Years of Miscalculation in Withdrawal from Afghanistan

All sides bear blame.

A close buddy of mine, who served years in the U.S. Army and Army reserve, told me that once we booted the Talbiban in 2001, we at most should've stay a few more years, leaving the Afghans to build their own country. 

At NYT, "Taliban Sweep in Afghanistan Follows Years of U.S. Miscalculations":

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s top advisers concede they were stunned by the rapid collapse of the Afghan army in the face of an aggressive, well-planned offensive by the Taliban that now threatens Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.

The past 20 years show they should not have been.

If there is a consistent theme over two decades of war in Afghanistan, it is the overestimation of the results of the $83 billion the United States has spent since 2001 training and equipping the Afghan security forces and an underestimation of the brutal, wily strategy of the Taliban. The Pentagon had issued dire warnings to Mr. Biden even before he took office about the potential for the Taliban to overrun the Afghan army, but intelligence estimates, now shown to have badly missed the mark, assessed it might happen in 18 months, not weeks.

Commanders did know that the afflictions of the Afghan forces had never been cured: the deep corruption, the failure by the government to pay many Afghan soldiers and police officers for months, the defections, the soldiers sent to the front without adequate food and water, let alone arms. In the past several days, the Afghan forces have steadily collapsed as they battled to defend ever shrinking territory, losing Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s economic engine, to the Taliban on Saturday.

Mr. Biden’s aides say that the persistence of those problems reinforced his belief that the United States could not prop up the Afghan government and military in perpetuity. In Oval Office meetings this spring, he told aides that staying another year, or even five, would not make a substantial difference and was not worth the risks.

For Mr. Biden, the last of four American presidents to face painful choices in Afghanistan but the first to get out, the debate about a final withdrawal and the miscalculations over how to execute it began the moment he took office.

“Under Trump, we were one tweet away from complete, precipitous withdrawal,” said Douglas E. Lute, a retired general who directed Afghan strategy at the National Security Council for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “Under Biden, it was clear to everyone who knew him, who saw him pressing for a vastly reduced force more than a decade ago, that he was determined to end U.S. military involvement,” he added, “but the Pentagon believed its own narrative that we would stay forever.”

“The puzzle for me is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?”

A Skeptical President From the moment that news outlets called Pennsylvania for Mr. Biden on Nov. 7, making him the next commander in chief for 1.4 million active-duty troops, Pentagon officials knew they would face an uphill battle to stop a withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. Defense Department leaders had already been fending off Mr. Biden’s predecessor, Donald J. Trump, who wanted a rapid drawdown. In one Twitter post last year, he declared all American troops would be out by that Christmas.

And while they had publicly voiced support for the agreement Mr. Trump reached with the Taliban in February 2020 for a complete withdrawal this May, Pentagon officials said they wanted to talk Mr. Biden out of it.

After Mr. Biden took office, top Defense Department officials began a lobbying campaign to keep a small counterterrorism force in Afghanistan for a few more years. They told the president that the Taliban had grown stronger under Mr. Trump than at any point in the past two decades and pointed to intelligence estimates predicting that in two or three years, Al Qaeda could find a new foothold in Afghanistan.

Shortly after Lloyd J. Austin III was sworn in as defense secretary on Jan. 22, he and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended to Mr. Biden that 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan, nearly double the 2,500 troops there. On Feb. 3, a congressionally appointed panel led by a retired four-star Marine general, Joseph F. Dunford Jr., publicly recommended that Mr. Biden abandon the exit deadline of May 1 and further reduce American forces only as security conditions improved.

A report by the panel assessed that withdrawing troops on a strict timeline rather than how well the Taliban adhered to the agreement heightened the risk of a potential civil war once international forces left.

But Mr. Biden, who had become deeply skeptical of American efforts to remake foreign countries in his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president, asked what a few thousand American troops could do if Kabul was attacked. Aides said he told them that the presence of the American troops would further the Afghan government’s reliance on the United States and delay the day it would take responsibility for its own defense.

The president told his national security team, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, that he was convinced that no matter what the United States did, Afghanistan was almost certainly headed into another civil war — one Washington could not prevent, but also, in his view, one it could not be drawn into...

Still more.

 

The Dream is in the Desert

For black Americans, at LAT, "‘We’re here to stay.’ Despite isolation and racism, Black Americans feel at home in California’s desert":

PALM SPRINGS — La’Ronjanae Curtis has grown used to the disbelief of college classmates and friends when she tells them she was born in Palm Springs, a city of 48,000 where people of color are relatively few. “There are Black people out there?” they always say. Curtis proudly tells them that she’s living proof.

Tourists flock to the Coachella Valley and Mojave Desert to take in the psychedelic hues of their sunsets, lose themselves among otherworldly rock formations, and sip drinks poolside at Modernist hideaways in Palm Springs the way Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack did in an earlier era.

For the few Black Americans who live in the California desert, it takes willpower to feel at ease in these playgrounds, and imagination to make them feel like home.

In the first half of the last century, hundreds of Black people from the South, and from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, settled in desert communities like Palm Springs. They came for some of the same reasons that drew many white people: plentiful jobs, ample land to put down stakes, and the live-and-let-live openness of what still felt like America’s frontier.

