Afghanistan: What Went Wrong?

Almost everything, it seems. 

At LAT, "News Analysis: What went wrong in Afghanistan?":

WASHINGTON — Twenty years ago, the mission seemed direct, clear and just: Invade Afghanistan and pursue, capture or kill Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and his armed band of followers.

Achieving that goal also included overthrowing the Taliban, and steadily the mission morphed into a vast, complicated experiment to reshape a society that few Americans understood.

After a war stretching over four U.S. presidencies and costing more than a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives, the once-routed Taliban has retaken power in a swift march across Afghanistan, barely meeting resistance, occupying the presidential palace and driving the remaining U.S. troops to a single redoubt: an airport now swamped with Afghans desperate to flee.

Despite its military might, expertise and investment, the United States badly miscalculated the speed and absolutism with which the Taliban would overtake Afghanistan and is handing a battered country back to the very people the U.S. sought to defeat, with any gains in nation-building, education and civil rights in jeopardy.

Why? And who is to blame?

The Afghan army “chose not to fight for its country,” U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan said Monday, hours after Taliban militants entered the capital, Kabul, and occupied the president’s residence.

On Wednesday, as criticism of the withdrawal mounted, and finger-pointing and postmortems began, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concurred while also recognizing broader blame.

Afghan security forces “had the training, the size, the capability to defend their country,” he said at a tense briefing at the Pentagon. “This comes down to the issue of will and leadership. I did not, nor did anyone else, see a collapse of an army that size in 11 days.”

In fact, the reality is much more complicated. Putting all of the blame on the Afghan army, government and people ignores U.S. directives, policy and lack of knowledge. It’s also a hollow analysis of what the United States was trying to do in Afghanistan in the two decades since President George W. Bush launched the initial invasion.

The invasion For years, Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network thrived in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which then ruled most of the country. Shortly after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people, Bush dispatched American troops to Afghanistan to hit the terrorist group where it lived.

It took a decade to finally assassinate Bin Laden, in 2011, in Pakistan. One distraction during that decade was Bush’s ill-fated decision to launch a second war in Iraq, despite the country having no relation to the Sept. 11 attacks. Today, military officials and analysts say the threat from Al Qaeda is diminished but not gone. Al Qaeda franchises have sprung up in parts of Africa, for example, where they did not operate previously. Moreover, according to the United Nations, the Taliban never completely severed its ties to Al Qaeda, despite its pledge to do so.

The Taliban surrendered in December 2001, although many of its forces hid in impenetrable mountain ranges or in neighboring Pakistan and other countries. But the U.S. mission was just beginning. It shifted to “nation-building,” an attempt to construct democratic institutions, to open civil rights for all, including women, and to fashion a system of freedom familiar to the West but unknown in Kabul.

It included missteps, many experts say, that the U.S. military and its civilian partners have often made — misjudging local cultures from Vietnam to Bosnia-Herzegovina, botching realistic goals and making serious errors.

Creating a dependent army

Many observers now are questioning how an army built with nearly a trillion dollars in U.S. and NATO funding over two decades and tons of materiel — from rockets to Humvees — could so quickly collapse. It appears that as the Taliban marched across the country in the last couple of weeks, its fighters met little resistance from the U.S.-trained military.

Reports from several provincial capitals said local elders and tribal chieftains negotiated with advancing Taliban troops, agreeing not to raise arms against them in exchange for a peaceful resolution. Some Afghans say that arrangement extended nationwide.

“The leadership at one point gave up and told the security forces not to resist,” Roya Rahmani, until last month the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., said this week. “Over the last few weeks, they continuously received calls from Kabul asking them to surrender, asking them not to resist.”

Afghan security forces and ground troops were operating without the air power that had been vital in staving off Taliban advances. At some point — it is not clear when — supportive airstrikes stopped. In recent weeks, the U.S. declined to provide most air support, leaving Afghan troops on their own.

Under U.S. tutelage, the Afghan army became increasingly dependent on its American patrons, so withdrawal of that support was devastating.

“They baked dependency into the Afghan forces,” said Laurel Miller, former acting special envoy for Afghanistan now at the International Crisis Group, describing the U.S. strategy.

She said U.S. efforts too frequently ignored facts on the ground, underestimated the sway of powerful regional warlords and failed to sufficiently take into account vast corruption and the collapse in morale among the rank and file as well as deficiencies in Afghan leadership and command.

Miller and others also gave some credit to the Taliban as fighters — fiercely dedicated and zealously motivated. Strategically, the Taliban, as it sought to regroup, concentrated many of its operations in northern Afghanistan, preventing a resurgence of the so-called Northern Alliance — militias that helped initially to defeat the Taliban. It continued to grow stronger even during a massive, temporary troop surge ordered by President Obama.

The U.S. military made a major mistake in trying to create an army replicating U.S. standards, which made little sense in Afghanistan, said James Stavridis, former NATO supreme allied commander with responsibility for Afghanistan.

