BRKG US Embassy in Kabul: potential security threats outside, advising U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the airport & avoid airport gates at this time
- Thread starter jward
- Start date
With what I wonder?
It is becoming more and more evident that leaving behind Americans in Af is deliberate.
Joe Biden’s inability to control his faculties has become more and more obvious over the last seven-plus months of his presidency. In what is almost certainly a symptom of his declining mental state, the president has had numerous angry outbursts and tone-deaf moments since taking office. Today was the scene of another awkward interaction that crossed the line into being outright offensive.
While talking about cybersecurity — because there’s apparently nothing more important going on — NBC News’ Peter Alexander asked Biden about what would happen if Americans still remain in Afghanistan after the 8/31 deadline.
That’s when the White House cut the audio feed to obscure his answer.
Luckily, there was a radio pooler in attendance who was recording and we now know what the president said. Per Alexander and multiple other people in the room, Biden actually made a joke about the Americans left stranded in the collapsed, war-torn nation, cracking a smile as he did so.
You can see why they cut the audio.
I know it’s cliche, but take a trip with me and imagine this were Donald Trump (or really any Republican) joking about Americans being trapped behind enemy lines due to a situation of his own making. I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying it would be a two-month news cycle much like the false Russian bounty story. There’d be mental health “experts” on CNN saying he’s unfit for office while seven-member MSNBC panels ripped him apart as tone-deaf and insulting.
Yet, because this is Joe Biden, no one says anything. It’s the starkest double standard in politics.
Regardless, on the merits, this is about as gross as it gets. Just this morning, I read the harrowing account of an American citizen from New Jersey who has tried to get to the Kabul airport multiple times. She’s been turned back and is now hiding out in her home with a group of SIV applicants who were also denied passage. These people have nowhere to go and are being forced to make impossible decisions. Does she leave children behind to die?
Or does she stay and attempt to protect them? That’s not a decision she should have to make, but she does because Joe Biden is a complete failure as president.
The point is that this is a deadly serious situation. It is not funny to make light of the ongoing suffering by popping off at reporters with smart-alec remarks instead of just answering basic questions. None of this is a joke, and that Biden is treating it as one is more proof he’s unqualified to hold the office he holds.
Let’s also pay attention to the fact that his handlers simply can’t protect him anymore. They tried to cut the audio but the president’s remarks got out anyway. Biden may not be in control of his own administration, but those who are can’t keep him in line. His mental state is becoming more of a liability, with him being five hours late for a presser yesterday only to show up half-alive being one of the latest examples.
None of this is normal. None of it should be treated as normal. The only reason this isn’t a major scandal is that Biden has the right letter next to his name.
Joe Biden’s inability to control his faculties has become more and more obvious over the last seven-plus months of his presidency. In what is almost certainly a symptom of his declining mental state, the president has had numerous angry outbursts and tone-deaf moments since taking office. Today was the scene of another awkward interaction that crossed the line into being outright offensive.
While talking about cybersecurity — because there’s apparently nothing more important going on — NBC News’ Peter Alexander asked Biden about what would happen if Americans still remain in Afghanistan after the 8/31 deadline.
That’s when the White House cut the audio feed to obscure his answer.
Luckily, there was a radio pooler in attendance who was recording and we now know what the president said. Per Alexander and multiple other people in the room, Biden actually made a joke about the Americans left stranded in the collapsed, war-torn nation, cracking a smile as he did so.
You can see why they cut the audio.
I know it’s cliche, but take a trip with me and imagine this were Donald Trump (or really any Republican) joking about Americans being trapped behind enemy lines due to a situation of his own making. I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying it would be a two-month news cycle much like the false Russian bounty story. There’d be mental health “experts” on CNN saying he’s unfit for office while seven-member MSNBC panels ripped him apart as tone-deaf and insulting.
Yet, because this is Joe Biden, no one says anything. It’s the starkest double standard in politics.
Regardless, on the merits, this is about as gross as it gets. Just this morning, I read the harrowing account of an American citizen from New Jersey who has tried to get to the Kabul airport multiple times. She’s been turned back and is now hiding out in her home with a group of SIV applicants who were also denied passage. These people have nowhere to go and are being forced to make impossible decisions. Does she leave children behind to die?
Or does she stay and attempt to protect them? That’s not a decision she should have to make, but she does because Joe Biden is a complete failure as president.
The point is that this is a deadly serious situation. It is not funny to make light of the ongoing suffering by popping off at reporters with smart-alec remarks instead of just answering basic questions. None of this is a joke, and that Biden is treating it as one is more proof he’s unqualified to hold the office he holds.
Let’s also pay attention to the fact that his handlers simply can’t protect him anymore. They tried to cut the audio but the president’s remarks got out anyway. Biden may not be in control of his own administration, but those who are can’t keep him in line. His mental state is becoming more of a liability, with him being five hours late for a presser yesterday only to show up half-alive being one of the latest examples.
None of this is normal. None of it should be treated as normal. The only reason this isn’t a major scandal is that Biden has the right letter next to his name.
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rairfoundation.com
Last Wednesday, Glenn Beck, in an impassioned plea to his faithful radio audience, sounded the trumpet for a call to action to save the persecuted Christians in Afghanistan. Working in tandem with the Nazarene fund, Mr. Beck requested his listeners to donate “to the point of hurting” to acquire the planes needed to shuttle Christians out of the chaos of the current Islamic takeover by the Taliban.
Starting with a generous $100,000, in 3 short days, Mr. Beck had raised over $22 million for the Christian organization. Today, they reached the $30 million mark.
With the donations, Mr. Beck and the Nazarene fund have purchased 20 airliners. But, unfortunately, the movement has been slowed down due to red tape by Joe Biden’s U.S. State Department. The Nazarene Fund lept through all the government’s necessary hoops such as; acquiring the personal information and passports for all the Christian refugees, gaining the assent of host countries to accept the Christians (ironically, not including America), providing paperwork in English, Arabic, and other languages for processing, and a slew of other bureaucratic details that hamper the speed of such missions.
Despite following all of the U.S. Statement Department’s requests, Glen Beck explains that “most of the 20 airlines are sitting on the tarmac waiting for the U.S. State Department clearance”. They are refusing to allow Afghani Christians to cross the border to another country without their approval. Ironically, the U.S. State Department is flying unvetted Afghani Muslims to America while stopping Christian Afghanis from fleeing to other countries willing to give them refuge.
Because of the State Department, the area surrounding the airport has been in chaos. Christian refugees and those Afhghani supporters of our American military are not allowed through the airport gate. As a result, flights were grounded for nearly three days. People awaiting a rescue evacuation are now going for nearly a week without food, without water, and without the ability to charge their cell phones, which act as a vital lifeline between them and their families and friends.
Thankfully, on Monday and Tuesday night, the State Department finally approved the Nazarene Fund’s first two flights out of Afghanistan. About 1200 Christian refugees were loaded onto the two planes and flown to safety. However, many of the passengers suffering from dehydration needed to wait an additional six hours for IVs and medical supplies before takeoff.
The critical deadline set by the Taliban to remove all Americans from the country is August 31st. On Monday, CIA director William Burns met with Senior Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar in Kabul. Despite their meeting, the Taliban did not extend the timeline for American evacuations was not extended. Baradar was imprisoned for 8 years in a Pakistan prison for his connection with terrorist attacks but was released in 2018.
After the Aug. 31st deadline, the Taliban vows to institute Sharia throughout the country. That means Islamic apostates who converted to Christianity, of which there are over 15,000, will most likely be slaughtered. Women will be required to wear full burkas, covering everything, including a mesh for the eyes, and not allowed outside without a male relative as a guardian. And Americans stranded will be used as bargaining chips to free more terrorists. Already, there are reports of the Taliban going door-to-door in hunt of Christians.
John Weaver, author of the book, Inside Afghanistan, says like ‘sheep among wolves,’ Afghan Christians are under threat of death, and many have already fled their home towns for other cities. The Taliban are looking for people who have left Islam and who are now following Jesus,” Weaver explained. “So, it is a desperate time for our brothers and sisters, and we need to stand in prayer with them and advocate for their situation.
The Nazarene Fund now has the capability to fly hundreds of passengers out of Afghanistan every 30 minutes. But due to Biden’s anti-Christian and anti-American State Department, that has not been happening.
Take Action: How You Can Help
U.S. State Department remains the last major impediment for the Nazarene fund and Mr. Beck to save persecuted Afghan Christians.
Would you please call your State Senators and Congressman and ask them to find out why the U.S. State Department is stopping the evacuation of persecuted Christians from Afghanistan? It is important to remember these persecuted Christians are not coming to America but are still being held up by the Biden’s State Department.
If you’d like to contribute to the effort to help Christians evacuate Afghanistan to a safer country, visit The Nazarene Fund.
Please continue to pray for all those trapped in Afghanistan seeking to get out of harm’s way.
94.7% of People Evacuated by U.S. from Afghanistan Are NOT Americans
If ever there was a time for “America First” policies to be applied, it’s the current situation with Afghanistan. The clock is ticking and there are tens of thousands of Americans stranded in Taliban-controlled territory living in fear and begging to be rescued. The Pentagon told reporters that...
americanconservativemovement.com
The White House bragged about the 4,400 Americans they've evacuated so far. They didn't mention those still stranded or the masses of non-Americans they've airlifted out.
by JD Rucker
August 25, 2021
in Foreign Affairs, Terrorism
Reading Time: 6 mins read
https://i0.wp.com/americanconservat...stan-Are-NOT-Americans.jpg?fit=1000,500&ssl=1
If ever there was a time for “America First” policies to be applied, it’s the current situation with Afghanistan. The clock is ticking and there are tens of thousands of Americans stranded in Taliban-controlled territory living in fear and begging to be rescued.
The Pentagon told reporters that they have rescued 4,400 Americans so far.
What they didn’t mention was that tens of thousands remain. They also didn’t mention that America’s efforts thus far have been focused on evacuating non-Americans. According to Jordan Davidson at The Federalist, that number is staggering:
More than 82,300 have been airlifted from Kabul since the government’s collapse nearly two weeks ago, but the Pentagon says that, as of Wednesday, only 4,400 Americans were rescued in those evacuation operations.
President Joe Biden previously promised to get out the Americans who are left in Afghanistan and subject to the Taliban’s rule, but so far, our own citizens do not appear to be the priority.
The State Department also confirmed that a majority of the people whisked away on flights from Kabul are not U.S. citizens. On Tuesday, Politico national security reporter Alex Ward reported leaked numbers indicating that in just 15 hours on Aug. 23, the United States evacuated approximately 6,916 people from Afghanistan. Only 483 of those were American citizens while the rest were Aghan nationals.
While estimates suggest that thousands are still stranded in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s swift takeover of the capital city, the Biden administration still refuses to disclose just how many Americans were left behind. The administration’s process for thoroughly vetting individuals coming into the United States from Afghanistan is also unclear.
