“The current assessment probably, conservatively, is one to two years for al-Qaeda to build some capability to at least threaten the homeland,” Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said at an intelligence conference on Tuesday.
“I think that the Taliban winning the war in Afghanistan, and then the way our exit happened, has absolutely inspired jihadists all over the world,” Morell said, Fox News reported.
Former President Obama and Michelle Obama, former President George. W. Bush and Laura Bush, and former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will serve as honorary co-chairs for the effort called Welcome.US.
They smell cash.
Even before the suicide bombings outside the Kabul airport on Thursday evening, the US media was acting with rare unanimity. For the first time in memory, US media organs across the ideological and political spectrum have been united in the view that US President Joe Biden fomented a strategic disaster for the US and its allies with his incompetent leadership of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some compare it to the 1961 Bay of Pigs; others to Saigon in 1975; others to the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. Whatever the analogy, the bottom line is the same: Biden’s surrender to the Taliban has already entered the pantheon of American post-war defeats.
A major row broke out between leaders of the Taliban over the make-up of the group’s new government in Afghanistan, senior Taliban officials told the BBC.
In the memo, which sought to track how misinformation impacted the protestors crashing Trudeau’s campaign events, researchers noted that Canada’s media heavily featured the anti-Trudeau protests in their election reporting at the cost of other election issues.
So far, the main losers in Afghanistan disaster, apart from the US and the Free World, are the people of Afghanistan, especially those who helped the US and found themselves betrayed, and the women who for 20 years, thanks to the US and its allies, had for the first time known freedom.
The Taliban raised their flag over the Afghan presidential palace on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as news emerged that the regime’s fighters had killed the brother of the country’s former vice-president at a checkpoint in Panjshir province.
Rohullah Azizi, the brother of former vice-president and anti-Taliban resistance leader Amrullah Saleh, was travelling in his car on Thursday when he and his driver were shot dead at a Taliban checkpoint, his nephew said on Saturday.
Shuresh Saleh said on Saturday that it was unclear where his uncle, an anti-Taliban fighter, was headed when the Taliban caught him. He said phones were not working in the area.
Private military contractors outnumbered US troops on the ground during most of both conflicts. And defense industry stocks soared
While Washington bickers about what, if anything, has been achieved after 20 years and nearly $5tn spent on “forever wars”, there is one clear winner: the US defense industry.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the American military relied to an unprecedented degree on private contractors for support in virtually all areas of war operations. Contractors supplied trucks, planes, fuel, helicopters, ships, drones, weapons and munitions as well as support services from catering and construction to IT and logistics. The number of contractors on the ground outnumbered US troops most years of the conflicts. By the summer of 2020, the US had 22,562 contractor personnel in Afghanistan – roughly twice the number of American troops.
Gul Ahmad Rasooli’s phone rang the day the Afghan government collapsed.
The now-former governor of the province of Zabul — a remote, mountainous southern Afghan province bordering Kandahar — had taken refuge in the capital, Kabul, as the security climate in Afghanistan unravelled over the summer.
The Taliban had overrun Qalat, the provincial capital, and Rasooli had escaped with his life.
The call was from his son, an Afghan special forces soldier assigned to the elite protection detail around Ashraf Ghani, the president of the western-backed regime.
It was not a nation, it can never be saved. Islam and tribalism are a toxic mix and we were fed a 20 year lie.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman has mocked the US and the chaotic collapse of the Washington-backed Afghan regime they left behind, as he shared footage of Taliban soldiers using captured aircraft as a swing.
On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian posted a video on his Twitter account, claiming Afghanistan was the “graveyard of EMPIRES and their WAR MACHINES.” As highlighted by the outspoken Foreign Ministry diplomat, the video shows Taliban troops tying a rope to the wing of a captured aircraft and using it as a swing.
On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be? It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad. It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.
Contingencies are messy things. The Biden administration’s improvisatory scramble after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban was one of several such messes America witnessed in the final weeks of August. Another was President Joe Biden’s impromptu effort to explain that the shambolic disgrace was among the best possible outcomes.
“All of them were innocent,” said Emal, Mr. Ahmadi’s brother. “You say he was ISIS, but he worked for the Americans.”