“I believe we probably trained them in a way that did not prepare them for this kind of moment in the sense that we tried to make them a mini version of ourselves,” he told MSNBC. “Dependent on intelligence, dependent on air cover, that was not as it turns out the force that was needed to defeat the Taliban.”

The levels of corruption in the Afghan military and government were something U.S. officials never came to terms with.

The Biden administration has repeatedly asserted that the Afghan army was a fighting force of 300,000, dwarfing the Taliban. But the payrolls of the Afghan military and police contained thousands of “ghost” soldiers, fighters who did not exist but were listed so officials could abscond with their payments.

A government watchdog, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, or SIGAR, in recent years found a gap between recorded and actual strength levels in the tens of thousands of personnel; in southern pro-Taliban provinces, 50% to 70% of police positions were filled by people who did not exist, the agency found.

The widespread corruption also served to demoralize the Afghan fighting forces, which by many accounts were formidable and relatively professional...

Keep reading.

 

'I Can't Help Myself'

Described by Billboard as a "spirited, fast -paced wailer performed in unique style."

The Four Tops. A phenomenal hit. 

Another live version here, even more excitedly upbeat.

U.S.-Allied Afghan Forces Are in Hiding

Pfft.

Every day I get more and more disgusted with Biden — and that’s saying a lot.

At NYT, "Hunted by the Taliban, U.S.-Allied Afghan Forces Are in Hiding":

#Warning⚠️: Video contains graphic images#Kandahar: Afghans are taken out of their homes and killed by Taliban. Videos have emerged on social media showing scores of dead bodies on roads and streets in the province. #SanctionOnPakistan #SanctionPakisan #Afghan_lives_matter pic.twitter.com/Wao6y9MaiO

— RTA World (@rtaworld) August 13, 2021

Columns of Afghan soldiers in armored vehicles and pickup trucks sped through the desert to reach Iran. Military pilots flew low and fast to the safety of Uzbekistan’s mountains.

Thousands of Afghan security force members managed to make it to other countries over the past few weeks as the Taliban rapidly seized the country. Others managed to negotiate surrenders and went back to their homes — and some kept their weapons and joined the winning side.

They were all part of the sudden atomization of the national security forces that the United States and its allies spent tens of billions of dollars to arm, train and stand against the Taliban, a two-decade effort at institution-building that vanished in just a few days.

But tens of thousands of other Afghan grunts, commandos and spies who fought to the end, despite the talk in Washington that the Afghan forces simply gave up, have been left behind. They are now on the run, hiding and hunted by the Taliban.

Continue reading the main story

“There’s no way out,” said Farid, an Afghan commando, in a text message to an American soldier who fought with him. Farid, who agreed to be identified by his first name only, said he was hiding in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, trapped after the regular army units surrendered around him. “I am praying to be saved.”

Accounts of the Taliban searching for people they believe worked with and fought alongside U.S. and NATO forces are beginning to trickle out, offering a bloody counterpoint to the kinder and gentler face the militants have been trying to present to the world.

The militants are threatening to arrest or punish family members if they cannot find the people they are seeking, according to former Afghan officials, a confidential report prepared for the United Nations and American veterans who have been contacted by desperate Afghans who served alongside them. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to protect friends and loved ones still hiding in Afghanistan.

The officials said the Taliban had been combing through records at the ministry of defense and interior and the headquarters of Afghanistan’s spy service, drawing up lists of operatives to search for. And there are more and more reports that the militants are exacting swift and fatal revenge when they are found.

One former interpreter for American Special Forces said he saw another man gunned down feet from him on the mere suspicion that he had worked with foreign forces.

In the southern city of Kandahar, video posted on social media last week by RTA, Afghanistan’s public broadcaster, showed dozens of bodies left by the road, many of them reportedly Afghan soldiers and officials executed by the Taliban. RTA itself is now in the hands of the Taliban.

How many Afghan soldiers and security officials are on the run is unclear. Dozens of Afghan pilots escaped to Uzbekistan, where 22 planes and 24 helicopters carrying nearly 600 men arrived on Sunday, according to Uzbek officials; an unknown number made it to Iran, former Afghan officials said.

On paper, the Afghan security forces number around 300,000. But because of corruption, desertion and casualties, only a sixth of that number were actually in the fight against the Taliban this year, U.S. officials say.

Thousands surrendered as the Taliban rolled through the country, laying down their weapons after being promised they would not be harmed. The Taliban so far appears to have stuck with those deals — historically a common feature of Afghan warfare — and the militants seemed far more focused on the 18,000 Army commandos, many of whom did not surrender, and officers from the country’s spy service, the National Directorate of Security...

Alexis Ren, Ashley Tavort, and Caroline Vreeland

It's a good day!

Ms. Alexis is on Twitter.

Ashley Tavort is here.

And also Caroline Vreeland here and here.

Clarissa Ward Reporting from Afghanistan (VIDEO)

 He's either foolish or brave. 

Either way, it's been doing phenomenal reporting, even heroic,

At CNN, and Melissa Mackenzie below:

Good grief. @clarissaward is going to need years of therapy after this horror in Afghanistan.

She's doing good work.

