“On a rainy day in early May, weeks after President Joe Biden announced the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, senior leaders from across the government gathered in the basement of the Pentagon for a broad interagency drill to rehearse the withdrawal plan.
During the exercise, top Pentagon leaders including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley stressed the need for American troops to get out of the country as quickly as possible to protect against renewed Taliban attacks.
Their plan called for the military to draw down to zero within 60 days of Biden’s official order, or roughly mid- to late-June — far sooner than the Sept. 11 deadline the president originally set. One of the most crucial decisions involved handing over Bagram Air Base to the Afghans as the last step of the withdrawal once U.S. forces were so depleted that they could no longer reasonably secure what had been the hub of the American military effort there for the past 20 years.
“All of them made the same argument,” said one defense official, who was in attendance at the drill on May 8, and whose account includes previously unreported details. “Speed equals safety,” the person said, referring to the message conveyed by the military leaders.
The military brass had done a remarkable 180. For the first four months of 2021, as the White House reviewed the withdrawal timeline inherited from the Trump administration, Austin and Milley, as well as senior military commanders, urged Biden to leave a few thousand troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. Both were overruled. Once that happened, the Pentagon embraced as quick a withdrawal as possible, including from Bagram. And the Pentagon stuck to that approach through the beginning of July, regardless of the conditions on the ground.”
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“At every stage of the withdrawal, the White House went along with the Pentagon’s recommendations, accepting a timetable that ended up going faster than Biden laid out in the spring. When the Taliban started to sweep through northern Afghanistan in the summer, different plans were discussed but never altered. The priority for the Pentagon was to protect U.S. troops and pull them out, even as diplomats and Afghan allies stayed behind.
By early August, when it was clear Kabul would fall sooner than expected, the American military presence was down to fewer than 1,000 troops. It was too late to reverse course.
None of the civilian officials who were at the May 8 meeting at the Pentagon questioned the military’s rapid drawdown plan, according to multiple officials. Those attendees included national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy, Jon Finer; CIA Director William Burns; Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the ambassador to the United Nations. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was not present, but was represented by his deputy, Brian McKeon. Besides Austin and Milley, other Pentagon officials included Gens. Frank McKenzie and Austin Scott Miller, the commanding generals of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, respectively, who joined via secure video.”
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“This account of the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is based on interviews with 17 current and former officials — most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak candidly without fear of retribution. Their accounts shed new light on the Pentagon’s decision to hand over Bagram, and the back and forth between senior military leaders and the White House leading up to the American exit from Afghanistan.
Spokespeople for the National Security Council and the State Department declined to comment on the May drill.”
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“The military’s first priority was getting its troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible after the initial May 1 deadline, in case of renewed Taliban attack.
The proposal assumed that the Afghans would control the base for at least a few months after the American withdrawal, allowing the U.S. to use the base for an evacuation if needed, the official said.
But as the drawdown neared completion in June and early July, some military officials were concerned that it was moving too quickly. This was one reason brass pushed American contractors to leave the country early, rather than on the administration timeline, said the former senior defense official.
“The one-stars and two-stars.… They are very discouraged because I think it shows some serious flaws in our four-star leadership,” the person said. “To me that was a big mistake by our military: they didn’t have to get them out that fast and they could have kept open some other options.
“The military should’ve pushed back harder and not pulled their people out the minute they didn’t win the argument with Blinken and Biden.””
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“Within hours of the Americans leaving on July 1, looters descended on the base, grabbing gas canisters and some laptops. Afghan officials said the U.S. left behind millions of small items, including bottles of water and ready-made meals known as MREs, as well as thousands of civilian vehicles, hundreds of armored vehicles, and some small weapons and ammunition for the Afghan troops.
Critics say the perceived abandonment played into the hands of the Taliban insurgents and further eroded the morale of the Afghan forces.
“[T]hey lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” one Afghan soldier told the Associated Press at the time.
On Aug. 8, McKenzie sent Austin a new assessment about Kabul’s prospects: the city could be isolated within 30 days of the American withdrawal.
Just seven days later, the Taliban captured Bagram and released thousands of prisoners held there, including many with ties to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.”
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“The Pentagon has defended the decision to give up Bagram, saying the administration’s cap of roughly 700 troops forced the military’s hand. With force levels dwindling due to the scheduled withdrawal, priority was given to securing the embassy over continuing operations at Bagram, Milley said in August.”
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“In the end, the Pentagon got the withdrawal senior leaders wanted. But the Taliban ultimately advanced faster than anyone anticipated, forcing the Biden administration to scramble to rush thousands of additional troops to Kabul to pull together a mass evacuation effort.
“I think [the administration] accepted risk to try to accomplish competing policy priorities, and unfortunately that risk was realized when the Taliban swept into Kabul,” said a senior defense official. “The result was a tragedy. It’s been hard for our people to process.””
“Howard Bailey came to the United States from Jamaica when he was 17. He served nearly four years in the Navy right out of high school, completing two tours in Operation Desert Storm and earning a National Defense Service Medal. But when it came time for Bailey—a lawful permanent resident—to apply for citizenship, his application was denied over a one-time marijuana offense.
