Calls for the US to consider rescuing those who risked their lives to dare to dream of the Afghanistan Americans promised them have only been rising, and they are coming from elements of the left and the right, though the calls themselves are still not a prevailing voice, either on the left or the right. The question is one to consider in light of our role in creating, essentially, bullseyes on significant portions of Afghanis, perhaps at least 1 million. Can we as a nation take in 1 million Afghan refugees that are now in danger of being harmed, enslaved, and killed? Or, perhaps the better question might be, should we feel morally obliged to?
20 years of US war in Afghanistan has resulted in hundreds of thousands of Afghan deaths and the displacement of 5.9 million people.
The US government and US citizens have a responsibility to repair the damage caused by our war.
The US must resettle at least one million Afghan refugees in the US over the next decade and provide additional humanitarian assistance to Afghans.
David Vine is professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. Vine is co-author of the Costs of War Project’s report “Creating Refugees: Displacement Caused by the United States’ Post-9/11 Wars.”
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
PGC – There are a lot of people out there that call themselves ‘leftists’ who also claim to support consensual exchange, while at the same time continue to support the DNC version of leftism that uses moral supremacist tactics to create police state powers for corporations and governments alike.
Though warned long ago that their tactic of ‘punching Nazis’ would lead to what we see today, Corpowoketarianizm, where their very core ideals have been commodified and altered to fit the agenda of the same billionaires these leftists claim to want to stop, these consensual-seeking leftists continued to stand behind the DNC as corpowoketarianizm spread throughout the land, starting in our colleges and universities, spreading like the plague in social media, then extending to our financial institutions which emboldened the rest of the corporate world to join in with full zeal, seeing the opportunity to elimiate competition among the poors by perepatuating divisions amongst the powerless.
Now we see in Belarus, a dictatorship in the truest sense of the term, the tactic of stigmatiizng people based on the label extremist being used to shut down news outlets that don’t advance the party line. It’s the government itself that’s doing this, though, to be sure, if government had an industry in its back pocket, it too would be happy to use that soft power over direct state power. They must envy the position of the DNC compared to themselves.
They had to actually pass anti-extremist laws, which was easy enough to do in a disarmed country with no Bill of Rights sown into the fabric of the narratives of a people, such as we still have in America today. They passed the laws and had no legal roadblocks to impede them such as the government would face in America, even now.
They are well within the ethical standards of the corpowoketarianz that currently occupy our lands. They are using the label extremist to cancel the extremists, just as the corporations are using that label to cancel opposition to the one-party–to-be-DNC. Eventually, it is hoped by the DNC, they will be able to declare people extremists too and use the full power of the state to cancel them as well.
Stockholm, August 16, 2021 – Belarus authorities should refrain from contesting the appeal of news website Zerkalo.io against its designation as “extremist,” and cease using the country’s anti-extremism laws to stifle independent reporting, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
On May 18, authorities raided the offices of the independent news website Tut.by, interrogated about 130 members of its staff, blocked the outlet’s website, and detained at least a dozen employees for suspected tax evasion, according to CPJ reporting from the time and Anna Kaltygina, former news desk manager at Tut.by, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.
Several of the outlet’s employees fled Belarus, and on July 8 launched Zerkalo.io as a temporary replacement for Tut.by, according to Kaltygina, who now works as the acting editor-in-chief of Zerkalo.io. Belarus authorities blocked access to the website within the country immediately after its launch,…
From WION out of India, the collapse of the US-backed government in Kabul is invoking images of the fall of Saigon as panicked locals realize the retreat of the US means the new masters of their country will seek their vengeance. The sheer terror and chaos are a culmination of 20 years of bad policy that cannot solely be laid at the feet of either Trump or Biden, of Democrats or Republicans. It has been a massive bipartisan failure at the gross expense of tens of thousands people, including American troops whose lives were forever changed by their deployment there.
Let’s look past the partisan spin and blame game DC is so famous for and debunk some common partisan narratives.
Biden Isn’t The Author Of This Disaster
President Biden certainly didn’t do anything to mitigate the debacle that has been the “war on terror” during his 8 years as Vice President. But the genesis of the collapse of the US-backed government in Kabul begins in 2001. The knee-jerk response to the Al Qaeda attack, which saw the US focus on “nation-building” and embrace the myth “better to fight the bad guys overseas than at home.”
