Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Based on a preliminary assessment, U.S. officials believe the suicide vest used in the attack, which killed at least 169 Afghans in addition to the 13 Americans, carried about 25 pounds of explosives and was loaded with shrapnel”
“To understand President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan against the advice of the US military establishment, you need to go back to a debate that played out more than a decade ago, during the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
In 2009, the new Obama administration debated whether to “surge” troop levels in Afghanistan after nearly eight years of war had failed to quell the insurgency from the overthrown Taliban forces. Top generals asked early that year for 17,000 more US troops and then, having gotten those, asked for an additional 40,000 to try to weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan government.
Then-Vice President Biden was consistently one of the biggest skeptics of the military’s recommendations. Throughout months of debate, he repeatedly raised the inconvenient point that the generals’ preferred strategy seemed extremely unlikely to lead to actual victory. “We have not thought through our strategic goals!” he shouted during the Obama administration’s first meeting on the war in Afghanistan.”
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“Biden did not actually support withdrawal at the time — he pushed for a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, accompanied by a smaller troop surge than the military wanted.
But his dark view of the long-term picture was clearly vindicated in the decade since.”
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“Biden wrote a six-page memo to Obama in which he questioned intelligence reports portraying the Taliban as a new al-Qaeda recruiting foreign fighters that posed a transnational terrorist threat. “Biden indicated that, based on the way he read the intelligence reports, the phenomenon was grossly exaggerated,” Woodward writes. “The vice president did not see evidence that the Pashtun Taliban projected a global jihadist ideology, let alone designs on the American homeland.”
At a meeting discussing the US strategy in Afghanistan, Biden asked, “Is there any evidence the Afghan Taliban advocates attacks outside of Afghanistan and on the U.S., or if it took over more of Afghanistan it would have more of an outward focus?” An intelligence official responded that there was no evidence.”
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“Woodward describes a phone conversation between the president and vice president near the end of the review, during which Biden said, “it would not be that bad if the Karzai government fell.” The book does not elaborate on what exactly Biden meant by this, but Obama disagreed, arguing that “the downside was too great.””
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“Biden diagnosed the problems well, and he was likely the high-level official most skeptical of the Afghanistan war in the Obama administration. But though his logic arguably pointed toward a withdrawal of troops in the near future, he didn’t argue for that — it simply seemed too unpalatable. Officials were not ready to stomach the Taliban retaking the country.
Instead, Biden proposed a smaller surge of 20,000 troops rather than 40,000, with a mission of “counterterrorism” as opposed to counterinsurgency. (Think targeting terrorists rather than nation-building.) The military fired back that that would be insufficient. Obama ended up agreeing to send 30,000 troops and satisfy most of the military’s demands, in part because he did not want to “break with” then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Woodward writes.
After a few years with the heavily expanded troop presence that, as Biden predicted, did not result in Afghanistan becoming a functioning government or in security forces capable of defeating the Taliban, Obama began a troop drawdown in his second term. Since then, US policy has essentially been to kick the can down the road.
In 2015, then-Vox staffer Max Fisher wrote, “The war is already lost, and has been for years,” adding that the only remaining mission was “to temporarily stave off Afghanistan’s inevitable collapse, a few months at a time.”
Former President Donald Trump continued that can-kicking until 2020, when he reached a deal with the Taliban to end the war. It then fell on Biden to decide whether to stick with that arrangement. He did so — rejecting advice from his generals — and a Taliban takeover has now occurred. But his decision was no doubt grounded in the fact that he’s had these debates before.”
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/us-special-operations-vets-carry-090023869.html
“On Tuesday, an unsealed Justice Department indictment exposed a shocking international kidnapping plot. According to federal prosecutors, Iranian intelligence official Alireza Shahvaroghi Farahani and three other foreign intelligence assets conspired to kidnap Iranian American author and journalist Masih Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn.
