Afghanistan

[Rue Bella]

This will drop down the memory hole pretty quickly.

Yep. As did needlessly invading Iraq and killing who knows how many thousands and thousands living there. We are a violent species. Moving on is what we do. It might be different if people actually cared about Afghanistan, but they/we really don't.  As soon as pictures stop showing up on the news, it will be a done deal. Except for election rhetoric of course. But that will be second to freedom from wearing masks and of course abortion. 

[LFC]

Vox has a piece on how Biden's position on getting out of Afghanistan hasn't really changed since 2009.

In 2009, the new Obama administration debated whether to “surge” troop levels in Afghanistan after nearly eight years of war had failed to quell the insurgency from the overthrown Taliban forces. Top generals asked early that year for 17,000 more US troops and then, having gotten those, asked for an additional 40,000 to try to weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan government.

Then-Vice President Biden was consistently one of the biggest skeptics of the military’s recommendations. Throughout months of debate, he repeatedly raised the inconvenient point that the generals’ preferred strategy seemed extremely unlikely to lead to actual victory. “We have not thought through our strategic goals!” he shouted during the Obama administration’s first meeting on the war in Afghanistan.

The US initially invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because its Taliban regime had sheltered Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group al-Qaeda; the military deposed the Taliban and sent bin Laden fleeing from the country by the end of that year.

After that, Americans became distracted by a separate war of choice in Iraq, while a Taliban insurgency brewed in Afghanistan and terrorist groups relocated to Pakistan and other countries.

So a grueling, months-long debate unfolded during Obama’s first year in office over what, exactly, the US’s goals should then be in Afghanistan, and whether many more troops were needed to accomplish them. Woodward chronicles this debate in Obama’s Wars in exhaustive detail. Military leaders wanted tens of thousands more troops to implement an expansive counterinsurgency mission in an effort to stabilize the country, as had just been done in Iraq.

Biden didn’t buy it. At every step, he tried to argue for less — for a more limited mission than the military was asking for. During meetings, this often made him the skunk at the garden party as he made a few noteworthy arguments:

[AnBr]

Aug 18, 2021 11:44:53 GMT GRowell said:

All I can see is spin and blame shifting for the hideously chaotic exit that is betraying the Afgans who worked with us and all Afgan women. The buck stops with Biden, plain and simple.

I hope he has the decency to admit he and his administration f- up big time. Only then can we move on. We will see.

Where was your outrage when tRump left the Kurds to fend for themselves? It was/is a no win situation.  People were dying and there was no realistic way prevent all deaths before or after withdrawal, just as when Britain withdrew from India millions died.The sooner we withdraw the sooner the deaths from our presence will eventually stop. Regrettable, yes, but other options would mostly be worse.

[goldenvalley]

While people, especially those in Congress, are howling and blaming Biden for the plight of Afghanis that helped the US I hope they know this: 

More than 7,000 special visas allocated to Afghans by Congress in 2020 went unissued, compared with about 5,000 the year before, according to State Department data. Nearly 19,000 visa applications were stuck in processing as of September 2019, according to a State Department audit last year, a number that was all but guaranteed to grow with the coronavirus disruptions.

Created to support Afghans and Iraqis who came under threat for their work with the United States, the special visa programs have lengthy applications processes that have prolonged the average wait time to three years. And as they wait, Afghan applicants to the program are increasingly vulnerable: The Taliban and other militant groups view them as traitors, putting them in a perilous position as the Taliban expands its influence and as thousands of U.S. troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan.

This quote is from a Washington Post article dated Jan. 21, 2021.

[GRowell]

Aug 19, 2021 0:13:51 GMT goldenvalley said:

While people, especially those in Congress, are howling and blaming Biden for the plight of Afghanis that helped the US I hope they know this: 

More than 7,000 special visas allocated to Afghans by Congress in 2020 went unissued, compared with about 5,000 the year before, according to State Department data. Nearly 19,000 visa applications were stuck in processing as of September 2019, according to a State Department audit last year, a number that was all but guaranteed to grow with the coronavirus disruptions.

