AFGHANISTAN

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thelivyjr
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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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BUSINESS INSIDER

"Biden says US troops will stay in Afghanistan until every American who wants to leave the country has gotten out"


cteh@businessinsider.com (Cheryl Teh)

19 AUGUST 2021

Biden told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that the US is committing to getting every American out of Afghanistan.

He has set an August 31 deadline to get US troops out of Afghanistan.


Biden said there are 50,000 to 60,000 Afghans and their families that the US wants to evacuate.

The US will keep troops in Afghanistan until every American who wants to leave the country has gotten out, President Joe Biden told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos.

In the August 18 interview, Biden told Stephanopoulos the US will try to complete its troop evacuation by August 31.

While Biden stopped short of saying troops will remain in Afghanistan past this deadline, he said the US would "determine at the time who's left."

"... if there's American citizens left, we're gonna stay to get them all out," Biden told Stephanopoulos.

The White House did not immediately reply to Insider's request for comment for this story.

There are 10,000 to 15,000 Americans who need to be evacuated from Afghanistan, Biden said in the interview.

He estimated that the administration wants to evacuate an additional 50,000 to 60,000 Afghan allies and family members from the country.

"It depends on where we are and whether we can get to ramp these numbers to five, to 7,000 a day coming out."

"If that's the case, they'll all be out," Biden said of meeting the August 31 evacuation deadline.

"The commitment holds to get everyone out," the president said.

More than 270,000 people have been displaced from their homes in Afghanistan this year while fleeing the Taliban's advances, the United Nations estimated in a July 13 report.

The Taliban stormed Kabul on August 15.

According to CNN, as of August 17, the US has evacuated more than 3,200 people on 13 flights.

This number includes more than 1,100 US citizens and permanent residents, and more than 2,000 Afghan special immigrants and their families.

Army Maj. Gen. William Taylor said in an August 18 Pentagon briefing that the US is aiming to have one flight departing Afghanistan every hour, per Reuters.

The eventual goal is to move 5,000 to 9,000 people out of Afghanistan every day, per Bloomberg.

While the Taliban pledged this week to guarantee "safe passage" to civilians out of Afghanistan, people are being beaten by the Taliban on their way to Kabul's Hamid Karzai airport.

Reports have described chaotic scenes at the airport, with people swarming the airport tarmac, scaling a jet bridge, and clinging to the sides of a US Air Force plane as it taxied down the runway.

A State Department security alert released on Wednesday said the US "cannot ensure safe passage" for Americans still in Afghanistan.

The US embassy is prioritizing US citizens and legal permanent residents in its evacuation process, per the security alert.

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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BUSINESS INSIDER

"Biden snapped at a reporter when asked about Afghans clinging to US Air Force planes out of Kabul"


sbaker@businessinsider.com (Sinéad Baker)

19 AUGUST 2021

Biden got defensive when asked about people clinging to planes in Kabul to escape the Taliban.

He immediately interrupted, saying: "That was four days ago, five days ago."

He also doubled down on his defense of how the withdrawal was handled.


President Joe Biden snapped at a reporter who asked him about the footage of people in Afghanistan clinging to the outside of planes in a bid to escape the country.

In an interview aired Tuesday, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Biden about the chaotic and wildly criticized withdrawal and the Taliban's takeover of the country.

In response, Biden defended the way the withdrawal unfolded, doubling down on his earlier claims that the Afghan military was not willing to fight the Taliban.

Stephanopoulos then asked: "But we've all seen the pictures."

"We've seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17."

"We've seen Afghans falling - "

Biden then interrupted him, saying "That was four days ago, five days ago."

The footage was widely shared Sunday and Monday.

Stephanopoulos asked: "What did you think when you first saw those pictures?"

Biden responded: "What I thought was we have to gain control of this."

"We have to move this more quickly."

"We have to move in a way which we can take control of that airport."

"And we did."

People were seen climbing the jet bridge to force their way onto a plane, and another video showed people clinging to the outside of a C-17 plane in desperation as it moved down the runway.

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"Biden Says He Will Get Americans Out of Afghanistan"


Catherine Lucey, Andrew Restuccia

20 AUGUST 2021

WASHINGTON—President Biden promised to evacuate every American who wants to leave Afghanistan and said he would seek to extract Afghan allies, but he cautioned that the mission is dangerous and didn’t rule out losses, following days of chaos at Kabul’s international airport.

“I cannot promise what the final outcome will be or that it will be without risk of loss, but as commander-in-chief, I can assure you that I will mobilize every resource necessary,” Mr. Biden said during a speech in the East Room of the White House Friday.


The speech came at the end of Mr. Biden’s most tumultuous week as commander-in-chief, with the problems unlikely to go away anytime soon.

They were his first public comments in several days, and it was also the first time Mr. Biden took questions from White House reporters since the fall of Kabul, aside from a television interview this week.

Mr. Biden is facing bipartisan criticism for the chaotic U.S. exit and frenzied evacuation process, as thousands of Afghans crowd outside the perimeter of the Kabul airport.

To reach the airport, Afghans and foreigners have to get past Taliban checkpoints, where Taliban fighters have been firing in the air and using violence to hold back crowds.

“This is one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history, and the only country in the world capable of projecting this much power on the far side of the world with this degree of precision is the United States of America,” Mr. Biden said.

Mr. Biden said the U.S. has made progress in speeding up the pace of evacuations in recent days.

The U.S. has helped evacuate 18,000 people from the country since July, including 13,000 since Aug. 14, when the military’s airlift operation began, according to Mr. Biden.

In the last 24 hours, the U.S. evacuated 5,700 people, according to the White House.

The military briefly paused evacuations to make sure officials could properly process evacuees, but Mr. Biden said the extractions had resumed.

Mr. Biden said the Taliban was committed to allowing U.S. citizens access to the airport.

But he also said the administration is considering all options to ensure that any Americans who are stuck behind Taliban checkpoints can reach the airport.

He said expanding the U.S. military security perimeter beyond the airport, however, would have unintended consequences.

