Yet once he was infected, he was given Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment, despite being fully vaccinated and having no symptoms.
Gupta, a pulmonologist, tweeted:
COVID-19 cases have skyrocketed in Texas in recent weeks, from around 1,000 daily cases reported in early July to over 20,000 cases reported on Monday.
Despite those rising numbers, just 45% of the state is fully vaccinated, well below the U.S. average of 51%.
Abbott has also undermined efforts to slow the spread of the virus with his ban on mask mandates, and by going to court to uphold that ban.
NBC News reported on Tuesday that Abbott has told friends he has received a third dose of the vaccine.
Abbott’s positive test results came less than 24 hours after he attended a crowded GOP event and posted images online showing him at the largely mask-free gathering.
‘Please Don’t Leave Us Behind. We Will Be Great Americans.’
An interview with a U.S.-trained Afghan Air Force pilot, now hiding from the Taliban.
by The Editors August 16, 2021
Afghan Air Force pilots land their UH-60 Blackhawks on a narrow landing strip during a resupply mission to an outpost in Ghazni Province,
Afghanistan, Sunday, May 9, 2021. The Afghan Air Force, which the U.S. and its partners has nurtured to the tune of $8.5 billion since 2010, is now the government’s spearhead in its fight against the Taliban. Since May 1, the original deadline for the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban have overpowered government troops to take at least 23 districts to date, according to local media outlets. That has further denied Afghan security forces the use of roads, meaning all logistical support to the thousands of outposts and checkpoints including re-supplies of ammunition and food, medical evacuations or personnel rotation must be done by air. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)
As the world watched the United States pull out from Afghanistan and Taliban forces take over the country, we spoke by text message with an Afghan Air Force pilot, now in hiding along with several other pilots and hoping to be evacuated.
Who are you? Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
I was born in Kunar, Afghanistan and joined the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in 2005. I’m married with seven beautiful children. Unfortunately, we are currently separated, because the Taliban took Kabul.
I’m at an undisclosed location with other Afghan Air Force (AAF) pilots, hiding from the Taliban. They are hunting us.
Actually, they’ve been hunting us for years, but this really increased over the last year. The AAF, along with the Afghan National Army Special Operations Corps (ANASOC), were the best fighters for the Afghan government. The AAF was very good. Because we were very good, the Taliban hunted us relentlessly over the last year. I lost many friends to Taliban assassins.
They’ve already executed a few pilots over the weekend.
What was your career with the Afghan Air Force like?
I was very proud to be an AAF pilot. I was a commander. I spent years in the United States, learning to speak English and going through undergraduate pilot training. I visited San Antonio, Fort Rucker, and a lot of other places, too. I like Texas the best. I thought the people were very friendly.
I started at the Defense Language Institute, then moved onto undergraduate pilot training, and then eventually more advanced pilot training for my aircraft. I have so many fond memories of my time in the United States. However, I loved working with my American Air Force advisors the most. They were incredible men and women. When they left [Afghanistan] in May, I was very scared that this day would come.
However, we fought for a long time, and it was the loss of the contractors that really hurt us. Although we have a lot of really good pilots, it takes a very long time to train maintainers. Although we had made great strides, especially with the Mi-17s, we weren’t ready to do it alone without the contractors. A lot of the American-made aircraft are very sophisticated and they take years of training to maintain them adequately.
What’s your current situation?
Like I said, I’m currently in hiding. We are hoping to get out. If we are not rescued, then the Taliban will execute us.
The AAF and the Afghan Special Operations Forces are not the same as regular rank-and-file soldiers. We are very well known. We were celebrated by the Afghan people, so everyone knows us. It’s a very big deal to be an Afghan pilot or a commando.
Anyway, we are hoping that the Americans will take us, and our families, to safety. We spent decades fighting alongside American forces.
Anything you want the American public to know?
Many Afghan soldiers died bravely. I’ve been fighting for over fifteen years. We did not all just give up and quit. Yes, some did. Once the Americans left, we weren’t ready to start doing all the logistics. The logistics, the maintenance, and corruption really hurt us.
I know people in the U.S. are upset that we didn’t fight longer. But we’ve been fighting for decades—and some of us, even longer. When the U.S. left, it really affected morale, especially how quickly it happened. We woke up one day, then Bagram was gone. Everyone got scared. It got out of control.
I’m mad at many of the senior leaders who lined their pockets and simply vanished from the country. However, thousands of Afghan officers were not responsible for that. We were simply doing the best we could.
There are a lot of Afghans who trusted the United States. Not just translators. Not just civil society activists, but also Afghan soldiers. We loved fighting alongside Americans.
Please don’t leave us behind. Please. We will be great Americans.
The president made a difficult but necessary choice.
By Daniel Silverberg August 17, 2021
Daniel Silverberg is a former Department of Defense official and, until recently, the national security adviser to the House majority leader.
