Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The war is over, I am sorry you can not understand what I was saying should happen. The 1st part was war and how to push it into the future and get back on the upper hand. But, a Civil War can not be won by and out side party.

What I said in the end was what we need to do to get our people out which includes Americans and Afghanistan allies. And, hopefully, negotiate a truce!

From The Economist.

"Joe Biden may have more foreign-policy experience than any American president in 30 years, but he is haunted by the brutal assessment of his judgment by Robert Gates, who was secretary of defence under the president both men served, Barack Obama. Mr Gates called Mr Biden “a man of integrity” whom it was impossible not to like. Yet, writing in “Duty”, his memoir, he added: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”

It is too soon to know whether history will add Mr Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan to a list of calls that includes support for the war in Iraq and opposition to the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. But in the short term the abandonment of Afghanistan to Taliban rule after nearly 20 years of American commitment—the images of panicked retreat and the pleas of terrified Afghan allies, the stench of great-power humiliation that inevitably recalled the evacuation of Saigon in 1975—mocks Mr Biden’s claims that “America is back”; that conviction in democracy and compassion for the oppressed have a place beside self-interest at the centre of his foreign policy; and that at least, after four years of buffoonery, American leadership is once again competent.

As recently as on July 8th Mr Biden dismissed any chance that American diplomats might wind up scrambling for an exit as they did in Vietnam. “None whatsoever,” he said. “Zero.” He said the possibility of “the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely”. By August 14th Mr Biden was reduced to trying to shift some blame to Donald Trump. “When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor,” he said in a statement. He argued the deal “left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001” and noted it imposed a May 1st, 2021 deadline for American withdrawal.

Yet Mr Biden also stood behind his own decision, saying that America’s mission of eliminating the terrorist threat from Afghanistan was accomplished years ago. His alternative to withdrawal, he said, would have been to commit more troops “to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.” He said he was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan and would not “pass this war on to a fifth.”

Mike Pompeo, Mr Trump’s secretary of state, rejected Mr Biden’s remark about Mr Trump’s deal as “pathetic blame-shifting” and insisted the Biden administration had failed to create conditions for an orderly withdrawal. Yet, appearing on August 15th on “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace,” Mr Pompeo also apportioned blame to the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, calling him more interested in accumulating American money than in talking to his own people, and he said the American armed forces had failed across two decades to train Afghan forces. Reporting by the Washington Post two years ago showed the armed forces and civilian leaders misled the public throughout the war, insisting on progress that did not exist, including in training Afghan soldiers. In fact, by supplying so much combat experience, America appears to have been more effective in training Taliban fighters. Veterans are stepping forward to say they now feel their sacrifices were for nothing, a conclusion that should help force a reckoning within the armed forces, as after Vietnam.

Polling as recently as on August 9th has shown that, if asked to express a view, Americans said they supported Mr Biden’s withdrawal. The left within the Democratic party wanted America out long ago, and his establishment Democratic critics have no other political home. Mr Trump’s own disdain for America’s involvement in Iraq has blunted attacks by Republicans, leaving them to complain about the manner of the withdrawal rather than the fact it happened. Further, the overnight evaporation of the Afghan security forces, after the commitment of more than $80bn from America, may lead many Americans to conclude the Afghan leadership failed the Americans, rather than the other way around. That said, images of Taliban brutality may shift the politics against the administration.

From the left and right, critics of Mr Biden’s withdrawal insist that America could have indefinitely sustained the recent, uneasy status quo in Afghanistan by maintaining a small support presence of perhaps 2,500 soldiers. These critics view Mr Biden as repeating the mistake Mr Obama made in Iraq in 2011—at the urging of Mr Biden. In withdrawing American troops then, Mr Obama opened the door to a takeover by Islamic State.

Mr Biden’s aides respond with their own counter-factual. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, insisted it was only the American commitment to withdraw that had led the Taliban to suspend attacks on American troops. Had the Biden administration reneged, he said on the NBC program Meet the Press on August 15th, “I would be on your show right now explaining why we were sending tens of thousands of forces back into Afghanistan to restart a war that we need to end.”

Mr Blinken noted the Americans had expended a trillion dollars and more than 2,300 lives in Afghanistan. He said they had stayed longer than the British in the 19th century and twice as long as the Soviets in the 20th century. “There is nothing that our strategic competitors would like more than to see us bogged down and mired in Afghanistan for another five to ten to 20 years,” said Mr Blinken, appearing weary and pained. “That is not in the national interest.” Pressed on whether the administration was closing its embassy, Mr Blinken said it would maintain a core presence of diplomats and “in effect, an embassy, at a location at the airport”.