But the picture-postcard settings and air of possibility masked an uglier reality for Black newcomers.

Many towns historically restricted Black families to segregated neighborhoods through housing covenants and lending practices. That legacy lives on.

Today, the presence of an established Black community isn’t obvious when driving through Curtis’ hometown, where low-lying houses hide behind Moorish-style screens, meticulously kept cactus gardens look as untouchable as jewelry displays, and locals ride around their condo complexes in golf carts designed to resemble Mercedes and Rolls Royces.

Most Black residents live far from the carefully constructed fantasy visitors see.

Curtis, who attends San Diego State University, says relatives on both sides of her family migrated from San Francisco in the middle of the last century. They mainly settled in Desert Highland Gateway Estates, a neighborhood of about 400 homes that sits on the wind-whipped northern outskirts — three miles from the Midcentury Modern furniture stores and spray-misted restaurant patios of downtown.

The other historically Black neighborhood, Lawrence Crossley, is at the opposite end of the city near the airport — a single U-shaped street lined with several dozen two- and three-bedroom houses shaded by palms. The lush green of a municipal golf course borders the neighborhood on one side. At the far end, a strip of barren desert.

Dominique Brenagh, 38, takes shelter from the 100-degree heat in the shade of his carport at the small ranch-style house where he grew up and his family still lives.

Brenagh says his father’s relatives moved to Palm Springs in the 1950s from Louisiana in part to escape the segregation and violence of the Jim Crow era.

“Back in those times, you had the KKK out there that was oppressing people,” he says of the South.

Brenagh looks back on his own life as a happy one by comparison. He smiles when reminiscing about sneaking from his backyard onto the golf course to play with friends.

“I love it here,” he says...

Keep reading.

 

Reporting From Kabul

NBC's Richard Engel:

Richard Engel reports from Kabul. https://t.co/Cjo6AUTupE

— On Assignment with Richard Engel (@OARichardEngel) August 15, 2021

Fuggetaboutit: Democrats Need to Stop Pushing for Zero Covid

It's Kat Rosenfield, at the Spectator, "The zero COVID delusion":

During World War Two, ordinary citizens were encouraged to plant victory gardens, collect scrap metal and carpool to save fuel, always with the understanding that these measures would somehow contribute to victory. The propaganda of the time was heavy on the same ‘do your part’ messaging that we’ve seen during the COVID pandemic, giving meaning to people’s sacrifices by characterizing their efforts as a patriotic duty and a moral imperative — and by strongly implying that those who balked at those sacrifices were on the side of the bad guy. One of the most famous posters from the era shows a snappily-dressed man behind the wheel of a car, with a ghostly, familiar figure sporting a toothbrush mustache in the passenger seat. ‘When you ride ALONE,’ the poster warns, ‘you ride with Hitler!’

The moral and patriotic imperatives of our current moment are different. (A 2020 version of that same poster might read, ‘When you ride TOGETHER, you ride with Death!’) But they offer the same comforting assurance: that together, if we just try hard enough and follow the rules, we can beat this thing.

Therein lies the problem.

We cannot beat this thing.

The notion that we could literally stop the spread of COVID by locking down and vaccinating it out of existence was always a fantasy. As National Geographic recently noted, ‘only two diseases in recorded history that affect humans or other animals have ever been eradicated’. (Only one of these viruses, smallpox, was a danger to human beings; the other is a bovine disease.) Every other virus, from ebola to influenza to the bubonic plague, still exists among us; we’ve just learned to live with them, and to control them as best we can through inoculation, preventive measures, and treatment for those who get sick.

Until very recently, we lived with them relatively easily. Take the flu: every year, it ripples through the American population. And every year, people deal with it according to their own personal set of priorities and risk tolerances. Some are content to take their chances. Some get a flu shot to protect themselves or their loved ones. Some take additional precautions because they’re immunocompromised or otherwise at above-average risk. But every year, no matter what, tens of millions of Americans catch the flu. Some get very sick. Some die.

Yet we still don’t assign a moral element to the flu season — even though every person who dies from the flu caught it from somebody else. Nobody hisses through their teeth at the selfish irresponsibility of people who don’t upend their lives to avoid getting the flu; nobody tells you that you have an individual moral duty to stop the spread of endemic viruses, generally. Co-existing with other creatures is the price of admission for planet earth, and that includes the millions of microorganisms that have evolved over the course of millennia to survive by making us sick.

But COVID — and more specifically, the messaging around it from our authority figures — changed how we conceive of our relationship with viruses. All those months of being told to mask up, stay home, and keep our distance have instilled in a fearful population the seductive illusion of control. We’ve been led to believe that if we just care enough and try really hard, we can stop getting sick and save lives. Suddenly, the only moral position is to do everything within your power to avoid illness, no matter how extreme, no matter how much it disrupts your life or hurts your livelihood, no matter the brutal costs it might exact elsewhere. And if you get sick anyway? This is somebody’s fault. Someone, somewhere, did this to you.

