Notations On Our World (Month-End Edition): On the Week & Month That Was
We present our final "Outsider Wall" for the month of the week that was as we gear up for a very busy September as we remember and honor the fallen and their families.
Afghanistan has been in the headlines as the Untied States and other countries have rushed to evacuate their nationals and vulnerable Afghans. Yesterday, the body of the 13 Americans killed was returned to the United States and received by President Biden. Over 100,000 Afghans have been evacuated and as we went to press, we saw reports about assurances by the Taliban that they would guarantee all who wish to leave Afghanistan will be allowed to leave. We have also saw reports of two leading political figures inside Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai & Abdullah Abdullah, have been placed under house arrest. It was also of interest to note how The Taliban have told Afghan Farmers to stop planting opium.
Our team has been assessing the situation out of Iran as Iranian Children go back to school. There is an estimated 15 Million Children and over 100,000 school facilities that the Government seems not to have the capability to avoid the spread of COVID as the fifth wave continues to cause hundreds of deaths daily. This is as inflation continues to rage on, An estimated 60 million Iranians are estimated to be below the official poverty line. Corruption continues to rage on and accepted by the current Government. There was also the Baghdad conference that caused a diplomatic row when the newly confirmed Iranian Foreign Minister, Amir Abdullahian, violated protocol standing next to the Emir of Dubai that caused him to leave.
Beyond the hotspots of the World, the Environment continues to be of profound concern underscored by the immense floods in Europe, the fires in Turkey, Greece, and our home state of California. As we also went to press, we were assessing the situation in our home state of California as the State's Governor, Gavin Newsom, was facing a recall slated for September 14 and our team will continue to assess it.
We look forward to the continued privilege to serve as we present the following courtesy the Financial Times, The Economist of London, The Bulwark, Haaretz and other leading publications we engage with daily:
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This is a hard newsletter to write, because there is no sugar-coating it. Yesterday was the worst day of the Biden presidency, but that’s not really the point, is it? Or, at least it shouldn’t be. The bombing in Kabul was a national and a human tragedy and some of you may actually be old enough to remember when the shock of losing the lives of 13 American servicemen would have brought us together, if only briefly, as a nation.
No longer.
ian bremmer @ianbremmerAugust 26th 2021
210 Retweets1,001 LikesAs far as I can remember, Democrats did not demand GW’s resignation (or impeachment) after 9/11. Nor was there a clamor for Reagan’s head the day that 241 Marines were killed in Lebanon. There was fierce criticism, but no one discussed the 25th Amendment. The Bay of Pigs was an epic disaster, but Republicans did not (as far as I remember) immediately call for JFK’s resignation.
But here we are. Via Politico’s Playbook:
Some [Republicans] called on Biden to resign as president in the wake of the attack — and not just conservative darlings like Sens. JOSH HAWLEY (R-Mo.) and MARSHA BLACKBURN (R-Tenn.), but also Rep. TOM RICE (R-S.C.), one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach DONALD TRUMP. Sen. RICK SCOTT (R-Fla.) has floated invoking the 25th Amendment, which won’t happen. There’s already talk about impeaching Biden over the ordeal if, as many expect, the GOP flips the House.
It all signals Republicans’ eagerness to capitalize on this crisis and potentially hammer it into a Benghazi-style scandal. On a House GOP conference call Thursday night, the ranking members of several committees — who could wield gavels and subpoena power in 2023 — said they’ve already sent document preservation requests to the administration.
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A brief thought about the tragedy and the mission.
Perhaps it’s simply a sign of getting older that these deaths seem to hit harder every year. Maybe it’s knowing how much pain there is, and the hole it leaves. The reality of tragedy is not like movies where everyone moves on and the endings are usually happy and uplifting. Real tragedies cut deep and linger for years, even lifetimes. And, as you get older, you realize how much is lost when a young life is cut short.
But, let’s also take a moment to talk about courage and meaning.
Aaron Astor @AstorAaronAugust 26th 2021
3,504 Retweets21,306 LikesWe will continue to debate the wisdom of the 20-year war, and we are likely to remember the retreat from Afghanistan as a fiasco. We’ll continue to ask “was it worth it?”
But no one will doubt the courage of the servicemembers who were in Kabul yesterday. They knew what this particular mission was. They understood the risks. And they gave their lives to save the lives of untold thousands of Americans, Afghans, and coalition partners. Since last month, 110,600 people have been evacuated, many of them saved from almost certain death.
Whatever we think of the war or the withdrawal, this mission in Kabul was not futile and their deaths were not meaningless. None of their families should wonder whether they died in vain.
