Quotes of the Day:
“This will be the final message from Saigon station. It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost. This experience, unique in the history of the United States, does not signal necessarily the demise of the United States as a world power. The severity of the defeat and the circumstances of it, however, would seem to call for a reassessment of the policies of ... half-measures which have characterized much of our participation here despite the commitment of manpower and resources, which were certainly generous. Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson. Saigon signing off."
- Thomas Polgar, Chief of Station, Saigon, April 30, 1975
“The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
- Georg Hegel
“As authority increases, however, so does self-consciousness. With more people watching, practice becomes performance. Reputations now matter, narrowing the freedom to be flexible. Leaders who’ve reached the top…can become prisoners of their own preeminence: they lock themselves into roles from which they can’t escape.”
- John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy
1. Intelligence Warned of Afghan Military Collapse, Despite Biden’s Assurances
2. In the End, the Afghan Army Was Always Doomed
3. ‘Team America’ has success evacuating Afghans, seeks help as requests grow
4. Opinion | Biden is blaming everyone but himself. But he’s the one who gave the Taliban a green light.
5. Biden Wanted to Leave Afghanistan. He Knew the Risks.
6. Flights to leave hourly from Kabul airport, if evacuees can get there
7. The Biggest American Fuck Ups That Screwed Afghanistan
8. FDD | The Afghan debacle will destroy the Biden presidency
9. Mike Pence: Biden Broke Our Deal With the Taliban
10. The Ides of August by Sarah Chayes
11. Why Was there so little Resistance when Afghanistan Collapsed?
12. Unrealistic timelines, unsustainable goals made ‘victorious US withdrawal’ from Afghanistan impossible, watchdog finds
13. Navy SEAL Commander in Kabul Getting Bolstered by 82nd Airborne
14.Opinion | Condoleezza Rice: The Afghan people didn’t choose the Taliban. They fought and died alongside us.
15. A philosophy professor breaks down why the US has a moral responsibility for the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan
16. Cobra blood is off the training menu for US troops, PETA says
17. To China, Afghan Fall Proves U.S. Hubris. It Also Brings New Dangers.
18. Leaving Afghanistan was America’s Most Moral Choice
19. Senator mistakenly lists 30,000 US troops in Taiwan
20. Chinese state media chief calls for war with US over troop numbers in Taiwan
21. Secret terrorist watchlist with 2 million records exposed online
1. Intelligence Warned of Afghan Military Collapse, Despite Biden’s Assurances
I am not surprised there were accurate warnings from the IC. Now they are in damage control.
From an OpEd I have submitted:
We are also hearing reports that that there is a kind of national security “circular firing squad” taking place that describes the “blame game.” The Department of Defense is blaming State because they did not want to recommend evacuation. State is blaming the intelligence community (IC) for not giving it adequate warning. The IC says they have been estimating this outcome in various forms for months. When all of this is examined in detail it is likely we will learn the military provided all the necessary options and the suboptimal course of action was selected by the White House (likely with concurrence from State). We will also see the IC provided accurate assessments, but they were not heeded because they undermined the two important assumptions. What may have been was missed was the sophistication of the Taliban campaign plan and the effort it put into influence operations and preparation of the political and information environment during probably the entirety of the peace negotiations.
I have to admire the campaign planning and influence operations conducted by the Taliban.
Intelligence Warned of Afghan Military Collapse, Despite Biden’s Assurances
Even as the president was telling the public that Kabul was unlikely to fall, intelligence assessments painted a grimmer picture.
Taliban fighters have taken over in Kabul, the capital of Aghanistan.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Aug. 17, 2021
WASHINGTON — Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials.
By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital. President Biden said on July 8 that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War.
One report in July — as dozens of Afghan districts were falling and Taliban fighters were laying siege to several major cities — laid out the growing risks to Kabul, noting that the Afghan government was unprepared for a Taliban assault, according to a person familiar with the intelligence.
Intelligence agencies predicted that should the Taliban seize cities, a cascading collapse could happen rapidly and the Afghan security forces were at high risk of falling apart. It is unclear whether other reports during this period presented a more optimistic picture about the ability of the Afghan military and the government in Kabul to withstand the insurgents.
A historical analysis provided to Congress concluded that the Taliban had learned lessons from their takeover of the country in the 1990s. This time, the report said, the militant group would first secure border crossings, commandeer provincial capitals and seize swaths of the country’s north before moving in on Kabul, a prediction that proved accurate.
But key American decisions were made long before July, when the consensus among intelligence agencies was that the Afghan government could hang on for as long as two years, which would have left ample time for an orderly exit. On April 27, when the State Department ordered the departure of nonessential personnel from the embassy in Kabul, the overall intelligence assessment was still that a Taliban takeover was at least 18 months away, according to administration officials.
One senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified intelligence reports, said that even by July, as the situation grew more volatile, intelligence agencies never offered a clear prediction of an imminent Taliban takeover. The official said their assessments were also not given a “high confidence” judgment, the agencies’ highest level of certainty.
As late as a week before Kabul’s fall, the overall intelligence analysis was that a Taliban takeover was not yet inevitable, the official said. Officials also said that around the time of Mr. Biden’s July remarks, where he called on Afghan leaders “to come together,” he and aides were privately pressing them to make concessions that the intelligence reports had indicated were necessary to stave off a government collapse.
Spokeswomen for the C.I.A. and the director of national intelligence declined to discuss the assessments given to the White House. But intelligence officials acknowledged that their agencies’ analysis had been sober and that the assessments had changed in recent weeks and months.
Facing clear evidence of the collapse of Afghan forces, American officials have begun to cast blame internally, including statements from the White House that have suggested an intelligence failure. Such finger-pointing often occurs after major national security breakdowns, but it will take weeks or months for a more complete picture to emerge of the decision-making in the Biden administration that led to the chaos in Kabul in recent days.
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Biden Defends U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan
President Biden said he stood “squarely behind” the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan despite a Taliban takeover of the country, and the collapse of the Afghan government and military.
We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: Get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure Al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and we got him. That was a decade ago. Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building. When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season. It was only a cold 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, lurching into the third decade of conflict. I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. 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. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.
President Biden said he stood “squarely behind” the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan despite a Taliban takeover of the country, and the collapse of the Afghan government and military.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
Intelligence agencies have long predicted an ultimate Taliban victory, even before President Donald J. Trump and Mr. Biden decided to withdraw forces. Those estimates provided a range of timelines. While they raised questions about the will of the Afghan security forces to fight without Americans by their side, they did not predict a collapse within weeks.
But in recent months, assessments became ever more pessimistic as the Taliban made larger gains, according to current and former officials. The reports this summer questioned in stark terms the will of Afghan security forces to fight and the ability of the Kabul government to hold power. With each report of mass desertions, a former official said, the Afghan government looked less stable.
Another C.I.A. report in July noted that the security forces and central government had lost control of the roads leading into Kabul and assessed that the viability of the central government was in serious jeopardy. Other reports by the State Department’s intelligence and research division also noted the failure of Afghan forces to fight the Taliban and suggested that the deteriorating security conditions could lead to the collapse of the government, according to government officials.
“The business of intelligence is not to say you know on Aug. 15 the Afghan government’s going to fall,” said Timothy S. Bergreen, a former staff director for the House Intelligence Committee. “But what everybody knew is that without the stiffening of the international forces and specifically our forces, the Afghans were incapable of defending or governing themselves.”
Afghanistan received little attention in the annual threat assessment released in April by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; but the brief discussion was dire, noting the Taliban were confident they could achieve a military victory.
“The Taliban is likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support,” the report said.
But current and former officials said that while it was true that the C.I.A. predicted a collapse of the Afghan government, it was often hard to get agency analysts to clearly predict how quickly that would occur, especially as Mr. Trump and then Mr. Biden made decisions on how fast to draw down troops.
Two former senior Trump administration officials who reviewed some of the C.I.A.’s assessments of Afghanistan said the intelligence agencies did deliver warnings about the strength of the Afghan government and security forces. But the agency resisted giving an exact time frame and the assessments could often be interpreted in a variety of ways, including concluding that Afghanistan could fall quickly or possibly over time.
Sharp disagreements have also persisted in the intelligence community. The C.I.A. for years has been pessimistic about the training of the Afghan security forces. But the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence shops within the Pentagon delivered more optimistic assessments about the Afghans’ preparedness, according to current and former officials.
Groups gathered at the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, looking to leave the country on Monday.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Military and intelligence assessments predicting that the government in Kabul could hold on at least a year before a Taliban takeover were built on a premise that proved to be flawed: that the Afghan army would put up a fight.
“Most of the U.S. assessments inside and outside the U.S. government had focused on how well the Afghan security forces would fare in a fight with the Taliban. In reality, they never really fought” during the Taliban blitz across the country, said Seth G. Jones, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Card 1 of 5
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. They are emerging now from obscurity, but little is known about them or how they plan to govern.
How did the Taliban gain control? See how the Taliban took control in Afghanistan and erased 20 years of defense in a few months.
Two decades ago, this dynamic played out in reverse. When U.S.-backed Afghan militias began capturing territory from the Taliban in late 2001, Taliban fighters folded relatively quickly, and both Kabul and Kandahar fell before the end of that year.
Some Taliban surrendered, some switched sides, and far larger numbers simply melted into the population to begin planning what would become a 20-year insurgency.
Intelligence officials have long observed that Afghans make cold calculations about who is likely to prevail in a conflict and back the winning side, a tactic that allows for battlefield gains to accumulate quickly until a tipping point turns the fight into a rout, according to current and former analysts.
At the core of the American loss in Afghanistan was the inability to build a security force that could stand on its own, but that error was compounded by Washington’s failure to listen to those raising questions about the Afghan military.
Part of the problem, according to former officials, is that the can-do attitude of the military frequently got in the way of candid accurate assessments of how the Afghan security forces were doing. Though no one was blind to desertions or battlefield losses, American commanders given the task of training the Afghan military were reluctant to admit their efforts were failing.
Even those in the military skeptical of the skills of the Afghan security forces believed they would continue to fight for a time after the Americans left.
For months, intelligence officials have been making comparisons between the Afghan national security forces and the South Vietnamese army at the end of the Vietnam War. It took two years for South Vietnam’s military, known by the American acronym ARVN, to collapse after the United States withdrew troops and financial support. Optimists believed the Afghan military — with American funding — could last nearly as long. Pessimists thought it would be far shorter.
The Taliban won with a strategy that has proved successful during Afghanistan’s many decades of war, according to analysts — they outlasted their opponent.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
“For the last two or three years I have been ruefully remarking that A.N.S.F. is Afghan for ARVN,” said Mr. Bergreen, who worked on intelligence matters on Capitol Hill from 2003 to 2021. “There was an acknowledgment that the Afghan forces were not up to the long-term fight. But I don’t think anyone expected them to melt away quite that fast.”
Recent Taliban diplomatic maneuvers with other countries in the region, most notably China, lent an air of inevitability to a Taliban takeover that further demoralized Afghan government troops, Mr. Jones said.
In the end, analysts said, the Taliban won with the strategy that has so often proved successful during Afghanistan’s many decades of war — they outlasted their opponent.
“I am not that surprised it was as fast and sweeping as it was,” said Lisa Maddox, a former C.I.A. analyst. “The Taliban certainly has shown their ability to persevere, hunker down and come back even after they have been beaten back. And you have a population that is so tired and weary of conflict that they are going to flip and support the winning side so they can survive.”
2. In the End, the Afghan Army Was Always Doomed
What the Admiral may be saying here is that perhaps we should have allowed Special Forces to continue to do the job they were doing in the spring of 2002 before the conventional JTF was deployed.
In particular, the Afghans should have been organized into local, light-defense forces in and around their own villages, districts and provinces. People will fight much harder when it is their own family behind them. They needed simpler weapons and larger caches of ammunition, with less of the sophisticated communications gear (much of which is now being harvested for scrap at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul).
Like politics, all security is local; but instead the focus was on creating a “national army,” seeking to use it as a tool to unify the nation. As we have seen, it simply did not work. In fairness, there was an attempt to create some local militias, but they were starved for resources that were committed to the big effort of creating a kind of “mini-me” force that looked better on paper than in combat.
It is instructive that the most successful of the domestic fighters for the past few years have been the 20,000 Afghan commandos. They resembled this philosophy of highly maneuverable troops able to move quickly, but were too few in number and still too reliant on U.S. air support and high-tech gear. By the end, they had become exhausted, like the smokejumpers now battling fires all over the American West — too few, too tired.
A decade ago, we debated all this at senior levels, but kept coming back to a firmly held belief that we could succeed best by modeling what we knew and found comfortable: ducks like ducks, in the end. We did not sufficiently respect the culture, history, traditions and norms of this difficult nation. The Greeks have a word for it: hubris.
From FID doctrine at the time. Had we adopted the concept of remote area operations, at least a supporting effort, we might have seen a different outcome though we will never be able to know that. But this is in effect what SF was doing in the spring of 2002.
Remote area operations are operations undertaken in insurgent-controlled or contested areas to establish islands of popular support for the HN government and deny support to the insurgents. They differ from consolidation operations in that they are not designed to establish permanent HN government control over the area.
Remote areas may be populated by ethnic, religious, or other isolated minority groups. They may be in the interior of the HN or near border areas where major infiltration routes exist.
Remote area operations normally involve the use of specially trained paramilitary or irregular forces. SF teams support remote area operations to interdict insurgent activity, destroy insurgent base areas in the remote area, and demonstrate that the HN government has not conceded control to the insurgents. They also collect and report information concerning insurgent intentions in more populated areas. In this case, SF teams advise and assist irregular HN forces operating in a manner similar to the insurgents themselves, but with access to superior combat support (CS) and combat service support (CSS) resources.
(From FM 3-05.202 Foreign Internal Defense 2007.) (NOTE: No longer in current FID Doctrine)
And fundamentally, (as I have written many times): Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it. Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.
In the End, the Afghan Army Was Always Doomed
Donald Rumsfeld said you “go to war with the army you have.” Instead, the Western allies tried and failed to create a “mini-me” version of the vast American military.
