As President Joe Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan comes to an end after 20 years, the Taliban is declaring victory and humiliating him by painting Taliban flags on the blockades in front of the former U.S. embassy.
A week previously, men were selling Taliban flags outside the entrance to the embassy. Now, huge murals depicting the terrorist logo are proudly and victoriously displayed in front of what was once American ground.
An American mom and her three children made a perilous overland trip to a neighboring country to escape the Taliban after being left behind by Joe Biden’s state department. The state department immediately took credit for the rescue operation.
A key question arising from the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan is their relationship with their long-time ally, al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda is bound to the Taliban by a pledge of allegiance – or “bay’ah” – which was first offered in the 1990s by Osama Bin Laden to his Taliban counterpart Mullah Omar.
The pledge has been renewed several times since, although it has not always been publicly acknowledged by the Taliban.
Under the 2020 peace deal with the US, the Taliban agreed not to allow al-Qaeda or any other extremist group to operate in areas under their control. They reiterated this vow days after the takeover of Kabul on 15 August.
But they do not appear to have publicly rejected al-Qaeda either.
“They’re scared for their lives.”
Canadian citizens left stranded after airlifts out of Kabul ended two weeks ago are quickly losing hope, particularly as allies continue evacuating their citizens via another city.
“They can’t believe it,” Trump told Breitbart News. “They can’t believe it. Just like you can’t believe it. Just like any sane rational person can’t believe it. We were going to get out — but we were going to get out with dignity and with honor. We were going to get out with all of the people. And we were going to take all of the equipment.”
Joe Biden’s self-touted evacuation of more than a hundred thousand Afghans, presumably allies, might just have been a migrant-lift instead of an evacuation of Americans and allies, an open border of a different sort, with NGOs and left-wing lawyers involved in who got in.
In the arts, the writer must craft a fictional work to induce the willful suspension of disbelief: the audience must deny the fact the work isn’t real; immerse themselves in the imaginary settings and manufactured situations; and be emotionally invested in the fictional characters’ lives. When the fictional story is over, the audience returns to reality, edified—or at least entertained—by the experience.
By contrast, applying fictional narratives to actual foreign affairs and national security induces the suicidal suspension of disbelief. And no one is safe.
In early May, as US and Nato forces began their final withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban stepped up their military offensive against Afghan national security forces.
But they also did something less common in the group’s history of conflict in the country – they launched a comprehensive social media campaign to go with it.
A network of social media accounts highlighted the alleged failures of the Kabul government while lauding the Taliban’s achievements.
Tweets boasted about the group’s recent victories – sometimes prematurely – and pushed several hashtags, including #kabulregimecrimes (attached to tweets accusing the Afghan government of war crimes); #westandwithTaliban (an attempt to drive grassroots support) and #ﻧَﺼْﺮٌ_ﻣٌِﻦَ_اللهِ_ﻭَﻓَﺘْﺢٌ_ﻗَﺮِﻳﺐٌ (help from God and victory is near). The first of the hashtags at least trended in Afghanistan.
President Trump?
The American Waterloo reveals itself in the details.
“The Taliban have more Black Hawk helicopters than 85 percent of the countries in the world. For me and for many others it is incomprehensible that the Taliban then have the fingerprints, eye scans and biometric information of the Afghans who have helped us and have been on our side for the past 20 years ”.
The first to report it was the Republican deputy Jim Banks, a former green beret. The arsenal that America left to the Taliban is such that today it is the first Islamist formation with an air force: C-130 Hercules, 23 A-29, 33 Black Hawk and 32 Mi-17 helicopters.
Two of the Afghan men evacuated from the Taliban-run country with their wives and children under the government’s generous refugee programme have called for extended families to be brought over as well, with one complaining that it was taking too long to get permanent accommodation.
That didn’t take long.
Tony Blair today took a swipe at Joe Biden as he said the US withdrawal from Afghanistan will embolden the West’s enemies and give them a ‘belief our time is over’.
The former prime minister said ‘it is clear now’ the US has decided that for the ‘foreseeable future’ it has a ‘very limited appetite for military engagement’.
Mr Blair suggested Europe and NATO should therefore ‘develop the capability to act’ when the US is ‘unwilling’.
I don’t care much for either dog in this fight, but Blair is right about Biden.
Denyse O’Leary, whom I always read with great interest in our Comments section, chides me for diagnosing our present woes but not proposing solutions.
That ought to be easy. In Afghanistan what needed to be done is almost as old as man. As Victor David Hanson pointed out to Tucker, “This is the greatest loss of military equipment in the history of warfare by one power.”
A 29-year-old Afghan man in Germany repeatedly stabbed a 58-year-old landscape gardener who was working in a park in Berlin, allegedly because he didn’t like the fact that as a woman she was working, police said Sunday.
The man stabbed the woman in the neck several times in the city’s Wilmersdorf district on Saturday afternoon.
A 66-year-old man who saw the attack unfold rushed to help the woman but was also stabbed in the neck by the suspect.
Back to gender studies class you go!
The US State Department has been accused of blocking dozens of Americans from fleeing Afghanistan after failing to tell the Taliban it had green-lighted charter flights.
On Sunday, Reuters reported that the delay had been caused by Biden administration officials not telling Taliban leaders it had approved the departures of the chartered flights from an airport in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, 260 miles north of Afghan capital Kabul.
An exasperated flight organizer hit out at the State Department over the fiasco, saying: ‘They need to be held accountable for putting these people’s lives in danger.’
The Taliban have fought their way to the capital of Panjshir, the last Afghan province holding out against their rule, and seem on the brink of total victory.
The group posted pictures on social media showing Taliban fighters standing in front of the gate of the governor’s compound. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid issued a statement, saying Panjshir was under the control of Taliban fighters.
“With this victory, our country is completely taken out of the quagmire of war,” he said.
