Afghanistan

A pregnant woman from California who is stranded in Afghanistan said the Taliban is “hunting” Americans now that the US military has withdrawn from the country​.​

The woman, identified by her first name, Nasria, to protect her from reprisals, is among the up to 200 Americans still trapped in Afghanistan.

“There’s been days, you know, where I think to myself, ‘Am I going to make it home? Am I going to end up living here? Am I going to end up dying here?​’​” Nasria ​told Voice of America in an interview recorded on Friday. ​

More … Top Republican says Taliban holding Americans

WASHINGTON — The top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee says some Americans who have been trying to get out of Afghanistan since the U.S. military left are sitting in airplanes at an airport ready to leave but the Taliban are not letting them take off.

Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas says there are six airplanes at the Mazar-e-Sharif airport with American citizens on board, along with their Afghan interpreters, and the Taliban are “holding them hostage” right now.

I bet all the right people are shocked at this development.

Taliban militants in Afghanistan have shot dead a policewoman in a provincial city, relatives have told the BBC.

The woman, named in local media as Banu Negar, was killed at the family home in front of relatives in Firozkoh, the capital of central Ghor province.

The killing comes amid increasing reports of escalating repression of women in Afghanistan.

The BBC has asked Taliban authorities for comment. The local Taliban promised to investigate, the family says.

In the words of SIGAR Special Inspector John Sopko, the West “poured in too much money, too quickly and above all with too little control”, which allowed warlords and local bosses to become extremely rich.

The Taliban takeover that followed the ignominious US-led retreat; the ouster of the West-backed government has spurred a re-evaluation of overseas aid to Afghanistan, its extent and placement.

Several experts have argued that the lack of control over aid to Afghanistan may have actually exacerbated the situation in the war-torn country.

The Biden administration has pulled off a military-political defeat that gets worse the more you look at it

It was quite the handover at Kabul airport this week. The last American troops to exit Afghanistan reportedly left facing an ‘elite unit’ of the Taliban. In a season finale that the most dystopian screenwriter would have struggled to invent, the elite Taliban unit was itself bedecked in US military kit. That is, they were not only wearing uniforms and protective kit provided by the fleeing US army, but were parading the airport with US-provided guns in US-provided vehicles.

BELGRADE, Serbia — Austria’s leader says any migration wave from Afghanistan should be handled in neighboring countries.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said Saturday in Belgrade that a potential wave toward Europe must not take place. He adds that “this is why we are in contact with countries in the region.”

Kurz spoke after meeting Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic. Thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa or Asia have been stranded in Serbia and neighboring countries situated on the so-called Balkan migration route toward Western Europe.

Afghans should be ‘sent back at the border,’ says AfD lead candidate Tino Chrupalla

One of the two lead candidates for the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Tino Chrupalla, says he opposes offering asylum to the vast majority of Afghans.

Chrupalla complained that of the first 4,000 people who had been flown out by the German military from Kabul airport during the recent multinational airlift, only 136 counted as what he would consider to be local support staff in Afghanistan.

Asked to clarify how he would define the term local support staff, Chrupalla said: “They are for example interpreters who worked for the German military.” When asked if only Bundeswehr staff, he said he did not want “NGOs or anything else diluting the term. Otherwise, it can’t be verified. Who can say for sure which people are truly local staff?”

No one wants a repeat of the Merkel Migrant Fiasco. Well a few virtue signaling morons do, like PM Asshat.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials are looking into reports that in the frantic evacuation of desperate Afghans from Kabul, older men were admitted together with young girls they claimed as “brides” or otherwise sexually abused.

U.S. officials at intake centers in the United Arab Emirates and in Wisconsin have identified numerous incidents in which Afghan girls have been presented to authorities as the “wives” of much older men. While child marriage is not uncommon in Afghanistan, the U.S. has strict policies against human trafficking that include prosecutions for offenders and sanctions for countries that don’t crack down on it.

We’ve been hearing a lot of speculation that the Afghan debacle is more than it seems – that rather than being a typical outcome of activity by some of the dumbest, most ill-informed, and most blinkered individuals ever to occupy places in the U.S government, it is instead a dark, convoluted conspiracy aimed at some goal sinister beyond words.

Some of this is from the usual suspects who see conspiracies every time a cat falls out of a tree, and some by more reputable people. The core concept here can be expressed simply: “There has to be something else going on. Nobody could be that stupid.”