Mediaboss Marketing

Members of the Taliban patrol in the back of a pickup truck with a Taliban flag along a street in Kabul. (Bulent Kilic / AFP via Getty Images)

Thank you for signing up forThe Nations weekly newsletter.

Bush and Cheney sold the war, Obama normalized it, Trump disowned it, and Biden had the courage to end it.

Cecil Rhodes once said he would annex the planets if he could, and the United States, over the past four decades, has nursed an ambition quite as otherworldly. Everyone (we believed) would choose our way of life if only they had the chance. It followed that we should try to get them there through arts and manners and commerce and, if necessary, through wars. The wars would, of course, be fought against the enemies of freedom, even if the enemies were their neighbors and compatriots.

Tony Blair put the case memorably, just three weeks after September 11, 2001: The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us. What poetry! To look on the world as a toy! That, for me, was the initial impression of Blairs words. More peculiar, as one looks back, was the emphasis on dispatch. The reordering would be done soon and speedily, with a brave unconcern for prudential caution.

A few days earlier, Dick Cheney had spoken about the necessity of working the dark side. The larger context of the vice presidents September 16 appearance on Meet the Press showed the consonance of his thinking with Blairs. Things have changed since last Tuesday, Cheney said. The world shifted in some respects. But he spoke with a dour realism about the likely duration of the conflict: Theres not going to be an end date that we say, There, its all over with. George W. Bush, for his part, issued a promise of both lasting resolve and a lucky ending: We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail. MORE FROM David Bromwich

The regrets now emanating from the North Atlantic policy elite suggest how little the fate of that project has changed their thinking. In an August 31 New Yorker piece deploring the US evacuation from Afghanistan, Robin Wright commented with punitive scorn: America did tire. It did falter. And it did fail. Bold promises, over time, turned into mission abandonment. The hope of personal freedom has evaporated. But whose hope and whose mission was she speaking for? Ellen Knickmeyer, in an August 17 Associated Press story, made a tally more matter-of-fact than Wrights. Besides the 2,500 American dead, there were 66,000 killed among Afghan military and police, 51,000 among Taliban and other opposition fighters, 47,000 among Afghan civilians.

No metaphor of evaporation is needed to conclude that a large fraction of those 164,000 dead would not have died if the US had never occupied Afghanistan. For a proportionate sense of the numbers, imagine a civil war on American soilfomented, funded, and protracted over 20 years by a foreign powerwhich ends up taking one and a half million American lives.

The dwindling Afghan support for the US mission was not a rejection of freedom but a last heave of disgust at the staggering burden of corruption this war spawned and nourished. As for the European criticism of our departure, it has been reported without the slightest irony regarding the relationship between defunct 19th-century empires and their successor. Britain and France showed an understandable embarrassment at having ceded to America so much authority for such a dismal result. Blair weighed in again, with a magnificent ferocity of reproach, and Bernard-Henri Lvy was grandiloquent: The image of the liberal democracies, epitomized by the greatest among them, is tragically tarnished. Lvy denounces only our exit. He does not say the liberal image was tarnished by anything the US did while it occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Regrets in a lower key were uttered by Leon Panetta: We can leave a battlefield, but we cant leave the war on terrorism. But Afghanistan was not only a battlefield but a proving ground for a system of bribery, bounty-hunting, and assassinations, as Cheney acknowledged early on:

A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, youre going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena.

Our interest in the dark side increased the supply of dark operators. Current Issue

Subscribe today and Save up to $129.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were debt-financed at a cost of $2 trillion. The final bill of health care for veterans of the wars, encompassing disability, burial, and related expenses, will probably come to another $2 trillion, Knickmeyer reports. The Senate Finance Committee questioned these costs just once over the past 20 years; the Senate Appropriations Committee queried them five times. Should that level of oversight be taken to exemplify the freedom we were bringing to people 7,000 miles away?

We think more easily of the saved than the drowned: We saved the women. What will the Taliban do to them now? American intervention improved the lives of some Afghan women, and many of those who hoped to leave will not be able to. It is harder to sayharder, even, to rememberthat we also killed many of the innocent and tortured brothers and husbands; or that the wedding parties we slaughtered in misjudged drone strikes also contained somebodys children.

Some years ago a friend, a Cold War liberal, surprised me by saying out of nowhere, Americans are better than other peopledont you think? It was clear from the context that this was not a chauvinist remark. The sense was rather that Americans, from a combination of national temperament and luck, were more generous than other people; and if on occasion we did real harm, it came from a reckless exuberance of goodwill. I didnt agree at the time, and dont agree now, but I believe this is the way a good many Americans think about us. We are generous judges in our own cause.