Mr. Biden again defended his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan as part of last year’s peace deal between the Trump administration and the Taliban.

“There’s no way in which we’d be able to leave Afghanistan without there being some of what you’re seeing now,” he said.

Mr. Biden made his comments amid the chaos that came with the rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as the U.S. approached Mr. Biden’s deadline to withdraw troops.

Lawmakers are calling for hearings into the administration’s handling of the withdrawal of U.S. troops and are asking why more Americans and Afghans who worked with the U.S. weren’t evacuated beforehand.

The coming anniversary of the Sep. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks will highlight the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country 20 years after the U.S. invasion.

“It’s been, sadly for America, I think an unfortunate week for the administration,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, though he said the decision to withdraw might look better in the long run.

Mr. Biden campaigned on his foreign-policy experience and pledged to be a stabilizing force in the world, casting himself as a contrast to the unpredictable foreign policy of the Trump administration.


His handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has been generally well received by the public and the economy appears strong.

Last week, the Senate voted to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill that is a central piece of his economic agenda.

But the erratic exit from Afghanistan — punctuated by scenes of desperate Afghans trying to get on evacuation flights — has prompted questions from lawmakers in both parties, as well as among world allies who have long relied on U.S. leadership and were looking to the Biden administration to lead an orderly exit from Afghanistan.

“You can’t ignore it, but for whatever reason, I feel like the president is trying to distance himself from this,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), a combat veteran.

“I feel like he should be out there every single day saying, ‘This is what’s going on right now."

"God bless these men and women that are trying to get our Americans out safely.’”


White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Mr. Biden is deeply focused on the evacuation effort.

He also added: “This week also saw a new record low in unemployment numbers since the pandemic began, and today over 1 million Americans received vaccine doses.”

It isn’t clear how the images coming out of Afghanistan will affect the public view of Mr. Biden’s actions or what the week’s events will mean for his presidency.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans said the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth fighting, according to a new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The poll, conducted Aug. 12-16, found that 52% approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of national security matters and 47% approved of his handling of foreign affairs.

The administration has been seeking to balance monitoring the situation in Afghanistan with work in its other priority areas that just a week ago dominated the news.

The president held a virtual meeting with Democratic lawmakers Thursday to discuss his infrastructure and antipoverty plans and gave remarks Wednesday on Covid-19 booster shots.

Moving forward, he must grapple with the Afghanistan fallout, as well as a rise in Covid-19 hospitalizations and recent Democratic squabbling over how to enact Mr. Biden’s agenda.

At times, top officials have struggled to explain how the administration ended up in this position, while insisting they are handling it.


As the Taliban takeover accelerated over the weekend, Mr. Biden was at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains, and was expected to be away from Washington all week.

The White House released a photo of him sitting alone in a conference room for a virtual briefing on the situation in Afghanistan.

He returned Monday to address the nation, focusing on the reasons for exiting the 20-year conflict, which he said should no longer require U.S. ground troops.

He largely didn’t address criticism that his administration executed the exit in a haphazard way and cast much of the blame for the quick fall of the Afghan government on its American-trained military.

After the speech, he returned to Camp David for another night, but by Tuesday evening, he was back in Washington.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said at the White House’s only briefing this week that the administration didn’t expect the Afghan government to fall so quickly, but he also said it was prepared for all scenarios.

Amid reports that Afghans couldn’t access the airport and were being beaten at checkpoints, he said that large numbers of people were getting to the airport and that they would hold the Taliban to a commitment to allow safe passage.

At a Pentagon briefing Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said they were working to fly people out of Kabul, but they couldn’t say how the U.S. would get Americans and Afghans past the Taliban and to the airport.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) on Twitter acknowledged heartbreaking scenes at the airport, but added, “the confidence many pundits have that a handful of U.S. troops and diplomats could have avoided a panic caused by the overnight total collapse of the Afghan military and government (whether or not it was foreseeable) is dubious.”

Democrats and Republicans are calling for hearings to probe how the withdrawal unfolded.

“There are numerous questions that demand answers on the lead-up to this crisis,” tweeted Rep. Bob Gibbs (R., Ohio), who is among a group of Republicans on the House Oversight Committee seeking a hearing.

Write to Catherine Lucey at catherine.lucey@wsj.com and Andrew Restuccia at andrew.restuccia@wsj.com

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Biden Defends Evacuation as Thousands Besiege Kabul Airport"


Mark Landler

22 AUGUST 2021

LONDON — The desperate scenes at the Kabul airport reverberated around the world on Friday, forcing President Biden to defend his handling of the chaotic evacuation and fueling recrimination from American allies that are struggling to get their own citizens out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Mr. Biden insisted the American-led operation made “significant progress” after a rocky start, with nearly 6,000 American troops evacuating 5,700 Americans, Afghans, and others on Thursday.

Flights were suspended for several hours on Friday to process the crush of people at the airport, but they were resuming, he said.

“We’re acting with dispatch,” Mr. Biden said at the White House.

“Any American who wants to come home, we will get you home.”

The president’s reassuring words, however, conflicted jarringly with the grim reality in Kabul, where panic reigned and the Taliban encircled the airport in a ring of terror.

While Mr. Biden pledged not to abandon American citizens or Afghans who helped the United States, he left untold others in a dangerous limbo, conceding, “I cannot promise what the final outcome will be.”


Thousands of Afghans continued to besiege the airport gates, begging to get on planes as Taliban militants menaced them with sticks and rifle butts.

Anxious crowds were pressed up against blast walls, with women and children hoisted into the arms of American troops on the other side.

In one harrowing image, a Marine leaned over razor wire to grasp a wailing baby from outstretched hands.

The Pentagon said the baby was sick, received treatment and was later returned to his father.

Many more people were simply turned away, repulsed by reddish clouds of tear gas and volleys of rifle fire above their heads.

A Taliban fighter put a gun to the head of one man and warned him, “Go back to your home or I will shoot you,” according to a person who witnessed the encounter.