Created to support Afghans and Iraqis who came under threat for their work with the United States, the special visa programs have lengthy applications processes that have prolonged the average wait time to three years. And as they wait, Afghan applicants to the program are increasingly vulnerable: The Taliban and other militant groups view them as traitors, putting them in a perilous position as the Taliban expands its influence and as thousands of U.S. troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan.

This quote is from a Washington Post article dated Jan. 21, 2021.

[Rue Bella]

[LFC]

Aug 19, 2021 17:12:46 GMT Rue Bella said:

The Biden team's cold political calculation is that Americans won't care what happens in Afghanistan as long as Americans are safe.

Or as I like to call it, "reality." The majority of Americans have wanted us out for a long time.

[LFC]

Sounds like revisionist history at its most self serving. It doesn't even make sense. (Hmmmm. Maybe it is true.)

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump sowed the seeds for this week’s chaotic U.S. pullback from Afghanistan by striking a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1 of this year. But Trump’s final acting defense secretary has now audaciously claimed that the former president never had any intention of going through with his own plan. Chris Miller told Defense One that Trump’s deal with the Taliban was actually all a “play” to disguise his administration’s secret strategy. He said: “We weren’t just going to head for the door... We were going to jam [ousted Afghan president] Ghani hard and make him cut a deal with the Taliban. It would have been ugly. It wouldn’t have been great. But there was no plan to just leave.” The plan as recounted by Miller would have seen some U.S. troops stay in Afghanistan while the Taliban was invited to lead the government. An unnamed Trump official told Defense One that Miller’s plan would have been totally unworkable, saying the idea that a Taliban-led government would allow U.S. troops to stick around was “wishful thinking.”

[goldenvalley]

Aug 19, 2021 17:28:50 GMT LFC said:

Sounds like revisionist history at its most self serving. It doesn't even make sense. (Hmmmm. Maybe it is true.)

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump sowed the seeds for this week’s chaotic U.S. pullback from Afghanistan by striking a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1 of this year. But Trump’s final acting defense secretary has now audaciously claimed that the former president never had any intention of going through with his own plan. Chris Miller told Defense One that Trump’s deal with the Taliban was actually all a “play” to disguise his administration’s secret strategy. He said: “We weren’t just going to head for the door... We were going to jam [ousted Afghan president] Ghani hard and make him cut a deal with the Taliban. It would have been ugly. It wouldn’t have been great. But there was no plan to just leave.” The plan as recounted by Miller would have seen some U.S. troops stay in Afghanistan while the Taliban was invited to lead the government. An unnamed Trump official told Defense One that Miller’s plan would have been totally unworkable, saying the idea that a Taliban-led government would allow U.S. troops to stick around was “wishful thinking.”

What Miller intended and what Trump would accept could have been different things.   And whatever "deal" was in the offing probably couldn't have convinced the Afghani president to stay in the country to hold up his end of it. Notice he jumped on a plane right quick.

[AnBr]

Aug 19, 2021 17:28:50 GMT LFC said:

Sounds like revisionist history at its most self serving. It doesn't even make sense. (Hmmmm. Maybe it is true.)

GOP Removes Page Praising Donald Trump's 'Historic' Peace Deal With Taliban

[jackd]

If their lips are moving, they are lying. Also, if they are writing.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall seems to be the only media voice of sanity. Amongst all the melting down of both the MSM and right-wing noise machine the fact is that this appears like it's going to be a fairly peaceful transition of power. Of course there will be some amount of violence. A number of the ground troops in the Taliban are angry ignorant men with guns (our own U.S. troops are hardly without stain over the decades) but it really does seem that today's Taliban leaders want to join the world at large rather than ruling a dying, poverty ridden backwater.

