“To those who believe America should have remained in Afghanistan, Biden posed a simple question. “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghans will not?”
None of this should let the State Department and the Pentagon off the hook for botching the final act of this two-decade tragedy. The mistreatment of Afghan civilians who helped American military and diplomatic officials only to be left behind to fend for themselves against the Taliban is a stain that the Biden administration and the United States should have to wear for a long, long time. The unwillingness to throw open America’s doors to refugees from a crisis that America helped create is shameful.
Officials at both the Pentagon and the State Department, for their parts, followed Biden’s remarks by outlining plans to secure the Kabul airport and continue the evacuation of Americans and Afghans with visas. That’s a process that should have been figured out long ago, and botching it has caused significant suffering.
But if the end of the disaster that has been America’s involvement in Afghanistan injects a bit of the humility that Biden displayed on Monday afternoon into future foreign policy decision making, that can only be a good thing. If the Biden Doctrine of not repeating the mistakes of the Bush Doctrine becomes the guiding principle for American foreign policy, America and the world will be better off.
Biden spoke Monday of relying on America’s diplomatic and economic tools rather than “endless military deployments” to reshape the world. That’s exactly what we need to be doing, but it requires humility for a president to say so. Heck, it takes humility just to admit that “the mistakes we’ve made in the past” were mistakes at all.
“After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces,” Biden said Monday. “What’s happening now could just as easily happen five years ago or 15 years in the future. I’m now the fourth American president to preside over a war in Afghanistan…I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president.”
There was never a good time. But today is better than tomorrow.”
“It’s been 10 days since Joel Valdez was shot outside of a Houston grocery store, and he still hasn’t been able to undergo surgery, due to his hospital being overcrowded with COVID-19 patients.”
“Military planners sounding the alarm about Afghanistan’s imminent collapse failed to predict the speed with which the Taliban would overrun the country, leaving the Biden administration scrambling to evacuate thousands of American citizens, embassy staffers and vulnerable Afghans from Kabul’s international airport.
Though officials warned repeatedly over the past few weeks that the Afghan government could fall far sooner than previous estimates — weeks or months after the last American troops depart the country — they overestimated the capability and will of the Afghan security forces to fight back as the Taliban seized city after city in recent days, defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning, told POLITICO.
In fact, DoD officials briefed lawmakers last month on the intelligence assessment that the combination of Afghan special commandos, air force and local militias could hold off the Taliban long enough for a political settlement, according to a senior Democratic aide with knowledge of the briefings.”
“As Afghanistan’s rural districts, and then its cities, fell in quick succession to the Taliban, official U.S. talking points settled on a common refrain: Afghanistan’s security forces had all the people and equipment they needed to battle the Taliban, and all that was missing was leadership. President Joe Biden has been saying this since mid-July.”
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“”They have modern equipment. They have organizational structure. They have the benefit of the training that we have provided them over 20 years. They have the material, the physical, the tangible advantages; it’s time now to use those advantages … as I’ve said from the beginning, we want to see the will and the political leadership, the military leadership that’s required in the field.”
The following day, the United States began evacuating its embassy in Kabul in preparation for the fall of the country’s last and most important city.”
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“So where was the Afghan leadership that U.S. officials kept saying was the key to stemming the Taliban’s advance? The answer is that it didn’t exist. For years, commanders of the Afghan National Army and National Police — the elements most critical to securing the country — failed to lead, often stealing the salaries and fuel that their forces needed to be effective, and more recently failing to even provide their forces with edible food.
What’s more, the United States government has known — and publicly stated—this fact for years. In an official 2008 assessment of the war, the Pentagon stated that Afghanistan’s government “is hampered by … a lack of sufficient leadership and human capital.” Fast forward to 2020, when the DOD’s most recent assessment acknowledged that “improving the quality of leadership at all echelons remains the most challenging issue” for the country’s security forces.”
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“the U.S. military’s preferred approach to advising foreign militaries centers on rapport, coaching and mentorship. While this focus on developing specific people has produced some impressive individual leaders — such as General Sami Sadat, whom former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani put in charge of the defense of Kabul before fleeing the country — it failed to reliably produce the quantity of high-quality leaders that the Afghan army and police needed to defend the country.
To do that, the United States and its partners would have had to recognize that the absence of leadership in the Afghan security forces was a symptom. The root cause was the lack of sufficient and effective institutions, especially those required for education, training, and the recruitment and management of human capital. Had we invested in these institutions, the army and police would have had the ability to accrue, develop, and retain good leaders. Unfortunately, as DOD’s own budgeting documents and internal assessments of the war revealed, efforts to develop these institutions were under-prioritized and under-resourced relative to investments in tangible items like helicopters and armored vehicles.”
““Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan inevitable?”
That’s the question a reporter put to President Joe Biden this week at a press conference on the US’s drawdown in Afghanistan.
