Kabul: where to run, where to hide?
I went to bed last night feeling very agitated and having my own small version of Vietnam PTSD. I can only imagine what it’s like for so many of those who served there, or in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, or who lost loved ones in those countries – as well, of course, as refugees from Afghanistan, or those who know people who have helped us and cannot get out in time.
Afghanistan is a land-locked country. So we won’t be reading about boat people. And Afghanistan’s neighboring countries aren’t exactly the sort that might be seen as sanctuaries. For example [emphasis mine]:
Iran said it will provide temporary refuge to Afghans arriving at its borders as the Taliban advance on Kabul, prompting thousands of people to flee the city.
Accommodation will be built in Razavi Khorasan, South Khorasan and Sistan-Baluchestan provinces along Iran’s eastern border with Afghanistan, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said Sunday, citing Hossein Ghassemi, deputy for border affairs at the Interior Ministry.
Fleeing Afghans are expected “to return when the situation improves,” Ghassemi said, adding that some of them, including members of the military as well as government and customs officials, had already been sent back.
And this [emphasis mine]:
Uzbekistan has detained 84 Afghan soldiers who crossed the border, the government said on August 15, adding that another group of soldiers had amassed near a border checkpoint on the Afghan side.
Uzbekistan provided the detained Afghan soldiers with food, temporary accommodation, and medical treatment, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The government is also providing humanitarian aid to a group of Afghan soldiers who have amassed on the Afghan side of the of the bridge at the Termez-Hairatan border crossing, the Foreign Ministry added. The bridge is a car and railway link between the two countries…
Uzbekistan is in talks with Kabul on returning the troops home and resolving the situation at the bridge, it said.
And Pakistan seems to be allied with the Taliban.
Some western European countries (Germany, for example) are also having their own problems with this. Were they even warned ahead of time how abruptly the withdrawal was about to happen? I have no idea, but my guess is that the answer is no:
“We need to make sure that the many people who have big worries and concerns, even though they have not worked with German institutions, have a secure stay in countries neighbouring Afghanistan,” Merkel said.
“We should not repeat the mistake of the past when we did not give enough funds to UNHCR and other aid programmes and people left Jordan and Lebanon towards Europe.”…
Merkel had earlier told a closed meeting of the CDU that those needing evacuation included 2,500 Afghan support staff as well as human rights activists, lawyers and others whom the government sees as being at risk if they remained in the country, up to 10,000 altogether.
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Germany was seeking to evacuate as many people at risk as it could, adding that NATO allies had misjudged the situation when they thought Afghan government forces could hold back the Taliban unaided.
That story is datelined today.
Many news outlets and bloggers have covered the horrific events occurring in Kabul. This one from Ace has compiled quite a few reports and videos. Prepare yourself; it’s profoundly disturbing. The title of the post is “Kabul ’75: Video Shows Terrified Afghan Civilians Clinging Desperately to Departing US Jets, Then Plunging To Their Deaths as Their Grips Give Out.”
“Video Shows Terrified Afghan Civilians Clinging Desperately to Departing US Jets, Then Plunging To Their Deaths as Their Grips Give Out”
So far, I cannot bring myself to watch.
This is a bloodbath unfolding in real time…on the hands & heads of every “nation-builder” neocon in love with the idea of militarily expanding democracy into Islamic tribal hellholes where today’s butchers know civilized nations will never kill as ruthlessly as they will…and so will always lose & leave.
I don’t think FICUS is going to want to do photo-ops with the returned soldiers anytime soon.
What Ira said; this new horror brings back nightmare memories of the people who jumped from the Twin Towers on 9/11.
Of course Pakistan is allied with the Taliban; that’s been obvious since 2003 or so. We could never do anything about it, since our supply line into Afghanistan was dependent on Pakistan, and there was no way we were going to expand the war.
Pakistan’s strategic interest has always been to dominate Afghanistan lest India do it instead and surround them. India’s strategic interest has always been to dominate Afghanistan in order to surround and therefore neutralize Pakistan. So with the US and NATO out, it’s really India’s move next.
Perhaps we should be reconsidering the billions we have given and continue to give to Taliban-supporting Pakistan, a country which routinely mistreats, in grotesque and inhumane fashion, its Christian (and, to a lesser extent, its Hindu) minority.
j e —
Well, now that we no longer need to bribe them to not loot our supply caravans, maybe we can do that. Next time there’s a Republican President and majority Congress.
Perhaps we should be reconsidering the billions we have given and continue to give to Taliban-supporting Pakistan, a country which routinely mistreats, in grotesque and inhumane fashion, its Christian (and, to a lesser extent, its Hindu) minority.
