Afghanistan

Monday

Roger Kimball

ABC News is the big loser of the Trump-Harris debate

The main takeaway from the ABC News ambus— er, presidential debate last night? That someone should sue the network for creating a hostile workplace environment.  The evening was supposed to offer Kamala Harris and Donald Trump an opportunity expose themselves to the public and explain their positions on various policy matters that are important to the public.   In the event, it was an event in which the immoderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, repeatedly pecked at and corrected, or pretended to correct, one candidate, Donald Trump, while passing over lie after lie after lie emitted by Kamala Harris.  Trump did not say “there were fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville. He did not “incite an insurrection” on January 6.

abc news
terror
Daniel DePetris

The never-ending War on Terror

Twenty-two years ago today, the United States experienced its worst terrorist attack in history. It was a life-changing moment for tens of thousands of Americans, particularly those in the New York metropolitan area who saw two of the city’s most iconic buildings reduced to smoldering heaps of rubble and ash. The Pentagon, a stoic building across the Potomac River from our capital, saw one of its sides destroyed. About 166 miles to the northwest, another hijacked plane went down in rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania. By the time that horrible day was over, nearly 3,000 people had lost their lives. The country’s entire being was shaken to the core. Americans, particularly those in New York and Washington, DC, felt more vulnerable than they had in years. For President George W.

Monday

The Spectator

Trump honors fallen soldiers of Abbey Gate

Former president Donald Trump made a surprise appearance at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday to lay a wreath and pay his respects to the thirteen American service members who were killed during a suicide bombing amid the military withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is the third anniversary of the Abbey Gate attack, which was a tragic source of national embarrassment as America left the twenty-year long war and has been a continuous political thorn in the side of President Joe Biden. While Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both released statements recognizing the fallen service members, Biden is currently at the beach (in fact, he is on vacation all week long) and Harris has no public events on her schedule.

abbey gate

Tuesday

Amber Duke

‘Kind of funny’: former House staffer rejects Foreign Affairs Committee’s defense of Afghanistan investigation

A senior investigator who resigned from the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week is hitting back at the committee’s attempts to defend its investigation into the United States’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Jerry Dunleavy, a former Washington Examiner reporter who wrote a book about the fall of Kabul in the summer of 2021, joined the Foreign Affairs Committee at the behest of senior staff about a year ago. In his resignation letter that was made public last week, Dunleavy accused the committee and Chairman Michael McCaul of not running a serious investigation into the Biden administration’s withdrawal from the twenty-year war in Afghanistan.

Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) speaks during a House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Tuesday

Justin Marozzi

Tall tales of the Golden East: the fabulous fabrications of two 20th-century con artists

From our UK edition

Have literary deceit and spiritual self-invention ever been this entertaining? The question arises on almost every page of this galloping exposé of two men who were exceedingly relaxed about not telling the truth throughout their professional lives. They would have called it ‘storytelling’. Those who questioned the reliability of their often outlandish claims were dismissed as academic nonentities. One minute Ikbal’s journey across the Middle East was 15,000 miles, the next it was 25,000 miles Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah was the great-grandson of Jan Fishan Khan, a 19th-century Arab nobleman who had supported the British in Afghanistan and been rewarded with an Indian title, palace and pension.

Thursday

David J. Garrow

A superbly written and insightful account of the contemporary American military

Four-star Marine General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie headed US Central Command — CENTCOM, covering the Middle East — from spring 2019 until spring 2022. It was an eventful, and stressful, three years: taking out long-time Islamic State head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019, then notorious Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in early 2020 and overseeing the disastrous final withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Prior to CENTCOM, McKenzie had spent four years in two top-level Joint Chiefs staff posts, and before that he served multiple tours of duty on the ground in Afghanistan. As a younger officer he had been in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 77 hit; he was commissioned in the Marine Corps right out of the Citadel in 1979.

McKenzie

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

Under the Taliban, Afghan light entertainment accrued unusual weight

From our UK edition

For a television talent show, Afghan Star had unusually high stakes. When it first hit Afghanistan’s screens in 2005, four years after the fall of the Taliban, it represented the triumph of music over those who had attempted to smother it. Even from the show’s somewhat chaotic inception, it galvanised a nation, sending supporters out on to the streets to canvas for their favourite performers. When the Taliban first swept into town, people were overjoyed: they were seen as ‘angels of peace’ The first winner, Shakib Hamdard, certainly deserved some luck: he had lost his father to a suicide bomb and his brother to a rocket attack, and was driving a taxi around Kabul to support his mother and sister.