View post:
Our Foreign Policy Elite Has Learned Nothing From Afghanistan - The Nation

To most Americans, foreign policy is not something they think about on a daily basis. But when the needle moves, its often because of gripping footage that finds its way to our screens.

In Afghanistan, videos of American allies clinging to and falling from our military planes as we left the country in chaos caught the attention of millions of Americans. News footage of those trapped outside the Kabul airport and images of a blown-up Toyota Corolla once full of innocent civilians have kept the story alive.

Compelling as those images are, what concerns me even more are the far reaching consequences of our botched departure that remain unclear.

Top military leaders testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week that they advised President BidenJoe BidenFrance (and Britain) should join the Quad Election denialists smacked down by Idaho secretary of state Under Biden, the US could fall further behind in the Arctic MORE against withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd AustinLloyd AustinDefense & National Security Afghan evacuee flights to restart soon Troops move to block Pentagon vaccine requirement in court Suicides up 15 percent among US troops in 2020 MORE said that the Biden administration never considered that the Afghan government would collapse in a mere 11 days. And Secretary of State Antony BlinkenAntony BlinkenFrench ambassador back in the US Is Australia's nuclear submarine deal a distraction from international climate action? Macron says Europe must assert independence from US MOREs recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has left us with more questions than answers about how this disaster occurred and who is responsible.

Congress rigorous oversight of the Afghanistan failure must continue and we must godeeperto understand the devastating and far-reaching costs that have yet to surface.

I can think of at least four areas where the costs of our dreadful exodus will continue to mount: diplomacy, intelligence, foreign influence and our military superiority.

If the orderly, conditions-based withdrawal President TrumpDonald TrumpNigerian president to lift Twitter ban if certain conditions are met Grisham calls Kushner 'Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit' Federal court orders FEC to rule on NRA shell entity campaign allegation MORE agreed to and President Biden articulated support for had been implemented, we would have been able to maintain a strategic toehold within the country through our embassy.

That diplomatic presence would have enabled the United States to provide essential consular services for American citizens and Afghan allies. And our enduring presence would have enabled the United States to monitor threat streams and provided us with access to critical human intelligence to respond to threats facing our nation.

The Biden administration has claimed that it will be able to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions remotely or over-the-horizon.But mistakes like the tragic drone strike in Kabul are avoidable only when we rely on multiple kinds of intelligence to find, fix, and finish targets.Simply put, relying exclusively on over-the-horizon capabilities will only increase the risk to civilians on the ground in Afghanistan and increase the risks to the United States by missing critical details through gaps in the intelligence available.

Our nations intelligence community is immensely capable but they must have access to as many resources as possible if they are going to provide a complete and accurate picture to the appropriate decision makers.

Further, given the distance from which various platforms must now travel to Afghanistan, the amount of time they will have over the target area will be extremely limited.

Beyond the tactical considerations, our withdrawal has also provided us with a strategic setback vis-a-vis the Chinese Communist Party.

As the U.S. Embassy in Kabul closed and shifted to Doha, Qatar, the Embassy for the Peoples Republic of Chinahas remained open for business.

While the relationship between the Taliban and the Chinese Communist Party will be complicated, China will undoubtedly do whatever they can in pursuit of Afghanistansvast, untapped natural resources.

Beyond the strategic threat with China, we have seen other challenges emerge as U.S. military equipment, originally provided to the Afghan National Security Forces,has now crossed the border into Iran.

It is now inevitable that experts from Russia, China, and Iran will use the equipment to test, research, and reverse engineer. Our equipment now serves as a laboratory for conducting tests to counter Americas defenses.

It is critical that Congress continue to conduct rigorous oversight to understand the many facets of this failure, hold leaders accountable, and ensure that the United States is properly positioned to respond to new threats as they emerge.

Ultimately, I expect that the American people will hold Joe Biden accountable for his calamitous withdrawal that left 13 American service members killed, left Americans and Afghan allies behind, and was a strategic and diplomatic failure for the United States.

President Biden may wish to be done with Afghanistan but it is clear Afghanistan is not done with us.

Todd YoungTodd Christopher YoungHow to fix the semiconductor chip shortage (it's more than manufacturing) Senate Democrats try to defuse GOP budget drama The 19 GOP senators who voted for the T infrastructure bill MORE is the senior senator from Indiana and is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

See the original post:
The unseen problems in Afghanistan | TheHill - The Hill

The Biden administration is doing its best to pretend thousands of green-card holders, legal US residents, didnt get left behind in Afghanistan and is even quieter on the fate of the far larger number of Americas Afghan allies.

