‘It’s hard for me to properly present the extent of this foreign policy failure. This is a cascading national security failure.
‘There’s a document in the embassy called the F-77. I am told the F-77 of Afghanistan indicates there are 15,000 potentially, upwards of 40,000 Americans scattered around Afghanistan right now…”
After the fall of Saigon, the Soviet Union began five years of aggressive subversion around the world, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. Henry Kissinger and the elites in the US and Europe all predicted a Russian victory in the Cold War. The fall of Kabul is worse: In Vietnam, we faced a well-trained and equipped North Vietnamese Army; we were humiliated by 75,000 rag-tag irregulars in Afghanistan.
The Taliban has given its first official news conference in Kabul since the shock seizure of the city, declaring it wants peaceful relations with other countries and would respect the rights of women within the framework of Islamic law.
“We don’t want any internal or external enemies,” the movement’s main spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said.
The insurgents seek no revenge and “everyone is forgiven” he said.
Mujahid said women would be allowed to work and study and “will be very active in society but within the framework of Islam”.
The Taliban would not seek retribution against former soldiers and members of the Western-backed government, he said, saying the movement was granting an amnesty for former Afghan government soldiers as well as contractors and translators who worked for international forces.
“Nobody is going to harm you, nobody is going to knock on your doors,” he said.
He said private media could continue to be free and independent in Afghanistan, adding the Taliban was committed to the media within its cultural framework.
“We intend to hold them to that commitment,” national security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters amid a barrage of questions about the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
SULLIVAN: “The Taliban have informed us that they are prepared to provide the safe passage of civilians to the airport, and we intend to hold them to that commitment.”
“…We are talking to them about what the exact timetable is for how this will all play out.” pic.twitter.com/RhUtHbgwgr
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) August 17, 2021
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday his government won’t recognize the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan one day after his foreign minister said it was too early to decide.
The Butcher of Benghazi must have some great advice for Trudy. https://t.co/Tvr7WcHzAZ
— Leslie-Ann Stoffel (@LA_Stoffel) August 17, 2021
To reprise a line from a decade-old column of mine:
Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you’re Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you’re Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.
That’s the point to remember: if you’re an Afghan schoolgirl, today is the fall of Kabul; elsewhere, in the chancelleries of allies and enemies alike, it’s the fall of America. Even by their usual wretched standards, the world’s most somnolent media are struggling to stay up to speed on the story.
A university student tells of seeing all around her the ‘fearful faces of women and ugly faces of men who hate women’
Early on Sunday morning I was heading to university for a class when a group of women came running out from the women’s dormitory. I asked what had happened and one of them told me the police were evacuating them because the Taliban had arrived in Kabul, and they will beat women who do not have a burqa.
We all wanted to get home, but we couldn’t use public transport. The drivers would not let us in their cars because they did not want to take responsibility for transporting a woman. It was even worse for the women from the dormitory, who are from outside Kabul and were scared and confused about where they should go.
Locals in Istanbul were recently shocked to see hordes of young Afghan men in worn out uniforms, strolling aimlessly down neighborhoods that were already home to thousands of Syrian refugees. Later, Turkish police detained and expelled nine of the men. Hundreds of others are communicating with their relatives and friends in Afghanistan and Iran and most likely updating them on the illegal migration routes into Turkey — Afghans would typically pay smugglers $1,000 for the trip from Kabul to Van in eastern Turkey. With the victory of the Taliban and the collapse of the Afghan government, hundreds of thousands may be crossing via Iran into eastern Turkey, finally seeking the least dangerous (and least costly) route into European Union soil.
‘Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building.’
President Biden stressed the purpose behind the US intervention in Afghanistan had “always been preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland” and “never supposed to be creating a unified centralised democracy”.
This clearly contradicts his previous positions on the US objective in Afghanistan.
At the outset of the conflict in 2001 when Mr Biden was a US senator, he outlined the long-term purpose of the American military intervention, saying: “Our hope is that we will see a relatively stable government in Afghanistan, one that… provides the foundation for future reconstruction of that country.”
And again, in 2003 – in another quote, tracked down by the Politico website – he said the “alternative to nation building is chaos, a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists”.
Senility in action.
When President Barack Obama released five Taliban commanders from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for an American deserter in 2014, he assured a wary public that the dangerous enemy combatants would be transferred to Qatar and kept from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.
In fact, they were left free to engineer Sunday’s sacking of Kabul.
h/t HallsOfMacademia
In the days before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a group of British defence and security officials took a top-secret trip to Moscow.
The plan was to ask their Russian counterparts for advice on operating in the country given the former Soviet Union’s doomed Afghan intervention that ended in defeat in 1989.
Afghanistan’s military collapse: Illicit deals and mass desertions
KABUL — The spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s military that allowed Taliban fighters to walk into the Afghan capital Sunday despite 20 years of training and billions of dollars in American aid began with a series of deals brokered in rural villages between the militant group and some of the Afghan government’s lowest-ranking officials.
The deals, initially offered early last year, were often described by Afghan officials as cease-fires, but Taliban leaders were in fact offering money in exchange for government forces to hand over their weapons, according to an Afghan officer and a U.S. official.
Over the next year and a half, the meetings advanced to the district level and then rapidly on to provincial capitals, culminating in a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces, according to interviews with more than a dozen Afghan officers, police, special operations troops and other soldiers.
Get ready. The rehab effort of Joe Biden’s disastrously incompetent handling of America’s exit from Afghanistan is beginning. While some on CNN (like Jake Tapper) have acted like real journalists and grilled the administration, others are already trying to turn the debacle around. Just minutes after Biden addressed the nation (taking no questions), CNN’s Fareed Zakaria deemed the President’s speech on Monday as “brave.”
Afghanistan’s all-girls robotics team is trying to escape the country and make it to Canada while the Taliban, known for its cruelty against women, continues to regain control over the nation.
“To talk to these girls and listen to them crying over the phone to be saved… Begging that the Canadians save them… These girls have a future—they deserve to have a future. They all want to go to college. They will not be able to do that if they remain in Afghanistan,” said human rights lawyer Kimberley Motley on CBC News Network.
The Taliban, now in near-total control of the country, are going door to door in newly conquered Kabul searching for journalists and political opponents, according to multiple outlets on the ground.
