, commercial airline pilots and crews would help to ferry the thousands of Afghans and others who are stranded at U.S. bases in Qatar, Bahrain and Germany.
The involvement of the commercial airliners would relieve the pressure on those bases, which are fast filling up with Afghan evacuees as the U.S. expands efforts to fly them out of the airport in Kabul. Thousands of Afghans at risk of retaliation from the Taliban because of their association with U.S. forces have flooded the airport in the past week.
Afghanistan Under the Taliban
As thousands of Afghans tried to flee the country, the Taliban moved to consolidate control while facing protests against their rule.
Taliban fighters patrol the Afghan capital of Kabul on Saturday as daily life continues.
Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
1 of 12
•••••
1 of 12
Show Caption
Taliban fighters patrol the Afghan capital of Kabul on Saturday as daily life continues.
Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The U.S. Transportation Command, part of the military, has provided an initial notification to airlines that they may be told to implement the reserve fleet, the U.S. officials said. White House, Pentagon and Commerce officials hadn’t yet issued final approvals for its use, and alternative options still could be instituted, the officials said. The possible use of CRAF hasn’t been previously reported.
In another aviation move, the Transportation Department issued an order Friday granting foreign carriers that wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to land in the U.S. blanket authority to conduct U.S.-government-sponsored evacuation flights to U.S. airports, until Sept. 30.
Carriers were notified Friday night that CRAF could potentially be activated, according to an industry official. Airlines also have held discussions about voluntary efforts to support the government’s airlift efforts, the official said.
The administration is considering a Stage 1 implementation of CRAF, involving a limited number of aircraft. A Stage 2 implementation could mean as many as 100 aircraft and could have significant impact on the airline industry, officials said.
Newsletter Sign-up
Capital Journal
Scoops, analysis and insights driving Washington from the WSJ's D.C. bureau.
SUBSCRIBE
An official from U.S. Transportation Command said Saturday that the Defense Department hadn’t yet activated the civilian fleet. “U.S. Transportation Command issued a warning order to U.S. carriers Friday night on the possible activation of CRAF,” said Capt. John Perkins, a spokesman for the command.
The warning order tells industry of a potential activation of the order but can be rescinded if the additional aircraft aren’t needed, Capt. Perkins said.
In a message to members, the union that represents flight attendants at United Airlines Holdings Inc. said Saturday that the airline had started the process of allowing flight attendants to bid to work flights under the CRAF program. Pay is typically higher for these flights, union officials said.
“In order for United to be prepared in the event the United States Department of Defense advises United Airlines CRAF has been activated, bidding for CRAF operations must be undertaken immediately and over a very abbreviated time period,” the union wrote to members.
The U.S. military has deployed dozens of C-17 cargo aircraft to fly evacuees out of Kabul. Those jets aren’t considered suitable for the long ride over the Atlantic to U.S. bases, officials said. Many have had seats removed to create more space for evacuees and a typical C-17 has only two onboard restrooms.
Some planes are carrying about 400 people, and one military jet took off with more than 600 evacuees, officials have said. Such conditions, one military official said, are untenable for longer flights.
“It’s all about increasing velocity and moving the most number of evacuees as quickly and as efficiently as possible,” said the official. “We want to utilize our gray-tail [military] aircraft to take evacuees to Europe and the Middle East, then they will unload there and get aboard these wide-bodied aircraft with 300 or more seats that will more comfortably fly across the pond.”
CRAF, which was used during U.S. military action in the Middle East in 1990 and 2003, is authorized under the Defense Production Act. That act was used last year to require companies to provide some equipment needed to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, although President Donald Trump had resisted calls from some governors and lawmakers to use it more widely.
President Biden on Friday said the U.S. has made progress in speeding up the pace of evacuations in recent days.
Photo: Chris Kleponis - Pool via CNP/Zuma Press
U.S. officials said the rarely used CRAF has been under consideration in recent days as a way to relieve crowding at the bases in Qatar, Bahrain and Germany, which have quickly reached capacity and on Friday forced a pause for several hours in evacuation flights out of Kabul.
Dulles International Airport, outside of Washington, D.C., is expected to become the central processing site for a surge of Afghan evacuees, officials said.
Pentagon officials are preparing at least one more U.S. base, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, to begin to receive Afghan refugees. But as the crisis in Kabul unfolds and other nations have grown wary of housing large numbers of Afghan evacuees, the U.S. has begun taking a harder look at its own facilities in the U.S. and overseas, officials said.
A tent city is being erected at the New Jersey base and medical supplies, food, water, restrooms, lighting and other equipment are being installed there now, officials said. Evacuees could be there by next week, they said.
Other bases being studied as potential housing sites include Fort Pickett, Va., Camp Atterbury, Ind., Camp Hunter Liggett, Calif., and Fort Chaffee, Ark. Pentagon officials are also looking at American bases in Japan, Korea, Germany, Kosovo, Bahrain and Italy, officials said.
The Pentagon earlier had identified Fort Lee, Va., Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin as bases that were to begin housing refugees.
WSJ · by Gordon Lubold and Alison Sider
12. Opinion | I Can’t Forget the Lessons of Vietnam. Neither Should You.
Excerpt:
Joe Biden, a senator in 1975, surely remembers that the majority of Americans did not want to accept Southeast Asian refugees. Nevertheless, Congress did the right thing, and the subsequent flourishing of Southeast Asian American communities throughout the United States has shown the wisdom of that moral decision. While the politics of these two moments in America’s flawed wars differ, the morality does not. Tens of thousands of Afghans believed in the American promise of ushering in freedom, democracy and an open, tolerant society. And now, they’re stuck. For Afghans, the war hasn’t ended simply because we, the United States, declared it to be over.
