Afghanistan

In the age-old tradition of large lumbering bureaucracies and armies and reporter stake-outs, this was an excruciating weekend of ‘hurry up and wait’. Their only shelter in the dusty and brutal Afghan sun was the red white and blue canopy of a self-serve gas bar. Maybe ten families who had completed the path to Canadian citizenship were told by government of Canada text to come to this spot late Friday with the promise of a Canadian Armed Forces flight waiting on the nearby airport tarmac.

h/t CC

… What better way to destroy the United States than by opening its borders to illegal immigrants; surveilling its citizens; inflating its currency; ignoring its laws; demoralizing its police; undercutting its energy independence; issuing arbitrary, contradictory, and unnecessarily restrictive policies regarding public health; and fomenting strife along the lines of party, class, and race? Our governing elites seem to believe that Americans deserve to be punished. But of all the things that the Biden administration has done to crush the American spirit, none is more damaging than the president’s cruel abandonment of the people—and especially the women and girls—of Afghanistan.

20 years is a long time with nothing to show for it. An Army of 300K surrendered without a shot to an army of 70K. The Afghans do bear responsibility, but yes a pity that more innocent blood will be shed.  

With President Ashraf Ghani’s hasty flight from Kabul, we are now witnessing the fall of the second of five regimes that label themselves “Islamic Republic” in just over two years.

The first to fall was the Islamic Republic of the Sudan and what we have left are Islamic Republics in Pakistan, Iran and Mauritania. If we include the Islamic State created in parts of Iraq and Syria a few years ago and still lingering as a bad smell, we might conclude that, despite Taliban’s latest success, the label “Islamic” is not as invulnerable as some suggest.

The difference is that in Sudan the Islamic Republic was replaced by a timid, though no less sincere, attempt at democratization while the Islamic Republic in Afghanistan signals the return of the Islamic Emirate or a more radical version of Islamism.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed “incidents” of Taliban violence against Americans heading to the Kabul airport to flee Afghanistan .

Austin said Sunday there have been “some tough encounters with [the] Taliban,” just two days after President Joe Biden denied Americans were having trouble getting to the airport.

OTTAWA — Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan says Canada will work tirelessly to evacuate people from strife-ridden Afghanistan “for as long as it is safe to do so.”

Speaking at a news conference today, Sajjan said the challenging security conditions in Kabul are changing rapidly, even by the hour, but Canadian personnel are doing everything in their power to get people to safety.

“What we’ve witnessed this week in Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote. “America cares more about pronouns than the fate of Afghan women.”

You could see it from the Western diplomatic response after the Taliban conquered Kabul without firing a shot and arrived in the capital as tourists.

“The Afghan government should engage with the Taliban to reach an inclusive agreement”. Even before Afghanistan had fallen into hands of the Taliban, that intrepid EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was already begging the Afghans to reach an agreement with the Islamists.

The Taliban were attempting to demonstrate they control the areas around the chaotic Kabul airport on Sunday, where Nato said 20 people died in the past week.

As witnesses reported Taliban fighters to be firing into the air and using batons to force people to form orderly queues outside the main gates and not gather at the perimeter, the militant group that retook the Afghan capital last week after 20 years said it was seeking “complete clarity” on the evacuation plan being led by foreign forces.

It was not clear, however, whether the Taliban’s increasingly organised presence around the airport would also result in it controlling who is able to enter the airport and leave the country as the group’s spokesmen used the situation at the airport to criticise the US.