God bless her and our soldiers. This is an abomination.

— Melissa Mackenzie (@MelissaTweets) August 20, 2021

Kamala Harris Goes to Ground

She's upside-down in a recent poll.

See, NYP, "Kamala Harris tanking in poll as she goes to ground on Afghan withdrawal."

'The Night House' Review (VIDEO)

Super, scary, scintillating.

A modern-day psychological thriller, and worth your time.

At the L.A. Times, "Review: Rebecca Hall keeps the tension building in ‘The Night House’."

Douglas London, The Recruiter

At Amazon, Douglas London, The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence.

London was the CIA's Counterterrorism Chief for South and Southwest Asia befoe his retirement in 2019.

Tucker Carlson Slams Biden on Afghan Refugees (VIDEO)

CNN was hammering Tucker today during their programming. It's like a night and day contrast: CNN's boosting the Democrats (for example, in its reporting on the serious threat from Larry Elder to Governor Newsom in next month's recall election) and Fox News (especially the evening opinion segments, though not exclusively, i.e., Bret Baier) has been eviscerating Biden on the disastrous crisis in Afghanistan.

Below is the long segment that got the folks over at CNN all hot and bothered. Indeed, Don Lemon took on Tucker in last night's segment. These goobers are shaken.

I should note that I'm not against accepting Afghan refugees, as long as they've been comprehensibly vetted for terrorist activity (or any of the slightest collaboration with the Taliban, al Qaeda, or any or all of the many other totalitarian jihadists across the international system). And to note, apparently even President Trump has flip-flopped on the issue of accepting Afghan refugees to the U.S.

At Fox News:

Protests Threaten Taliban Rule (VIDEO)

That's the New York Times' take. 

But if the Taliban are a truly totalitarian force, they won't stand for these protests too long. They'll arrest, torture, imprison, murder, assassinate, and slaughter any and all opponents of the new regime. 

See, "As demonstrations spread, the Taliban face growing challenges in running the nation."

Bernard-Henri, Levy Who Killed Daniel Pearl?

At Amazon, Bernard-Henri, Levy Who Killed Daniel Pearl?

Liz Cheney on 'This Week' (VIDEO)

The defeat in Afghanistan will certainly resonate in international politics for years to come. I'm still gobsmacked yet fascinated about this whole thing, especially how swiftly things fell apart, and the shape of the future for the nation. The Afghan people are worthy of your prays. 

I'm also interested in it from a policy perspective. I'm neoconservative, a dreaded "neocon," to listen to all these pro-isolationism and "Never Trumpers," the majority of whom were warmongering boosters just a few years ago. I saw former Breitbart writer John Nolte on Twitter ragging about how awful U.S. policy has been, but I'd bet if you check the archives there from, say, a decade ago, you'd find all kinds of attacks on President Obama and his own pledge to surge the troops with a firm deadline for a troop withdraw, to say the least.

To be honest, the fact is each and all the last four presidents bear responsibly, but clearly, none more than President Biden.

What to do now? I mean, if I were in charge of course U.S. troops would have stayed. The U.S. would have maintained bases and prisons, and would have had robust air-power to support ground operations, including throughout the hinterlands across the country. A number of commentators have noted that just keeping U.S. forces in country, with no announcement of a troop withdrawal, would have been preferred, and of course we could have temporarily surged troops if things got out of hand. 

Now we'll have to continue fighting there, for one thing, to prevent a humanitarian and regional security nightmare from taking place. This may not be a popular position right now, but it's stupid to argue that the U.S today is more secure today than it was just a week or so ago. 

At the video, Liz Cheney argues that instead of ending the war, U.S. policy --- in both the Trump and Biden administrations --- has guaranteed the war there will continue.

She's not a popular figure in her party, and it'll be interesting to see how she fares in the 2022 midterms, but she's firm and consistent in her positions, and I think she's great.

Watch: 

Afghan Women Fear for Their LIves

Tragic, but no surprise, at all. 

At NYT, "For Afghan Women, Taliban Stirs Fears of a Return to a Repressive Past":

As Afghan women remained cloistered at home in Kabul, fearful for their lives and their futures, a starkly different image played out on Tuesday on Tolo News, an Afghan television station: a female presenter interviewing a Taliban official.

Sitting several feet away from Mawlawi Abdulhaq Hemad, a member of the Taliban’s media team, the host, Beheshta Arghand, asked him about the situation in Kabul and the Taliban’s conducting house-to-house searches in the Afghan capital.

“The entire world now recognizes that the Taliban are the real rulers of the country,” he said, adding: “I am still astonished that people are afraid of Taliban.”

But many are deeply fearful, among them the millions of Afghan women who are afraid of a return to a repressive past, when the Taliban were in power from 1996 to 2001, and barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. In 1996, a woman in Kabul had the end of her thumb cut off for wearing nail varnish, according to Amnesty International. In recent months, some women have been flogged by Taliban fighters for having their faces uncovered.

