Afghanistan news and discussions

[caltrek]

Panjshir Commander Ahmad Massoud Readies for War While Negotiating With Taliban
by Gareth Browne
August 19, 2021

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/a ... h-taliban/

Introduction:

(The National) The leader of Afghanistan’s only region not to have fallen to the Taliban has said he would be willing to join a Taliban government, but only if the group proved itself to be inclusive and respect the rights of all Afghans.

Ahmad Massoud, 32, leads forces in the Panjshir valley and said that war was on the cards if the group attempted an attack on his region.

In his first interview since the fall of Kabul last week, he told The National he had seen little evidence the group had changed over the past two decades.

He poured scorn on the group’s promise not to seek revenge against Afghans who had worked for the government or foreign forces.

“The pardon that the Taliban mentioned is just a sham — it is not real,” he said.

[Yuli Ban]

Taliban carrying out door-to door manhunt, report says

The Taliban have stepped up their search for people who worked for Nato forces or the previous Afghan government, a document prepared for the UN has warned.

It said the militants have been going door-to-door to find targets and threaten their family members.

The hardline Islamist group has tried to reassure Afghans since seizing power in a lightning offensive, promising there would be "no revenge".

But there are growing fears of a gap between what they say and what they do.

The warning the group were targeting "collaborators" came in a confidential document by the RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses, which provides intelligence to the UN.

"There are a high number of individuals that are currently being targeted by the Taliban and the threat is crystal clear," Christian Nellemann, who heads the group behind the report, told the BBC.

[Yuli Ban]

Taliban and women: Kabul university student on fears for future

In Kabul, university students should be getting ready for the start of a new term. Instead, many are destroying evidence of their previous lives as the Taliban patrol the streets outside.

For one student - a woman, and a member of the persecuted Hazara minority, which in recent years has faced abductions and killings at the hands of the Taliban - the men outside pose even more risk. Here, she tells the BBC how the dreams she hoped to fulfil have been replaced by fears for her future survival in just a matter of days.

It's something that I can't put into words, honestly. Everything, everything that I dreamed of, everything that I ever worked for. My dignity, my pride, even my existence as a girl, my life - they are all in danger. Who knows how long it would take them to come and search house-by-house and take girls - probably rape them. I may have to kill myself when they come to my home. I've been talking to my friends, this is what all of us, all of us, are planning to do. Death is better than being taken by them.

We are all scared and we are scared to our bones.

Two months ago my only focus was on my degree. I was planning how to study for the fall semester, what to do, what not to do, making schedules, trying to make everything correct.

Various people were scared as the Taliban were taking provinces, but I and others never thought they would take Kabul.

My life was normal until they took Mazar-i-Sharif (a large city north-west of Kabul, that was an anti-Taliban bastion). That day I realised we were finished. Then they got to Kabul. There was some gunfire in the city and we heard that the Taliban were in every neighbourhood.

Then, nothing was normal.

[weatheriscool]

Afghanistan: Taliban 'tortured and massacred' men from Hazara minority
Source: BBC

The Hazara community is Afghanistan's third largest ethnic group.

They mainly practise Shia Islam and have faced long-term discrimination and persecution in predominantly Sunni Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the report published on Thursday, Amnesty said the nine Hazara men were killed between 4 and 6 July in Malistan district in the eastern Ghazni province.
...
In total six men were allegedly shot, some in the head, and three were tortured to death.

Read more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58277463

[weatheriscool]

Taliban Quash Afghanistan Protests, Tightening Grip on Country
Source: New York Times

The Taliban cracked down on protests that erupted in at least four cities in Afghanistan on Thursday and rounded up opponents despite promises of amnesty, even as fearful workers stayed home and thousands of people continued a frenzied rush to leave the country.

Even as the Taliban moved to assert control, hundreds of protesters took to the streets for a second day to rally against their rule, this time marching in Kabul, the capital, as well as other cities. Again, the Taliban met them with force, using gunfire and beatings to disperse crowds. And again the actions of Taliban foot soldiers undermined the leadership’s suggestions that, having taken power, they would moderate the brutality they have long been known for.

The police officers who served the old government have melted away, and instead armed Taliban fighters are operating checkpoints and directing traffic, administering their notions of justice as they see fit, with little consistency from one to another.