Whole worlds have been rescued because of their courage. Generations unborn will live in freedom and safety because of their sacrifices.
If only we could take a moment from the finger-pointing to honor them.
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Sgt. Isaiah Campbell / Reuters
Don’t miss this amazing story. Via ABC: “US special operations vets carry out daring mission to save Afghan allies.”
With the Taliban growing more violent and adding checkpoints near Kabul's airport, an all-volunteer group of American veterans of the Afghan war launched a final daring mission on Wednesday night dubbed the "Pineapple Express" to shepherd hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety, members of the group told ABC News.
Moving after nightfall in near-pitch black darkness and extremely dangerous conditions, the group said it worked unofficially in tandem with the United States military and U.S. embassy to move people, sometimes one person at a time, or in pairs, but rarely more than a small bunch, inside the wire of the U.S. military-controlled side of Hamid Karzai International Airport.
The Pineapple Express' mission was underway Thursday when the attack occurred in Kabul. Two suicide bombers believed to have been ISIS fighters killed at least 13 U.S. service members -- 10 U.S. Marines, a Navy corpsman and an Army soldier and one to be determined -- and wounded 15 other service members, according to U.S. officials.
There were wounded among the Pineapple Express travelers from the blast, and members of the group said they were assessing whether unaccounted-for Afghans they were helping had been killed.
As of Thursday morning, the group said it had brought as many as 500 Afghan special operators, assets and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to the protective custody of the U.S. military.
That number added to more than 130 others over the past 10 days who had been smuggled into the airport encircled by Taliban fighters since the capital fell to the extremists on Aug. 16 by Task Force Pineapple, an ad hoc groups of current and former U.S. special operators, aid workers, intelligence officers and others with experience in Afghanistan who banded together to save as many Afghan allies as they could.
Heroes.
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August 23-24
By Marc Cooper
Eight days after the fall of Kabul these are this Monday morning’s headlines from Google News:
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As a journalist for last 50 years, I reject out of hand any and all conspiracy theories about the media. They are false. That in no way means the media is always telling you the straight story. It does not conspire as much as it panders to false patriotism.
So here’s a little quiz for those of you who are news hounds and have been following this closely. What major salient fact is missing from all these headlines, and frankly, from all these stories?
Here’s the answer, written in headline form:
EIGHT DAYS AFTER FALL OF KABUL U.S. FORCES EVACUATE 38,000 AMERICANS AND AFGHANS.
(Update: that figure on Tues morn is now 48,000.)
Yet, turn on the noise machine known as broadcast news and the coverage becomes even more errant with the now ritualized script of Biden failing to “get everybody out” while “chaos” ensues around the Kabul Airport.
Who does that mean when people say everybody?
A handful of weeks ago, the number being floated of Afghan allies who would eventually need to leave was 40,000. That number, including something like 10-15,00 American “civilians,” has subsequently grown to 80-100,000. If the high figure is accurate and if the current figure of 10,000 a day are being rescued continues, simple math tells you that by August 31, the U.S. will have evacuated something like a remarkable 100,000 from Afghanistan, a figure for which we should feel some pride, rather than disgust.
We continue to be shown the images of anxious and desperate crowds pressing up against the airport perimeter while anchors and reporters suggest these are the masses we are leaving behind that should instead be boarded onto US planes.
I have reported from around the globe for decades and in many hot spots like this. Let me make it easy. Open up a US base with an ongoing airlift to the United States anywhere in the undeveloped world and you will instantly have tens of thousands of desperate locals trying to get on board. Try it in Mexico City or Tegucigalpa and watch what kind of “chaos” and “tragedy” ensue.
One issue that the media itself has not bothered to clarify —mostly because they could not be bothered to find out— is just who exactly we should be morally bound to extricate.
Biden has said “any American who wants to get out we will get out.” When asked about the Afghan allies, he said, the same applies. That second promise might be generous but perhaps not operationally feasible. There’s a reason why everybody made such a big deal a few days ago when a couple of American choppers ventured a grand total of 500 yards to rescue some people. Hey, gronk it. The US Army is a politically if not militarily defeated force penned up and surrounded in the airport.
The media’s conflation of the crowds in front of the airport and who knows who else into “everybody” who wants to get out, would probably total in the millions. In any war, the civilians who backed a losing side wind up in very deplorable conditions with few options.