Fox News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst warns that the State Department is underestimating the number of legal permanent residents trapped in Afghanistan, noting Monday that a senior State official claimed that around 100 US citizens and legal residents are still waiting to get out, when Yingst noted, Ive personally met dozens.

Indeed, independent estimates put the total of green-card holders in the thousands before US forces bugged out at the end of August, and State doesnt claim more than a few hundred made it out.

Not to mention the tens of thousands of Afghans who could qualify for Special Immigrant Visas, since they publicly supported US forces over the last two decades and are now targets for Taliban vengeance.

So much for President Joe Bidens vow of Aug. 20, Were making the same commitment to Afghan allies to evacuate them along with US citizens and legal residents. After the bugout, the administration basically stopped talking about these people, instead only giving totals of citizens (and, sometimes, of legal residents) evacuated by the Qataris and independent groups.

This mans word is worthless.

View original post here:
Team Biden tries to erase the tens of thousands we left behind in Afghanistan - New York Post

Demetria Charlifues work on the U.S. State Departments Afghanistan Task Force reflects her desire to serve the vulnerable in crisis situations.

Courtesy photo

Demetria Charlifue began her shift as an intern at the U.S. State Departments Bureau of Consular Affairsby skimming through hundreds of field reports from the ground in Afghanistan.

She had just 30 minutes to complete the task. At the end of her 12-hour shift, Charlifue had five minutes to compose a shift report, preparing the person who occupied the post next for whatever the day required.

I felt very prepared, said the second-year Master of International Affairs student at Texas A&M Universitys Bush School of Government and Public Service, referring to the technical demands of her appointment. Professors at the Bush School assign stacks of complicated reading to students each week, reflective of the real demands placed on individuals in public service careers. Im grateful to have had two semesters of that reading load under my belt.

The Bush School requires that all students in theInternational Affairs program pursue either an internship or language immersion in the summer between their first and second year. But for Charlifue, beginning a virtual Pathways internship with theU.S. State Departmentin summer 2021 meant more than just fulfilling a degree requirement.

A desire to serve the vulnerable through diplomacy has motivated her long before beginning her graduate studies. She worked the visa window at the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt during the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2016.

I got to see the plight of these people coming to the U.S. Embassy at their most vulnerable moments, Charlifue said. That image remained with Charlifue as she applied and was accepted into the program, which allows participants to transition into a civil service appointment upon fulfilling a yearlong internship.

Initially, the bureau stationed her in the Office of Childrens Issues, where she assisted in policymaking and implementation to support the departments interests regarding childrens welfare issues, such as inter-country adoption and parental abduction. Her duties involved providing communications services to mediate between the office and other stakeholders, such as Congress, the Department of Homeland Security, and other consular offices overseas.

When the opportunity arose to participate on the Afghanistan Task Force to facilitate the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, Charlifue put the skills she learned at the Bush School to the test.

The Afghanistan mission was deeply personal to me. It was something that I wanted to give back to support our Afghan allies and American citizens abroad, Charlifue said. Her parents, both career Foreign Service officers, previously served at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

For anyone in the Foreign Service community, assisting in lifesaving missions is not a requirement, but an expectation, according to Charlifue. Nearly the entire Office of Childrens Issues, consisting of roughly 100 people, stepped up. Charlifue said she volunteered not knowing that it would mobilize into the huge conglomerate that it did.

After the United States withdrew its forward military presence in Afghanistan and shut down its embassy, the Taliban overcame the Afghan Armed Forces and swept into Kabul. Thousands of American citizens and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders were endangered.

According to Charlifue, the Afghanistan Task Force had begun making arrangements for potential mass mobilization of personnel and qualified individuals from Afghanistan since it was formed in mid-July, before the first provincial Afghan capital fell to the Taliban.

The stepping stones were in place, she said. People forget that the department did a mass repatriation during COVID-19 to help repatriate American citizens who were abroad, so a lot of my colleagues were very well versed in what crisis management looked like from that effort. We were ready to step in.

On Aug. 14, the bureau issued the mandate to commence emergency evacuations from Afghanistan. Charlifue said the task force anticipated a chaotic, unpredictable and at times dangerous exit, which turned out to be the case.

The security situation was so fluid that we had to redirect at a moments notice, she said. And when the circumstances on the ground shifted, guidance from top officials about how to conduct the evacuation would change along with it. The information coordination channels had to be almost picture perfect to manage that really fluid timeline.