Mr Biden has said he will be judged in the end on whether a terrorist threat to America emerges again from Afghanistan. His aides insist that advances in military intelligence, tactics and capabilities since the 9/11 attacks mean that American forces will be able to pre-empt any danger. Along with the probable resistance of Pakistan to future counter-terrorism operations, the evident failure of American intelligence to anticipate the Taliban’s onslaught calls that assurance into question.

So does Mr Biden’s own inconsistent advocacy over the years for the use of force. He supported NATO air strikes in the Balkans, then opposed George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraq before supporting George W. Bush’s second one. In the years since he has been more frequently an advocate of restraint, opposing Mr Obama’s intervention in Libya as well as his decision, in response to a renewed Taliban threat in 2009, to dispatch 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan. Since Mr Biden was a child he has always been a risk-taker, trusting in the end in his own judgment. That pattern led to another appraisal that has long troubled him, from a largely admiring portrait in the great chronicle of American presidential politics, “What It Takes”, by Richard Ben Cramer. “Joe Biden had balls,” Mr Cramer wrote. “Lot of times, more balls than sense.”

The Economist has been a staunch supporter of Biden. It doesn't side with him this time on this issue.

I don't think the war is over. The Taliban are going great guns after kicking the the venal Ashraf Ghani out. Having said that, The Taliban are said to be riven by corruption as well, and that might be the only force that could do Taliban forces in. Yes, I'm talking about graft and paternalism.

The Capitol Police are gearing up for Insurrection Part II. It's planned for 18 September for the same bunch of numbnuts who tried to nullify the American peoples right to vote. Today a man from North Carolina full of Qanon hate fantasy parked near the Library of Congress, called and informed authorities that he had a bomb and would blow up 2 blocks in D.C. If Joe Bidden didn't immediately resign. These people actually believe they can 'reinstate' Trump despite the fact he lost the election. We have inauguration ceremonies in this country, we do not reinstate defeated presidents. Its not the Miss America pageant, those folks don't get reinstated either.

There was a time when I just shook my head and wondered how anyone in this country could possibly get so confused. I don't think I have to wonder any longer, I believe we have become a nation of resentful selfish people. People resent paying taxes, they resent it so much they cheer when others get away with paying nothing to support this country. We resent people who don't go to church, we resent people who go to the wrong church, we resent people who need help with heath issues, we resent the unemployed and single mothers. We resent people who have good jobs, we resent anyone we suspect might have a shinier education than we do, our jealousies and resentments are bottomless all cheered on by the Wizard of Resentment Donald Trump.

We are on the brink, and we better stop being amused by the foolish folks who follow Trump. The same people who want to overthrow the Government are not equipped to establish another form of Government....we have to face it, there are no Benjamin Franklin's or John Adams or Alexander Hamiltons available. Even those men allowed slavery and only permitted males the right to vote.

Sorry for the rant, I was reading the paper and just couldn't hold it in.

I agree with what you said. Had to get something out of my system first.

Local news first! I did hear they are keeping armed fighters over Kabul at all times. They even ran some buzz flights where shooting was ongoing and it stopped without any arms discharged.

Reality shows that it isn't. Again, look at South Korea.

Wrong. You are the person here who is not capable of understanding anything that anyone writes.

It isn't. The best way was to continue training the Afghanis to fight and protect themselves.

I've noticed.

Just about any 18 year old raw recruit, from any background or town, fresh from high school and completely ignorant to the ways of war, can be trained into an efficient, effective hardcore soldier in less than 4 months. They’ve been doing it in the US for over a century.

The Afghanis were trained by the best for years - THEY TRAINED FOR YEARS - and still couldn’t defend themselves. They had the numbers. They had the weaponry.

No country should be expected to sacrifice what you are saying we should continue to. Twenty years is ENOUGH!

They defended themselves just fine for years until Traitor Joe abandoned them.



Continuing to support them would hardly have been a sacrifice.

Tell that to the families of soldiers who’d deployed there 3-4 times.
Not a sacrifice? You surely have no earthly idea what you are talking about.

Maybe we can put in a good word for Oral and have him sent there to train all the foreign troops. He is always busting at the seams, with certitude....let him put his money where his mouth is and resolve this situation for his Lord
and Saviour, Donald Trump......whose Grandfather snuck out of Germany to avoid protecting or fighting for the Kaiser and established bordello's in the West to keep the miners happy. What a great country.

Meh. What about soldiers who deploy to Germany or South Korea?