‘The fact is, if you get infected, even if you are without symptoms, you very well may infect another person who may be vulnerable,’ Anthony Fauci said on ABC last week. ‘So in essence, you are encroaching on their individual rights.’ This is the flip-side of the delusion that we can control our way to zero COVID: the specter of the noncompliant villain who’s keeping us from getting there. Those who dissent, who express skepticism, who want to question the rules instead of simply following them? They’re not just asking questions; they are ‘literally killing’ people...

Still more.

 

Biden Blames Trump for Taliban Resurgence

The inevitable blame game.

At Axios, "Biden blames Trump for Afghanistan bedlam":

President Biden on Saturday doubled down on his long-standing rationale for withdrawing the U.S. military from Afghanistan as the threat of Kabul falling to the Taliban looms large.

Driving the news: Biden blamed his predecessor, former President Trump, for empowering the Taliban and leaving them "in the strongest position militarily since 2001." Trump responded with a statement blaming Biden for the situation unfolding in Afghanistan.

* Biden said in a statement that he had to make a choice and that he would not pass on the war to a "fifth" U.S. president.

* "When I became President, I faced a choice — follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict," Biden said.

* "One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country," Biden added. "And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me."

What he's saying: Trump said in an emailed statement hours after Biden's comments that his successor had "ran out of Afghanistan instead of following the plan our Administration left for him." He didn't elaborate further on details of this plan...

Still more.

 

Fine Young Cannibals

Going back 32 years.

"She Drives Me Crazy."

The Taliban Takeover

It's underway.

At WSJ, "Taliban Take Over Kabul as Afghan President Flees Country":

KABUL—Taliban fighters on Sunday took over the Afghan capital as President Ashraf Ghani fled abroad, triggering a massive effort to airlift Western diplomats, civilians and Afghans likely to be targeted by the country’s new rulers.

Demoralized Afghan security forces offered no resistance as the insurgents, who seized most of the country in just over a week, appeared Sunday morning on Kabul’s outskirts. While the Taliban initially said they wouldn’t enter the city while a transitional government is being formed, they reversed their stance by nightfall, saying that someone needed to maintain public order after Afghan police deserted their posts.

“To prevent chaos and looting, the Islamic Emirate has ordered the mujahedeen to get control of the abandoned areas,” a Taliban statement said. The Taliban fighters, it added, won’t bother any civilian or military officials of the former regime.

By evening, the main road to the Kabul airport—packed with Afghans desperately trying to escape and with thousands of American troops protecting the evacuation effort—presented a bizarre scene of Taliban fighters mingling with uniformed Afghan troops.

Mr. Ghani, who fled the presidential palace and spent Sunday morning at the U.S. Embassy, left the Afghan capital in the afternoon. “God will hold him accountable and the people of Afghanistan will make their judgment,” Kabul’s chief peace negotiator said in a video message. A senior security official confirmed Mr. Ghani’s departure.

On Sunday morning, the administration of Mr. Ghani told all employees to go home. Soon after, sporadic gunfire erupted and some checkpoints were abandoned as panicked residents clogged the streets. By early afternoon, the Taliban took over Kabul’s main Pul-e-Charkhi prison, freeing thousands of inmates, videos on social media showed.

As the Taliban moved to seize Kabul, the U.S. Embassy sent out an alert Sunday night warning U.S. citizens in the capital to stay where they were, effectively putting a halt to America’s rushed efforts to get its citizens out of the country before the government collapsed.

“Do not come to the embassy or airport at this time,” the alert said.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected parallels being made with the rushed U.S. exit from the U.S. embassy in Vietnam in 1975, when staff was evacuated by helicopter from the building’s roof. He said the aim in Afghanistan was to target al Qaeda, which had been achieved.

“This is not Saigon,” said Mr. Blinken, speaking to CNN on Sunday. “We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11. And we succeeded in that mission.”

Helicopters had earlier ferried American and Western diplomats and civilians to the military side of Kabul airport. One after another, Chinooks and Black Hawks took off from the landing zone, spraying dust.

Below them was a city of traffic jams and roundabouts choked by cars—many of them filled with Afghans trying to reach the airport’s relative safety. Dark smoke, presumably from burning documents, rose from the presidential palace.

In the airport, large crowds gathered at the military gate, trying to get through the checkpoint. There was an exchange of gunfire, with a warning of a ground attack sounding in the terminal.

Dozens of gray U.S. Air Force and British transport planes awaited their passengers, the landing strip secured by newly arrived American troops.

Some of the evacuating Westerners waited on cardboard boxes marked with the words “non-Pork MRE,” or meal-ready-to-eat. Others—including Afghan dual citizens—nervously waited their turn for the shuttle bus that would take them to their planes, away from the city they would be unlikely to see again soon.

In Kabul, just before the Taliban takeover, long lines formed outside banks and at the city’s few functioning ATMs as residents rushed to withdraw their cash before it was too late. Few succeeded.

The stunning meltdown of the Afghan state left the city in shock.

This is America's longest war, and like the last one, Vietnam, we lost it. 

One of the most significant foreign policy debacles ever. 

Still more.

Biden's Failure in Afghanistan

The top headlines at the New York Times right now, "LIVE: As Major Afghan Cities Fall With Stunning Speed, U.S. Readies Evacuation," and "Afghanistan’s Unraveling May Strike Another Blow to U.S. Credibility."