Jim Huylebroek / The New York Times / Redux
In 2017, I arrived at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Airport as part of a congressional staff delegation. Even though the U.S. embassy stood a mere four miles away, safety concerns necessitated our helicoptering from a recently constructed multimillion-dollar transit facility instead of traveling by road. As we flew over Kabul, I realized that the Afghan security forces, backed by thousands of U.S. personnel, could not even secure the heart of Afghanistan’s capital.
Kabul was not lost yesterday; the United States and our Afghan partners never truly had control of the country, nor of its capital. Once the Taliban had secured an agreement that the United States would be pulling out and that forces would be reduced to minimal numbers before Joe Biden’s presidency began, they merely had to wait.
The dozens of congressional briefings I attended over 14 years of working on Capitol Hill underscored this dynamic. The intelligence community would commence each briefing with a stark assessment regarding the fragility of conditions in Afghanistan. Senior defense leaders would then provide a far more optimistic view, one that often gave a sense of progress, despite the Herculean challenge with which they had been tasked.
Various critics of President Biden are engaging in fantasies amid Kabul’s collapse: if only we’d used more force, demonstrated more will, stayed a few months longer, then the Taliban would have adopted a different strategy. John Allen, a retired Marine general and former commander of forces in Afghanistan, argued last week that Biden “should issue a public redline” and that “just this announcement will help the Afghan government and give the Taliban pause.” Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, was sharply critical of the withdrawal of the last 3,500 troops. Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, argued that “keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely” would be “worth it.”
These criticisms ignore the developments of the past decade and downplay the impact of last May’s announcement. Even the Biden administration’s harshest detractors mostly concede that the United States would eventually have had to withdraw from Afghanistan. According to the U.S. military, the Taliban was stronger this year than it had been since 2001, while the Afghan defense forces were suffering from high rates of attrition. At some point, the attack on the Afghan government would have come, and U.S. troops would have been caught in the middle—leaving the U.S. to decide between surging thousands of troops or withdrawal.
Some critics also argue that the United States should have preserved a residual force in Afghanistan, much as we have in South Korea. There are any number of ungoverned spaces today, however, which pose as great a threat, if not greater, to U.S. security as Afghanistan, and few are calling for U.S. deployments to those areas. There is a cost—financial and military—to tying forces down in a project that was ultimately doomed to fail.
Finally, critics are lobbing the usual refrain that the withdrawal has damaged U.S. credibility. “Afghanistan’s Unraveling May Strike Another Blow to U.S. Credibility,” read a headline in The New York Times;“Afghanistan’s Collapse Leaves Allies Questioning U.S. Resolve on Other Fronts,” echoed The Washington Post. The United States has spent billions of taxpayer dollars, fought for more than 20 years, and suffered thousands of casualties in this war. If that sort of commitment lacks credibility, our allies will never believe we are doing enough. Critics likewise argued that withdrawal from Vietnam would hurt our credibility. In reality, Japan and other allies questioned our ability to protect them not because we withdrew from Vietnam, but because the United States was militarily overstretched. Withdrawal did not undermine our credibility; by consolidating our efforts, it might enhance it.
The United States had multiple opportunities over the past 20 years to pursue an end to its involvement in Afghanistan. Shortly after the initial invasion, the U.S. rejected a reported offer of surrender. In 2011, peace negotiations were suffocated in their infancy by political opponents and a wary Pentagon. President Biden has demonstrated courage in finding a path forward where others merely fought to preserve the status quo.
Now policy makers should focus on mitigating the fallout of this disaster. First, Congress—led by advocates such as Representatives Jason Crow and Seth Moulton—should redouble its efforts to allow for the immigration of vulnerable Afghans.
Second, Congress and the administration should revitalize engagement with Pakistan and our regional partners in order to contain the fallout from Afghanistan. Pakistani leaders rebuffed both the Bush and Obama administrations’ efforts to cooperate on counterterrorism and instead played a dangerous double game, providing succor to terror groups like the Haqqani Network while accepting billions as part of our counterterror effort. U.S. officials should approach Pakistan in a bluntly transactional manner by asking its leaders to assess the cost of preventing terror groups from using its borderlands as a refuge.
Finally, the United States should repurpose the international-coalition framework used during combat operations in Afghanistan, turning it into the basis of a sustained diplomatic mission. The coalition should keep eyes on the ground in Afghanistan, engaging with Taliban officials where appropriate. This will be challenging without military forces in the country, but it is not impossible, and even a minimal level of observation would be better than the neglect we chose after 1995. The coalition should also collaborate on measures to encourage the Taliban to prevent its territory from being used as a launching point for terrorist attacks. Last, the coalition should maintain UN-based sanctions on the Taliban to pressure the new government to preserve the rights of women and minorities, including the Shiite Hazara population.
Biden faced a set of bad options. He ultimately made the difficult but necessary choice to preserve American lives. That decision will have devastating consequences for Afghanistan, and we will learn more in the coming days regarding how the administration might have executed its plans better. But as I saw for myself in 2017, and as many others had also observed, the government we supported never truly controlled the country it governed. Biden did not decide to withdraw so much as he chose to acknowledge a long-festering reality, one accelerated by the previous administration’s withdrawal announcement.