An American official punching a man in an effort to knock him from the doorway of an airplane overloaded with refugees hoping to flee Nha Trang, Vietnam, on April 1, 1975.Credit...Bettmann, via Reuters
A U.S. service member pointing his gun toward an Afghan man as thousands of people poured into the airport in Kabul in an effort to flee Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban.
The nightmare doesn’t end for Afghans after the last American leaves. Our obligation to help Afghans in mortal danger extends beyond the present moment and well into the years ahead. The United States now must take the lead in evacuating and welcoming tens of thousands of its Afghan allies. Otherwise the words of another young Afghan woman contemplating the future of her country will be painfully true: “We don’t count because we were born in Afghanistan … No one cares about us. We’ll die slowly in history.”
Opinion | I Can’t Forget the Lessons of Vietnam. Neither Should You.
Guest Essay
I Can’t Forget the Lessons of Vietnam. Neither Should You.
Aug. 19, 2021
South Vietnamese civilians scaling a U.S. Embassy wall in a desperate attempt to leave the country aboard evacuation flights from Saigon in 1975.Credit...Neal Ulevich/Associated Press
By
Mr. Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” and its sequel, “The Committed.” He is a professor of English, American studies and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.
I was 4 years old when Saigon fell, so I do not remember any of it. I count myself lucky, since many Vietnamese who survived the end of that war were greatly traumatized by it. The collapse of the American-backed Southern regime began in my Central Highlands hometown, Ban Me Thuot, in March 1975. In less than two months, all of South Vietnam capitulated to the North Vietnamese. Soldiers fled in chaotic retreat among civilians. My mother, brother and I were among them. We left behind my adopted sister. After walking nearly 200 kilometers to escape the advancing North Vietnamese army, the three of us made it to the seaside city of Nha Trang, where we managed to find a boat to take us to Saigon where my father was.
We were lucky; many others weren’t. My brother remembers dead Southern paratroopers hanging from trees. In Nha Trang, some people fell to their deaths in the sea, trying to clamber onto boats. In Da Nang, desperate soldiers crammed into the luggage compartments of a plane, while the ones left behind threw grenades and fired at the plane.
Images of bodies falling, of people running desperately, are now with us again, from Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. Comparisons to Vietnam began early in America’s misadventure in Afghanistan: It was classic mission creep, a quagmire, another forever war. The pessimism was warranted. Two decades, billions of dollars and tens of thousands of deaths later, Taliban forces are now in Kabul, having secured control of the country with dizzying speed. As much as some American leaders resist it, the analogy presents itself again, with the fall of Saigon and resulting catastrophe foreshadowing the possible fate of tens of thousands of Afghans. It is not something the Biden administration is interested in hearing. “This is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said over the weekend.
True, the Taliban are not the People’s Army of Vietnam, and the American evacuation of Saigon, chaotic as it was, was better planned than the American endgame for Kabul. But the Saigon analogy is important because the urgency and the human disaster are similar as is the role that the United States and other nations must play to shape those fates of Afghans. It was therefore disappointing to hear President Biden on Monday defend his Afghanistan policy by focusing on two alternatives — stay and fight or withdraw — while laying the blame primarily at the feet of the Afghan government and army. Blaming Afghans obscures a history of American miscalculation starting with President George W. Bush, and allows Mr. Biden to treat the evacuation of Afghan allies as an afterthought rather than a priority.
For these civilians, the war hasn’t ended, and won’t end for many years. Their future — and Mr. Biden’s role in determining whether it’s one of resettlement and new beginnings or one of fear and misery — is what will determine whether America can still claim it will always stand by its allies.
As a scholar of memory and a novelist who has written about the Vietnam War, I have often thought of 1975 and its consequences. I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee community so deeply shaped by the fall of Saigon that the community calls that month Black April, which is commemorated every year. So when I read this account by an anonymous Afghan journalist in recently captured Taliban territory, it resonated completely with all the stories I have heard from Vietnamese refugees: “My whole life has been obliterated in just a few days. I am so scared and I don’t know what will happen to me. Will I ever go home? Will I see my parents again? Where will I go? The highway is blocked in both directions. How will I survive?”
Her questions are especially haunting as images of Afghans trying to escape for their lives, crowding Kabul’s airport, fill the airwaves. Her questions were probably similar to ones my parents and many other Vietnamese refugees asked of themselves.
Again, we were the lucky ones: My family tried to flee by air but could not make it to Saigon’s airport. We tried the U.S. Embassy and could not get past the enormous crowd. Finally, we found a barge at the dock, left Saigon and eventually made it to the United States, where we restarted our lives. We were civilians, but this was a war story.
People struggled to cross the boundary wall of Hamid Karzai International Airport to flee the country after the Taliban took control of Kabul, Afghanistan.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock
Americans like to imagine war stories featuring their heroic soldiers, sailors and pilots. The reality is that refugee stories are also war stories. Yet despite a growing sense of antiwar sentiment in the country, the United States has found it hard to give up its habits of war, partly because of the military-industrial complex built for war, and partly because even antiwar stories featuring the military still center on the seductive glamour of firepower, hardware, heroism and masculinity. Anthony Swofford, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, recalls in his memoir, “Jarhead,” how he and his fellow Marines experienced an almost sexual ecstasy in watching the battle scenes from the movie “Apocalypse Now,” even the ones depicting the killing of American soldiers.