While the south side of the airfield — the site of anguished scenes earlier in the week — was calmer on Friday, a witness reported that the gate at the north side, where American troops are in control, was mobbed.

American-trained Afghan special forces units pushed back the crowds, some shooting in the air.

The staccato pops of gunfire mixed with the roar of planes taking off.

On the airport’s eastern perimeter, hundreds of Afghans jostled with British soldiers as they tried to get into a British-controlled compound.

In video posted to social media by the BBC, troops ordered people away from the entrance.

Footage showed a soldier hurling a man to the ground.

“It is impossible to get to the airport — if you keep going and pushing, you may get shot dead and lose your life,” one Afghan man said on Friday.

“I saw a teenage girl trampled yesterday."

"She was dead, and her father was crying.”

The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety, said he had tried and failed six times in recent days to reach the airport

The havoc, five days after the Taliban stormed the capital in a swift conquest that stunned American officials, attests to the terror inspired by the militants, as well as the logistical obstacles faced by the United States and its allies.

Mr. Biden said the United States was communicating with Taliban officials to guarantee safe passage for those who wanted to leave.

But many people are hiding in their homes, fearful of reprisals if they were captured by militants.

In one case, the United States dispatched three helicopters to pick up 169 Americans who had gathered at a hotel near the airport.

They had intended to walk the 200 yards to the airfield, but local commanders, concerned about a crowd at the gate, decided to send the CH-47 helicopters, which loaded the passengers and made the short hop to the airfield without incident, said John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman.

While the president spoke of the heartbreak of the past week and said there would be plenty of time for “criticism and second-guessing,” he was defiant that leaving Afghanistan now was the right move.

At one point, he referred to the Afghan people as Afghanis, a surprising lapse from someone who has visited the country multiple times over the last two decades.

“This is one of the largest, most difficult airlifts in history,” said Mr. Biden, flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

“The only country capable of projecting this much power, with this much precision, on the other side of the world, is the United States of America.”

NATO foreign ministers also said they were working with the Taliban to make it easier for Afghans to get to the airport and vowed the allies would closely cooperate.

NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, said the problem was not the availability of planes but the difficulty in filling them.

“The main challenge we face,” he said, “is ensuring that people can reach and enter Kabul airport.”

The United States and Germany agreed on Friday that Ramstein Air Base in southwestern Germany will be used as a transport hub to try to bring as many people out of Afghanistan as possible.

“We are in agreement with all our partners on the ground that no seat on our aircraft should remain empty,” said Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister.

The bottleneck at the airfield threatened to set off another humanitarian crisis.

Relief agencies are struggling to bring food, medicine and other urgently needed supplies into Afghanistan, according to officials.


“We are running out of supplies and scrambling now to see how we can get the next shipment in,” said Richard Brennan, the regional emergencies chief of the World Health Organization.

As tragic as are the images of people clinging to a departing American plane, he said, “the bigger humanitarian picture has been lost in all this.”

Even if the United States evacuates all the Afghans on its list, experts say that is a sliver of the total number of people who aided the American mission in Afghanistan during the two decades of military engagement there.

The State Department and Defense Department said they would move 22,000 people, a number that includes Afghan workers, their relatives and other “at-risk Afghans.”

About 18,000 are in line for special immigrant visas guaranteed to people who were employed by the United States, and they have more than 50,000 relatives.

The International Rescue Committee estimates more than 300,000 Afghan civilians have been affiliated with the United States since 2001, but only a minority qualify for refugee status.

Signs of the Taliban’s tightening grip over the capital were everywhere on Friday.

An activist posted a photo on Twitter of billboards of women’s faces outside a Kabul beauty salon that were blacked out.

Khalil Haqqani, the leader of one of the most powerful and violent Taliban factions, appeared at Friday prayers, the high point in the Islamic week.

Mr. Haqqani, 48, is on both the U.S. and United Nations terrorist lists, responsible for kidnapping Americans, launching suicide attacks and conducting targeted assassinations.

He is now playing a prominent role in the new Taliban government.

To many Afghans and others who followed the war, Mr. Haqqani’s swaggering appearance was a stark reminder of who now runs Afghanistan.

As if to drive home that point, Mr. Haqqani showed up carrying an American-made M4 rifle and accompanied by a security detail dressed in high-end American combat gear.

There were growing fears that the Taliban would abduct Afghans left behind to extort their family members outside the country.

An Afghan interpreter who worked for the American military and who left several months ago told his former battalion commander that he recently received an email from the Taliban demanding that he return to face trial, or his family would be killed.

Thousands of human rights activists were stranded, some sheltering with friends and moving every day to avoid arrest by the Taliban.

“They fear that as soon as the Western citizens are evacuated that people will be massacred,” said Shaharzad Akbar, head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, which has documented atrocities carried out in decades of war.


And yet there were also glimmerings of resistance.

Bismillah Khan Muhammadi, who served as defense minister in the ousted government of President Ashraf Ghani, said that “popular resistance forces,” mobilized to confront the Taliban, had recaptured three districts of Baghlan province, north of Kabul.

Opponents of the Taliban have announced they were regrouping in the Panjshir Valley, which was a stubborn redoubt of opposition to the Taliban in the 1990s.

“Resistance against the terrorist Taliban is an obligation,” Mr. Muhammadi said in a post on Twitter.

“The resistance is alive.”


Still, the devastating aftermath of the Taliban takeover continues to ripple through Washington, London and other capitals — and the finger pointing has begun.

In London, the foreign minister, Dominic Raab, came under fierce criticism for delegating a phone call to the Afghan foreign minister last weekend to a subordinate, while he was on vacation in Crete.

The opposition Labour Party accused Mr. Raab of dereliction of duty and demanded he resign.

Mr. Raab insisted that the call was overtaken by events and that he was busy working on the evacuation while in Crete.


As a result, he said, Britain was able to evacuate 204 British nationals and Afghan staff members the morning after the Taliban seized the capital.

Mr. Raab’s apparent lack of involvement crystallized a sense in Britain that their leaders were asleep at the wheel — a striking turn for a NATO member that contributed more troops to the Afghan war than any but the United States.

