RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/25/afghanistan-the-graveyard-of-experts/

At the beginning of July, US president Joe Biden told the press it was ‘highly unlikely’ the Taliban would retake the whole of Afghanistan.

This was clearly a prediction based on what the experts had told him, from military strategists to intelligence agencies. But by 11 August, the experts had changed their tune. A US official told the press that Taliban fighters could be in a position to besiege Kabul within 30 days and possibly take it within 90.

Just four days later, on 15 August, the Taliban took control of Kabul, and with it, Afghanistan. In the end, it didn’t take 30 days, or 90 days – but four days.

So much for intelligence. So much for experts. So much for all those who claimed to know how things really were in Afghanistan. As the US joint chiefs of staff chair, General Mark Milley, told reporters last week, he and his colleagues had underestimated the speed of the Taliban’s advance. ‘There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days’, he said.

That a senior military official can admit that the US and its allies had no idea that a state they built was about to collapse is a spectacular admission. It tells us that all the intelligence gatherers, the planners and the nation-building technocrats – in short, the experts – had no idea what was actually happening in a country the US and its allies had been occupying for nearly two decades.

But this wasn’t an aberration. It wasn’t a catastrophic but momentary lapse in intelligence. The experts haven’t just got it wrong on Afghanistan over the past few months – exaggerating the resilience of the Afghan army and government and downplaying the Taliban’s resurgence.

No, the experts have been getting it wrong on Afghanistan throughout this 20-year-long tragedy. Indeed, the whole bloody debacle has been marked by a conspicuous expert failure to understand the dynamics of this still tribal country. And the result has been a fatally flawed attempt to impose a prefabricated political order on a recalcitrant society.

This was apparent right from the outset, when President George W Bush launched the war on Afghanistan in October 2001. At the time, expert failure was certainly evident at the level of intelligence gathering. An unnamed adviser to a US Army Special Forces team told interviewers in 2017 that he was repeatedly asked during the early stages of the conflict, ‘who are the bad guys, where are they?’. He didn’t know. It was a sentiment clearly shared by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who complained in September 2003, ‘I have no visibility into who the bad guys are. We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.’

The US and its allies were not just ‘woefully deficient in human intelligence’. This was a war waged in spite of the social and political realities of Afghanistan. It was the product of ignorance and technocratic hubris.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/27/biden-turns-the-taliban-into-a-military-superpower/

A day after at least 13 U.S. soldiers were killed at the Kabul airport, it’s still unclear how many Americans will be abandoned in Afghanistan by the Biden administration. What we do know, though, is that most of the U.S. weaponry in the country will not be recovered. It’s as if Joe Biden himself was the military procurement chief for the Taliban.

Until Thursday, there had been no U.S. combat casualties in Afghanistan since February of last year. But a bloodbath that the entire world outside of the White House saw coming arrived, and it became the deadliest day in the country for American troops since 2011, when – yes, that’s right – Biden was vice president.

Homicide bombers and gunmen, reportedly from that brood of terrorist vipers called the Islamic State, killed at least 60 Afghans in addition to the American servicemen, and wounded more than 140. These horrific deaths and dismemberments are squarely on Biden, who rejected military leaders’ advice, has resorted to blaming the victims, and once again demonstrated that he has miserable, if not depraved, foreign-policy instincts.

Don’t bet Thursday’s deaths will be the last. The country is now a modern arms bazaar, overflowing with designed-to-kill equipment for the Taliban to use on Americans and anyone else they choose to murder, or sell to unsavory characters who want to massacre Westerners. Remaining in Afghanistan after the U.S. quits will be nearly 76,000 military vehicles, 208 American airplanes and helicopters, and almost 600,000 arms.

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said earlier this week. “And obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”

The list of equipment, provided by Open The Books, a nonprofit determined to force transparency on governments at all level, includes: combat vehicles, armored personnel carriers, Black Hawk helicopters, aircraft that can fire Hellfire and anti-tank missiles, drones, rifles, machine guns, bombs, hand grenades, grenade launchers, rocket-propelled weapons, mortars, and howitzers.