There is neither power nor glory in the stories of civilians killed or maimed or forced to flee or orphaned by war. It is in civilian experiences, similar to what many Afghans are now going through, that we truly find war stories. We keep hearing that Americans are suffering from war fatigue — but how many stories do we read or hear or see about American soldiers at war compared to stories of refugees created by wars led by the United States? Civilian war stories disturb our mind-set of conducting perpetual warfare as an unquestioned American privilege.
Americans also like to think that wars end when they are declared to end. But the aftereffects of war continue for years. In Vietnam, the victorious Vietnamese imprisoned untold numbers of South Vietnamese soldiers, politicians, priests, sex workers and other people in re-education camps, where many died of illness, starvation and overwork. Others were executed. Prison sentences ran from months to more than a decade.
Many of those prisoners probably felt like the Afghan journalist describing her bewilderment at being turned into a refugee and at the mercy of the Taliban: “I remember screaming and crying, women and children around me were running in every direction. It felt like we were all stuck in a boat and there was a big storm around us.” She is speaking metaphorically, but in the decades after the fall of Saigon, nearly a million Vietnamese fled by sea. Tens of thousands perished during the desperate attempts. The truly lucky ones made it to refugee camps and then to host countries. The less lucky ones lingered in those refugee camps for years and even decades. They are part of the human toll that continued to grow for years after the official end of the war. This is what the Afghan people face, with the certainty that as the Taliban seize Kabul, there will be potentially terrible recriminations for those who allied with the Americans.
One hoped that as we saw the increasingly desperate pleas of Afghans over the weekend that the comparison to the fall of Saigon would provoke greater urgency on the part of the Biden administration to do its duty and help its Afghan allies escape the country.
Yet, the danger of the Saigon analogy is that it could also simply allow Americans to view the tragedy in Afghanistan as many viewed the end of the Southern Vietnamese regime — as a spectacle, a singular moment in history.
In reality, the fall of Saigon ushered in many more years of fear and desperation for the defeated. With Afghanistan, Mr. Biden committed to evacuating an unspecified number of vulnerable Afghans to safety. And perhaps in response to anti-immigrant sentiment in the country, the United States is also trying to find homes for many Afghan refugees in other countries. This is not enough. “The people of Afghanistan do not deserve this,” the novelist Khaled Hosseini said on Twitter. “The United States has a moral obligation. Admit as many Afghan refugees as possible.”
History is happening again, and again as tragedy and farce. The wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan happened as a result of American hubris, and in both cases Americans mostly focused on the political costs of war for them. But in each case, the Vietnamese (and Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong), and now the Afghans, have paid the much greater toll in human suffering. In April 1975, the United States recognized its moral responsibility and evacuated about 130,000 Vietnamese people, and then accepted hundreds of thousands more from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in subsequent decades. This is what must happen now, and anything short of such a vision of responsibility and hospitality will compound the American failure in Afghanistan.
Joe Biden, a senator in 1975, surely remembers that the majority of Americans did not want to accept Southeast Asian refugees. Nevertheless, Congress did the right thing, and the subsequent flourishing of Southeast Asian American communities throughout the United States has shown the wisdom of that moral decision. While the politics of these two moments in America’s flawed wars differ, the morality does not. Tens of thousands of Afghans believed in the American promise of ushering in freedom, democracy and an open, tolerant society. And now, they’re stuck. For Afghans, the war hasn’t ended simply because we, the United States, declared it to be over.
An American official punching a man in an effort to knock him from the doorway of an airplane overloaded with refugees hoping to flee Nha Trang, Vietnam, on April 1, 1975.Credit...Bettmann, via Reuters
A U.S. service member pointing his gun toward an Afghan man as thousands of people poured into the airport in Kabul in an effort to flee Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban.
The nightmare doesn’t end for Afghans after the last American leaves. Our obligation to help Afghans in mortal danger extends beyond the present moment and well into the years ahead. The United States now must take the lead in evacuating and welcoming tens of thousands of its Afghan allies. Otherwise the words of another young Afghan woman contemplating the future of her country will be painfully true: “We don’t count because we were born in Afghanistan … No one cares about us. We’ll die slowly in history.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen (@viet_t_nguyen) is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” and its sequel, “The Committed.” He is a professor of English, American studies and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.
13. Atlantic Charter credibility crumbles; can an Indo-Pacific Charter give hope?
Excerpts:
So, what now?
The Atlantic was the strategic and economic ocean linking the powers of the 20thcentury.The 21stcentury belongs to the Indo-Pacific.If the free world—and those who want to be free—has a hope, it will be in working together.
The enduring lesson from the original Charter is that it is a good idea to make the threats and the goals clear at the highest levels.If adhered to, that clarity can act as a guiding star in rough waters.
It may now be time for Indo-Pacific Charter, fit for purpose for the 21st Century, and shaped and led by the countries of the region.
Atlantic Charter credibility crumbles; can an Indo-Pacific Charter give hope? - The Sunday Guardian Live
Given how quickly the strategic situation is changing, it’s worth taking a look back at the original Charter to see what is at risk—and what can still be done to protect its central tenets.
Washington, D.C. :On 10 June 2021, President Joseph Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed “The New Atlantic Charter”, an update of the original Atlantic Charter signed 80 years ago this week by President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Among other points, the New Charter promised: “We will champion transparency, uphold the rule of law, and support civil society and independent media.We will also confront injustice and inequality and defend the inherent dignity and human rights of all individuals.”
They forgot to add “except in Afghanistan, and maybe a few other places”.
TheUK forces areat leastfighting to evacuate those at risk in Afghanistan,in spite of reported disagreements with American military leadership (US rank and file tend to be more in favour of the UK position than the position of their own commanders).