We didn’t fight the bad guys, we engaged in nation-building. When US and Northern Alliance troops were closing in Al Qaeda, the US suddenly STOPPED the attack and Bin Laden got away. Ideally, had this attack been pushed to its conclusion, the bad guys are gone, the war is over. Sure, the US could back the Northern Alliance as it did the Mujahideen, but we went for an invasion to save people who weren’t trying to save themselves.
Instead of snuffing the real bad guys out, the US let them go, perhaps due to incompetence, perhaps for other geopolitical reasons. The nation-building idea was always bad and once the US entered the land and began its han-fisted approach to Afghani politics, the stage was set for what happened, albeit after much loss of mostly civilian lives.
Donald Trump’s Withdrawal Agreement Was Bad
Donald Trump wanted out and he was willing to make nice with the Taliban, on the grounds they promised, on paper, to foreswear the use of terrorism or hosting terrorism. It was not expected this would be observed, but if it wasn’t, well, we have plenty of bombs for that. Whatever one thinks of Trump, he knew when to hold and when to fold, and it was time to fold. But his plan involved militarily supporting a withdrawal and leaving in May, not August. His plan wasn’t followed the US arbitrarily reneged on the deal.
It’s true it may seem Trump was naive about the Taliban and that they weren’t going to follow the deal. But Trump’s calculus was to stop the bleeding and cut losses but to make sure the withdrawal of US personnel and collaborative Afghanis was orderly and on time.
A better deal wasn’t to be had and none of the critics have proposed better alternatives that would have worked.
The US Is On Retreat and Only Taliban Backers Like China and Pakistan Benefit
One alternative view is that the seemingly precipitous withdrawal is an abject defeat. But the geopolitical calculus is possible mote subtle. The US is aligning against China and its position on Afghanistan leaves it vulnerable to Russia, Pakistan, and the “Stans” and constrains their hand against China. In essence, China, allied to Pakistan, and Russia, patron of the Stans, could hold US forces hostage.
China may indeed be falling for a clever trap in which they become embroiled in the morasse of Afghani trial politics. The Taliban may be making nice with Beijing now but it’s ability to keep its word is nil. The love betweem Islamists and Communists is notoriously low, which is the nicest thing one may say about the Communists.
Biden Blew It By Changing The Date of Withdrawal
It is true Biden abandoned the original agreement and plan, thus making the blaming of Trump laughable as the plan executed was not Trump’s plan. The negotiations with the Taliban were nixed and so was the withdrawal date, which did in fact violate the agreement.
While this was used as a pretext by the Taliban to present this change as an affront to Afghanistan itself, it is flimsy logic to say this alone ruined the plan. Biden needed, or wanted, more time to effect withdrawal and vastly over-estimated the potential of Afghan forces. The major deviation was dismissing the Taliban, but one can hardly argue against viewings these people as brutal savages as opposed to making nice with them.
The Taliban don’t keep agreements. Biden knew this and ditched the idiotic pretext, but it may have led to a miscalculation of many things, such as the strength of the enemy and of allies. Merely changing the date of withdrawal may have fed Taliban propaganda, but that’s about it.
What’s The Conclusion?
The collapse of the US-backed government in Afghanistan was essentially ensured when US and Allied forces tried to defend people who didn’t want to fight for themselves and tried nation-building in a land that basically rejected the values upon which that effort was based.
Backed by China and Pakistan, the Taliban are poised to take Kabul and end the 20 year exmpiremnt in nation-building with a staggering defeat. The Taliban were estimated by the US “intelligence community” to be incapable of matching the larger and better equipped Afghan national army, which either switched sides or evaporated. Billions in US weapons seized make the Talbin a creditable force in the region.
The Afghan people seem to be of three types: cowards who flee the first signs of battle, people who don’t want freedom and are willing to accept tyranny, people who may want freedom but only as a handout at others’ expense. Exceptions to this can be found, a brave Afghani willing to stand for freedom is rare and would not be able to realistically hold their ground on the midst of such a moribund and corrupt population.
The Epoch Times covered the stunning evacuation of US embassy in Kabul in scenes reminiscent of the fall of Saigon.
Meanwhile, the President and Vice President have left Kabul after the President spoke of a peaceful transition of power but the Vice President vowed to fight the Taliban to the death and never, ever sit under the same roof as them.
