Kabul Afghanistan is Falling to the Taliban

[C C]

John Cleese: "And now for something completely different..."

A non-linear chronology of the (sordid?) tale.

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(Jul 8, 2021) Poll: 73 percent support US withdrawal from Afghanistan
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas...tan-steady

EXCERPT: An overwhelming majority of voters support the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds. Seventy-three percent of registered voters in the July 2-3 survey said they support removing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a number that has remained steady from an April 2021 poll conducted by Hill/HarrisX.

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(4 hours ago) Seven in 10 Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of Afghanistan
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...uxbndlbing

EXCERPT: The vast majority of Americans are not happy with President Joe Biden's handling of the situation in Afghanistan as the country falls to the Taliban in just over a week, a poll released Monday shows.

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Full text of Joe Biden’s speech on withdrawal from Afghanistan
https://news.yahoo.com/full-text-joe-bid...26032.html

BIDEN: “The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”

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(Feb, 2020) Afghan conflict: Trump hails deal with Taliban to end 18-year war
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51692546

EXCERPT: In Kabul, activist Zahra Husseini said she feared the deal could worsen the situation for women in Afghanistan. "I don't trust the Taliban, and remember how they suppressed women when they were ruling," the 28-year-old told AFP. "Today is a dark day, and as I was watching the deal being signed, I had this bad feeling that it would result in their return to power rather than in peace."

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(Feb, 2020) US signs historic deal with Taliban, Trump announces, beginning end of US war in Afghanistan and withdrawal of American troops
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-sign-...d=69287465

EXCERPT: According to Pompeo, the agreement triggers a "conditions-based and phased" U.S. withdrawal and the "commencement" of Afghan negotiations where "all sides of the conflict will sit down together and begin the hard work of reconciliation." U.S. officials say the deal also includes Taliban commitments on counterterrorism, although those details are still unclear.

"These commitments represent an important step to a lasting peace in a new Afghanistan, free from Al Qaeda, ISIS, and any other terrorist group that would seek to bring us harm," Trump said in his statement. "Ultimately, it will be up to the people of Afghanistan to work out their future. We, therefore, urge the Afghan people to seize this opportunity for peace and a new future for their country."

At a White House briefing Saturday, Trump said troops will be returning from Afghanistan "today."

"Today, they'll start immediately," Trump said.

However, the president did note that if "bad things happen" that U.S. troops will go back to Afghanistan "with a force like nobody's ever seen."

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(Aug 13, 2021) Donald Trump Weighs In On Afghanistan: 'If I Was President, Things Would Be Different'
https://www.republicworld.com/world-news...erent.html

EXCERPT: Former US President Donald Trump condemned the US' pullout plan from Afghanistan under President Joe Biden, stating if he was the President, the world would have seen a much more 'different and successful' exit from the region. Issuing a statement, Trump noted the withdrawal of the US troops from the country should have been 'conditions-based' and stated that what was transpiring in Afghanistan today was 'not acceptable’.

Trump said, “If I were now President, the world would find that our withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a conditions-based. I personally had discussions with top Taliban leaders whereby they understood what they are doing now would not have been acceptable.”

In response to the growing criticism, Biden defended his pullout plan that said that Afghanistan needs to 'fight for themselves and fight for their nation’. He has also said, “I do not regret my decision.”

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Trump claims Afghanistan withdrawal would have been 'much more successful' if he were president. Would it?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...uxbndlbing

EXCERPT: What Trump didn’t say: It was Trump, not Biden, who negotiated the agreement to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Biden delayed the original deadline set by Trump, which was to pull all troops by May 1.

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How wrong the Biden administration was about Afghanistan
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/..._manual_32

EXCERPT: If there’s one comment that drives home the wayward predictions and lack of appreciation for how this might play out, it came July 8 from President Biden.

Biden has warned repeatedly over the years of U.S. policy in Iraq leading to a repeat of Saigon, when a chaotic withdrawal from Vietnam resulted in helicopters evacuating U.S. personnel from the embassy. And Biden promised no reprise of that.

“There’s going to be no circumstance when you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy,” Biden said. “It is not at all comparable.”

On Sunday, helicopters were indeed forced to evacuate people not from the roof, but from a landing pad on the U.S. Embassy grounds in Kabul.

Perhaps an even more striking scene involved another aircraft. People surrounded and in some cases clung to a U.S. military airplane as it attempted to depart Monday from the airport in Kabul. At least seven people were killed at Kabul’s international airport, the Associated Press reported Monday.

Biden continued in his July 8 event: “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

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Biden says the ‘buck stops with me’ — while pinning blame on Trump and many Afghans
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/...s-afghans/

EXCERPT: Biden contended that he had been hamstrung by former president Donald Trump’s agreement with the Taliban to withdraw the United States by May 1. Biden pushed back that deadline by a few months, to Sept. 11, but he said Monday that more of a delay would have required an escalation with an impatient adversary, thanks to its deal with Trump.

“After May 1st, there was no status quo of stability without American casualties,” Biden said. “After May 1st, there was only a core reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan.”