And from Frederick Kagan, whose father recently passed away, at the New York Times, "Biden Could Have Stopped the Taliban. He Chose Not To":

The Taliban is sweeping across Afghanistan seizing more than a dozen provincial capitals in the past week, and is poised to seize more. Afghan defense forces, finding themselves mostly cut off from U.S. air support, haven’t been able to stop them, and the Afghan government may not survive for much longer. The United States has all but abandoned the country.

A disastrous Taliban takeover wasn’t inevitable. President Biden said his hands were tied to a withdrawal given the awful peace deal negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban. But there was still a way to pull out American troops while giving our Afghan partners a better chance to hold the gains we made with them over the last two decades.

Mr. Biden chose otherwise. The way he announced the drawdown and eventual departure of American troops — at the start of the fighting season, on a rapid timeline and sans adequate coordination with the Afghan government — has in part gotten us into the current situation.

Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely, even at very low numbers. I and others have argued that the investment, including the risk to American personnel, is worth it to prevent militant groups from once again overrunning the country.

Mr. Biden believes that further expending U.S. resources in Afghanistan is “a recipe for being there indefinitely.” He rightly notes that President Trump had left him few good options by making a terrible deal with the Taliban. That’s a fine argument, but it explains neither the hastiness nor the consequences we are now observing: the Taliban overrunning swaths of the country, closing in on Kabul, pushing the Afghan security forces and government to the brink of collapse and prompting the Pentagon to prepare for a possible evacuation of the U.S. embassy.

A responsible withdrawal needed more time and better preparation. History will record Mr. Biden, a supposed master of foreign policy for decades, as having failed in this most critical assignment.

As U.S. military planners well know, the Afghan war has a seasonal pattern. The Taliban leadership retreats to bases, largely in Pakistan, every winter and then launches the group’s fighting season campaign in the spring, moving into high gear in the summer after the poppy harvest. At the very least, the United States should have continued to support the Afghans through this period to help them blunt the Taliban’s latest offensive and buy time to plan for a future devoid of American military assistance.

American diplomats could have used this time to negotiate access to regional bases from which to continue counterterrorism operations. Simultaneously, the American military should have prepared contingencies in case those negotiations failed. And even that plan would have meant contending with an increasingly brazen Taliban. (A report by the special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction said the Taliban launched its latest offensive after U.S. and coalition forces officially began drawing down in May.)

Adopting a more judicious approach would have required Mr. Biden to accept two things in addition to a longer timeline: the temporary deployment of additional U.S. forces and the slightly increased risk of American casualties.

Sending additional troops into Afghanistan could have allowed the United States to carry out the withdrawal safely without severely disrupting military support...

It's a bloody, horrific debacle.

I fear most for the women and children, who're not doubt facing a grim future.

Still more.

 

Afghanistan on the Brink

The Taliban should be taking over any minute now, it's that bad.

If this isn't banner headlines in newspapers across the country in the morning, the publishers are idiots and traitors --- and no doubt in the tank for our bumbling, fumbling chief executive.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Taliban captures four more key Afghan cities on its way to encircling Kabul":

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban completed its sweep of Afghanistan’s south Friday as it took four more provincial capitals in a lightning offensive that is gradually encircling Kabul, just weeks before the U.S. is set to officially end its two-decade war.

In just the last 24 hours, the country’s second- and third-largest cities — Kandahar and Herat, respectively — have fallen to the insurgents, as has Lashkar Gah, the capital of southern Helmand province, where American, British and NATO forces fought some of the bloodiest battles of the conflict.

The blitz through the Taliban’s southern heartland means that the insurgents now hold at least half of the country’s 34 provincial capitals and control more than two-thirds of the country — weeks before the U.S. plans to withdraw its last troops. The Western-backed government in the capital, Kabul, still holds a smattering of provinces in the center and east, as well as the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

While Kabul, the national capital, isn’t directly under threat yet, the resurgent Taliban was battling government forces in Logar province, some 50 miles from the capital. The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment suggests that Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months. The group has already taken over much of the north and west of the country.

In the south, the insurgents stormed the capitals of Zabul and Uruzgan provinces, in addition to Helmand.

Attaullah Afghan, the head of the provincial council in Helmand, said that Taliban fighters captured the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah following heavy fighting and raised their white flag over governmental installations. He said that three national army bases outside of Lashkar Gah remained under control of the government.

Atta Jan Haqbayan, the provincial council chief in Zabul province, said that the capital, Qalat, fell to the Taliban and that officials are in a nearby army camp preparing to leave...

Keep reading.

 

Alex Haley's 'Roots'

An all-time American classic, no question.

At Amazon, Roots.

'The Night House' Review

At Variety, "‘The Night House’ Stars on the Film’s Loud Jump Scares and Female-Led Horror":

“The Night House,” the upcoming psychological horror directed by David Bruckner, follows the trend of recent films, like “The Invisible Man,” “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” by centering on female protagonists dealing with grief and trauma. However, this movie sets itself apart by cranking up the volume on the jump scares

During the Wednesday premiere at the Cinépolis Chelsea in New York City, the “Night House” stars discussed the film and some of the reviews that have called it “one of the loudest horror movies ever made.”

