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“The first flight evacuating Afghans who worked alongside Americans in Afghanistan brought more than 200 people, including scores of children and babies in arms, to new lives in the United States on Friday… Congress on Thursday overwhelmingly approved legislation that would allow an additional 8,000 visas and $500 million in funding for the Afghan visa program.” AP News
“The Taliban have swiftly captured significant territory in recent weeks, seized strategic border crossings with several neighboring countries and are threatening a number of provincial capitals… The U.S.-NATO withdrawal is more than 95% complete and due to be finished by Aug. 31.” AP News
Here’s our recent coverage of Afghanistan. The Flip Side
Both sides are critical of the delay in providing visas to Afghans who were employed by the US government:
“Current and former interpreters must produce documents proving their identity and that they worked with U.S. forces—and they must obtain testimonials from American military officers, many of whom are now thousands of miles away or have left the service…
“‘I have to get an H.R. letter plus a recommendation letter from the supervisor that I work with,’ one young man told me, in broken English. ‘But due to evacuation of Americans and due to leave of your supervisor to U.S.A. or any other places, you can’t reach them.’ The young man, who asked not to be named, said that he had been frantically searching Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram for the contact information of the U.S. military officers who supervised him…
“The Afghans I spoke with said that they did not regret backing the American effort and that they were proud of the economic and humanitarian gains Afghanistan had made over the last two decades. But they felt that a rushed American withdrawal was causing them to be treated unfairly. During our conversation in his home, Ahmed, the former military translator, explained that several of his relatives had worked for the Canadian military. ‘Now they live in Canada,’ he said.”
Jane Ferguson, New Yorker
“Our tendency to retreat often costs the lives of both people who worked with allied governments as well as innocents who tried not to choose a side. In the case of the Afghan interpreters, the betrayal is especially egregious. Few of America’s friends have faced a more brutal enemy than the Taliban and the rank-and-file translators lack the political clout to cut through the bureaucracy in either Afghanistan or the United States…
“Making America great again should start with honoring our commitment to those who fought alongside our own soldiers. Not abandoning them to be brutally murdered along with their families is the least we can do. If we, as a country, can’t find a way to get these people out of Afghanistan, it will be to our everlasting shame.”
David Thornton, Racket News
Other opinions below.
“When Mr. Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal in April, fewer than half of Afghanistan’s roughly 400 districts were contested. The government controlled 127 while the Taliban held 77, according to the Long War Journal. Today the Taliban control 224 districts while the government is down to 73. Civilian casualties were up 47% in the first six months of 2021 compared to the same period last year, according to the United Nations. The U.S. withdrawal is now at least 95% done, and soon only some 650 troops will remain to defend the U.S. Embassy and Kabul’s main airport. Expect more massacres, and an emboldened al Qaeda…
“Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal is popular now—bringing troops home usually is—but it won’t look good if the Taliban roll over Kabul and chaos ensues. Donald Trump may have set the withdrawal in motion, but since when did Mr. Biden follow his predecessor’s lead? The rout will be on Mr. Biden’s watch.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“The United Nations mission in the country recently released its Afghanistan Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict midyear update. They recorded 1,659 civilians killed and 3,254 wounded, an increase of almost 50% over the same period last year. And for the first time, nearly half of all casualties (46%) were women and children. 468 children were killed by the Taliban in six months…
“Once the fighting moves into the populated sections of cities like Kandahar and Kabul, the death toll is expected to skyrocket. The pattern of killing women and young girls is unfortunately giving us a preview of what we can expect from the Taliban once they fully retake control. Some of the girls and young women in Afghanistan have grown up and spent their entire lives only knowing a country where American and NATO forces were on hand to provide at least some measure of protection… That’s all changing very quickly.”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
Some argue that “In the time since killing Osama bin Laden, the people of the United States have elected two successive presidents who vowed to wind down the war in Afghanistan. That is actually the best reason to leave. The War on Terror was, at one point, temporarily transmuted into a mission of global democratic revolution. But America’s democratic people have expressed themselves over and over again. According to a May Quinnipiac poll, 62 percent approved of President Biden’s decision to withdraw all American troops…
“After billions of dollars and years of training from NATO and the United States in particular, the Afghan National Army does not look like it is up to the task of defending the city [of Kabul] from the Taliban. The Afghan state, riddled with corruption, is almost a sideshow. The capacity of that state to act is mostly provided by American-paid contractors. Holding up a government that has no real-world legitimacy in the region, or among the people it is supposed to govern, is practically the opposite of the high-flown ideals of Bush’s second inaugural. More important, it’s a project that does not interest the American people.”
Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review
“Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted last week that the Taliban now controls nearly half of Afghanistan’s districts — 200 out of 419. The previous month, he said that the Taliban controlled only 81 districts. That’s an alarming trend. The Taliban is now massing around major urban centers amid growing fears that they could soon take Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city. The Taliban has already seized many of Afghanistan’s border posts, securing tariff revenue for itself and denying it to the Afghan government…
“I get that Biden wants to end ‘forever wars,’ disengage from the Middle East and focus on the looming threat from China. But we can still pivot to the Pacific while keeping 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and 2,500 troops in Iraq — together amounting to just 0.4 percent of the military’s active-duty end strength.”
Max Boot, Washington Post
Others argue that “Invading Iraq and Afghanistan, dropping iron fragmentation bombs on villages and towns, kidnapping, torturing and imprisoning tens of thousands of people, using drones to sow terror from the skies, resurrected the discredited radical jihadists and was a potent recruiting tool in the fight against U.S. and NATO forces. We were the best thing that ever happened to the Taliban and al-Qaida…
“Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry…
“Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders.”
Chris Hedges, Salon
“The training of foreign militaries and police forces in places like Iraq and Afghanistan should be stopped. The utter collapse of the US-trained forces in Iraq in the face of the Islamic State in 2014 and the ongoing collapse of the US-trained Afghan military today have made a mockery of this whole process. Military missions launched by intelligence agencies like the CIA, including those drone assassination programs overseas, should be halted and the urge to intervene secretly in the political and military lives of so many other countries finally brought under some kind of control…
“A true Department of Defense wouldn’t need 800 foreign military bases, nor would the national security state need a budget that routinely exceeds a trillion dollars annually. We wouldn’t need a huge, mechanized army, a navy built around aircraft carriers, or an air force that boasts of its global reach and global power, all of it created not for defense but for offense—for destruction, anytime, anywhere.”
William Astore, The Nation
