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How did a small group of Islamic students go from local vigilantes to one of the most infamous and enigmatic forces in the world? The Taliban is a name that has haunted the American imagination since 2001. The scenes of the group's brutality repeatedly played in the Western media, while true, perhaps obscure our ability to see the complex origins of the Taliban and how they impact the lives of Afghans. It's a shadow that reaches across the vast ancient Afghan homeland, the reputation of the modern state, and throughout global politics. At the end of the US war in Afghanistan we go back to the end of the Soviet Occupation and the start of the Afghan civil war to look at the rise of the Taliban. Their story concludes Throughline's two-episode investigation on the past, present, and future of the country that was once called "the center of the world.

If you would like to read more about the Taliban's rise to power:

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Afghanistan: The Rise of the Taliban : Throughline - NPR

Then-President George W. Bush speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast in 2003. (J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo)

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The American national security establishment has little aptitude for winning wars, but it is very good at defending its political power. The swift collapse of the Afghan government in August, with the leaders like Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing as its army surrendered to the Taliban, should have been an occasion for soul-searching among Americans leaders. After all, building a viable, non-Taliban government in Afghanistan has been a project carried out by four presidencies over nearly 20 years, at the cost of more than $2 trillion and nearly 2,500 soldiers. The number of Afghans who died in the war of the last two decades is difficult to establish with certainty, but best estimates are in the neighborhood of 240,000with perhaps 70,000 of those civilians.

By any measure, the effort to create a viable Afghan state was a major political project, supported not just by a bipartisan political consensus but also numerous NGOs and, intermittently, aided by American allies. Yet the Afghan government was revealed in the end to be a Potemkin regime, one that fell apart almost as fast as a house of cards encountering a gust of wind.

You would think that so massive a failureone that implicated so many leaders and institutionsmight lead to some reflection on all that had gone wrong. But such a level of mature introspection isnt common to the national security establishment. This clubby collection of military and civilian policy-makers, think tank wonks, and upscale journalists is sometimes called the Blob. (The term was popularized, if not coined, by Ben Rhodes, an adviser to Barack Obama). Its an apt metaphor; like the fabled movie monster, the foreign policy Blob may look amorphousbut still always oozes in the same general direction.

The Blob quickly decided that the end of the Afghan debacle, rather than a moment for self-reflection, presented an ideal opportunity to slime Joe Biden. The quickly formulated Blob consensus went something like this: The mission in Afghanistan didnt fail. The situation on the ground had stabilized with the Afghan government supported at a manageable cost by a few thousand US troops. Afghanistan was well on its way to becoming a viable long-term ally like Japan, South Korea, or Germany. Biden, hypnotized by the slogan end the forever wars, was guilty of a premature withdrawal. MORE FROM Jeet Heer

To make sure Biden received the requisite lashing, the media dug up all the ghouls who launched Afghanistan and earlier wars: John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blaireven the prince of the undead himself, Henry Kissinger. Variations of this critique were made by everyone from Ryan C. Crocker, ambassador to Afghanistan under Obama, to Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass. Writing in The New York Times, Crocker argued, Bidens decision to withdraw all U.S. forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure. Haass tweeted, The alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not endless occupation but open-ended presence. Occupation is imposed, presence invited. Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, & South Korea. And yes, withdrawal was the problem.

These arguments are so flimsy as to barely need refutation. Theres simply no rational comparison between the American presence, however contested by some locals, in Japan, Germany, and South Korea and two decades of ferocious blood-letting in Afghanistan. The minimum cost of Afghanistan is true only if you ignore both that American casualties over the last year are down because of Donald Trumps agreement with the Taliban to withdraw US troopsand that Afghan casualties remain numbingly high. As Joe Biden rightly said in an August 31 address, Theres nothing low grade or low risk or low cost about any war.

What Biden could have added is that his critics are willfully dishonest about the history of the warand the nature of the status quo before the collapse. One of the very best guides to that history is the blockbuster Afghanistan Papers report that Craig Whitlock released in The Washington Post in 2019 (now available in expanded form as a book). Current Issue

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Based on an internal autopsy of the Afghan mission commissioned by the Pentagon titled Lessons Learned, The Afghanistan Papers make clear that the war was lost from almost the very startand that the Afghanistan war was unwinnable because the United States lacked the knowledge and capability to build a legitimate or even viable government.

Instead, administration after administration kept kicking the can down the road by pretending the facade of a viable regime was the real thing. As MSNBC host Chris Hayes rightly observed, the philosophy behind Americas nation-building effort was fake it till you make it.

In 2015, Army Gen. Douglas Lute, who served as Afghan war czar under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told government interviewers, We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistanwe didnt know what we were doing. He added, What are we trying to do here? We didnt have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.

The Afghanistan Papers paint a grim picture of a mission lacking in any clear focus leading to the creation of a make-believe government, a phantom local army, and a status quo maintained by massive American-directed killing. As Whitlock notes:

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In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salariespaid by U.S. taxpayersfor tens of thousands of ghost soldiers. Whitlock adds, None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

Reading The Afghanistan Papers illuminates the rapid collapse of the American mission: It fell apart because it was always one big lie. The title of the original Pentagon report now takes an ironic air: Lessons Learned. The cynical and calculated freakout over Bidens wise decision to withdraw makes clear that the Blob will never learn any lessons.