The Biden regime has been as opaque as possible with their efforts to evacuate Americans. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was more offended by the word “stranded” earlier this week than the atrocities being committed against Americans by their new Taliban overlords. They are not acting like an administration with a mission. They’re acting like a political unit in PR damage-control mode.
Meanwhile, reports are coming out of Afghanistan of Americans and non-Americans alike in hiding, fearing for their lives. The Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan has sent shockwaves across the world as nations scramble to retrieve their threatened citizens. It’s a situation that should be perfectly suited for American leadership. Instead, we’re displaying utter weakness in the face of a Taliban force the White House miserably underestimated.
As Mark Moore at the NY Post reported, journalists in particular do not know if they’ll survive:
A female journalist in Afghanistan said she is on the run from the Taliban and fears for her life and those hiding her if members of the extremist group discover her whereabouts.
“I don’t know what will happen to me, because if they find me, they will kill me,” the woman told Fox News in an interview published Wednesday.
The journalist, whose identity Fox News is concealing to protect her, said she was a vocal critic of the Taliban’s cruel treatment of women and lives in terror that the group will begin killing female journalists.
She said she “was one of the females to always talk against Taliban in the media because of what they did to the women, what they did to the innocent people in Afghanistan, what they did to the children in Afghanistan.”
“They burned them,” the 24-year-old told Fox News. “They killed them.”
Shortly after the Taliban took over Kabul more than a week ago, they prohibited her from returning to her office, demanding that she cover her face.
The Biden regime has made their priorities clear. The Afghanistan debacle has exposed they aren’t just against “America First” policies. They’re determined to make America — and Americans — last.
northern watch
TB Fanatic
From my email inbox
jward
passin' thru
at this time they indicate two blasts, 11 casualties, and 3 american marines injured. . .
www.timebomb2000.com
ALERT - We can confirm an explosion outside Kabul airport - UPDATE: AT LEAST THIRTEEN U.S. SERVICE MEMBERS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN ACTION!
John Kirby @PentagonPresSec 47s We can confirm an explosion outside Kabul airport. Casualties are unclear at this time. We will provide additional details when we can.
thompson
Certa Bonum Certamen
I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. The current situation is far more frightening.It is becoming more and more evident that leaving behind Americans in Af is deliberate.
Joe Biden’s inability to control his faculties has become more and more obvious over the last seven-plus months of his presidency. In what is almost certainly a symptom of his declining mental state, the president has had numerous angry outbursts and tone-deaf moments since taking office. Today was the scene of another awkward interaction that crossed the line into being outright offensive.
While talking about cybersecurity — because there’s apparently nothing more important going on — NBC News’ Peter Alexander asked Biden about what would happen if Americans still remain in Afghanistan after the 8/31 deadline.
That’s when the White House cut the audio feed to obscure his answer.
Luckily, there was a radio pooler in attendance who was recording and we now know what the president said. Per Alexander and multiple other people in the room, Biden actually made a joke about the Americans left stranded in the collapsed, war-torn nation, cracking a smile as he did so.
You can see why they cut the audio.
I know it’s cliche, but take a trip with me and imagine this were Donald Trump (or really any Republican) joking about Americans being trapped behind enemy lines due to a situation of his own making. I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying it would be a two-month news cycle much like the false Russian bounty story. There’d be mental health “experts” on CNN saying he’s unfit for office while seven-member MSNBC panels ripped him apart as tone-deaf and insulting.
Yet, because this is Joe Biden, no one says anything. It’s the starkest double standard in politics.
Regardless, on the merits, this is about as gross as it gets. Just this morning, I read the harrowing account of an American citizen from New Jersey who has tried to get to the Kabul airport multiple times. She’s been turned back and is now hiding out in her home with a group of SIV applicants who were also denied passage. These people have nowhere to go and are being forced to make impossible decisions. Does she leave children behind to die?
Or does she stay and attempt to protect them? That’s not a decision she should have to make, but she does because Joe Biden is a complete failure as president.
The point is that this is a deadly serious situation. It is not funny to make light of the ongoing suffering by popping off at reporters with smart-alec remarks instead of just answering basic questions. None of this is a joke, and that Biden is treating it as one is more proof he’s unqualified to hold the office he holds.
Let’s also pay attention to the fact that his handlers simply can’t protect him anymore. They tried to cut the audio but the president’s remarks got out anyway. Biden may not be in control of his own administration, but those who are can’t keep him in line. His mental state is becoming more of a liability, with him being five hours late for a presser yesterday only to show up half-alive being one of the latest examples.
None of this is normal. None of it should be treated as normal. The only reason this isn’t a major scandal is that Biden has the right letter next to his name.
Heliobas Disciple
TB Fanatic
U.S. officials provided Taliban with names of Americans, Afghan allies to evacuate
The White House contends that limited information sharing with the Taliban is saving lives; critics argue it's putting Afghan allies in harm's way.
www.politico.com
U.S. officials provided Taliban with names of Americans, Afghan allies to evacuate
“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official.
By LARA SELIGMAN, ALEXANDER WARD and ANDREW DESIDERIO
08/26/2021 03:28 PM EDT
U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that's prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.
The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.
Since the fall of Kabul in mid-August, nearly 100,000 people have been evacuated, most of whom had to pass through the Taliban's many checkpoints. But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.
“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”
A spokesperson for U.S. Central Command declined to comment.
The issue came up during a classified briefing on Capitol Hill earlier this week, which turned contentious after top Biden administration officials defended their close coordination with the Taliban. Biden officials contended that it was the best way to keep Americans and Afghans safe and prevent a shooting war between Taliban fighters and the thousands of U.S. troops stationed at the airport.
After the fall of Kabul, in the earliest days of the evacuation, the joint U.S. military and diplomatic coordination team at the airport provided the Taliban with a list of people the U.S. aimed to evacuate. Those names included Afghans who served alongside the U.S. during the 20-year war and sought special immigrant visas to America. U.S. citizens, dual nationals and lawful permanent residents were also listed.
“They had to do that because of the security situation the White House created by allowing the Taliban to control everything outside the airport,” one U.S. official said.
But after thousands of visa applicants arrived at the airport, overwhelming the capacity of the U.S. to process them, the State Department changed course — asking the applicants not to come to the airport and instead requesting they wait until they were cleared for entry. From then on, the list fed to the Taliban didn’t include those Afghan names.
As of Aug. 25, only U.S. passport and green card holders were being accepted as eligible for evacuation, the defense official said.
Still, that U.S. officials handed over a list of Afghan allies and American citizens and residents shows the extent to which they outsourced security of the airport’s outer perimeter to the Taliban. The Taliban has gone door-to-door in search of Afghan interpreters and others who helped U.S. and Western forces.
In written and verbal communications, Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, and Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, head of U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan, have referred to the Taliban as “our Afghan partners,” according to two defense officials.
The Biden administration has been coordinating the evacuation effort and airport security with the Taliban, which is running the checkpoints outside the airport’s outer perimeter. Officials have been “in daily communication” with Taliban commanders about who to let in, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters this week.
The news comes just hours after two Islamic State terrorist attacks rocked the area just outside the airport, killing at least four U.S. Marines and wounding dozens more. A number of Afghans were also killed in the bombings.
After the attacks, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) appeared to criticize the Biden administration’s strategy of coordinating with the Taliban, writing in a statement: “As we wait for more details to come in, one thing is clear: We can’t trust the Taliban with Americans’ security.”
Heliobas Disciple
TB Fanatic
Indiana Representative Jim Banks at a Capitol Hill press conference on Aug 24, 2021:
"My job there was as a foreign military sales officer, so I was on the front lines of acquiring the equipment that the Americans provided and turned over to the Afghan army and the Afghan police. I’m going to read to you what is so painful for me and so many other Afghan veterans who served in that capacity, others who serve as a part of the train, advise, and assist equip effort in helping the Afghans.
We now know that due to the negligence of this administration, the Taliban now has access to over $85 billion worth of American military equipment. That includes 75,000 vehicles over 200 airplanes and helicopters, over 600,000 Small arms and light weapons. The Taliban now has more Blackhawk helicopters than 85% of the countries in the world. But they don’t just have weapons. They also have night-vision goggles, body armor, medical supplies, and unbelievably, unfathomable to me and so many others, is that the Taliban now has biometric devices which have the fingerprints, Iscans and the biographical information of the Afghans who helped us over the last 20 years. And here’s what we just learned, again, in the briefing that we just walked out of, is this administration still has no plan to get this military equipment, or these supplies back."
watch video here 1min 39sec
View: https://twitter.com/maj_retd_fox/status/1430959001567641606
also watch him speaking at a different press event here:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTn70ENFonI
GOP Rep.: Biden has BLOOD on his hands for botched Afghanistan withdrawal
2 min 34 sec
.
"My job there was as a foreign military sales officer, so I was on the front lines of acquiring the equipment that the Americans provided and turned over to the Afghan army and the Afghan police. I’m going to read to you what is so painful for me and so many other Afghan veterans who served in that capacity, others who serve as a part of the train, advise, and assist equip effort in helping the Afghans.
We now know that due to the negligence of this administration, the Taliban now has access to over $85 billion worth of American military equipment. That includes 75,000 vehicles over 200 airplanes and helicopters, over 600,000 Small arms and light weapons. The Taliban now has more Blackhawk helicopters than 85% of the countries in the world. But they don’t just have weapons. They also have night-vision goggles, body armor, medical supplies, and unbelievably, unfathomable to me and so many others, is that the Taliban now has biometric devices which have the fingerprints, Iscans and the biographical information of the Afghans who helped us over the last 20 years. And here’s what we just learned, again, in the briefing that we just walked out of, is this administration still has no plan to get this military equipment, or these supplies back."
watch video here 1min 39sec
View: https://twitter.com/maj_retd_fox/status/1430959001567641606
also watch him speaking at a different press event here:
GOP Rep.: Biden has BLOOD on his hands for botched Afghanistan withdrawal
2 min 34 sec
.
Heliobas Disciple
TB Fanatic
(fair use applies)
Surprise, panic and fateful choices: The day America lost its longest war
By Susannah George, Missy Ryan, Tyler Pager, Pamela Constable, John Hudson and
Griff Witte
August 28, 2021 at 3:53 p.m. EDT
KABUL — On the day that Afghanistan’s capital fell to the Taliban, delivering the definitive verdict on a war that had lumbered on ambiguously for nearly 20 years, one of the city’s top security officials woke up preparing for battle.
The day before, government forces in the north’s largest city — Mazar-e Sharif, a notorious anti-Taliban stronghold — had surrendered with barely a fight. The same had happened overnight in Jalalabad, the traditional winter home of Afghanistan’s kings and the country’s main gateway to the east.
As dawn broke over the misty mountains that ring the city on Aug. 15, Kabul had suddenly become an island — the last bastion of a government that the United States had supported at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. But it was an island that some were still prepared to defend.
“Everyone was ready to fight against the Taliban,” said the Afghan security official, who had spent the previous evening distributing new uniforms to his officers. “All the security forces were ready.”
