Analysis has revealed that Joe Biden’s last minute effort to salvage credibility during the Afghanistan withdrawal included a heinous war crime which murdered aid worker civilians, not the ISIS-K terrorists the Biden regime claimed.
Afghanistan
Accountability for Afghanistan
America has just experienced perhaps its greatest foreign policy debacle in modern history by surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The enemy that the U.S. held accountable for harboring the al-Qaeda terrorist group that attacked us on 9/11 once again governs Afghanistan. The Taliban now holds the keys to whether, how, and when Americans left behind will be returned home safely. The question today is who will be held accountable for this debacle, a debacle in both strategy and execution.
There is really no debate about whether the exit plan from Afghanistan failed miserably. Americans left behind, our military equipment left behind, and the Taliban are victorious and now in power while our wartime allies were left blindsided and furious. We lost 13 U.S. service members along with nearly 200 Afghans killed. Who will be held accountable?
Taliban: Women cannot be ministers in government, may inaugurate new government on 9/11 anniversary
The only people this is a shock to are those in the Biden administration. The Taliban is talking of inaugurating their new government in Afghanistan on the anniversary of 9/11 and no, there will not be any women in leadership positions. The new Taliban is the same old Taliban and the bad old days are back.
Boy am I shocked. Did Malala speak to them yet?
‘Remarkable, even though it go off to a hazy start’: Nancy Pelosi PRAISES Biden’s ‘historic’ Afghanistan withdrawal that left 13 US service members dead and hundreds of Americans still stranded on the ground
The House leader’s comments are particularly noteworthy as President Joe Biden’s handling of the total troop withdrawal from Afghanistan has been widely criticized by Democrat and Republican lawmakers and politicians, as well as the general American public.
Reports: China Eyes Takeover of US Air Base in Afghanistan
The Chinese military is reportedly eyeing a move into Bagram Air Base, only weeks after the Biden administration ordered a withdrawal from what was the United States’ largest military installation in Afghanistan.
Multiple sources confirmed to U.S. News that the Chinese military is assessing the feasibility of sending soldiers and other officials to the abandoned military base, which the Biden administration shuttered in July before a full withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Subterranean Tone-Sick Blues
A decade and a half back, the late Christopher Hitchens was talking to the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and brought up my demographic-death-spiral thesis from America Alone. Hitch wanted to know whether, when the PM got together with the Continental bigwigs, it was part of “the European conversation”.
Tone replied that it was part of “the subterranean conversation”.
By which he meant that nice house-trained EU prime ministers hadn’t figured out a way to raise such subjects in public without being damned as racists and becoming electorally unviable, at least anywhere west of the Landstraße, to modify Metternich. They still haven’t. Fifteen years on, almost every subject worth talking about remains part of “the subterranean conversation”.
Chaos and confusion: The frenzied final hours of the Afghan government
For a generation that grew up with education, international investment and hope in a democratic future, reading that line must feel scarcely believable.
So how did the previous administration fall so quickly? The Taliban went from taking control of their first major city to arriving at the gates of Kabul in just 10 days.
But the capital, it was assumed, would be different. Most observers believed that Kabul would hold until a negotiated agreement could take place. On Sunday 15 August, that all changed. Within hours, the president and his top officials had fled. What was left of the Afghan army and police forces changed out of their uniforms, and went into hiding.
Send in Rapinoe! Taliban official says women will be barred from playing sports in Afghanistan
“I don’t think women will be allowed to play cricket because it is not necessary that women should play cricket,” Wasiq said. “In cricket, they might face a situation where their face and bodies will not be covered. Islam does not allow women to be seen like this.”
If allowed to take participate in sports, there will be “photos and videos” of the women that people will undoubtedly watch – something that cannot occur, Wasiq said.
Four Taliban members swapped for Bowe Bergdahl now in Afghan government
Four of the five Taliban members released from Guantanamo Bay by the Obama administration in 2014 in exchange for admitted US Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl are part of the Islamic fundamentalist group’s new hardline government in Afghanistan, according to local media reports.
The four members of the so-called “Taliban Five” who have joined the new government are Acting Director of Intelligence Abdul Haq Wasiq, Acting Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs Norullah Noori, Deputy Defense Minister Mohammad Fazl, and Acting Minister of Information and Culture Khairullah Khairkhah. The fifth member of the Taliban Five, Mohammad Nabi Omari, was appointed governor of eastern Khost Province last month.
Some people should have small rocks tossed at them…
The State Department and the EU are concerned the all-male Taliban government isn’t diverse enough
Late on Tuesday, a US State Department spokesman said: “We note the announced list of names consists exclusively of individuals who are members of the Taliban or their close associates and no women.”
Update – Of course Canada’s Sharia Council of the Woke – CBC News is running with the same idiocy. Funny how they made the Ceeb’s “news” service free for streaming this month. Justin’s propagandists never miss a trick.
The Roots of America’s Defeat
It was laid in the days, weeks and months that followed 9/11.
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.
US-built databases a potential tool of Taliban repression
BOSTON (AP) — Over two decades, the United States and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars building databases for the Afghan people. The nobly stated goal: Promote law and order and government accountability and modernize a war-ravaged land.
But in the Taliban’s lightning seizure of power, most of that digital apparatus — including biometrics for verifying identities — apparently fell into Taliban hands. Built with few data-protection safeguards, it risks becoming the high-tech jackboots of a surveillance state. As the Taliban get their governing feet, there are worries it will be used for social control and to punish perceived foes.
Putting such data to work constructively — boosting education, empowering women, battling corruption — requires democratic stability, and these systems were not architected for the prospect of defeat.
The West is being played by the Taliban
Our politicians and media are treating the Taliban’s pronouncements as if the group can be held to account
There were some curious juxtapositions in Afghanistan last week. On the one hand, the under-19 Afghan cricket team was allowed to leave for a planned tournament in Bangladesh, as if things were normal, while on the other there was a sinister military parade taking place in Kandahar this week. After the lines of horsemen in flowing white robes, a deliberate image of Islamic warrior superiority, came the fleets of captured Humvees. And at the side of the procession lay a car packed with a bomb, suicide vest, and large plastic bottles of explosives from a roadside bomb.
The same grifters who lied for 20 years have found a new lie.
Afghan Fallout: Biden Ruins America’s Most Important Relationship — India
President Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan has ruined, perhaps for decades, America’s most important bilateral relationship of this era.
If Washington is going to deter a militant China, it needs the support of democratic India. Unfortunately, India looks like the country most immediately — and perhaps most adversely — affected by the Biden-created debacle. As a result, New Delhi could decide to side not with America but with a Chinese ally, Moscow.
Taliban announces formation of new government, including some ministers sanctioned and WANTED by US
The Taliban has begun to fill government positions following its successful conquest of Afghanistan. Among the names are people still on the UN Security Council sanction list and a minister with a $5-million US bounty on his head.
Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, a co-founder and head of the Taliban’s leadership council, was named acting Prime Minister of Afghanistan on Tuesday, with other senior Taliban leaders approving his nomination. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, considered the militant group’s de-facto leader, was named Deputy Prime Minister, according to a Taliban spokesman.