August 16, 2021, 11:34 AM EDT
No escape. Source: AFP via Getty Images
James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also chair of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation and vice chairman of Global Affairs at the Carlyle Group. His latest book is "2034: A Novel of the Next World War."
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In 2006, as a Navy vice admiral, I was in Iraq traveling with Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld. At a town hall with U.S. troops, he famously answered a question about the U.S. Army’s lack of armored vehicles by saying, “You go to war with the army you have — not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” It was an honest but tone-deaf comment, and it was rattling through my mind over the weekend watching the stunning collapse of the Afghan security forces in the face of a Taliban onslaught.
After my Pentagon service, I ended up as the Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. One of the key missions over four years, from 2009-2013, was to build an Afghan national army that could take over fighting from the 150,000 U.S. and International Security Assistance Force troops at the center of the fight with the Taliban. When we pulled out the final few thousand troops over the past several weeks, Afghanistan went to war with the “army we had,” and it collapsed miserably.
Despite plenty of resources and talent, and over a decade of serious effort, the training mission clearly failed. Why? What is there to learn from this debacle?
Let’s begin by pointing out that the effort failed in many separate aspects. First comes the lack of will and leadership on the part of the Afghan government and people. There are also many policy mistakes, including the failure to hold the Taliban to the agreement it negotiated with President Donald Trump’s administration before taking U.S. troops out: the insistence on a “conditions-based withdrawal.”
At the endgame, Western intelligence did not predict the rapidity of collapse, nor did our imagination encompass the determination and audacity of the Taliban. Pakistani havens just across the border played a part in this long drama, as did the underlying corruption that suffuses Afghan culture. But all of that would probably have been survivable if the Afghan army had fought capably.
In retrospect, we trained the wrong kind of army for Afghanistan. America and the ISAF tried desperately to use the U.S. army as the model, and it was the wrong approach. The U.S. way of war is very resource-rich: exquisite satellite-based intelligence; high-end technology with precision guided firing; superb air cover (manned and drone) with nearly instantaneous response times; crisp and clear command and control that provided over-the-horizon connectivity; “on time” logistic systems that allowed fuel, food and ammunition to support combat operations; and “golden hour” medical evacuation to sophisticated hospitals. The Taliban had none of that, and while the U.S. was side-by-side with the Afghans, those local partners could fight — by relying on American support.
Think of the American revolution as an analogy: The U.S. and ISAF trained up an army of British redcoats, but what was really needed were more minutemen. We should have emphasized what might be called “Afghan-right” fighters, meaning forces that were far lighter, and could fight in decentralized teams, squads, light platoons and quick-maneuver companies. There is a strong combat DNA in many Afghans — they have all grown up in a war zone, after all, given the continuous conflicts stretching back to the 1980s (and, indeed, to previous centuries). The Western allies should have capitalized on that, building their own version of the Taliban’s force.
In particular, the Afghans should have been organized into local, light-defense forces in and around their own villages, districts and provinces. People will fight much harder when it is their own family behind them. They needed simpler weapons and larger caches of ammunition, with less of the sophisticated communications gear (much of which is now being harvested for scrap at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul).
Like politics, all security is local; but instead the focus was on creating a “national army,” seeking to use it as a tool to unify the nation. As we have seen, it simply did not work. In fairness, there was an attempt to create some local militias, but they were starved for resources that were committed to the big effort of creating a kind of “mini-me” force that looked better on paper than in combat.
It is instructive that the most successful of the domestic fighters for the past few years have been the 20,000 Afghan commandos. They resembled this philosophy of highly maneuverable troops able to move quickly, but were too few in number and still too reliant on U.S. air support and high-tech gear. By the end, they had become exhausted, like the smokejumpers now battling fires all over the American West — too few, too tired.
A decade ago, we debated all this at senior levels, but kept coming back to a firmly held belief that we could succeed best by modeling what we knew and found comfortable: ducks like ducks, in the end. We did not sufficiently respect the culture, history, traditions and norms of this difficult nation. The Greeks have a word for it: hubris.
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Will this collapse create a Taliban government that will welcome back al-Qaeda? Perhaps they will have learned the lesson of allowing their land to become an ungoverned space. Given all the factions within their own movement, and the competing bastions of ethnic and regional actors, the Taliban will probably have imperfect control over their troubled nation. The only certainty of Taliban 2.0 is that the ultimate losers will be women and girls, who are on a rocket ride back to the 9th century, after briefly tasting the fruits of the modern, educated world.
You can hear the immense frustration in the voices of President Joe Biden and his team, saying in effect, “We gave them everything they needed, and they failed.” There is truth in that. But Americans also need to admit that we built that failed army, over the course of 15 years. The Pentagon and civilian leadership must admit their part of this failure, and learn the lessons from those mistakes, for which the Afghan people will pay dearly. It was, tragically, the army we wanted. It just wasn’t the right army to win.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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3. ‘Team America’ has success evacuating Afghans, seeks help as requests grow
This is what Americans, and in particular veterans, do.
We also need to activate escape and evasion (E&E) networks in other parts of the country for those who cannot get to the Kabul airport.
‘Team America’ has success evacuating Afghans, seeks help as requests grow
After days of frustration, an informal group of service members and veterans, who are now calling themselves “Team America,” are seeing their hard work on behalf of Afghan allies paying off.
Working around the clock in the U.S, and Kabul, Team America finally received some good news about their efforts. After days of highlighting cases to the U.S. government and helping evacuees navigate a series of Taliban and American checkpoints, Team America says some evacuees they supported had flown to safety aboard an Air Force C-17 cargo jet.
“We’ve got people on C-17s already, and we have a lot more people. We have 128 people on our list now, Joe Saboe, a former Army infantry officer and unofficial spokesman for Team America, told Military Times.
A critical development occurred overnight when order was restored at Hamid Karzai International Airport allowing evacuation flights to resume. According to Saboe, the chaos prevented evacuees from being admitted to the airfield at all.
“The big change right now is that the airfield is now very orderly, and people are being processed. Neither one of those things were to before,” said Saboe, adding that American citizens, U.S. Green Card holders, and those with an approved visa can clear American checkpoints.
“We were getting a lot of people through the North Gate and the abbey gate, which is on the southeast side of the airport,” said Saboe. “Those two gates are the ones that are letting people in.”
Taliban control is raising alarms for Afghans and Americans in Kabul.
Howard Altman and James R. Webb
August 16 at 1:25 PM
The information that Saboe and the rest of Team America generate comes from a network of informal and personal contacts that the group has both inside the U.S. government and individuals attempting to flee Kabul. However, not all the information coming out of Kabul paints a rosy picture of events on the ground. According to Saboe, it also comes with news that the Taliban is hunting down U.S. allies as they attempt to make their way out of the country.
“There are two Taliban checkpoints,” Saboe said. “They are searching for any sort of documents that link you to the government.”
Further, evacuees are reporting to Team America that the Taliban is also going door-to-door to search for high-level officials from the collapsed Afghan government.
Complicating this further is the system by which the U.S. State Department provides credentialing to those seeking a flight out. According to Saboe, DoS should notify evacuees through a phone call or an email when approved for a flight.
“But nobody, nobody’s getting any of that information. Nobody’s actually getting those calls or emails right now,” Saboe said.
Defense Department officials deferred comment to State. DoS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After a Military Times story about their efforts, Team America has seen the number of evacuees it is supporting nearly triple from around 50 to almost 130. The increased numbers also mean an increased workload. While Saboe and others fully embrace the challenge, Team America is asking for help managing their small part of the evacuation and locating any additional people who need to get out of Afghanistan.
4. Opinion | Biden is blaming everyone but himself. But he’s the one who gave the Taliban a green light.
I am happy to see the strategic military expertise of Mr. Tiessan with this statement (note sarcasm):
That should come as no surprise. There is not a single U.S. ally in the world that could defend itself without U.S. help. There is a reason we have had American troops deployed in Japan, Germany and South Korea for more than seven decades — and why we have more than 170,000 active-duty troops stationed in over 170 countries around the world today.
I think some of our allies will take exception to this statement. It certainly does not help our alliance relationships. But I guess it justifies the demand that our allies pay us for their defense and base our alliances on a transactional relationship. (how is that working out for us?)
Opinion | Biden is blaming everyone but himself. But he’s the one who gave the Taliban a green light.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Marc A. ThiessenColumnist Today at 8:11 p.m. EDT · August 17, 2021
On Sep. 11, 2001, Americans literally fell from the sky — jumping from the top floors of the World Trade Center to escape the fires set by al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that aided and abetted them. Today, almost two decades later, it is our Afghan allies who are falling from the sky — after clinging to the fuselage of a U.S. military aircraft taking off from the Kabul airport, in a desperate effort to escape the Taliban regime.
The debacle President Biden has unleashed in Afghanistan today is the most shameful thing I have witnessed over three decades in Washington. Biden has said it’s not comparable to the U.S. departure from Saigon. That’s true; it’s far worse. As former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker put it, “I’m left with some grave questions in my mind about his ability to lead our nation as commander in chief. To have read this so wrong — or, even worse, to have understood what was likely to happen and not care.” He’s right. Either Biden had no idea this disaster was going to happen, in which case he is incompetent; or he knew that this would be the result but doesn’t care, in which case he is morally complicit in an intentional humanitarian catastrophe.
Yet rather than admit wrongdoing, the president is blaming everyone but himself. He argues that he had no choice because of the withdrawal agreement President Donald Trump signed with the Taliban. First of all, the Taliban violated that agreement, so the United States was under no obligation to follow it. Second, Biden has spent the past seven months reversing almost every Trump policy, from border security to the Keystone XL pipeline, sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. But his hands were tied in Afghanistan? That’s the one place he had no choice but to carry out the Trump policy?
Trump’s Afghan policy was terrible, and I criticized his outreach to the Taliban. But does anyone really believe he would have let the United States be humiliated in this way? He would have unleashed a bombing campaign the likes of which the Taliban had not seen since 2001. Moreover, Trump promised a withdrawal based on conditions on the ground. Biden explicitly rejected a conditions-based withdrawal, declaring “we cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal.” By announcing that we were getting out no matter what the Taliban did, Biden gave the Taliban a green light to carry out the murderous offensive we now see unfolding.
When Biden is not blaming Trump, he is blaming the Afghan army. In his address to the nation Monday, Biden accused the Afghan military of collapsing “sometimes without trying to fight” and declared that “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.” This is a calumny. In January 2015, Afghan forces assumed full responsibility for combat operations against the Taliban. Since that time, the State Department reports that U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan “dropped sharply to an average of about 17 per year” while during that same period between 53,000 and 57,000 Afghan soldiers were killed in action fighting the Taliban — including about 2,600 thorough Aug. 5 this year. To say Afghans were not willing to fight is libelous. For more than six years, the Afghan army bore the brunt of the fight — and with U.S. support they succeeded in holding the Taliban at bay. It was only when Biden withdrew the U.S. mission planning, intelligence and air support that had enabled them to succeed that Afghan forces were overwhelmed.
That should come as no surprise. There is not a single U.S. ally in the world that could defend itself without U.S. help. There is a reason we have had American troops deployed in Japan, Germany and South Korea for more than seven decades — and why we have more than 170,000 active-duty troops stationed in over 170 countries around the world today.
The mission in Afghanistan was never to turn that country into a Jeffersonian democracy. It was to ensure that Afghanistan had a government whose leaders did not wake up every morning thinking that America must be destroyed — and did not provide sanctuary for terrorists determined to bring that destruction to the American homeland. That mission was succeeding — until Joe Biden’s misbegotten, incompetent, unconditional retreat handed Afghanistan over to the United States’ enemies, who will turn it into an Islamist militant haven once again.
The Washington Post · by Opinion by Marc A. ThiessenColumnist Today at 8:11 p.m. EDT · August 17, 2021
5. Biden Wanted to Leave Afghanistan. He Knew the Risks.
Like it or not this is how it is supposed to work. The President makes a decision and the administration (military, diplomats, intelligence professionals , etc) must execute. They provided advice and recommendations and in the end the President made the decision. And he has to own it.
But this is a troubling statement and words that will come back to haunt POTUS.
In a February 2020 interview with CBS News, Mr. Biden said he would bear “zero responsibility” if the Taliban eventually returned to power.
“The responsibility I have is to protect America’s national self-interest and not put our women and men in harm’s way to try to solve every single problem in the world by use of force,” he said. “That’s my responsibility as president and that’s what I’ll do as president.”
Biden Wanted to Leave Afghanistan. He Knew the Risks.
Generals and diplomats warned about a pullout, but the president told his team the U.S. was simply providing life support for the Kabul government while neglecting more pressing issues
WSJ · by Ken Thomas and Vivian Salama
The president’s top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley, urged Mr. Biden to keep a force of about 2,500 troops, the size he inherited, while seeking a peace agreement between warring Afghan factions, to help maintain stability. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who previously served as a military commander in the region, said a full withdrawal wouldn’t provide any insurance against instability.
Other advisers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, raised the possibility of Taliban attacks on U.S. forces and diplomats as well as the Afghans who for two decades worked alongside them. Ultimately, neither disagreed with the president, knowing where he stood.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, left, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, right.
Photo: jim lo scalzo/EPA/Shutterstock
Mr. Biden, however, was committed to ending the U.S. military role in the country. The president told his policy advisers the U.S. was providing life support for the Afghan government, which, in his view, was corrupt and had squandered billions of dollars in American assistance, according to current and former administration officials. He wanted to reorient American foreign policy onto what he sees as more pressing international matters, including competition with China, and domestic issues including infrastructure and battling Covid. “I am deeply saddened by the facts we now face, but I do not regret my decision,” he said Monday.
The Taliban on Sunday rolled into Kabul having barely fired a shot. The onslaught triggered a chaotic evacuation of almost all U.S. diplomats, helped by thousands of American soldiers who were sent back to assist in the mission, sending shock waves around the world.
His team’s failure so far to mitigate the fallout of the withdrawal, including protecting thousands of pro-Western Afghans marooned in the capital, has some countries expressing concern about the U.S. as a partner, including on some of the very issues Mr. Biden wants to address.
America’s allies were beginning to warm to the Biden administration until this weekend, said Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and CIA director during the Obama administration. “I’m sure that those events are raising questions about our credibility and President Biden is absolutely going to have to deal with that,” he said.