In nominal terms, American aid to Pakistan was at its peak in 2010. In nominal terms, it has declined by 75% since that time. It currently stands at just shy of $700 m, or 0.23% of Pakistan’s gross national income. About 54% is earmarked for military purposes.
adding that NATO allies had misjudged the situation when they thought Afghan government forces could hold back the Taliban unaided.
That ‘misjudgement’ is about the biggest story out there, and it’s being ignored by all the goodthinkers.
It must have been obvious for years to US intel agencies what level of effort was required to hold back the Taliban from its inevitable conquest. So the minute the quack in the White House decreed ‘we’re outa here’, the lines must have been burning up with alarms and demands for plans to extract humans and equipment (particularly military) from the country BEFORE those lovely Talibans began giving triumphal press conferences to world ‘news’ agencies.
So let’s learn how those alarms were snuffed, ignored and suppressed, and by whom, because there’s a five-year blame festival in the making to address the bloody ‘governance’ shaping up in Afghanistan. If the White House ever heard such alarms, Ms. Psaki has mounted a successful performance of ignorance, or deflection, one or the other.
Insufficiently Sensitive:
I agree that that’s a huge issue – perhaps the biggest one of all. How clueless were the people other than Biden? And if they weren’t clueless, why didn’t they prepare properly? Did Biden suddenly spring this on them as Commander-in-Chief and they ran out of time? Could no one overrule him or at least delay somehow? Or did most people agree with him that they still had enough time? And if so, why?
Ira writes: “Video Shows Terrified Afghan Civilians Clinging Desperately to Departing US Jets, Then Plunging To Their Deaths as Their Grips Give Out”
So far, I cannot bring myself to watch.
Oh it’s just a couple of dots, sort of like distant gnats, or maybe some flyspecks on your monitor.
Distant tragedy in a distant land,.,,, while clinging to a climbing American Airforce C-5a… departing the military sandbox of Afghanistan and leaving a million or so to take the fall.
Maybe it won’t be like the killing fields of Cambodia or the hunting of those allied to Americans who did not make the last helicopter or last boat out of Vietnam.
Then again maybe it will.
It probably doesn’t signal a return to 9/11 attacks on American cities. But it might. It just might.
Those little specks falling hundreds of feet onto the tarmac? That sick oozing smack of a body exploding on the hard ground so far away you cannot hear it?
“A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.”
Neo asks: “How clueless were the people other than Biden?”
Unclued because they did not care.
” And if they weren’t clueless, why didn’t they prepare properly?”
They did prepare properly. They wanted the United States weakened and seen as weak by the whole world. It was their prep. This is the result. It worked.
“Did Biden suddenly spring this on them as Commander-in-Chief and they ran out of time?”
The only thing Biden can spring on anybody these days is a bowel movement. Everything else is planned and executed by his handlers. This continuing idea that Biden has more control over what he does than a sock puppet is, well, quaint.
“Could no one overrule him or at least delay somehow?”
They didn’t want to and they would not overrule and delay. The faster the worse and ‘The worse the better.’ They work on the schedule of their masters. Pay attention to Taiwan as the various mining contracts the Chinese have with the Taliban.
“Or did most people agree with him that they still had enough time? And if so, why?”
Now, the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
An’ here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
Or the scene from “The Third Man” where Martins (Joseph Cotten) confronts Lime (Orson Welles) on the ferris wheel about those he has killed by selling watered-down penicillin on the black market:
________________________________________
MARTINS
Have you ever seen any of your victims?
HARRY
Do you know, I don’t ever feel comfortable on these sort of things…Victims?
(He opens the door of the carriage.)
Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there…
(Long shot from Martins’ eye line of the fairground far below and the people now on it.)
Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?
If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped – would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man……free of income tax.
It’s the only way to save money nowadays.
https://genius.com/Graham-greene-the-third-man-fairground-scene-annotated
Gerard vanderleun:
I agree that there were some people down the line who felt that way, but I strongly suspect there were others who felt quite differently and disagreed with Biden about how to go about this. I don’t know how many (nor do you, of course), nor do I know what transpired (nor do you, of course). I happen to think – and I have stated this several times – that this particular event actually WAS Biden’s decision and that he had a large role in it. He is addled and he is fading and other people control and guide him in many things, but he still has some ability as Commander In Chief to order things and to have people obey, and he still has some will and function and at times can be relatively lucid (although never smart or wise, but that’s nothing new). Again, I agree that he almost certainly had some confederates in this decision, however.