What was already a devastating blow then turned into almost a decade in exile, with Bailey deported to a country he hadn’t seen in 24 years. Last Wednesday, he finally won the fight to come home.”
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“From 2003 to August 2018, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, over 45,000 people were deported for marijuana possession. And according to immigration lawyers and advocates, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has denied citizenship applications from immigrants who admit to using marijuana in states where it’s legal. The agency requires that applicants have “good moral character.” Even legally sanctioned behavior can come into conflict with such a subjective criterion.
Around 5,000 noncitizens enlist in the military every year, and an estimated 94,000 veterans do not have U.S. citizenship. Biden administration officials announced steps to support noncitizen veterans and service members in July, including allowing those who have been unjustly deported to return to the U.S. There are likely around 1,000 military deportees in 40 countries, and recourse for those wrongfully removed is difficult to come by.”
“the roots of the Democratic divide go back to last November, to the arguments over what happened, and to the way to respond to those results. In those first days after Election Day, Democrats discovered that their hopes for widespread gains were
“ISIS-K has been a thorn in the Taliban’s side for years. Formally known as the Islamic State – Khorasan, it has existed since 2015, formed initially by the defection of disaffected members of various other jihadist groups in the region, including some former members of the Taliban. The group initially gathered thousands of followers and seized some small areas in the east and north of the country. In the years since then, the group has declined in size and stature due to relentless pressure from the United States, Afghan and Pakistani security forces, as well as the Taliban.
It has also been notoriously resilient. A U.S. special operator once told me he estimated that the U.S. had killed “five-thirds” of ISIS-K’s manpower over the course of several years. Since 2015, the group has lost four emirs to capture or death in operations conducted by U.S. and Afghan forces. Reports estimate that by 2019, 11,700 ISIS-K militants had been killed, 686 had been captured and 375 had surrendered.
Over the course of 2020, ISIS-K attempted to rebuild its forces from these heavy losses. These efforts met with mixed results, in part due to tacit cooperation between the U.S. military and Taliban forces in efforts to dismantle the group. Today, ISIS-K is generally estimated to have a few thousand fighters at its disposal and is considered degraded but not defeated, though such estimates may need to be revised based on reports of thousands of ISIS-K prisoners having escaped from Afghan penal institutions in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover.
Its resilience stems from the high degree of its members’ motivation, its network of alliances with other jihadi groups that provide ISIS-K assistance and multiply its reach, its attraction to disaffected members of the Taliban and other militants (especially from Pakistan), and its ability to recruit individuals from outside the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, including from India. One of the group’s key assets is its ability to attract a steady stream of experienced leaders and fighters from other local groups who know the region and how to survive in it.
Prior to the beginning of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was general consensus that ISIS-K was a threat outside of Afghanistan’s borders as well, with intentions to launch attacks on the United States and other Western countries. The combined efforts of the U.S. and others over the past five years have left the group without the capability to do so. However, U.S. intelligence estimates earlier this year suggested that if counterterrorism pressure were removed, the group might reconstitute the ability to attack the United States directly within 18 to 36 months.”
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“ISIS-K is also a sworn enemy of the Taliban. The group sees the Taliban as a bunch of sell-outs, who have abandoned the higher calling of a global caliphate in pursuit of their own goal of ruling Afghanistan. Calling them (among other things) “filthy nationalists,” ISIS-K has consistently sought to denigrate the Taliban and seize the mantle of jihad from its amīr al-muʾminīn (“Leader of the Faithful”), Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.
For the Taliban, ISIS-K represents one of two immediate internal challenges to its writ as the new government of Afghanistan (the other being the National Resistance Front). For the U.S., the group’s rivalry with the Taliban presents both opportunities and challenges.”
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“According to the head of U.S. Central Command, General Kenneth McKenzie, the U.S. has been providing the Taliban sanitized intelligence on ISIS-K threats in Kabul since Aug. 14. Further, he gave credit to the Taliban for having taken action on that intelligence, saying “we believe that some attacks have been thwarted by them.” So one opportunity is to build on this relationship of counterterrorism cooperation, at least insofar as it applies to the common enemy of ISIS-K.
A significant challenge, however, is how far to take such cooperation given both the political and operational risks. For example, the reported provision by the U.S. to the Taliban of names of Americans and Afghans that the U.S. wanted to be let through Taliban checkpoints created political uproar at home, with critics claiming that such action amounted to putting those Afghans on a Taliban “kill list.” Another major challenge is the Taliban’s cooperative relationship with jihadist groups beyond ISIS-K. The most notable of these from a U.S. perspective is al-Qaeda, which retains a small presence in Afghanistan and close ties to the Taliban that neither group is likely to sever anytime soon.”
“Already grappling with coronavirus, a political crisis stemming from President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination last month and resulting gang violence, Haiti was hit with a two-punch 7.2-magnitude earthquake and tropical depression this week, leaving almost 2,000 dead and thousands more injured or missing.
Thousands are without shelter because some 83,000 homes have been destroyed. International aid has been slow to arrive, delayed by Tropical Storm Grace’s heavy rains, and some Haitians are frustrated that their own government hasn’t done enough to help.