The main change in protocol for this Biden withdrawal over the Trump withdrawal was that Biden cut off all talks with the Taliban and seems to have bought the false narrative that Afghan army, strong on paper, with limited US air support, could hold the line. What happened was that the army turned, fled, or was bought off and in many cases, after surrendering and believing they would be spared, they write slaughtered. Trump thought he could engage the Taliban, mostly to keep them from supporting terror groups like Al Qaeda, in the future in a power-sharing arrangement.
Both approaches would likely have ended in the same space.
Efforts to rescue the 20,000 or more Afghanis who would face execution for collaboration with the Americans are under way. There are no plans for the women and children whose menfolk so thoroughly let them down. There are also no plans to punish China and Pakistan, without whose help this would not have been possible.
US forces are being airlifted back into Afghanistan in a desperate bid to save US citizens and Afghani collaborators from the Taliban advance.
As the Taliban marches into the remaining “free” areas of Afghanistan, a feat nobody who was watching matters is surprised about, the temptation to “save” Afghanistan from itself may be great. The amount of money made by the defense industry is staggering, but the gain of this policy is negligible. In the end, despite massive aid and training, the people of Afghanistan don’t want freedom, they want a throwback to the most archaic and barbaric religious ideology known to modern humanity.
The US is now sending in troops to rescue US citizens and Afghani collaborators with the US in scenes that will potentially be more dramatic than the fall of Saigon. The Taliban, backed by China and Pakistan and freshly armed with captured US war booty, are about to turn the country back into a terrorist safe haven and 7th century hellscape in which Christians are martyred and women become chattel.
The blame lies with every US President since Bush II, the neocon “genius” who promised that everyone wants “democracy” if only US forces fought for their freedom, even though the actual people being “liberated” never have. But the consequences are to the American people, both in terms of lost lives, changed lives through injury and psychological damage, and trillions of dollars, most of which lined corporate pockets.
The drumbeat of war will begin as soon as, once again, Afghanistan hosts the next terrorist act against the US. Outraged people will want revenge and will forget that this story keeps repeating with no successful end in sight. The propensity of the ruling class to foment conflicts which they profit from has never been greater.
But from the perspective of the average Afghani, most of whom lack the courage and conviction needed to resist the ideology of the Taliban, life will become a horror freak show. The ruthlessness and arbitrary brutality of the Taliban falls on people even if they desperately try to comply with the overwhelming edicts of this throwback religious sect. Nobody, not even a faithful Taliban member, is safe from the possibility of being brutalized and murdered for reasons they cannot even fathom.
Every Afghani who aided the Americans, and there are hundreds of thousands, is going to face dire consequences, and so is their family. The precipitous withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan, brokered by Trump and then carried out months later than planned by Biden, means that almost none of these people will be safe. Simply importing all of them to the US is not a practical solution. Moreover, they didn’t collaborate with the US to have to leave their homeland, many just wanted to make money or, in some cases, they wanted to move their country into the 21st century.
Sending in US troops to Kabul to effect an emergency evacuation while the President practically begs and then cajoles the Taliban, who have no fear of the US, may morph into saving the army of collaborators who have, mostly, turned tail and fled from the enemy. Plaintiff cries to save the Afghani collaborators have already begun and this pressure is coming from the right and left.
But the pressure to just put this behind us, cut our losses, including human losses, and move on is greater. Any “engagement” is likely to be covert and concealed, possibly carried out by mercenaries (contractors), and possibly by buying off more Afghanis to trade money for propping up a corrupt puppet regime. There is no popular support or willingness to sacrifice or fight to save Afghanistan from the China and Pakistan backed Taliban.
Afghanistan and Iraq have been a gross debacle, they have caused massive losses to the US and they have only made things worse in those lands. This is a bipartisan debacle no US President since Bush II has had the moral courage and tenacity to stop. Biden is the last unfortunate President who must oversee the final collapse which was inevitable way back in 2001 when the plan became “nation building” for a population that wouldn’t fight for its own freedom.
US re-engagement in Afghanistan would only serve the defense industry and, while it is unlikely, one can never underestimate the corruption and foolishness of America’s real political shot-callers.
PGC – It looks like the Taliban are set to take full control of Afghanistan and once again become a world player on a world stage with a whole nation-state behind them that will have nation-states like China and Russia coming in to try and get a little piece of the action. China, for sure, has, for now, the inside track, but that could turn after a couple of years of Chinese presence in the land where Empires die.