The Taliban were stepping up an intensive search for people who worked with U.S. and NATO forces, particularly members of the former Afghan security services, according to witnesses and a security assessment prepared for the United Nations. Though the Taliban have said there would be no reprisals, there have been arrests, property seizures and scattered reports of reprisal killings.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ta ... li=BBnb7Kz

[Yuli Ban]

Resistance forces recapture three districts in Baghlan from Taliban

Afghan National Resistance Forces have recaptured three districts in Baghlan province, north of Kabul, witness, and the Afghan Minister of Defence said on Friday.
Sources close to Amrullah Saleh confirmed to The National that resistance forces recaptured Pul-e-Hisar, Deh-e Saleh and Banoo districts that make up the Andarab region in southern Baghlan province.
"The resistance is still alive," Gen Bismillah Mohammadi tweeted from Panjshir.

[weatheriscool]

Taliban going 'house to house' in Afghanistan 'hanging' people who worked with US: source
Marine Sgt. Ryan Rogers says the interpreter he worked alongside in Marjah is now trapped in Kabul
By Michael Ruiz | Fox News

Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane gives his take on the collapse of Afghanistan and bringing Americans home on 'The Story'

As the U.S. military and State Department rush to evacuate American citizens and Afghan allies from Kabul’s airport, Taliban checkpoints are cutting off many from freedom and safety – and reports on the ground indicate the militants are summarily executing people who helped U.S. forces over the years.

Ryan Rogers, a retired Marine sergeant, told Fox News Thursday that the interpreter he worked with during the bloody 2010 battle of Marjah in Helmand province is currently trapped in Kabul, prevented from reaching the airport as Taliban fighters seek out and murder former Afghan commandoes and interpreters.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/taliban-g ... -us-source

[andmar74]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... ed-to-plan

This is going from bad to a catastrophe for Biden. The US forces can't move in and get the people stuck in Kabul? Taliban is stronger than the US military?

[weatheriscool]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... ed-to-plan

This is going from bad to a catastrophe for Biden. The US forces can't move in and get the people stuck in Kabul? Taliban is stronger than the US military?

No, Biden is just a pussy!

[Yuli Ban]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... ed-to-plan

This is going from bad to a catastrophe for Biden. The US forces can't move in and get the people stuck in Kabul? Taliban is stronger than the US military?

It's why I say stimulus checks are inevitable.

Sure, he was dealt the bitchiest of bitch hands by Trump, but he allowed this to happen on his watch. Only way to save his approval rating is welfare.

[caltrek]

Yuli Ban: It's why I say stimulus checks are inevitable.

Sure, he was dealt the bitchiest of bitch hands by Trump, but he allowed this to happen on his watch. Only way to save his approval rating is welfare.

While you make a good point about stimulus checks and welfare, I wonder if voters are going to much care about all of this come November 2024?

We all collectively seem to have such short term memories. Also, as you point out, there is plenty of blame to spread around in a bipartisan fashion. At the end of the day, who is to say that voters will not conclude that getting out of Afghanistan was not such a bad thing, and admire Biden for having the guts to finally finish that extrication process?

Of course, those who most loudly complain that Biden is a wuss will also no doubt be complaining about the excessive size of government, the impact of deficit spending on inflation and/or higher taxes, etc.

There will also always be those that ignore Republican hypocrisy:

Trump Slams Biden for Doing What Trump Bragged About
by Sam Van Pykeren
August 16, 2021

https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2 ... ghanistan/

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) As uncertainty consumes Afghanistan, Donald Trump is blaming Joe Biden for doing what Trump said he did.

“He ran out of Afghanistan instead of following the plan our Administration left for him,” the former president wrote in a statement Saturday. Then, barely 25 hours later, another statement from Trump: “Never would have happened if I were President!”

While we’ll never know exactly what a Trump administration-led withdrawal from Afghanistan will look like, we can make some educated guesses based on his words from barely a month ago. “I started the process, all the troops are coming home,” he told supporters at a rally in Wellington, Ohio in late June. “What are we going to say? We’ll stay for another 21 years, then we’ll stay for another 50. The whole thing is ridiculous.” And few months before that, in April of this year, Trump was clear about where he stood: “We can and should get out earlier…Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do. I planned to withdraw on May 1st.” Trump’s former National Security Advisor even agrees, saying the former president “would’ve done essentially the same thing” as Biden.