The bonfire of hyperboles in US press coverage seems limitless at the moment. And the consequences of the fall of the US-backed government in Kabul are likely to be very, very limited beyond Afghanistan itself. But I wanted to focus on something that seems to be getting very, very little above-the-fold coverage in the American press coverage: the key leaders of the US backed government over the last two decades are relaxedly meeting with the political leadership of the Taliban in Kabul about the formation of the new government.

Meanwhile, Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan President whose precipitous flight hastened the rapid collapse of the government last weekend says he supports these negotiations and is in the process of negotiating his own return to the country.

He’s currently in the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, Afghan media reports that Ghani’s brother, Hashmat Ghani, pledged loyalty to the Taliban and has encouraged all Afghans to do the same. I have no idea if that is in line with these negotiations or something different.

[goldenvalley]

So Trump's deal with the Taliban was that troops would be out in the spring...they weren't. I guess that few extra months didn't much matter in terms of whatever it is the critics think would happen if the US stayed in another few more months. I'm sure things could have been handled better. That's true of most every human endeavor.

[LFC]

This sounds kind of like what I was talking about. You have two groups of Taliban, those who are leading and are trying to set up a government and those who are young, angry, ignorant, and armed. The latter were spun into a frenzy to go to war with The Great Satan, the war was a nothing burger, and now don't really have anything to do so they're lashing out on their own.

“We have lost everything so fast, I can't recognize the city of Kabul anymore,” she said. “Yesterday, I went out and I sensed the chaos. Lads with messy dirty long hair filled the public space. They either stand at the end of streets or drive armored Humvees. They are looking for an opportunity to show that they are in control. They are uneducated and… you simply have to obey them."

Is it any wonder some Republicans are speaking approvingly of the Taliban these days? This is the type of force they have been trying to harness for years.

[LFC]

From the Department of WTF Were They Thinking? (Clearly they weren't.)

Two members of Congress went on a junket to Kabul right in the middle of the massive airlift to rescue Americans and Afghans from the Taliban takeover.

• The guilty reps are Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Peter Meijer (R-MI).

• Military and State Department officials were livid, according to the Washington Post.

A diplomat lambasted the trip as “one of the most irresponsible things I’ve heard a lawmaker do,” and a senior official said it was “as moronic as it is selfish.”

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) didn’t seem to care for the stunt either, reminding members that State and Defense Department officials have asked them not to travel to the region now.

“Member travel to Afghanistan and the surrounding countries would unnecessarily divert needed resources from the priority mission of safely and expeditiously evacuating America [sic] and Afghans at risk from Afghanistan,” she wrote in a letter.

• Moulton and Meijer insisted that they went there to “to gather information, not to grandstand,” and that they hadn’t taken up room in a plane that actual refugees needed.

“We left on a plane with empty seats, seated in crew-only seats to ensure that nobody who needed a seat would lose one because of our presence,” they said.

So apparently empty "crew-only" seats can't be used by people who need to be evacuated but they can be used by House members. Uh, huh. But seriously, WTF "information" did they actually think they would "gather?" It was a political stunt with no actual value and a damn stupid one at that.

[LFC]

I wish we could leave this piece of shit with the Taliban.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince is among the growing number of private defense contractors and former spies who are attempting to turn a profit on desperate Afghans who want out of their country before the U.S. shutters its 20-year mission on August 31. The Wall Street Journal reports that Prince, who faces U.N. sanctions over his sketchy work in Libya and whose Blackwater guards were convicted of murder in 2014 while providing security for Americans in Iraq, told the WSJ he is charging upwards of $6,500 a seat on a private charter out of Kabul. The paper was not able to confirm whether Prince even had the capabilities to carry out private evacuations.

Other private entities are offering over ground travel despite increased checkpoints on the way to the Pakistan border. Meanwhile, efforts have stepped up to evacuate as many Americans, green card holders and eligible Afghans before the hard deadline. On Tuesday, the U.S. military began its own withdrawal preparations to be ready to remove all staff and equipment by next week.