It has also hardened feelings toward the United States, which barely consulted its ally about the timing or logistics of the withdrawal.


British newspapers pointed out that Mr. Biden did not take a call from Prime Minister Boris Johnson until Tuesday, days after Britain requested it.

Some British diplomats said they could not recall a time when an American president came under harsher criticism than Mr. Biden has in recent days.

“It shows that Biden wasn’t that desperate to get the prime minister’s input on the situation,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington.

“It’s all escalated a bit."

"It’s not a great sign.”

Reporting was contributed by Jim Huylebroek in Kabul, Carlotta Gall in Istanbul, Eric Schmitt and Zolan Kanno-Youngs in Washington, Nick Cummings-Bruce in Geneva, Steven Erlanger in Brussels, and Marc Santora in London.

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

U.S. Says It Doesn't Know How Many Americans Are in Afghanistan"


Thomas Kaplan

22 AUGUST 2021

At the center of the scramble to airlift American citizens out of Afghanistan after its fall to the Taliban is a simple question: How many Americans are waiting to be evacuated?

It is a question the Biden administration has been unable to answer.

“We cannot give you a precise number,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.


Mr. Sullivan said the United States had been in touch with a “few thousand Americans” and was working on making arrangements to get them out of the country.

In another interview, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he estimated that “roughly a few thousand” Americans were trying to leave Afghanistan.

American officials had estimated on Tuesday that 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. citizens were in Afghanistan.

Maj. Gen. William Taylor of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff said on Saturday that about 2,500 Americans had been evacuated since Aug. 14, the day before the Taliban took Kabul, the Afghan capital.

The evacuation of American citizens is one piece of the broader airlift effort that is underway in Kabul, with thousands of Afghans also being flown out of the country.

The White House said on Sunday that about 25,000 people, in total, had been evacuated on military and other flights since Aug. 14.

Complicating matters for the Biden administration is a lack of clarity about how many Americans were in Afghanistan when the Taliban seized control of the country.

When American citizens come to Afghanistan, they are asked to register with the U.S. Embassy, Mr. Sullivan said.

Some register but then leave the country without notifying the embassy.

Others never register to begin with.

“We have been working for the past few days to get fidelity on as precise a count as possible,” Mr. Sullivan said in the NBC interview.

“We have reached out to thousands of Americans by phone, email, text."

"And we are working on plans to, as we get in touch with people, give them direction for the best and most safe and most effective way for them to get into the airport.”

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

"IS threat forces US changes to evacuations at Kabul airport"


By AHMAD SEIR, RAHIM FAIEZ, KATHY GANNON and LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press

22 AUGUST 2021

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Potential Islamic State threats against Americans in Afghanistan are forcing the U.S. military to develop new ways to get evacuees to the airport in Kabul, a senior U.S. official said Saturday, adding a new complication to the already chaotic efforts to get people out of the country after its swift fall to the Taliban.

The official said that small groups of Americans and possibly other civilians will be given specific instructions on what to do, including movement to transit points where they can be gathered up by the military.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.

The changes come as the U.S. Embassy issued a new security warning Saturday telling citizens not to travel to the Kabul airport without individual instruction from a U.S. government representative.

Officials declined to provide more specifics about the IS threat but described it as significant.

They said there have been no confirmed attacks as yet.

Time is running out ahead of President Joe Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw most remaining U.S. troops.

In his remarks on the situation Friday, he did not commit to extending it, though he did issue a new pledge to evacuate not only all Americans in Afghanistan, but also the tens of thousands of Afghans who have aided the war effort since Sept. 11, 2001.

That promise would dramatically expand the number of people the U.S. evacuates.

Biden faces growing criticism as videos depict pandemonium and occasional violence outside the airport, and as vulnerable Afghans who fear the Taliban's retaliation send desperate pleas not to be left behind.

The Islamic State group — which has long declared a desire to attack America and U.S. interests abroad — has been active in Afghanistan for a number of years, carrying out waves of horrific attacks, mostly on the Shiite minority.

The group has been repeatedly targeted by U.S. airstrikes in recent years, as well as Taliban attacks.

But officials say fragments of the group are still active in Afghanistan, and the U.S. is concerned about it reconstituting in a larger way as the country comes under divisive Taliban rule.

Despite the U.S. Embassy warning, crowds remain outside the Kabul airport's concrete barriers, clutching documents and sometimes stunned-looking children, blocked from flight by coils of razor wire.

Meanwhile, the Taliban's top political leader arrived in Kabul for talks on forming a new government.

The presence of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who returned to Kandahar earlier this week from Qatar, was confirmed by a Taliban official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media.

Baradar negotiated the religious movement’s 2020 peace deal with the U.S., and he is now expected to play a key role in negotiations between the Taliban and officials from the Afghan government that the militant group deposed.

Afghan officials familiar with talks held in the capital say the Taliban have said they will not make announcements on their government until the Aug. 31 deadline for the troop withdrawal passes.

Abdullah Abdullah, a senior official in the ousted government, tweeted that he and ex-President Hamid Karzai met Saturday with Taliban’s acting governor for Kabul, who “assured us that he would do everything possible for the security of the people” of the city.

Evacuations continued, though some outgoing flights were far from full because of the airport chaos.

The German military said in a tweet that one plane left Kabul on Saturday with 205 evacuees, while a second aircraft carried only 20.

The Italian Defense Ministry announced the evacuation Saturday of 211 Afghans, which it said brought to 2,100 the number of Afghan workers at Italian missions and their families who have been safely evacuated.

On Friday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said around 1,000 people a day were being evacuated amid a “stabilization” at the airport.

But on Saturday, a former Royal Marine-turned charity director in Afghanistan said the situation was getting worse, not better.


“We can’t leave the country because we can’t get into the airport without putting our lives at risk,” Paul Farthing told BBC radio.

Army Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, Joint Staff deputy director for regional operations, told Pentagon reporters Saturday that the U.S. has evacuated 17,000 people through the Kabul airport since Aug. 15.