However, the actions taken by Washington are so overtly appalling they have the potential to crack the core not only of what was agreed in June, but more importantly what was agreed 80 years ago.
Given how quickly the strategic situation is changing, it’s worth taking a look back at the original Charter to see what is at risk—and what can still be done to protect its central tenets.
The original Charter was signed months before the US entered World War II.It was a blueprint for what the two leaders wanted the world to look like once the war was over. If a war had to be fought, this is why they were fighting.
The Charter contained eight points. Point Six clearly identified the threat, and the broad goal: “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want”.
There were specific points to make that happen, including: countries should not seek territorial aggrandizement (Point One); access for all States to the trade and raw materials needed for economic prosperity (Point Four); and freedom of navigation (Point Seven).
By January 1942, 26 countries had agreed to the Charter. It is considered to have been a foundational document in the creation of several post-War institutions including the United Nations and NATO, as well for decolonisation.
However, today, many of the commitments made in the Charter are crumbling, mere months after the two founding countries signed its renewal.
Washington is failing even at retreating and General Sir David Richards, former Chief of the UK Defence Staff, said: “What price the UK’s promises and commitment to people in jeopardy? Along with the US, I fear, pretty worthless. The impact of this tragedy on Britain’s influence and reputation and ability to do things globally will last for a long time.”
This is just the most recent blow to the credibility of the leadership underpinning Atlantic Charter(s), that itself underpins Western post-war institutions.
Especially among non-Western democracies, the financial crisis of 2008 damaged the West’s credibility on economic issues.
The lack of US backing for treaty partner Philippines on the Scarborough Shoal issue in 2012, and again in 2016, damaged American credibility on alliances and enforcement of international law.
The politicized response to the Covid health crisis damaged the West’s credibility on academic and scientific issues.
And Afghanistan (coming on top of other event, such as the abandonment of the Kurds) damaged the West’s credibility on security commitments.
Point after point of the Charter have been abrogated, either by the West, or without pushback by the West.
Meanwhile, China and others (including those currently taking selfies in Kabul) seek to recreate the world in their image, and new technologies have created new threats.
So, what now?
The Atlantic was the strategic and economic ocean linking the powers of the 20thcentury.The 21stcentury belongs to the Indo-Pacific.If the free world—and those who want to be free—has a hope, it will be in working together.
The enduring lesson from the original Charter is that it is a good idea to make the threats and the goals clear at the highest levels.If adhered to, that clarity can act as a guiding star in rough waters.
It may now be time for Indo-Pacific Charter, fit for purpose for the 21st Century, and shaped and led by the countries of the region.
Thought leaders in India have already put forth proposed elements for an Indo-Pacific Charter. As starting points, M.D. Nalapat suggested in an article in Japan Forward:
- No territorial gains to be sought by any major power.
- No creation of artificial territories in the open seas.
- No acquisitions by force or lease of new territories within sovereign nations.
- Re-formation of the UN Security Council or formation of a new Indo-Pacific security council.
5: Signatories will work towards freedom and sovereignty of data.
6: Signatories will work towards a unified approach to using Artificial Intelligence for the good of humanity.
7: Formation of a Space Security Council.
8: Signatories to work together to promote democracy and participatory government.
- Nations that are democracies, stay democracies.
While far from set in stone, and still being discussed, refined and tested, they begin to give an idea of the threats, and the goals.
As for which countries would lead—if you had asked even three months ago, I might have suggested starting with the Quad members.But given recent events, India, Japan and Australia—all three of which, in their own ways, have been putting up increasingly focused defences against CCP aggression—might be more credible, at least for the moment.
To be clear, a Charter doesn’t replace a Quad, an ASEAN or others, but it could help focus them.And once it’s set up, any country that is willing to follow that guiding star, no matter how small, can sign on.There is room for countries like Palau that, though small in population, has been large in its courage in standing up for Taiwan.And each signatory brings their own tools to help build the way forward.
Once it’s in place, hopefully other countries that have lost their way can—if they decide to look up from their shuffling feet—follow the star home.
But, even if they don’t, the chart(er) for the 21st century can give hope again that if we have to fight, we know what we are fighting for. And why—like last time—it’s a fight that needs to be won.
Cleo Paskal is The Sunday Guardian Special Correspondent and a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
14. US special operations forces race to save former Afghan comrades in jeopardy
I am reading anecdotes about some success on special operations social media. Many people are doing their best to help their Afghan comrades.
US special operations forces race to save former Afghan comrades in jeopardy
Current and former U.S. military special operations and intelligence community operatives are using their own networks of contacts to get elite Afghan soldiers, intelligence assets and interpreters to safety as they've become increasingly disillusioned and fed up with the U.S. government-led evacuation effort in Kabul, ABC News has learned.
One informal group, dubbed "Task Force Pineapple," began as a frantic effort last weekend to get one former Afghan commando into Hamid Karzai International Airport as he was being hunted by Taliban who were texting him death threats. They knew he had worked with U.S. Special Forces and the elite SEAL Team Six for a dozen years, targeting Taliban leadership, and was therefore at high risk of reprisal.
Two months ago, he told ABC News, he had narrowly escaped a tiny outpost in northern Afghanistan that was later overrun, while awaiting his U.S. special immigrant visa to be approved.
During a harrowing night last week involving coordination between former Green Berets, aid workers and a congressional staffer for Florida Republican and Green Beret officer Rep. Mike Waltz, the ad hoc team enlisted the aid of a sleepless U.S. Embassy officer inside the airport. He helped Marines to identify the former Afghan commando, who was caught in the throngs of civilians outside the airport and said he saw two civilians knocked to the ground and killed.