[LFC]

Aug 24, 2021 17:33:36 GMT LFC said:

Josh Marshall seems to be the only media voice of sanity. Amongst all the melting down of both the MSM and right-wing noise machine the fact is that this appears like it's going to be a fairly peaceful transition of power. Of course there will be some amount of violence. A number of the ground troops in the Taliban are angry ignorant men with guns (our own U.S. troops are hardly without stain over the decades) but it really does seem that today's Taliban leaders want to join the world at large rather than ruling a dying, poverty ridden backwater.

Well that didn't take long.

Fear is mounting for women and girls in Afghanistan after the Taliban told working women to stay at home, admitting they were not safe in the presence of the militant group's soldiers.

Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid said at a news conference on Tuesday that women should not go to work for their own safety, undermining the group's efforts to convince international observers that the group would be more tolerant towards women than when they were last in power.

The instruction came the same day that the World Bank halted funding in Afghanistan, citing concerns about the safety of women, and within hours of the UN calling for a "transparent and prompt investigation" into reports of human rights abuses since the Taliban takeover.

Mujahid said the guidance to stay at home would be temporary, and would allow the group to find ways to ensure that women are not "treated in a disrespectful way" or "God forbid, hurt." He admitted the measure was necessary because the Taliban's soldiers "keep changing and are not trained."

"We are happy for them to enter the buildings but we want to make sure they do not face any worries," he said. "Therefore, we have asked them to take time off from work until the situation gets back to a normal order and women related procedures are in place, then they can return to their jobs once it's announced."

They created an army of angry fanatics (kind of like Trump was trying to do). Will they really be able to control them now as they claw for some level of respectability?

[LFC]

After the last stupid stunt I want to know who's in this new group of assholes. At least the military responded properly.

It appears that yet another group of U.S. lawmakers has tried, but ultimately failed, to visit Afghanistan as thousands of people are still attempting to flee Taliban rule as the U.S. enters its final 36 hours of evacuations. CNN reports that, early Thursday, U.S. military officials in charge of the Kabul airport turned away a private jet thought to be carrying another U.S. congressional delegation. The Gulfstream jet reportedly departed from Athens, Greece, and was seen on flight tracking websites over Turkmenistan before it turned back to fly over Azerbaijan. The reported attempt comes after Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Peter Meijer (R-MI) briefly interrupted evacuations during a surprise visit on Tuesday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others condemned the visit. “We don’t want anyone to think this was a good idea,” she said. CNN didn’t name the lawmakers suspected to be the latest flight. Around 150 American citizens are thought to be in Afghanistan desperate to get to the airport before the U.S. ends its evacuation program.

Yee haw! Let's drop in unexpectedly, require security, completely disrupt military operations, and prance around on video so we have a show and tell to take home!

[LFC]

Josh Marshall continue to point out the insanity inanity of the MSM over Afghanistan. The latest piece is titled The Number Of Afghans We’re Supposed to Evacuate Keeps Spiraling Upward. Biden can't possibly be doing a reasonable job so time to move the goalposts!

I want to discuss an issue I’ve been watching unfold through the process of the evacuation from Kabul which has now been on-going for some ten days. As we’ve discussed, the fate of American allies in the country has become both a humanitarian mission as well as a cudgel used to attack the US withdrawal – both by those who wanted the US to stay in Afghanistan permanently and those who’ve wanted to use the inevitable messiness and chaos of the US withdrawal as a way to cleanse their own dirty hands and complicity in the misbegotten mission. But a key part of both dimensions of this question is that the number in need of evacuation is a moving target.

A week and a half ago reports had numbers in the range of 70,000 to 80,000 Afghan nationals needing to be evacuated – mostly so-called SIVs and their families. A greater number of people have now been flown out of the country, though a small percentage of those are US citizens and some large percentage is third country nationals. Today however The New York Times reports new numbers based on analyses of Pentagon records by an advocacy group called the Association of Wartime Allies. They find that as many as one million Afghan could be eligible for expedited immigration status and that a minimum of 250,000 are yet to be evacuated.