“I don’t know how many nor do you…” Clearly not enough.
We must respectfully disagree about the level of will and function inside this seething mass of diseased protoplasm. The right cocktail of drugs IV can do wonders for the slosh and phlegm that fill his skull. He’s not right. He’s not lucid. And he just ain’t making it.
““Kabul ’75: Video Shows Terrified Afghan Civilians Clinging Desperately to Departing US Jets, Then Plunging To Their Deaths as Their Grips Give Out.”
This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in a comment a couple of days ago. I would have thought that images like this were the one thing that the administration would go to any lengths to prevent. Afghans would be expected to die offstage. It shows a massive failure of the one thing the administration ought to be good at, which is managing their PR. But then they really haven’t been taxed in that area, because the only press they care about is on their side.
neo,
Maybe it’s a situation where he is being ‘handled’ in a way where those around him absolutely get what they want on certain things like the environment and CRT and the border by ‘managing’ the memory care President but on issues like this where they are kinda meh on Afghanistan they let Biden get his way and depend on the media to cover for him.
And they will cover for him just give them a day or two and this will barely be getting any coverage on CNN and MSNBC.
Cui bono?
I don’t think this was the answer Brian Williams was looking for.
https://twitter.com/whitneyleerob/status/1427386966685913092
John Guilfoyle,
I was one of those neocons, who like Bush bought into the premise that all peoples inherently desired the freedom of self-determination.
Over time, as events proved otherwise, I came to accept that premise to be profoundly mistaken. I have not considered myself to be a neocon since its premises were disproven.
That said, when we’re attacked again by Islamic jihadists, what would you advise our response to be?
Just take it? Nuke em? What other alternatives are there?
How do you respond to the assertion that, if we react as ruthlessly as they, that we’re no better than they?
I think it highly likely that we are, within a few years at most, going to be suffering numerous terrorist attacks by jihadists on American soil. No doubt jihadists view our southern border as an open invitation and now that they’ve taken the American public’s measure and found it to be a ripe, easily picked fruit… the temptation to attack will be irresistible.
I don’t understand how anyone who is civilized is benefiting from this, either, Mr.Vanderleun. Biden seems to think he does, but is a life long corrupt criminal. He was influential among the young Congressional fools that cut off military aid to South Vietnam, he is supposed to be the person behind the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq, ( why did Obama put him in charge of that? ), his office was where the identity of DEVGRU, the SEAL Development Group, as the killers of Bin Laden was leaked out, leading to the shoot down of EXTORTION 17, with the deaths of 31 Americans. And now,this.
I know I am not saying anything you don’t already know, All of this is open knowledge, but why had Biden gotten away with this, as well as his use of office, to sell influence, for so long? Is the Democratic Party nothing but a criminal organization, play acting being a political party?
I fear the answer, is yes.
Ending American civilization is the ‘benefit’.
Once America is razed to the ground, then upon its ashes… a truly “socially just” society can be constructed.
And since you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, the deplorables must be ‘reeducated’ with those who prove irredeemable… turned into ‘fertilizer’.
I was one of those neocons, who like Bush bought into the premise that all peoples inherently desired the freedom of self-determination.
Geoffrey Britain:
I wasn’t so sure, but, given the stakes, I figured it was worth a shot. If we had turned Iraq around to a model Islamic country, it would have been huge all the way around.
I don’t believe it was an impossible dream. Not surprisingly, the Bush team made mistakes during the occupation and we can argue about those, but Obama, deliberately and with malice aforethought, made sure to kill that possibility.
I imagine Biden’s Afghan bug-out was partly in imitation of Obama.
However, between Muslims, Democrats and the Usual Gang of UN Idiots, I’d never back another such effort.
huxley: “I wasn’t so sure, but, given the stakes, I figured it was worth a shot. ”
Yeah, that was roughly my view, too. Also I was reacting against the deranged “Bush is Hitler” etc etc etc stuff, and the anti-Vietnam-war protestors of my youth–of whom I was one–who were defined more by their/our antipathy to their/our own country than rational opposition.
Count me in with Mac, huxley, and Geoffrey Britain. (Except that I also agree with Zaph: Islam is unreformable. And cannot be made into any “model” ideal we can accept.)
The lesson rejected by our “principled Libertarian” brothers is that culture matters more, much more over time, than abstract reasoning. These folks oughta be allies defending actual existing Liberty, yet they are AWOL (cuz so principled!).
Is THIS our second post-Covid national emergency?
Somebody wake me up for the next one.
Maybe a Cat 5 hurricane? Re-branded as a Climate Emergency!