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (ret.), former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, who previously served in Afghanistan, listed potential consequences including assassination campaigns, summary executions and the razing of girls’ schools. “This is what power-sharing with the Taliban looks like,” he said.
Taliban Take Over Kabul After Sweeping Afghanistan
Insurgents consolidate control of the capital after government’s collapse
Taliban fighters on a pickup truck in a market area of Kabul on Tuesday following the group’s takeover of the Afghan capital.
hoshang hashimi/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
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Taliban fighters on a pickup truck in a market area of Kabul on Tuesday following the group’s takeover of the Afghan capital.
hoshang hashimi/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Majorities of Americans support ending the war in Afghanistan. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released in July found that 55% approved of Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from the country. It isn’t yet known how the mess of the withdrawal has affected that support.
Mr. Biden as a senator supported the Afghanistan intervention after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, before souring on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as President Barack Obama’s vice president. Now came one of the first major foreign policy moves of his presidency: Mr. Biden had to decide how to carry out the 2020 agreement signed by Mr. Trump with the Taliban, which called for a May 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops.
White House aides have said Mr. Trump’s deal limited their options and risked the possibility that Mr. Biden would need to deploy more troops if he ignored the agreement and delayed the withdrawal.
Administration officials who have served in Afghanistan said the past few weeks have been a disaster, both with respect to policy planning as well as the outcome, which many believe was predictable.
“Anytime you’ve got a situation like this, that’s so volatile, so unpredictable, so dangerous, you’ve got to plan for the worst and I don’t think they did that,” said Chuck Hagel, a former defense secretary under Mr. Obama who traveled to Afghanistan with Mr. Biden in 2008, when both served in the Senate.
Senior administration officials said they planned for a range of outcomes, including through three dozen interagency meetings throughout the summer, including a number of “bad-case scenarios.”
The administration had been holding meetings for months on the withdrawal but lost time reviewing policy planning for what came next, an administration official said, including the plight of the Afghan translators who assisted U.S. forces and diplomats. From January to April, there was little instruction to various government agencies on how to prepare for the transition of power to the Afghan government and military.
Mr. Biden and his top advisers hoped the Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani would find its own way once there was a concrete exit date, though some military advisers said Mr. Ghani wasn’t up to the task—correctly as it turned out.
Mr. Biden had initially been a supporter of the George W. Bush administration’s decision to launch the war in October 2001. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Biden was among the first senators to visit the country in early 2002, meeting with the then-chairman of the country’s interim administration, Hamid Karzai.
Then-U.S. Sen. Biden met with Hamid Karzai, then the chairman of Afghanistan’s interim government, in 2002 in Kabul.
Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
“History is going to judge us very harshly, I believe, if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we are fearful of the phrase, ‘nation-building,’ or we do not stay the course,” he said in a February 2002 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. Biden grew uneasy with Mr. Bush’s handling of the war in Afghanistan, which he felt was undercut by that administration’s decision to launch a war against Iraq. The focus on Iraq diverted resources from Afghanistan for years and worsened the security situation, Mr. Biden said at the time. He initially supported both military actions.
After Mr. Obama’s election, Mr. Biden, as the vice president-elect, traveled to Afghanistan, Kuwait, Pakistan and Iraq. He left that trip concerned about the deterioration of the conditions in Afghanistan and cited the need to rebuild the country’s political institutions. White House aides said the visit served as an inflection point for the future president.
“The truth is that things are going to get tougher in Afghanistan before they get better,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the Obama transition office following the trip, joined by Mr. Obama and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who traveled with Mr. Biden.
Mr. Biden grew skeptical of military leaders’ advice on Afghanistan during the early years of the Obama administration when the Pentagon urged a troop surge to try to seize the initiative in the war.
Mr. Biden cautioned Mr. Obama against sending tens of thousands of additional troops into a conflict he viewed as a “dangerous quagmire,” Mr. Obama wrote in his memoir. Gripping Mr. Obama by the arm after one National Security Council meeting, Mr. Biden warned that the military might try to shrink the new president’s options. “Don’t let them jam you,” Mr. Obama quoted Mr. Biden as saying.
Ben Rhodes, a former Obama national security aide, recalled in his memoir that Mr. Biden was the “only senior official who consistently opposed sending more troops to Afghanistan.”
During meetings in the White House Situation Room, Mr. Biden “would go on long discourses about why it was foolish to think we could do anything more than kill terrorists in Afghanistan, and he solicited military advice outside the chain of command that prepared requests for more troops.”
A 2009 Afghanistan briefing attended by President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden.
Photo: Pete Souza/The White House
Officials who have worked with Mr. Biden over the years said that as a military parent—his late son Beau Biden served in Iraq—he is reluctant to send other people’s children to war.
U.S. troop levels reached about 100,000 during Mr. Obama’s presidency before falling to about 9,800 at the end of his second term.
By the time Mr. Biden became his party’s leading contender to challenge Mr. Trump in the 2020 election, most of the Democratic presidential field supported pulling out of Afghanistan.
In a February 2020 interview with CBS News, Mr. Biden said he would bear “zero responsibility” if the Taliban eventually returned to power.
“The responsibility I have is to protect America’s national self-interest and not put our women and men in harm’s way to try to solve every single problem in the world by use of force,” he said. “That’s my responsibility as president and that’s what I’ll do as president.”
In 2011, Vice President Biden visited troops in Afghanistan.
Photo: SHAH MARAI/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
6. Flights to leave hourly from Kabul airport, if evacuees can get there
We cannot turn back time (so said Cher). There is only one thing we can do to salvage a somewhat positive outcome. That is to leave no one behind. We must conduct the NEO operation until all Americans and at-risk Afghans are evacuated. We have to tell the Taliban we are not leaving until we have everyone out and if necessary we will conduct operations to fight our way to get to the location of all Americans and at-risk personnel. The President is in a bad political position now because of the decision and unfolding tragedy. If we now arbitrarily end the NEO on August 31, 2021 and we leave anyone behind he will face political problems that will likely make him a one term president.
Flights to leave hourly from Kabul airport, if evacuees can get there
Chaos at Kabul airport
Crowds swarmed the runway at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul as people desperately tried to get flights out of the country in the hours after the Taliban took over the Afghanistan capital. US forces secured the military side of the airport amid tense scenes of Afghans doing anything they could to get on a plane, including rushing aircraft and clinging to landing gear.
Hamid Karzai International Airport is up and running after a shutdown on Monday, with regular C-17 flights coming in and out and a limited number of commercial flights, deputy director of the Joint Staff for regional operations told reporters on Tuesday.
“Right now, we’re looking at one aircraft per hour in and out of HKIA,” Taylor said, within the next 24 hours. “We predict that our best effort could look like 5,000 to 9,000 passengers departing per day.”
Overnight, nine C-17s brought in 1,000 troops and equipment for the mission to secure the airport, taking out between 700 and 800 people as they left again. Of those, 165 were Americans and the remainder were special immigrant visa applicants and third-country nationals, Taylor said.
All told, he said, roughly 1,500 have been evacuated since the situation in Kabul began to deteriorate on Saturday.
There have been no attacks by the Taliban or other security incidents since an active shooter situation on Monday, in which two were shot and killed by U.S. forces.
The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold hearings on the missteps sometime this fall.
Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, has been in Qatar, where U.S. diplomats and Taliban representatives have continued peace talks.
“In meetings with Taliban senior leaders in Doha on Sunday, I cautioned them against interference in our evacuation, and made it clear to them that any attack would be met with overwhelming force in the defense of our forces,” McKenzie said in a release Tuesday.
Taylor couldn’t say how many people are still at the airport, though he clarified that the crowds that rushed the tarmac over the weekend have been cleared and only identified evacuees, including Americans and SIVs, are still there.
The Taliban have agreed to allow “safe passage” from Afghanistan for civilians struggling to join a U.S.-directed airlift from the capital, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser said Tuesday, although a timetable for completing the evacuation of Americans, Afghan allies and others has yet to be worked out with the country’s new rulers.
Jake Sullivan acknowledged reports that some civilians were encountering resistance — “being turned away or pushed back or even beaten” — as they tried to reach the Kabul international airport. But he said “very large numbers” were reaching the airport and the problem of the others was being taken up with the Taliban, whose stunningly swift takeover of the country on Sunday plunged the U.S. evacuation effort into chaos, confusion and violence.
“There are interactions down at the local level and, as the general said, we are processing American citizens to get out,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
Both Kirby and Taylor reiterated that the mission remains to secure the airport, and there have been no moves to start escorting anyone to the airport or to secure Taliban-controlled checkpoints to allow Americans and SIVs to get to the airport.
7. The Biggest American Fuck Ups That Screwed Afghanistan
No one can provide more blunt in your face criticism (based on academic expertise and on the ground field experience) than Dr. Christine Fair who is one of our nation's experts on the region (and a tenured full professor at Georgetown).
The Biggest American Fuck Ups That Screwed Afghanistan
The images of the fall of Kabul will forever represent one of America’s biggest diplomatic failures: Americans occupying the airport in Kabul, focusing on evacuating their own while terrified Afghans cling to the departing C-17 aircraft.
Virtually every American news channel has been focused on the fate of hundreds of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives to support the U.S. military and civilian mission. Everyone knows that the Taliban has a list of the so-called collaborators who are being hunted down and killed along with their families. But many Americans are in a quandary. They hear the figures recited: 2,448 U.S. service members killed through April; all at an estimated price tag of $2.3-6.5 trillion. What they are less likely to hear are these figures: at least 111,000 Afghan civilians have been killed or injured since 2009 alone. The Taliban killed so many members of the Afghan National Defense and Security forces in 2016 that the American and Afghan governments decided to keep casualty figures a secret for fear of further eviscerating their morale.
Rightly so, many Americans are asking whether it was all worth it. But the truth is, this war was unwinnable from the get-go. Here’s why.
Pakistan was always the problem.
The biggest American blunder was going to war with the one country dedicated to undermining American objectives at every turn, even while raking in tens of billions of dollars in the fictive guise of supporting them: Pakistan. Pakistan’s perfidy was evident from the earliest days of the war and it continues now, helping its assets—the Taliban—squeeze the democratic life from Afghanistan wherever and however it can.
The U.S. entered Afghanistan under the banner of “Operation Enduring Freedom” with a small force of special operators in October 2001. With the help of the Afghan militia group, the Northern Alliance, American-led forces quickly toppled the Taliban, whose dedicated fighters fled to sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Meanwhile, the Americans granted Pakistan permission to conduct numerous sorties over two days in what is known as “Operation Evil Airlift.” Pakistani army officers and intelligence advisers who were working with the Taliban and fighting alongside them in Afghanistan were airlifted back to Pakistan using U.S-.supplied transport aircraft. Special operators who witnessed this firsthand, and with whom I’ve discussed this operation, claim that the number of sorties was in the dozens, much larger than was reported. While the U.S. insisted it was supposed to be a limited evacuation of Pakistani operatives, uncountable Taliban and al Qaeda fighters were also ferried out of Afghanistan by Pakistan’s “Evil Airlift.” That probably should've been a sign of what the Pakistanis would do as the conflict progressed. Pakistan was just warming up.
A week after the U.S. entered Afghanistan, Pakistani President Musharraf chose a Taliban sympathizer—Lieutenant-General Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai—to lead Pakistani forces deployed to support the Americans, who in December 2001 were searching for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora cave complex. According to all source intelligence reports, bin Laden was in Tora Bora for several days in mid-December. Aurakzai’s forces were supposed to be playing the “anvil” to America’s “hammer,” by catching and or killing al Qaeda and Taliban fighters escaping into Pakistan. That effort was short-lived: there is a general consensus that by the end of December 2001, bin Laden had escaped Tora Bora and fled to Pakistan where he was eventually killed by U.S. special forces in 2011. He had been staying in a garish safe house in Abbottabad, a casual one-mile stroll from Pakistan’s Military Academy, its equivalent to the U.S. West Point Military Academy.
While President Bush insisted that Musharraf was a loyal ally, the remaining sentient observers grasped Pakistan’s unending perfidious support to the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and other groups operating against American forces. No matter what Pakistan did, American officials found reasons to excuse it. Many believed that there was some magical combination of allurements that could transform Pakistan from the regional menace it was and is, into a state that is at peace with itself and its neighbors. President Trump, despite his numerous other outrages, at least cut off the aid to the country. But even Trump could not bring himself to do what needed to be done: apply every possible sanction against Pakistani military, intelligence, and political personalities for supporting the Taliban and other Islamist terrorist groups.
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Corruption: we built it.
It’s a story that Americans don’t want to hear: that we contributed to the massive corruption in Afghanistan. In some cases, it happened because USAID didn’t know how to distribute all the money it was expected to allocate and relied on enormous institutional contractors. USAID was drinking from a fire hose, and didn’t seem bothered by the fact that it was effectively transferring U.S. taxpayers’ money into the bank accounts of institutional contractors who enriched themselves in the process. By the time the leftovers reached Afghan implementing partners, there was neither interest nor ability to monitor those activities. Much of the funds were stolen or spent on poorly executed projects. Afghans quickly came to resent public displays of generosity when they understood that most of the money went into the pockets of U.S firms or dodgy Afghans who had little intention of aiding ordinary people. They also understood that the corruption was giving the Taliban grist for their mill of decrying the legitimacy of the Afghan government.
HOSHANG HASHIMI/AFP via Getty Images
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The myth of the legitimate leader.
If the corruption aided the Taliban’s return to power, so did the failure of Afghanistan’s political system to produce a so-called legitimate leader. Biden officials have been busy castigating Afghan political leaders for “failing to come together” in aid of their country. It would be a nice narrative if this was, in fact, the singular fault of dodgy Afghan leaders. Unfortunately, the U.S. and its partners foisted upon Afghanistan a political system that would always be characterized by political fragmentation and illegitimacy.
In 2003, President Karzai banned political parties. The U.S. went along with this because it did not, in fact, want an effective Afghan parliament to get in the way of its big ideas. If there are no political parties, Afghan politicians would have to form coalitions repeatedly. This was one way of keeping the parliament out of America’s way. Parties are now allowed to function; however, they are very weak institutionally and people have little incentive to affiliate with any party.