Donald J Trump was heading us down this path as well, but one does not know how much different, if at all, his withdrawal would have been. Our withdrawal appears to be sudden and unmerciful. We are knowingly leaving behind hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people with more than enough positive interactions with our soldiers to put their families under threat for death, slavery, or worst, sex slavery.
We knew full well what the Taliban was and its highly coercive assumptions regarding the nature of human governance. For the Taliban, their religious leaders are like little gods, or at least manifestations of the wisdom of Allah, that speak with infallibility, leaders willing to consign to death anyone who dares not believe in the particular Allah this group holds at its heart.
Life is not much among those not of the orthodox faith of the Taliban, and we Americans knew it, but we left, hardly with any plan to evacuate hardly anyone that put their lives, their families lives at risk to cooperate wtih the Americans, to even enter some of their programs, to dare dream one day something like America will happen in Afghanistan, and there will be no more bombs, no more Taliban, only open squares to argue about non-essential politics.
Even here in America, though, those days are fast ending, but still, compared to the people of Afghanistan, we are still a golden light of free thought and action, ideally, yes, but also physiologically still significantly true as well. America is hope and wonder compared to the conditions that Afghanis found themselves under while America was there. Now that America has left, well, for many, this is the end. Life itself will be over, and it will end violently for many of them. Many will be beaten, taunted, paraded around in cages. Some will be beheaded. Some will be burned alive. Some will be raped until they die.
The methods of death set aside for these American sympathizers, well, it’s pretty ghastly, and we knew it, and we left without any real effort to rescue those who once rescued us. This withdrawal has done more damage to America’s credibility, gravitas on the world stage than all of the little ways we have been letting down our allies through the second part of the 20th and early part of the 21st Centuries have combined. It might even be the culmination of this period in American geopolitical history, and it might mark the end of it, an age when America commanded the moral high ground, but now, after Afghanistan, can no longer be trusted as an ally in a risky situation.
Taliban fighters could isolate Afghanistan’s capital in 30 days and possibly take it over in 90, a US defence official told Reuters on Wednesday (Aug 11) citing US intelligence, as the resurgent militants took control of an eighth provincial Afghan capital.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the new assessment of how long Kabul could stand was a result of the rapid gains the Taliban had been making around the country as US-led foreign forces leave.
“But this is not a foregone conclusion,” the official added, saying that the Afghan security forces could reverse the momentum by putting up more resistance.
The extremists now control 65 per centof Afghanistan and have taken or thre
The US Navy recently sent one of its stellar aircraft carriers into the lion’s den, the strike of the so-called ‘ship-killer’ missiles. The USS Gerald R Flord withstood a series of attacks by ship killer missiles to demonstrate the resilance of US Aircraft Carriers against such threats that enemies such as China and Russia claim they have against us.
The aircraft carrier is still, even in current year, the apex predator of miliitary power and there is still no one close who can field the quality and amount of aircraft carriers that the United States can still sustain. By putting their aircraft carrier through such tests, the US Military just displayed a powerful visual rebuttal to the seriousness of the threat the Chinese and Russians thought they possessed.
After surviving beyond the percussive power of the so-called ship-killer missiles, the US Carrier proved itself still the apex predator of the seas. So long as America holds that title, the power of all nation-states in the physical is considerably limited compared to the United States, whose power resides now almost entirely in her far superior Navy, which starts with her Aircraft Carrier Task Forces, which project real physical power like nothing else human-made on the face of the planet.
If and when the Aircraft Carriers become moot, the reality of power of this planet will be signficiantly re-aligned in ways that might be difficult to prognosticate, but, most likely, it leads to a more disbursed power structure than we currently have today, but also increased local production and manufacturing due to rising cost of internataional shipping with rise in piracy worldwide. The death of the carrier might, in the end, potentially lead to less disparity in power signficiantly compared to where we are today where so many of our large-scale systems continue to merge with others until we are down to a handful of major corporations and governments dictating the reality to the overwhelming majority, and not in their interest, in the interst of those who find themselves advantaged in power in the first place.
The US Navy’s successful completion of explosion impact trials for aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R. Ford has sent a message to China and Russia that it is not worried about
The US’ newest and most advanced nuclear carrier’s third and final full ship shock trial was completed on Sunday off the coast of Florida, following the previous such trials on June 18 and July 16, the American navy said in a press release on Monday.
The carrier suffered no major casualties and less damage than expected, officials said.