"Two people died next to me -- 1 foot away," he told ABC News from outside the airport that night, as he tried for hours to reach an entry control point manned by U.S. Marines a short distance away.
With Taliban fighters mixing into the crowd of thousands and firing their AK-47s above the masses, the former elite commando was finally pulled into the U.S. security perimeter, where he shouted the password "pineapple" to American troops at the checkpoint. (The password has since changed.)
Two days later, the group of his American friends and comrades also helped get his family inside the airport to join him with the aid of the same U.S. embassy officer.
"I'm very excited. I feel like on one side of the wire is Afghanistan and on this side is America, and I told my family we are now on U.S. soil," the former Afghan commando told ABC News after his young children went to sleep inside the well-guarded airport.
Senior Airman Taylor Crul/U.S. Air Force/Handout via Reuters
U.S. soldiers arrive to provide security in support of Operation Allies Refuge at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 20, 2021.
Other former members of the military and CIA have consolidated their own efforts with a separate group calling itself "Task Force Dunkirk," a reference to the massive evacuation of British and other Allied forces from France in 1940 under threat of the Nazi juggernaut.
"I spent the primacy of my career in special operations, and that gave me access to a lot of people who are like-minded, and a lot of people who have lived with the Afghan people and love the Afghan people and have been with them for 15, 20 years," retired Marine Lt. Col. Russell Worth Parker, a spokesman for the group, said in an exclusive interview with ABC News.
"We couldn't stand by and just watch people we know fall to a very, very certain fate," he added.
Parker said that while there are civilian supporters assisting the group, the majority of members served in Afghanistan. As the country fell to the Taliban, they received pleas for help from Afghans they worked with and befriended during the war. The veterans then began calling each other and talking about ways to help their comrades.
"I don't know that I could live with myself if I didn't do something," Parker said. "I told my daughter the other day, 'Someday this is going to be something that people talk about. And when they do, I want you to remember that your dad and a bunch of moms and dads did the best that they could.'"
Former deputy assistant secretary of defense and ABC News analyst Mick Mulroy is part of the grouping that is assisting former Afghan comrades.
"I am proud to be a member of this group," said Mulroy, who served as a Marine and CIA paramilitary officer. "It is very impressive to see all of my retired former colleagues volunteer to meet the obligations we all made to those that committed to us during the last 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. Many have taken weeks off work to assist, to include going to Afghanistan. We will see this through until everyone is out."
Parker said Task Force Dunkirk and the groups it has now banded together with have helped get at least 83 at-risk Afghans out of the country -- but their modus operandi remains "one at a time."
Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla/U.S. Marine Corps
U.S. Marines assist with security at an Evacuation Control Checkpoint during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 20, 2021.
The mission statement is simple: "To just get one more Afghan out. And after we get him or her out, we want to get just one more. That's the best that we can do right now, and we don't want to get at cross purposes with any broader effort," Parker said.
After Task Force Pineapple's initial success bringing the Afghan commando and then his family into the safety of the U.S. military's security bubble, the group's aspirations grew to getting dozens more out of harm's way -- especially those who fought against the Taliban in elite Afghan units alongside U.S. special operators, as well as women and children. It is now teaming up with Task Force Dunkirk in the effort.
"This is an informal, organic and eclectic group that spans the public and private sector with one goal: to get Afghans at risk to safety," Scott Mann, a former Green Beret and leader of the nonprofit Heroes Journey, told ABC News.
The Afghan commando, who inspired Mann and others to form Task Force Pineapple to help get him through the Taliban and into Kabul's airport, had served with the U.S. Special Forces lieutenant colonel a decade ago in the Village Stability Operations program.
But there are more commandos at grave risk, so the veterans said the group plans to continue.
"We are collating, learning and adapting -- and moving faster than the hamstrung U.S. bureaucracy," Mann said.
The U.S. military said it had flown at least 13,500 Afghans and 2,500 Americans out of Kabul since the Taliban took Kabul and the government fell. But the effort has slowed in recent days from 6,000 on Friday to 3,800 on Saturday for a variety of reasons, including the failure to quickly find third-party countries willing to accept Afghans temporarily while their U.S. visas are processed, the Taliban blocking those trying to reach the airport, and overcrowding at the airport with 16,000 people awaiting flights.
President Joe Biden has defended his handling of a catastrophe he said was inevitable, saying in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos there was no "way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing." Critics have said the United States caused the defeat of the Afghan government and the abandonment of its loyal allies.
Many of the veterans of the 20-year war in Afghanistan said they were inspired by those Afghans who fought side-by-side with them and were often wounded and killed with them. Abandonment was never an option for them, they said, even when the U.S. abruptly withdrew almost all military forces last month.
"They never wavered. I and many of my friends are here today because of their bravery in battle. We owe them all effort to get them out and honor our word," Mulroy said.
Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images
Afghans gather on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul, Aug. 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban's military takeover of Afghanistan.
But desperate messages from Afghans continue to flood the inboxes of American friends.
Gretchen Peters, who formerly worked as a journalist for ABC News in Kabul, has made her own efforts to help. Although she has managed to get several Afghans on manifests for flights out of the country, she still has a feeling of helplessness when she reads her messages.
"I'm getting lots of requests from other people, mainly through Twitter ... and it's heartbreaking to hear the fear in people's messages," said Peters, now the executive director of the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime.
"All we can do is try," Peters said. "And I will feel better for having tried and failed than having never tried at all."