Islam has its currents. Prior to the fundamentalst takeover, the urban centers of the ME were fairly mellow. Women going to work in dresses and heels. Beirut the Paris of The Levant.
Donning a burka or growing a beard from fear is not the same as being a fundamentalist.
The Nazis were a growth of German culture. They’re no more. But it wasn’t done by trying to vote them out or sweet talk them. You need a polity which will forbid them, hunt them down, jail them or kill them. That can’t happen autonomously.
Richard Aubrey:
Not to be too paranoid but Antifa has been trying to establish the seeds of such polity in Portland for all not Antifa. And our DHS and FBI are not far behind with their guidance on domestic extremism (formerly called free speech and politics).
10,000 U.S. citizens still in Kabul. Hoping someone saves them. Jeez.
https://twitter.com/nannburke/status/1427450829389316101
Richard Aubrey,
It’s true that Islam has had it’s times of tolerance.
However, I would argue that Nazi Germany is not analogous to Islam.
Nazism’s racist ideology was based upon the premise that the Jews were evil and responsible for most of the injustice in the world. Yes, they held up the Aryan ‘race’ as the only valid pure race but without the Jewish scapegoats they had no unifying standard to rally around. Not happy with your life? Blame the Jews!
On the other hand, Islam is based upon Muhammad’s claim that Allah, through the archangel Gabriel in repeated visits, miraculously enabled the illiterate Muhammad to write down Allah’s exact words. That Allah is the Qur’an’s author not Muhammad. Which means that not even one comma in the Qur’an can be changed. As fallible mankind is incapable of correcting infallible Allah. So the Qur’an is perfect because Allah is incapable of error and so are his angels incapable of an accidental error.
This doesn’t just mean that Islam cannot be reformed either internally or externally. As to reform the Qur’an and thus Islam would require the implicit declaration that Muhammad, in his most basic claim was either a liar or deluded, in which case Islam’s theological foundations collapse.
As importantly, among Muslims Islam’s fundamentalists hold the theological ‘high ground’ for what mere man can credibly dispute Allah? The moderate societies you point to were, in effect in violation of Allah’s commands in the Qur’an. No moderate Muslim can credibly dispute that assertion, which is why Islam always returns to its expansionist, violent roots.
So Islamic societies cannot remain or permanently evolve into a tolerance toward other cultures and religions because Islam’s basic tenets are set in Allah’s unequivocal commands to make the world Islamic. And to do it by whatever means are necessary.
huxley said:
“I imagine Biden’s Afghan bug-out was partly in imitation of Obama.”
To me, so far, the “Biden” administration has been redoing the worst policies, decisions, ideas, of every Democrat administration of the past 100 years in less than a year and harder-harder-harder.
They either think that this time they’ve finally grasped that golden ring, or someone wants to see if there is still a sleeping giant in the US polity to be wakened.
One trouble with this [below link] is that it wasn’t Nixon who abandoned Vietnam, it was Congressional Democrats feeling empowered by the takedown of Nixon who did it.
https://twitter.com/ian_mckelvey/status/1427232830103371778
I cannot get past how pathetic the Afghanistan Government’s resistance to the Taliban , is.
Thousands of people trying to flee. Maybe thousands of people should turn around and fight!
Perhaps no civilians are allowed to have weapons, to begin with.
GB, huxley, Mac & TJ…my once-upon-a-time neocon siblings…
It is possible we might all agree that after the first “purple fingers” were visible in Iraq and a defensive perimeter & capacity built in post-Taliban Afghanistan, a draw down of US military (South Korea style not South VietNam style) may have been the best outcome for which any of us could have prayed.
That we were there for 20 years…
It should be axiomatic by now that you cannot build democracy where the internal mechanisms for it do not exist. Islam is not the fertile soil of Christendom out of which our Western liberal democratic institutions grew…It. Never. Will. Be. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
We should have been out long ago & at least taken our people & our gear with us, and if attacked again…
“Just take it? Nuke em? What other alternatives are there?
How do you respond to the assertion that, if we react as ruthlessly as they, that we’re no better than they?”
Acting less ruthlessly has brought us to this moment…But maybe. We knew where the camps were? We knew where their mountains hideouts were? Did we? Could we have airborne ordinance rearranging the geography until even the roaches were dead? I don’t have that answer to hand.
What I know is there will be a bloodbath and a refugee crisis the likes of which we have never seen before unless all the surrounding nations close their borders, then we’re back to bloodbath.