So let me get this straight, the only president to be impeached twice is blaming Biden for a mess that Trump took credit for in front of supporters?

The rest of the Republican party seems to realize this too, seeing as the RNC wiped clean their webpage laying out Trump’s negotiations and work with the Taliban during his presidency.

Yesterday, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC also revisited these and other comments by Trump, including one in which he predicted that the withdrawal of U.S. troops by the implementation of his (Trump's) policy of withdrawal would indeed result in the collapse of the Afghan government.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Inside the mission to rescue 169 Americans from a hotel outside the Kabul airport

A group of 169 Americans were airlifted from a hotel outside the Kabul airport on Thursday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed to reporters Friday, one of a very limited number of actions that U.S. troops have undertaken outside of the Hamid Karzai International Airport walls since a contingent of 6,000 began deploying last week.

[link:https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/flashp ... l-airport/|

[weatheriscool]

The Latest: Biden says 11,000 flown from Kabul over weekend
Source: AP

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden says 11,000 individuals were evacuated from Kabul over the weekend and he remains committed to assisting all Americans who want to leave Afghanistan get out.

Biden added Sunday that his first priority is getting American citizens out of Afghanistan “as quickly and safely as possible.”

In the president’s words: “We’re working hard and as fast as we can to get people out. That’s our mission. That’s our goal.”

Biden also says he is also activating the civilian reserve air fleet provided by commercial airlines to help move evacuees from third country waystations on to the United States.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan- ... 0b83efd769

[caltrek]

US Public Opinion Survey Data Is Out Regarding War in Afghanistan
by Andrea Germanos
August 22, 2021

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... t-worth-it

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) As corporate media amplify pro-war voices to cover developing events in Afghanistan, two polls out Sunday showed the U.S. public has little appetite for continuing the 20-year war.

A new CBS News/YouGov survey, conducted August 18-20, found that 63% approve of President Joe Biden's decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan, and just 37% disapprove. Just 47%, however, approve of the way Biden is handling the troop withdrawal.

Separate polling from NBC News, conducted August 14-17, asked if the war in Afghanistan was worth it. Sixty-one percent said it was not, compared to 29% who said it was. The last time the poll asked the question was in June of 2014 when similar percentages were found. At that time, 65% said the war wasn't worth it, compared to 27% who said it was.

Those findings mirror a poll out last week from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Conducted leading up to and after the Taliban entered Kabul on August 15, the survey found 62% of U.S. adults believed the war in Afghanistan wasn't worth fighting.

The surveys were released amid still emerging and chaotic scenes of Afghan civilians trying to flee Taliban takeover of the country. The British military said Sunday that seven people were killed as a result of a crowd crush at the Kabul airport.

[caltrek]

For those that want to study Afghanistan in order to learn from our mistakes, I think this might be a good place to start:

The Powell Doctrine Could Have Helped Us Avoid the Afghanistan Debacle
by Richard J. Pierce, Jr.
August 20, 2021

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... uxbndlbing

Introduction:

(The Hill via MSN) We could have avoided the expenditure of over $2 trillion dollars, the loss of the lives of more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen, as well as the tragic and humiliating disaster that is unfolding in Afghanistan if we had applied the Powell Doctrine twenty years ago.

Former Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell provided a list of eight questions that any president must answer affirmatively before authorizing military action by the United States:
1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4. Have all other nonviolent policy means been fully exhausted?
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?

[caltrek]

Speaking of the need to learn from our mistakes:

The Lessons the U.S. Will Probably Not Learn from Afghanistan
by Robert Freeman
August 21, 2021

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021 ... fghanistan

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) The maudlin coverage of the U.S.’s botched exit from Afghanistan will go on for months, maybe years. It will do as much good as rubbernecking a wreck on the side of the road to prevent it from having happened. The U.S.’ inartful exit from the country should not be confused with the loss of the War, and it’s the loss that needs to be weighed.

To understand that loss and what we might learn from it, we have to go back to before the time when the U.S. was even a country. It is there that we locate the cultural DNA that drove the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place. Then, we need to update our understanding to the current context. Only then, with knowledge of both past and present, can we make an informed judgement about the loss of the War.