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Americas Afghanistan Amnesia - The Nation

The absurdity and dysfunction of the Biden Administration have become so pervasive that its easy to become numb to it all. But some things it does are still so outrageous and inconceivable touching on the very identity of the nation itself that it is worth pausing to take stock of just how far the U.S. has fallen as a country in the short time Joe Biden has occupied the White House.

The latest example comes from the National Archives, the federal entity entrusted with preserving Americas most significant records and documents, including those which established the United States as an independent nation. Images of those original documents which include the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are now displayed on the National Archives website with a Harmful Language Alert. This advisory warns the content in the documents may, among other things, be outdated, offensive, racist, and discriminatory.

The alert was placed on the website by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), a collection of D.C. bureaucrats who obviously believe they are smarter, more enlightened, and morally superior to those whose genius, vision, and courage led to the formation of the United States itself. NARAs explanation of the alert even suggests they will improve upon the output of the founders and of their predecessor archivists through a process of self-examination and constant revision to root out any hint of what they consider biases, prejudices, and harmful language in their own work product.

Of course, theres nothing wrong with choosing ones words carefully, taking into account a broad range of perspectives. And the individuals who work for NARA are surely entitled, in their private capacities, to hold whatever view of Americas constitutional republic and founding ideals they want.

But its difficult to imagine how a sovereign nation can continue as such if the very government-appointed guardians of its history presume to apply their own political, cultural, and esthetic sensibilities to critique and criticize, in their official capacity, the countrys most fundamental and enduring precepts.

After all, the signature moment in the career of the governments most powerful officers is when they are sworn into office by taking an oath, sometimes with a hand placed on a sacred religious text, promising to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Its particularly telling that the bureaucrats at NARA believe themselves to be over and above that document, which after all, established the form of government that eventually led to their own existence and that allows such existence to be sustained at the publics expense. This may be the most breathtaking example of arrogance and biting the hand that feeds you the American public has ever seen from any government officials.

In response to a media inquiry about the alert (which reported the advisory was created in July 2021), NARA defended itself by claiming the Harmful Language Alert is not connected to any specific records, but appears at the top of the page while you are using the online National Archives Catalog.

In other words, it seems that NARA is claiming the advisory while still applicable to the nations founding documents wasnt necessarily or exclusively written for those documents and that, really, all of recorded American history could be considered offensive and harmful to right-thinking people.

Thats hardly an improvement, especially coming from the functionaries whose most important official duty is to ensure preservation of the records that literally make America America.

Yet NARA has, however unwittingly, provided Americans with an important public service by illustrating in as clear and profound a way as possible the anti-American rot that infests all levels and departments of the Executive Branch under Biden and the disdain with which it holds Americas highest aspirations.

It doesnt seem like too much of an exaggeration to say their objective appears not so much to run the government as to transform it into something the founders would find unrecognizable, a nation founded not on enduring and universally-applicable principles but on the shifting whims of entrenched elites.

To be sure, such deranged minds must find the ideas in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights deeply offensive, outdated, and harmful. They cannot conceive that there should be any limits to their own designs for government rule or that they should be considered merely part of the undifferentiated mass of common people who make up the U.S. population and subject to the same rules that apply to them.

Yet, ironically, the answer to this dismal state of affairs is still found in those very documents and in the processes they establish for electing and holding government officials accountable and in the fundamental rights none of those officials may transgress.

Patriotic Americans need to take heed and engage in those processes and assert those rights.

Because if the government can haughtily superimpose derogatory warnings over the written records that delineate and limit their own authority and that empower the people they represent, then the day may indeed come when those records wont be worth the parchment on which they are written.

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The Second Amendment Now Comes with Government-Issued Harmful Language Alert - NRA ILA

The leader of the group of heavily armed Moorish sovereign citizens who held an hours-long stand off on Rte. 128 in July is suing over his arrest and continuing lockup - and is demanding $1,000 a day in recompense for his time behind bars plus written apologies from Charlie Baker, Maura Healey and the troopers who put him in cuffs for what he claims is a violation of his and his fellow gun slingers' Second Amendment rights.

In a handwritten complaint filed in US District Court in Boston - one of three filed by Moorish sovereign citizens against Massachusetts this week - Jamhal Talib Abdullah Bey of Providence, formerly known as Jamhal Lattimer, cites a bevy of cases from outside New England and one case involving stun guns in Massachusetts that he says protects the rights of armed militias to pack weapons to protect themselves and that his group should never have been questioned, let alone arrested, in Wakefield while on their way from their Providence headquarters to Maine for training on the "large capacity firearms" they had with them.