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The next internationally-backed recipe for illegitimacy was the way in which Afghan elections are carried out. Elections for national and sub-national elections are not held on the same day. This means that each election is an opportunity for fraud, malfeasance in the election rolls, counterfeit ballots, and a raft of election-stealing techniques that the Afghans perfected, often with American and international complicity. Elections for the lowest level of elected positions specified in Afghanistan’s constitution never even happened. So Afghans were not governed by elected officials at the provincial level. Instead, they were governed by strong men appointed by the president. The electoral system of the Single Non-Transferable Vote permitted persons to be elected to office often with less than 10 percent of the votes cast.
Now what?
Last night, during his address to the nation, President Biden doubled down on this criminal retreat that abandoned our Afghan partners to fend for themselves. Callously, he reiterated the same canards: that we couldn’t stay forever, that the Afghans need to fight for themselves, that Afghans need to find unity amidst diversity, and other nauseating bromides meant to serve as a salve on a nation’s heavy consciousness. Know this: all of this is a lie. We never gave the Afghans a fighting chance.
8. FDD | The Afghan debacle will destroy the Biden presidency
I think the most important thing now is for the President to ensure we get all Americans and at-risk personnel out. There is no doubt we have left Afghanistan and the Taliban are in charge. But we cannot abandon any Americans or at-risk Afghans. We have to conduct NEO until complete and not allow the Taliban to interfere with that and in fact demand that they allow it to happen. If we leave anyone behind that will irreparably damage the presidency.
FDD | The Afghan debacle will destroy the Biden presidency
fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · August 17, 2021
Some people are comparing the chaotic end of US involvement in Afghanistan to the final days of South Vietnam. They’ve got it wrong. What’s happening in Kabul is more akin to the Bay of Pigs under JFK or the disaster in Iran in 1979. That failure cost Jimmy Carter the presidency in 1980, and Afghanistan could cost Democrats the White House in 2024.
President Biden had been flying high in the polls. Thanks to bipartisan support on a host of issues, he had been running 10 per cent above his predecessor at the same point in their respective administrations. With his carefully manicured image and his refusal to face reporters on a daily basis, Biden had looked, for the most part, competent and confident. No longer.
It is said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Biden, not wanting another Vietnam, told the American people it was time to leave Afghanistan. The public agreed. In April, 69 per cent of Americans supported Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, while only 16 per cent were opposed. For a nation hopelessly divided on just about every issue, this is as unanimous as it gets.
In his April 14 withdrawal announcement, Biden was clear. No Vietnam. No Iran. “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately and safely.” The public overwhelmingly agreed. On the surface, Biden had made a wise decision to leave. But there is an even more powerful emotion that pollsters can’t immediately measure. Americans hate to lose – and they will punish a president who leads America to defeat.
On Monday, the President had to scramble back from Camp David to explain why there was an unfolding disaster in Kabul. Yet he passed the blame to the previous administration and, incredibly, the Afghan people.
The political consequences will be just as impactful in Washington as the military impact in Kabul. It could even unravel the Biden presidency. The most damaging impact will be the backlash over how the withdrawal was executed. Biden promised the country that there would be no helicopters “lifting people off the roof of the embassy”. He kept that promise: the American embassy in Kabul has its helipad on the front lawn.
More embarrassing moments will follow. On September 11 2021, 20 years after 9/11, a Taliban flag will be flying over that new $775 million embassy. Thanks to technology not available in the 1970s, the images from Kabul are already unmistakably tinged with failure. Afghans falling off C-17 wheel-wells as the planes take off are no less searing than tank man in Tiananmen Square or falling man on 9/11.
This will be followed by horror stories of Afghans who supported the US, as translators, or host nation staff, being tortured or killed. This in addition to the nearly 30,000 Afghan special forces troops who fought ferociously side by side with US troops and are now being hunted down by the Taliban. The egregious failure to properly plan for their extraction will be a constant and agonizing story for the US over the next six to 12 months.
We know how women were mistreated under the Taliban in the 1990s. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken express false hope that the Taliban will moderate themselves. The American voter, particularly suburban moms, will think otherwise.
In the end, the public will need to come to grips with what brought the US to Afghanistan in 2001: the Taliban’s harboring of terrorists. This weekend, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that he had already begun to revise the date he estimates terrorist organizations will be able to operate freely in Afghanistan and threaten the US and its allies. The US stopped those deadly attacks against our homeland for 20 years thanks to military control of Afghanistan. Should that streak be broken, the public will know who to blame.
Regardless of the facts on the ground, Biden will continue to assert that this was the right withdrawal at the right time. That will not sit well with the electorate. The negative impact on his popularity and the American public’s trust in his leadership and competence will be significant, and it was all self-inflicted. Foreign policy is normally the place where presidents go to mask mistakes at home. Not this time.
Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, once wrote that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”. That harsh assessment may prove even more prescient as we watch this complex foreign policy disaster play out in the region – and eventually at the ballot box.
Frank Luntz is a US pollster. Mark Montgomery was a rear admiral in the US Navy. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by RADM (Ret) Mark Montgomery CCTI Senior Director and Senior Fellow · August 17, 2021
9. Mike Pence: Biden Broke Our Deal With the Taliban
Best tweet ever. We should keep this in mind as we critique the ongoing tragedy.
Jim Ludes
@JMLudes
If your hot take on Afghanistan views these events through an exclusively partisan frame, reducing the human rights calamity happening before our eyes to the latest in American partisan fights, you are part of the problem.
Mike Pence: Biden Broke Our Deal With the Taliban
It’s a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.
The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.
It has embarrassed America on the world stage, caused allies to doubt our dependability, and emboldened enemies to test our resolve. Worst of all, it has dishonored the memory of the heroic Americans who helped bring terrorists to justice after 9/11, and all who served in Afghanistan over the past 20 years.
In February 2020, the Trump administration reached an agreement that required the Taliban to end all attacks on U.S. military personnel, to refuse terrorists safe harbor, and to negotiate with Afghan leaders on creating a new government. As long as these conditions were met, the U.S. would conduct a gradual and orderly withdrawal of military forces.
Unanimously endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, the agreement immediately brought to Afghanistan a stability unseen in decades. In the past 18 months, the U.S. has not suffered a single combat casualty there.
By the time we left office, the Afghan government and the Taliban each controlled their respective territories, neither was mounting major offensives, and America had only 2,500 U.S. troops in the country—the smallest military presence since the war began in 2001.
America’s endless war was coming to a dignified end, and Bagram Air Base ensured we could conduct counterterrorism missions through the war’s conclusion.
The progress our administration made toward ending the war was possible because Taliban leaders understood that the consequences of violating the deal would be swift and severe. After our military took out Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani, and U.S. Special Forces killed the leader of ISIS, the Taliban had no doubt we would keep our promise.
But when Mr. Biden became president, he quickly announced that U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan for an additional four months without a clear reason for doing so. There was no plan to transport the billions of dollars worth of American equipment recently captured by the Taliban, or evacuate the thousands of Americans now scrambling to escape Kabul, or facilitate the regional resettlement of the thousands of Afghan refugees who will now be seeking asylum in the U.S. with little or no vetting. Rather, it seems that the president simply didn’t want to appear to be abiding by the terms of a deal negotiated by his predecessor.
Once Mr. Biden broke the deal, the Taliban launched a major offensive against the Afghan government and seized Kabul. They knew there was no credible threat of force under this president. They’ve seen him kowtow to anti-Semitic terrorist groups like Hamas, restore millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority, and sit by earlier this year while thousands of rockets rained down on Israeli civilians.
Weakness arouses evil—and the magnitude of evil now rising in Afghanistan speaks volumes about the weaknesses of Mr. Biden. To limit the carnage, the president has ordered more troops to Afghanistan, tripling our military presence amid a supposed withdrawal.
After 20 years, more than 2,400 American deaths, 20,000 Americans wounded, and over $2 trillion spent, the American people are ready to bring our troops home.
But the manner in which Mr. Biden has executed this withdrawal is a disgrace, unworthy of the courageous American service men and women whose blood still stains the soil of Afghanistan.
Mr. Pence served as vice president of the United States, 2017-21, and is chairman of Advancing American Freedom.
10.
A powerful essay:
Excerpts:
I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.
For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That’s when I knew today was inevitable.
Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line.
I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for.
And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.
...
One final point. I hold U.S. civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can and did find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the U.S. military is subject to civilian control. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But faced with calls to do so, no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.
Today, as many of those officials enjoy their retirement, who is suffering the cost?
The Ides of August
August 15, 2021
I’ve been silent for a while. I’ve been silent about Afghanistan for longer. But too many things are going unsaid.
I won’t try to evoke the emotions, somehow both swirling and yet leaden: the grief, the anger, the sense of futility. Instead, as so often before, I will use my mind to shield my heart. And in the process, perhaps help you make some sense of what has happened.
For those of you who don’t know me, here is my background — the perspective from which I write tonight.
I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my way into their former capital, Kandahar, in December 2001, a few days after the collapse of their regime. Descending the last great hill into the desert city, I saw a dusty ghost town. Pickup trucks with rocket-launchers strapped to the struts patrolled the streets. People pulled on my militia friends' sleeves, telling them where to find a Taliban weapons cache, or a last hold-out. But most remained indoors.
It was Ramadan. A few days later, at the holiday ending the month-long fast, the pent-up joy erupted. Kites took to the air. Horsemen on gorgeous, caparisoned chargers tore across a dusty common in sprint after sprint, with a festive audience cheering them on. This was Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. There was no panicked rush for the airport.
I reported for a month or so, then passed off to Steve Inskeep, now Morning Edition host. Within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (You can read about that time, and its lessons, in my first two books, The Punishment of Virtue and Thieves of State.)
From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today’s climax of a two-decade long fiasco:
Afghan government corruption, and the U.S. role enabling and reinforcing it. The last speaker of the Afghan parliament, Rahman Rahmani, I recently learned, is a multimillionaire, thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram. Is this the type of government people are likely to risk their lives to defend?
Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.
I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.
For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That’s when I knew today was inevitable.
Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line.
I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for.
And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.
Is that American democracy?
Well…?
Pakistan. The involvement of that country's government -- in particular its top military brass -- in its neighbor’s affairs is the second factor that would determine the fate of the U.S. mission.
You may have heard that the Taliban first emerged in the early 1990s, in Kandahar. That is incorrect. I conducted dozens of conversations and interviews over the course of years, both with actors in the drama and ordinary people who watched events unfold in Kandahar and in Quetta, Pakistan. All of them said the Taliban first emerged in Pakistan.
The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. “Taliban” worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders. They were known as sober, studious, and gentle. These Taliban, according to the ISI messaging, had no interest in government. They just wanted to get the militiamen who infested the city to stop extorting people at every turn in the road.
Both label and message were lies.
Within a few years, Usama bin Laden found his home with the Taliban, in their de facto capital, Kandahar, hardly an hour’s drive from Quetta. Then he organized the 9/11 attacks. Then he fled to Pakistan, where we finally found him, living in a safe house in Abbottabad, practically on the grounds of the Pakistani military academy. Even knowing what I knew, I was shocked. I never expected the ISI to be that brazen.
Meanwhile, ever since 2002, the ISI had been re-configuring the Taliban: helping it regroup, training and equipping units, developing military strategy, saving key operatives when U.S. personnel identified and targeted them. That’s why the Pakistani government got no advance warning of the Bin Laden raid. U.S. officials feared the ISI would warn him.
By 2011, my boss, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Taliban were a “virtual arm of the ISI.”
And now this.
Do we really suppose the Taliban, a rag-tag, disjointed militia hiding out in the hills, as we’ve so long been told, was able to execute such a sophisticated campaign plan with no international backing? Where do we suppose that campaign plan came from? Who gave the orders? Where did all those men, all that materiel, the endless supply of money to buy off local Afghan army and police commanders, come from? How is it that new officials were appointed in Kandahar within a day of the city’s fall? The new governor, mayor, director of education, and chief of police all speak with a Kandahari accent. But no one I know has ever heard of them. I speak with a Kandahari accent, too. Quetta is full of Pashtuns — the main ethic group in Afghanistan — and people of Afghan descent and their children. Who are these new officials?
Over those same years, by the way, the Pakistani military also provided nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. But for two decades, while all this was going on, the United States insisted on considering Pakistan an ally. We still do.
Hamid Karzai. During my conversations in the early 2000s about the Pakistani government’s role in the Taliban’s initial rise, I learned this breathtaking fact: Hamid Karzai, the U.S. choice to pilot Afghanistan after we ousted their regime, was in fact the go-between who negotiated those very Taliban’s initial entry into Afghanistan in 1994.
I spent months probing the stories. I spoke to servants in the Karzai household. I spoke to a former Mujahideen commander, Mullah Naqib, who admitted to being persuaded by the label and the message Karzai was peddling. The old commander also admitted he was at his wits’ end at the misbehavior of his own men. I spoke with his chief lieutenant, who disagreed with his tribal elder and commander, and took his own men off to neighboring Helmand Province to keep fighting. I heard that Karzai’s own father broke with him over his support for this ISI project. Members of Karzai’s household and Quetta neighbors told me about Karzai’s frequent meetings with armed Taliban at his house there, in the months leading up to their seizure of power.
And lo. Karzai abruptly emerges from this vortex, at the head of a “coordinating committee” that will negotiate the Taliban’s return to power? Again?
It was like a repeat of that morning of May, 2011, when I first glimpsed the pictures of the safe-house where Usama bin Laden had been sheltered. Once again — even knowing everything I knew — I was shocked. I was shocked for about four seconds. Then everything seemed clear.
It is my belief that Karzai has been negotiating this surrender just as he did in 1994. This time, he enlisted two lieutenants. Former co-head of the Afghan government, Abdullah Abdullah has credibility with his old battle-buddies, the Mujahideen commanders of the north and west. You may have heard some of their names as they have surrendered their cities in recent days: Ismail Khan, Dostum, Atta Muhammad Noor. The other member of Karzai’s team is Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a bona fide Taliban commander, who has credibility with them and with the ISI. With these men beside him, Karzai had his flanks reinforced.