About 2,500 have been Americans, he said.

U.S. officials have estimated there are as many as 15,000 Americans in Afghanistan, but acknowledge they don’t have solid numbers.

In the past day, about 3,800 civilians were evacuated from Afghanistan through a combination of U.S. military and charter flights, Taylor said.

Three flights of Afghan evacuees have arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.

The evacuations have been hampered by screening and logistical strains at way stations such as al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

U.S. officials said they have limited numbers of screeners, and they are struggling to work through glitches in the vetting systems.

Taylor said that the Kabul airport remains open, and that Americans continue to be processed if they get to the gates, but he and Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the threat picture changes by the hour.

“We know that we’re fighting against both time and space,” Kirby said.

“That’s the race we’re in right now.”

The Biden administration was considering calling on U.S. commercial airlines to provide planes and crews to assist in transporting Afghan refugees once they were evacuated from their country by military aircraft.

Under the voluntary Civil Reserve Air Fleet program, civilian airlines add to military aircraft capability during a crisis related to national defense.

The U.S. Transportation Command said Saturday it had issued a warning order to U.S. carriers Friday night on the possible activation of the program.

If called upon, commercial airlines would transport evacuees from way stations outside Afghanistan to another country or from Virginia’s Dulles International Airport to U.S. military bases.

So far, 13 countries have agreed to host at-risk Afghans at least temporarily, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

Another 12 have agreed to serve as transit points for evacuees, including Americans and others.

“We are tired."

"We are happy."

"We are now in a safe country,” one Afghan man said upon arrival in Italy with 79 fellow citizens, speaking in a video distributed by that country's defense ministry.

But the growing question for many other Afghans is, where will they finally call home?

Already, European leaders who fear a repeat of the 2015 migration crisis are signaling that fleeing Afghans who didn’t help Western forces during the war should stay in neighboring countries instead.

Remaining in Afghanistan means adapting to life under the Taliban, who say they seek an “inclusive, Islamic” government, will offer full amnesty to those who worked for the U.S. and the Western-backed government and have become more moderate since they last held power from 1996 to 2001.

They also have said — without elaborating — that they will honor women’s rights within the norms of Islamic law.

But many Afghans fear a return to the Taliban’s harsh rule in the late 1990s, when the group barred women from attending school or working outside the home, banned television and music, chopped off the hands of suspected thieves and held public executions.

“Today, some of my friends went to work at the court and the Taliban didn't let them into their offices."

"They showed their guns and said, ‘You’re not eligible to work in this government if you worked in the past one,'” one women's activist in Kabul told The Associated Press on Saturday.

She spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

With a Turkish visa but no way to safely reach the airport, the activist described the gap between the Taliban's words and actions “very alarming.”
___

Faiez reported from Istanbul, Gannon from Islamabad, and Baldor from Washington. Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Colleen Barry in Milan, Italy; Matt Lee in Washington; and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.
___

Afghanistan coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/afghanistan

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"Editorial: What we’ve lost: Biden sidesteps responsibility for the mess in Afghanistan even as he claims to own it"


Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News

22 AUGUST 2021

Joe Biden told a nationwide TV audience Monday that the horrifying scenes in Kabul, with desperate refugees fleeing the rule of a resurgent Taliban, aren't his fault.

He also says he won’t “shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today.”

Look up "cognitive dissonance" in the dictionary.


The problem, Biden explained, is that the Afghan army that we and our allies stood up, fell down the moment the U.S. troops pulled back and the Afghan government hightailed it out of the country.

Fair enough: How can we fight their war if they won’t even fight it themselves?

But what Biden fails to face candidly is why the withdrawal had to be so chaotic, so seemingly haphazard, risking the lives of those who helped America fight its longest war.

That was transparently a failure of planning and intelligence and leadership.


In making the broader case against staying in that dysfunctional land for another five or 10 or 20 years, Biden could have cited one of his predecessors on a different war: “We are not about to send American boys nine or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

Of course, Lyndon Johnson said that two weeks before his 1964 election, then soon enough sent huge numbers of American boys to Vietnam to fight.

But like Vietnam, the Afghanistan war is ending, and in much the same way with us closing our embassy and flying away, leaving terrified people to the mercy of the conquering enemy.

For that it’s impossible to blame the weak will of the Afghan forces, or Ashraf Ghani, who was Afghan president before he skipped out.

Ghani wanted to avoid the fate of Najibullah, the Soviet-installed Afghan president who didn’t escape when the Taliban conquered the country the first time in the 1990s.

Najibullah was caught, tortured, castrated and dragged to death behind a Jeep.

America is right to leave.

“The buck stops with me,” said the president.

Hold him to his word.

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL

"'It's impossible to conquer the Afghans'"


PAUL KORING, MOSCOW

PUBLISHED JULY 12, 2008

Head bowed, exhausted, the statue of a young soldier back from Afghanistan's killing fields is flanked by long, grim, lists of his dead comrades.

It's a cautionary monument for Western politicians and generals who boldly boast they will succeed where the Soviets failed.


In Russia, a country chock full of heroic memorials to enormous military sacrifice, the uniquely dejected pose of the helmetless Afghan combat veteran in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg is a sobering reminder that great powers have an unhappy history of overreaching and then being driven ignominiously from Afghanistan.

"Canadians and Americans are learning the hard way."

"You have been there seven years and you have no prospect of early victory," said Ruslan Aushev, a highly decorated combat veteran who served two tours, totalling nearly five years with the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

"We knew by 1985 that we could not win," he recalls.

It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops from Afghanistan, while claiming victory on the way out.


Afghanistan was plunged into civil war.

In Russia, there's a widespread view that the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan has failed to heed the lessons of history.

"You are just repeating our mistakes," Mr. Aushev said in an elegant, memento-filled office close to the Russian Duma.

While some Russians - perhaps many - take some satisfaction in watching the U.S.-led coalition struggle in Afghanistan, Mr. Aushev knows better than most the dangers of a defeated superpower leaving the wreckage of Afghanistan to violent and radicalized factions.