“No, it is not,” Biden said, noting that Afghan government troops greatly outnumber the Taliban and are “as well-equipped as any army in the world.”
That may be true, but numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. The Taliban has rapidly expanded its territorial control over the last week and is closing in on the capital, Kabul. On Monday, more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers reportedly fled into neighboring Tajikistan to escape a Taliban advance. A US intelligence assessment has said the Afghan government could fall in six months once US and other international troops leave.
It makes it hard to see a Taliban takeover as anything other than extremely likely”
“Prosecutions for “drug-induced homicide,” which have risen dramatically in recent years, are ostensibly aimed at reducing opioid-related deaths. But as a new investigation by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review shows, there are good reasons to think they have the opposite effect. Consider the paper’s description of a typical case:
“In one 2019 case, a Westmoreland County man died from an overdose of drugs he’d gotten from a friend of a friend of a friend. Though the drugs ultimately came from a man called “Bee” in Penn Hills, the three individuals between the victim and Bee were all charged with drug delivery resulting in death [DDRD].
One pleaded guilty to drug delivery resulting in death and received a 5- to 10-year prison sentence. Another pleaded guilty to the same charge and was sentenced to a minimum of one year minus one day in jail and a maximum of two years minus one day. The third person is awaiting trial.”
It is hard to believe that such prosecutions of bit players have any impact on the supply of heroin and illicit fentanyl. Furthermore, charging people with homicide when their role in someone’s death was unintentional and incidental or highly attenuated is blatantly unjust. Under Pennsylvania law, Stormie Mauck notes in a 2019 Penn State Law Review article, “drug addicts may face imprisonment of up to 40 years for simply sharing drugs with a friend who overdoses.”
Worse, this strategy makes fatal overdoses more likely by deterring bystanders from seeking medical assistance when it could make a crucial difference.”
“So let’s just get this out of the way: Critical race theory is the idea that structural racism is embedded in many U.S. institutions. Slavery was the reality when the country was founded, and segregation endured for a century following the Civil War. It would thus be naive to assume that supposedly race-neutral policies are actually race-neutral—there’s nothing neutral about America and race. Working from this assumption, adherents of critical race theory tend toward a kind of progressive activism that views post-Enlightenment classical liberalism and its notions of equal opportunity, the prioritization of individual rights over group rights, and colorblindness with hostility.”
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“Savvier liberals are correct, for instance, that CRT, as defined by the people who actually coined the term, mostly exists in academia, not K-12 classrooms. This means that Republican legislative efforts to protect kids from CRT are actually targeting a wide swath of only semi-related progressive concepts. These bills are almost uniformly heavy-handed, and in some cases represent active threats to freedom of expression in the classroom.”
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“anti-CRT folks on the right are correct that there are a whole host of progressive writers, teachers, and activists who were clearly inspired by critical race theory—a field that does in fact include fairly radical ideas, some of which run contrary to the colorblind liberalism of previous racial equality advocacy. Whether or not these people would admit to being adherents of CRT is almost beside the point.
Included in this mix are two of the least persuasive anti-racism writers: White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo and How to Be Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi, who are routinely paid thousands of dollars to give short presentations to corporate employees, school administrators, and teachers. Both take wildly flawed approaches; DiAngelo treats racism as a kind of incurable infection, or original sin—John McWhorter accurately accused her of promoting the cultish notion that “you will never succeed in the ‘work’ she demands of you…it is lifelong, and you will die a racist just as you will die a sinner.”
Kendi’s big idea is to create a U.S. Department of Antiracism. “The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas,” he wrote. This proposal would necessitate the creation of a vast surveillance state and render the First Amendment moot.”
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“The person most responsible for this framing—CRT as the avatar of all dubious race and diversity stuff—is undoubtedly Rufo, whose unmatched zeal for exposing it occasionally makes him sound like the sort of activist he is otherwise criticizing. He tweeted, for instance, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” That’s a fairly straightforward admission that he’s not really against CRT; his project is raising the salience of CRT so that people will identify the concept with every other thing they don’t like.”
“FOSTA and the takedown of Backpage have made finding and fighting sex criminals more difficult, according to the GAO report.
Since FOSTA’s passage, the commercial sex ad market has become more highly fragmented and more likely to be based overseas. This “heightens already-existing challenges law enforcement face in gathering tips and evidence,” the report says. Those running the newer platforms often “host servers abroad, reside abroad, use offshore bank accounts and financial institutions, or introduce third parties to attempt to obscure or distance themselves from the day-to-day operation of their platforms, according to DOJ officials.”
Whereas sites like Backpage and Craigslist were willing to work with legal authorities—reporting suspicious ads, turning over information relevant to prosecutions, etc.—the new crop of commercial sex ad platforms are much less responsive and helpful. As a result, prosecuting their users has become more difficult, as has finding the victims of sex trafficking.”