Rebecca Hall plays Beth, a woman dealing with the sudden suicide of her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit), whom she can still somehow sense around her maze-like house as she discovers dark secrets about his past.

When asked about the importance of telling female-led horror stories, she added with a laugh, “It’s as important to tell them with women at the front as it is to tell them with men at the front, so, you know, you might as well!”

Jonigkeit even compared Hall’s performance to one of the female icons in the horror genre.

“Even as far back as ‘Misery’ with Kathy Bates, I think there are so many really strong female characters that are getting in the forefront. This genre has created a bunch of opportunities for amazing performances, and Rebecca’s is definitely up there with the top of them,” Jonigkeit told Variety.

In film critic David Ehrlich’s review for IndieWire, he called “The Night House” “shudderingly intense and sadistically loud” with jump scares that “often arrive without any warning whatsoever.” Meanwhile, Variety critic Dennis Harvey praised composer Ben Lovett‘s “effective score” that contributed to the film’s “discomfiting atmosphere.” The film’s co-writer Ben Collins and Lovett offered differing takes on the several reviews that have referenced the jarring jump scares and score.

“David Ehrlich called it the loudest horror movie ever made. I don’t agree with him necessarily — I would like it to be true just because it’s a nice thing to say,” Collins told Variety.

He also noted that the film “does get loud at times,” but says it was intentional...

Sounds good to me. 

My eldest son and I occasionally see horror flicks together.

We're going to see this one on Saturday night --- I hope my heart holds out, lol. 

  

She's Still Got It

Ms. Kate Upton --- and boy does she still have it!

On Twitter:

Matching sets make my life so much easier 🙌🏻 pic.twitter.com/iIzAam0L0q

— Kate Upton (@KateUpton) August 11, 2021

Babe Roundup

At Country Girls below:

Also, massive Daisy Dooxx.

And wonders never cease.

Gladys Knight, 'Midnight Train'

She's so beautiful.

Glady Knight & the Pips.

Senate Democrats Pass $3.5 Trillion Social Spending Legislative Boondoggle

I could go for a lot in the package, as being neoconservative, I support a robust social safety net, but the traditional conservative in me is disgusted by all the poison-pill elements of the legislation, which covers every from carbon taxes, climate change efforts, added powers for the I.R.S., and especially the legalization of millions of illegal immigrants.

It's actually a shocking bill.

At LAT, "Senate approves Democrats’ $3.5-trillion budget blueprint in another win for Biden":

WASHINGTON — Democrats pushed a $3.5-trillion framework for bolstering family services and health and environmental programs through the Senate early Wednesday, advancing President Biden’s expansive vision for reshaping federal priorities just hours after handing him a triumph on a hefty infrastructure package.

Lawmakers approved Democrats’ budget resolution on a party-line 50-49 vote, a crucial step for a president and party set on training the government’s fiscal might at assisting families, creating jobs and fighting climate change. Higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations would pay for much of the plan.

Passage came despite an avalanche of Republican amendments intended to make their rivals pay a price in next year’s election for control of Congress.

House leaders announced that their chamber would return from summer recess in two weeks to vote on the fiscal blueprint, which would disburse the $3.5 trillion over the next decade. Final congressional approval, which appears certain, would protect a follow-up bill to enact the spending and tax changes from the threat of being killed by a Republican filibuster in the 50-50 Senate.

Even so, passing that follow-up legislation will be dicey: Democratic moderates who are wary of the massive $3.5-trillion price tag are sparring with progressives who demand aggressive action. The party controls the House with just four votes to spare, while the evenly divided Senate is under the party’s control only due to Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote. Solid GOP opposition to the legislation seems guaranteed.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), once a maverick congressional progressive voice but now a national figure wielding legislative clout, said the measure would help children, families, elderly and working people — and more.

“It will also, I hope, restore the faith of the American people in the belief that we can have a government that works for all of us, and not just the few,” he said.

Republicans argued that Democrats’ proposals would waste money, raise economy-wounding taxes, fuel inflation and codify far-left dictates that would harm Americans. They were happy to use Sanders, a self-avowed democratic socialist, to try to tar all Democrats backing the measure.

If Biden and Senate Democrats want to “outsource domestic policy to Chairman Sanders” with a “historically reckless taxing and spending spree,” Republicans lack the votes to stop them, conceded Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “But we will debate. We will vote.”

The Senate turned to the budget minutes after it approved Biden’s other major objective: a compromise bundle of transportation, water, broadband and other infrastructure projects costing about $1 trillion in new and old spending. That measure passed 69 to 30, with McConnell among the 19 Republicans backing it. It will need House approval next.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) assured progressives that Congress would pursue sweeping initiatives that go beyond the infrastructure compromise, in a nod to divisions between the party’s moderates and liberals that he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) need to resolve before Congress can approve Democrats’ fiscal goals.

“To my colleagues who are concerned that this does not do enough on climate, for families, and making corporations and the rich pay their fair share: We are moving on to a second track, which will make a generational transformation in these areas,” Schumer said.