Meanwhile, we have Boris Johnson and a battalion of American talking heads demanding that Biden extend the U.S. mission past August 31, the date the US agreed to leave. As if this was Biden’s decision alone. As if the U.S. forces could just leave the airport and wade into a sea of armed Taliban without provoking a fresh outbreak of total war. As if it is a detail that we would probably have to deploy yet another 5,000-10,000 troops to Kabul to move that perimeter a few hundred yards. To paraphrase Barack Obama when asked if he would go with Mitch McConnell to have a beer, I say to Boris Johnson, why don’t YOU put on a flack jacket and YOU can go and extend the deadline and the airport perimeter, and while you are at it, Boris, please evacuate the 19 million Afghan women threatened by the Taliban. Ditto Bush poodle and multi millionaire former PM Tony Blair who was also beating war drums again this week. We had already forgotten about you, Tony. Please go away again. This denialist line was also taken by the myriad American TV talking heads, many of them on the dole of military contractors and deep state think tanks.
What world are these jokers living in? Why such a disconnect between elite opinion and the ground reality?
I think we are experiencing the pain and chaos of withdrawal…not withdrawal of the troops. But withdrawal from the toxic, decades-long fantasy, that the U.S. is invincible, that it is all-powerful, that we are the Indispensable Nation and that, as much as a burden as it might be, we are, indeed, the Cops of the World.
It’s hard for anybody to accept their personal shortcomings. Just ask me. Much harder for an entire nation. Nobody likes to lose. But the U.S. is showing the enormous capacity to keep losing while trying hard to learn nothing.
Twenty years after the commencement of the Global War on Terror, the U.S. has gone 0-for-2 in its major wars. And Jihadist groups, like the Taliban seem to remain fairly healthy. And 62% or more of Americans have rightly concluded the Afghan war was not worth it. For that matter, they are sort of finished with the moral panic of the Global War on Terror.
The good news is that the American people by a decisive 2 to 1 margin are finished with these miserable and useless and bloody imperial adventures. A bipartisan truth, if you will.
The bad news is that American political and media elites remain wholly addicted to the fantasy that America can do anything it wants anywhere always and you are a quitter and perhaps a traitor if you are not on board. And that there is always a solution at hand when we send in the troops.
The thrashing pain, the howls, the cries, the supplications staged by reps of the national security blob and their hallelujah choir in the media this past week, is the same sort of panic, despair and denial you can hear any day of the week inside any drug rehab center when the addict begins to understand there just might be no more dope.
Cautious kudos then to General Mike Mullen (Ret) who commanded US troops in Afghanistan under Bush and Obama and who on Monday became the first and only senior American military official to admit that he, and everybody else, was WRONG about the war. I repeat, he is the only one. Sort of amazing, no?
“It’s hard to deny the evidence in front of you,” he told Slate in a phone interview this Monday.
“Mullen acknowledged that, back in 2009, he and all the other top officers and officials advised Obama to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan and to adopt a nation-building strategy. Biden was alone in calling for merely an extra 10,000 troops and to restrict their activities to training the Afghan army and fighting terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border. “He got it right,” Mullen said of Biden. “It would be hard to argue that [Biden’s proposal] wasn’t the right way to go,” he said. In the conversation with Slate, Mullen referred to the rest of his fellow senior officers during the Afghan period as “the silent crew.”
Good for Mullen. Read the Slate piece for more detail.
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The other egregious element missing from this blanket coverage can be hinted at in the demand that we get everybody out, not bring everybody home.
Republicans, aided by a whole lot of Democrats, have taken a position saying bring them all out but please don’t bring any of those raggedy-ass towel-heads here. This is now a given, reflected in U.S. policy itself. Look at the acrobatics that Biden has gone through to get third countries to allow the dumping and processing of refugees on their lands.
If you want to demand something of Biden in this crisis, demand that refugees be brought directly to the U.S. where they will be processed and quickly settled. Expedited, please.
Not gonna happen. Biden knows very well that this is a political third rail because so many Americans, just like what is happening this week in the EU, do not want refugees to enter the U.S. (If you are old enough you will remember the fierce hostility with which Vietnamese refugees —*boat people* as they were branded- were met in the US forty years ago).
Leading the anti-refugee charge, are, of course, Biden’s most vocal critics on the withdrawal. Enter Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, the pro-fascist agitators on Fox News. Said Carlson a few days ago:
“If history is any guide, and it’s always a guide, we will see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country, and over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions,” Carlson said. “So first we invade, and then we are invaded.”
These are the same assholes who a couple of weeks ago were claiming, with a straight face, that the current COVID wave of Delta infections was caused by diseased illegal aliens crossing the southern border.