Minn. Residents Warned They Might Need to Evacuate amid ‘Rapidly Growing’ Wildfire
Superior National Forest Fire. US Forest Service – Superior National Forest Greenwood Fire.
As fire crews in Minnesota work to put out a “rapidly growing and spreading” wildfire in northeastern Minnesota, authorities are warning some local residents to prepare to evacuate.
According to Superior National Forest officials, the Greenwood Fire was first detected around 3 p.m. on Sunday near Greenwood Lake, which is about 15 miles southwest of Isabella township. At the time, officials estimated it was “a couple hundred acres” in size, noting that it was “moving quickly.”
“It is rapidly growing and spreading due to high winds and dry vegetation and has the potential to impact structures and recreation assets,” the Forest Service reported in an update hours later, according to MPR News.
Lake County Emergency Management Director Matt Pollmann said the fire was about 1,000 acres in size as of Monday morning, KARE reported.
A possible cause of the fire has yet to be announced.
As crews continue to try and suppress the fire from the ground and air, weather conditions threaten efforts to contain the blaze.
According to the National Weather Service, Monday’s forecast for northern Minnesota calls for low humidity and gusty winds — “near-critical fire weather conditions.”
On Sunday night, Gov. Tim Walz announced he had authorized the Minnesota National Guard to provide wildfire support in Northern Minnesota.
“This summer, Minnesota has experienced abnormally high temperatures and a historic drought resulting in dry conditions conducive to wildfires. I am grateful to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for their tireless efforts to combat wildfires in our state,” he said in a statement. “The Minnesota National Guard’s additional support will be critical to responding to these wildfires and protecting the safety of Minnesotans and their property. I am proud that our Service Members have again answered the call to serve their fellow Minnesotans.”
Insurance companies are bailing in risk areas—what to do if your homeowners policy isn’t renewed
By Ben Moore August 16, 2021
Nonrenewals are on the rise—but there are alternatives
In July, fire swept through Greenville, Calif., destroying homes, historic buildings and forcing hundreds to evacuate. Getty Images
Homeowners insurance non-renewals are on the rise as private insurers steer clear of locations at high risk for natural disasters. The West Coast’s blazing wildfires are leaving some Californians scrambling to find coverage, while many Floridians are facing non-renewals during hurricane season.
In the midst of changing climate conditions and increasing weather-related catastrophes, it’s more crucial than ever to have insurance coverage for your home to have peace of mind. Here’s what to do if your homeowners insurance policy isn’t renewed.
1. Know your rights
An insurance company is usually required to provide a nonrenewal notice, typically at least 30 days prior to the end of coverage, unless you’ve missed a payment or committed fraud on your application. But you might get more time to find a new policy. For example, Florida homeowners could get up to 120 days’ notice, according to Stacey Giulianti, chief legal officer for Florida Peninsula Insurance Company.
If you believe you were wrongly dropped, you can contest the nonrenewal. You’ll likely need to prove that your home isn’t in a high-risk area, or that you’ve made efforts to mitigate that risk, like replacing the roof or removing flammable shrubs near your house.
2. Make home improvements
If your policy isn’t renewed because of a failed inspection, making the proper updates could help you maintain coverage, even if you’re in a high-risk area.
Inspections give homeowners the opportunity to fix problems, like leaky roofs or exposed electrical wiring, so they can keep an insurance policy, according to Michael Peltier, media relations manager for Citizens Property Insurance.
When making improvements, consider upgrading your home’s building materials. Newer materials may withstand weather catastrophes better than older ones while simultaneously lowering your insurance costs, Giulianti says. “The houses that are a hundred years old … aren’t going to withstand storms the same way as a brand-new concrete building.”
Building upgrades could include:
Replacing walls with ignition-resistant materials like stucco or fiber-cement siding to mitigate fire damage.
Switching to impact-resistant shingles to prevent roof damage.
Installing hurricane-resistant windows if you live on the coast.
3. Shop around for another policy
Your previous insurer may not be an option, but you should still shop around. “There’s almost always another company … that will pick you up,” Giulianti says.
An independent insurance agent can research home insurance quotes for companies in your area. You can also ask your real-estate agent, mortgage lender, home builder or previous owner for a list of companies, or call your state’s insurance department.
4. Turn to your state’s shared market option
If you still can’t find coverage, you may need a state-run shared market policy. Many states offer Fair Access to Insurance Requirements policies for high-risk homes, or beach and windstorm plans for coastal properties. Aptly named “last-resort” policies, FAIR policies offer limited coverage and are often more expensive than a standard home policy from a private insurer.
California’s FAIR Plan
The California FAIR Plan sells insurance for damage from fire, lightning, internal explosions and smoke, with optional coverage available at an additional cost. As wildfires worsen in the state, more customers are turning to the FAIR Plan for coverage, and this trend is expected to continue, Natalie Haskell, a spokesperson for the California FAIR Plan, wrote in an email.
But these policies don’t cover everything standard homeowners insurance policies do, like personal liability, your belongings or additional living expenses. For more extensive coverage, homeowners in California need to purchase a “difference in conditions” policy that complements FAIR Plan coverage to create a comprehensive home insurance policy.