Or so he thought. When he prepared to reinforce one of the main checkpoints protecting the city that morning, his commander waved him off. “He told me, ‘Leave that for now,’” the official recalled. “‘You can do it in a few days.’”
But Kabul didn’t have days.
Within hours, long-haired Taliban fighters had seized those checkpoints. The president had fled, not bothering to tell U.S. officials or even many of his own top lieutenants on his way out the palace door. And a country that has been whiplashed by multiple violent overthrows in its modern history was on course for a chaotic, destructive and humiliating end to the American era.
That outcome stunned top U.S. officials, several of whom had been on vacation when the weekend began, having expected the pro-Western government to hang on for weeks, if not months or even years longer. Afghans were no less astonished by the speed with which their government crumbled. Even the Taliban was surprised.
And in both countries, those who had dedicated themselves to keeping the extremist group out of power through decades of violent insurgency agreed on one thing: Had it not been for a few fateful choices that Sunday in mid-August, it all could have gone very differently.
A spur-of-the-moment decision by the president to escape the country, based on apparently incorrect information supplied by his advisers, was the most consequential. Later, the United States had one last chance to challenge Taliban supremacy in Kabul but opted to focus squarely on getting its people out from the airport.
This account of Kabul’s fall — the climactic moment of America’s longest war — is based on nearly two dozen interviews with U.S. and Afghan officials, a Taliban commander and residents of the city.
Before the fall
In both Washington and Kabul, the days and weeks leading up to Kabul’s fall were marked by complacency. The United States was withdrawing its forces. The Taliban was notching gains. But the prevailing view in both capitals was that there was still plenty of time before the insurgents might take over in a city of nearly 5 million that had long been the nerve center of America’s presence in the country.
President Ashraf Ghani exuded that belief, according to Afghan and U.S. officials who, like others for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
A technocratic and mercurial former professor, Ghani told aides that Afghan forces could hold off the Taliban in the wake of the American departure, and that the government just needed six months to turn the situation around, according to a former Afghan official. Even as Taliban attacks intensified in rural Afghanistan and provincial capitals, his confidence remained unshaken.
“We’re fighting there so we don’t have to fight here,” he would insist from his perch in the Arg, Kabul’s 19th-century presidential palace.
But reports from the field suggested that in some cases, Afghan government forces were not fighting at all.
When the Taliban advanced on key border crossings with Iran and Tajikistan in late June and early July, government forces abandoned their posts. Hamdullah Mohib — the young, Western-educated official who served as Ghani’s national security adviser but who had scant experience in military or security affairs — told others the government forces would soon retake them.
But no significant attempts ever materialized, depriving the government of key sources of revenue. Mohib did not respond to requests for comment.
As the Taliban continued to accumulate gains, American officials began to see the president’s confidence as delusion.
Ghani’s lack of focus on the threat that the Taliban posed mystified U.S. officials, in particular, Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, and Ambassador Ross Wilson.
In a July meeting with Ghani in Kabul, the two men told the Afghan president that his team needed a “realistic, implementable and widely supported plan to defend the country” and must drop the idea of defending all 34 provincial capitals, said an official familiar with the meeting.
“They had to focus on what they could actually defend,” said the official. “All provinces are important, but some were integral to the defense of Kabul.”
Ghani appeared to agree, but there would be no follow-through, the official said.
“Advice would be given, the right things would be said, and nothing would happen,” the official said. “They never did it. They never came up with that plan.”
Even as a cascade of provincial capitals fell — starting with Zaranj in the far southwest on Aug. 6, and continuing through two dozen others over the nine days that followed — the president appeared distracted.
“Ghani would want to talk about digitization of the economy,” said the official, referring to the president’s plan for a government salary payment system. “It had nothing to do with the dire threat.”
As late as the Saturday afternoon before Kabul fell, Ghani did not suggest any urgency around departure arrangements or the safety of senior staff.
Receiving one adviser in the palace gardens, and speaking in his characteristic soft tones, he made arrangements to shore up the country’s economy. He was supposed to address the nation later that night. But he never did.
The Americans, meanwhile, were suffering their own delusions.
In June, U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that the Afghan government would hang on for at least another six months. By August, the dominant view was that the Taliban wasn’t likely to pose a serious threat to Kabul until late fall.
American officials may have been urging Ghani to show greater urgency. But their own actions suggested no immediate cause for alarm, with officials surrendering to the customary rhythms of Washington in August.
On the Friday afternoon before Kabul fell, the White House was starting to empty out, as many of the senior staff prepared to take their first vacations of Biden’s young presidency. Earlier in the day, Biden had arrived at Camp David, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken was already in the Hamptons.
But by Saturday, the fall of Mazar-e Sharif — site of furious battles between pro and anti-Taliban forces in the 1990s — convinced U.S. officials that they needed to scramble. How quickly was a subject of dispute between the Pentagon and State Department.
In a conference call with Biden and his top security aides that day, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called for the immediate relocation of all U.S. Embassy personnel to the Kabul airport, according to a U.S. official familiar with the call.
Wilson’s embassy colleagues had been racing to destroy classified documents and equipment in the compound since Friday. An internal memo, obtained by The Washington Post, implored staff to destroy sensitive materials using incinerators, disintegrators and “burn bins.” The directive also called for the destruction of “American flags, or items which could be misused in propaganda efforts.”
Wilson said U.S. personnel needed more time to complete their work. But Austin insisted time had run out, the official said.
Saturday evening Kabul time, Ghani and Blinken spoke by phone. Hoping to avert a showdown in the capital, Blinken sought Ghani’s support for a U.S.-brokered arrangement with the Taliban in which the militants would remain outside Kabul if the Afghan leader would step aside as an interim government took charge. The aim, said a senior U.S. official, was to buy time for negotiations aimed at forming an inclusive government that involved the Taliban, as well as others.
The president reluctantly agreed.
Precarious as it may have been, there appeared to be a path to a peaceful, political transition — a way for Afghanistan to avoid the sort of violent takeovers that have characterized so much of its recent past.
[CONTINUED NEXT POST]
Surprise, panic and fateful choices: The day America lost its longest war
By Susannah George, Missy Ryan, Tyler Pager, Pamela Constable, John Hudson and
Griff Witte
August 28, 2021 at 3:53 p.m. EDT
KABUL — On the day that Afghanistan’s capital fell to the Taliban, delivering the definitive verdict on a war that had lumbered on ambiguously for nearly 20 years, one of the city’s top security officials woke up preparing for battle.
The day before, government forces in the north’s largest city — Mazar-e Sharif, a notorious anti-Taliban stronghold — had surrendered with barely a fight. The same had happened overnight in Jalalabad, the traditional winter home of Afghanistan’s kings and the country’s main gateway to the east.
As dawn broke over the misty mountains that ring the city on Aug. 15, Kabul had suddenly become an island — the last bastion of a government that the United States had supported at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. But it was an island that some were still prepared to defend.
“Everyone was ready to fight against the Taliban,” said the Afghan security official, who had spent the previous evening distributing new uniforms to his officers. “All the security forces were ready.”
Or so he thought. When he prepared to reinforce one of the main checkpoints protecting the city that morning, his commander waved him off. “He told me, ‘Leave that for now,’” the official recalled. “‘You can do it in a few days.’”
But Kabul didn’t have days.
Within hours, long-haired Taliban fighters had seized those checkpoints. The president had fled, not bothering to tell U.S. officials or even many of his own top lieutenants on his way out the palace door. And a country that has been whiplashed by multiple violent overthrows in its modern history was on course for a chaotic, destructive and humiliating end to the American era.
That outcome stunned top U.S. officials, several of whom had been on vacation when the weekend began, having expected the pro-Western government to hang on for weeks, if not months or even years longer. Afghans were no less astonished by the speed with which their government crumbled. Even the Taliban was surprised.
And in both countries, those who had dedicated themselves to keeping the extremist group out of power through decades of violent insurgency agreed on one thing: Had it not been for a few fateful choices that Sunday in mid-August, it all could have gone very differently.
A spur-of-the-moment decision by the president to escape the country, based on apparently incorrect information supplied by his advisers, was the most consequential. Later, the United States had one last chance to challenge Taliban supremacy in Kabul but opted to focus squarely on getting its people out from the airport.
This account of Kabul’s fall — the climactic moment of America’s longest war — is based on nearly two dozen interviews with U.S. and Afghan officials, a Taliban commander and residents of the city.
Before the fall
In both Washington and Kabul, the days and weeks leading up to Kabul’s fall were marked by complacency. The United States was withdrawing its forces. The Taliban was notching gains. But the prevailing view in both capitals was that there was still plenty of time before the insurgents might take over in a city of nearly 5 million that had long been the nerve center of America’s presence in the country.
President Ashraf Ghani exuded that belief, according to Afghan and U.S. officials who, like others for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
A technocratic and mercurial former professor, Ghani told aides that Afghan forces could hold off the Taliban in the wake of the American departure, and that the government just needed six months to turn the situation around, according to a former Afghan official. Even as Taliban attacks intensified in rural Afghanistan and provincial capitals, his confidence remained unshaken.
“We’re fighting there so we don’t have to fight here,” he would insist from his perch in the Arg, Kabul’s 19th-century presidential palace.
But reports from the field suggested that in some cases, Afghan government forces were not fighting at all.
When the Taliban advanced on key border crossings with Iran and Tajikistan in late June and early July, government forces abandoned their posts. Hamdullah Mohib — the young, Western-educated official who served as Ghani’s national security adviser but who had scant experience in military or security affairs — told others the government forces would soon retake them.
But no significant attempts ever materialized, depriving the government of key sources of revenue. Mohib did not respond to requests for comment.
As the Taliban continued to accumulate gains, American officials began to see the president’s confidence as delusion.
Ghani’s lack of focus on the threat that the Taliban posed mystified U.S. officials, in particular, Marine Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, and Ambassador Ross Wilson.
In a July meeting with Ghani in Kabul, the two men told the Afghan president that his team needed a “realistic, implementable and widely supported plan to defend the country” and must drop the idea of defending all 34 provincial capitals, said an official familiar with the meeting.
“They had to focus on what they could actually defend,” said the official. “All provinces are important, but some were integral to the defense of Kabul.”
Ghani appeared to agree, but there would be no follow-through, the official said.
“Advice would be given, the right things would be said, and nothing would happen,” the official said. “They never did it. They never came up with that plan.”
Even as a cascade of provincial capitals fell — starting with Zaranj in the far southwest on Aug. 6, and continuing through two dozen others over the nine days that followed — the president appeared distracted.
“Ghani would want to talk about digitization of the economy,” said the official, referring to the president’s plan for a government salary payment system. “It had nothing to do with the dire threat.”
As late as the Saturday afternoon before Kabul fell, Ghani did not suggest any urgency around departure arrangements or the safety of senior staff.
Receiving one adviser in the palace gardens, and speaking in his characteristic soft tones, he made arrangements to shore up the country’s economy. He was supposed to address the nation later that night. But he never did.