Earlier this week, after a briefing for members of Congress, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) expressed skepticism about whether all evacuees could be flown out by the end of August. “Given the number of Americans who still need to be evacuated, the number of SIVs, the number of others who are members of the Afghan press, civil society leaders women leaders. It’s hard for me to imagine all of that can be accomplished between now and the end of the month.”

So this is SIVs (basically people who worked for the US military mission), members of Afghan media, leaders of civil society and prominent women leaders. As noted above, the SIV group alone is now being pegged at as many as one million people. When you add in these other groups you’re talking about a non-trivial percentage of the entire Afghan population of 38 or 39 million people.

[snip]

In many cases this is done in good faith. There are lots of people endangered or potentially endangered by the Taliban takeover. Certainly there are lots of people whose life opportunities will dim dramatically. Just to make this concrete I recommend listening to the most recent episode of our podcast in which our co-host Kate Riga talks about her own effort to assist a desperate one-time interpreter for the US Army in getting out of the country with his family. This is very real whatever your opinions about the US mission in the country. But it is just as clear that this ever growing number is being used as both an anchor for the unending US military presence in the country and a cudgel with which to pin the consequences of the failed mission on the decision to withdraw itself. The number keeps escalating so that the storyline of failure and betrayal stays intact no matter what.

[LFC]

From TPM:

GOP Soberly Responds To Kabul Attack: JOE BIDEN MUST RESIGN!

Expect impeachment proceedings if Republicans take the House. Their fascism knows no bounds.

[LFC]

A take from a TPM reader.

I’ve been working on a piece about critiques of the American people’s lack of “strategic patience” as evidenced by our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then I got this note from TPM Reader PT and thought, yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.

I suspect that you, like me, have seen at least some commentators who argue that the Taliban “won” in Afghanistan by simply waiting us out, or that this demonstrates to other nations that consider an adversarial stance towards the US that we’re a paper tiger now that they know that even if we do take military action against them, all they have to do is wait for us to withdraw, which we inevitably will. I have a different perspective that I’d like to offer, starting with an analogy:

Consider somebody who has been arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison, but who is subsequently released from prison after 20 years. Would such a person walk out of the penitentiary thinking, “Ha! I beat the rap! All I hadda do is wait them out! Law enforcement in this town is a paper tiger.”

Well, I suppose that’s one way to look at it. But a more accurate way to look at it is that the convict had no power — none — to determine the outcome once he was imprisoned. His release isn’t a victory over the state; it’s a sign that the state decided that its interests were no longer well served by his incarceration. It’s also evidence that it would have been perfectly sustainable for the state to keep him in prison for the full life sentence had it chosen to.

This is how I currently think about the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. This happened not because they were smart and just waited us out. They waited us out because that was the only option available to them. As long as the US didn’t want the Taliban running Afghanistan, they weren’t going to be running Afghanistan. The US decided that it’s not in our interest at this time to make it our mission to keep them out of Afghanistan’s government indefinitely. We decided that a 20 year sentence, as it were, was sufficient.

Regardless of what they say for public consumption, I suspect the Taliban get this. I suspect they understand that none of their last 20 years in the political wilderness (and often the literal wilderness) would have happened had al-Qaeda not organized and planned a major terrorist attack on the US from their bases in Afghanistan, and had the Taliban not refused to cooperate in the US effort to destroy al-Qaeda and kill or capture its people. Given that, I expect they will think long and hard before they let some terrorist organization set up shop on their territory and start carrying out attacks on the US from there.

[jackd]

It's probably more about money. The Taliban need foreign aid, and that of the U.S. in particular, in order to have any chance of successfully running the country.