As Americans have witnessed in our own context — the #MeToo movement, for example, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, or the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — surprisingly abrupt events are often months or years in the quiet making. The abrupt collapse of 20 years’ effort in Afghanistan is, in my view, one of those cases.
Thinking this hypothesis through, I find myself wondering: what role did U.S. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad play? He was the one who ran the negotiations with the Taliban for the Trump Administration, in which the Afghan government was forced to make concession after concession. Could President Biden truly have found no one else for that job than an Afghan-American with obvious conflicts of interest, who was close to former Vice President Dick Cheney and who lobbied in favor of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan when the Taliban were last in power?
Self-Delusion. How many times did you read stories about the Afghan security forces’ steady progress? How often, over the past two decades, did you hear some U.S. official proclaim that the Taliban’s eye-catching attacks in urban settings were signs of their “desperation” and their “inability to control territory?” How many heart-warming accounts did you hear about all the good we were doing, especially for women and girls?
Who were we deluding? Ourselves?
What else are we deluding ourselves about?
One final point. I hold U.S. civilian leadership, across four administrations, largely responsible for today’s outcome. Military commanders certainly participated in the self-delusion. I can and did find fault with generals I worked for or observed. But the U.S. military is subject to civilian control. And the two primary problems identified above — corruption and Pakistan — are civilian issues. They are not problems men and women in uniform can solve. But faced with calls to do so, no top civilian decision-maker was willing to take either of these problems on. The political risk, for them, was too high.
Today, as many of those officials enjoy their retirement, who is suffering the cost?
My warm thanks to all of you who have left comments, for taking the time to write, and for the vibrancy of your concern.
11. Why Was there so little Resistance when Afghanistan Collapsed?
I understand there are areas where elements of Afghan SF and Commandos and some senior political and military leaders are linking up to perhaps fight another day. Resistance may come later. I wonder how much US SF advisors discussed resistance with them during their training and advisory operations with the Afghan SF and commandos?
A question for us is if there is resistance, what will we do?
Why Was there so little Resistance when Afghanistan Collapsed?
AUGUST 17, 2021 | JOHN MCLAUGHLIN
Cipher Brief Expert John E. McLaughlin served as Acting Director of Central Intelligence from July to September 2004 and as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from October 2000 to July 2004. He is the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
OPINION — Among the many questions in the aftermath of the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan, two stand out: How and why did the Afghan security forces collapse so quickly and will the U.S. withdrawal lead to a resurgence of terrorism there?
On the first question, many commentators have expressed astonishment that years of training by U.S. and allied forces, along with the provision of advanced and costly military equipment, did not create a force able to resist the Taliban resurgence. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of war. My views on this were forged in a very different conflict, Vietnam, where I served in the U.S. Army during 1968, the bloodiest year of that war.
I took away the view that in war, training, sophisticated equipment and personal courage are not enough to ensure effective combat performance. In the end, it is all very personal and is about whether you are ready to risk your life to defeat the enemy. You come to that readiness through some combination of four means: strong identification with a cause you support and respect (usually embodied in a government you trust), gifted military leadership you trust that shares those values and inspires you to overcome fear, a government that can compel you to serve with the threat of sanctions and a conviction that you must destroy the adversary to save yourself. When most of those are not present simultaneously, as they seldom were for many South Vietnamese soldiers, the level of bravery, fine training and equipment become close to irrelevant.
Without hard data, I suspect that this was also the situation for many Afghan soldiers, which I say with no intention of questioning their personal courage. To be sure, other factors were also at work. U.S. air support, on which they became vitally dependent, had begun to disappear. And not to be underestimated is these forces’ ability to simply change into civilian clothes and fade away, which is something nearly impossible in tightly structured western armies with long traditions of enforcing such violations of military commitments. I have not served with Afghan units, but I would not be surprised if there was weak identification with national leadership, limited trust in many military commanders and widespread awareness of corruption — always the breeding ground for cynicism in military units.
On the issue of whether terrorists will again take root in a Taliban-governed Afghanistan, it’s virtually certain that the threat from Afghan soil will increase beyond what it has been in the years of U.S. military presence. There has been much discussion of whether to believe or dismiss Taliban claims that they will not again ally with al-Qaida or like-minded groups. But whether there is some formal or informal agreement between the Taliban and al-Qaida or the Islamic State is almost irrelevant. The more important point is that many stretches of this mountainous country will be either ungoverned or un-monitored in the way they constantly were during the period of heavy U.S. presence. That, combined with the lengthy porous border with Pakistan’s least governed regions will give extremists a large field in which to train, plan and plot.
That situation adds to a broader problem conditioning the terrorist threat globally: the fact that there is now more ungoverned — or less tightly controlled — space in the region and in Africa than there was on 9/11. Back then, Afghanistan was wide open for al-Qaida, but there had not yet been a civil war in Syria, an insurgency and its still-unsettled aftermath in Iraq, a revolution in Libya followed by a civil war. All of these opened up space for terrorists that they still use. Egypt and Tunisia, for example, were still tightly controlled by dictators with horrible human rights records enforced by security services that, however despicable their policies, had firmer control of their streets and territory generally. And sub-Saharan Africa had not yet seen the rise of groups such as Boko Haram, al-Shabab, and various Islamic State affiliates.
Does this mean an increased threat to the U.S. homeland? Probably not in the short-term, because of the damage we’ve inflicted on many of these groups and because of the much more effective defenses we’ve erected against penetration of America since 9/11. But over the longer term, we must assume they will work hard to get through such defenses. Charting the surprises terrorists have sprung on us leaves me always humble in estimating the threat they pose. I’m thinking of plots that went awry or were disrupted, but just barely — the 2006 plot to blow up airliners heading over the Atlantic from the U.K., the 2009 “underwear bomber” who almost blew up a plane over Detroit, the 2010 Times Square bomber thwarted by a street seller, the detected plan to place bombs in printer cartridges on transport aircraft. For now, though, what’s most immediately called for is heightened security at U.S. and allied facilities in the region and in Europe.
At this point, Afghanistan is the most fluid situation facing U.S. national security. Our understanding of it and estimates of the future are certain to evolve rapidly. So, the best bottom line right now has to be simply: stay tuned.
This piece by Cipher Brief Expert John McLaughlin was first published by our friends at Ozy.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief.
John E. McLaughlin is the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he teaches a variety of courses and conducts research.
Mr. McLaughlin served as Acting Director of Central Intelligence from July to September 2004 and as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from October 2000 to July 2004. He was a US Army Officer in the 1960s, with service in Vietnam. He comments on foreign... Read More
12. Unrealistic timelines, unsustainable goals made ‘victorious US withdrawal’ from Afghanistan impossible, watchdog finds
Unrealistic timelines, unsustainable goals made ‘victorious US withdrawal’ from Afghanistan impossible, watchdog finds
Body armor and helmets belonging to U.S. Embassy staff lay discarded at Kabul’s military airport, as the staff evacuate Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021. (Phillip Walter Wellman/Stars and Stripes)
WASHINGTON — A “victorious U.S. withdrawal” from Afghanistan was impossible to achieve because the U.S. government created unrealistic timelines to rebuild the country, leading to short-term fixes such as injections of troops, money and resources, according to the watchdog agency created by Congress to provide oversight.
U.S. officials also pushed their own political aims without taking into account what was achievable, a report released Tuesday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, concluded in its final “lessons learned.” By relying on quick-fix solutions, U.S. programs ultimately worsened the issues that they were meant to address.
“By design, these timelines often ignored conditions on the ground and forced reckless compromises in U.S. programs, creating perverse incentives to spend quickly and focus on short-term, unsustainable goals that could not create the conditions to allow a victorious U.S. withdrawal,” according to the report.
The U.S. continued to draw down troops and resources, despite recognizing the Afghan government’s failure to address its instability, the report said.
The government’s unrealistic timelines — devised on the “mistaken” belief that the choices in Washington could “transform the calculus of complex Afghan institutions, powerbrokers and communities contested by the Taliban” — is one of seven lessons explained in the report that the U.S. must learn after almost two decades of war.
Since Congress created SIGAR in the fiscal 2009 National Defense Authorization Act to provide independent oversight on the billions of dollars appropriated for Afghanistan's reconstruction, the inspector general has systematically detailed years of waste, corruption and fraud. In the agency’s last quarterly report, SIGAR chief John Sopko provided a grim outlook on the future of a country that the U.S. has spent 20 years and $145 billion trying to rebuild. The Defense Department has also spent an additional $837 billion on warfighting, during which 2,443 American troops and 1,144 allied troops have been killed and 20,666 U.S. troops injured, according to the report.
On Sunday, Taliban fighters poured into Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul, ending the Afghan government’s rule of the country and signaling the final stage of the U.S. involvement there. Images struck a nerve for many Americans on Monday morning of thousands of desperate Afghans clinging to and chasing after U.S. military aircraft in an attempt to flee the country.
John Sopko has served as special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)
In the midst of the chaos at the airport, the Pentagon deployed additional troops to Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, bringing the total number of U.S. forces expected to be in Afghanistan to roughly 6,000 to assist with evacuations from the country.
The Taliban’s swift takeover of the country in recent days is not surprising, Sopko told NPR. For the last 10 years, SIGAR has shone a light on the Afghan National Security Forces’ weaknesses.
“I think the speed maybe is a little bit of a surprise. But the fact that the [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] could not fight on their own should not have been a surprise to anyone,” he said Monday on NPR.
The SIGAR report issued Tuesday maps out a wide range of U.S. failures that led to the collapse of Afghanistan. The mission in Afghanistan was first tied to the defeat of the terrorist group al-Qaida, but the strategy expanded consistently to cover the destruction of the Taliban and corrupt Afghan officials.
A resulting weak and incoherent strategy by the U.S. government shows it was “simply not equipped to undertake something this ambitious in such an uncompromising environment,” the report concluded.
As the U.S. government built unsustainable infrastructure, billions of reconstruction dollars were wasted, and persistent violence and insecurity undermined all reconstruction efforts. The U.S. also did not understand the country’s social, economic and political dynamics, and attempted to impose Western models of governance onto Afghan economic institutions, the report found.
One of the most “significant failures of the mission” was the government’s inability to attract the right civilian and military personnel, according to the report, as well as retain qualified workers. Many U.S. personnel were poorly trained and unqualified, and there was not enough staff to oversee spending, the report said.
Finally, the report found the U.S. did not conduct adequate monitoring and evaluation to figure out what worked and what didn’t and how to improve, endangering the lives of U.S., Afghan, and coalition government personnel and civilians.
SIGAR officials said in the report that none of the policymakers the agency interviewed found it acceptable to keep the U.S. involved in Afghanistan for 20 years, the actions of these policymakers made it so that the prolonged involvement was inevitable.
“Not only did U.S. officials misjudge in good faith the time and resources required to rebuild Afghanistan, they also prioritized their own political preferences for what Afghanistan’s reconstruction should look like, rather than what they could realistically achieve,” the report said.
U.S. officials felt pressured to demonstrate progress and to increase resources for reconstruction as security crumbled, which accelerated unrealistic goals. Even when officials recognized the timelines had backfired, “they simply found new ways to ignore conditions on the ground,” the report said.
In one “short-term solution,” shortly after former President Barack Obama took office in December 2009, he ordered an 18-month surge of troops, money and resources into Afghanistan. The timeline was “sprung” onto U.S. Central Command, the report said, and commanders were given two days of notice prior to Obama’s announcement.
“The U.S. government ‘set in motion a series of events that fostered unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved in a few years and ensured the U.S. government’s stabilization strategy would not succeed,’ ” SIGAR said in its latest report, citing one of the agency’s earlier reports.
Between 2009 and 2010, spending in Afghanistan spiked more than 50%, though the U.S. had shown it could not manage their previous levels of funding.
“Enormous pressure to demonstrate progress to the Congress and the American and Afghan people distorted accountability systems into spin machines. There was little appetite for honest assessments of what worked and what did not,” the report said.
The administration of former President Donald Trump “still continued its predecessor’s tendency to draw down troops and resources with little concern for conditions on the ground,” despite the U.S. and the Taliban reaching a peace deal in February 2020 to complete the U.S. withdrawal of troops in exchange for commitments from the Taliban to continue negotiations with the Afghan government.
The report concludes a cascade of government decisions resulted in a counterproductive cycle in which “short-term goals generated short timelines, which created new problems that could only be addressed by more short-term goals.”
When all else failed, the U.S. government decided to pull out all of its troops, another short-term goal, without taking into consideration how that would impact the reconstruction mission and the personnel necessary to continue security assistance in Afghanistan.
Sarah Cammarata
13. Navy SEAL Commander in Kabul Getting Bolstered by 82nd Airborne
I hope he is recommending the August 31st deadline be extended until the NEO is 100% complete. I cannot imagine any American military leader or diplomat getting on a plane on August 31st to leave if there are still Americans and at-risk Afghans left behind. It will not be the same as MacArthur being ordered to leave Corregidor.
Navy SEAL Commander in Kabul Getting Bolstered by 82nd Airborne
August 17, 2021, 4:33 PM EDT
- Rear Admiral Peter Vasely received assignment in early July
- U.S. aims to evacuate as many as 9,000 people per day soon
Peter Vasely Source: U.S. Department of Defense
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The top U.S. commander in Kabul is a 30-year veteran and Navy SEAL who had a key leadership role at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Now with help from the 82nd Airborne he’s trying to keep Kabul’s airport operating after Afghans fleeing the Taliban clung to U.S. military planes.
Rear Admiral Peter Vasely used to be a member of Seal Team 6, the elite Navy unit best known for killing former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. His responsibilities in Kabul include ensuring Taliban forces around the airport don’t disrupt plans to get Americans and allies out of the country and completing a U.S. troop withdrawal by Aug. 31.
It’s not exactly the job Vasely, 54, expected in early July when he was named by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to lead a new command meant to protect U.S. diplomats after combat forces left Afghanistan.
At the time, most Afghan experts thought a possible Taliban takeover of the country would take months or longer. The U.S. embassy was still staffed and officials were handing over Bagram Air Base, the sprawling headquarters of American military operations in the country, to the Afghan defense forces. The U.S. spent more than $80 billion training those forces over two decades.