And, we might add, uniforms, which the Taliban have already used to taunt the U.S. by wearing them last month while acting out the famous, and treasured, shot of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in World War II.

All told, the U.S. “provided an estimated $83 billion worth of training and equipment to Afghan security forces since 2001,” says Open The Books founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski.

At least this administration didn’t set up the Taliban with a navy and long-range bombers.

Even before the Biden Retreat, the Taliban had “a wealth of armaments,” says a January report from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. The military gear included “armored vehicles, night-vision devices, Western rifles, laser designators, and advanced optics.” We’ve also seen the Taliban firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, and missiles out of the back of trucks.

Though the Russians denied it, there have been reports of Moscow arming the Taliban over the years. Gen. John Nicholson, at one time commander of the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, said three years ago “we’ve had weapons brought to this headquarters and given to us by Afghan leaders and (they) said, ‘This was given by the Russians to the Taliban.’”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/26/us-officials-provided-taliban-with-names-of-americans-afghan-allies-to-evacuate-506957

By LARA SELIGMAN, ALEXANDER WARD and ANDREW DESIDERIO

The White House contends that limited information sharing with the Taliban is saving lives; critics argue it’s putting Afghan allies in harm’s way.

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.

Since the fall of Kabul in mid-August, nearly 100,000 people have been evacuated, most of whom had to pass through the Taliban’s many checkpoints. But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

Asked about POLITICO’s reporting during a Thursday news conference, President Joe Biden said he wasn’t sure there were such lists, but also didn’t deny that sometimes the U.S. hands over names to the Taliban.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/cost-tragedy-kabul-airport/

America’s frantic, confused exit from Afghanistan was a humiliating shambles even before today’s terrorist attack. Now, it is something much worse. It is a deadly tragedy, leaving victims dead and injured and trapping thousands of Americans and friendly Afghans in a lethal environment, where terrorists roam free.

There will be a huge political price to pay for this unfolding disaster, and President Biden will pay it. This deadly fiasco didn’t just happen on his watch. It happened because of his decisions, a series of fundamentally bad ones, taken by the President himself.

Gone are the days when the administration could trot out a press secretary to try and spin away the unfolding catastrophe, Jen Psaki could quibble over whether Americans were ‘stranded’. Now, there are far more pressing questions the President himself must answer. He cannot just turn his back on the press corps and walk away. Those questions are ‘how the hell did this happen?’ and ‘how on earth are you going to safely evacuate the rest of our own people and our friends? How can we prevent this from becoming a hostage crisis?’

Beyond those immediate questions lie larger ones about how to repair America’s standing in the world, now that the world’s greatest military power has been visibly defeated.

The consequences for the Biden presidency are equally grave. Only a month ago, President Biden privately told our Nato allies that Kabul would be stable during our exit. He overrode their entreaties to leave a residual force. Only a month ago, President Biden held a press conference (you know, the kind where he actually answers questions) where he told Americans he expected the friendly Afghan army to perform well against the Taliban and to prevent the terrorists from winning for many months, perhaps years. This was far different from our loss in Vietnam, he said, where Americans lined up on the embassy roof to escape by helicopter. He’s right. It’s different. It’s far worse.

Biden himself overruled the generals who wanted to keep a small residual force in Afghanistan to provide intelligence and air support for the Afghan army. Biden himself decided to execute this withdrawal in the middle of the fighting season, not during the winter lull, when Taliban commanders pull back temporarily to Pakistan. Moreover, we tried to execute the entire withdrawal from a single airport, having abruptly abandoned the major airbase at Bagram, literally in the middle of the night and apparently without arranging for our local partners to replace our troops there. That left the US with only one location to stage its evacuation and provided terrorists a rich target to attack. His perceived weakness and the lack of military resources on the ground invited attacks by our enemies and endangered every American who remained.

The Biden administration will pay a huge price for this slaughter and humiliating defeat. So will our country and our friends abroad.