I don’t say this glibly or recklessly, but this perfectly mirrors Nazi propaganda about dirty Jews in the 1930’s.
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One area where U.S. policy makers did succeed in Afghanistan was in persuading a swath of public opinion that the invasion and occupation was staged, in great part, to liberate Afghan women. A very clever ploy by those world-class feminists George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and then, sadly, endorsed by Barack Obama along with legions of comfortable Democratic women who knew nothing about ground realities.
As I remember it, Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban govt that sheltered them. After less than 2 months, at the end of 2001, the Taliban offered to surrender. Bush said no, the occupation began in serious, and so our fate was sealed. Once again we plunged neck deep into a foreign land where we didn’t speak the language and where we understood even less.
That a small percentage of mostly urban professional women did, in fact, see their positions improve with the Taliban gone is a fact. But that was a by-product of the invasion, hardly its goal. And yet, what an absurd wash of news stories over the last 20 years with media using a telephoto lens to zoom in on this or that new beauty shop or other woman-run business in Kabul, creating the illusion that the U.S. had turned Afghanistan, or at least Kabul, into a massive Berkeley-esque women’s resource center and bookstore.
Only the most delusional can believe that the US Army spent its time opening abortion clinics, founding women’s CR groups, and “bombing” villages with thousands of translated copies of Our Bodies Our Selves. Even most of the schools opened US occupation were found abandoned and run down several years ago by correspondents.
The reality is quite different than the cheery propaganda. U.S. forces spent years sweeping through remote villages, kicking in doors and rousting and terrifying rural families (men and women) in the middle of the night. Women stood by after being shoved to the floor and watched their husbands, sons and brothers carted off blindfolded by American troops. And God Forbid if any of these villagers retaliated by shooting at American troops. That would only produce more aggressive action by the occupiers. Like massive and indiscriminate bombing.
Meanwhile, the systematic torture and renditions conducted at the American-run Bagram base and other U.S. sites were a secret to nobody (except the U.S. congress of course). Indeed, that U.S. base became known by Afghans as their own local version of Guantanamo.
The obsessive, heavy use of American air power (to spare American lives on the ground) wiped out countless families and ordinary Afghans wondered when the next drone strike would blow apart their village or home. The drones. Drones and more Drones. None of them were painted pink. None of them knew who they were killing. Nobody looked to find out.
As late as 2019, the U.S. dropped more bombs (7500 of them) on Afghanistan than in any other year since tracking began in 2006. Where did they fall? Who did they kill? Is it possible that some liberated Afghan women were also scared stiff by this death from the air? Or did they stand and cheer the bombing holding up their hands in the shape of a uterus? Somehow, I don’t think so.
The American war caused the displacement or exile of more than 6 million Afghans…something that has little to do with rescuing women and girls unless you define liberation as barely surviving in a freezing tent in a Pakistani camp.
You can look at any source that pleases you because nobody really knows the real civilian death count. The U.S. pointedly kept no reliable tally of this “collateral damage.” And what does that tell you?
Most reliable sources estimate that about 250,000 Afghans were killed during the war. Just who was a “civilian” and who was a “terrorist” remains as blurred and dubious as in Vietnam. The most conservative estimates say that “innocent” civilian deaths at the hands and bombs of US forces is about 100,000. This also assumes that a passive villager who might express some sort of sympathy for the Taliban was taken out as a presumed “terrorist.”
In a country eight times as populous as Afghanistan we are still mourning the 55,000 soldiers lost in Vietnam 50 years ago and the 3,000 civilians on 9/11/. Draw your own conclusions.
Just what political impact has mass death in Afghanistan affected the local consciousness. We will never know because, remember, we don’t even speak or understand their language!
The mythology that the U.S. occupation saved and liberated Afghan women over the last 20 years has turned out to be, well, mythology. Time magazine dispatched that fantasy back in 2018 with a couple of short paragraphs highlighting a miserable situation persisting after 17 years of U.S. occupation and one that nobody would argue has improved since.
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I am one hundred percent in favor of rescuing and improving the lives of the 20 million Afghan women and their children and maybe even their husbands and brothers. But OK let’s stick with just women for the moment.
I am also in favor of liberating the women of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (who both supported the Taliban) and let’s throw in Mynamar. While we are at it, how about the million or so uighur women currently in Chinese prison camps? Oops, I almost forgot the several hundred million rural Chinese women who have been forced into hunger and homelessness that nobody reports on.