Alinejad is a champion of women’s rights and an outspoken critic of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As host of Voice of America Persian’s show Tablet, she has reported extensively on the regime’s human rights abuses, particularly those carried out against women.”
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“Although the FBI caught on before the plot could be carried out, these events nonetheless set a terrifying precedent for dissidents, journalists, and human rights advocates at home and abroad. Iran’s abduction attempt is an assault not just on Alinejad but on the very tenets of freedom. No person on American soil should live in fear of retaliation for simply speaking out to defend human rights.”
““Ted Cruz is making it very hard on him,” Murphy said bluntly of the Texas Republican senator. “Ted Cruz is holding up every single State Department nominee right now, so the Republican strategy is to try to make it as hard as possible for President Biden to manage crises around the world.”
Cruz, who is widely considered a possible candidate in the next presidential cycle, has held up Biden’s nominees to key national-security positions. He says it’s an effort to encourage the administration to fully implement congressionally mandated sanctions for the controversial Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline known as Nord Stream II.”
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“Biden has declined to fully impose those sanctions — which could have crippled the pipeline — as the German government pushes for its completion. The president has said he wants to patch up U.S. alliances with European allies like Germany, which suffered under Trump.”
“The latest domino to fall to the Taliban was the northern commercial hub of Mazar-e-Sharif. It was becoming clear that Kabul was next. Seasoned military officers expressed disbelief that the Afghan forces appeared ready to give up their capital city without a fight.
“Email was blowing up left and right [with people saying] ‘Wow, this is actually happening right now,’” a defense official said. “This thing just fell apart over the weekend.”
Pentagon officials were realizing far too late that the Taliban had waged an effective influence campaign in addition to the physical one, taking advantage of tribal dynamics to build ties with village elders and others who played key roles in the group’s mostly bloodless march across the country.
At the same time, the U.S. military had fewer than 2,500 troops left — not enough to understand just how fast the Afghan national army’s morale and cohesion was crumbling.”
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“Biden’s cabinet members and their deputies had held some three-dozen “scenario planning” meetings following the president’s April announcement that U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11.
They covered everything from how to secure the U.S. Embassy and handle Afghan refugees to how to best position the U.S. military in the region in case things spun out of control. Many more sessions were held at the Pentagon, U.S. Central Command in Tampa, the State Department, and other agencies.
But it still wasn’t enough to prepare for the utter collapse, in a matter of days, of America’s two-decade, $2 trillion effort designed to prop up the Afghan government. Biden had insisted the Afghan military would fight; it largely hadn’t. Blinken had scoffed at the notion that Kabul would fall over a weekend; and yet it did. The “Saigon moment” Biden feared had arrived.”
“Since the early 1960s, the Cuban government, often with justification, has relied on a critique of U.S. intervention, embargo and hostility to explain its persistent economic difficulties. For many Cubans, however, that formula long ago lost its power. Instead, today’s protestors have targeted the revolutionary imagination itself and its failure to deliver either bread or freedom — whether freedom from domestic or foreign powers.”
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“In the first half of the 20th century, the need to shore up the island’s economy meant the relationship with the United States was rarely decided in favor of Cuban autonomy. By the 1950s, the symbols of U.S. economic hegemony in Cuba — from the notorious United Fruit Company in the east to a sprawling, often illicit, tourism economy in Havana — had become galling to many. This, along with the U.S. government’s willingness to prop up an increasingly unpopular dictator (Batista) inspired many to join the movement to overturn his government.
After the revolution against Batista brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959, tensions between Cuba and the United States escalated quickly amid Cold War-era U.S. interventions throughout the hemisphere. This geopolitical context inspired and accelerated the radicalization of Cuban domestic politics and gave anti-imperialism an increasingly central place in the government’s rhetoric.”
Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars Ellen Knickmeyer. 8 14 2021. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f Exploring the Cost of the War in Afghanistan Neal Freyman. 8 15 2021. Morning Brew. https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2021/08/16/exploring-cost-war-afghanistan Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics National Archives.
“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.”
“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.”