August 15, 2021

So Kabul has fallen...And so has Afghanistan.

I was going to post another Taliban atrocity and war crime video but why bother.

Feel bad for

the lost generation of freedoms of Afghanistan
the young girls who will become sex slaves to these animals
the young girls who held such promise
the women who are were working and now thats over
the women who will be stoned
the women who will be whipped in public
the forcing of girls and women to wear demeaning burkas
the women who will be shot to death for breaking insane taliban rules
the boys who will be sex toys
the boys who will be brain washed into becoming EVEN more taliban
the hindu and other minorities

and Afghanistan has now become a haven for more terrorists...again

out of site...out of mind

I am past sad.

August 14, 2021

Doesn't matter at this point..Taliban kill woman for not wearing veil, say reports.

interesting video

August 13, 2021

Taliban Forcibly Take Away Young Girl Despite Protests As Dark Days Return For Women in Afghanistan

sickening.

August 13, 2021

Rush of troops to Kabul tests Biden's withdrawal deadline

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-middle-east-evacuations-783b4aeabe20c709feed18129c49ac1e

The Pentagon also was moving an additional 4,500 to 5,000 troops to bases in the Gulf countries of Qatar and Kuwait, including 1,000 to Qatar to speed up visa processing for Afghan translators and others who fear retribution from the Taliban for their past work with Americans, and their family members.

The remainder — 3,500 to 4,000 troops from a combat brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina — were preparing Friday to depart for Kuwait “in very short order.” Kirby said the combat troops would be a reserve force on standby for whatever mission might be required in Kabul.

The temporary buildup of troops for U.S. evacuations highlights the stunning pace of the Taliban takeover of much of the country. Friday’s latest significant blow was the Taliban capture of the capital of Helmand province, where American, British and other allied NATO forces fought some of the bloodiest battles in the past 20 years. Hundreds of Western troops died there during the course of the war, in fighting that often succeeded in knocking back Taliban fighters locally, only to have the Taliban move back in when a Western unit rotated out.

The State Department said the embassy in Kabul will remain partially staffed and functioning, but Thursday’s decision to evacuate a significant number of embassy staff and bring in the thousands of additional U.S. troops is a sign of waning confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to hold off the Taliban surge. The Biden administration has not ruled out a full embassy evacuation or possibly relocating embassy operations to the Kabul airport. There are a little over 4,000 personnel still at the embassy; the State Department has not said how many are being pulled out in the next two weeks.

The Biden administration warned Taliban officials directly that the U.S. would respond if the Taliban attacked Americans during the stepped-up deployments and evacuations.

August 13, 2021

What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-america-failed-afghanistan/619740/

In 2005, I was an adviser to an Iraqi infantry battalion conducting counterinsurgency operations in and around Baghdad, one of the most violent parts of Iraq during one of the most violent periods in that conflict. It was difficult to have any hope at the time. I returned to Iraq in 2009, this time in Mosul, where my unit advised and supported two Iraqi-army divisions, one Iraqi-federal-police division, and thousands of local police officers. This time, I sensed more progress: Leaving Iraq in 2010, I felt we had done a great job, turning a corner and building a capable and competent security force. A year later, I found myself in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, recruiting and training Afghan police units and commandos. After nine months there, I again rotated home thinking we had done some good. I would be proved wrong on both counts. In 2014, by then stationed at the Pentagon, I watched in dismay as the Iraqi divisions I’d helped train collapsed in a matter of days when faced with the Islamic State. Today, as the Taliban seizes terrain across Afghanistan, including in what was my area of operations, I cannot help but stop and reflect on my role. What did my colleagues and I get wrong? Plenty.