15. U.S. Military Veterans Rush to Help Afghan Interpreters Escape
U.S. Military Veterans Rush to Help Afghan Interpreters Escape
American retreat has brought feelings of anger, guilt and frustration to many veterans who feel the U.S. has betrayed Afghan allies
The Afghan interpreter spent Monday hiding in Kabul with his wife and three children, Mr. Kiernan said, while the former marine now spends much of his day calling people, hoping to shake loose visas so that his old colleague can fly out before it is too late. He says he calls his friend in Afghanistan every 12 hours to check in.
Many military veterans say they forged lasting bonds with Afghan interpreters who ate meals with them, bunked alongside them and, on occasion, saved their lives. The Taliban’s victory over Afghan forces this week has left tens of thousands of American allies stuck and at risk, and is prompting frantic efforts by military vets to get their former colleagues out. It has brought feelings of bitterness and guilt to many veterans who feel bonded to their Afghan friends and has even left them embarrassed by how the U.S. has seemingly abandoned those who were so loyal.
“Some of these guys are absolutely special,” Mr. Kiernan said of Afghans who helped Americans during the 20-year military presence there. “It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming. I’m especially bitter that we’ve forsaken the bonds of camaraderie and abandoned our allies.”
President Biden said Monday that he stood by his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, though he said the exit has been “far from perfect.” The administration also said some 22,000 Afghans could be relocated in coming weeks, though the mechanism for that process was left undefined, even as thousands scramble for safety.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that the Taliban said they would allow safe passage for people to travel to the airport, even as reports from Kabul indicate the group had set up checkpoints.
Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants crowded into a cafe in Kabul last week.
Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
Like Mr. Kiernan, Afghanistan war veteran Doug Livermore hasn’t been sleeping much over the past few days. He finds himself sometimes spending 20 hours a day fielding calls, answering emails and trying to help Special Immigrant Visa applicants get to and then resettle in the U.S.
The former Army Special Forces officer is now a board member of No One Left Behind, a nonprofit whose mission is “ensuring that America keeps its promise to our interpreters from Iraq and Afghanistan.” He found time to talk about the past 48 hours when his computer crashed late Monday night and he was forced to take a break.
“These are folks who invested in the American dream even before they became Americans, when they were fighting alongside us,” Mr. Livermore said. The organization began in 2013 when an Afghan interpreter struggled through the SIV process and launched it to help others like him. The organization ramped up its efforts to evacuate Afghan interpreters after former President Donald Trump announced the pullout early last year. “That was our clarion call,” he said.
They bought tickets for commercial airlines and worked to speed visas, but all that fell apart over the past week, as the Taliban quickly took control of the country. On Sunday, after the Taliban captured Kabul, the capital, No One Left Behind was flooded with emails and desperate calls for help.
Many of those calls are coming from U.S. veterans who have reconnected with their interpreters.
Ismail Hussainy worked as an interpreter, adviser and guard for a security contractor under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Bagram Airfield.
Photo: Ismail Hussainy
Ismail Hussainy, who spent four years working as an interpreter, adviser and guard for a security contractor under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Bagram Airfield, said he has been trying to get a visa since 2014. His application was denied after his former supervisor who wrote his reference letter died, and Mr. Hussainy said he couldn’t find another American to vouch for him.
“Our life is in danger,” Mr. Hussainy said Monday by phone from Kabul, where he is living with his wife, four children and parents.
He recently reconnected with an American colleague from his time in Bagram, Ryan Jackson, who pledged to serve as his reference and help with the visa process.
Ryan Jackson, who worked with Ismail Hussainy in Afghanistan, pledged to serve as his reference and help with the visa process.
Mr. Jackson has been scouring the internet looking for contacts but has mostly found generic inboxes and phones that go unanswered. “I don’t know where we’re supposed to go from here,” Mr. Jackson said Monday. “You can’t get any point of contact.”
Andrew Darlington, who served two tours in Afghanistan as a Marine, has also been working to get his interpreter, Sayed Obaidullah Amin, on a flight out of the country and has spent the past few days fighting with “Obaid” over the phone to get him to go wait for a flight at the airport. That would mean leaving his wife and children behind.
“You will be killed by the Taliban,” Mr. Darlington wrote in a text.
“I will go alone,” Obaid finally replied, resigned to leaving behind his family.
But Obaid couldn’t ultimately carry through with such a wrenching choice. As of Tuesday, he had rejoined his family, choosing to wait together with them in Kabul, Mr. Darlington said.
Mr. Darlington, like many others trying to get people out, wants the stories of delay and confusion to reach U.S. leadership quickly.
“ ‘These are folks who invested in the American dream even before they became Americans, when they were fighting alongside us.’ ”
— Afghanistan war veteran Doug Livermore
“Please put pressure on Washington to get their asses in gear,” he said. “These guys don’t have time.”
Mr. Kiernan said Afghans like his interpreter helped America achieve its missions.
In one instance on a night raid, the Marines thought they got bad intelligence because they couldn’t find the Taliban fighter they were told was there, said Mr. Kiernan. His interpreter noticed a woman in a burqa was holding a screaming baby, yet making no effort to calm the child. So the interpreter sidled up to the mother and asked about the baby. A halting answer came back in a baritone.
“He knew it was a man,” Mr. Kiernan recalled. “The guy threw the baby and ran.”
The interpreter lunged and caught the child, as the Marines nabbed the militant.
“That guy had seen him and could pick him out of a lineup,” Mr. Kiernan said, noting that the Taliban have released prisoners as they swept through the country in recent days.