[andydp]

It certainly didn't take long for Pauly Shore's evil twin's name to surface from the slime of the Last Administration:

Mike Pence’s former national security adviser Olivia Troye Tweets:

🧵There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State.(1/7)

I tracked this issue personally in my role during my WH tenure. Pence was fully aware of the problem. We got nowhere on it because Trump/S. Miller had watchdogs in place at DOJ, DHS, State & security agencies that made an already cumbersome SIV process even more challenging.(2/7)

I met w/ numerous external organizations during my White House tenure who advocated for refugees & pleaded for help in getting US allies through the process. I got the phone calls & letters as the homeland security & CT advisor to Pence…(3/7)

The system wouldn’t budge, regardless of how much this was argued about in National Security Council mtgs. The Pentagon weighed in saying we needed to get these allies through the process-Mattis/others sent memos. We all knew the urgency but the resources had been depleted.(4/7)

The fear of people across the Trump Admin to counter these enablers was palpable. There were numerous behind closed door meetings held-strategizing how to navigate this issue. The Trump Admin had FOUR years…(5/7)

..Trump had FOUR years-while putting this plan in place-to evacuate these Afghan allies who were the lifelines for many of us who spent time in Afghanistan. They’d been waiting a long time. The process slowed to a trickle for reviews/other “priorities”-then came to a halt.(6/7)

To people like Ben Domenech, JD Vance & others who are making blanket statements & pushing narratives of convenience on Afganistan-especially on the SIV/allies issue-please, just stop. Your comments are uninformed & also hurtful. We see right through you.(7/8)

Grateful for everyone advocating the urgency of getting our allies evacuated out of Afghanistan ASAP & those who are doing everything they can to help. It’s the least we can do for these individuals & it’s a matter of national security. The world is watching.(8/8)

ETA: I posted this a few hours ago on my news feed.  NO ONE has tried a rebuttal.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 27, 2021 18:36:00 GMT andydp said:

It certainly didn't take long for Pauly Shore's evil twin's name to surface from the slime of the Last Administration:

Mike Pence’s former national security adviser Olivia Troye Tweets:

🧵There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State.(1/7)

I tracked this issue personally in my role during my WH tenure. Pence was fully aware of the problem. We got nowhere on it because Trump/S. Miller had watchdogs in place at DOJ, DHS, State & security agencies that made an already cumbersome SIV process even more challenging.(2/7)

I met w/ numerous external organizations during my White House tenure who advocated for refugees & pleaded for help in getting US allies through the process. I got the phone calls & letters as the homeland security & CT advisor to Pence…(3/7)

The system wouldn’t budge, regardless of how much this was argued about in National Security Council mtgs. The Pentagon weighed in saying we needed to get these allies through the process-Mattis/others sent memos. We all knew the urgency but the resources had been depleted.(4/7)

The fear of people across the Trump Admin to counter these enablers was palpable. There were numerous behind closed door meetings held-strategizing how to navigate this issue. The Trump Admin had FOUR years…(5/7)

..Trump had FOUR years-while putting this plan in place-to evacuate these Afghan allies who were the lifelines for many of us who spent time in Afghanistan. They’d been waiting a long time. The process slowed to a trickle for reviews/other “priorities”-then came to a halt.(6/7)

To people like Ben Domenech, JD Vance & others who are making blanket statements & pushing narratives of convenience on Afganistan-especially on the SIV/allies issue-please, just stop. Your comments are uninformed & also hurtful. We see right through you.(7/8)

Grateful for everyone advocating the urgency of getting our allies evacuated out of Afghanistan ASAP & those who are doing everything they can to help. It’s the least we can do for these individuals & it’s a matter of national security. The world is watching.(8/8)

ETA: I posted this a few hours ago on my news feed.  NO ONE has tried a rebuttal.

I'm sure the people she called out are telling themselves "don't feed the trolls" and hoping this will drop off the top of the feed quickly.  In the meantime, the howlers keep howling about masks, Nazism, inept Biden, so her thread will drop down quickly.

[LFC]

From TPM:

Remembering the Origins of the United States’ 20 Year War in Afghanistan