"Most Afghans still live in a feudal society, in villages far from the cities," he said.

"For them, there is no difference between being bombed by the Soviets and now being bombed by the Americans ... and it won't succeed."

In the West, the bloody, decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan is viewed as the last gasping failure of a blundering Communist giant, eventually defeated by the proud and fierce Afghan mujahedeen, armed and backed by billions of dollars worth of sophisticated U.S. weaponry, and jihadists from throughout the Islamic world.

Tagged as the Soviet's Vietnam, the Afghan quagmire helped sink the USSR.

But the view from Russia - tempered by experience and the passage of two decades that allowed some lessons to sink in - suggest the West may, too, have overestimated its welcome and its capacity to rebuild Afghanistan at the point of a gun.

"We could take any village, any town and drive the mujahedeen out," Mr. Aushev said, recalling his two combat tours, first as an infantry battalion commander and later in charge of a full Soviet regiment - roughly the size of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan.

"But when we handed ground over to the Afghan army or police they would lose it in a week."


If that formula for eventual defeat sounds eerily familiar, so does much of what Mr. Aushev and other Afghan veterans recall about their efforts in Afghanistan.

Mr. Aushev, 53, is no apologist for Russian military adventurism.

In the post-Soviet era, he served as president of Ingushetia for eight years, and during the war in neighbouring Chechnya he decried incursions by Russian soldiers and even threatened to sue the Defence Ministry.

An able soldier - the youngest to reach the four-star rank of lieutenant-general in the Russian army - Mr. Aushev now heads an international organization for veterans.

And he is no stranger to dealing with extremists.

He helped broker the release of more than two dozen hostages during the bloody Beslan school siege by Islamic terrorists in 2004.

"The Taliban may not be able to win militarily but they can't be defeated and sooner or later the Western alliance will be forced with pullout," he warned.

Support for the insurgents will grow the longer the foreign armies remain in Afghanistan, he said.

Although the Soviets deployed more than 100,000 soldiers across Afghanistan - roughly double the number of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops currently deployed - and trained an Afghan army three times the size of Kabul's current security forces, it was never enough, Mr. Aushev said.


"If we wanted stability we would have needed 800,000 soldiers," he said, echoing the estimates of some unheeded American generals who called for much larger occupation forces in Iraq.

But no matter how many soldiers are sent (and Washington is expected to significantly increase its deployments to Afghanistan next year as the long-awaited drawdown in Iraq frees up some units), Mr. Aushev said, there can be no military solution.

"There will have to be an accord with the Taliban, because at least 50 per cent of the Afghan population supports them," he said.

The Soviet Union invaded in 1979, setting off a decade-long effort to occupy and pacify Afghanistan.

Former sergeant Igor Grigorevich, 46, now stands watch over a tiny, seldom-visited museum, tucked away on the ground floor of a hulking building on Moscow's outskirts.

Unlike the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to the Second World War, there is little about the Afghan war to remember proudly.

Instead there are deep scars, both on the national psyche and among hundreds of thousands of largely ignored veterans.

"It's impossible to conquer the Afghans ... Alexander the Great couldn't do it, the British couldn't do it, we couldn't do it and the Americans won't do it ... no one can," said Mr. Grigorevich, still trim and determined not to let the war be forgotten.

The museum began largely as a volunteer effort by veterans, although the government now provides some funding.

The exhibits are striking.

If the Soviet army looks vaguely dated, the pictures of Afghan villagers would be instantly familiar to Canadian soldiers now serving in Afghanistan.

So, too, would the lumbering four-engined military transports with honour guards solemnly carrying flag-draped coffins into the waiting holds on Kandahar air field.

The Russians called those flights "Black Tulips."

But there are also poignant reminders of the brutality of a lopsided war that pits the military of a modern superpower against insurgents.

Photos show bombed-out villages, a crayon drawing by a young Afghan boy depicts helicopter gunships unleashing a torrent of death and destruction.

In another corner is a mock-up of a mujahedeen fighter shouldering a U.S.-made Stinger surface-to-air missile that wreaked havoc with Soviet air power and helped tip the balance to the jihadists.

Russian veterans say the huge effort by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to arm and support the mujahedeen from bases in Pakistan was crucial to the eventual Soviet defeat.

But even without the active backing of a hostile superpower, the current insurgency has new tactics and new funding that the Russians never faced.

Suicide bombers and sophisticated roadside explosives were unknown to Russian occupation forces.

For all the broad similarities between the Soviet efforts to pacify Afghanistan in the 1980s and the current U.S.-led campaign, there are also significant differences.

U.S. and NATO troops, including Canada's, are in Afghanistan at the request of a democratically elected government headed by President Hamid Karzai.

Although dismissed by critics as the "mayor of Kabul" because of his government's limited reach beyond the capital, Mr. Karzai nevertheless represents the first Afghan leader elected in a free and fair national election.


There are other lessons still being learned from the Russian experience in Afghanistan.

A lost war or a war that has lost public support leaves a different set of scars on its veterans, says Zurab Kekelidze, deputy director of the Serbsky psychiatric centre in Moscow.

"The Afghan Syndrome," he says, afflicts many of the thousands of Russian veterans, and, he predicts, Canadian and other Western soldiers will similarly suffer.

"If a society sees a war as a good thing ... then that's a form of therapy that helps," he said at his clinic.

Soldiers readjust to society after all the horrors and stresses of battle.

"But if a war is unpopular or is seen as lost or pointless, then the situation is reversed and returning soldiers are forced to try and find some justification for what they have done," he added.

The Americans suffered it in Vietnam, the Soviets faced it after Afghanistan and Canadians may have to deal with the problem if the public stops backing the current war, he said.

*****

Invaders of Afghanistan

Many foreign forces have attempted to conquer Afghanistan and its predecessor states.

Few have succeeded.


Here are some examples of those who tried.

Darius the Great

In the late sixth century BC, much of the country was absorbed into the Persian empire of Darius the Great.

However, plagued by constant uprisings, the Persians never established effective control.