For example, Charlifue described how the task force had issued guidance to approved individuals regarding which airport gate was safe to pass through. The information leaked within hours to the throngs of Afghans who had fled to the airport in hopes of escaping.

People were crowding the gates and then nobody could get through, she said. We had to quickly reconnect and issue new guidance.

Charlifues desk at the Department of State in Washington, D.C.

Courtesy photo

Working 12-hour shifts through the night, Charlifue supported the congressional team of the task force. Much like in her function in the Office of Childrens Issues, Charlifue was charged with liaising between the task force and Congress, relaying critical information minute-by-minute.

Others in her office coordinated with embassies in other countries to organize and staff call centers for evacuating endangered individuals and expedite processing to get them into the United States or lily pads, which are temporary sanctuaries in third countries.

It was a mass effort, Charlifue said. It was a huge, commendable effort and a testimony to how quickly we had to mobilize once the situation really gained momentum.

Charlifue recalled photos of unaccompanied Afghan children that circulated on news and social media platforms. While most Americans could only watch events transpire from afar, Charlifue had the opportunity to influence the fate of many Afghan refugees, including some of those children.

We would always get emails whenever those children had landed in Dulles airport, or wed get pictures of them sometimes, she said. And youd recognize certain cases you had seen, and youd see those kids get reunited with family overseas or be at Dulles airport with caregivers who would assist them now in moving forward. Those tugged at your heart strings and made all the other 12-hour shifts feel really important.

Not only was the world watching Afghanistan, but it was also watching and often criticizing the actions of the U.S. State Department, where Charlifue served.

The workload was really intense, and the expectations were really high the expectations for career folks to rise to that occasion and to do so at a very high-profile level, she said. Youre talking to people who are at their most vulnerable moments. It was very difficult to separate yourself from the chaos in Kabul in order to do the work and to continue doing the work. So I think everybody who has had to serve in a crisis has a crisis mentality a front they put up.

Charlifue said she and her colleagues will have to learn how to build resiliency and process the pressure that comes from high-stakes assignments.

Her participation on the Afghanistan Task Force ended Sept. 3, but her internship extends until May 2022. She plans to move to Washington, D.C., in December to work at her internship full-time in the spring while taking evening classes at the Bush Schools D.C. campus.

Crisis moments are what define diplomats, said Charlifue. I am just so in awe of our consular officers who were working out of an embassy in Kabul one moment and then were working out of an airfield. I am constantly thinking back to the resiliency they must have had and how I can mirror that in my own way.

See more here:
Aggie Aids In Afghanistan Evacuation Efforts - Texas A&M Today - Texas A&M University Today

The plane carrying US citizens and permanent residents had been temporarily prevented from departing for the US.

A group of United States citizens and Afghan evacuees have been permitted to travel to the US from the United Arab Emirates after being temporarily held up for vetting, according to the Gulf states foreign ministry.

The 117 passengers had been stuck at Abu Dhabis international airport after arriving from Kabul, a lawyer who had been working to relocate the passengers told Al Jazeera on Wednesday.

In an email on Thursday to Reuters news agency, the UAE foreign ministry said the processing of those passengers has been completed and they have already departed for the United States on a commercial aircraft (Etihad) this morning.

Stan Bunner, a lawyer working with the passengers, told Al Jazeera that all the evacuees were US citizens, permanent legal residents, or special immigrant visa applicants. They included 59 children under the age of 18.

Bunner, who is part of an ad hoc group of US veterans called Project Dynamo that formed to help Afghans flee after the Taliban took control of the country on August 15, said US Customs and Border Patrol had repeatedly denied the plane permission to enter the US.

He said that the groups organisers believed they had full US landing permissions when the Kam Air flight they had chartered took off from Kabul.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson previously told Al Jazeera all passenger manifests of US-bound flights must be verified before departure to the US to ensure all passengers are screened appropriately.

A State Department spokesperson said on Wednesday that embassy staff in the UAE were vetting the passengers paperwork.

The US completely withdrew its troops from Afghanistan on August 30, stepping up a chaotic evacuation operation in the final weeks after the Taliban swept to power.

Defence officials have since acknowledged the US was surprised by the Talibans rapid takeover of Kabul, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Mark Milley, telling a Senate Committee on Tuesday the withdrawal was a strategic failure.

While the US and its allies airlifted about 120,000 people out of the country, officials have acknowledged that hundreds of US citizens and permanent residency holders likely remain in Afghanistan.

Rights groups, meanwhile, say tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked for the US government, and are eligible for special visas to relocate to the US, have been left behind.

Here is the original post:
UAE allows blocked Afghanistan evacuation flight to depart for US - Al Jazeera English