OTTAWA — A Conservative government would match commitments by the Liberals to resettle not only Afghan citizens who worked alongside Canada forces, but also thousands more who fear for their lives as the Taliban retake control of their country, Erin O’Toole said Wednesday.
Just before the election campaign began, the Liberal government committed to resettling at least 20,000 Afghans as the Taliban appeared set to regain power after a bloody 20-year battle.
Roslyn Talusan, who boasts in her bio that she’s written for Vice and Refinery 29 among other online publications, first asked “why did a white woman write a cookbook about dumplings and noodles.” She made sure to include a screen grab of the cookbook and a photo of author Pippa Middlehurst just so everyone could get the full effect of how supposedly offensive this all was.
If Joe Biden played checkers in a chess game in his catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, he’s playing Tic-Tac-Toe in his distraction campaign against the US intel community. And losing, too. Sources at the CIA have pushed back against suggestions that the White House lacked intel on the potential for a fast collapse…
The Biden administration apparently doesn’t know the meaning of the word “optics.”
With the Taliban takeover of Kabul, which prompted emergency flights out of Afghanistan, drawing comparisons to the fall of Saigon, Vice President Kamala Harris is heading to Vietnam.
The U.S. and the West are experiencing two unfolding intelligence disasters. Oxford Languages succinctly defines the two possible meanings of the word “intelligence:” (1) the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, or (2) the collection of information of military or political value. What we are experiencing today is not chiefly a failure to collect information, but the ever more tangible inability of our leaders to apply the information they have acquired.
The two debacles began to unfold around the turn of the millennium, within twelve months of each other. We are now seeing the fruits of the first failure play out 24/7 before our very eyes: the stunningly rapid fall of Afghanistan despite twenty years of sacrifice and investment. The second, the failure to understand and counter the growing threat posed by China, is set soon to prove itself just as disastrous as the first. In responding to each of these two challenges, our leadership has demonstrated a profound lack of insight and skill: a true failure of intelligence.
Pencils scratch as students in year eight feverishly work through an exam paper. At the back of the classroom, Clara Edna Chevambo, 37, a minute figure in hand-me-down clothes, finishes first and hands her paper to the teacher. As she leaves, her 11-year-old daughter is arriving for afternoon class. A vegetable farmer who supported, clothed and fed five children, her mother and her grandmother, Chevambo is now living in a borrowed tent in a camp, one of the ones with something to do to fill a few hours.
“I’m in school every day, and I don’t want to miss class. I send my daughter to school every day.”
Where she lived and farmed in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost region, bordering Tanzania, is too dangerous a place to be now war has engulfed the region. An estimated 800,000 people have been displaced by an Islamist insurgency that has killed 3,000 people since 2017. Known as al-Shabaab, although not linked to Somalia’s group of the same name, it has declared itself affiliated to Islamic State.
I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said.
I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner.
We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw.
Lots of blame to go round, 20 years worth of lies.
Pope Francis has urged people to get vaccinated against Covid-19, describing doing so as “an act of love”.
The pontiff made his appeal in a video produced by the Vatican and the Ad Council, a non-profit US group that has previously made videos promoting vaccination against Covid. He praised the work of scientists for producing safe and effective vaccines.
“Thanks to God and to the work of many, we now have vaccines to protect us from Covid-19,” he said in the video. “Vaccines bring hope to end the pandemic, but only if they are available to all and if we collaborate with one another.”
Evacuation flights out of Kabul are taking off almost empty despite tens of thousands of Afghans trying to flee the country after the Taliban formed a ring of steel around the airport and barred most people from reaching it.
One Australian Hercules C-130 aircraft with room for 120 people took off with just 26 on board today, the government has confirmed, while a German Airbus A-400M with room for 150 was carrying just seven people when it departed yesterday.
That is despite there being around 50,000 Afghans gathered at the airport who have been promised sanctuary by western nations. One particularly harrowing piece of footage showed women pleading with US troops that ‘the Taliban are coming for me’.
Justin needs to speak to the Taliban on turning this into a She-Covery.
Sun columnist Lorrie Goldstein explains how Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau needs to do more to bring to safety those who helped Canada during its mission in Afghanistan.
Fresh chaos descended in Kabul today as thousands of Afghans desperate to escape Taliban rule pleaded with troops to be allowed on planes out of the country after the militants used whips, sharp objects, and gunfire to bead back crowds outside the city’s airport.
One man was photographed with tears streaming down his cheeks, his face contorted in anguish as he saw his fellow Afghans being whipped. The Taliban then opened fire to drive the masses back from the site.
Women were filmed reaching their hands through iron railings towards US troops while screaming ‘the Taliban are coming’ in footage being circulated on Afghan social media accounts this morning.
Taliban fire into crowd, beat protesters: reports
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban violently broke up a protest in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least one person as they quashed a rare public show of dissent. The militant group meanwhile met with former officials from the toppled Western-backed government.
The insurgents’ every action in their sudden sweep to power is being watched closely. They insist they have changed and won’t impose the same draconian restrictions they did when they last ruled Afghanistan, all but eliminating women’s rights, carrying out public executions and harboring al-Qaida in the years before the 9/11 attacks.
BREAKING: Taliban opens fire on protesters in Jalalabad because they were reportedly waiving the Afghan flag.
— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) August 18, 2021
Ontario reports 485 new COVID-19 cases, 3 more deaths
President of largest public sector union ‘will not stand’ for termination of unvaccinated civil servants
OTTAWA — The Public Service Alliance of Canada president says he “will not stand for the termination” of federal public servants who refuse to get vaccinated, after Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau warned of “consequences” for those civil servants.
In an interview with CTV News, Chris Aylward said “it’s very concerning to us when national party leaders are making statements around discipline around terminations when it comes to these vaccinations. That is totally unacceptable to us.”
CORBELLA: Trudeau falls into his own forced vaccination trap that he set for O’Toole
But on Tuesday — just four days later — PSAC, the largest union of the Canadian federal public sector, made such a sharp 180-degree turn it has likely left Trudeau and union leadership with whiplash.