The Americans, meanwhile, were suffering their own delusions.
In June, U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that the Afghan government would hang on for at least another six months. By August, the dominant view was that the Taliban wasn’t likely to pose a serious threat to Kabul until late fall.
American officials may have been urging Ghani to show greater urgency. But their own actions suggested no immediate cause for alarm, with officials surrendering to the customary rhythms of Washington in August.
On the Friday afternoon before Kabul fell, the White House was starting to empty out, as many of the senior staff prepared to take their first vacations of Biden’s young presidency. Earlier in the day, Biden had arrived at Camp David, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken was already in the Hamptons.
But by Saturday, the fall of Mazar-e Sharif — site of furious battles between pro and anti-Taliban forces in the 1990s — convinced U.S. officials that they needed to scramble. How quickly was a subject of dispute between the Pentagon and State Department.
In a conference call with Biden and his top security aides that day, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called for the immediate relocation of all U.S. Embassy personnel to the Kabul airport, according to a U.S. official familiar with the call.
Wilson’s embassy colleagues had been racing to destroy classified documents and equipment in the compound since Friday. An internal memo, obtained by The Washington Post, implored staff to destroy sensitive materials using incinerators, disintegrators and “burn bins.” The directive also called for the destruction of “American flags, or items which could be misused in propaganda efforts.”
Wilson said U.S. personnel needed more time to complete their work. But Austin insisted time had run out, the official said.
Saturday evening Kabul time, Ghani and Blinken spoke by phone. Hoping to avert a showdown in the capital, Blinken sought Ghani’s support for a U.S.-brokered arrangement with the Taliban in which the militants would remain outside Kabul if the Afghan leader would step aside as an interim government took charge. The aim, said a senior U.S. official, was to buy time for negotiations aimed at forming an inclusive government that involved the Taliban, as well as others.
The president reluctantly agreed.
Precarious as it may have been, there appeared to be a path to a peaceful, political transition — a way for Afghanistan to avoid the sort of violent takeovers that have characterized so much of its recent past.
[CONTINUED NEXT POST]
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[CONTINUED]
The fall
The news that Kabul awoke to that Sunday morning was ominous: The overnight fall of Jalalabad had left the capital isolated. Many shops remained shuttered, and people stayed home from work. But there was no sense that a takeover was imminent.
Nader Nadery, a former human rights activist, was flying out to Doha, Qatar, that morning to participate in negotiations with the Taliban. He knew the group’s fighters were nearing Kabul, but he believed that diplomacy could still spare the country from outright Taliban control and a return to the dark days of the 1990s.
When he reached the traffic circle just before the airport entrance, a police officer manning a checkpoint opened his vehicle door and recognized him. The officer radiated exhaustion.
“I will never forget his eyes,” Nadery said. “He had not slept in a long time. He seemed hopeless, and he said the situation was getting bad. But he also told me, ‘You are going to Doha, and we need you to bring peace. Please try to find a way.’”
At the presidential palace — set in the heart of Kabul, but behind a maze of blast walls that cut it off from much of the city — the morning unfolded with a bracing normality.
There were the usual meetings. Even as some senior officials grew increasingly panicked, asking about contingency plans to evacuate Ghani and others, the president’s personal secretary insisted he didn’t know of any, according to a former Afghan official. The government had until U.S. troops left on Aug. 31, the secretary said, as a result of the deal Ghani had struck the night before.
“A lot of reassurances were given. The American and British troops were still there. We were living our lives normally,” said Marjan Mateen, 28, who was a senior communications manager in the palace.
She was on her way into work late that morning, being driven through central Kabul in an armored car, when she began to realize something was very wrong.
First she saw university students hurrying home early with their backpacks, then shops closing and people running in panic. Taliban fighters had been seen at the city’s main entrances, and residents were fearing a battle to come.
“It was like a horror movie,” she said, “and you are a part of it.”
Within the palace, too, the illusion of calm was being punctured. Around midday, much of the staff had been dismissed for lunch. While they were gone, according to officials, a top adviser informed the president that militants had entered the palace and were going room to room looking for him.
That does not appear to have been true. The Taliban had announced that while its fighters were at the edges of Kabul, having entered through the city’s main checkpoints after security forces withdrew, it did not intend to take over violently. There was an agreement in place for a peaceful transition, and the group intended to honor it.
Yet that wasn’t the message that was being delivered to Ghani. The president was told by his closest aides that he needed to get out — fast.
“It will either be your palace guards or the Taliban,” the president was told, according to one adviser’s account, “but if you stay you’ll be killed.”
Mindful of the last time the Taliban had conquered Kabul — in 1996, when victorious fighters sought out the former Soviet-backed president, disemboweled him and hung his body from a traffic light — Ghani agreed to go.
The president wanted to return home to gather his belongings but was told by advisers that there was no time. Early that afternoon, wearing plastic sandals and a thin coat, the president — along with the first lady and a handful of top aides — lifted off from the palace grounds in military helicopters.
One palace official who fled with the president said he didn’t know where they were going until he saw the Hindu Kush — the colossal mountain range to the north of Kabul — rising outside the window.
The group eventually landed in Uzbekistan. From there, they boarded a small plane bound for the United Arab Emirates.
Ghani aides who had not been part of the hasty evacuation returned from lunch to find the president had vanished, his office empty.
The president, who did not respond to requests for comment, later justified leaving as a way to spare his country “a flood of bloodshed,” writing on Facebook that he faced a choice between being killed or “leaving the dear country that I dedicated my life to protecting the past 20 years.” But he did not inform most of the government’s senior ranks, including his two vice presidents, about his departure. Nor did Ghani contact the U.S. government, which was left to piece together the absent leader’s movements from rumor and media reports.
Not knowing Ghani had left, some senior Afghan officials continued to ask the palace for help. But at some point that afternoon, Ghani’s secretary stopped responding to messages.
Officials who had been left behind took the hint and made their own dash for the airport, hoping to get on commercial flights out that evening.
A handful, including the parliament speaker, were whisked away to Pakistan. The defense minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, boarded a military flight to the UAE. Ghani’s second vice president, Sarwar Danish, and the head of the Afghan intelligence service, Ahmad Zia Saraj, also managed to leave.
Others were less fortunate. The hajj minister, a former Talib who had spoken out strongly against his former comrades, had his flight canceled, forcing him to return to a city where his friends-turned-enemies were fast becoming the de facto rulers.
Even after they had reached safety, the president and his party never circled back with senior officials who had been anxiously seeking their help. Some of those who had worked closely with Ghani over the years felt betrayed, believing he had left them to die.
Capital in chaos
The senior Kabul security official who had been waved away from reinforcing checkpoints that morning found out from a friend that the government he had been prepared to fight for was no more.
“The president’s gone,” the friend reported. “I think the government collapsed.”
He rushed to the airport, wanting to see for himself as an exodus began, with pilots and crews rushing to board planes and get airborne from a country suddenly confronted with a vacuum.
“Everyone was talking to each other like ‘What’s happened? What’s happened? What’s going on?’” he said.
U.S. officials were as surprised as anyone. The Americans had expected Ghani would stay for an orderly transition to an interim authority, as the agreement that negotiators in Doha had struck promised. News of Ghani’s departure, received secondhand, meant that hope had been crushed.
“He not only abandoned his country, but then unraveled the security situation in Kabul,” said a senior U.S. official. “People just simply melted away, from the airport to everywhere else.”
In the void, law and order began to break down, with reports of armed gangs moving through the streets.
In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha — including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command — spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing.
“We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”
Throughout the day, Biden had remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan. The collapse of the Afghan government hadn’t changed his mind.
McKenzie, aware of those orders, told Baradar that the U.S. mission was only to evacuate American citizens, Afghan allies and others at risk. The United States, he told Baradar, needed the airport to do that.
On the spot, an understanding was reached, according to two other U.S. officials: The United States could have the airport until Aug. 31. But the Taliban would control the city.
Fighters were now on the move throughout Kabul, with the group’s spokesman issuing a revision of his earlier guidance: The Taliban hadn’t intended to take Kabul that day. But Ghani’s exit gave the group no choice.
“The government has left all of their ministries; you have to enter the city to prevent further disorder and protect public property and services from chaos,” read a message that pinged on Muhammad Nasir Haqqani’s phone.
Haqqani, a Taliban commander, had led his forces to the city’s gates that morning and been surprised by what he found.
“We didn’t see a single soldier or police,” he said. For several hours after, he had done as he was told, refraining from advancing further.
But after getting word that the government had collapsed, he and his men were in the city’s center within an hour. By late afternoon, they had reached the palace.
“We couldn’t control our emotions, we were so happy. Most of our fighters were crying,” he said. “We never thought we would take Kabul so quickly.”
For many others in Kabul, Haqqani’s source of joy was a cause for profound despair.
The sight of Taliban fighters taking up positions in the streets of Kabul accelerated an exodus that had already begun. The city’s perpetually jammed traffic was even more gridlocked than usual as people raced home from work or to the airport to try to catch a flight.
Mateen, the palace communications manager, was fielding calls from her colleagues as she sat in an armored car amid the mayhem.
“Don’t come,” they said, according to Mateen. “All the local staff is leaving. Just help us get our documents.”
She detoured to a relative’s house and realized she urgently needed to change her clothes: She had been wearing jeans and a shirt but knew that could now get her in trouble with the city’s new authorities.
“I had just seen my government fall right in front of my eyes,” she said. “I had this sudden feeling that everything was gone now. The flag of our country was not going to be there anymore. We were waking up to a new country ruled by the Taliban.”
Aria Raofi, an Afghan American who had been teaching photography to Afghan girls displaced by war, had a similar epiphany when she drove past a tank.
“Those were not Afghan soldiers in it. They were terrorists,” she said. She rushed home and hid in her apartment, only to discover that the Afghan security forces at her neighborhood checkpoint were gone, replaced by Taliban gunmen. She was soon making preparations to leave.
At the palace, too, the Taliban had taken control. A lone guard had stayed behind to let the militants in and show them around. Looking slightly dazed, he told an Al Jazeera reporter how Ghani had called him and told him to work with former president Hamid Karzai to coordinate the handover.
The Al Jazeera cameras rolled as the fighters — fresh from 20 years in the shadows — gawked at the gilded trappings of power.
Nadery, who has not returned to Afghanistan since he flew to Qatar that Sunday, said the news that the Taliban had taken over felt like the worst kind of failure.
“I just sat there thinking, ‘I lost my country today,’” said Nadery, 40, who had been head of the country’s national civil service agency. “I saw everything I had fought for, for so many years, crumbling before my eyes.”
For the United States, the scope of defeat was total — and was vividly rendered as helicopters evacuated embassy personnel to the airport. Before the American flag was lowered one last time, diplomats engaged in a frenzy of destruction, burning documents and smashing sensitive equipment.
“It was extremely loud,” said a senior U.S. official. “There were controlled fires, the shredding of classified paper documents, and a constant pounding noise from the destruction of hard drives and weapons.”