He claims these rulings protect the rights of militias like his to prepare for "a foreign invasion from the Northern States, or an act of domestic terrorism in the northern States, such as Maine" and that Massachusetts's strict gun-control laws, which outright ban certain types of automatic weapons:

[C]ould and clearly does have a direct negative effect and impact on the response time, ability, effectiveness and efficiency of any militia trying to help the situation if said militias had to either: travel around Massachusetts, adding at least an additional 7 hours of travel, plus gas, or somehow, during foreign invasion or terrorism, unload their firearms, apply for an FID card, wait for approval and destroy or trade in their standard and high capacity magazines before the militiamen can ever do their job in protecting the Constitution Union. No military organization will ever burden itself in that manner, the former nor the latter.

He claims that a federal court decision created a legal definition of an acceptable militia - that its members wear uniforms, have a chain of command, open-carry weapons and practice with their weapons - just like he and his fellow Rise of the Moors members were doing, or trying to do when stopped. In fact, the case he cites involved a Lebanese man brought to the US to face charges after he and members of a Lebanese militia hijacked a plane with American passengers on board. In its ruling, the court was not defining a militia under the Second Amendment but describing how the man and his fellow militiamen boarded and then hijacked a plane getting ready for takeoff from Beirut's airport.

Bey also cites the 2008 Heller decision in which the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment grants people the right to own guns for self protection.

However, he seems to have missed two recent decisions in federal court in Massachusetts that hold that even the Heller decision has limits and that there's a limit to what can be considered weapons for "self protection."

In 2019, US District Court Judge Allison Burroughs - who was assigned Bey's case - ruled that while Heller means states can no longer totally ban all weapons, they can still place restrictions on them, including enacting requirements that gun owners must first obtain a license. She noted that Heller was not absolute, that it allows governments to ban gun ownership by the mentally ill or people with prior gun convictions. Burroughs cited a 2017 case in which the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit - which covers Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico - upheld the right of Massachusetts towns to set requirements for gun ownership.

Just two days after Burroughs' ruling, the appeals court ruled Massachusetts could bar specific types of assault weapons because they go way beyond the "self protection," as defined by the Supreme Court, that nobody needs a gun that can fire 10 or more rounds in rapid succession to protect themselves. The court contrasted the weaponry with the small stun guns the Supreme Court ruled Massachusetts could not ban, because they can be used for self protection without threatening the lives of large numbers of people at once.

The record contains ample evidence of the unique dangers posed by the proscribed weapons. Semiautomatic assault weapons permit a shooter to fire multiple rounds very quickly, allowing him to hit more victims in a shorter period of time. LCMs [large-capacity magazines] exacerbate this danger, allowing the shooter to fire more bullets without stopping to reload. ... It is, therefore, not surprising that AR-15s equipped with LCMs have been the weapons of choice in many of the deadliest mass shootings in recent history, including horrific events in Pittsburgh (2018), Parkland (2018), Las Vegas (2017), Sutherland Springs (2017), Orlando (2016), Newtown (2012), and Aurora (2012).

Unusual for a complaint by a Moorish sovereign citizen, Bey, a former Marine, concludes his complaint by avowing he is a "proud American" - typically, they will say they are, in fact, citizens of Morocco not subject to American laws. Bey does state, after saying he is American, that he is also "a Moroccan citizen."

Complete complaint (3.3M PDF).

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Leader of heavily armed 'militia' driving on 128 says Second Amendment gives them the right to protect Maine from foreign invasion - Universal Hub

Amid the media frenzy surrounding President Joe Bidens decision to pull his Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) pick, David Chipman, the National Rifle Association (NRA) tells The Federalist that no Biden nominee will respect the constitutional rights of Americans.

The NRA does not expect an administration as anti-gun and radical as Bidens to nominate anyone who supports the Second Amendment and cares for the constitutional rights of American citizens, NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter said. That said, were pleased we defeated Chipman, who was on record as a radical gun control proponent and who could have imposed widespread bans and countless attacks on [Second Amendment] rights.

Biden yanked Chipmans nomination Thursday after it became clear not enough lawmakers would back him. The senior policy advisor at Giffords, a gun-control group, has been roundly scrutinized for his controversial positions and actions. As The Federalist reported in July, Chipman claimed in 2019 he was frustrated by the First Amendment freedom of gun owners to say things he disapproved of.

Republican leadership indicated to The Federalist that Chipman was an inadequate nominee and other potential picks must show consideration for the rights of Americans.

Mr. Chipmans disregard for the Second Amendment was radical, even for the Senate Democrats who killed his nomination, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said. Leader McCarthy would support a nominee who stands with law enforcement and respects the Second Amendment a glaring omission in Mr. Chipmans resume.

A baseline qualification for anyone to be considered for this position would be a strong support for the Second Amendment and the rights of law-abiding gun owners, said Lauren Fine, spokeswoman for House Minority Whip Steve Scalise.

While the NRA is pleased with Chipmans withdrawal, the organization is still convinced the Biden administration has little regard for the Second Amendment. In August, for instance, Republicans on the Second Amendment caucus slammed the White House for altering the legal definition of a firearm.

In Chipmans defeat, weve won the most immediate threat to our rights, Hunter said. But, we expect many more battles in the future as long as Biden remains in office.

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NRA: Blocking Chipman Is A Win But Biden's War On Gun Rights Isn't Over - The Federalist