Do we have any room left on the plane for, say, Indian women who suffer extreme sexual harassment and rape? Yeah, why not. Maybe, Boris Johnson can provide the planes for that one after he’s done expanding our Afghan airlift. After all, India is a sad reminder of British colonialism rather than US imperialism.
Look. I am not being sarcastic or snide. I do care about all those folks and a lot more. Just as any other decent human would. It’s just that at age 70 I have firmly concluded that for better or worse, the exercise and deployment of hard U.S. military power is NOT the solution to any of these frightful issues. I don’t blame you for yearning otherwise, let’s just not continue more warfare on that mistaken notion.
OK, if you have read this far you might be snickering that I am a devious and clever guy by avoiding the Big Question of whether or not Biden screwed this up and if he could have done more earlier on to make this a much cleaner exit.
It’s a legit if secondary question and one that nobody can really answer, sorry. I maintain my view that once it is was clear the US was *really* leaving, this sort of ending was inevitable.
The paltry number of troops still in Afghanistan when Biden came to office was hardly enough to hold a country of 40 million, where the Taliban already had a massive footprint and where the population was sick of endless war.
The only mistake Biden made was to trust the “consensus view” of the national security and Pentagon blob that he probably had 2 or 3 or maybe 6 months of margin before the Afghan government fell and the Taliban took over. On that latter point of inevitable Taliban rule, everybody knew it was a certainty. Just like Kissinger and Nixon knew in 1973 that they were making way for the insurgents to take power.
I think Ryan Grim of The Intercept has summed up this “tragedy” as well as anybody:
“The only way for there to have been an orderly transfer of power in the wake of the U.S. departure was for the process to have been negotiated as a transfer of power. And to negotiate a transfer of power requires acknowledging — and here’s the hard part for the U.S. — that power is transferring.
“Therein lies the contradiction: An orderly exit required admitting defeat and negotiating the unutterable: surrender to the Taliban.”
“Instead, the U.S. preferred to maintain the fiction that it was handing over power to the Afghan government, whatever that was, and to former President Ashraf Ghani. We would rather risk the chaos we’re now witnessing than admit defeat. After all, it’s mostly not our lives on the line anymore, but rather the lives of Afghans who helped us over the past 20 years.”
“And no amount of time and preparation would have fully resolved that problem, because the U.S. immigration bureaucracy, in league with the State Department’s special visa program, is not designed to work. It can take an average of 800 days for an application to process, by which time Biden may no longer even be president. And those are the successful applications. We are not a country that places any value on helping desperate people migrate to our shores, and to paraphrase Rumsfeld again, you retreat from war as the country you are, not as the one you might wish to be.”
Joe Biden is catching hell over this politically and that might increase the already excellent chance of the Trumplicans taking back the House next year. So it goes in the politics of empire. Sad.
I, for one, am pleased that Joe Biden of all people took the enormous risk of ending this war. I am also proud of the ongoing airlift that has rescued tens of thousands with more to come.
In the meantime, welcome to Withdrawal. It’s a tough time but you eventually ride it out and get past it. +
The Final Retrograde from Afghanistan Has Officially Begun
By Tara Copp
The U.S. military has begun the process of withdrawing from Hamid Karzai International Airport but pledged to continue to evacuate people despite threats to the dwindling force and its outbound aircraft, the Pentagon said Saturday.
Read more »
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ISIS attack leaves Biden with four bad optionsWhat now? With President Joe Biden committing to withdraw all U.S. forces by Aug. 31, the U.S. faces one of four difficult choices.
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WorldJoe Biden’s potential Jimmy Carter momentThe US president will always be associated with the manner of the pullout from Afghanistan AUGUST 27, 2021 by Edward Luce |
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PoliticsTurkey will not act as EU ‘warehouse’ for Afghan refugees, says ErdoganPresident faces rising popular and political opposition to migrants, unlike during the 2015 Syria crisis AUGUST 26, 2021 by Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul |
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PoliticsKabul retreat leaves the UK on a bridge to nowhereUS indifference to its ally’s interests in the Afghan pullout underscores London’s dependence on Washington AUGUST 26, 2021 by Philip Stephens |
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PoliticsLukashenko’s ever closer Russian ties raise risks for PutinA weak and isolated Belarus suits the Russian president’s strategic goals, but only up to a point AUGUST 23, 2021 by Nastassia Astrasheuskaya in Moscow |
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WorldBolsonaro pushes the limits of democracy in BrazilWith his approval ratings sliding, the president is crafting a strategy reminiscent of Donald Trump AUGUST 24, 2021 by Bryan Harris in São Paulo |
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