“Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has launched more than 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan. We don’t really know for certain how many people have been killed, let alone how many of those people were civilians and not terrorists. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism tracked the drone war in Afghanistan up until February 2020. It calculates that between 4,000 and 10,000 deaths in Afghanistan were from drone strikes. Of those, it says, between 300 and 900 were civilians and somewhere between 66 and 184 were children.
These wide variances in these estimates reflect the lack of transparency and reliable data. It wasn’t until the last couple of years of President Barack Obama’s administration that the Pentagon even provided data about drone strikes. And then President Donald Trump’s administration ended that practice.”
“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.”
…
“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.”
…
“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.”
…
“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.””
…
“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.”
…
“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.”
…
“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.””
“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.”
…
“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.”
…
“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.”
“The bureaucratic process established by the Trump administration to determine which American companies should be exempted from paying tariffs on imports from China is a black box of “inconsistencies” and poorly documented decision-making, according to a new audit.
In a report published last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) cast a critical eye on the so-called “tariff exclusion process” created in 2018 as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to slap tariffs on a wide range of imports from China. The process, overseen by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, allowed American businesses to appeal to the federal government for permission to not pay tariffs if they could demonstrate that a given product was not available from other sources, or if a business faced “severe economic harm” due to the tariffs.
Between 2018 and 2020, American businesses submitted more than 53,000 exclusion requests. The vast majority—87 percent—were denied, and most of the denials were on the grounds that the company failed to demonstrate sufficient economic harm to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the GAO found.
In other words, federal bureaucrats reviewed tens of thousands of statements from companies pointing out how the Trump administration’s tariffs would cause economic harm—because, yes, Americans paid for the tariffs—then discarded most of those requests because the harms were not “severe” enough.
What’s even worse is that there’s very little in the way of objectivity or due process afforded to companies that had their exclusion requests denied. Soon after the tariffs were imposed, members of Congress warned that the exclusion process lacked “basic due process and procedural fairness” and that it could be “abused for anticompetitive purposes.” As Reason previously reported, business owners have complained that simply getting a decision one way or the other can take months. And there is no way to appeal the rulings.
The new GAO report confirms some of those concerns.”
…
“tariffs are always about protecting certain industries, and protecting certain industries always invites influence-peddling.”
“As both recent and more distant history has made evident, the ways that lawmakers talk about China has huge effects. Broadly labeling China an enemy can lead to needless marginalization, violence, and even death.
“I think the biggest advice is to not have anything that was sweeping. We’re asking folks to watch their tone, tenor, and nuance in their approach to China,” said chief of staff for the Foreign Policy for America’s NextGen initiative Caroline Chang. Staying away from broad terms and talking about the government or specific leaders, such as President Xi Jinping, is a start.”
“Multiple investigations, including by United Nations officials, have determined the Rohingya were victims of genocide or that there was strong evidence of it. Dozens of countries, led by The Gambia, have pushed a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing Myanmar of genocide.”
“When I came back to Afghanistan [in 2011], it was a very, very different paradigm. The IED techniques had migrated from Iraq. You couldn’t drive anywhere. When I was [in Afghanistan in 2001], we were on horseback or we’re on foot or we’re in light-skinned vehicles. Now, you couldn’t get from A to B without being in an armored vehicle or flying a helicopter.
But the biggest problem—the big point where I said, things aren’t going as well as I had hoped for — was dealing with these district governors, whom I dealt with frequently. They didn’t have a long view. They were not invested in the central government. There were a lot of reasons for that. Every day was a new day to them and it was a fight for survival. They had no incentive to build these relationships that we designed for them.
For example, we were paying nine and a half dollars per gallon to ship gas from Karachi to outlying districts. And when I approached the district governor—’Hey, you need to learn how to use your own bureaucratic requisition systems’—he said, ‘Why should I do that when you’re doing it for me?’ And he was dead serious. And of course, he died a couple of months later, as probably 60 percent of the guys who I worked with did on the Afghan side.”
…
“We made a lot of efforts to pacify villages that were more hostile to us. And we succeeded in some cases by putting an Afghan National Police checkpoint in a village that didn’t have one to help deter the Taliban from launching rockets at the base. [In one instance] we convinced a village elder, who was a Ghilzai Pashtun, to support us, which was a big deal because many of the people to whom he had tribal ties were Taliban supporters.
But he was assassinated. Then his brother stood up and took his place and said, ‘We’ll stand with the government, the Americans.’ And he was assassinated. By that point, the Taliban had essentially regained control of the village. I spoke to one gentleman on the side of the road one day, and he was subsequently beheaded for talking to me and made an example of.
I saw through that that some of these things were almost Pyrrhic victories because we were doing the things that, [per] the counterinsurgency manual, doctrinally, we were doing the right things. And we were succeeding in some cases. But at the end of the day, the sacrifice and the loss of trust in the villages was starting to hamper our effectiveness in getting people to want to work with us, to follow our goals and objectives, to cooperate with us and to resist the Taliban and ultimately for us to succeed. I think they were going to have to resist them on their own. We couldn’t maintain a permanent presence of U.S. forces indefinitely to keep them safe or to deter the Taliban.”