Now Bagram is in Taliban hands and the U.S. embassy is shuttered, with the American flag ceremonially lowered and transferred to the military side of Hamid Karzai International Airport, where the scenes of chaos on Monday prompted President Joe Biden to defend his decision to pull troops out.
Military officials under Vasely’s command have been having “multiple interactions a day” with the Taliban commanders to keep the airport secure and running, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday, without saying who specifically leads those talks.
Vasely had already been in Afghanistan, slated to lead special operations there before Biden announced his plans for the withdrawal. Biden’s move delayed by three months a deal former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban last year.
“He was available. He had the experience,” Marine General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told the Washington Post during a visit earlier this year to Afghanistan. “I know and trust him.”
Vasely isn’t alone in trying to restore order at the Kabul airport: thousands of U.S. troops, part of the 82nd Airborne division out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are pouring back into the Afghan capital this week to bolster his effort. More than 4,000 were expected to be in place by Tuesday evening, the Pentagon said.
6,000 Troops
The 82nd was picked for the job because of its expertise in airfield and seaport seizure, and because it is trained to deploy on 18 hours’ notice.
Major General Chris Donahue will lead that division on the ground. Backed by an eventual 6,000 troops, his job will be to ensure that the military can keep the airport secure and ramp up operations to one flight per hour by Wednesday, with a total of 5,000 to 9,000 evacuees leaving each day, Kirby and Army Major General Hank Taylor told reporters Tuesday.
American officials want to avoid any repeat of Monday’s events at the airfield, when some Afghans died trying to hold on to a C-17 cargo plane, or hide in its wheel wells, an event now under investigation by the U.S.
Donahue, a West Point graduate, has deployed 17 times in support of operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, according to his Army biography.
Talking to the Taliban
With an Aug. 31 deadline to get U.S. citizens and forces out of Afghanistan, Donahue and Vasely have little time to ensure operations run smoothly at the Kabul airport. For now, they’ve reached a working relationship with Taliban commanders in the area.
“There’s been no hostile interactions” from the Taliban so far, Pentagon spokesman Kirby said. “Thus far the results are speaking for themselves.”
14. Opinion | Condoleezza Rice: The Afghan people didn’t choose the Taliban. They fought and died alongside us.
With all due respect to the former Secretary, the more we invoke Korean comparison the more our Korean allies raise questions about our alliance. You correctly say Afghanistan is not Korea but then invoke a Korea comparison.
Afghanistan is not South Korea. But we might have achieved a reasonable outcome with a far smaller commitment. More time for the Afghans didn’t have to entail combat troops, just a core American presence for training, air support and intelligence.
More time for us might have retained American intelligence and counterterrorism assets on the ground to protect our allies and our homeland from the reemergence of a terrorist haven. More time might have preserved our sophisticated Bagram air base in the middle of a dangerous region that includes Pakistan and borders the most dangerous country in the Middle East — Iran.
More time would have served our strategic interests.
But we cannot turn back the clock. We can't go back to Afghanistan and execute any of the recommended (and rejected) courses of action. We will be wringing our hands for a long time over this. There are only two things we can do now to salvage US strategic interests. Leave no one behind and move forward to reinforce our alliances and effectively compete with the revisionist and rogue powers (who are already trying to exploit our strategic decisions in Afghanistan),
Opinion | Condoleezza Rice: The Afghan people didn’t choose the Taliban. They fought and died alongside us.
Condoleezza Rice was secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 and national security adviser from 2001 to 2005. She is director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
The past years in Afghanistan have been difficult for every president, our armed forces, our allies and our country. The sacrifices of those who served — and those who died — will forever sear our national memory.
Each of us who held positions of authority over those years made mistakes — not because we didn’t try or were heedless of the challenges. But the United States could not afford to ignore the rogue state that harbored those who attacked us on 9/11. The time will come to assess where we failed — and what we achieved.
In the wake of Kabul’s fall, though, a corrosive and deeply unfair narrative is emerging: to blame the Afghans for how it all ended. The Afghan security forces failed. The Afghan government failed. The Afghan people failed. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future,” President Biden said in his address Monday — as if the Afghans had somehow chosen the Taliban.
No — they didn’t choose the Taliban. They fought and died alongside us, helping us degrade al-Qaeda. Working with the Afghans and our allies, we gained time to build a counterterrorism presence around the world and a counterterrorism apparatus at home that has kept us safe. In the end, the Afghans couldn’t hold the country without our airpower and our support. It is not surprising that Afghan security forces lost the will to fight, when the Taliban warned that the United States was deserting them and that those who resisted would see their families killed.
No — they didn’t choose the Taliban. They seized the chance to create a modern society where girls could attend school, women could enter professions and human rights would be respected.
No — they didn’t choose the Taliban. They built a fledgling democracy with elected leaders who often failed but didn’t brutalize their people as so many regimes in the region do. It was a government that never managed to tame corruption and the drug trade. In this, Afghanistan had plenty of company across the globe.
Twenty years was not enough to complete a journey from the 7th-century rule of the Taliban and a 30-year civil war to a stable government. Twenty years may also not have been enough to consolidate our gains against terrorism and assure our own safety. We — and they — needed more time.
We have understood this before. Technically, our longest war is not Afghanistan: It is Korea. That war didn’t end in victory; it ended in a stalemate — an armistice. South Korea did not achieve democracy for decades. Seventy years later, we have more than 20,000 American troops there in an admission that even the sophisticated South Korean army cannot deter the North alone. Here’s what we achieved: a stable equilibrium on the Korean Peninsula, a valuable South Korean ally and a strong presence in the Indo-Pacific.
Afghanistan is not South Korea. But we might have achieved a reasonable outcome with a far smaller commitment. More time for the Afghans didn’t have to entail combat troops, just a core American presence for training, air support and intelligence.
More time for us might have retained American intelligence and counterterrorism assets on the ground to protect our allies and our homeland from the reemergence of a terrorist haven. More time might have preserved our sophisticated Bagram air base in the middle of a dangerous region that includes Pakistan and borders the most dangerous country in the Middle East — Iran.
More time would have served our strategic interests.
We did not want to give ourselves or the Afghans more time. Understood. But we were in such a hurry that we left in the middle of the fighting season. We know that the Taliban retreats in the winter. Might we have waited until then and given the Afghans a little more time to develop a strategy to prevent the chaotic fall of Kabul?
Now we have to live with the consequences of our haste.
We must do everything we can to mobilize regional allies and the international community to temper the nature of Taliban rule. Let us hope that Taliban leaders mean it when they say they will not brutalize the population as they did before.
Meantime, the administration cannot simply state that our credibility is intact — it is not. Credibility is not divisible, and China, Russia and Iran have taken our measure. The pictures of the past few days will emblazon an image of America in retreat. Now is the time to reinforce our commitment to Ukraine, Iraq and particularly Taiwan.
And as we relive the fall of Saigon, there is one page that is worth repeating. We rescued thousands of South Vietnamese who had helped us and were endangered. We did not get them all, and many suffered at the hands of the North. But the ones we did relocate, their children and grandchildren, contribute daily to strengthening the fabric of America. They are businesspeople, educators, government officials — and soldiers in the American armed forces who enlisted after 9/11.
If we do nothing else, we must urgently provide refuge for the Afghans who believed in us. We must demonstrate that we still believe in them.
15. A philosophy professor breaks down why the US has a moral responsibility for the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan
Excerpts:
There are at least two things that might follow this moral vision. The first is that, even if the withdrawal entails taking ownership of some moral wrongs, the United States has an obligation to ensure that such wrong is minimized.
It might therefore be obligated to provide refuge to those people who have borne particular risks in the name of the United States, such as the translators who worked on the military bases within Afghan territory and have been targeted by the Taliban for their work.
The second is, more broadly, that the US tries to avoid entering into such morally tragic situations in the future. If Walzer's analysis is correct, it might be impossible to avoid situations in which the United States is responsible for serious moral wrongs. Having power over others always involves the risk of moral bad luck, and the US has exceptional power in the global community.
But it might at least be expected that the United States, in future conflicts, take account of what philosopher Brian Orend calls justice after war and enters into such conflicts only with some clarity about how and when to end them well.
A philosophy professor breaks down why the US has a moral responsibility for the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan
Afghanis climbing over the Kabul Airport fence in Afghanistan.STRINGER/Reuters
- Michael Blake is a political philosopher in Washington whose work focuses on international affairs.
- He says although withdrawing from Afghanistan was supported by many, it'll likely lead to great suffering.
- Staying could have endangered US troops, but Blake the US is obligated to ensure that wrongs are minimized.
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Chaotic scenes in Kabul accompanied the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The fundamentalist Islamic group was able to retake power after President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw the remaining US troops from the country.
Without the ongoing prospect of US military support, the Washington-backed Afghan government quickly fell — and within days, the Taliban announced they will rename the country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The withdrawal was widely popular in the United States, when first announced by Biden on April 14 — the majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, favored an end to the military presence in Afghanistan.
The withdrawal, however, has brought significant costs for the people of Afghanistan. The Taliban has proved itself willing to engage in widespread violation of basic human rights — in particular, the human rights of women. The decision to withdraw is likely to lead to enormous suffering in the years to come. A hypothetical decision to remain in Afghanistan, however, would also have led to significant moral costs — that decision would continue to put American soldiers in harm's way. As a political philosopher whose work focuses on international affairs, I have tried to understand how ethical reasoning might be applied to such cases.
The first, and most important, ethical question might be: Was the United States justified in withdrawing its troops?
A second question might involve asking about how the moral wrongs that are now emerging in Afghanistan should weigh upon the American conscience. Should American political leaders regard these wrongs as, in some fashion, their responsibility?
More broadly, is it sometimes possible that, in doing the best available thing, we are nonetheless guilty of doing something morally wrong?
Power and moral tragedy
Many philosophers have disliked the idea that someone might make the best choice available and nonetheless be thought to have committed a moral wrong. Immanuel Kant, for one, thought this vision was fundamentally in conflict with the purposes of morality — which is to tell people what it is they ought to do.
If a moral theory told us that sometimes there's no option open to us that doesn't involve doing wrong, then that theory would sometimes imply that even a perfect moral agent might end up having to become a wrongdoer.
That sort of theory would mean that there might be situations in which we could not escape from doing wrong. If we were unlucky enough to end up in those situations, we would become liable for wrongdoing because of this bad luck. Kant thought this sort of "moral luck" was simply implausible. For Kant, if we do what's best, we can regard ourselves as having avoided doing wrong.
Other philosophers, however, have been more willing to entertain the possibility of moral tragedy, which is understood as a state of affairs in which all options open to us involve serious moral wrongdoing.
Michael Walzer, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, argues that those who exercise power over others may frequently find themselves unable to do good for some without doing serious wrong to others. Instead of thinking that the good they do outweighs the wrong, Walzer argues, individuals ought to accept that the wrong continues to be a genuine wrong.
For example, the politician who must make a deal with a corrupt colleague in order to help protect vulnerable children does wrong in the name of a greater good. This individual does their best but nonetheless stains their soul in the doing.
On this view, politicians who do wrong while trying to do what's right may do the best thing, but they should also be understood as having done wrong, and having stained their consciences in the doing. For Walzer, it's difficult for a person to be both good at politics and a genuinely good person.
Afghanistan and moral responsibility
If Walzer is right about politicians, his analysis might also help in understanding the morality of international relations — and the morality of the American decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Taken in this context, the benefits of withdrawal may have been sufficient to make it the right act. However, the human rights violations that are now very likely to follow in the aftermath of this withdrawal are genuinely wrong, and they are rightly attributed to the United States.
The women and girls of Afghanistan are likely to face abuses, and the inhabitants of Afghanistan will likely face significant violence as the Taliban seek to reassert their vision of religious law. This ought to trouble the politicians who defended the withdrawal, and those voters who gave power to those politicians.
This vision of international politics is echoed in former Secretary of State Colin Powell's advice to then-President George W. Bush about the invasion of Iraq — codified as the "Pottery Barn rule" after the perceived store policy: If "you break it, you bought it." That is: If you make yourself the ruler over others, you're responsible for them, and what happens to them should be on your conscience.
There are at least two things that might follow this moral vision. The first is that, even if the withdrawal entails taking ownership of some moral wrongs, the United States has an obligation to ensure that such wrong is minimized.
It might therefore be obligated to provide refuge to those people who have borne particular risks in the name of the United States, such as the translators who worked on the military bases within Afghan territory and have been targeted by the Taliban for their work.
The second is, more broadly, that the US tries to avoid entering into such morally tragic situations in the future. If Walzer's analysis is correct, it might be impossible to avoid situations in which the United States is responsible for serious moral wrongs. Having power over others always involves the risk of moral bad luck, and the US has exceptional power in the global community.
But it might at least be expected that the United States, in future conflicts, take account of what philosopher Brian Orend calls justice after war and enters into such conflicts only with some clarity about how and when to end them well.
16. Cobra blood is off the training menu for US troops, PETA says
A PETA victory? You would think they would find more important things to try to protect. This is and always has been a publicity stunt. Of course on the military side it had always been publicized as a unique part of local cultural training which of course is what tipped off PETA to the training so I guess we only have ourselves to blame..
Cobra blood is off the training menu for US troops, PETA says
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on June 3, 2021, protested the killing of king cobras during the U.S.-Thai military exercise Cobra Gold. The protest took place outside the embassy of Thailand in Washington, D.C. (Caitlin Doornbos/Stars and Stripes)
The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals declared victory this week after the practice of drinking the blood of cobras was axed from the multinational Cobra Gold military exercise in Thailand.
Killing the snakes to demonstrate a jungle survival technique was scuttled at the exercise earlier this month, PETA announced Monday, citing unnamed Thai military sources. The nonprofit, based in Norfolk, Va., spent years lobbying against a practice it called “frat boy-style barbarity.”
“We are proud that after PETA’s intensive campaigning, Thai and U.S. armed forces made the ethical and safe decision to not kill any animals during this year’s Cobra Gold exercises, apparently for the first time in the event’s history,” PETA vice president of international laboratory methods Shalin Gala wrote in an email Wednesday to Stars and Stripes. “This move means that this year troops were no longer made to eat live animals or drink the blood of beheaded snakes, which is a win-win, sparing animals and protecting public health.”