Thursday

Max Jeffery

Ahmad Massoud: ‘I’m 100% sure I can topple the Taliban’

From our UK edition

It’s fighting season in Afghanistan again. When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring, and the madrassas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term, the Islamists kicked off the fighting. Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died, including 453 Britons. Now an insurgent group called the National Resistance Front (NRF) are starting the annual springtime assaults, this time against the Taliban government. ‘The Taliban do not possess the support of the mass of the people. We do’ ‘In the past 31 days, we have staged 31 attacks on Taliban, only in Kabul,’ Ahmad Massoud, the NRF leader, cheerily tells me from Tajikistan, where he directs his troops in exile.

Sunday

Daniel McCarthy

Lessons from costly wars past

Money is often a substitute for strategy in US foreign policy. We spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan, only to lose the country the minute our troops began to pull out. How much will it realistically cost, then, to beat Russia in Ukraine? Will the next $100 or $200 billion do the trick? This is not a question that supporters of war-spending ask themselves. As in Afghanistan, spending is a way to defer thinking about actually winning — or facing the serious possibility of losing. Our aid buys delay, not results. Ironically, while the specter of World War Two is invoked every time there’s a conflict, our experience then teaches the same lesson as recent attempts to purchase victory.

wars

Sunday

Matthew Foldi

‘My kid’s name resonated in that body’: Steve Nikoui’s first interview after State of the Union outburst

Steve Nikoui’s son, Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, was killed alongside twelve other American service-members outside of Abbey Gate at the Kabul Airport during the Biden administration's hasty exit of Afghanistan in August 2021. That's why Nikoui's outburst, “Do you remember Abbey Gate,” interrupted the president’s State of the Union address on Thursday, roughly fifty-one minutes through the speech. Nikoui was escorted out, arrested, placed in handcuffs and charged with a misdemeanor that could see him in jail for up to ninety days. “I remember what set me off," Nikoui told The Spectator Friday night, in his first interview since his arrest. "When he was talking about kids, in one moment, they're glorifying these abortions...

nikoui

Thursday

Matthew Foldi

A make-or-break State of the Union for Biden

Tonight President Joe Biden is set to deliver one of what may be his final major speeches as president: the State of the Union. After a completely empty schedule today, the president will address both Houses of Congress — but rivals are speculating if he’ll even make it through the evening. “Will the president be juiced enough to appear to be coherent?” Representative Darrell Issa wonders. And, “how will he deal with immigration. Those are the two issues that I think are on everyone’s mind,” he said. Prior to the speech, the House Republican Conference hosted a media row where dozens of lawmakers spoke about their expectations heading into tonight’s speech. “Border, border, border,” is what some, such as Oklahoma’s Kevin Hern, want to hear from the president.

state of the union

Tuesday

Leyla Sanai

A war reporter bravely faces death – but not from sniper fire

From our UK edition

When you are a foreign correspondent and have covered wars in dozens of countries, the last place you’d expect a threat to your life to come from is your own cells. Yet this was the predicament in which the New York Times reporter Rod Nordland found himself in July 2019. Despite close shaves in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central America and Darfur, he only really became aware of his mortality after collapsing with a seizure in India and discovering the existence of a ‘space occupying lesion’ (SOL) in his brain – a euphemism for a growth, benign or malignant. On transfer to a hospital in Manhattan, Nordland learned that his was a stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme, a primary brain cancer with a poor prognosis.

Thursday

David J. Garrow

Who’s really behind the Biden administration’s foreign policy?