In the two decades after the U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban, the United States invested more than $780 million to encourage women’s rights. Girls and women have joined the military and police forces, held political office, competed in the Olympics and scaled the heights of engineering on robotics teams — things that once seemed unimaginable under the Taliban.

Now, however, a central question remains: Will the Taliban once again trample over women’s rights with the same velocity they captured the country?

The Tolo News interview was part of a broader campaign by the Taliban since taking power to present a more moderate face to the world and to help tame the fear gripping the country. They are encouraging workers back to their jobs — and have even encouraged women to return to work and to take part in the government.

“The Islamic Emirate doesn’t want women to be victims,” Enamullah Samangani, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, was quoted as saying by The Associated Press, using the militants’ name for Afghanistan. “They should be in the government structure according to Shariah law.”

Still, worried about running afoul of local Taliban officials, many women have remained shuttered at home. Kabul residents have been tearing down advertisements showing women without head scarves in recent days. In some areas of Afghanistan, women have been told not to leave home without being accompanied by a male relative, and girls’ schools have been closed.

And, despite their pledges of no reprisals, there have already been reports of Taliban seizing property, hunting down government workers and journalists and attacking crowds of civilians.

At the same time, the Taliban was showing indications that it was, at least for the moment, adopting a more tolerant stance regarding the role of women and girls. Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s organization, said one of its representatives met a health commissioner on Monday in Herat and reported that he requested that women who work for the health department return to work.

That made the work of Tolo’s female journalists, including a reporter out on the street, all the more notable.

Matthieu Aikins, a journalist who has reported widely on Afghanistan, described the Tolo interview as “remarkable, historic, heartening,” although he pointed out that during recent peace talks in Qatar, the Taliban had given access to female journalists from Afghanistan and other countries.

Afghanistan observers said that while it is not unheard-of for the Taliban to grant interviews to female journalists, including international correspondents from CNN and other outlets, they are rare inside the country... Yeah, CNN's Clarissa Ward, apparently stuck behind enemy lines. I literally pray she has security. I watched her segment yesterday, and Wolf Blitzer finished off that part of the discussion admonisher her to stay safe...

Such a beautiful, beautiful woman, and wearing a burqa, as all Afghan women will be wearing now that the nation's in Taliban hands.

I shake my head and say to myself: I must pray.

 

Norman Podhoretz, World War IV

At Amazon, Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

War in Afghanistan Ends in Ignominy and Shame

At NYT, "For America, and Afghanistan, the Post-9/11 Era Ends Painfully":

An era that began two decades ago with the shock of hijacked planes flying into American skyscrapers drew to a close this week with desperate Afghans clinging to American planes as they tried to escape the chaos of Kabul. Some fell; one was found dead in the landing gear.

A colossal bipartisan investment of American force, treasure and diplomacy to defeat a hostile ideology bent on the creation of an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has failed. Over four presidencies, two Republican and two Democratic, more than 2,400 Americans gave their lives, and more than $1 trillion dollars was spent, for shifting Afghan goals, many of which proved unattainable.

The curtain came down on the post-9/11 era, with the Taliban retaking control of the country that served as the base for the attack on America, a full-circle debacle for the United States that will engrave Afghanistan painfully in the national memory.

Mistakes and illusions and a particular American naïveté, or hubris, about remaking the world in its image led to the swift Taliban takeover almost two decades after its defeat, but a more fundamental factor also played a part. With China flexing its muscles, the nation’s priorities shifted. The relative power of the United States is not what it was 20 years ago.

The country’s capacity and inclination to commit resources to faraway struggles ebbed. Absent the Cold War, Americans have little appetite for the kind of open-ended military commitment that cemented democracies in Germany, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.

“As president, I’m adamant we focus on the threats we face today, in 2021, not yesterday’s threats,” President Biden said Monday, defending his decision to proceed with a rapid military withdrawal.

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” Mr. Biden said.

Yet if there has been a single thrust to Mr. Biden’s presidency, it has been the defense of democracies at an “inflection point” with repressive forms of governance spreading, and the reassertion of American values.

“America is back,” has been the refrain. But the question will now be raised: To do what? A planned summit in December conceived to reinforce democracies looks far less credible now that Afghan schools may be closed to girls again and Afghans who believed in freedom are desperate to flee.

“For decades Afghanistan has been the victim of people who wanted to do it good,” said Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian diplomat who served as United Nations Special Representative for Afghanistan and Iraq. “At this point there was no good time to leave, so this was as good — or as bad — as any,” he added.

The chaos in Kabul as the United States and its allies scrambled to evacuate their nationals, and the Afghans who had helped them, has inevitably been compared to the desperate scenes in Saigon in April 1975 as North Vietnamese troops took the city. Then, as now, a homegrown guerrilla insurgency undid a superpower’s designs.

The analogy should not be overdrawn, however. The United States was bitterly divided over the Vietnam War. Today most Americans want out of Afghanistan. Their priorities are domestic.

As Mr. Biden said, an overriding American objective was achieved: Islamist terrorism, in the form of Al Qaeda, was largely defeated over the past two decades. But the political Islam embraced by the Taliban has retained its magnetism as an alternative to secular Western models of governance.