The III Marine Expeditionary Force, which is based in Okinawa, Japan, and usually participates in Cobra Gold, did not respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday.
PETA began campaigning in 2020 against the military killing cobras at Cobra Gold after the images came to their attention, Gala said. The group discovered that troops and instructors also killed chickens with their bare hands, skinned and ate live geckos and ate live scorpions and tarantulas.
Gala said the group was concerned about the poor treatment of animals, but also about the health of the service members.
The practice poses “a serious zoonotic disease threat,” a group of 19 military veterans and PETA supporters wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on July 22.
“The World Health Organization has warned that ‘an estimated 70 percent of emerging and re-emerging pathogens’ — such as those that have caused the current COVID-19 pandemic, along with Ebola, Zika, SARS, MERS, smallpox, tuberculosis, and others — originated in animals,” the letter said. “It’s irresponsible to jeopardize our service members’ health and safety during these bloodlust exercises.”
PETA complained in writing to Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Navy Inspector General Vice Admiral John Fuller and Thai officials.
“These actions likely influenced the Cobra Gold organizers to reconsider the ritualistic bloodlust killing of animals this year,” he said. “This is an important victory for ensuring that troops can learn survival techniques without having to mutilate and kill animals.”
Better jungle survival methods can be taught that do not include the killing of animals, he said.
Gala wrote that PETA would monitor future exercises to ensure the practice is not resurrected.
Cobra Gold typically takes place in the winter months and is one of the largest multinational exercises in the Indo-Pacific region. In addition to U.S. soldiers and Marines, thousands of troops from over 24 nations also take part.
Last year, approximately 5,500 U.S. service personnel participated in activities ranging from amphibious assaults to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok said at the time.
This year’s 40th iteration was pushed back to July and August, and some activities were canceled, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Bangkok Post reported July 2. It said only 600 U.S. troops took part.
Matthew M. Burke
17. To China, Afghan Fall Proves U.S. Hubris. It Also Brings New Dangers.
Excerpts:
Given those concerns, China seems unlikely to move quickly to recognize the Taliban’s seizure of power. A week before the collapse of the Afghan government, officials from China, the United States, Russia and Pakistan met in Qatar to discuss a path forward. It is not yet clear whether countries will choose to negotiate with the Taliban or rather repeat efforts to isolate them, as happened after they seized power in 1996.
China’s statements suggest that it first wants clarity about the political future of Afghanistan and whether the Taliban will fulfill their security promises. Ms. Hua, the spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said Tuesday that the Taliban should “pursue a moderate and prudent religious policy,” and “work with other parties to form an open and inclusive political structure.”
Even if Beijing decides to more actively support Afghanistan, it should do so only under the auspices of the United Nations and regional groupings, said Wu Baiyi, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
“Relying on one great power to solve Afghanistan’s problems won’t work,” Mr. Wu said. “We’re all in common absorbing the lessons of the past 40 years. We can’t carry on like that.”
To China, Afghan Fall Proves U.S. Hubris. It Also Brings New Dangers.
By Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers
The Taliban’s return to power is no victory for Beijing, which faces the threat of extremism and an American military no longer bogged down by the “war on terror.”
A Taliban fighter in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Wednesday. China has been scrambling to judge how the American defeat in Afghanistan could reshape the contest between the world’s two great powers.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Aug. 18, 2021Updated 5:26 a.m. ET
For China’s leaders, the chaotic scenes unfolding in Afghanistan have served as stinging vindication of their hostility to American might. “The last dusk of empire,” China’s official news agency said. The Chinese foreign ministry called it a lesson in “reckless military adventures.”
Any smugness in Beijing could be premature. China is now left scrambling to judge how the American defeat could reshape the contest between the world’s two great powers. While the Taliban’s rout has weakened American prestige and its influence on China’s western frontier, it could also create new geopolitical dangers and security risks.
Officials in Beijing worry that extremists could use Afghanistan to regroup on China’s flank and sow violence around the region, even as the Taliban look to deep-pocketed countries like China for aid and investment. The American military withdrawal could also allow the United States to direct its planning and matériel toward countering Chinese power across Asia.
“There should be anxiety rather than glee in Beijing,” said John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul. “The U.S. is at last extricating itself from an unpopular, unwinnable war in a geopolitically peripheral theater. Ending the military presence in Afghanistan frees up resources and attention to focus on the long-term rivalry with China.”
The two-decade American effort to build a functioning democratic government in Afghanistan crumbled far faster than the world expected. The Chinese government criticized what it called a hasty, ill-planned withdrawal by the Americans, which has upended hopes that the Taliban would build a broader governing coalition before taking power.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy leader of the Taliban, left, was warmly greeted by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin in July.Credit...Li Ran/Xinhua, via Associated Press
“Wherever the United States sets foot, be it Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan, we see turbulence, division, broken families, deaths and other scars,” Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a regular news briefing this week.
How China engages the Taliban will be closely watched well beyond Afghanistan. Governments across the world are grappling with the new rulers there, especially their promises that they will pursue more moderate policies and stop any violence spilling abroad. China, Afghanistan’s richest and most powerful neighbor, will be particularly attentive to how a Taliban-led government performs.
China says it has won assurances from the Taliban that Afghan territory will not be used as a staging ground for attacks inside China, but its sway over the group is unclear.
“Although the Taliban has made promises, there is still great uncertainty about the extent to which they will be fulfilled,” Zhu Yongbiao, the director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at Lanzhou University in northwest China, said in a telephone interview.
“I think Chinese influence over the Afghanistan issue has been overestimated,” he said. “The United States finally thinks that after pulling its forces out of Afghanistan, this mess will become one for China. I find that a bit baffling.”
A man in Beijing on Tuesday reading an article about the downfall of Afghanistan in Global Times, a Chinese state-backed nationalist tabloid.
For China, a lot is at stake. If the Taliban victory leads to a surge of regional instability, it could disrupt China’s “Belt and Road” program to finance and build infrastructure across the region, which has largely sidestepped Afghanistan because of the war. Beijing is concerned about the security of other countries near Afghanistan: Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. An attack last month on a bus carrying Chinese workers in Pakistan, killing nine of them, has since been attributed to assailants operating from inside Afghanistan.
“All of their concerns are magnified by this outcome,” said Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States who studies China’s relations with Afghanistan, referring to Beijing’s view.
“They worry that it will have a kind of inspirational effect, with the country becoming a permissive environment for the groups they most worry about,” he said.
The American pullout will also allow the United States to refocus its attention on Beijing. President Biden made it clear that the war in Afghanistan — however chaotic its denouement — had for too long distracted the country from larger geopolitical priorities.
“Our true strategic competitors — China and Russia — would love nothing more than the United States to continue to funnel billions of dollars in resources and attention into stabilizing Afghanistan indefinitely,” Mr. Biden said at the White House on Monday.
Twenty years ago, the swift American toppling of the Taliban following the attacks of Sept. 11 was seen by China as a worrisome demonstration of military power near its border, but it also provided a kind of relief.
Livestock grazing in the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan, near the Chinese border. The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan magnifies China’s security concerns.
Until then, President George W. Bush had appeared eager to carry out his campaign pledges to curb China. He voiced support for Taiwan, the self-ruled island claimed by Beijing, and criticized China’s manipulation of trade rules at the expense of American companies.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Card 1 of 5
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. They are emerging now from obscurity, but little is known about them or how they plan to govern.
How did the Taliban gain control? See how the Taliban took control in Afghanistan and erased 20 years of defense in a few months.
After Sept. 11, though, as the United States sought Chinese support for its war in Afghanistan, it agreed to designate as a terrorist organization a group of Uyghur fighters from Xinjiang, China’s far western region, which shares a short, mountainous border with Afghanistan. According to the United Nations, the Uyghur group, known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, once maintained links to Al Qaeda and was responsible for a number of violent incidents, including several in Xinjiang in the late 1990s that killed a total of 140 people.
“Every time it looks like the U.S. is going to be able to focus seriously on China, something gets in the way,” Mr. Small, the researcher at the German Marshall Fund, said. “You’ve had this succession of crises that have given China additional space, and Afghanistan has been a constant. When American forces and lives are at stake, that just dominates.”
The question is what China will do now. While some expect China to step unto the breach created by the American withdrawal, Beijing is deeply wary of wading into Afghan political and military conflicts that have dragged down the United States and Soviet Union.
China’s unofficial contacts with the Taliban date to the 1990s, and officials from Beijing stayed in touch with the group in the past two decades, largely to urge the Taliban not to support attacks in Xinjiang.
A street in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang in 2019. After Sept. 11, the United States agreed to designate a Uyghur group that once maintained links to Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization, to gain support from China in the war in Afghanistan.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
Those contacts have lately served China well. The Chinese Embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, has stayed open after the Taliban takeover. Even so, China has showed no eagerness to step up its involvement in Afghanistan under its new rulers.
“In Chinese discussions about Afghanistan, you will often hear that phrase, ‘the graveyard of empires,’” said Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. “I think their concern is that instability in Afghanistan gets spread north and south, and that’s a bigger problem for them. It could destabilize their entire back region.”
Given those concerns, China seems unlikely to move quickly to recognize the Taliban’s seizure of power. A week before the collapse of the Afghan government, officials from China, the United States, Russia and Pakistan met in Qatar to discuss a path forward. It is not yet clear whether countries will choose to negotiate with the Taliban or rather repeat efforts to isolate them, as happened after they seized power in 1996.
China’s statements suggest that it first wants clarity about the political future of Afghanistan and whether the Taliban will fulfill their security promises. Ms. Hua, the spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said Tuesday that the Taliban should “pursue a moderate and prudent religious policy,” and “work with other parties to form an open and inclusive political structure.”
Even if Beijing decides to more actively support Afghanistan, it should do so only under the auspices of the United Nations and regional groupings, said Wu Baiyi, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
“Relying on one great power to solve Afghanistan’s problems won’t work,” Mr. Wu said. “We’re all in common absorbing the lessons of the past 40 years. We can’t carry on like that.”
Liu Yi and Claire Fu contributed research.
18. Leaving Afghanistan was America’s Most Moral Choice
Excerpts:
This cuts into a set of deeper moral issues for the United States. It is right for us to wish the people of other lands well and at times to help them. Indifference would be a failure of solidarity—a denial of our common humanity. But a solidarity-only ethic denies subsidiarity. Humans are not abstractions—rational souls floating in the void. We are incarnate. We live in particular times, places, and cultures. These particularities impose duties on us—to our family and polity—that are more immediate than our duties to humanity at large. It is natural and just that Americans rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and not after, say, the fall of Mekelle or Kilinochchi. The Afghan state and its security forces bore the same duties to Afghanistan—duties they abandoned. Thus President Joe Biden’s statement Monday: “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not.”
Behind all this, we must remember that the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place because we were victims. The de facto government of Afghanistan hosted a notorious international terrorist group. That group then killed thousands within the United States. We drove out this government and replaced it with a better one. We then spent nearly two decades strengthening the new government and providing reconstruction aid. We sacrificed thousands of our troops’ lives. We went above and beyond any reasonable duty that could be imposed on a victim of aggression. Was Abyssinia obliged to rebuild post-Mussolini Italy? How many decades of support did China owe post-Imperial Japan?
The moral stain of Afghanistan’s chaos does splatter us. Yet continuing the conflict had moral costs of its own. Withdrawal critics have often ignored or downplayed these costs, but thanks to the withdrawal, these are costs the United States will no longer pay.
Leaving Afghanistan was America’s Most Moral Choice
The moral stain of Afghanistan’s chaos does splatter us. Yet continuing the conflict had moral costs of its own. Withdrawal critics have often ignored or downplayed these costs, but thanks to the withdrawal, these are costs the United States will no longer pay.
“Afghanistan,” wrote Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands in 2019, “is best seen not as a morality play but as a classic foreign policy dilemma in which all the options are bad ones.” The tragic scenes unfolding in the country this week must be understood in this context. Some pundits are proclaiming that the U.S. withdrawal was an evil act and that continued U.S. participation in the conflict was clearly the morally superior choice. They hold that the ongoing U.S. presence was cheap—their view of tens of U.S. casualties and tens of billions of U.S. dollars per year. Their position ignores the high moral costs of remaining in the war, our duties to our own nation, and the profound moral failures of our partner government. Afghanistan was a land of nasty tradeoffs that any moral declamations must reckon with. These are tradeoffs that we will no longer be making.
The price of fighting
Above all we must remember that war is a morally costly activity. Even the most careful and well-intentioned major military operation will kill many civilians, displace many more, and devastate civilian property. This was especially true in Afghanistan. Like many insurgent forces, the Taliban do not wear uniforms and can operate in civilian areas. As the conflict grew more unpopular, the U.S. assistance mission had turned to airstrikes to keep the Taliban at bay while keeping U.S. casualties down. This had driven up civilian casualties. With the Taliban growing in strength and the regular Afghan military hesitant to fight without air support, these casualties would likely have remained high.
Fighting in the conflict had been heavily concentrated in rural areas; Kabul had been safer for the common Afghan. And our view of Afghanistan is heavily shaped by Kabul—it is more accessible to journalists, especially Western journalists, and is home to many English-speaking professionals. This is the part of the country that had benefited the most from the establishment of the 2001-2021 Afghan government. As Brookings’ Vanda Felbab-Brown, writing with former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan John R. Allen, pointed out, drawing on survey work she had done in Afghanistan,
Urban women may prefer for fighting to go on, particularly as urban areas are much less affected by the warfare than are rural areas, and their male relatives, particularly of elite families, rarely bear the battlefield fighting risks. For them, the continuation and augmentation of war has been far less costly than for many rural women.
It is unsurprising that the media’s parachute regiment thus found a country eager to continue the war, eager to have American forces remain and American airstrikes continue—and a country that would change profoundly under new rulers.
The picture in rural areas was more complicated, Felbab-Brown and Allen wrote:
For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much from the Taliban era, formal legal empowerment notwithstanding. They are still fully dependent on men in their families for permission to access health care, attend school, and work. […] Afghan women in rural areas—where an estimated 76 percent of the country’s women live—experience the devastation of bloody and intensifying fighting between the Taliban and government forces and local militias. Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generates not only psychological trauma for them, but also fundamentally jeopardizes their economic survival and ability to go about everyday life.