In a budget ritual, senators plunged into a “vote-a-rama,” a nonstop parade of messaging amendments that often becomes an all-night ordeal. This time, the Senate held over 40 votes before approving the measure around 4 a.m. Eastern time, more than 14 hours after the procedural marathon began.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) missed the budget votes to be with his ailing wife.

With the budget resolution largely advisory, most amendments were offered not in hopes of passing but to force the other party’s vulnerable senators to cast troublesome votes that can be used against them in next year’s midterm election.

Republicans crowed after Democrats opposed GOP amendments calling for the full-time reopening of pandemic-shuttered schools, boosting the Pentagon’s budget and retaining limits on federal income tax deductions for state and local levies. Those deduction caps are opposed by lawmakers from upper-income, mostly Democratic states...

Still more.

Breaking: U.S. Prepares to Evacuate Afghanistan

Breaking news, but not surprising.

It's getting grim over there.

A.P. has a detailed report this morning, "Taliban take Afghanistan’s third-largest city in onslaught."

And at NYT, "Marines Prepare for Possible Evacuation of Americans in Afghanistan":

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Pentagon is moving thousands of Marines into position for a possible evacuation of the American Embassy and U.S. citizens in Kabul as the Biden administration braces for a possible collapse of the Afghan government within 30 days, administration and military officials said.

The sharply deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, as the Taliban rapidly advance across the north and Afghan security forces battle to defend ever shrinking territory in the south and west, has forced the Defense Department to accelerate plans to get Americans out of the country. Officials say any evacuation will involve a robust use of American military force to move people to Hamid Karzai International Airport to waiting military transport planes and to protect them en route.

American negotiators are also trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the embassy if they overrun the capital, two American officials said.

The 30-day estimate is one scenario and administration and military officials insist that the fall of Kabul might still be prevented if Afghan security forces can muster the resolve to put up more resistance. But while Afghan commandos have managed to continue fighting in some areas, they have largely folded in a number of northern provincial capitals.

The Taliban seized the strategic city of Ghazni, about 90 miles south of Kabul, on Thursday, putting the group in a better position to attack Kabul after its recent string of victories in the north.

And as Ghazni fell, Taliban fighters broke through multiple front lines in Kandahar, pushing deep into the city. As Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar is historically and strategically important. The Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, began their insurgency there in the 1990s.

Herat, a city in western Afghanistan near the Iranian border, was also in an increasingly dangerous position as Taliban fighters flooded in.

A senior official in the Biden administration said in an interview that the Taliban might soon take Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province and the country’s economic engine, which is now effectively surrounded by the Taliban. The fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kandahar, which has all but collapsed, the official said, could lead to a surrender of the Afghan government by September. Another senior U.S. official described the mood in the White House as a combination of alarm and resignation — at the rapid pace of the Taliban offensive and the collapse of Afghan national forces, and over how the situation could continue to worsen. There has been a constant stream of video teleconference calls every day this week, the official said.

Three contingents of Marines are preparing for the possible evacuation of the American Embassy, officials said. A Marine battalion of several hundred is already on the complex grounds, responsible for evacuating the embassy, which has 4,000 employees, including 1,400 Americans, officials said.

In addition, the Pentagon is moving a Marine expeditionary unit, with more than 2,000 Marines, into position closer to the air route over western Pakistan, known as the “boulevard,” where it can dispatch its forces into Afghanistan as a rapid response team that would be able to begin an embassy evacuation within a day of orders, officials said. And as a contingency plan in case any embassy evacuation turns into a fight with the Taliban, Defense Department officials have tasked thousands of Marines to begin a training exercise that can, if necessary, quickly be turned into an evacuation deployment, the officials said. The Marines in the exercise have been told that they may need to be ready to deploy next week within 96 hours, officials said.

Asked during a news conference on Wednesday whether the Pentagon was speeding up any evacuation of people from the embassy, a spokesman for the Defense Department, John F. Kirby, demurred.

“We’re focused on the security situation that we face now, which again we’ve acknowledged is deteriorating,” he said. “We are certainly mindful of the advances that the Taliban have made in terms of taking over yet an increased number of provincial capitals.”...

Who lost Afghanistan? Why, Joe Biden, of course. *Shrug.*

And is it possible? I'd argue it's inevitable. While withdrawal is the zeitgeist right now, one the Taliban take over, it's going to be a bloodbath. 

 

Margaret Walker, Jubilee

At Amazon, Margaret Walker, Jubilee: A Novel.

More Cuomo

Lots more.

Here, "In Resignation Speech, Cuomo Makes a Last Play to Preserve His Legacy."

And, "Cuomo Resigns Amid Scandals, Ending Decade-Long Run in Disgrace":

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said on Tuesday that he would resign from office, succumbing to a ballooning sexual harassment scandal in an astonishing reversal of fortune for one of the nation’s best-known leaders.

Mr. Cuomo said his resignation would take effect in 14 days. Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, will be sworn in to replace him, becoming the first woman in history to occupy New York State’s top office.

“Given the circumstances, the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing,” Mr. Cuomo said in remarks streamed from his office in Midtown Manhattan. “And therefore, that’s what I’ll do.”