By the time they were finished, what had once been the world’s largest diplomatic mission was “a strange-looking place,” the official said. “All the signage and photos were gone. Computers had the guts ripped out of them and the offices looked oddly bare.”
At the State Department, top brass, including Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s deputy, and Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, were frantically calling foreign ministers to ask them to help with evacuation efforts and to coordinate a statement signed by 114 countries urging the Taliban to allow safe passage for evacuees. This, they realized, would be a historic evacuation effort.
As darkness enveloped the city, more and more people swarmed the airport — eventually overwhelming the modest terminal and spilling out onto the tarmac.
But some had already given up hope that they would ever get out. That night, instead of going home, the senior Kabul security official went to a friend’s house. He has been hiding there ever since but is resigned to the fact that, sooner or later, the Taliban will probably find him.
His fate was sealed, he said, when Afghanistan’s president decided to save himself.
“From that moment, everything was smashed,” he said. “I’ve killed hundreds of Taliban. So for sure they will kill me.”
The fall
The news that Kabul awoke to that Sunday morning was ominous: The overnight fall of Jalalabad had left the capital isolated. Many shops remained shuttered, and people stayed home from work. But there was no sense that a takeover was imminent.
Nader Nadery, a former human rights activist, was flying out to Doha, Qatar, that morning to participate in negotiations with the Taliban. He knew the group’s fighters were nearing Kabul, but he believed that diplomacy could still spare the country from outright Taliban control and a return to the dark days of the 1990s.
When he reached the traffic circle just before the airport entrance, a police officer manning a checkpoint opened his vehicle door and recognized him. The officer radiated exhaustion.
“I will never forget his eyes,” Nadery said. “He had not slept in a long time. He seemed hopeless, and he said the situation was getting bad. But he also told me, ‘You are going to Doha, and we need you to bring peace. Please try to find a way.’”
At the presidential palace — set in the heart of Kabul, but behind a maze of blast walls that cut it off from much of the city — the morning unfolded with a bracing normality.
There were the usual meetings. Even as some senior officials grew increasingly panicked, asking about contingency plans to evacuate Ghani and others, the president’s personal secretary insisted he didn’t know of any, according to a former Afghan official. The government had until U.S. troops left on Aug. 31, the secretary said, as a result of the deal Ghani had struck the night before.
“A lot of reassurances were given. The American and British troops were still there. We were living our lives normally,” said Marjan Mateen, 28, who was a senior communications manager in the palace.
She was on her way into work late that morning, being driven through central Kabul in an armored car, when she began to realize something was very wrong.
First she saw university students hurrying home early with their backpacks, then shops closing and people running in panic. Taliban fighters had been seen at the city’s main entrances, and residents were fearing a battle to come.
“It was like a horror movie,” she said, “and you are a part of it.”
Within the palace, too, the illusion of calm was being punctured. Around midday, much of the staff had been dismissed for lunch. While they were gone, according to officials, a top adviser informed the president that militants had entered the palace and were going room to room looking for him.
That does not appear to have been true. The Taliban had announced that while its fighters were at the edges of Kabul, having entered through the city’s main checkpoints after security forces withdrew, it did not intend to take over violently. There was an agreement in place for a peaceful transition, and the group intended to honor it.
Yet that wasn’t the message that was being delivered to Ghani. The president was told by his closest aides that he needed to get out — fast.
“It will either be your palace guards or the Taliban,” the president was told, according to one adviser’s account, “but if you stay you’ll be killed.”
Mindful of the last time the Taliban had conquered Kabul — in 1996, when victorious fighters sought out the former Soviet-backed president, disemboweled him and hung his body from a traffic light — Ghani agreed to go.
The president wanted to return home to gather his belongings but was told by advisers that there was no time. Early that afternoon, wearing plastic sandals and a thin coat, the president — along with the first lady and a handful of top aides — lifted off from the palace grounds in military helicopters.
One palace official who fled with the president said he didn’t know where they were going until he saw the Hindu Kush — the colossal mountain range to the north of Kabul — rising outside the window.
The group eventually landed in Uzbekistan. From there, they boarded a small plane bound for the United Arab Emirates.
Ghani aides who had not been part of the hasty evacuation returned from lunch to find the president had vanished, his office empty.
The president, who did not respond to requests for comment, later justified leaving as a way to spare his country “a flood of bloodshed,” writing on Facebook that he faced a choice between being killed or “leaving the dear country that I dedicated my life to protecting the past 20 years.” But he did not inform most of the government’s senior ranks, including his two vice presidents, about his departure. Nor did Ghani contact the U.S. government, which was left to piece together the absent leader’s movements from rumor and media reports.
Not knowing Ghani had left, some senior Afghan officials continued to ask the palace for help. But at some point that afternoon, Ghani’s secretary stopped responding to messages.
Officials who had been left behind took the hint and made their own dash for the airport, hoping to get on commercial flights out that evening.
A handful, including the parliament speaker, were whisked away to Pakistan. The defense minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, boarded a military flight to the UAE. Ghani’s second vice president, Sarwar Danish, and the head of the Afghan intelligence service, Ahmad Zia Saraj, also managed to leave.
Others were less fortunate. The hajj minister, a former Talib who had spoken out strongly against his former comrades, had his flight canceled, forcing him to return to a city where his friends-turned-enemies were fast becoming the de facto rulers.
Even after they had reached safety, the president and his party never circled back with senior officials who had been anxiously seeking their help. Some of those who had worked closely with Ghani over the years felt betrayed, believing he had left them to die.
Capital in chaos
The senior Kabul security official who had been waved away from reinforcing checkpoints that morning found out from a friend that the government he had been prepared to fight for was no more.
“The president’s gone,” the friend reported. “I think the government collapsed.”
He rushed to the airport, wanting to see for himself as an exodus began, with pilots and crews rushing to board planes and get airborne from a country suddenly confronted with a vacuum.
“Everyone was talking to each other like ‘What’s happened? What’s happened? What’s going on?’” he said.
U.S. officials were as surprised as anyone. The Americans had expected Ghani would stay for an orderly transition to an interim authority, as the agreement that negotiators in Doha had struck promised. News of Ghani’s departure, received secondhand, meant that hope had been crushed.
“He not only abandoned his country, but then unraveled the security situation in Kabul,” said a senior U.S. official. “People just simply melted away, from the airport to everywhere else.”
In the void, law and order began to break down, with reports of armed gangs moving through the streets.
In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha — including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command — spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing.
“We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”
Throughout the day, Biden had remained resolute in his decision to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan. The collapse of the Afghan government hadn’t changed his mind.
McKenzie, aware of those orders, told Baradar that the U.S. mission was only to evacuate American citizens, Afghan allies and others at risk. The United States, he told Baradar, needed the airport to do that.
On the spot, an understanding was reached, according to two other U.S. officials: The United States could have the airport until Aug. 31. But the Taliban would control the city.
Fighters were now on the move throughout Kabul, with the group’s spokesman issuing a revision of his earlier guidance: The Taliban hadn’t intended to take Kabul that day. But Ghani’s exit gave the group no choice.
“The government has left all of their ministries; you have to enter the city to prevent further disorder and protect public property and services from chaos,” read a message that pinged on Muhammad Nasir Haqqani’s phone.
Haqqani, a Taliban commander, had led his forces to the city’s gates that morning and been surprised by what he found.
“We didn’t see a single soldier or police,” he said. For several hours after, he had done as he was told, refraining from advancing further.
But after getting word that the government had collapsed, he and his men were in the city’s center within an hour. By late afternoon, they had reached the palace.
“We couldn’t control our emotions, we were so happy. Most of our fighters were crying,” he said. “We never thought we would take Kabul so quickly.”
For many others in Kabul, Haqqani’s source of joy was a cause for profound despair.
The sight of Taliban fighters taking up positions in the streets of Kabul accelerated an exodus that had already begun. The city’s perpetually jammed traffic was even more gridlocked than usual as people raced home from work or to the airport to try to catch a flight.
Mateen, the palace communications manager, was fielding calls from her colleagues as she sat in an armored car amid the mayhem.
“Don’t come,” they said, according to Mateen. “All the local staff is leaving. Just help us get our documents.”
She detoured to a relative’s house and realized she urgently needed to change her clothes: She had been wearing jeans and a shirt but knew that could now get her in trouble with the city’s new authorities.
“I had just seen my government fall right in front of my eyes,” she said. “I had this sudden feeling that everything was gone now. The flag of our country was not going to be there anymore. We were waking up to a new country ruled by the Taliban.”
Aria Raofi, an Afghan American who had been teaching photography to Afghan girls displaced by war, had a similar epiphany when she drove past a tank.
“Those were not Afghan soldiers in it. They were terrorists,” she said. She rushed home and hid in her apartment, only to discover that the Afghan security forces at her neighborhood checkpoint were gone, replaced by Taliban gunmen. She was soon making preparations to leave.
At the palace, too, the Taliban had taken control. A lone guard had stayed behind to let the militants in and show them around. Looking slightly dazed, he told an Al Jazeera reporter how Ghani had called him and told him to work with former president Hamid Karzai to coordinate the handover.
The Al Jazeera cameras rolled as the fighters — fresh from 20 years in the shadows — gawked at the gilded trappings of power.
Nadery, who has not returned to Afghanistan since he flew to Qatar that Sunday, said the news that the Taliban had taken over felt like the worst kind of failure.
“I just sat there thinking, ‘I lost my country today,’” said Nadery, 40, who had been head of the country’s national civil service agency. “I saw everything I had fought for, for so many years, crumbling before my eyes.”
For the United States, the scope of defeat was total — and was vividly rendered as helicopters evacuated embassy personnel to the airport. Before the American flag was lowered one last time, diplomats engaged in a frenzy of destruction, burning documents and smashing sensitive equipment.
“It was extremely loud,” said a senior U.S. official. “There were controlled fires, the shredding of classified paper documents, and a constant pounding noise from the destruction of hard drives and weapons.”
By the time they were finished, what had once been the world’s largest diplomatic mission was “a strange-looking place,” the official said. “All the signage and photos were gone. Computers had the guts ripped out of them and the offices looked oddly bare.”
At the State Department, top brass, including Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s deputy, and Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, were frantically calling foreign ministers to ask them to help with evacuation efforts and to coordinate a statement signed by 114 countries urging the Taliban to allow safe passage for evacuees. This, they realized, would be a historic evacuation effort.
As darkness enveloped the city, more and more people swarmed the airport — eventually overwhelming the modest terminal and spilling out onto the tarmac.
But some had already given up hope that they would ever get out. That night, instead of going home, the senior Kabul security official went to a friend’s house. He has been hiding there ever since but is resigned to the fact that, sooner or later, the Taliban will probably find him.
His fate was sealed, he said, when Afghanistan’s president decided to save himself.
“From that moment, everything was smashed,” he said. “I’ve killed hundreds of Taliban. So for sure they will kill me.”