It remains to be seen whether a newly savvy Taliban, honed by diplomatic experience that may have cooled something of the zealous ardor of the seminary, will honor promises to prevent Afghanistan becoming a terrorist haven again...

C'mon. No one believes the Taliban won't renew their global jihad. It goes without saying U.S. national security is more a risk than it was just last week.

And it's all on Biden, and he's getting hammered for it.

Still more.  

Human Remains Found in Wheel Well of C-17 Military Plane That Departed from Kabul

Absolutely horrifying. 

At ABC News, "The discovery was made after a day of chaotic evacuations from Kabul's airport":

A U.S. official has confirmed that human remains were found inside the wheel well of a C-17 military plane that had been swarmed by hundreds of people on the tarmac as it took off at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.

The discovery was made upon landing at al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on Monday.

A dramatic video taken earlier Monday showed some people clinging to the plane as it taxied down the runway in Kabul.

A defense official said the individuals swarming the plane had breached the runway from the civilian side of the airport. At the airport in Kabul, there is a side for military operations and another side for commercial flights.

Air operations were suspended for hours at the airport Monday because of the crush of Afghan civilians desperate to leave Kabul. Operations resumed after the U.S. military, Turkish forces and other troops forcibility removed 15,000 Afghan civilians who had breached the runway, a U.S. official said...

Keep reading.

 

Raymond Ibrahim on Totalitarian Islam (VIDEO)

At Prager University:

Republican Candidates Vow to Rollback Mask and Vaccination Mandates

 At LAT, "GOP recall candidates vow to roll back Newsom mask, vaccine rules. But can they?":

Conservative talk-show host Larry Elder, who recent polls show leads the field of candidates running to replace Newsom if he’s ousted, has promised to take quick action to undo Newsom’s policies. During a news conference on Friday, he called mask mandates an “assault on freedom.”

“When I win I will fight any and all vaccine and mask govt mandates at state and local level,” Elder tweeted to his followers.

Elder’s comment came shortly after San Francisco decided to require proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 for restaurants, bars, gyms and other indoor venues. The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday called for a similar ordinance. The day before, Elder and other GOP candidates were critical of Newsom’s announcement that public school teachers and staff members will be required to be vaccinated or be tested regularly for the coronavirus. That order followed earlier directives by the Newsom administration that, with limited exceptions, require all public school children to wear masks in class, all healthcare workers to be vaccinated and all state employees to be vaccinated or tested for the virus.

Other well-known Republicans running in the recall election also oppose mask mandates, including former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, 2018 gubernatorial candidate John Cox, Rocklin Assemblyman Kevin Kiley and former Northern California Rep. Doug Ose.

“I have consistently urged my fellow Californians to join me in getting vaccinated, but mandates are not the solution,” Faulconer said in a statement Wednesday.

At a GOP debate the week before, when Faulconer was asked if he would take action as governor to ban mask mandates at schools as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has done in Florida, he sidestepped the question.

Ose called the mask mandates a “significant overreach” of government authority.

“We must draw the line and protect people’s freedoms,” Cox said...

Keep reading.

 

Drop Dead People of Afghanistan and American and Afghani Military and Civilian Personnel in Country (VIDEO)

Disgusting dishonest of the Commander in Chief, not to mention the cowardly blame game. 

At WSJ, "Biden to Afghanistan: Drop Dead":

President Biden told the world on Monday that he doesn’t regret his decision to withdraw rapidly from Afghanistan, or even the chaotic, incompetent way the withdrawal has been executed. He is determined in retreat, defiant in surrender, and confident in the rightness of consigning the country to jihadist rule. We doubt the world will see it the same way in the days, months and years ahead.

Mr. Biden refused to accept responsibility for the botched withdrawal while blaming others. He blamed Donald Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban and falsely claimed again that he was trapped. He blamed his three predecessors for not getting out of Afghanistan. He blamed the Afghans for not fighting hard enough, their leaders for fleeing, and even Afghans who helped us for not leaving sooner. The one group he conspicuously did not blame was the Taliban, who once harbored Osama bin Laden and may protect his terrorist successor.

The President made glancing reference to the horrible scenes unfolding in Kabul and especially at the airport, though again without addressing the mistakes that led to them. Had the U.S. not given up the air base at Bagram, now controlled by the Taliban, the U.S. would not now have to fight to control Kabul’s commercial airfield.

The chaotic scenes at the airport, with Afghans hanging from a U.S. military plane and two falling from the sky to their deaths, will be the indelible images of this debacle. They are the echo of 9/11, with people falling from the sky, that Mr. Biden didn’t anticipate when he chose the 20th anniversary of 9/11 as his withdrawal deadline.

Instead of taking responsibility, Mr. Biden played to the sentiment of Americans who are tired of foreign military missions. It’s a powerful point to speak of sending a child to risk his life in a foreign country, and no doubt it will resonate with many Americans. It is a question that every President should ask.