In the trials, held in the Atlantic Ocean, 40,000lbs (18 tonnes) of explosives – equivalent to a 3.9-magnitude earthquake – were detonated under water, each time taking place closer to the carrier. Data on the impact on the vessel was collected.
KABUL: The Taliban were in control of six Afghan provincial capitals on Tuesday after a blitz across the north forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes for the relative safety of Kabul and other centres.
The insurgents now have their eyes on Mazar-i-Sharif, the north’s biggest city, whose fall would signal the total collapse of government control in a region that has traditionally been anti-Taliban.
Government forces are also battling the hardline Islamists in Kandahar and…
PGC – As the United States leave Afghanitan and a trail of broken alliances behind her, the Chinese under Chairman Xi have chosen to side with the Taliban in the war for the hearts and minds of the people. The same nation-state that is regularly feted in American corporate markets, the same nation-state that has more infliuence over America’s media than the American people do, is busy cozying up with the Taliban in a bid to cull from the Afghan mountains what gold they imagine they can if the Taliban welcomed their presence.
Perhaps the coal is the geo-political circumstance of Afghanistan itself, a bridge between what is commonly referred to as the Near East and the Far East. But Afghanistan is a bridge ridged with mountains and difficult terrain, a land not easily tamed if the people of the land don’t will it. America is not the first Empire to die in those mountains, and she won’t be the last.
So China is figuring on trying a different strategy, make nice with the might that is, a strategy America herself has deployed in the past as well. It’s a dangerous gambit but fitting with China’s overal strategy of consolidating world power, gain power through influence where the soul eats and sleep, commerce. If China can help the Taliban exploit the lands for capital for the cause, while getting the kind of cut China will hope to get, this can be a very productive relationship, not just economically, but geopolitically as well. Still, it’s a dangerous game the Chinese play and it remains to be seen if they have the discipline to be a velvet glove master of a land of iron wills.
As the United States withdraws from Afghanistan and leaves a security vacuum there, is China moving in by cozying up to the Taliban? On July 28, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a high-profile official meeting with a delegation of nine Afghan Taliban representatives, including the group’s co-founder and deputy leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. This was not the first visit by Taliban members to China, but the meeting was unprecedented in its publicity, the…
PGC – The European Union has wanted to destabilize the nationlist spirits of its members for decades now, as a european bureaucratic leviathon would be much easier to manage for the wealthiest families of the continent than what they experience having to deal with multiple sovereignties across multiple borders.
The problem with the experiment is generally the people in these once-sovereign lands who get the short end of that deal eventually turn back to the one potential vehicle of power that can protect them from this European leviathon, your local nationalism. So Britain Brexits, and in many other European countries there are political factions that are forming around the desire of the losers of the EU bureaucratic leviathon to break free by clinging to local nationalism. Nationalism of the poles, nationalism of the Germans, Nationalism of the Beligans, etc, etc, etc.
The nationalists in these lands are achieving varying levels of success politically, but enough success that the families that be of Europe, I theorize, are now ready to stop using certain resources to undermine the nationalist trends, importing a shock-and-awe level of other nations radically different than the nations they are coming into (nations as in cultural people groups, not states), under states that are born from that very nation-state but are now seeking to undo their own source of historical power for the last 200 plus years, the nation and the state being one.
Now that the immigrants of Afghanistan have failed to be, in part, the poison pill that would undo these local nationalisms, the powers that are Europe have determined that even if their national lands, since they last occupied them, might be even more dangerous to life than they were before, these failed poison pills must go, lest they continue to foment even more local nationalisms by continuing to stay.
In the course of this story the people we forget are the pawns in the story, the ‘refugees,’ the ‘immigrants’ themselves, shuffled in with real needs but for purposes that never cared much about how their final journeys ever ended, so long as they worked to undo whatever power structures the ones who paid to have them flooded in were paying them to destroy. Now that the usefulness is now in doubt, expect more European leaders, even previous refugee supporters, to suddenly support sending ‘them all back home.’
At least six EU countries insist that the forced deportation of migrants back to Afghanistan continues despite the Taliban’s alarming gains in recent weeks.
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, and the Netherlands wrote to the European Commission claiming that halting returns “sends the wrong signal and is likely to motivate even more Afghan citizens to leave their home for the EU.”
Adalbert Jahnz, the Commission’s spokesman for home affairs explained that “it’s up to each member state to make an individual assessment of whether the return is possible in a specific set of circumstances, that needs to take into account the principles, notable the principle of rule of law and other fundamental rights.”
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