Also of little help has been the United States, one of the contributors to Haiti’s political and economic troubles, which has the ability to aid Haitians attempting to flee the country due to its three most recent crises, but has instead prevented them from accessing the protection to which many of them are entitled.
The Biden administration has sent a search and rescue team to the island and is transporting medical personnel to the most hard-hit areas and carrying out evacuations. It is also distributing much-needed supplies, such as food, hygiene kits, and tents.
But the administration is still turning away Haitians who have chosen to flee in light of recent events. Thousands of Haitians are still stuck in Mexico on account of US policies, which currently allow asylum seekers and other migrants to be turned away on the basis of pandemic-related border restrictions, known as the Title 42 policy.
Many more Haitians may seek entry: Though it’s hard to estimate how many, the Darién Gap, a treacherous stretch of jungle and swamp on the border of Panama and Colombia that has functioned as a migrant corridor, has seen more crossings this year — at least 46,000 — than it has in the previous three years combined, and most of those attempting to navigate it are Haitians and Cubans.
The Biden administration has allowed more than 100,000 Haitians who arrived in the US before July 29, 2021, to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is typically offered to citizens of countries suffering from natural disasters or armed conflict. Those people are able to live and work in the US free of fear of deportation.
But that doesn’t help those who might be continuing to leave the country due to the political fallout from Moïse’s July 7 assassination, or now, in the aftermath of Saturday’s earthquake. What’s more, Haitians who have been prohibited from entering the US under Title 42, for which experts say there is no public health justification, appear indefinitely trapped in Mexico. And the US has continued to carry out deportation flights of Haitians despite the turmoil.
At the same time, the Biden administration has discouraged Haitians, as well as Cubans fleeing their communist regime’s recent crackdown on anti-government protesters, from trying to reach the US by boat. Officials have made clear that those who try will be intercepted by the US Coast Guard and will not be permitted to enter the US. Instead, they will either be repatriated back to Haiti or, if they can demonstrate the need for humanitarian protection, resettled in another country.”
“A Thursday night news brief on Fox News contained a remarkable claim — that the network doesn’t have enough information to determine what motivated a man spouting right-wing conspiracy theories to shut down a significant portion of Washington, DC, around the Library of Congress by claiming to have a bomb earlier in the day.
“So far, no word on a possible motive,” said anchor Jackie Ibanez at the conclusion of a 15-second brief that amounted to the entirety of Fox News’s Thursday night coverage of the incident.
The brevity could conceivably be excused: No one was injured, and US Capitol Police announced Thursday evening they had cleared the suspect’s black pickup truck. And Fox News covered the incident as it was ongoing earlier in the day. But Ibanez’s claim about motive bears more scrutiny.
It’s true that after the bomb threat suspect — later identified as 49-year-old Floyd Ray Roseberry, of Grover, North Carolina — surrendered to law enforcement, police said “we don’t know what his motives are at this time.” (Fox News didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from Vox asking the network to explain Ibanez’s “no word on a possible motive” report.)
But Ibanez’s comment may have been intended to obscure an uncomfortable truth for America’s most-watched cable news network. In videos streamed to Facebook before and during the bomb threat while he sat in a truck, Roseberry made clear he’s immersed in right-wing conspiracy theories and grievances that receive heavy play on Fox.
“Once this dickhead Biden’s out of office and the Democrats sitting down there in the f**kin’ jailhouse, our president’s gonna be Donald Trump, and this is no limit on his pardons,” claimed Roseberry in a video posted early Tuesday morning, alluding to a lie propagated by former President Donald Trump on Fox News as recently as Wednesday about the 2020 election being stolen from him.
“I just got chose for the job. Unlike you,” Roseberry added. “This ain’t about politics. I don’t care if Donald Trump ever becomes president again. I think y’all Democrats need to step down. Y’all need to understand people don’t want you there.””
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“Facebook eventually removed Roseberry’s profile, but not before his videos were widely watched and summarized in media reports. Yet if you’d watched Fox News Thursday night, you’d have no idea those videos existed.”
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“This isn’t the first time in recent years a violent right-wing extremist has been motivated by the same sort of incendiary rhetoric that the network traffics in.
In October 2018, social media posts from the lone suspect in a shooting that killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh indicated he was motivated by conspiracy theories about migrant caravans to the southern border representing an “invasion” of the country, conspiracy theories that continued to receive play on the network even in the days immediately following the shooting.
That same month, Fox News strained to avoid acknowledging the right-wing fanaticism that inspired a man to send explosive devices to CNN and other perceived enemies of then-President Trump
Hammering people with lies about Democrats stealing elections and overseeing an immigrant invasion of the country can have deadly consequences. It’s notable but not surprising that Fox News is unwilling to reckon with those consequences — especially in comparison to the wall-to-wall coverage that would likely ensue if an adherent of antifa or Black Lives Matter shut down the Capitol area with a bomb threat.”
“Refugees and immigrants are not only good for the economy, they can help us reverse dangerous trends in stagnant cities and towns. Policymakers should stop referring to refugees as a burden and trust that new Americans will benefit the nation.”