What does that add up to? They write: “peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms.” Felbab-Brown’s survey is not the only data point here. 2018 saw a public peace movement in Afghanistan, one that pressured Taliban and government alike, with demonstrators marching barefoot hundreds of miles through dangerous terrain to show support for a peace process. Voices like the rural women or the peace marchers do not fit in a clean narrative of good and evil, of a battle between miniskirted modernity and bearded barbarism. The war was costing Afghanistan tens of thousands of lives and regular mass displacement, and many Afghans had come to favor peace at any price.
The price for America
The war’s cost for the United States was high, too, even if it wasn’t like that of Vietnam or World War II. U.S. casualties would surely have followed had we broken the Doha Agreement that had kept the Taliban off our backs for more than a year. Too many in Washington see our side of the war as an abstraction and speak of U.S. involvement in conflicts in euphemisms like “kinetic action,” “presence,” or “light footprint.” Consider, then, this recent Associated Press profile of a chaplain who had spent the War on Terror caring for the families of U.S. war dead and for the mortuary technicians who prepared bodies for funerals:
Some families seem to sink into a catatonia that he knows means he should give them space. Others come clutching photos of the lost or otherwise tip [him] off that his conversation might help. […] Sometimes, he’ll find a child hasn’t been told why they’re there. Others pose wrenching questions, like a boy who asked the minister who would play catch with him now that his father was gone. […] The work can bring some of the steeliest to crumble. He’s seen drivers who transported families of the dead bawling and embalmers who reached their breaking point and found a new profession. A handful of times over the years, a mortuary staffer has died by suicide or suffered through an attempt.
The war had also produced a swarm of veterans bearing physical, mental, and moral injuries. Some came back as different people. Some hid their problems in alcohol or drugs. Some died by their own hand. And even the many who came back well lost time with family—something that surely has been one factor in the many divorces in the military community.
There was also a military cost to the war. Time spent preparing for deployment, deploying, and redeploying is time unavailable for training more relevant to current U.S. security needs. Our air forces have spent the last two decades flying racetracks over places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, waiting to be called for a strike; they spent the decade before that enforcing the no-fly zones over Iraq. All that time, effort, and money went into present-tense consumption of military power, not future-tense development of military power. We spent the first decades of the “Pacific Century” using land power, not building sea power. We operated in uncontested airspace with persistent surveillance and reliable communications, an environment nothing like what we’ll confront in a major power war. Our military was eating its seed corn; China’s was putting every last kernel in the ground. That fact has a moral reality, too. Every day it looks more and more likely that U.S.-China relations will define the middle of the century. Our military is less prepared to play its part in that. In conflict, that could end up costing us more dead in a few hours than we’ve lost in Afghanistan in a few decades. It could make that conflict more likely.
And, of course, the war’s financial cost was nothing to sneeze at. We were slated to spend $14 billion this year, and, as RAND’s Michael Mazarr pointed out, this number could have climbed if we’d stayed and the Taliban had continued to advance. That means we would be spending around what the federal government spends every year on children’s health insurance. It’s about half of what we spend on health research and training. It’s roughly what the Navy spends on shipbuilding or the amount the Navy and Air Force each separately spend on buying aircraft. It’s about the value of United Airlines. And it’s certainly a big amount for a country to be sending abroad when more than two million of its own citizens don’t have running water or indoor plumbing.
A bad government
Working with the Afghan government had a moral price, too. We had to overlook a lot of corruption—much of which was fueled by the money we pumped into Afghanistan. Uprooting that corruption would have been akin to uprooting the Afghan system. We had to overlook massive poppy production—and when we fought it, we pushed money toward the Taliban. We had to overlook pedophilic kidnappings by Afghan military leaders. We had to overlook nasty partners like General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who once suffocated hundreds of prisoners of war and who has twice caused political crises by kidnapping and torturing high-profile rivals. U.S.-backed strike teams and militias were no strangers to serious abuses too.
The Afghan military and Afghanistan’s political leaders bear the most moral responsibility, after the Taliban, for the situation in the country now. After decades of fighting, these men gave up and cut deals with the Taliban. Those who wanted to stand their ground found themselves isolated and abandoned by their comrades in arms. Pundits may speak of Biden abandoning the women of Afghanistan. This is navel-gazing. The women of Afghanistan were abandoned by their husbands, sons, and fathers. The Afghan military’s surrender was an act of cowardice and injustice against their own country and their fellow citizens. We would be outraged if our military did this to us. To be sure, the United States could have better prepared for Kabul’s fall, and there have been ignominious moments in the withdrawal—see the aerial evacuation of dogs, for example. But the ugly scenes at Kabul’s airport would not have happened had the Afghan military held its ground.
The higher levels of Afghanistan’s military leadership failed, too. They obviously did not prepare a competent fighting force. Their corruption certainly helped with that—some frontline personnel had not been paid in months, and many lacked supplies. Yet they also failed to deploy what they had well. All of Afghanistan’s major cities fell in a matter of days because the Taliban had methodically cut them off, one by one, in the preceding weeks and months. The Afghan military lost everything because it had tried to hold too much.
Afghanistan’s political leaders deserve the blame most of all. They oversaw all of this, and their venality, selfishness, and incompetence undercut support for the government.
This cuts into a set of deeper moral issues for the United States. It is right for us to wish the people of other lands well and at times to help them. Indifference would be a failure of solidarity—a denial of our common humanity. But a solidarity-only ethic denies subsidiarity. Humans are not abstractions—rational souls floating in the void. We are incarnate. We live in particular times, places, and cultures. These particularities impose duties on us—to our family and polity—that are more immediate than our duties to humanity at large. It is natural and just that Americans rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and not after, say, the fall of Mekelle or Kilinochchi. The Afghan state and its security forces bore the same duties to Afghanistan—duties they abandoned. Thus President Joe Biden’s statement Monday: “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not.”
Behind all this, we must remember that the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place because we were victims. The de facto government of Afghanistan hosted a notorious international terrorist group. That group then killed thousands within the United States. We drove out this government and replaced it with a better one. We then spent nearly two decades strengthening the new government and providing reconstruction aid. We sacrificed thousands of our troops’ lives. We went above and beyond any reasonable duty that could be imposed on a victim of aggression. Was Abyssinia obliged to rebuild post-Mussolini Italy? How many decades of support did China owe post-Imperial Japan?
The moral stain of Afghanistan’s chaos does splatter us. Yet continuing the conflict had moral costs of its own. Withdrawal critics have often ignored or downplayed these costs, but thanks to the withdrawal, these are costs the United States will no longer pay.
John Allen Gay is executive director of the John Quincy Adams Society.
Image: Reuters.
19. Senator mistakenly lists 30,000 US troops in Taiwan
And the CCP is reacting! Or perhaps we have a new kind of stealth capability.
Senator mistakenly lists 30,000 US troops in Taiwan | Taiwan News | 2021-08-17 16:14:00
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) on Tuesday (Aug. 17) mistakenly listed the U.S. as having 30,000 troops stationed in Taiwan, a country that has not seen a major American military presence in over 40 years, leading to widespread criticism on Twitter.
In the wake of the disastrous collapse of the Afghan government following the rushed withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, many politicians are arguing that the relatively small force that the U.S. had in place maintained stability in the nation at a comparatively low cost in terms of lives and money.
To illustrate this point, Cornyn took to Twitter on Tuesday to list other current U.S. troop deployments around the world that are much higher than the 2,500 stationed in Afghanistan as recently as two months ago.
Among the countries listed with major troop contingents were South Korea, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan, where he cited 30,000 soldiers in place. However, the U.S. has not stationed troops in Taiwan since 1979, when former President Carter severed diplomatic relations with the country.
Many Twitter users were aghast that a member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence could get such basic information wrong. Others joked that Cornyn had accidentally leaked top-secret information about U.S. forces clandestinely stationed in Taiwan.
The last time the U.S. had 30,000 soldiers based in Taiwan was in the midst of the Vietnam War in the late 60s and early 70s. Many speculated that Cornyn may have obtained the number from a Wikipedia page on the defunct United States Taiwan Defense Command, which operated in Taiwan from Dec. 1954 to April 1979 and had 30,000 combined U.S. military personnel at its peak.
US Troops today in:
South Korea - 28,000
Germany - 35,486
Japan - 50,000
Taiwan - 30,000
Africa - 7,000
Afghanistan (month or 2 ago) - 2,500
— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) August 16, 2021
20. Chinese state media chief calls for war with US over troop numbers in Taiwan
Chinese state media chief calls for war with US over troop numbers in Taiwan
Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Chinese state-run Global Times, tweeted a call for war after Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) mistakenly tweeted that there are 30,000 U.S. troops currently stationed in Taiwan.
In a now-deleted tweet sent on Tuesday, Cornyn said, “US Troops Today in: South Korea – 28,000; Germany – 35,486; Japan – 50,000; Taiwan – 30,000; Africa – 7,000; Afghanistan (month or 2 ago) – 2,500.” Responding to Cornyn’s post, Hu tweeted, “Now, the US and the Taiwan authorities must explain. If it is true that the US has 30,000, or less than that number, soldiers stationed on the Taiwan island, Chinese military forces will immediately launch a war to eliminate and expel the US soldiers.”
Now, the US and the Taiwan authorities must explain. If it is true that the US has 30,000, or less than that number, soldiers stationed on the Taiwan island, Chinese military forces will immediately launch a war to eliminate and expel the US soldiers. pic.twitter.com/sZMrmIweM6
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) August 17, 2021
According to Taiwan News, Cornyn’s tweet was a mistake and the island has not had any U.S. military presence since 1979.
Taiwan News speculated the 30,000 U.S. troops described in Cornyn’s now-deleted tweet actually referred to the U.S. troop presence in Taiwan during the Vietnam War in the 60s and 70s. The Taiwanese news outlet reported Cornyn may have obtained the number from a Wikipedia page on the United States Taiwan Defense Command, which operated from Dec. 1954 to April 1979 and had 30,000 combined U.S. military personnel at its peak.
Cornyn’s office did not immediately respond to an American Military News request for comment on the matter.
While Taiwan News offered a possible explanation for Cornyn’s now-deleted tweeted, Hu expressed doubts and suggested Cornyn was not mistaken but is actually testing the PRC’s response.
“Someone said that @JohnCornyn mistook that number by using the number of previous US troops stationed on Taiwan island before China and the US set up diplomatic relations,” Hu tweeted. “I think the senator is not confused, and he wants to test our response. My answer to him is war.”
Someone said that @JohnCornyn mistook that number by using the number of previous US troops stationed on Taiwan island before China and the US set up diplomatic relations. I think the senator is not confused, and he wants to test our response. My answer to him is war. https://t.co/OTSt82O6Ng
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) August 17, 2021
While Taiwan governs itself as an independent nation, China maintains a claim of sovereignty over the island. The U.S. first described the sovereignty dispute between China and Taiwan in the 1972 Shanghai Communique, stating, “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” In 1979, the U.S. discontinued formal relations with Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China (ROC), and formalized relations with the People’s Republic of China PRC), which is led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
21. Secret terrorist watchlist with 2 million records exposed online
Secret terrorist watchlist with 2 million records exposed online
A secret terrorist watchlist with 1.9 million records, including classified "no-fly" records was exposed on the internet.
The list was left accessible on an Elasticsearch cluster that had no password on it.
Millions of people on no-fly and terror watchlists exposed
In July this year, Security Discovery researcher Bob Diachenko came across a plethora of JSON records in an exposed Elasticsearch cluster that piqued his interest.
The 1.9 million-strong recordset contained sensitive information on people, including their names, country citizenship, gender, date of birth, passport details, and no-fly status.
The exposed server was indexed by search engines Censys and ZoomEye, indicating Diachenko may not have been the only person to come across the list:
The researcher told BleepingComputer that given the nature of the exposed fields (e.g. passport details and "no_fly_indicator") it appeared to be a no-fly or a similar terrorist watchlist.
Additionally, the researcher noticed some elusive fields such as "tag," "nomination type," and "selectee indicator," that weren't immediately understood by him.
"That was the only valid guess given the nature of data plus there was a specific field named 'TSC_ID'," Diachenko told BleepingComputer, which hinted to him the source of the recordset could be the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC).
FBI's TSC is used by multiple federal agencies to manage and share consolidated information for counterterrorism purposes.
The agency maintains the classified watchlist called the Terrorist Screening Database, sometimes also referred to as the "no-fly list."
Such databases are regarded as highly sensitive in nature, considering the vital role they play in aiding national security and law enforcement tasks.
Terrorists or reasonable suspects who pose a national security risk are "nominated" for placement on the secret watchlist at the government's discretion.
The list is referenced by airlines and multiple agencies such as the Department of State, Department of Defense, Transportation Security Authority (TSA), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to check if a passenger is allowed to fly, inadmissible to the U.S. or assess their risk for various other activities.
Server taken offline 3 weeks after DHS notified
The researcher discovered the exposed database on July 19th, interestingly, on a server with a Bahrain IP address, not a US one.
However, the same day, he rushed to report the data leak to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
"I discovered the exposed data on the same day and reported it to the DHS."
"The exposed server was taken down about three weeks later, on August 9, 2021."
"It's not clear why it took so long, and I don't know for sure whether any unauthorized parties accessed it," writes Diachenko in his report.
The researcher considers this data leak to be serious, considering watchlists can list people who are suspected of an illicit activity but not necessarily charged with any crime.
"In the wrong hands, this list could be used to oppress, harass, or persecute people on the list and their families."
"It could cause any number of personal and professional problems for innocent people whose names are included in the list," says the researcher.
Diachenko believes this leak could therefore have negative repercussions for such people and suspects.
"The TSC watchlist is highly controversial. The ACLU, for example, has for many years fought against the use of a secret government no-fly list without due process," continued the researcher.
Note, it is not confirmed if the server leaking the list belonged to a U.S. government agency or a third-party entity.
BleepingComputer has reached out to the FBI and we are awaiting their response.
Update 11:02 PM ET: The FBI had no comment on the matter.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