snip


If those were things we did poorly or insufficiently, there were other things we should not have done at all—namely, train police. We generally accepted that our ultimate goal of combatting insurgents or terrorists was to turn the fight over to domestic law enforcement. In other words, get to the point where the police could handle threats without fielding the army. (I remember, in Iraq, 2006 was supposed to be the “Year of the Police.” It would be hilarious if not for the incredible cost in blood and treasure—that year was a terrible and deadly one for police across Iraq.) But the United States does not have a national police force, so police training became a task that largely fell to the Army. In Iraq, I oversaw thousands of police, and in Afghanistan, I led a task force that vetted, selected, and fielded nearly 3,000 local police while supporting the Afghan National Police with warrant-based targeting of insurgents. I should make clear that I have zero law-enforcement experience, nor does most of the U.S. military, aside from some National Guard or Reserve troops. (We do have Military Police units, but they serve a unique operational role unlike any of the security forces we tried to build up.) We attempted to bridge this gap by hiring a handful of brave retired police officers and having them serve as technical advisers and trainers alongside U.S. Army troops, but even they could only focus on tactical tasks; they lacked the professional and personal experience to build national institutions and systems. We never had a chance to make policing work. The U.S. military could not overcome our national and institutional lack of experience.

snip.

Over these past 20 years, there have been many failings. We checked the box when it came to saying that we had trained our partners, spun a rosy narrative of progress, and perhaps prioritized the safety and well-being of our troops over the mission of buttressing partner capacity. (When our Afghan partners shot at us, killing our comrades in the now infamous “green on blue” incidents, we tightened up our security procedures but didn’t address the hard questions of why they were shooting at us in the first place.) We didn’t send the right people, prepare them well, or reward them afterward. We rotated strangers on tours of up to a year and expected them to build relationships, then replaced them. We were overly optimistic and largely made things up as we went along. We didn’t like oversight or tough questions from Washington, and no one really bothered to hold us accountable anyway. We had no capacity or experience with some of our tasks, and we stumbled.

.

We invaded Afghanistan with righteous anger after 9/11, but then what? Why was the United States in Afghanistan for years afterward? What about our fraught relationship with Pakistan and its influence in Afghanistan? A coherent strategy to address these questions would have made my job easier on the ground. First and foremost, a clearly articulated end goal would have assured our Afghan partners and our allies from other nations (as well as our foes) of our determination. Instead of leaving the entire effort to the Department of Defense, a coordinated strategy with commensurate resources across government could have produced better results in multiple Afghan institutions. Further, 20 years ago, a commitment to law enforcement might have been very attractive to our allies, many of whom have their own national police force and a track record of success in performing such missions. Perhaps most crucial, a clear and forceful foreign policy regarding Pakistan, coupled with a commitment to supporting and employing a new Afghan army, would have provided much clarity and focus for our military. We didn’t fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan; we fought 20 incoherent wars, one year at a time, without a sense of direction. The U.S. military can and should be blamed for the collapse of security forces in Afghanistan—I hold us responsible. The current collapse keeps me up at night. In the military, the main effort gets the best resources and the best talent available. For more than 20 years, no matter what was reported, what we read in the headlines, efforts to build and train large-scale conventional security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have mostly been an aimless, ham-fisted acronym soup of trial and error that never became the true main effort, and we are to blame for that.

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So much more to read.

August 13, 2021

STATEMENT FROM CHAIRMAN MENENDEZ FOLLOWING CLASSIFIED COMMITTEE BRIEFING ON AFGHANISTAN

“I very much appreciated the Administration’s willingness to provide our Committee with unvarnished facts about the future of U.S.-Afghan policy after a war that has gone on for a very long time and at great sacrifice by U.S. service members, our diplomats, and aid workers
.

“I share the President’s desire to get our troops out of Afghanistan, but I continue to have concerns about our ability to protect the hard fought gains made for the rights of Afghan women and minorities, as well as our confidence level that Afghanistan will not again become a haven for terrorists. How we withdraw and what political arrangement is left in our wake is critically important.

“Now that the President has made this decision, we need to come together to focus on the implications and chart a path forward that ensures we are not forced to send our troops back. As a follow-up to today’s briefing, I will convene a full committee hearing in the coming weeks to further examine in an open setting the implications of a withdrawal for U.S. national security interests in the region, a full accounting of the diplomatic and development tools we have to pursue our interests, and what it will mean for the people of Afghanistan.”

https://www.menendez.senate.gov/newsroom/press/statement-from-chairman-menendez-following-classified-committee-briefing-on-afghanistan

August 13, 2021

"Not Our Tragedy": the Taliban Are Coming Back, and America Is Still Leaving

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/not-our-tragedy-the-taliban-are-coming-back-and-america-is-still-leaving

At least Joe Biden is owning it. “I do not regret my decision,” the President said this week, as provincial capital after provincial capital in Afghanistan fell to the Taliban while the Afghan government—propped up by two decades of U.S. support—looked soon to suffer its long-predicted post-American collapse. “Afghan leaders have to come together. We lost thousands—lost to death and injury—thousands of American personnel. They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” Biden said on Tuesday, making it as clear as he could that he would not revisit his decision to pull out. America is finally, definitively, done with the war in Afghanistan after two decades, never mind the consequences.

