Afghanistan

Vietnam lingered in the American body politic like a residual infection. Afghanistan could also poison American politics for years to come.

“ALL SORROWS can be borne,” wrote Isak Dinesen, “if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.” Today, America has sorrows to bear. The Afghanistan War has left 2,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Afghans dead, the Taliban in control of Kabul, Al Qaeda crowing about victory, and teenage Afghan girls unable to attend school. America needs to tell a story about Afghanistan or craft a narrative of the war that helps Americans make sense of events, learn lessons—and move on.

As the Afghanistan War recedes into the past—at least for Americans—the war moves from the drone’s eye to the mind’s eye. The Vietnamese author Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Military loss is one of the most arduous traumas that a country can endure. “To lose an empire is to lose yourself,” said one French general in the 1960s. “It takes all the meaning away from the life of a man, the life of a pioneer.”

Don’t ask questions, just give them their citizenship.

Biden’s evacuation brought tens of thousands of Afghans to America.

The majority of them were not interpreters, had no visas, and no basis for entering the country. Despite that, they were rapidly brought here with virtually no vetting, dropped off at military bases, and then put through the resettlement process across the United States.

There’s no one problem.

When the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan last year one of its first pledges was to clean up the country’s drug problem – never mind that they spent years profiting off the very same opium people are now addicted to.

Six months on from the take-over and the Taliban is keeping its promise, after a fashion: By rounding up thousands of homeless drug addicts and locking them in hospitals reminiscent of concentration camps for three months while they detox, cold turkey.

A look inside one such ‘hospital’, in Kabul, reveals inmates wasting away in horrifying conditions: Crammed in three-to-a -bed with little or no food, forced to eat grass to stave off hunger pains – amid rumours they have resorted to eating cats and even cannibalism in order to survive.

It’s not huge news that the Biden administration was a colossal failure on Afghanistan, or that Joe Biden still thinks there’s nothing to apologize for.

What’s news now is the colossal incompetence that went on inside that administration as Afghanistan was collapsing, according to a leaked memo that Axios got hold of…

KABUL, Afghanistan—The Taliban, officially termed the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, went from an insurgency to a self-declared state in a matter of moments when they entered the abandoned presidential palace five months ago.

The leadership immediately professed to have changed from their brutal rule of the 1990s in a desperate attempt to obtain recognition and foreign aid. However, it is clear that some unsettling elements are unlikely to change.

LGBTQ people in Afghanistan are facing a rise in attacks and an increasingly desperate situation under Taliban rule, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and OutRight Action International.

The report, entitled “‘Even If You Go to the Skies, We’ll Find You’: LGBT People in Afghanistan After the Taliban Takeover” interviewed 60 queer Afghans in late 2021. Most were still living in Afghanistan, while a few had escaped to nearby countries.

An Afghan evacuee was convicted of having sexual contact with a toddler while they resided on a U.S. military base that was providing temporary housing for those who departed Afghanistan at the end of the war.

Mohammad Tariq, 24, was convicted on charges of abusive sexual contact with a 3-year-old girl on Monday, and he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. He will be sentenced on April 26.