But the President was dishonest in framing the U.S. mission merely as fighting in another country’s “civil war.” The U.S. didn’t remain in Afghanistan for 20 years to send women to school or to “nation build.” The core mission was to prevent the country from again becoming a terrorist safe haven. The Taliban’s victory will now attract thousands of young jihadists from around the world, and they will have Americans and the U.S. homeland in their sights. Mr. Biden said he would maintain a “counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability” to strike camps in Afghanistan, but that will be much harder from the distance of the Persian Gulf. This is a far bigger risk than he lets on, as U.S. intelligence agencies know.

Mr. Biden was also dishonest in framing his Afghan decision as a false choice between total withdrawal and sending tens of thousands of troops again. He knows his own advisers, military and civilian, believed they could support the Afghan military with no more than a few thousand troops to supply air power and intelligence.

He also knows the U.S. hasn’t had a single casualty in more than a year in Afghanistan. Even if Mr. Biden was set on withdrawal, he could have done it based on conditions that would have given the Taliban more incentive to negotiate with the government.

Mr. Biden claimed that Afghan leaders Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah had refused his advice to negotiate with the Taliban. That is false. They had been negotiating with the Taliban for months, under enormous pressure from the Trump Administration. The problem is that the Taliban had no incentive to negotiate in good faith when it knew the U.S. was leaving and would be able to take its chances on a military victory.

Like all good liberal internationalists, Mr. Biden thinks you can achieve a diplomatic outcome by diplomacy alone. Mr. Biden’s claim that the U.S. will continue to support the Afghan people and stand for human rights and the women of Afghanistan is the same kind of internationalist twaddle. The Taliban is taking the women of Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages, and the “international community” will do nothing to stop it. Mr. Biden’s words of “support” will be cold comfort when the Taliban knocks on the doors of women who worked in the Afghan government...

Still more.

 

Clint Romesha, Red Platoon

At Amazon, Clint Romesha, Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor.

Over Kabul, Tragedy in the Sky (VIDEO)

As if this entire episode isn't tragic enough. 

At the Guardian U.K.:

Biden Rebuked

If anyone deserves it, it is he.

At NYT, "In Washington, Recriminations Over Afghanistan Emerge Quickly":

WASHINGTON — A conference call between members of Congress and the Biden administration’s top diplomatic and military leaders on Afghanistan turned contentious on Sunday, as lawmakers pressed the administration on how intelligence could have failed so badly and how long the military would help hold the Kabul airport.

Lawmakers said the 45-minute call with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken; Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III; and Gen. Mark. A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; was not particularly revelatory.

“It was, I would say, a rote exercise in telling us what we had already learned from the media and social media,” said Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan and a former Army reservist who did conflict analysis in Afghanistan.

But the questioning was pointed and at times contentious, centering on which Afghans the United States would get out and how. Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey, who was a State Department official in the Obama administration and a former leader of Human Rights Watch, pressed the top officials on how long the U.S. military would be able to keep the Kabul airport open to charter and commercial flights.

Lawmakers also asked whether the Afghans that Americans were trying to help leave would include more than those who worked for the embassy, interpreters for the military and others with special immigrant visas, or S.I.V.s. The briefers assured them that they would try to help a broader group, including human rights and women’s rights activists, journalists and students of the American University of Afghanistan.

“I want to make sure we don’t pick up and leave when all the Americans and S.I.V.s are out,” Mr. Malinowski said.

Democrats said they did emerge from the call convinced that the military would hold on to the airport for a while, even if the Taliban took full control of the government. But that is no guarantee that all Afghans who want to get out will be able to do so.

“It is overwhelmingly clear to me that this has been a cascade of failures at the Defense Department, with the intelligence community and within our political community,” Mr. Meijer said. “And nothing on the call gave me the confidence that even the magnitude of the failures has been comprehended.”

On the conference call, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican minority leader, was recognized to ask a question, then began a blistering attack on the Biden administration, saying the collapse in Afghanistan would empower China and weaken the U.S. position in the world, according to people on the call.

He put out a statement afterward saying that during the call “I only heard excuses.”

“Amidst the ongoing chaos and ensuing instability at home and abroad, the only solution President Biden has offered is to play politics and baselessly blame his predecessor,” he said...

Keep reading.

 

Abject Desperation as U.S. Evacuates from Afghanistan (VIDEO)

Richard Engel, reporting for NBC News:

The chaos and devastation --- including massive human rights violations inflicted by the Talbian --- is at what seems biblical scale.

Watch:

Ms. Katie

Ms. Katie's on Twitter.

Plus, "ON/OFF FLASHER FRIDAYS OF THE DAY."

More, "BRITNEY SPEARS TOPLESS STRIPTEASE FULL VIDEO IN 4K."

Hananya Naftali

Afghanistan Has Fallen.

Afghanistan: A Return to Brutal Islamic Rule Under Stone-Age Taliban

On comes the barbarity.

At LAT, "The Taliban won. Here’s what that could mean":

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Afghans woke fearfully to both a new and old reality Monday with their country under the control of the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist group that ruled Afghanistan with a brutal hand for five years before a U.S.-led invasion ousted it from power in 2001.