Alexander the Great

In the third century BC, Alexander the Great invaded.

The harsh, mountainous terrain and brutal weather were only part of the challenge.

The Afghans themselves were no less formidable.

Constant revolts undermined whatever glory he could claim.

Genghis Khan

In 1220, the Islamic lands of Central Asia were overrun by the armies of this Mongol invader.

But even Genghis Khan failed to destroy the strength of Islam there.

By the end of the 13th century, his descendants were themselves Muslims.

Britain

There were three major interventions by the British Army between 1838 and 1919.

Each one ultimately failed.

Soviet Union

In 1979, the Soviets rolled in about 115,000 troops.

The Afghans responded with an extended guerrilla war, and in 1989 the Soviets withdrew.

Sources: The Claremont Institute, encyclopedia.com, CNN, espritdecorps.ca, channel4.com, BBC, NYT

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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THE HILL

"Biden blames others, but the errors are his in Afghanistan's crisis"


Andrew McClure, opinion contributor

22 AUGUST 2021

Nearly 20 years after America's longest war began, the dramatic dash for the exit has yielded an unmitigated tragedy.

This chapter in American history did not have to end this way, principally because the Taliban already had violated their commitments under the deeply flawed U.S. agreement last year to draw down military forces.

The haste of the American military retreat expedited the descent in chaos.


As Americans choose how to remember the war in Afghanistan, there is plenty of blame to go around.

We may have failed to learn many of the lessons of the past two decades, but President Biden's misapprehension in Afghanistan is perhaps the most grievous among them.

The Biden administration's flaccid response has been uninspiring.

As the Taliban rapidly gained strongholds, the White House could only muster vacant reminders that the international community would be watching the Taliban's actions.

The farcical encouragement to the barbarians at the gates to "make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community" is tone-deaf - as if the mullahs among the Taliban are interested in joining cocktail parties in Georgetown.

For the U.S. citizens, interpreters or collaborators fleeing guaranteed persecution, the White House seemed content to hold firm to vacuous assurances the Taliban would facilitate safe passage.

As the crisis metastasized, Biden appeared aloof to the events unfolding on the ground.

When he finally emerged from Camp David after the Taliban declared an Islamic Emirate, he struck a defiant tone, casting blame widely - at his predecessor, the Afghan president and security forces and, of course, the omnipresent nation-builders.

He omitted culpability for the melee that his decisions unleashed.

History repeatedly has taught us that nothing good arises when America is observed to be weak.

Some have suggested the events of the past week confirm the folly of nation-building.

The project in Afghanistan was doomed to fail, they say, because liberty and peace cannot be enforced through force.

This well-worn caricature fundamentally misunderstands the mission of the U.S.-led forces since the transition years ago from combat operations, a forgivable oversight since the campaign has fallen so low on our nation's priorities.

To achieve stability, a small, residual security presence has operated for years primarily in a support capacity to the Afghan security forces, whom the president accused in his White House speech of not fighting to defend their own country.

Nearly 70,000 Afghanis died - many alongside or in front of coalition forces - defending their homeland.

Biden's callous comments betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the battlefield psychology that accelerated the country's rapid implosion.

When the U.S. unceremoniously withdrew combat support, including intelligence and contract logistical support, what choice did the security forces have when faced with the Faustian bargain from the advancing Taliban?

There are other critics who simply wanted to cut and run, ending our so-called "forever war" regardless of the consequences.

Another five or 10 years would have made no difference, they argue; the project in Afghanistan has gone on long enough, so we have nothing to lose in exiting because we have gained nothing by staying.

These critics conveniently forget the series of events that led us to Afghanistan originally, and seem more intent on re-litigating the arguments of the past than facing new strategic decisions ahead with prudence.

Perhaps this is why Biden felt compelled to remind Americans of his failed opposition to President Obama's surge over a decade ago.

He was wrong then, just as he is wrong now.

No doubt mistakes have been made over the years, but we're about to be reminded what failure really looks like.

For nearly 20 years the American-led presence has kept at bay the terror threat and prevented Afghanistan from being used as a haven for extremists targeting our homeland.

No longer.

Stability is an undervalued asset in international relations.

In diplomacy, as in life, you never fully appreciate what you have until it's gone.

What political pressure did Biden face to take such action while ignoring his military advisers and intelligence assessments?

National security barely makes it into the top 10 most important issues voters care about these days (except for immigration, which polls No. 2).

Was it so that he could say that by the 20th anniversary of 9/11 he could finally bring home our troops?

That momentous occasion, usually marked by hallowed remembrance, will now become an odious symbol of the triumph of the Taliban and a lasting stain on the American psyche.

While many politicians are inclined to follow public opinion, leaders shape it.

On Monday, as Kabul was falling, a new poll found public support for full military withdrawal declined 20 percent since the spring.

Policymaking, like polling, is best understood when considering trade-offs.

So when presented with potential costs of full withdrawal (i.e., the Taliban regains control), a plurality of respondents no longer assent.

To have relied on cute slogans to drive complex foreign policy decisions has been misguided.

Given what many are now beginning to recognize as the cost of retreat, retaining a small, persistent security presence (as we do in many countries) was clearly the best option.

The government in Afghanistan had its share of challenges, which many young nations encounter.

However, the 38 million Afghans who were slowly building better lives for themselves could point to modest gains.

Over the past week, that progress has been erased.

What America has lost - including having an ally and air bases sandwiched between Iran, Pakistan and China - far outweighs what we may have gained in retreat.

Under no circumstance, despite what some critics might believe, has the war in Afghanistan been a complete and utter failure - until now.

Responsibility for that rests completely with the Biden administration.

The damage to U.S. prestige and credibility will be felt for decades.

For all the bluster and mismanagement of the situation in Afghanistan by the Biden administration, our adversaries have taken inventory as well.

If his intent was to clean the slate for his successors, Biden surely made their job more challenging, all but guaranteeing the region becomes less manageable.

His decision will saddle future leaders with the consequences for years to come.

Progress is difficult and sometimes requires patience.