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Viral Infographic Reveals The Shocking Amount Of Military Hardware Biden Handed To The Taliban
by Tyler Durden
Sunday, Aug 29, 2021 - 07:30 PM
When President Biden leaves billions of US military hardware in the hands of America-hating terrorists - after having seven months to "plan a withdrawal" - he doesn't mess around.
According to a now-viral infographic from The Sunday Times, ongoing terror operations will benefit from the luxury of more than 22,000 Humvees, 42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs, 16,000 night visions goggles and devices, 64,000 machine guns, and 358,000 assault rifles.
Indeed, while Biden wants to strip law-abiding Americans of their constitutional right to bear arms, he's put over 400,000 of them in the hands of terrorists.
Needless to say, the vast trove of US military hardware handed to America's enemies on a silver platter should, at minimum, make Raytheon - whose board Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sat on until he joined the Biden admin - very happy.
Bogey
“Where liberty dwells, there is my country.”
I'm looking confirmation.
Update: The only place I found any reference is on her twitter page. She appears to have some ex spec ops guys providing her sitreps and it's FUBAR. The people running this shit show are pure evil.
Emily Miller (@emilymiller) / Twitter
‘7 buses loaded with American women all likely dead now’… – CITIZEN FREE PRESS
7 buses loaded with American women all likely dead now’…
Posted by Kane on August 30, 2021 3:39 am
Emily Miller
@emilymiller
·
Update: The only place I found any reference is on her twitter page. She appears to have some ex spec ops guys providing her sitreps and it's FUBAR. The people running this shit show are pure evil.
Emily Miller (@emilymiller) / Twitter
‘7 buses loaded with American women all likely dead now’… – CITIZEN FREE PRESS
7 buses loaded with American women all likely dead now’…
Posted by Kane on August 30, 2021 3:39 am
Emily Miller
@emilymiller
·
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American University of Afghanistan students and relatives trying to flee were sent home.
After seven hours of waiting for clearance to enter the airport gates, the group met a dead end: Evacuations were permanently called off.
American University of Afghanistan students and relatives trying to flee were sent home.
By Farnaz Fassihi
Published Aug. 29, 2021Updated Aug. 30, 2021, 5:34 p.m. ET
Hundreds of students, their relatives and staff of the American University of Afghanistan gathered at a safe house on Sunday and boarded buses in what was supposed to be a final attempt at evacuation on U.S. military flights, the students said.
But after seven hours of waiting for clearance to enter the airport gates and driving around the city, the group met a dead end: Evacuations were permanently called off. The airport gates remained a security threat, and civilian evacuations were ending Monday.
“I regret to inform you that the high command at HKIA in the airport has announced there will be no more rescue flights,” said an email sent to students from the university administration on Sunday afternoon, which was shared with The New York Times.
“The scholar pilgrims who were turned away today while seeking safe passage to a better future need the help of the U.S. government, who gave them the hope they must not lose,” the American University president, Ian Bickford, said.
The email asked the 600 or so students and relatives to return home. The U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan must be completed by a Tuesday deadline, so the military is turning from evacuating civilians to bringing its own personnel home.
The group was then alarmed after learning that their names had been shared with the Taliban fighters guarding the airport checkpoints. Mr. Bickford said that the university had given the names only to the U.S. military.
“They told us: We have given your names to the Taliban,” said Hosay, a 24-year-old sophomore studying business administration who was on the bus on Sunday. “We are all terrified. There is no evacuation, there is no getting out.”
Hosay earned a scholarship that covered half of her tuition. She wanted to get an M.B.A. and start an all-female engineering firm.
When the Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15, one of the first sites they captured was the sprawling, modern American University campus. Men in traditional Afghan outfits swinging AK-47 rifles brought down the university flag and raised the flag of the Taliban, according to student and social media photos.
The Taliban posted a picture of themselves on social media standing at the entrance of a university building with an ominous message, saying this was where America had trained infidel “wolves” to corrupt the minds of Muslims.
The photograph was widely shared among Afghans and sent students and alumni into hiding. They had reason to be scared. In 2016, the Taliban attacked the campus with explosives and guns in a terrorist assault that lasted 10 hours and killed 15 people, including seven students.
The university shut down its campus on Aug. 14 as word reached administrators that the Taliban were on the outskirts of Kabul. Mr. Bickford and foreign staff left Kabul for Doha that night.
Mr. Bickford said in an interview last week that he was working with the State Department to evacuate about 1,200 students and alumni. But on Friday, after the deadly attack on the airport, Mr. Bickford said the effort had become much more complicated.
Mr. Bickford said the university was committed to ensuring all enrolled students would finish their degrees remotely.
The American University of Afghanistan opened in 2006, receiving most of its funding from the United States Agency for International Development, which gave $160 million. It was one of the U.S.A.I.D.’s largest civilian projects in Afghanistan.
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. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
How did the Taliban gain control? See how the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in a few months, and read about how their strategy enabled them to do so.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
What does their victory mean for terrorist groups? The United States invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to terrorism, and many worry that Al Qaeda and other radical groups will again find safe haven there.
Students said they had struggled emotionally over the past two weeks after they went from being college students to fugitives overnight.
Several students interviewed repeated a poetic saying in Dari: “Our hopes and dreams have turned into dust.”
Mohammad, a 31-year-old father of three and part-time government ministry worker, had three more courses left to finish his degree in business administration.
His job and salary are now gone. His degree is in jeopardy.
“It’s as if you throw a glass on a cement floor and your life shatters in a split second,” he said Sunday from a safe house.
Yasser, a 27-year-old political science student, said he had been told in an email from the university on Saturday to report to a safe location for evacuation. But after President Biden said there were security threats to the airport, the plan was scrapped and everyone was sent home.
Early Sunday morning, Yasser received another email from the university asking him to go to a safe house at 7:45 a.m. The students were told to bring only a backpack with two outfits. Videos shared with The New York Times show hundreds of students carrying backpacks and waiting on the roadside. Dozens of buses are lined up.
The chitchat among students abruptly ends, and someone gasps. Someone cries. The students have just been told that evacuations have been called off.
“It was a frightening day,” Yasser said. “We went there anticipating to be rescued and returned home defeated.”
Correction: Aug. 30, 2021
An earlier version of this article misstated comments by the president of the American University of Afghanistan about attempts to evacuate students. He said that the university had shared the students’ names with the U.S. military, and that the military’s protocol was to share that information with the Taliban to coordinate access to the airport. He did not say the U.S. military had shared with the Taliban a list of students trying to leave Afghanistan.
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Osama bin Laden’s security chief triumphantly returns to hometown in Afghanistan | FDD's Long War Journal
The video of Dr. Amin al Haq is evidence that Al Qaeda commanders now feel secure enough to appear publicly in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
www.longwarjournal.org
Osama bin Laden’s security chief triumphantly returns to hometown in Afghanistan
By Bill Roggio | August 30, 2021
The man who served as Osama bin Laden’s security chief at the battle of Tora Bora triumphantly returned to his home in eastern Afghanistan today, less than two weeks after the country fell to the Taliban. The Al Qaeda commander was reportedly freed by Pakistan a decade ago.
Dr. Amin al Haq, the former head of bin Laden’s Black Guard, was captured on video in a large convoy as it traveled through a checkpoint in Nangarhar province. Haq was accompanied by a large convoy of heavily armed Taliban fighters in brand new SUVs. A small crowd flocked to Haq to shake his hand and take selfies with him.
The video of al Haq is evidence that Al Qaeda commanders now feel secure enough to appear publicly in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
It was not immediately clear if al Haq was returning to his home in eastern Afghanistan for the first time, or if he has been in Afghanistan the entire time since being released from Pakistani custody. He may have also been traversing the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Either way, the confidence to travel and operate out in the open – in plain sight for the first time in a decade – speaks to the marked change in Afghanistan over the last month.
Al Qaeda leaders and fighters have been in Afghanistan supporting the Taliban’s insurgency for the past two decades. Pakistan’s cities and the tribal areas have served as safe havens for Al Qaeda over the past two decades.
From Tora Bora, to a Pakistani “prison,” to Nangarhar
Al Haq began his career as a jihadist as a member of the Hizb-i Islami Khalis (HIK), a faction of the Hizb-i-Islami group that was founded by Maulvi Mohammed Yunis Khalis, who was instrumental in welcoming Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan after Al Qaeda was ejected from Sudan in 1996.
As leader of the Black Guard, al Haq accompanied Osama bin Laden during the 2001 battle at Tora Bora in Nangarhar province. Al Haq helped the Al Qaeda emir and other senior al Qaeda leaders escape the U.S. and Afghan militia assault on the cave complex and flee to Pakistan.
During renewed fighting at Tora Bora in the summer of 2007, which was led by Anwarul Haq Mujahid, the eldest son of Khalis, al Haq was reportedly wounded and fled across the border into Pakistan’s Kurram tribal agency. A large Taliban and Al Qaeda force, which is said to have included Arabs, Chechens, and Uzbeks, battled with Afghan and U.S. forces, raising speculation that bin Laden was in the area.
Al Haq was said to be detained by Pakistani security forces in the city of Lahore in 2008. Lahore is the home of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Al Qaeda-allied, Pakistan-sponsored terror group that has significant infrastructure in the city. He was reportedly released in 2011, and he subsequently disappeared from public eye until he emerged in Nangarhar today.
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State Dept Admits The Majority of Afghans and SIVs Who Helped us Did Not Evacuate, So Who Are These 116,000 Afghans We Evacuated - The Last Refuge
According to the data provided by the U.S. State Department in the last few days, the total number of people evacuated from the Kabul airport was 122,000. Of those, 6,000 were American citizens (AmCits), and 116,000 were Afghan refugees. Today the State Department admits the “majority” of the...
theconservativetreehouse.com
State Dept Admits The Majority of Afghans and SIVs Who Helped us Did Not Evacuate, So Who Are These 116,000 Afghans We Evacuated
September 1, 2021 | Sundance | 433 Comments
According to the data provided by the U.S. State Department in the last few days, the total number of people evacuated from the Kabul airport was 122,000. Of those, 6,000 were American citizens (AmCits), and 116,000 were Afghan refugees.
Today the State Department admits the “majority” of the qualified Afghan people who assisted the U.S. during operations in Afghanistan, Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants, did not get evacuated. That admission begs the question: then who the heck are those 116,000 refugees?
It’s not just some NBC reporter relaying information, there are multiple reports of exactly the same dynamic. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. left behind the majority of Afghan interpreters and others who applied for visas to flee Afghanistan, a senior State Department official said on Wednesday, despite frantic efforts to evacuate those at risk of Taliban retribution in the final weeks of the airlift.”
[…] The U.S. still doesn’t have reliable data on who was evacuated, nor for what type of visas they may qualify, the official said, but initial assessments suggested most visa applicants didn’t make it through the crush at the airport. “I would say it’s the majority of them,” the official said. “Just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support.”
[…] The Biden administration has said that from the end of July, the U.S. and allied nations evacuated more than 122,000 thousand people from the country, most of whom were Afghans.