The Taliban captured major population centers with breathtaking speed last week, culminating in the fall Sunday of the capital, Kabul, and the ongoing flight of foreign diplomats, including ones from the U.S. There were reports Monday of chaotic scenes — and at least two deaths — at Kabul’s international airport amid the crush of people desperate to flee the country.

The millions of Afghans left behind now face a radically different government, and lifestyle, from the one they have known over the last two decades.

How will the Taliban rule? Have they changed?

When the Islamist insurgent group first came to power in 1996, it billed itself as a corrective movement in a society mired in the lawlessness of years of civil warfare.

Under its harsh interpretation of religious jurisprudence, women and girls were pushed almost completely out of public life and forbidden from employment and schooling. The Taliban imposed sartorial injunctions on both sexes, and mandated such brutal punishment as hand-chopping and execution by stoning — for infractions of its brand of Islamic law. It also banned television and music.

Lately, the militant group has sought to present a more benevolent image.

“We will respect rights of women,” said Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen in an interview with the BBC. “Our policy is that women will have access to education and work.”

But they will also have “to wear the hijab,” he added, referring to the Islamic head covering for women.

Other statements from the Taliban have sought to reassure Afghans and others that insurgents would not engage in looting or revenge killings against members of the former government, and that embassies, international missions and charities would be allowed to continue their work unperturbed. Even international journalists, the group said, could operate after registering with authorities.

Yet the group’s recent actions have been at odds with that rosy image, unverified reports say. In the areas it has recently overrun, girls’ schools have reportedly been closed, women have been plucked out of their place of employment and told to send a male relative in their stead; or forced into marrying a Taliban fighter. (A Taliban spokesman on Twitter vehemently dismissed the last assertion as propaganda.)

It has also re-imposed harsh punishments. Last month in the southwestern province of Helmand, the group’s fighters hanged two men it said had been convicted as child kidnappers. It kept their bodies swinging from a bridge for days.

And far from offering amnesty for those linked to the state, there have been ominous reports from residents on social media and elsewhere of militants going door-to-door asking for government employees. Months before the Taliban entered Afghanistan’s major cities, scores of activists, journalists, prominent female advocates and other members of civil society were killed in a Taliban assassination campaign...

I don't believe "Taliban statements" for one minute. 

It's virtually 100 percent certain the stone-age rule will return to the country, with amputations, mass murder and executions, harsh sharia law and the brutal subjugation of women, many of whom will be murdered by families and communities for violating antediluvian tenets of Islam --- women stoned to death, raped and passed around as sex slaves, and the loss of life prospects. The women's place is in the home and no women can leave the shack without a male escort, at risk of beatings. 

At Least 7 Dead as Chaos Erupts Amid Evacuations at Kabul International Airport

I'm still shaking my head at this debacle.

It's a huge story and an extreme risk for Joe Biden and his presidency. 

At USA Today, "US troops try to manage Kabul airport turmoil; 7 dead as thousands attempt to flee Taliban":

WASHINGTON – U.S. troops Monday sought to gain control of the international airport in Kabul after thousands of Afghans rushed through the civilian side and swarmed the military landing strip. At least seven people have died in the mayhem.

Senior U.S. military officials say the dead include some who fell from a departing American military transport jet, according to the Associated Press. Videos show people clinging to the sides of a U.S. military plane as it taxied, as well as falling from a plane as it took off.

U.S. troops killed two armed individuals at Hamid Karzai International Airport during the chaos there as civilians poured onto runways and halted flights, Pentagon press John Kirby said.

The troops had been fired on, he said, adding that there may be one servicemember wounded, but reports are incomplete.

There is no indication that the individuals killed were members of the Taliban.

There are about 2,500 troops at the airport and another 500 will arrive by Tuesday, he said. In all, there will be 6,000 American forces at the airport.

Amid this, President Joe Biden is expected to address the Taliban's takeover later Monday from the White House.

US troops try to secure civilian side of airport

U.S. troops are attempting to set up barriers to separate the military portion of Hamid Karzai International Airport from the civilian terminal and its landing strip, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to comment publicly.

The airport had no physical barrier between those operations, although they are separated by a significant distance. Huge crowds of Afghans desperate to flee the country and its new Taliban leadership entered the civilian side of the airport and swarmed a U.S. Air Force C-17 as it taxied on a runway.

U.S., Turkish and other allied troops were clearing the field to allow flights to resume, Kirby said. Large crowds of Afghans remain on the south side of the airport where civilian flights arrive and depart.

The Taliban’s surprisingly swift rout of Afghan security forces and fall of the government on Sunday — including the flight of Afghan President Ashfar Ghani from the country — drew comparisons to the U.S. abandonment of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, as well as harsh criticism for President Joe Biden’s strategy for winding down the nearly 20-year-old war in Afghanistan.

US veterans:'Were all of our sacrifices wasted?' War veterans react to stunning Afghanistan collapse

Jonathan Finer, Deputy White House National Security Adviser, speaking on MSNBC early Monday, confirmed there will be additional US troops at the airport.