Florida’s state-run insurer
Citizens Property Insurance, Florida’s insurer of last resort, has also seen an uptick in policy sales. But the reasons differ — worsening hurricane seasons combined with increasing litigation have driven up home insurance costs and non-renewals in the state.
Citizens offers coverage similar to that of private insurers, including dwelling, personal property, other structures and additional living expense coverage, though limits may be lower. In some areas, the company also sells wind-only policies that cover damage from hurricanes and other wind-related catastrophes. Policies are available only through an independent agent.
If you’ve exhausted all other options, surplus lines insurance may be available. Provided by specialized insurers that are regulated differently from standard companies, surplus lines offer coverage for risky properties when other insurers won’t. Available companies may vary by state, so speak with an insurance agent about surplus lines once you’ve been rejected by at least three other insurers.
Florida’s outdoor workers could lose billions as climate change makes it too hot to work
Alex Harris
Climate change, if left unchecked, could make outdoor work in notoriously hot Florida even more unbearable and unhealthy, and a new report shows it could also make that work less profitable.
Under scenarios where the world doesn’t quickly cut fossil fuel emissions, there could be a full month of the year where it’s too hot to safely work a normal day outside in Florida. Right now, Florida experiences an average of five days like that a year.
“Between now and mid-century, outdoor workers’ exposure to extreme heat would quadruple,” said Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the report. “That could put them in the position to increasingly choose between their health and their paychecks.”
Florida, the third-most populous state, has the third-largest population of outdoor workers. Those 2 million workers account for nearly a quarter of the state’s workforce and earn $56 billion a year.
Those earnings could be at risk in a future with more days where it’s too hot to work outside.
By the Union of Concerned Scientists’ calculations, Florida outdoor workers could lose up to $8.4 billion of those earnings by mid-century if no action is done to slow climate change. If the world acts slowly to lower fossil fuel emissions by that time, workers could lose less, around $6 billion.
The numbers grow more dire by century’s end. With continued slow action, workers could lose around $7.5 billion a year, versus double that amount with no action.
The only state with more potential earnings at risk is Texas.
As heat and humidity rise, the CDC recommends that employers provide more work breaks to avoid heat-related illness. However, reductions in work time would translate into losses in workdays (top map) and put workers’ earnings at risk (bottom). Florida, especially South Florida, ranks highly on both maps.
Per Florida worker, that breaks down to losing $3,743 a year in wages by mid-century if nothing is done to switch away from fossil fuels and $2,648 a year if slow action is taken.
Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous county, has the most outdoor workers in the state — over 300,000.
Miami-Dade’s first Chief Heat Officer, Jane Gilbert, said she’s planning to host focus groups with outdoor workers and their employers to hear more about what conditions are like and how the county could possibly protect outdoor workers. So far, no one is talking about regulations for heat exposure for outdoor workers.
“Having something on the books that you cannot enforce doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I’d rather focus our resources on raising awareness, making employers aware of what their costs are and broader responsibilities to their workforce.”
She’s also talked with the National Weather Service about sending out more alerts for dealing with heat. This summer, cities from Seattle to Boston have issued heat advisories, but there have been none in Florida, despite record-breaking temperatures.
That’s because heat, like time, is relative.
The threshold for a heat advisory in Florida is a heat index (meaning temperature plus humidity, or “feels like”) of 108 degrees Fahrenheit for at least two hours. An “excessive” heat warning requires temperatures of 113 degrees.
“You can have pretty dangerous conditions over 100 heat index and they’re not even getting into advisories until 108,” she said.
Dr. Ankush Bansal, co-chair of the Florida Clinicians for Climate Action and a doctor of internal medicine in a Palm Beach County hospital, said extreme heat can take a toll on the body. It affects the lungs, the heart and especially the kidneys.
In extreme cases, heat illness can lead to red or brown urine, the result of muscles in the body breaking down into pieces and clogging up the kidneys.
“What happens is, and I’ve seen this, people that work outside … even athletes … are coming into the hospital with heat exhaustion or even heat stroke, which if untreated can lead to death,” he said. “If you have heart disease or a history of heart failure, it can throw you over the edge. It can cause a heart attack.”
The military treats extreme heat as a matter of national security. It has strict rules and a flag-based system for warning soldiers how much strenuous activity they can safely do outside in order to keep military personnel safe and healthy.
The Union of Concerned Scientists report calculated the potential lost wages by using similar standards, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations for worker safety on days when the heat index is at or over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The center suggests workers take a break for 15 minutes every hour in shade and drink water.
As the heat index rises, the recommended amount of outdoor work drops. At 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the CDC says workers should work 30 minutes and rest 30 minutes. When the heat index crosses 108 degrees Fahrenheit (the standard for a heat advisory in Florida), the CDC recommends no one work outside at all.
The report assumed those breaks were unpaid.
“It’s an assumption but it also reflects to some extent that some outdoor workers are paid annually, some are paid hourly and others are paid piece rate,” Dahl said.