In this claim, Biden has some support — from none other than Trump. In June, when the two sides were still fighting for credit for the departure from Afghanistan, Trump said: “I started the process. All the troops are coming home. They couldn’t stop the process. … They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process.”

Of course, now each is blaming the other rather than wanting the credit.

[Leigha]

I wonder if anyone could have remotely known the magnitude of this botched exit, and the horror of Afghanistan having to fall subject to the Taliban, what they might have done differently. Foreign affairs always seem so calculated and cold, I hope this is an eye opener for our government now and in the future, that there are humans on the end of their decisions.

[Syne]

All of Biden's advisors counseled against it, and Trump was known for listening to his.

[Zinjanthropos]

Should we expect an escalation of global terror activity or attacks on American interests? I kind of doubt USA is the Taliban’s teddy bear.

[Yazata]

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from all this is to recognize the problems inherent in "nation building".

That can't be twisted into a partisan politics thing, since there are those in both US (or British for that matter) parties that supported it and those that opposed it. Among Republicans it pitted the Trumpist America-first faction against the so-called "neoconservatives" and among the Democrats the anti-war factions faced off against the human-rights and globalist factions.

But perhaps it helps explain why Afghans have flocked to such hard-core extremist versions of Islam. Because they feel themselves under constant threat by outsiders who want to remake them in somebody else's image. So they grasp tighter and tighter to things that they perceive as theirs. Backsliding and compromise become tantamount to treason. Extremism flourishes.

If the rest of the world adopts a hands-off policy in Afghanistan, the result won't be pretty. Certainly not for women, gays or religious minorities. But if they finally stop feeling threatened, there may be local voices of moderation and toleration appearing. The whole crazy culture might start to normalize. They will see how much more successful countries can be that aren't 7th century dark-ages theocracies. They will start to want some of those things for themselves.

A century from now Afghanistan will still be Islamic, even fundamentalist Islamic, but I expect that it might be far more easy-going than today. At least if they stop feeling constantly backed into a corner and forced to fight.

[Syne]

Muslim countries have already and repeatedly proven that the "moderate voices" will just flee to western countries, in huge droves of refugees. Just as we're seeing in the Kabul airport. All we're likely to get is another extremist nation like Iran, who has likely been supporting the Taliban.

[C C]

Should we expect an escalation of global terror activity or attacks on American interests? I kind of doubt USA is the Taliban’s teddy bear.

Now that the Taliban are back, will they restrain or support Al Qaeda?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/world...qaeda.html

On the plus side, in 2015, ISIS and the Taliban declared Jihad against each other. That enmity supposedly still pertains. According to this update map, most ISIS activity is "far" away for Afghanistan right now: https://isis.liveuamap.com/

Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia have been accused of supporting, funding, arming, assisting or facilitating the Taliban over the years, but who knows what their focus/interests are now that the US/West has withdrawn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#In..._relations

[Yazata]

"The U.S. Air Force has opened a review of the harrowing and fatal incident Monday involving desperate Afghans rushing toward and climbing onto a taxiing C-17 Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

In a statement released Tuesday, the Air Force confirmed that human remains were found in the C-17's wheel well after it landed at Al Udeid Air base in Qatar, following the plane's hasty departure from Kabul...

The C-17 landed at the airport in Kabul -- now the site of thousands of the last U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as American, Afghan and other civilians seeking to flee the country -- loaded with equipment to deliver, the Air Force said. But before the crew could unload the cargo, hundreds of Afghan civilians who had breached the airport perimeter surrounded the aircraft, the service added.

The C-17 crew saw the situation was rapidly deteriorating and decided to take off again as quickly as possible, according to the Air Force. That's when the tragic scene of Afghans climbing onto its exterior in a desperate bid for escape unfolded, captured on video that went viral. Some Afghans fell to their deaths from the airplane after takeoff, press reports said."

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021...-c-17.html

[Syne]

US military expects Al Qaeda to move back into Afghanistan with a matter of months. Al Qaeda sides with the Taliban in their opposition to ISIS, but one is no better than the other, characterized as a civil war among Jihadists.

And turns out the fall of Afghanistan wasn't due to them being unwilling to fight, as tens of thousand of Afghan military have died while US troops suffered only double digit deaths per year, since about 2014. The main problem is that Afghan troops where trained to fight like US troops, with the expected air support. Without that, they were not prepared for a sudden fight restricted to the ground, where guerilla Taliban fighters were only trained to fight on the ground.

[Yazata]

There are still several thousand Americans and American protected persons in Kabul. Just a few days ago they were being told to shelter in place and don't try going to the airport due to the chaos there. Today some order has been restored on the runways and aircraft are arriving and departing about one an hour. Most of these aircraft have been arriving carrying US troops and departing carrying evacuees. Mostly Afghans. Only a few hundred American civilians have gotten out.

The developing problem is that the Taliban fighters have set up checkpoints around the airport on all the roads. So everyone hoping to travel to the airport has to go through the Taliban, including all those Americans told to shelter in place. The State Department is now telling the Americans in Kabul to make their way to the airport, but with this disclaimer: The United States Government cannot ensure safe passage to the Hamid Karzai International Airport

It's a developing major problem

https://af.usembassy.gov/security-alert-...t-18-2021/