According to Mr. Kiernan, the Afghan interpreter was in Herat when that city was on the verge of falling last week, so he took his family and fled to Kabul. Mr. Kiernan said the interpreter told him he burned all the commendations, letters of recommendation and other paperwork he has collected over the years from Americans, scrubbed his social media and is now deleting his text messages and call history regularly in case the Taliban shows up at his door.
“I’m most furious with this administration,” Mr. Kiernan said. “It’s not all on [Mr. Biden’s] shoulders, but we’ve known for months there were allies out there whether journalists or interpreters. They extended their hands when we needed it.”
—Sara Randazzo contributed to this article.
16. Plan for Texas to host Afghan evacuees gets bipartisan support though experts are wary
Good. We need bipartisan support to do right by these refugees. We have to get his right and we cannot allow this to be a partisan football.
Plan for Texas to host Afghan evacuees gets bipartisan support though experts are wary
Critics warn that the base is ‘not safe’ because of concerns for migrant children held there after crossing the Mexico border
There was bipartisan support in Texas this weekend for housing Afghan evacuees at the million-acre Fort Bliss military base, in El Paso near the Mexico border.
But one immigration rights expert warned both that those escaping the Taliban might need to stay at the facility as long as a year, while they are processed for resettlement, and that the base was “not safe” because of concerns about conditions for migrant children held there after crossing the southern border.
Amid chaotic scenes at the airport in Kabul, fears were growing over the ability of the US to bring out Afghan nationals who have assisted military, diplomatic and other efforts for the last 20 years. The capital fell to the Taliban last Sunday, after the Afghan government and military crumpled.
In remarks at the White House on Friday, Joe Biden tried to reassure Afghan allies, although the safe passage of non-Americans is far from certain.
“We’re going to do everything, everything that we can to provide safe evacuation for our Afghan allies, partners and Afghans who might be targeted because of their association with the United States,” the president said.
On Saturday, a Pentagon official told reporters 22,000 people had been relocated to Fort Bliss.
In El Paso, the Democratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar tweeted her approval for housing refugees at the local base.
“I support the [Department of Defense’s] decision to consider Fort Bliss and other US military installation sites to resettle vulnerable refugees,” she posted. “America must act swiftly to get our partners out of harm’s way and El Paso stands ready to welcome them and their families.”
John Cornyn, one of two Texas Republicans in the US Senate, said officials at Fort Bliss “believe they have more than enough space to accommodate the Afghan refugees”.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has stated that it has space for up to 5,000 such unaccompanied children at Fort Bliss and is now housing 2,551 at what the Biden administration called an emergency intake site (EIS), where operations have been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic.
A lawsuit was filed in California earlier this month by lawyers representing migrant children, accusing the government of exposing children at Fort Bliss to “shockingly deplorable conditions”, CBS first reported.
“Minimal standards and inadequate oversight at EISs has exposed thousands of children to unacceptable conditions that threaten their safety and wellbeing,” said the lawsuit from the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and the National Center for Youth Law.
Vice-president Kamala Harris did not include the army base on her visit to El Paso in June, even as multiple reports suggested poor conditions, long detention times and even abuse at the tent camp, triggering an HHS watchdog investigation.
Bilal Askaryar, communications coordinator for Afghan immigration rights group Welcome With Dignity, said such reports prompted concern for evacuees from Kabul.
“We should not be taking refugees from evacuation to, essentially, detention,” Askaryar said.
Fort Bliss is not expected to provide permanent or semi-permanent housing for Afghanis but rather a processing center before families are resettled across the US. But shortages of legal representation to help child migrants raise further questions.
“Afghan refugees could be at Fort Bliss or other similar facilities for up to a year as their cases are processed,” said Askaryar. “The recent track record suggests Fort Bliss isn’t a safe location for even a few days.”
Fort Bliss officials directed questions to the Pentagon, which has declined to comment beyond press briefings earlier in the week.
The HHS administration for children and families, which runs the EIS at Fort Bliss, did not respond when asked if it would also be running the site for Afghan refugees.
As of Thursday, the El Paso county judge and local immigration leaders had not been briefed on if refugees might be resettled into the greater El Paso community. Refugee service groups were expected to help resettle families, with the help of non-governmental organizations to various places across the country.
Refugee Services of Texas said it expected that about 300 Afghan refugees in total would be resettled in larger cities in the state. The El Paso county judge, Ricardo Samaniego, said he requested a meeting with the commander at Fort Bliss, Maj Gen Sean Bernabe, but that had not been scheduled as of Friday.
Fort Bliss, a US army base for more than 150 years, straddles Texas and New Mexico. It is now home to the 1st Armored Division and more than 160,000 people including members of the military and their families.
17. Afghan Resistance Ready For Conflict But Prefers Negotiations
This may be an indication of the potential sophistication of the resistance. It is not all about fighting. They have to take advantage of what may now be a latent or incipient phase of a protracted war. This may also be an indication tha the Taliban may not be able to exercise central control over Afghanistan.
The resistance requires a thorough and deep assessment.
Afghan Resistance Ready For Conflict But Prefers Negotiations
Barron's · by David FOX with Saad SAYEED in Hong Kong
Text size
REFILES to correct byline
Former Afghan government forces forming a resistance movement in a fortified valley are preparing for "long-term conflict", but are also seeking to negotiate with the Taliban, their spokesman told AFP in an interview.
Since the Taliban took control of the country following a lightning charge into the capital Kabul, thousands of people have made their way to Panjshir to both join the fight and find a safe haven to continue their lives, Ali Maisam Nazary said.