Tree trimmers work along Southwest 13th Street in Fort Lauderdale to remove limbs damaged during Hurricane Irma, Sept. 18, 2017.
Piece rate workers can be paid per pound of fruit or vegetable they pick, per lawn they mow or other per task goal, and would potentially have the most to lose economically in a future where it’s physically unsafe to work outside sometimes.
That’s a present reality in Saudi Arabia, where outdoor work is banned from noon to 3 p.m. from June to September to protect workers from dangerous heat.
In hot places like Arizona or Florida, outdoor workers already adjust their schedules to survive the summer. Construction workers get going at dawn and take breaks when the noonday sun is hottest. Some contractors, like AC repair workers, avoid sending employees into sweltering attics for jobs that can be put off til the cooler months.
Those adjustments may become more common in the U.S. as the world warms, but for now, they’re solely at the discretion of the employer.
There is no nationwide protective standard for outdoor workers, although the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health developed standards in 2016 for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to take up, which it never did. OSHA’s general duty clause requires employers to provide a safe working environment, and it has some recommendations for working in extreme heat, but it’s tough to enforce a recommendation.
Veronica Custodio, 37, picks through spinach at her father’s farm in Homestead on May 27, 2020. The farm belongs to Juventino Custodio, 53, who was forced to let his spinach rot after the coronavirus pandemic caused a disruption in his supply chain process.
A survey of hundreds of nursery workers in Homestead by the organization WeCount! found that more than half said they weren’t allowed to rest in the shade, 15% said they weren’t provided water and 69% had experienced symptoms of heat illness.
Farmworkers told the WeCount! organizers they try not to drink water so they can avoid bathroom breaks and possibly missing production quotas.
Another study of farmworkers in Central and South Florida measured core body temperatures, heat rate and hydration levels. Half started the day dehydrated, and three-quarters finished that way. One in three of the workers had acute kidney injury at some point in the study.
So far, California and Washington have passed state-level heat protection laws for outdoor workers, but they have different standards, leading to unequal protections during this summer’s heat wave.
“If we leave it up to states to do individually, we’re going to end up with a real patchwork of protections for outdoor workers,” Dahl said.
Reducing workload and shifting outdoor work to cooler parts of the day can help, she said. “But since there are limits to those, we found our first line of defense has to be reducing emissions.”
If Florida and the rest of the world stop burning fossil fuels, the worst effects of climate change and extreme heat can be avoided.
Bansal said there’s a common analogy in the medical world when discussing treating symptoms versus cause that applies to climate change too. If a bathtub is overflowing and you’re only putting towels on the floor but never turning off the water, the problem will never be fixed.
“And that’s what we need to do, shut off the faucet,” he said.
Miami Herald intern Ariana Aspuru contributed to this story.
What does a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan actually mean?
Gabrielle Debinski August 16, 2021
It happened faster than most people expected, but the US-backed Afghan government has now fallen. The Taliban have taken over the capital, Kabul, and installed themselves in the presidential palace. Thousands of Afghans are scrambling to leave amid uncertainty of what comes next for the war-torn country. Chaos reigns.
What are some of the implications for Afghans and other countries with a stake in the region?
Islamic law will be front and center. Recent developments, and Taliban leaders’ statements, make it clear that when it comes to ideology, ambition and creed, the Taliban of 2021 is the same radical group that was toppled in 2001.
Essentially, Taliban members believe in a fundamentalist Quranic philosophy, which is underscored by stringent prohibitions. As the group has swept the country, there have been reports of summary executions, abuse of women, and closing of schools that teach non-religious curricula. (The Taliban espouse that girls and women should be confined to their homes.) Western influence is sacrilegious, and the Taliban have reportedly been searching homes for alcohol and other contraband.
Politically, they want the Islamic Emirate reinstalled. Under the Taliban, electoral politics in Afghanistan are a thing of the past, and civil society has no role in the decision-making process, which they say, will be left solely to emirs (religious chiefs) and a council of mullahs.
An influx of refugees. As the Taliban stormed dozens of provincial capitals, thousands of Afghans descended on the international airport in Kabul in hopes of fleeing the country. Scenes of anguished people clinging to a US military plane will forever be a symbol of Afghans’ desperation and struggle to escape Taliban terror. But there are no flights to carry these people out.
While the US has been accused of abandoning thousands of Afghans who aided the US-led mission over the past two decades, Canada has said that it will take in about 20,000 vulnerable Afghans, including women leaders and human rights activists. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many analysts say that the burgeoning refugee crisis will soon land on Europe’s doorstep, drawing comparisons to 2015-2016, when more than 1 million refugees, mostly from Syria, arrived in Europe, fueling one of the biggest political crises in the bloc’s history.
Since then, the European Union has beefed up its immigration protocols and border control: surveillance drones are used to monitor migrant flows, and border fences have been constructed bloc-wide. Just days ago, several EU states signed a letter saying that despite the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, deportations of failed asylum-seekers will continue: accepting refugees “would lead more people trying to leave and come to the European Union.” (However, Germany, the Netherlands, and France have since said they would hold off on deportations — for now.)