Mr. Cuomo’s dramatic fall was shocking in its velocity and vertical drop: A year ago, the governor was being hailed as a national hero for his steady leadership amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The resignation of Mr. Cuomo, 63, a three-term Democrat, came a week after a report from the New York State attorney general concluded that the governor sexually harassed nearly a dozen women, including current and former government workers, by engaging in unwanted touching and making inappropriate comments. The 165-page report also found that Mr. Cuomo and his aides unlawfully retaliated against at least one of the women for making her complaints public and fostered a toxic work environment.

The report’s findings put increased pressure on Mr. Cuomo to resign, with even President Biden, a longtime friend, advising him to do so. It spurred the State Assembly — Mr. Cuomo’s last political bulwark in an Albany increasingly arrayed against him — to take steps toward impeachment. And it left Mr. Cuomo with few, if any, allies to fight on with him.

The fallout from the report was swifter than even those closest to Mr. Cuomo expected. He quickly became isolated and grew more so by the day. His top aide, Melissa DeRosa, resigned Sunday. On Monday, the speaker of the State Assembly, Carl E. Heastie, made clear that there would be no “deal” to allow Mr. Cuomo to avoid an impeachment that appeared increasingly inevitable.

In the end, Mr. Cuomo followed through on the advice his top advisers and onetime allies had been offering: leave office voluntarily.

By stepping down, Mr. Cuomo dampened talk of impeachment in the State Assembly, which is dominated by Democrats, and left open the possibility, however remote, for a political revival.

In a 21-minute speech that was by turns contrite and defiant, Mr. Cuomo decried the effort to remove him and acknowledged that his initial instinct had been “to fight through this controversy, because I truly believe it is politically motivated.”

“This situation and moment are not about the facts,” he said. “It’s not about the truth. It’s not about thoughtful analysis. It’s not about how do we make the system better. This is about politics. And our political system today is too often driven by the extremes.”

The governor said he took “full responsibility” for his actions as he denied ever touching anyone inappropriately. He sought to frame the allegations from 11 women as stemming from generational differences and even thanked them for coming forward.

“In my mind, I have never crossed the line with anyone,” Mr. Cuomo said. “But I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn.”

At one point, he addressed his three daughters directly to let them know that “I never did and I never would intentionally disrespect a woman.”

“Your dad made mistakes,” he said to a room filled with staff members, some of them teary-eyed, most caught by surprise. “And he apologized. And he learned from it. And that’s what life is all about.”

His speech was prefaced by a 45-minute presentation from his personal lawyer, Rita Glavin, who blamed the media for creating a frenzied environment. She sought to cast doubt on many of the women’s allegations and the level of seriousness of some of the others.

“This report got key facts wrong,” she said. “It omitted key evidence, and it failed to include witnesses whose testimony would not support the narrative that it was clear this report would weave from Day 1.”

It was a taste of the bare-knuckled counterattack that Mr. Cuomo had been eager to launch and was considering in the days after the report came out. Instead, he appeared to conclude, as many of his advisers already had, that no path existed for him to stay in office.

Mr. Cuomo still faces potential legal liability, particularly from the accusation that he groped an executive assistant, Brittany Commisso. She filed a criminal complaint with the Albany County sheriff’s office last week.

From the start, Mr. Cuomo’s tenure in office was a study in vivid contrasts, marked by a head-spinning scale of accomplishment — the passage of marriage equality, raising the minimum wage, the construction of bridges and train stations — and political scandals, such as his decision to shut down a panel investigating public corruption before its work was completed.

His demise stunned Albany, where Mr. Cuomo had governed with an outsize presence for more than a decade, wielding the State Capitol’s levers of power with deft and often brutal skill, both alienating allies and keeping them in check. Most politicians — Democrats and Republicans — welcomed Mr. Cuomo’s decision and offered Ms. Hochul their support. Few thanked Mr. Cuomo for his years of service. Some could barely contain their glee.

“It was past time for Andrew Cuomo to resign, and it’s for the good of all New York,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has been repeatedly attacked and disparaged by Mr. Cuomo over the years.

Mr. Biden took a different tone, saying he respected the governor’s decision to resign and praising his accomplishments. “I thought he’s done a hell of a job,” he said, mentioning infrastructure, voter access and “a range of things.”

“That’s why it’s so sad,” Mr. Biden added.

As recently as February, it was largely assumed that Mr. Cuomo would coast to a fourth term next year — eclipsing the three terms served by his father, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, and matching the record of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller — perhaps positioning himself for even higher office.

But that notion was shredded by a steady drumbeat of sexual harassment allegations earlier this year, coupled with troubling reports about his administration’s efforts to obscure the true extent of nursing home deaths during the pandemic, an issue that has been the subject of a federal investigation.

The allegations led to a barrage of calls for his resignation in March from top Democrats, including Senator Chuck Schumer and most of the state’s congressional delegation. Under immense pressure, and in an effort to buy himself time, Mr. Cuomo authorized Letitia James, the state attorney general, to oversee an investigation, urging voters to wait for the facts before reaching a conclusion.