This is what failed nation-building has wrought. This is what happens when empires fail…as ours is failing. Stolen elections have consequences. And everybody who continually beat the “next war” drums & rejoiced when President Trump was ousted…this one’s on you.
Griffin – that Tweet links to this story, which is not paywalled (yet).
The URL / headline is devastating, coming as it does from The Official Biden Press Office.
And the author is not a conservative.*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/16/biden-must-rescue-thousands-us-citizens-trapped-afghanistan/
I’m sure Rogin will be happy to join in blaming Trump and the Republicans later, but he’s right that the first priority is saving lives. Of course, that was true in Benghazi as well, and we know how that played out. Any bets on how many Democrats will be forced to resign?
*”Josh Rogin is a columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post. He writes about foreign policy and national security. Rogin is also a political analyst for CNN. He previously worked for Bloomberg View, the Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Congressional Quarterly, Federal Computer Week and Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper.”
**Remember when the NYT purged their staff for daring to print an op-ed by Senator Cotton?
***And just what are those troops going to do when they get in theater? Fight off the entire Taliban contingent in Kabul, and the rest throughout the country? Take back the planes at Bagram, which any competent planner would have used as evacuation vehicles in the first place?
(…school buses in New Orleans come to mind…)
****Hope is not a plan. There are no “coming days” left.
@ Neo – “How clueless were the people other than Biden? And if they weren’t clueless, why didn’t they prepare properly? Did Biden suddenly spring this on them as Commander-in-Chief and they ran out of time? Could no one overrule him or at least delay somehow? Or did most people agree with him that they still had enough time? And if so, why?”
Maybe Mr. Rogin’s “blame game” will answer some of those questions later. The suggestions are coming in piece-meal right now, and they don’t look good for the Administration at any level.
The only thing I’m sure of is that none of the perpetrators of this debacle will be declared Domestic Terrorist and locked up in solitary without bail.
@ geoffb – “One trouble with this [below link] is that it wasn’t Nixon who abandoned Vietnam, it was Congressional Democrats feeling empowered by the takedown of Nixon who did it.”
First, you are correct. Democrats adjust history to suit themselves. Always.
Then they start to believe it.
Second, that Tweet & its companion make a pretty blunt accusation.
The Saigon evacuation should have clued people in (been the final nail in the coffin) that Democrats couldn’t be trusted with foreign policy ever again, but they voted them in anyway.
Maybe.
T J,
Re: “(Except that I also agree with Zaph: Islam is unreformable. And cannot be made into any “model” ideal we can accept.)”
I’ve been asserting that Islam cannot be reformed since June of 2010. See: “The Theological Nature of Islam” https://geoffreybritain.wordpress.com/2010/06/18/the-theological-nature-of-islam/
Pointing out the same fact based logic as I do above to Richard. I’ve made it many times here and across the web.
No one has ever refuted it.
John Guilfoyle,
I think it prudent to qualify that I am not in agreement with the common view that, “if we react as ruthlessly as they, then we’re no better than them”. That IMO is a formula for defeat and an error in reason. But also a very slippery path at the edge of a moral cliff.
Above I stated that, “I think it highly likely that we are, within a few years at most, going to be suffering numerous terrorist attacks by jihadists on American soil.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out I’m not the only one to think that likely.
“Europe’s Latest Terrorism Threat Report”
Violent jihadists who killed and plotted in 2020 illegally crossed borders first; distant terror-travel warning bells for an out-of-control U.S. border
https://cis.org/Bensman/Europes-Latest-Terrorism-Threat-Report
Even NBC sees it:
“The international Jihadi movement is reinvigorated”
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/the-international-jihadi-movement-is-reinvigorated/
It also is obvious that the Left will use terrorist attacks as an argument for a nationalized, ‘quick reaction’ police force.
Of course, such a force would naturally pay close attention to “domestic terrorists”… who after all are “the greatest threat to national security”.
Daniel Greenfield: “Afghanistan doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s its own forever war of quarreling tribes.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/one-thing-we-never-understood-about-afghanistan-daniel-greenfield/
GB…I suspect that you & I are closer to a common mind than a few words on Neo’s page would indicate.
That’s probably true almost across the board here.
Today’s a new day…let’s see what new level of hell the “Biden” admin can plumb.
This was a deliberate effort under the guise of ineptitude to get weapons into the hands of people who wish us harm AND to have an excuse to make up for all the lost jihadist immigration to the US under Trump by airlifting ‘threatened’ muslims into the American Heartland. As an extra bonus, the Taliban can kidnap a dozen or so Americans and hold them for $100 million ransom. Gee, who in the current administration would wish such a thing?