Tellingly, EU member states, like Greece — which bore the brunt of the migrant crisis in 2015 — say that they simply don’t have the state capacity to absorb the huge number of people trying to flee Afghanistan. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a staunch refugee advocate, recently said: “we cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in.”
But “the risk to the EU is not from a short-term surge in Afghan refugees — the numbers will remain manageable,” Mujtaba Rahman, who leads Eurasia Group’s Europe desk, told GZERO Media. Rather, problems could arise “from the fractious internal debate it will sponsor, distracting from priorities elsewhere.”
The power of international recognition. The last time the Taliban were in power, they turned Afghanistan into an international pariah. While the group maintained relations with Pakistan, as well as with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, it was mostly isolated from the rest of the world.
But 2021 is very different to 2001. With the US more interested in leaving than dealing with the mess it’ll leave behind, in recent weeks senior Taliban leaders have embarked on a whirlwind diplomatic mission, trying to court Western rivals in Moscow and Beijing.
When the Taliban last ruled Afghanistan, Beijing had already suspended ties with Kabul after civil war erupted in 1993. But a pragmatic and increasingly ambitious China has made clear that it may be willing to recognize the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan if it gives China carte blanche to expand its Belt and Road infrastructure development projects to Afghanistan.
Similarly, some analysts say that the Kremlin is also toying with the idea of recognizing the Taliban, and could use it as leverage to ensure Russian interests are safeguarded across Central Asia.
Meanwhile, the seemingly botched withdrawal is becoming a massive political crisis for the Biden administration both at home and abroad. Domestically, he’s being criticized on the left and right for the hasty pullout. With foreign allies, it’s further undercutting Washington’s global standing, which plummeted mostly under his predecessor. Even though Biden said in an address Monday that he “stands squarely behind” his own decision-making, the optics are very bad for a president who has made “America is Back” the rallying cry of his administration.
Rough road ahead. The situation is still in flux, and much could change in the upcoming days and weeks. For now, the Taliban is certainly in the driver’s seat, both domestically and internationally.
Op-Ed: Afghanistan’s rapid fall shows Biden was right to pull out
By Charles A. Kupchan August 16, 2021
A Taliban fighter in Ghazni, an Afghan provincial capital, last week.
(Gulabuddin Amiri / Associated Press)
It has been excruciating to watch the Taliban roll across Afghanistan, undoing in a matter of months two decades of efforts by the Afghan people and the international community to build a decent, secure and functioning state.
The Taliban’s virtually uncontested takeover raises obvious questions about the wisdom of President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces from the country. However, the rapidity and ease of the Taliban’s advance provides a clear answer: that Biden made the right decision — and that he should not reverse course.
Biden doubted that U.S.-led efforts to prop up the government in Kabul would ever enable it to stand on its own. The international community took down Al Qaeda; beat back the Taliban; supported, advised, trained and equipped the Afghan military; bolstered governing institutions; and invested in the country’s civil society. None of that created Afghan institutions capable of holding their own.
That is because the mission was fatally flawed from the outset. It was a fool’s errand to try to turn Afghanistan into a centralized, unitary state. The country’s difficult topography, ethnic complexity, and tribal and local loyalties produce enduring political fragmentation. Its troubled neighborhoods and hostility to outside interference make foreign intervention perilous.
Biden made the tough and correct choice to withdraw and end a losing effort in search of an unattainable goal.
The case for withdrawal is also buttressed by the reality that even if the U.S. has fallen short on the nation-building front, it has achieved its primary strategic goal: preventing future attacks on America or its allies from Afghan territory. The U.S. and its coalition partners have decimated Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The same goes for the Afghan branch of the Islamic State, which has demonstrated no ability to carry out transnational attacks from Afghanistan.
In the meantime, the U.S. has built a global network of partners with which to fight terrorism worldwide, share relevant intelligence and jointly boost domestic defenses against terrorist attacks. The U.S. and its allies are today much harder targets than they were on Sept. 11, 2001. Al Qaeda has not been able to carry out a major overseas attack since the bombings in London in 2005.
There is, of course, no guarantee that the Taliban won’t again provide safe harbor to Al Qaeda or similar groups. But that outcome is highly unlikely. The Taliban has been doing just fine on its own and has little reason to revive its partnership with the likes of Al Qaeda. The Taliban will also want to maintain a measure of international legitimacy and support, likely quashing any temptation to host groups seeking to organize terrorist attacks against foreign powers. Moreover, those groups have little incentive to seek to regroup in Afghanistan when they can do so more easily elsewhere.
Finally, Biden is right to stand by his decision to end the military mission in Afghanistan, because doing so is consistent with the will of the electorate. Most Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, have lost patience with the “forever wars” in the Middle East. The illiberal populism that led to Donald Trump’s election (and near reelection) emerged in part as a response to perceived American overreach in the broader Middle East. Against a backdrop of decades of economic discontent among U.S. workers, recently exacerbated by the devastation of the pandemic, voters want their tax dollars to go to Kansas, not Kandahar.