If you’re one of the many people worried that US foreign policy is in the hands of a visibly declining eighty-one year-old president, Alexander Ward’s account of the Biden administration’s first two years in office may — or may not — make you feel better, for he leaves readers with little doubt as to who is actually the executive branch’s most influential decision-maker: forty-seven year-old national security advisor Jake Sullivan. Ward might deny any such authorial intent, but time and again he shows his hand, as when he invokes “Sullivan’s first two years at the helm alongside Biden.

biden ward

Tuesday

Matthew Foldi

Inside the Biden administration’s indifference towards rescuing Americans from Afghanistan

At the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden administration officials said behind closed doors that secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan “don’t give a fuck” about rescuing Americans from the clutches of the Taliban. The admission came on a late August 2021 phone call held between the Department of Defense and congressional Democrats, based on The Spectator’s review of contemporaneous text messages. During the conversation, a Pentagon official acknowledged in response to frustration from Democrats that two of the senior-most officials working on the evacuation — Blinken and Sullivan — were indifferent to the plight of their fellow Americans.

afghanistan kabul

Tuesday

Jonathan Boff

A Guardsman’s life as not as glamorous as it might seem

From our UK edition

This book is the perfect present for the Guardsman in your life. It offers an authorised biography of the five regiments of Foot Guards and two of Household Cavalry from 1969 to the present day. In that half century the Guards have been under fire in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan, with much of the time also spent maintaining a presence in West Germany. These were busy years. Units of the Household Division took part in no fewer than 24 operational tours in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2013, many of them involving intense combat. At the same time, the Guards have also had to keep up a demanding schedule of ceremonial duties.

Tuesday

Justin Marozzi

How dangerous is the Sunni-Shia schism?

From our UK edition

In 2014, with the Middle East convulsed by the murderous, self-styled Islamic State, a Daily Mail reader wrote a letter to the editor which began: ‘Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain...’ Aubrey Bailey went on to describe the dizzying complexity of diplomatic relationships thrown into turmoil: So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting our other enemies, whom we don’t want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win... And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out – do you understand now?

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

Israel’s imperial problem is ours, too

Israel will win its war against Hamas. But can it win the kind of war the United States lost in Afghanistan? Israel is facing today a dilemma that the West will face tomorrow. For more than sixty years, it has been easy for Western liberals to believe that imperialism is an unnecessary evil. When the US conquers and militarily occupies a foreign country, liberals don’t call it imperialism. It’s merely “regime change,” “nation-building” and “promoting democracy.” Such Newspeak has been powerless to alter the outcome of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars which after successful regime decapitations followed by decades of occupation and trillions of dollars spent on rebuilding failed to establish anything resembling secure liberal democracies in either land.

Israel

Tuesday

Matthew Foldi

Gold Star families hosted by Trump at Bedminster

Late last month, former president Donald Trump hosted the Gold Star families of the thirteen US military members who were slain in the 2021 Kabul Airport suicide bombing. “Trump was way more than I expected,” Christy Shamblin, the mother-in-law of Sergeant Nicole Gee, told me. “The contrast is stark with the president we met at Dover.”  Trump “knew so much about the event, the kids, Bagram and who made decisions… He was a normal human and made eye contact, answered every question, even the uncomfortable ones.” Following their meeting with Trump, the former president surprised them all by spending several more hours with them, as he signed pictures of their children — and even a pair of bedazzled high heels.

gold star families

Thursday

Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson

The Biden admin was prepared to leave our Afghan allies behind

The administration’s utter failure to plan for the inevitable Afghanistan evacuation meant that it had barely enough resources to focus on getting (some) US citizens out of the country. If the government was the only actor calling the shots — normally standard procedure in war zones, to say the least — then the tens of thousands of Afghan allies who had risked their lives based on years-long US promises of loyalty would be on their own.  Colonel Seth Krummrich, a twenty-two-year Green Beret who served as the chief of staff for Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT) during the withdrawal, told us that US special forces had had just enough capacity to rescue Americans stranded across the country, but evacuating SIV applicants was simply beyond their bandwidth.

afghan allies biden

Tuesday

Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson

Exclusive: How Covid protocol disrupted the Afghanistan withdrawal

The Biden administration’s Covid obsession interfered with the execution of the Afghanistan evacuation, just as it had with Special Immigrant Visa applicants’ evacuation planning. The administration’s Covid vaccination requirements deprived critical units of key personnel. The problem was especially acute for the Marines in 2/1. From April to October 2021, the battalion rotated in as the combat arms unit of the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force — Crisis Response — Central Command (SPMAGTF-CR-CC). In classic military fashion, the task force has an eleven-word name but a straightforward mission: part of the battalion safeguards embassies in the region, and the other part serves as the region-wide “Oh, shit!” response team.

U.S. Army soldiers are briefed on COVID-19 quarantine procedures after returning home from a 9-month deployment to Afghanistan on December 10, 2020 (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)