The State Department estimates that fewer than 200 Americans that wanted to leave Afghanistan have been left behind. Pentagon Press secretary John Kirby said on Friday, near the end of the evacuation effort, that the U.S. had been able to evacuate about 7,000 Special Immigrant Visa applicants by that point. (read more)
If 116,000 Afghans were evacuated, and 7,000 of them were valid SIV applicants, that means we have evacuated approximately 110,000 residents from Afghanistan who have an unknown ideological reason for their departure.
Sketchy…. all of it.
And don’t expect the U.S. Senate to lift a finger or look quizzically at any of this; the upper chamber of congress is 100% in alignment with this import, and the lower House chamber is in full defense of Biden.
ETA: WSJ ARTICLE POSTED BELOW IN FULL.
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Biden State Department Left 600 of Its Own Journalists Behind in Afghanistan | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
They lied.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
Biden State Department Left 600 of Its Own Journalists Behind in Afghanistan
By Jim Hoft
Published September 1, 2021 at 11:14am
They lied.
The Biden administration stranded hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans in Afghanistan as they fled the country earlier this week.
And now there are reports that Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken stranded 600 State Department journalists and family members behind in Afghanistan.
They abandoned the reporters and their families when they left the country, after promising to bring them out.
Over 100 Afghans working for @USAGMgov, @voanews & @RFERL were left behind in Afghanistan with their families, even though they are funded by the U.S. Congress and are targeted by the Taliban. Shameful. https://t.co/c6412vDwUK
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) August 31, 2021
The Washington Post reported:
The administration was warned early and often about the 600 or so employees, contractors and family members who worked for U.S.-sponsored news organizations under the umbrella of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, a federal agency funded by Congress. They include journalists working for the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio LIberty (RFE/RL) who have worked in Afghanistan for years — at great personal risk. The Taliban has killed four RFE/FL journalists since 2016 through suicide bomb attacks, and the company’s journalists routinely receive death threats from the extremists.
Now, the leaders of these organizations say the State Department promised to get their vulnerable people out of the country before the Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline, only to later renege on that promise amid the chaos and confusion at the Kabul airport. They describe a harrowing ordeal for these Afghans, who were repeatedly turned away by our own troops at the airport gates and whose personal information was handed over to the same Taliban fighters they are fleeing from.
Rep. Michael McCaul released this statement following this report today.
McCaul: “Disgraceful” State Dept. Left Hundreds of USAGM Journalists in Afghanistan
Press Release 08.31.21
Washington, D.C. – House Foreign Affairs Committee Lead Republican Michael McCaul has released the following statement on the news that more than 500 journalists and their families who were employed by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) were abandoned by the State Department in Afghanistan. Only 50 USAGM staffers were evacuated, thanks to efforts by our allies – not the United States government.
“It is absolutely disgraceful the U.S. State Department claimed they evacuated their local employees when in reality they abandoned hundreds of USAGM journalists and their families. Some of these journalists were given express assurances by the Biden Administration that they would be treated as locally employed staff – but were not. My office was working with one of these journalists and tried for two weeks to get attention brought to his case so he, his wife, and his infant child could be saved – but our pleas were ignored. I am calling on the president and the State Department to rapidly find ways to get these people to safety and away from the threats President Biden and Secretary Blinken enabled.”
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View: https://twitter.com/BonillaJL/status/1432776611510767617
Jorge Bonilla @BonillaJL
2:45 PM · Aug 31, 2021
Per former Deputy Assistant SecDef Roger Pardo-Maurer, the DoD had foreknowledge of the Kabul bomber AND denied permission to fire to the Predator drone that had a lock on the bomber.
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1432776611510767617
MORE ON THIS
newsbusters.org
BOMBSHELL: Former Deputy SECDEF Claims Predator Drone Operator Ordered To STAND DOWN Against Kabul Airport Bomber
Jorge Bonilla
September 1st, 2021 12:43 PM
Univision aired a bombshell allegation in the midst of its coverage of the United States' disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Per former Army Green Beret and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Roger Pardo-Maurer, the Department of Defense had knowledge of the homicide bomber at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and scrambled a Predator drone only to order it to stand down as it locked on its target. Per Pardo-Maurer, the stand-down order was given in deference to negotiations with the Taliban.
Watch the stunning allegation, as aired on Univision's midday Edición Digital newscast on Tuesday, August 31st, 2021:
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1432776611510767617
ROGER PARDO-MAURER: What is being said by people who were involved is that the Department of Defense already knew who the bomber was, and when (the Kabul attack would happen), and that a Predator drone had a lock on him, OK, and that they refused to grant permission to fire upon that bomber. (Permission) was requested, and was denied. Why? Because we are in this process of negotiating with the Taliban, who aren't even in control of their own government or their own people.
More information will emerge in the days to come but this is a deeply disturbing allegation from which two questions emerge: For how long in advance did we have eyes on the Kabul bomber *prior* to his arrival at HKIA, and who issued the stand down order to the Predator drone operator that had a lock on the Kabul bomber?
The full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on Univision's Edición Digital on Tuesday, August 31st, 2021:
PAULINA SODI: The Biden Administration faces serious criticism over the manner in which it has handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
SATCHA PRETTO: And we connect with Roger Pardo-Maurer, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense and also served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. We’re glad to have you join us on Edición Digital.
ROGER PARDO-MAURER: Thank you very much. Always a privilege.
PRETTO: Well, Roger, the question many of us are asking ourselves today is: what;s going to happen with those nearly 200 or so Americans that were not evacuated out of Afghanistan?
PARDO-MAURER: Look, we’ve got to get them out. They’re American citizens. We can’t leave anyone behind. Period. Either by reason or by force.
SODI: Roger, considering the results to date, can it be said that this is a mission accomplished?
PARDO-MAURER: No. Absolutely not. But, what mission do you refer to? Because this entire episode, which I call the Battle for Evacuation, we’ve gotten out, as you mentioned, about 122,000. There is an estimated, let’s say, 100 or up to 200 thousand to whom we owe to get out, to get out of Afghanistan. So we’re not even halfway to fulfillment but, indeed, the United States has left Afghanistan so this has entered into another phase. To all those who are asking, “what can I do to help?” “What’s going to happen?” “How are we going to honor our promises to the Afghans?”, I say: calm. We’re going to see how it gets done, but it’s going to get done. Somehow, something is going to get established which people are already talking about an Underground Railroad, inspired by the (original) Underground Railroad with which fugitive slaves were removed from the South prior to the Civil War. So this is by no means over. We’re not even halfway there.
PRETTO: But it will be interesting to see, then, what the strategy that the Biden Administration puts in place. Now, speaking of this president’s legacy, when we’re talking about 13 service members losing their lives over the past few days- in addition to the 2400 over the past 20 years. What legacy does he leave behind after this chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan?
PARDO-MAURER: We can’t even talk about a legacy. These are events that are still just now becoming news. And what they’re already saying, people who are involved, for example, with those 13 service members who- by the way, half were Hispanics. Espinosa, Lopez, Sanchez, Merola, they were Hispanic. What is being said by people who were involved is that the Department of Defense already knew who the bomber was, and when (the Kabul attack would happen), and that a Predator drone had a lock on him, OK, and that they refused to grant permission to fire upon that bomber. (Permission) was requested, and was denied. Why? Because we are in this process of negotiating with the Taliban, who aren't even in control of their own government or their own people. So what is the legacy? It’s too soon to talk about that but it is total chaos, poorly managed.
SODI: Without a doubt, a very interesting issue to analyze. Thank you very much for joining us, Roger Pardo Maurer. Thank you for these words.
Jorge Bonilla @BonillaJL
2:45 PM · Aug 31, 2021
Per former Deputy Assistant SecDef Roger Pardo-Maurer, the DoD had foreknowledge of the Kabul bomber AND denied permission to fire to the Predator drone that had a lock on the bomber.
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1432776611510767617
BOMBSHELL: Former Deputy SECDEF Claims Predator Drone Operator Ordered To STAND DOWN Against Kabul Airport Bomber
UPDATE: Jennifer Griffin of Fox News reports that the official spokesperson for the Department of Defense denies this incident ever happened. We will continue to monitor this story.
newsbusters.org
BOMBSHELL: Former Deputy SECDEF Claims Predator Drone Operator Ordered To STAND DOWN Against Kabul Airport Bomber
Jorge Bonilla
September 1st, 2021 12:43 PM
Univision aired a bombshell allegation in the midst of its coverage of the United States' disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Per former Army Green Beret and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Roger Pardo-Maurer, the Department of Defense had knowledge of the homicide bomber at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and scrambled a Predator drone only to order it to stand down as it locked on its target. Per Pardo-Maurer, the stand-down order was given in deference to negotiations with the Taliban.
Watch the stunning allegation, as aired on Univision's midday Edición Digital newscast on Tuesday, August 31st, 2021:
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1432776611510767617
ROGER PARDO-MAURER: What is being said by people who were involved is that the Department of Defense already knew who the bomber was, and when (the Kabul attack would happen), and that a Predator drone had a lock on him, OK, and that they refused to grant permission to fire upon that bomber. (Permission) was requested, and was denied. Why? Because we are in this process of negotiating with the Taliban, who aren't even in control of their own government or their own people.
More information will emerge in the days to come but this is a deeply disturbing allegation from which two questions emerge: For how long in advance did we have eyes on the Kabul bomber *prior* to his arrival at HKIA, and who issued the stand down order to the Predator drone operator that had a lock on the Kabul bomber?
The full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on Univision's Edición Digital on Tuesday, August 31st, 2021:
PAULINA SODI: The Biden Administration faces serious criticism over the manner in which it has handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
SATCHA PRETTO: And we connect with Roger Pardo-Maurer, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense and also served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. We’re glad to have you join us on Edición Digital.
ROGER PARDO-MAURER: Thank you very much. Always a privilege.
PRETTO: Well, Roger, the question many of us are asking ourselves today is: what;s going to happen with those nearly 200 or so Americans that were not evacuated out of Afghanistan?
PARDO-MAURER: Look, we’ve got to get them out. They’re American citizens. We can’t leave anyone behind. Period. Either by reason or by force.
SODI: Roger, considering the results to date, can it be said that this is a mission accomplished?
PARDO-MAURER: No. Absolutely not. But, what mission do you refer to? Because this entire episode, which I call the Battle for Evacuation, we’ve gotten out, as you mentioned, about 122,000. There is an estimated, let’s say, 100 or up to 200 thousand to whom we owe to get out, to get out of Afghanistan. So we’re not even halfway to fulfillment but, indeed, the United States has left Afghanistan so this has entered into another phase. To all those who are asking, “what can I do to help?” “What’s going to happen?” “How are we going to honor our promises to the Afghans?”, I say: calm. We’re going to see how it gets done, but it’s going to get done. Somehow, something is going to get established which people are already talking about an Underground Railroad, inspired by the (original) Underground Railroad with which fugitive slaves were removed from the South prior to the Civil War. So this is by no means over. We’re not even halfway there.