The success of Biden’s effort to repair American democracy depends principally on delivering domestic investment; the infrastructure and social policy bills now moving through Congress are critical steps in the right direction. But foreign policy also matters. When Biden pledges to pursue a “foreign policy for the middle class,” he needs to deliver by pursuing a brand of statecraft that enjoys the backing of the American public.
Afghanistan deserves the support of the international community for the foreseeable future. But the U.S.-led military mission has run its course. Sadly, the best the international community can do for now is help alleviate humanitarian suffering and press Afghans to look to diplomacy, compromise and restraint as their country searches for a peaceful and stable political equilibrium.
Joe Biden’s Surrender Is an Ugly, Needless Disaster
Matt Lewis
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With the Taliban retaking Afghanistan amid a frenzied U.S. exit, I am reminded that Robert Gates, Barack Obama’s defense secretary, famously said that Joe Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” That isn’t an exaggeration.
Biden opposed the Persian Gulf War (later, reversing his decision and saying George H.W. Bush should have gone all the way to Baghdad) and supported the Iraq War, before opposing the surge in Iraq (not to mention famously wanting to partition Iraq into three countries). As vice president, he opposed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
This brings us to Afghanistan. As recently as a month ago, Biden denied a Taliban takeover was inevitable. Everyone knew that was wrong. Everyone except Biden, I suppose. Based on his horrible track record, we can assume he was being sincere. If he wasn’t, he would have demanded a more responsible exit plan before proceeding.
Biden inherited an Afghanistan where Americans were suffering few casualties, and where a small residual force was seemingly maintaining some semblance of order (not to mention preventing the country from once again being used as a staging ground for international terrorists to launch attacks against the U.S.). With his what-could-go-wrong withdrawal, he has managed to turn it into the tragic debacle that is happening now in front of our eyes.
To be sure, Biden didn’t do it alone. His predecessor, Donald Trump, deserves much of the blame. Biden claims that, by withdrawing forces, he’s honoring his predecessor’s commitment. But he has reversed lots of other Trump policies, didn’t adhere to Trump’s May 1 deadline for withdrawal, and could have easily cited examples of the Taliban not living up to their side of the agreement as reason enough to scuttle the deal.
The point is that Biden was not locked in to following through with Trump’s unwise “America First” policy. As much as Trump deserves blame for this situation (and so much more), the fall of Afghanistan is happening on Biden’s watch. This is his rodeo. This is, if not his Vietnam, his fall of Saigon.
Now, Biden is rushing troops back into Afghanistan to try and end or at least mitigate the optics of a desperate evacuation that leaves translators and other allies and Afghans who’d depended on us behind. But it’s already terribly late, as the civilians waiting for flights that may never come can vouch.
Some people believe that Biden’s real problem was his execution. For example, why would he refuse to leave a residual force behind, and why would he time his withdrawal for the summer fighting season? With more prudent logistics and better timing, Biden might have bought a cushion of time between the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban takeover. That would have resulted in better PR for Biden, but the fundamental problem was the decision to withdraw U.S. troops without leaving a residual force behind—not the hamfisted way he did it.
It could have been even worse. Biden originally had this insane idea of linking the Afghanistan withdrawal to September 11, and that may be why he couldn’t wait for the fighting season to end before giving in. In his mind, he somehow thought that ending a 20-year war on this particular date would be romantic and symbolic. And it would. For the Taliban!
In this pathetic departure, with American arms again ending up with our enemies as they did in Iraq, Biden is reinforcing the notion that our enemies can simply outlast us. Likewise, he is demonstrating (as Trump before him did with the Kurds) that putting your neck on the line for this nation is a fool’s errand. These decisions will make any future military interventions that more difficult.
This naivete is on full display with the anemic threats the U.S. is now issuing. Their behavior could lead to “international isolation.” Executions, our embassy warns, show a lack of “human rights.” It’s not a perfect analogy, but I am reminded of Die Hard, when John McClane tries to use a police radio to report a terrorist attack and is threatened with an FCC violation: “Fine, report me. Come the fuck down here and arrest me!” The Taliban are pillaging, executing and pressing 15-year-old girls into “service” as Taliban brides while we are threatening to, what, ruin their reputation in the international community?
In short, it’s a shit show. If you had told me 10 ten years ago that Biden would be elected president to clean up after Trump, I would have worried about precisely this kind of mess. Trump was so chaotic and dangerous that Biden, who (aside from his track record of bad foreign policy calls) had been a handsy gaffe machine, looked like Abe Lincoln by comparison. Today, however, we are witnessing the one-two punch of the Trump-Biden era. The scene unfolding in Afghanistan is exactly what you might expect from a policy that both men endorsed.