Hard-fought gains are easily reversed.

When the chapter on the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan closes, just remember that it did not have to end this way.

Andrew McClure is a visiting fellow at George Mason University's National Security Institute and an investor at a venture capital firm focused on cybersecurity. He served in Afghanistan in 2010 as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps and remains in the Marine Reserve.

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Re: AFGHANISTAN

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THINK newsletter

"Jeff McCausland - Afghanistan's Taliban takeover was predictable. How did Biden miss the red flags?"


By Jeff McCausland, retired Army colonel and former member of the National Security Council

Aug. 18, 2021, 12:38 PM EDT / Updated Aug. 18, 2021, 1:03 PM EDT

On July 8, President Joe Biden assured the American people that it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would take control of Afghanistan.

That is exactly what happened five weeks later.

And the catastrophic scenes in Kabul this week beg the obvious questions: How did the Biden administration get this so wrong?

Why is the president now facing his own Saigon moment?


The Taliban were technically outnumbered and outgunned by Afghan government forces.

Biden and his administration frequently have emphasized that the U.S. has spent $83 billion training Afghan security forces that on paper, at least, numbered roughly 300,000 including police and the Afghan air force.

But the reality on the ground undermined any purely numbers-based assessment.

An analysis of Afghan security forces found that of the 352,000 soldiers and police counted as members of the security forces, only around 254,000 could be confirmed as actively serving.

The remainder were so-called ghost soldiers who padded unit payrolls and allowed local commanders to skim pay.


The president made his statement in early July based on analysis he said he was provided by the U.S. intelligence community.

Numerous members of his administration echoed this belief that Kabul would not fall immediately.

Still, reports confirm that key intelligence assessments stated a collapse was possible, and it could necessitate the rapid evacuation of American diplomats not unlike what had occurred in South Vietnam in 1975.

Biden’s administration had also received numerous warnings.

The annual threat assessment released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in April noted the Taliban were making gains and the Afghan government would “struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support.”

The most recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted that attacks by the Taliban against government forces were rising.

Taliban fighters had taken control of key border crossings as well as numerous district centers.

The report said Afghan army units refused to execute missions without support from the special operations forces and that the Afghan air force was frequently misused.

This quarterly report was not startling.

It was consistent with previous reports provided to the Biden administration and its predecessors.

Biden had also been warned several months prior to his withdrawal decision by Gen. Scott Miller, the last U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, as well as Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to The Washington Post.

Milley advised against a full withdrawal, and Miller noted that government collapse was likely if U.S. forces left in a rush, the report said.

This quarterly report was not startling.

It was consistent with previous reports provided to the Biden administration and its predecessors.

Afghan soldiers had fought over the past 20 years and carried the major burden during the past three years.

Over 60,000 were killed, which is around 27 times the number of American casualties.

Still, Afghan forces were heavily dependent on U.S. and contractor support for maintenance as well as American air power.

Ultimately, subjective factors made the difference.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”

This was proven true once again in the last few weeks in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military can train soldiers in a foreign army how to fight, but it is impossible to train soldiers why they should.

Why should an Afghan government soldier fight for a government that cannot feed him or provide him reinforcements, ammunition, supplies and care for his wounded comrades?

Furthermore, Afghan soldiers became increasingly convinced that their government was corrupt, something that had also been clearly documented in the “Afghanistan Papers” published by The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the average Taliban soldier firmly believes he is defending his country from foreign occupiers, like his ancestors did against the British or the Soviet Union, and defending his religion against “crusaders.”


An Afghan special forces officer told The Washington Post this week that many soldiers had lost hope following the signing of the agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration in February 2020.

This accord called for a full withdrawal of all American forces by May 2021 and the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

Many experts agree the accord not only isolated and undermined the credibility of the Afghan government, but also meant it could no longer count on American air power and other crucial support on the battlefield.

Consequently, Afghan soldiers became receptive to Taliban approaches urging them to surrender.

The last week has shown the consequences of a deadly combination of lack of willpower, poor leadership, unreliable air support and the poison of corruption.

These factors combined to create the disaster that rapidly unfolded.


Biden addressed the nation Monday and acknowledged “this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”

He further accepted responsibility and that “the buck stops with me.”

But his remarks focused primarily on the policy decision to withdraw American forces after 20 years and not on the execution of the withdrawal.

The scenes at Kabul’s airport are eerily reminiscent of the American departure from Saigon in 1975, despite the president’s arguments to the contrary.

The president also argued that his administration had “planned for every contingency,” but facts on the ground dispute this assertion, too.

Furthermore, the decision to execute a contingency is often more important than the details of the plan.

The failure to properly plan, prepare and execute an evacuation plan for American and foreign diplomats, aid workers, foreign journalists and Afghans who worked for the United States for the past two decades is inexplicable.

It undermines the credibility of a nation already undermined on the world stage by four years of President Donald Trump.

Ron Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told The Washington Post, “If Trump undermined the confidence of the world, Biden’s actions, pulling out and leaving a mess in Afghanistan, may simply be chapter two in undercutting fundamental assumptions about America.”

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, acknowledged in a statement that American intelligence officials had anticipated for years that in the absence of the U.S. military, the Taliban would continue to make gains in Afghanistan.

He noted that, in fact, this “is exactly what has happened as the Afghan National Security Forces proved unable or unwilling to defend against Taliban advances in Kabul and across the country.”

It is now the responsibility of congressional committees to ask why we were not better prepared and why it seems we ignored so many red flags.

The vast majority of Americans are tired of the war in Afghanistan and likely welcome its conclusion.

But even those who support the president’s decision to withdraw (and there are many) must agree it is imperative that we determine how this catastrophe occurred.

Otherwise, we will fail to learn from our past mistakes and better prepare ourselves for a challenging future.

At this moment, U.S. service members are still standing guard at the Kabul airport.

Hopefully, they will soon be the last Americans to board an aircraft departing Afghanistan, bringing America’s longest war to a sad conclusion.

But the end of this war must mark the beginning of our investigation into how we got its final chapter so wrong.

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