The Assembly also began a wide-ranging impeachment investigation earlier this year. That inquiry was looking not only at sexual harassment allegations, but also at other accusations involving Mr. Cuomo’s misuse of power, including the possible illegal use of state resources to write a book about leadership last year for which he received $5.1 million, as well as his handling of nursing homes.

The inquiry was unfolding slowly, but the attorney general’s report eroded what little support Mr. Cuomo had in the Assembly. Mr. Cuomo was left with two options: step down or risk becoming only the second New York governor to be impeached in state history.

The last elected New York State governor, Eliot Spitzer, also resigned, after it emerged in 2008 that he had been a client of a high-end prostitution ring.

Multiple claims of sexual harassment. Eleven women, including current and former members of his administration, have accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior. An independent inquiry, overseen by the New York State attorney general, corroborated their accounts. The report also found that he and aides retaliated against at least one woman who made her complaints public.

Nursing home Covid-19 controversy. The Cuomo administration is also under fire for undercounting the number of nursing-home deaths caused by Covid-19 in the first half of 2020, a scandal that deepened after a Times investigation found that aides rewrote a health department report to hide the real number.

Efforts to obscure the death toll. Interviews and unearthed documents revealed in April that aides repeatedly overruled state health officials in releasing the true nursing home death toll for months. Several senior health officials have resigned in response to the governor’s overall handling of the pandemic, including the vaccine rollout.

Will Cuomo still be impeached? The State Assembly opened an impeachment investigation in March. But after Mr. Cuomo announced his resignation, it was unclear whether the Assembly would move forward with its impeachment process. If Mr. Cuomo were impeached and convicted, he could be barred from holding state office again.

Looking to the future. Mr. Cuomo said on Tuesday that his resignation would take effect in 14 days, and that Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, would be sworn in to replace him. She will be the first woman in New York history to occupy the state’s top office.

In recent months, Mr. Cuomo had tried to steer attention away from the investigations and scandals that had battered his administration, seeking to counter his critics’ contention that he had lost the capacity to govern. His top advisers believed that the good will he had amassed during the pandemic would allow him to survive, despite the findings from the state attorney general’s investigation, which was being conducted by a team of outside lawyers...

LAUSD Struggles to Fill Thousands of Positions

I hadn't thought about this. 

They're hurting for teachers, counselors, school nurses (and no doubt more).

At LAT, "Thousands of vacancies for L.A. teachers, counselors, nurses remain days before school starts":

Days before the academic year starts, a well-funded hiring spree for Los Angeles schools is falling short of its goal to provide unprecedented and critical mental health and academic support as a shortage of teachers and other professionals collides with pandemic recovery goals.

The staffing ambitions of the nation’s second-largest school district have been sweeping — targeting hires to meet academic needs, mental and physical wellness and campus sanitation. And in all areas, staffing appears to be strengthened compared to pre-pandemic levels. But it’s also not what officials had hoped for — and leaders worry that important needs will not be met effectively.

Shortfalls are particularly pronounced in positions serving students most in need of academic and mental health recovery. Many teachers and counselors promised to elevate achievement and well-being of Black students haven’t been hired. Hundreds of special education and math teacher posts — the hardest to fill in normal times — are vacant. School nurses and mental health specialists are seemingly impossible to find. Half of the openings remain for school facilities and cleaning staff.

In all, the district had hoped to hire the equivalent of 4,389 full-time positions that require a professional credential for teaching or a related field. This would include librarians, principals, other administrators and counselors. Of these open slots, 2,000 — less than half — had been filled as of July 29, the most recent date for which figures are available.

Several school board members and leaders of local advocacy groups found the number of vacancies worrisome.

“There has never been a more compelling need for support services and qualified teachers for our most vulnerable students,” said Katie Braude of Speak Up. “LAUSD must find a way to meet the immediate needs of students returning from a year and a half of limited instruction.”

“The staffing shortage should NOT be another disproportionate inequitable impact on our most vulnerable students,” said Ana Ponce, executive director of Great Public Schools Now, in an email.

Board member George McKenna wanted to see disaggregated numbers geographically pinpointing the vacancies — data that were not presented to the school board at its Tuesday meeting. In his prior service as a district administrator, he became familiar and frustrated with the high vacancy and turnover rate at schools that served large numbers of low-income and minority students.

A scramble is on to fill vital positions by the Aug. 16 start of school, but if schools were to open immediately, 479 classrooms would be staffed with substitute teachers. While the district is hiring continually, the classroom vacancy number has dropped by only seven teachers in the last 12 days. One problem is that some teachers are leaving the classroom to fill other vacancies, such as for reading specialists, administrative positions and other out-of-classroom jobs, leaving their principals with last-minute openings to backfill.

Administrators described hiring efforts that include using job boards, social media, virtual job fairs, workforce centers, referrals, radio and print advertising and outreach through parent groups and labor unions.

“During these unprecedented times, we are hiring everywhere,” Chief Human Resources Officer Ileana M. Dávalos said.

Los Angeles Unified is not alone in facing a hiring crunch. Even before the pandemic, teacher retirements were outpacing new teachers...

Keep reading.

 

James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

At Amazon, James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (Vintage International).