US Veterans View Afghan Collapse With Anguish, Rage and Relief
Dave Philipps
Ginger Wallace, right, a retired Air Force colonel, with her wife, Janet Holliday, a retired Army colonel, in Louisville, Ky., on Monday, August 16, 2021. (Andrew Cenci/The New York Times)
On Javier Mackey’s second deployment to Afghanistan, one of his friends was shot in an ambush and bled to death in his arms. He saw high-ranking Afghan officers selling off equipment for personal gain and Afghan troops running away during firefights. And he started wondering what the United States could really achieve by sending thousands of troops to a distant land that seemed to have never known peace. That was in 2008.
Mackey, an Army Special Forces soldier, deployed there five more times, was shot twice, and, he said, grew more cynical on each trip, until he decided the only sensible thing for the U.S. to do was cut its losses and leave.
Even so, seeing the swift and chaotic collapse of the Afghan government in recent days hit him with the intensity of a bomb blast.
“It’s pain — pain I thought I had gotten used to,” said Mackey, who retired as a sergeant first class in 2018 and now lives in Florida. “I sacrificed a lot, I saw death every year. And the guys I served with, we knew it would probably come to an end like this. But to see it end in chaos, it makes us angry. After everything we gave, I just wish there had been a way to leave with honor.”
In the 20 years that the U.S. military was in Afghanistan, more than 775,000 U.S. troops deployed there, to citylike air bases and sandbag outposts on lonely mountaintops. As the Taliban swept into Kabul on Sunday, wiping away any gains made, veterans said in interviews that they watched with a roiling mix of sadness, rage and relief. Some were thankful that America’s involvement in the country seemed to have ended, but were also dismayed that hard-won progress was squandered. Others were fearful for Afghan friends left behind.
In interviews, text messages and on Facebook, men and women who collectively spent decades in Afghanistan said they were angry that despite a drawdown that has spanned years, the United States could not manage to exit the country with more dignity.
The anguish can be especially raw because veterans often worked side by side with Afghans during the years of attempts at nation-building, and now in that nation’s collapse they see the individual faces of friends who have been enveloped by the anarchy.
“My heart breaks for the Afghan people,” said Ginger Wallace, a retired Air Force colonel who in 2012 oversaw a program that retrained low-level Taliban fighters to clear land mines and work in other jobs that offered an alternative to combat.
At the time, she thought that efforts to stabilize Afghanistan were succeeding, and that U.S. troops would one day leave the country a better place. But her optimism slowly wore down as the Taliban gained ground.
“It’s heartbreaking, absolutely. I hate to see it end like this, but you don’t know what else we could have done,” she said from her home in Louisville, Kentucky. “Do we have an expectation that U.S. service members should stay and fight the Taliban when the Afghan army won’t?”
Wallace met her wife, Janet Holliday, while deployed in Afghanistan. The two normally watch the news each morning, but Monday, as scenes of mayhem unfolded at the airport in Kabul, Holliday, a retired Army colonel, switched to the Food Channel.
“It was too hard to watch,” Holliday said, excusing herself as she became upset. “I just can’t help thinking about what a waste it is. I can’t allow myself to think about how after all that blood and treasure, it ends like this.”
More than with other wars in the nation’s history, Americans have been mostly insulated from the fighting in Afghanistan. There was no draft or mass mobilization. Less than 1% of the nation served and a disproportionate number of troops came from rural counties in the South and West, far from the seats of power.
But veterans have said in interviews over the years that they were cleareyed about the challenges posed by the war, perhaps more so than the rest of the nation. They saw firsthand the deeply ingrained traditional cultures, tribal allegiances and endemic corruption that continually hobbled U.S. efforts.
Mackey agreed with President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw, but thought the way it was done was slapdash and unprofessional.
“We train to have contingencies. The way it was handled was just irresponsible,” Mackey said. “We didn’t want to have another Vietnam, we wanted to do better.”
Jake Wood was a 25-year-old Marine sniper deployed to a forgotten corner of Afghanistan in 2008 when he started to see how much daylight there was between the optimistic pronouncements of top U.S. leaders and the reality of serving with Afghans on the ground.
Villagers in the district center of Sangin, where he manned an outpost, seemed to have little allegiance to the Afghan government in Kabul or the U.S. vision of democracy.
“We had no idea what our mission was, even back then,” said Wood, who now runs the nationwide veteran volunteering network Team Rubicon. “Were we trying to defeat the Taliban? Were we nation-building? I don’t think we knew.”
The Afghans he served with seemed to accept the uncertainty with a weary fatalism foreign to young Marines. At one point over small cups of tea, he said, he spoke with a young Afghan he served with who said Afghanistan only knows war, and when the U.S. war ended, another would come.
“He told me that maybe the Americans would come back,” Wood said. Then he recalled the Afghan saying, “But if you do, I can’t tell you if we’ll be friends or enemies.”
Wood said the veterans he has been in touch with feel a mix of sadness and fury watching the fall of Kabul: sadness that the folly that seemed so obvious in the ranks took years and thousands of lives for top leaders to accept; fury that the result of that ignorance and hubris was playing out on cable television in a way that would tarnish the reputation of the nation and the hundreds of thousands of troops who fought.
“We already knew we were losing the war,” he said. “But now we are losing it live on TV in front of the rest of the world. That’s what’s so hard.”
