Afghanistan

Two years ago today, the fall of Kabul exposed the delusions of ‘liberal interventionism’.

Two years ago today, Taliban fighters arrived at the gates of Kabul. Afghan security forces put up no resistance. Within hours, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and his assorted cronies fled the country. By the evening of 15 August 2021, the Taliban had effectively retaken power. The shiny new modern Afghanistan, liberated from Taliban rule, that the US and its allies had spent 20 years trying to build had crumbled upon first contact with reality.

Militants who left fingerprints on IEDs meant to kill Americans in Afghanistan and a prisoner freed by the Taliban were among more than 65 terrorists allowed into the United States after the catastrophic withdrawal.

Most of them could still be roaming the country, and the government cannot track them down.

The damning revelations made in a new book add to the laundry list of blunders from the Biden administration during and after the disastrous evacuation of Kabul in August 2021.

The first of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals to fall to the Taliban was the city of Zaranj in the southern deserts of Nimroz, near the border with Iran, on Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. The following day in the far northwest, the Talibs roared into Sheberghan, the capital of Jawzjan, on the border with Turkmenistan.

The next to fall was Sar-e-Pul, then Kunduz, Taloqan and Aybak. Then Kandahar and Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, then Jalalabad. Only the month before, U.S. president Joe Biden had scoffed at suggestions that his capitulation to the Taliban would echo the humiliating American retreat from Vietnam, with its indelible images of diplomatic staff scrambling into helicopters on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

Afghanistan and the Bud light fiasco may have something in common.

The marketing wiz for Bud was comfortably ensconced in Manhattan while her Afghan counterparts were similarly situated in Kabul.

They are the same people, they exist above the hoi polloi whose sole purpose is to be told what to do when they aren’t being ignored.

They had it all figured out until they didn’t.

The Taliban have burned musical instruments in Afghanistan, claiming music “causes moral corruption”.

Thousands of dollars worth of musical equipment went up in smoke on a bonfire on Saturday in western Herat province.

Since taking power in 2021, the Taliban have imposed numerous restrictions, including on playing music in public.

Ahmad Sarmast, Afghanistan National Institute of Music founder, likened their actions to “cultural genocide and musical vandalism”.

The Taliban has ordered all beauty salons to close in a further reduction of women’s freedoms in Afghanistan.

“The deadline for the closing of beauty parlours for women is one month,” Mohammad Sadiq Akif, a spokesman for the ministry for the prevention of vice and propagation of virtue, said on Tuesday.

Less than two years after President Biden withdrew U.S. personnel from Afghanistan, the country has become a significant coordination site for the Islamic State as the terrorist group plans attacks across Europe and Asia, and conducts “aspirational plotting” against the United States, according to a classified Pentagon assessment that portrays the threat as a growing security concern.

The attack planning, detailed in U.S. intelligence findings leaked on the Discord messaging platform and obtained by The Washington Post, reveal specific efforts to target embassies, churches, business centers and the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, which drew more than 2 million spectators last summer in Qatar. Pentagon officials were aware in December of nine such plots coordinated by ISIS leaders in Afghanistan, and the number rose to 15 by February, says the assessment, which has not been disclosed previously.

After the chaotic and deadly pullout of US forces from Afghanistan last year, and with no country recognising the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (better known as the Taliban), it was thought that with bank freezes and sanctions from the international community the Islamic regime would not be able to financially survive. But that is not what happened. As it is believed that up to two-thirds of Afghans live in extreme poverty, to alleviate the problem, in September 2022 the Biden administration announced it would create a fund to assist the people of Afghanistan, apart from the country’s central bank.

‘The Afghan Fund will help mitigate the economic challenges facing Afghanistan while protecting and preserving $3.5 billion in reserves from Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), Afghanistan’s central bank, for the benefit of the people of Afghanistan,’ Wally Adeyemo, U.S. deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at the time. The central bank of Afghanistan has recently said it received another injection of $40 million in cash in December.

Yet most of the country still remains poverty stricken. This is because the jihadists have been economically doing quite well through the fleecing of international humanitarian aid and making deals with draconian countries like China.

There has been a steady flow of articles in the western press highlighting the plight of the Afghan people since the Taliban were handed the reins of power marking the end of a 20 year con job.

Everyone on the gravy train during the Great Afghan Grift naturally wants to go back to pretending they “make a difference.”

Let the Afghans sort it out and the western grifters be brought to justice.

h/t VV