There, Ahmad Massoud, the son of legendary Mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by Al-Qaeda two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks, has assembled a fighting force of around 9,000 people, Nazary added.
Pictures taken by AFP during training exercises show dozens of recruits performing fitness routines, and a handful of armoured humvees driving across the valley northeast of Kabul.
The National Resistance Front's main goal is to avoid further bloodshed in Afghanistan and press for a new system of government.
But Nazary said the group is also prepared for conflict, and if the Taliban do not negotiate they will face resistance across the country.
"The conditions for a peace deal with the Taliban is decentralisation -- a system that ensures social justice, equality, rights, and freedom for all," said Nazary, the NRF's head of foreign relations, adding if the Taliban do not agree there will be "long-term conflict".
Talks between local leaders from Afghanistan's north and authorities in Pakistan were taking place until just days ago, he added.
While the Taliban control the vast majority of Afghanistan, Nazary optimistically highlighted reports that local militias in some districts have already begun resisting their hardline rule and have formed links with Massoud's NRF.
"Massoud did not give the order for these things to happen but they are all associated with us," Nazary said.
"The Taliban are overstretched. They cannot be everywhere at the same time. Their resources are limited. They do not have support amongst the majority."
He said, however, that Masood had different views to Amrullah Saleh, latterly the country's vice president who is also holed out in the valley and last week vowed to lead an uprising.
"Mr Saleh is in Panjshir. He opted to stay in the country and not flee," Nazary said, noting Saleh's strong anti-Pakistan stance was at odds with Massoud who wanted good relations with Afghanistan's Taliban-supporting neighbour.
"Mr Saleh is anti-Taliban and anti-Pakistani. That does not mean he is a part of this movement. He is in Panjshir and he is respected."
The aim right now is to defend Panjshir and its people, Nazary said.
"If there is any aggression because our fight is only for defence; if anyone attacks us we will defend ourselves."
Alongside Massoud's fighting force, Panjshir now hosts more than 1,000 displaced people from across Afghanistan who have poured into the valley looking for sanctuary, Nazary said.
"We are seeing Panjshir become a safe zone for all those groups who feel threatened in other provinces."
He added the province has seen an influx of intellectuals, women's and human rights activists, and politicians "who feel threatened by the Taliban".
Massoud appealed for weapons from the United States in an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Thursday. Nazary told AFP that they also require humanitarian assistance to feed and take care of the newly arrived.
Massoud is determined to stand by the people of the valley and take up his father's mantle, Nazary added, stressing Afghanistan needs a federated system of government to close its endless cycle of war.
"War is just a byproduct of conflict in Afghanistan. What has caused the conflict is that Afghanistan is a country made up of ethnic minorities ... (and) in a multi-ethnic country you cannot have one ethnic group dominate politics and others having a presence in the margins."
Nazary says Massoud's resistance, and others across Afghanistan, are vital in making this change happen.
"Panjshir has always been a beacon of hope."
bur-ssy/fox/mtp
Barron's · by David FOX with Saad SAYEED in Hong Kong
18. Colonel Maxwell is flawed
I received the following email in response to my recent OpEd in the MIlitary Times (HERE) which I thought would be of interest. Unfortunately based on our email exchange I have to anonymize the author. If he ever provides me with the promised schooling I will certainly share that for the benefit of everyone.
From:
Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2021 5:21 AM
To:
Subject: Colonel Maxwell is flawed
Colonel Maxwell‘s assumptions are flawed. He forgets the history of how we got here. Let him know if he wishes to contact me I’ll gladly school him in the history and volunteer to show him how we got where we are now. His assumptions are flawed just like him.
With warmest regards,
XXXXX, MBA
Captain, United States Air Force (retired);
(~20-years active duty; 39-overseas deployments; and 2-tours in Iraq),
__________________
David Maxwell
Sun 8/22/2021 9:27 AM
Dear Captain XXX
Thank you for your message. I certainly would not claim to have your long experience and expertise on Afghanistan or in the military and strategic and campaign planning. As you would note in my first paragraph there will be a lot of post-mortems written on the entire war. My focus is only on the narrow decision and that is the decision to withdraw the US military and not withdraw Americans, 3d country nationals, and at-risk Afghan civilians before the military completed the withdrawal. My analysis is narrowly applied.
Many Afghanistan post-mortems will be written. All will identify many problems. But two major flaws in U.S. policy are readily apparent and warrant immediate attention. Although it is too soon to draw definitive conclusions, the current tragedy likely stems in part from false assumptions — embraced by the White House —about the Afghan military and the recently ousted Afghan government. Assumptions may seem like a mundane aspect of military planning, but they are critical for the success of any military operation.
But I am happy to be schooled by you. Please educate me on assumptions, strategic planning, NEO, and the history of Afghanistan.
And if you do not mind, I would like to include your critique in my morning dispatches to my email distribution list and my National Security and Korean News and Commentary on Small Wars Journal.
Thank you again for your interest.
_____________________
From: XXXX
Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2021 9:31 AM
To: David Maxwell
Subject: Re: Colonel Maxwell is flawed
Good morning and thank you for your reply. Please do not include
My critique in any of your dispatches or communications whatsoever. It was strictly a private communication between me and you, Man to Man. Thank you.
With warmest regards,
Captain XXXXX
_____________________
David Maxwell
Sun 8/22/2021 9:35 AM
You do not stand by your comments?
But your comments are very much worth sharing.
I will do so but remove your name and email. The public should see the analysis of experts such as yourself and I am happy to receive and share criticism from experts such as you.
Your comments made my day.
Thank you.
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.