A small troop presence to train the Afghanis was hardly a major strain on our military.

As a whole Germany is not non-deployable.

Since living costs in Germany are above the cost of living in the U.S.A., soldiers here get get above the usual 100% overseas taxfree Cost of Living Allowance (COLA). Many say that it really is an opportunity of a lifetime to stay as a soldier with family in Germany.

This guy...

Is this a fetish situation, snood?

Anatol Lieven, who's a British journalist, seems to be an expert on this issue. Let me post two articles he has written concerning the current imbroglio in Afghanistan.

From Politico

"Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms
Opposing Afghan factions have long negotiated arrangements to stop fighting — something the U.S. either failed to understand or chose to ignore.

In the winter of 1989, as a journalist for the Times of London, I accompanied a group of mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province. At one point, a fortified military post became visible on the other side of a valley. As we got closer, the flag flying above it also became visible — the flag of the Afghan Communist state, which the mujahedeen were fighting to overthrow.

“Isn’t that a government post?” I asked my interpreter. “Yes,” he replied. “Can’t they see us?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied. “Shouldn’t we hide?” I squeaked. “No, no, don’t worry,” he replied reassuringly. “We have an arrangement.”


I remembered this episode three years later, when the Communist state eventually fell to the mujahedeen; six years later, as the Taliban swept across much of Afghanistan; and again this week, as the country collapses in the face of another Taliban assault. Such “arrangements” — in which opposing factions agree not to fight, or even to trade soldiers in exchange for safe passage — are critical to understanding why the Afghan army today has collapsed so quickly (and, for the most part, without violence). The same was true when the Communist state collapsed in 1992, and the practice persisted in many places as the Taliban advanced later in the 1990s.




This dense web of relationships and negotiated arrangements between forces on opposite sides is often opaque to outsiders. Over the past 20 years, U.S. military and intelligence services have generally either not understood or chosen to ignore this dynamic as they sought to paint an optimistic picture of American efforts to build a strong, loyal Afghan army. Hence the Biden administration’s expectation that there would be what during the Vietnam War was called a “decent interval” between U.S. departure and the state’s collapse.

While the coming months and years will reveal what the U.S. government did and didn’t know about the state of Afghan security forces prior to U.S. withdrawal, the speed of the collapse was predictable. That the U.S. government could not foresee — or, perhaps, refused to admit — that beleaguered Afghan forces would continue a long-standing practice of cutting deals with the Taliban illustrates precisely the same naivete with which America has prosecuted the Afghanistan war for years.

The central feature of the past several weeks in Afghanistan has not been fighting. It has been negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan forces, sometimes brokered by local elders. On Sunday, the Washington Post reported “a breathtaking series of negotiated surrenders by government forces” that resulted from more than a year of deal-making between the Taliban and rural leaders.



In Afghanistan, kinship and tribal connections often take precedence over formal political loyalties, or at least create neutral spaces where people from opposite sides can meet and talk. Over the years, I have spoken with tribal leaders from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region who have regularly presided over meetings of tribal notables, including commanders on opposite sides.

One of the key things discussed at such meetings is business, and the business very often involves heroin. When I was traveling in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, it was an open secret that local mujahedeen groups and government units had deals to share the local heroin trade. By all accounts, the same has held between Taliban and government forces since 2001.



The power of kinship led to a common arrangement whereby extended families have protected themselves by sending one son to fight with the government army or police (for pay) and another son to fight with the Taliban. This has been a strategy in many civil wars, for example, among English noble families in the 15th-century Wars of the Roses. It means that at a given point, one of the sons can desert and return home without fearing persecution by the winning side.

These arrangements also serve practical purposes. It is often not possible for guerrilla forces to hold any significant number of prisoners of war. Small numbers might be held for ransom, but most ordinary soldiers are let go, enlisted in the guerrillas’ own ranks or killed.



Thus, as in medieval Europe, Afghanistan has a tradition to which the Taliban have adhered closely — and which helps explain the speed of their success. The Taliban will summon an enemy garrison to surrender, either at once or after the first assaults. If it does so, the men can either join the besiegers or return home with their personal weapons. To kill them would be seen as shameful. On the other hand, a garrison that fought it out could expect no quarter, a very strong incentive to surrender in good time.

The Soviet-backed Afghan state survived for three years after the Soviet withdrawal, and in fact outlasted the USSR itself — a telling commentary on the comparative decrepitude of the “state” that the United States and its partners have attempted to create since 2001. During my travels with the mujahedeen, I was present at a hard-fought battle at Jalalabad in March 1989, in the immediate wake of the Soviet withdrawal, when Afghan government forces beat off a massive mujahedeen assault.