PRETTO: But it will be interesting to see, then, what the strategy that the Biden Administration puts in place. Now, speaking of this president’s legacy, when we’re talking about 13 service members losing their lives over the past few days- in addition to the 2400 over the past 20 years. What legacy does he leave behind after this chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan?
PARDO-MAURER: We can’t even talk about a legacy. These are events that are still just now becoming news. And what they’re already saying, people who are involved, for example, with those 13 service members who- by the way, half were Hispanics. Espinosa, Lopez, Sanchez, Merola, they were Hispanic. What is being said by people who were involved is that the Department of Defense already knew who the bomber was, and when (the Kabul attack would happen), and that a Predator drone had a lock on him, OK, and that they refused to grant permission to fire upon that bomber. (Permission) was requested, and was denied. Why? Because we are in this process of negotiating with the Taliban, who aren't even in control of their own government or their own people. So what is the legacy? It’s too soon to talk about that but it is total chaos, poorly managed.
SODI: Without a doubt, a very interesting issue to analyze. Thank you very much for joining us, Roger Pardo Maurer. Thank you for these words.
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Majority of Interpreters, Other U.S. Visa Applicants Were Left Behind in Afghanistan
The U.S. still doesn’t have reliable data on who was evacuated from Afghanistan, a senior State Department official says.
www.wsj.com
Majority of Interpreters, Other U.S. Visa Applicants Were Left Behind in Afghanistan
U.S. still doesn’t have reliable data on who was evacuated from Afghanistan, a senior State Department official says
By Jessica Donati
Updated Sept. 1, 2021 4:07 pm ET
WASHINGTON—The U.S. estimates it left behind the majority of Afghan interpreters and others who applied for visas to flee Afghanistan, a senior State Department official said on Wednesday, despite frantic efforts to evacuate those at risk of Taliban retribution.
In the early days of the evacuation effort, thousands of Afghans crowded Kabul’s airport seeking a way to flee the country. Some made it through without paperwork, while American citizens and visa applicants were unable to enter and board flights out.
The U.S. still doesn’t have reliable data on who was evacuated, nor for what type of visas they may qualify, the official said, but initial assessments suggested most visa applicants didn’t make it through the crush at the airport.
“I would say it’s the majority of them,” the official estimated. “Just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support.”
The Special Immigrant Visa program set up in 2009 aimed to help those at risk of Taliban reprisal for helping the U.S., including interpreters for the U.S. military and diplomatic and foreign aid workers.
The Biden administration has been under intense pressure by lawmakers, veterans and other advocates to do more to help the more than 20,000 Afghans who had already applied for visas when the U.S. decided to withdraw. Including their family members, as many as 100,000 Afghans may be eligible for relocation.
The U.S. had only just begun airlifting those in the final stages of the process when Kabul fell.
The U.S. and its allies evacuated more than 123,000 people out of Afghanistan on a combination of military, commercial and charter flights in the final weeks of the mission.
The State Department says it doesn’t have reliable data on the composition, but it says about 6,000 were U.S. citizens. It says fewer than 200 Americans that wanted to leave have been left behind.
Some of the Americans remaining in Afghanistan belong to families comprised of a mix of U.S. citizens, green-card holders, and kin with neither U.S. citizenship nor permanent residency.
“The reluctance of mixed-status families seems to register with [the U.S. government] as not wanting to leave,” said Morwari Zafar, an Afghan-American anthropologist who founded The Sentient Group, a development consulting firm. “The access afforded to them by their status competes with their social and personal obligation to stay with loved ones.”
The majority of those evacuated were Afghans, including those that worked for foreign embassies, aid programs, media and some that had simply made it through the crowd but had no paperwork.
“Everybody who lived it is haunted by the choices we had to make and by the people we were not able to help,” the State Department official said.
On Friday, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said the U.S. had evacuated 7,000 Special Immigrant Visa applicants to the U.S. It wasn’t clear whether the figure included family members.
The State Department has repeatedly said it lacks complete data on the composition of the evacuation population.
“Much of that information is going to be forthcoming once these individuals have cycled through transit points in the Middle East, in Europe, and for those who are being relocated to the United States, relocated here,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa program was ill-suited for the circumstances the U.S. faced in Afghanistan.
“The SIV program is obviously not designed to accommodate what we just did, in evacuating over 100,000 people,” he told reporters Wednesday. Mr. Austin, briefing reporters for the first time since all American forces withdrew from Afghanistan on Monday, said the program is “designed to be a slow process.”
“For the type of operation we just conducted, I think we need a different kind of capability,” he said.
Among the visa applicants left behind was an Afghan interpreter who was part of a 2008 mission to rescue then- Sen. Joe Biden and two other senators when their helicopter made an emergency landing in blinding snow in a valley 20 miles southeast of Bagram Air Field.
His application had been snagged in the bureaucracy when the Taliban took over, and now he is in hiding.
On Tuesday, the interpreter, identified only as Mohammed to protect his identity, made an appeal for help to Mr. Biden in The Wall Street Journal.
“Don’t forget me,” he said.
In response to the story, Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, said the U.S. wouldn’t forget him.
“We’re going to cut through the red tape,” he told MSNBC. “We’re going to get him and other SIVs out.”
In the final days of the evacuation leading to the withdrawal of all U.S. troops on Monday, the U.S. focused its efforts on U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
The State Department senior official said that efforts to help get the most vulnerable Afghans through the crowds and into the airport were hindered by the threat of an attack by Islamic State, limited access points to the airport, and Taliban checkpoints in the approaches to the airport.
In addition, “every credential we tried to provide electronically was immediately disseminated to the widest possible pool,” the State Department official told reporters.
Heliobas Disciple
TB Fanatic
View: https://twitter.com/MSoghom/status/1433099107204321286
Mardo Soghom @MSoghom
12:07 PM · Sep 1, 2021
Photos and reports from Iranian and Afghan social media show the #Taliban have handed over US tanks and Humvees to #Iran. Below is a photo of Humvees being transported toward Tehran.
(My comment: photo is below the article, it copied over better from the article)
Mardo Soghom @MSoghom
1:21 PM · Sep 1, 2021
Here is one more photo of American military hardware from #Afghanistan delivered to #Iran. The #Taliban probably received fuel for the deal. Iran can claim big victory as it cozies up to the Taliban.
iranintl.com
(fair use applies)
Taliban Reportedly Deliver American Military Hardware To Iran
Wednesday, 01 Sep 2021 20:47
Reports and images on social media received from Iran indicate that tanks and military vehicles which belonged to the Afghan army were seen in Tehran and other parts of Iran.
Photos have emerged showing armored Humvees being transported from the eastern parts of the country toward Tehran, on the Semnan-Garmsar road.
Besmallah Mohammadi, a former Afghan defense ministry official published one of the photos referring to Iran as a “bad neighbor” and saying Afghanistan misfortune will not last forever.
Iran had promised to resume fuel deliveries to Afghanistan last week, which the Taliban need to prevent a collapse in the economy. Tehran has adopted a friendly posture toward the Taliban, unlike past relations which were marked by tensions.
Iranian officials have not yet reacted to the news. However, if Iran has made a deal with the Taliban to receive some of the American military hardware given to the Afghan army or left behind, it would claim a big victory against the United States.
The reports received so far are brief and there is no information about the kind and quantity of hardware delivered to Iran.
.
Mardo Soghom @MSoghom
12:07 PM · Sep 1, 2021
Photos and reports from Iranian and Afghan social media show the #Taliban have handed over US tanks and Humvees to #Iran. Below is a photo of Humvees being transported toward Tehran.
(My comment: photo is below the article, it copied over better from the article)
Mardo Soghom @MSoghom
1:21 PM · Sep 1, 2021
Here is one more photo of American military hardware from #Afghanistan delivered to #Iran. The #Taliban probably received fuel for the deal. Iran can claim big victory as it cozies up to the Taliban.
Taliban Reportedly Deliver American Military Hardware To Iran
The Taliban have delivered to Iran American tanks and Humvees, which people have seen and photographed.
Taliban Reportedly Deliver American Military Hardware To Iran
Wednesday, 01 Sep 2021 20:47
Reports and images on social media received from Iran indicate that tanks and military vehicles which belonged to the Afghan army were seen in Tehran and other parts of Iran.
Photos have emerged showing armored Humvees being transported from the eastern parts of the country toward Tehran, on the Semnan-Garmsar road.
Besmallah Mohammadi, a former Afghan defense ministry official published one of the photos referring to Iran as a “bad neighbor” and saying Afghanistan misfortune will not last forever.
Iran had promised to resume fuel deliveries to Afghanistan last week, which the Taliban need to prevent a collapse in the economy. Tehran has adopted a friendly posture toward the Taliban, unlike past relations which were marked by tensions.
Iranian officials have not yet reacted to the news. However, if Iran has made a deal with the Taliban to receive some of the American military hardware given to the Afghan army or left behind, it would claim a big victory against the United States.
The reports received so far are brief and there is no information about the kind and quantity of hardware delivered to Iran.
.
Zagdid
Veteran Member
and, what's stashed inside the Hummers?View: https://twitter.com/MSoghom/status/1433099107204321286
Mardo Soghom @MSoghom
12:07 PM · Sep 1, 2021
Photos and reports from Iranian and Afghan social media show the #Taliban have handed over US tanks and Humvees to #Iran. Below is a photo of Humvees being transported toward Tehran.
(My comment: photo is below the article, it copied over better from the article)
Mardo Soghom @MSoghom
1:21 PM · Sep 1, 2021
Here is one more photo of American military hardware from #Afghanistan delivered to #Iran. The #Taliban probably received fuel for the deal. Iran can claim big victory as it cozies up to the Taliban.
View attachment 287148
(fair use applies)Taliban Reportedly Deliver American Military Hardware To Iran
The Taliban have delivered to Iran American tanks and Humvees, which people have seen and photographed.
Taliban Reportedly Deliver American Military Hardware To Iran
Wednesday, 01 Sep 2021 20:47
Reports and images on social media received from Iran indicate that tanks and military vehicles which belonged to the Afghan army were seen in Tehran and other parts of Iran.
Photos have emerged showing armored Humvees being transported from the eastern parts of the country toward Tehran, on the Semnan-Garmsar road.
Besmallah Mohammadi, a former Afghan defense ministry official published one of the photos referring to Iran as a “bad neighbor” and saying Afghanistan misfortune will not last forever.
Iran had promised to resume fuel deliveries to Afghanistan last week, which the Taliban need to prevent a collapse in the economy. Tehran has adopted a friendly posture toward the Taliban, unlike past relations which were marked by tensions.
Iranian officials have not yet reacted to the news. However, if Iran has made a deal with the Taliban to receive some of the American military hardware given to the Afghan army or left behind, it would claim a big victory against the United States.
The reports received so far are brief and there is no information about the kind and quantity of hardware delivered to Iran.
.
Likely as not......