The words from the Biden Administration in the face of this unfolding disaster have been strikingly cold. Biden himself, normally the most empathetic of politicians, did not address the predictable and predicted human tragedy that his April decision to withdraw the roughly thirty-five hundred U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan has now unleashed. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, followed his comments by blaming the Afghan military, which the U.S. funded, trained, equipped, and built over twenty years, for its fate. “They have what they need,” she said. “What they need to determine is if they have the political will to fight back.” The State Department, for its part, put out the word that it was making a last-ditch diplomatic push to convince the Taliban that their government will be an international pariah if they take over the country by force. Does anyone think that will stop them?

snip

“The general sense seems to be, ‘Hey, look, we’ve spent a lot of blood and treasure there for twenty years, we’ve done a lot, there’s a limit to what any country can do,’ ” Richard Fontaine, a former foreign-policy adviser to the late Senator John McCain who now heads the Center for a New American Security, told me. “This is tragic, but it’s not our tragedy.” While Fontaine and I were talking on Thursday, the news came from the Associated Press that Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city and the gateway to the country’s west, had fallen to the Taliban. Hours later, Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the birthplace of the Taliban movement, had fallen as well. Kabul, the capital, will soon be encircled by the Taliban, who in a matter of weeks have taken control of twelve of the country’s thirty-four provincial capitals. By the time you read this, that number may well be higher. On Thursday afternoon, the State Department and Pentagon announced that the U.S. military is sending in some three thousand troops to help evacuate much of the U.S. Embassy staff from Kabul. Bitter irony of ironies—that was approximately the number of U.S. troops still deployed in Afghanistan when Biden decided to pull them out and perhaps insure the government falling to the Taliban in the first place.

None of this was a surprise, despite Biden’s embarrassing comment just last month that it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would soon be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country.” Senior U.S. government officials knew what was coming, even if they hoped for better, or at least for more time until the Taliban onslaught—akin to the “decent interval” Richard Nixon sought between his own withdrawal from Vietnam and the inevitable victory of the North over the South. They were neither “clueless” nor “delusional,” as a person who has recently spoken with Biden’s advisers about Afghanistan put it to me. To those who were paying attention, there was a grim inevitability to the week’s events. The Pentagon has warned every one of the last four Presidents that an abrupt U.S. withdrawal would lead to some version of the Afghan military debacle we are seeing this week.

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Terrible

I hope and pray for the Afghan people. And those poor young women.

August 12, 2021

Panic grips Afghanistan as civilians flee Taliban's relentless advance

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/panic-grips-afghanistan-civilians-flee-taliban-s-relentless-advance-n1276528

A new wave of panic has gripped Afghanistan.

As the Taliban tear through territory, toppling government districts like dominoes, those who can are scrambling to leave provincial cities for the relative safety of the capital, Kabul. Those who can’t live with constant anxiety and are struggling to sleep.

Diyana Sharifi left her hometown of Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan this week as rumors swirled that the Taliban were poised to take the city and fighters were looking to find young girls to marry, and young boys to join the fight.

The prospect of having to marry a Taliban fighter was beyond her worst nightmare, the law student said, adding that she would rather die than be submitted to such a fate. “It was fear, it was helplessness, it was anger,” Sharifi, 21, said, ticking off the emotions she had felt in Mazar-e-Sharif. “I had the fear of being trapped in that place, of not being able to get out

Sharifi is one of hundreds of thousands of Afghans driven from their homes so far this year due to conflict, seeking refuge both from the fighting and the prospect of the Islamist regime that ruled the country before 2001 being reimposed. While in power, the Taliban enforced a strict interpretation of Islam under which women were largely invisible in public life.

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Terrible. Just terrible