With the US-led NATO forces hastily exiting Afghanistan, a windfall awaits the Taliban that includes an army of well-trained soldiers equipped with latest weapons and gadgets, well-planned military bases but most importantly, something the Taliban never dreamt of—an air force, reports senior journalist Sanjib Kr Baruah.
As scenes of horror and terror continue to unfold in Kabul amid Presidentish Joe Biden’s haphazard and increasingly desperate evacuation efforts, many of us have said all week that it didn’t have to be like this.
Here’s the proof.
Raheem Kassam revealed on Wednesday that under President Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo’s State Department had ordered the creation of a “Contingency and Crisis Response” office whose job would be avoiding “a future Benghazi-style situation for Americans overseas.”
But while Biden lied to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday that “We planned for every contingency,” behind the scenes Biden’s State Department had already “revoked the funding and the approval” for Trump’s response team, according to Kassam.
Biden didn’t plan for every contingency. He killed our ability to respond to the most likely contingency.
Lithium is a strategically important element, essential for making batteries for smartphones, laptops, electric cars. Almost entire consumer electronics containing power cells are using Li-Ion batteries. In the last 12 months, lithium futures already prices went up 300% – and they’re poised to increase thousands of percent more, as growing electric cars production will increase demand at least twenty times.
Our country has undergone a radical change in the 21st century. It has not been a change for the better. We have focused more on arguing among ourselves while the “barbarians are at the gates,” so to speak. If we learn no other lesson from the Afghanistan debacle, it is that our military and intelligence agencies need to refocus their priorities. If we fail to do so, situations such as Afghanistan might become much more common.
Four days after the quick and unexpected invasion of Kabul by the Taliban, the streets of the Afghan capital are almost entirely devoid of women.
The few women who are on the streets are wearing the traditional blue burqa, Islamic garb that, while customary in Afghanistan, was not used as widely in Kabul until now. Many women are dressed in the long black clothes commonly worn in the Middle East and Arab nations.
All the women are accompanied by a male guardian – a requirement that the Taliban has imposed on women across the country. Many of these women are out grocery shopping; a simple task that has become extremely dangerous for them.
The West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the country’s subsequent fall to the Taliban, has brought the number of refugees the UK should take back to the forefront of the political conversation. It is eerily familiar: many of the same ideas were being advanced by many of the same people in 2015 at the height of the Syria crisis.
Earlier this year, Ayaan Hirsi Ali did an interview with UnHerd in which she predicted exactly this, and warned about not making the same mistakes again.
While Sleepy-Time Joe recuperates from the hard work of not getting lost on the White House lawn (Camp David is so peaceful this time of year), the vultures are circling.
The America which flexed its muscles under Reagan and Trump is now prostrate.
The Taliban, Mexican cartels, OPEC, city savages – the sky is full of carrion birds. Signs of weakness always bring them out. With Biden, America might as well be wearing a kick-me sign on its back.
Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan has been the worst managed event in American history. With Saigon as an example, the administration knew exactly how bad it would be. There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on now, but, at bottom, people are wondering if the unconditional Taliban takeover, including the trapped Americans, is a deliberate policy. On Tucker Carlson’s Wednesday show, Lara Logan said, “Yes, it is. This was what the government wanted.”
When the cash-strapped Soviet Union stopped providing military support to its client government in Afghanistan in February 1989, U.S. intelligence officials predicted immediate demise for the Russian-backed Afghan regime.
They were wrong.
“Weeks passed and then more weeks. [Soviet-backed leader Mohammad] Najibullah, his cabinet, and his army held firm. Amid heavy snows, the Afghan military pushed out a new defensive ring around the capital, holding the mujahedin farther at bay,” author Steve Coll wrote in “Ghost Wars,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning history on Afghanistan in the 1980s and ’90s. “As March approached, the Afghan regime showed no fissures.”
There are many lessons to learn from the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, but there is one that we should take home right now: Failure must be punished.
The United States has been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years. It has been obvious for the last few years that we would be leaving soon. Former President Donald Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan, but the generals managed to slow him down and wait him out. Instead of making plans, they stonewalled.
In the world of political speak — double-talk, if you prefer — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not say, unequivocally, that his government would never recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban has been accused of burning down an amusement park in northern Afghanistan because it had ‘idolatrous statues’ as their ‘moderate’ facade crumbles.
The jihadists torched the recreation grounds last night in the northern city of Sheberghan which are also used for holding sports and cultural events for children.
Sheberghan is in the heartlands of the vanquished strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum whose opulent mansion was seized by the jihadists when he fled over the border into Uzbekistan on Saturday.
The Bokhdi Amusement Park was set on fire by Taliban insurgents in Begha, Sheberghan. The reason is that the statues/idols standing there are in Public access Idols are illegal in Islam, This is the logic of the Taliban's brutal emirate. The homeland is occupied.#Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/MBuYsQQbxk
— Ihtesham Afghan (@IhteshamAfghan) August 17, 2021
It’s remarkable how quickly liberals abandoned the women of Afghanistan.
Back in April, The Nation magazine told readers that the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan would be “a welcome and long-overdue action.” The essay, by a scholar named Phyllis Bennis, sounded upbeat, even salubrious. It was the liberal case in full: We Americans were a wretched people to have gone there and a depraved people to have stayed for two decades. Some collateral damage upon our retreat was to be expected. We had spent too much time, she suggests, celebrating “the important but tiny gains in human rights won by the small sliver of women living in the cities, while the 75 percent of Afghan women who live in isolated villages and rural areas continue to face the highest level of infant mortality in the world.”
America and it’s allies forgot the lessons of WW II, whether the emperor worshipping Japanese or our modern day Islamists the only solution is to kill them all if need be.
“I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation,” Joe Biden said in 1975. “There’s a point where you are incapable of meeting moral obligations that exist worldwide.” At the time, he was arguing against U.S. aid to Cambodia. But he could just as easily have said the same about his decision this year to end the American presence in Afghanistan, a catastrophic mistake that has led to a Taliban takeover, undermined our national interest, and morally stained Biden’s presidency.
It is the latest blunder in a foreign-policy record filled with them.
This is an article from lefty rag The Atlantic. The knives are out.