But after the USSR collapsed and Soviet aid ended in December 1991, there was very little fighting. Government commanders, starting with Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum (who since 2001 has been on the American side, illustrating the fluidity of Afghan allegiances), either took their men over to the mujahedeen, fled or went home — and were allowed to do so by the victors. Kabul was captured intact by the mujahedeen in 1992, as it is being captured by the Taliban now. In the later 1990s, while in some areas the Taliban faced strong resistance, elsewhere enemy garrisons also surrendered without a fight and in many cases joined the Taliban.



Deals between Afghan and Taliban forces during the U.S. war have been detailed in works like War Comes to Garmser by Carter Malkasian and An Intimate War by British soldier Mike Martin. A report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network describes such an agreement in Pakhtia province in 2018:

“Haji Ali Baz, a local tribal elder, told AAN that it was agreed that the government’s presence would be limited to the district centre, and neither side would venture into the areas controlled by the other. This agreement resulted in all of the government security posts outside the district centre being dismantled. In the words of Haji Ali Baz, this led to the end of the fighting, which had ‘caused a lot of trouble for the people.’”

Most recently, as described in the Washington Post Sunday, after the Biden administration declared in April that U.S. forces were withdrawing, “the capitulations began to snowball.”

Afghan society has been described to me as a “permanent conversation.” Alliances shift, and people, families and tribes make rational calculations based on the risk they face. This is not to suggest that Afghans who made such decisions are to blame for doing what they felt to be in their self-interest. The point is that America’s commanders and officials either completely failed to understand these aspects of Afghan reality or failed to report them honestly to U.S. administrations, Congress and the general public.



We can draw a clear line between this lack of understanding and the horrible degree of surprise at the events of the past several days. America didn’t predict this sudden collapse, but it could have and should have — an unfortunately fitting coda to a war effort that has been undermined from the start by a failure to study Afghan realities.


。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。
From Time.

What Pakistan Stands to Gain From the Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan

"We need to recognize that the single most important factor in Taliban victory was their own commitment, courage and sheer grit. Nevertheless without Pakistan’s shelter and support they might not be marching through the streets of Kabul right now. How grateful they will be remains to be seen. But Pakistan wasn’t doing it for them. Pakistan’s strategy of helping the Taliban stemmed from long fears concerning Afghanistan, some of which have existed since Pakistan became a state in 1947.

a group of people wearing military uniforms: Taliban fighters sit over a vehicle on a street in Laghman province on August 15, 2021.© AFP-Getty Images Taliban fighters sit over a vehicle on a street in Laghman province on August 15, 2021.
These fears were of Afghan alliance with India and Afghan support for rebellion inside Pakistan, and have therefore been considerably reduced by the Taliban victory. India is bitterly hostile to the Taliban and very unlikely to be able to ally with them; and if the Taliban support Islamist rebellion against Pakistan, they will cut off Afghanistan’s trade routes to the sea; quite apart from the fact that the Pakistan Army has demonstrated in recent years (after some delay) that it can successfully crush any rebellion. The strong Pakistani alliance with a China that is vastly richer than it was 20 years ago also gives Pakistan the hope that Chinese investment in Afghanistan may help to keep the Taliban government aligned with Pakistani interests. Pakistan can therefore afford to be quite confident about the positive consequences of the Taliban’s victory.



But there is a complicated history that is worth exploring. The older story of Afghan-Pakistani hostility over the past 74 years was a legacy of the British Empire. In the 1890s, the British drew a frontier between Afghanistan and their Indian Empire which came to be known as the “Durand Line,” after the British colonel who surveyed it. Drawn purely for British strategic reasons, this border cuts through the middle of the Pashtun ethnicity, and even through the middle of several Pashtun tribes like the Afridis.

Afghanistan, a state founded by Pashtuns in the mid-18th century, has never accepted this border. When the British Raj ended in 1947, the Afghan government initially refused to recognize Pakistani independence unless Pakistan tore up the Durand Line and handed its Pashtun territories to Afghanistan. This not surprisingly Pakistan refused to do.

As a result, a succession of Afghan governments continued to refuse to recognize the Durand Line as a legal frontier, aligned Afghanistan with India against Pakistan, and periodically attempted to stir up Pashtun ethnic separatism in Pakistan. In response, for almost 70 years Pakistan tried either to influence or to weaken Afghanistan through a combination of economic pressure and inducements with support for rebellions within Afghanistan.

