For months, the Biden administration was stockpiling military equipment for the Taliban before the collapse of the Afghan government. The report comes from Reuters who shares that well over a month before the Taliban’s march across the country, the Biden administration was sending military equipment to Afghanistan amid a “planned withdrawal.”
The plans of the Biden administration were not very well thought out or executed. But perhaps this was the plan all along.
h/t Mauser98
Taliban fighters are reportedly flogging Afghan civilians in the streets for wearing ‘westernised’ clothing such as jeans as they cement their power in Afghanistan.
Several young Afghans posted on social media they had been beaten and whipped by members of the Taliban for wearing jeans after being accused of disrespecting Islam.
One social media post says the boys were ‘walking with friends in Kabul,’ when they were confronted by Taliban soldiers.
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top national security officials assembled at the Pentagon early on April 24 for a secret meeting to plan the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. It was two weeks after President Joe Biden had announced the exit over the objection of his generals, but now they were carrying out his orders.
In a secure room in the building’s “extreme basement,” two floors below ground level, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with top White House and intelligence officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined by video conference. After four hours, two things were clear.
The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is a debacle for the United States; the consequences will take shape fast. The Biden administration and President Joe Biden himself have an overwhelming responsibility for what is taking place and what will follow; they have shown a degree of incompetence unseen in the United States since the calamitous Carter years.
I can’t agree with the author, to me it makes no sense to have stayed.
The costs were far too great and in return America received next to nothing.
You can’t compare this to NATO and the American presence in Europe.
Unlike Afghanistan some Europeans would actually fight if attacked and some even appreciate America being there.
They don’t like paying their fair share but they like the security.
More than 200 former Guantanamo Bay inmates who were released have returned to terrorism following their release – with 151 still at large, according to newly declassified documents.
The declassified Office of National Intelligence report, which is dated December 18, 2020, highlights that 229 former Guantanamo prisoners have reengaged in acts of terrorism and killing Americans since their release.
Data included in the report shows that 125 former prisoners are confirmed to have reengaged in acts of terrorism since their release, while an additional 104 are currently suspected of reengaging.
Ministers today revealed people on the UK’s terror ‘no fly list’ have already tried to infiltrate RAF flights in Kabul – amid fears of an ISIS suicide bomb attack.
Alarm has been raised that troops are ‘having to keep their fingers on the trigger in one hand while holding a baby in the other’ with desperate crowds trying to get away from the Taliban.
Defence minister James Heappey insisted there are ‘people trying to take advantage of this process to get into the UK to cause us harm’.
h/t TB
The brother of an Afghan translator who worked for American forces during the war is being sentenced to death for helping provide security to his brother in yet another sign that the Taliban’s new ‘moderate’ façade has already crumbled.
News of the letter emerges as Vice President Kamala Harris announced that now was not the time to analyze the withdrawal of the Biden administration from the war-torn country, but instead to focus on evacuation.
CNN confirmed the translator, who has not been named, worked with the US Army, and that his brother, also unnamed, had been sentenced to death.
… America acted unilaterally over Afghanistan – actually maybe that should be Joe Biden acted unilaterally. The administration was not much interested in what the UK thought. Mr Biden, from what I have been told, was not much interested in the red flags being raised by his intel community and military top brass, or by the warnings delivered from London. He wanted out. The warnings of HM Government – and my understanding is they were made strenuously – fell on deaf, indifferent ears in Washington.
In those circumstances – and let me depersonalise this – what is a British prime minister to do? If the 800lb gorilla is going to leave the room, what is the much smaller primate meant to do? The idea that the British armed forces could have swarmed in to fill the vacuum left by a US withdrawal is unrealistic.
Twenty years of war in Afghanistan are over. What comes next is 20 years, or even more, of recriminations and blame for why the war ended as it did. Scholars and partisans still argue over the reasons America lost in Vietnam, so why should Afghanistan be any different?
On the plus side, the debate promises to be far more interesting. When it comes to Vietnam, partisans debate rules of engagement, bombing strategies, funding levels, and the Tet Offensive. With Afghanistan, the question could be: did gender studies cause America to suffer its most humiliating defeat ever? Cockburn wishes he was joking.
A week after the Fall of Kabul, the flailing hegemon continues to embarrass itself:
America’s official deadline for total withdrawal from Afghanistan is August 31st, so half the remaining time has already elapsed, and in that first week of a final fortnight, according to the Department of Defense, it evacuated just 2,500 Americans – or about 350 per day. That seems an under-performance – or, as The New York Post’s front-page headline distills it, “DUMKIRK”.
The Taliban say they will not extend the deadline for Western forces to leave Afghanistan.
Spokesman Suhail Shaheen told the BBC’s Yalda Hakim that 31 August was a red line and that any extension would be a “clear violation” of the Doha agreement between the United States and the Taliban.
It was the rescue mission that didn’t happen.
A large group of Afghan interpreters and their families were gathered together by Canadian government officials in a group and waited all day and night for the heroes to come and take them into the safe confines of the Kabul airport.
These are the Afghan interpreters, LECs and families who gathered for the heroic Canadian rescue next to Kabul Airport that never came pic.twitter.com/gFLySFYHED
— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) August 23, 2021
Marco Mendicino made the statement during an interview with The West Block’s Mercedes Stephenson on Sunday, after being asked if he was worried that they would not be able to bring home everyone they had promised to by the time the Americans wrap up their evacuation efforts.
Taliban-linked social media accounts claim that members of the group’s Badri 313 outfit are providing “security” at Kabul’s international airport. Badri 313 is a special forces wing of the Taliban’s army. It has been responsible for some of the group’s key battlefield successes and has also conducted complex “martyrdom” (suicide) operations.
Earlier today we described how some British troops are describing the situation around the airport in Kabul as “the worst they’ve ever seen.” Well, they may need to expand their horizons a bit in terms of extremes. CNN is reporting that the Pentagon is working on an “alternate route” for Americans, allies and our helpers to get to the airport and it’s not just because of the massive crowds blocking the roads or the Taliban checkpoints turning people away. (Which we were assured wasn’t happening.) No, this is an entirely new wrinkle in the picture. There appears to be solid intelligence indicating that ISIS-K (which is just a rebranded ISIS offshoot that’s taken root in Afghanistan) is on the prowl and looking to perpetrate attacks in or around the airport. But that can’t be right, can it? Apparently, it can. (CNN)