The British colonies that eventually became the U.S. were inextricably bound up in genocide and slavery. That is a commonplace. Less well understood is that they were also agents of imperialism. The Europeans and their white descendants killed more than 50 million Native Americans to subdue the continent. It was “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed” and as pure an act of both genocide and imperialism as has ever been accomplished.

Yes, it was dressed up in the sociological fig leaves of “Manifest Destiny” and “bringing civilization to the savages,” but it was inescapably an act of mass murder and pillage by an industrial-age civilization exterminating and expropriating the land from a people still living in the stone age. That is not a value judgement, but a statement of fact.

And it was wildly successful for the U.S. and its white rulers. In 1800, huddled on the Eastern seaboard, the U.S. economy generated about 1.5% of global GDP. In 1900—by then spanning the continent—it was 20% of a nine-times larger number, making the U.S. the largest economy on earth.

caltrek's comment: I don't agree with everything Mr. Freeman writes on the subject in the article cited and linked above. Still, where I disagree is a matter of semantics and nit-picking. Where I agree tends to be on far more substantive conclusions.

[caltrek]

Here's Everything U.S. Didn’t Learn in Afghanistan According to Inspector General
by Megan Rose
August 23, 2021

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/afghan ... 654760224/

Introduction:

(Alternet) ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter ( propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-stor ... t=top-note – if this link does not work, see hyperlink in the article) to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The chaotic collapse of the Afghan military in recent months made starkly clear that the $83 billion U.S. taxpayers spent to create and fund those security forces achieved little. But a new report this week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction also reveals the depths of failure of the United States' entire 20-year, $145 billion effort to reconstruct (or construct, in some cases) Afghanistan's civil society.

John Sopko, the special inspector general since 2012, has long chronicled the government's miscalculations. In his latest lacerating assessment, he concluded that “the U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve." The U.S. effort was clumsy and ignorant, the report says, calling out the hubris of a superpower thinking it could reshape a country it didn't understand by tossing gobs of money around.

The new report is a sweeping look back over America's two decades in Afghanistan, which left 2,443 U.S. servicemembers and more than 114,000 Afghans dead. The watchdog agency has, for 13 years, consistently and accurately pointed out consequential flaws of the many reconstruction programs at play.

ProPublica also examined some of the same issues along the way in a series called “GI Dough." In 2015, we decided to add up the waste and did an extensive analysis of the causes behind it. Our reporting found at least $17 billion in likely wasted taxpayer dollars at the time. (And that was just out of the small percentage of total spending SIGAR had scrutinized at that point.) To help put those squandered funds into context, we created a game readers could play to see what the money could have bought at home.

[caltrek]

More on the lessons that need to be learned:

What I Learned About American Power Watching the U.S. Leave Vietnam — and Then Afghanistan Decades Later.
by Phil Caputo
August 21, 2021

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... tan-505943

Introduction:

(Politico) As a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam (1965-1966), a reporter who was among the last to be evacuated from Saigon by helicopter (1975) and a correspondent who covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from the Afghan side (1980), I can say with authority that I agree wholeheartedly with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement, “This is not Saigon.”

It’s worse.

Compared to what’s happening now in Kabul, the chaotic U.S. exodus from Saigon seems in retrospect to have been as orderly as the exit of an audience from an opera.

But there are similarities that can’t be ignored. The news and images from Kabul — the thud of helicopters, the roar of transport planes landing and taking off, along with footage of civilians mobbing the planes, desperate to get on — summon my memories of April 29, 1975, when, trapped in a city under siege, my colleague Ron Yates summed up the uniquely American feeling of empire at sundown...

Conclusion:

A dozen years after the Soviets withdrew, and for twenty years more, America tried and failed as well, re-consecrating in blood and treasure what Tsarist Russia, the British Empire and even Alexander the Great learned the hard way about “the graveyard of empires.” I think back to when I was a young lieutenant in Vietnam, listening to a friend recite his favorite Rudyard Kipling poem. The last stanza could apply to Afghanistan as much as to Vietnam:

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, ‘A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'

[weatheriscool]

America needs to focus on itsself and its people. We have millions of homeless on our streets that need housing and help for starters. It is such a waste of blood and treasure to attempt to help other nations.