This strategy was a key motivation for Pakistani shelter for the Afghan Taliban, just as in the 1980s (in alliance with the U.S.) it partly motivated Pakistani support for the Afghan mujahedin against the Afghan communist state and its Soviet backers. Interestingly though, despite this Pakistani support and shelter, Afghan nationalism has meant that both the Afghan mujahedin leadership and the Afghan Taliban refused categorically to recognize the Durand Line.

With the Taliban victory, Pakistani fear of Afghan alignment with India has vanished for the moment, as India has always been bitterly opposed to the Taliban, due to their support for the Islamist revolt in Kashmir. Since the 1980s, however, another combination of Pakistani fears emerged concerning Afghanistan: that of Afghan refugees causing destabilization among Pakistan’s Pashtuns.



Taliban sweeps across Afghanistan's south, taking over 4 more cities

During the Afghan war of the 1980s, some three million mostly Pashtun refugees fled into Pakistan. These refugee camps became fertile recruitment grounds first for the mujahedin, and then for the Taliban. The refugees to a considerable extent merged with the Pashtuns of Pakistan, and the Afghan jihad after 1979 and 2001 received passionate support from many Pakistani Pashtuns, especially in the tribes that straddled the border with Afghanistan.

In 2003, intense U.S. pressure led the Pakistani government of General Pervez Musharraf to attempt a selective crackdown on anti-American Islamist fighters who had fled Afghanistan for the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. The result was an escalating series of Pashtun Islamist revolts in Pakistan that in 2007 came together to found the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The resulting civil war in Pakistan cost some 60,000 dead including 8,000 soldiers and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The other Pakistani reason for helping the Afghan Taliban has therefore been to make sure that they do not support Pashtun Islamist rebellion within Pakistan. To date they have not done so, and ensuring that they do not do so in future will be central to Pakistan’s strategy.

Pakistan confidence in this has been increased by the appearance in recent years of a common enemy of Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban and the other main regional states: ISIS, which is called in Afghanistan Daesh. ISIS are bitter rivals of the Taliban for rule in Afghanistan, and have recruited a considerable number of Taliban dissidents. On the other hand, ISIS in Afghanistan is also largely made up of members of the Pakistani Taliban who fled into Afghanistan as a result of successful Pakistani military offensives against them after 2014. This gives Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban a common enemy. But there is a risk that if the Taliban experience internal dissent over how to govern, the disappointed elements are likely to gravitate to ISIS and threaten Taliban unity and rule.

The Afghan Taliban have publicly renounced international terrorism and jihadism, and have given specific assurances to Moscow and Beijing that they will not support Chechen and other Islamist rebels against Russia, Uighur rebels against China, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and other Central Asian jihadi forces. They have also promised Iran not to provide bases for anti-Iranian Sunni rebels supported by Saudi Arabia. The Taliban can probably be trusted on this, since they can hardly afford to face the hostility of their entire region, and to risk their external trade blockaded.

In my own conversations with lower-level Taliban figures over the years, they have also assured me that the Taliban have learned the lesson of the disaster that befell their regime as a result of 9/11. ISIS on the other hand remains dedicated to international jihad and incorporates many international jihadis in its ranks.

Pakistan hopes therefore that a regional coalition of itself, China, Russia and Iran (if the Taliban keep their promises to Tehran to respect Shia rights in Afghanistan) will support the Taliban against ISIS, ensure that the Taliban themselves do not back international extremism, including an Islamist revolt in Pakistan, and refrain from backing Tajik, Uzbek and other ethnic forces against the Taliban state.

Pakistan may be helped in its Afghan goals by the enormous economic power of China. Beijing’s chief concern in Afghanistan is that it should not be a base for Uighur rebels against China. However, China has also agreed in principle to make billions of dollars of investments in Afghanistan, including the development of a giant copper mine at Aynak, and of oil and gas reserves in the north of the country.

The Afghan civil war has meant that to date China has not actually started any of this. If Beijing is confident enough in the Taliban state and Afghan peace to make this investment, it will not only help secure stable Taliban government in Afghanistan; the new transport connections needed to export the copper will bind Afghanistan into Pakistan’s transport network and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that runs the length of Pakistan from Chinese Sinkiang to the Pakistani ports of Karachi and Gwadar on the Arabian Sea.

These then are Pakistan’s hopes concerning Afghanistan; but as Pakistanis would be the first to admit, Afghanistan has a long tradition of disappointing outside hopes, and frustrating well laid plans."

Wtf are you talking about?