"Absolutely there's a plan to secure the airport," Finer said. "That's why we've been able to flow additional forces into Afghanistan without having to fight their way in. There has been contingency planning going on now for a period of month. We believe there are the forces in place to be able to provide security for the airport, particularly with the additional forces that are going to be arriving again today, tomorrow and in the coming days, and the main focus of our efforts today are going to be getting that airport back up and running so the flights can continue."

Biden expected to speak Monday afternoon

Facing heavy criticism for his handling of Afghanistan, Biden planned to return to the White House on Monday and deliver remarks in the afternoon. Biden spent the weekend at Camp David, where he had been out of sight save for an image of him participating in a videoconference that was released Sunday by the White House.

Robert Gibbs, who served as White House press secretary during the Obama administration, called it imperative that Biden speak to the nation and the world.

“Hopefully this happens very soon,” Gibbs tweeted Monday morning. “He must lay out again the reasoning behind his decisions, how he sees the future of this region & what must be done to prevent another safe haven for al-Qaeda to plan attacks."

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., put it more bluntly.

“Mr. President,” McCarthy tweeted, “Do your job and address the nation.”

The comparison to Saigon is haunting. If Vietnam was America's first defeat in war, Afghanistan's the second, and far more foreboding.

Still more.

Claire

The editor of Quillette and a stunning beauty --- and fascinating too.

Her face is a picture of serenity. Her skin so fair it's heavenly. And her blonde hair so light and shimmering and dreamy. I suspect she's been in the sun and her tresses have bleached out, for at other times her hair is more an autumnesque shimmer of mystical light grey.

Most intriguing is her Australian accent. I've heard some Aussie men's accents (most notably, "Crocodile Dundee"), but not as frequently women's. The Australians are not so near the British in their mode of pronunciation, for, at least for Ms. Claire, it's seems there's a bit of harshness, almost the hard ack! of the German (harsh in the sense of that back-of-the-throat sound, like "Achtung!" (attention in German).

This is much less a criticism than a celebration of variety, and in Ms. Claire a brush of her fair beauty and wonder.

She's hella smart too, if not a bit arrogant sometimes (all part of her unique personality, as true for anyone).

Via Twitter:

Democrat Congressional Majority in Jeopardy

 Kiss Pelosi's slim House majority goodbye --- and thank goodness!

At NBC News, "Early indicators suggest Democrats' House majority is in jeopardy":

WASHINGTON — Democrats with proven track records of winning tough districts aren't running for re-election. Republicans are enjoying early fundraising windfalls. And, as Donald Trump and Barack Obama both learned the hard way, midterm elections almost always break against the president's party.

The early indicators that showed Democrats poised to make big gains in Congress four years ago now point the other direction, suggesting that the narrow 220-212 Democratic House majority is in serious danger.

"Based on all factors, you'd have to consider Republicans the early favorites for the House majority in 2022," said David Wasserman, who tracks congressional races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

"But as we found out in 2020, surprises can happen, and it's not a done deal," he said. "Democrats' best hope is that Biden's approval rating stays above 50 percent and that Republicans have a tougher time turning out their voters without Trump on the ballot."

Much remains uncertain about the midterm elections more than a year away — including the congressional districts themselves, thanks to the delayed redistricting process. The Senate, meanwhile, looks like more of a toss-up.

House Democrats think voters will reward them for advancing President Joe Biden's generally popular agenda, which involves showering infrastructure money on virtually every district in the country and sending checks directly to millions of parents. And they think voters will punish Republicans for their rhetoric about the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.

"Democrats are delivering results, bringing back the economy, getting people back to work, passing the largest middle-class tax cut in history, while Republicans are engaged in frankly violent conspiracy theory rhetoric around lies in service of Donald Trump," said Tim Persico, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

But the challenges Democrats face are real and numerous.

They knew they would face a tough 2022 immediately after 2020, when massive, unexpected GOP gains whittled the Democratic majority to just a handful of seats.

"House Republicans are in a great position to retake the majority," said Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, "but we are taking nothing for granted."

Emmer and other Republicans say they think they can continue to press their advantage on divisive issues supported by the "far left" and make hay of rising inflation and crime rates. "We are going to continue to relentlessly hold House Democrats accountable for their socialist agenda," Emmer said.

Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin, one of just seven Democrats representing districts Trump won, shocked politicos Wednesday when he announced that he'd "run out of gas" and wouldn't seek a 14th term in Congress.

His rural district had been trending Republican for years. Kind won re-election last year by just about 10,000 votes.

Incumbency is an enormous advantage — well over 90 percent of members of Congress win re-election — and some Democrats worry that lawmakers like Kind who are abandoning swing districts this year are the only ones who can win them...

It's still early, and while I'm very confident Republicans will take control of both chambers, it's still early and risks for the G.O.P. still impossible to calculate.

It's going to be fun, though.

Keep reading. 

 

Andrew Hacker, Two Nations

At Amazon, Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.

So Wonderful

Ms. Kate, for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:

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.