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Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan

The Atlantic – Ideas

Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, for Afghanistan

Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks.

By David Rothkopf                           
About the author: David Rothkopf is an author, a commentator, a former senior government official, and the host of the Deep State Radio podcast.
President Joe Biden
Evan Vucci / AP

America’s longest war has been by any measure a costly failure, and the errors in managing the conflict deserve scrutiny in the years to come. But Joe Biden doesn’t “own” the mayhem on the ground right now. What we’re seeing is the culmination of 20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders. If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame.

Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement. Although Donald Trump made a plan to end the war, he set a departure date that fell after the end of his first term and created conditions that made the situation Biden inherited more precarious. And despite significant pressure and obstacles, Biden has overseen a military and government that have managed, since the announcement of America’s withdrawal, one of the most extraordinary logistical feats in their recent history. By the time the last American plane lifts off from Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 31, the total number of Americans and Afghan allies extricated from the country may exceed 120,000.

Graeme Wood: What does ISIS want now?

In the days following the fall of Kabul earlier this month—an event that triggered a period of chaos, fear, and grief—critics castigated the Biden administration for its failure to properly coordinate the departure of the last Americans and allies from the country. The White House was indeed surprised by how quickly the Taliban took control, and those early days could have been handled better. But the critics argued that more planning both would have been able to stop the Taliban victory and might have made America’s departure somehow tidier, more like a win or perhaps even a draw. The chaos, many said, was symptomatic of a bigger error. They argued that the United States should stay in Afghanistan, that the cost of remaining was worth the benefits a small force might bring.

Former military officers and intelligence operatives, as well as commentators who had long been advocates of extending America’s presence in Afghanistan, railed against Biden’s artificial deadline. Some critics were former Bush-administration officials or supporters who had gotten the U.S. into the mess in the first place, setting us on the impossible path toward nation building and, effectively, a mission without a clear exit or metric for success. Some were Obama-administration officials or supporters who had doubled down on the investment of personnel in the country and later, when the futility of the war was clear, lacked the political courage to withdraw. Some were Trump-administration officials or supporters who had negotiated with and helped strengthen the Taliban with their concessions in the peace deal and then had punted the ultimate exit from the country to the next administration.

David Frum: The two blows America is dealing to the Taliban

They all conveniently forgot that they were responsible for some of America’s biggest errors in this war and instead were incandescently self-righteous in their invective against the Biden administration. Never mind the fact that the Taliban had been gaining ground since it resumed its military campaign in 2004 and, according to U.S. estimates even four years ago, controlled or contested about a third of Afghanistan. Never mind that the previous administration’s deal with the Taliban included the release of 5,000 fighters from prison and favored an even earlier departure date than the one that Biden embraced. Never mind that Trump had drawn down U.S. troop levels from about 13,000 to 2,500 during his last year in office and had failed to repatriate America’s equipment on the ground. Never mind the delay caused by Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller’s active obstruction of special visas for Afghans who helped us.

Never mind the facts. Never mind the losses. Never mind the lessons. Biden, they felt, was in the wrong.

Despite the criticism, Biden, who had argued unsuccessfully when he was Barack Obama’s vice president to seriously reduce America’s presence in Afghanistan, remained resolute. Rather than view the heartbreaking scenes in Afghanistan in a political light as his opponents did, Biden effectively said, “Politics be damned—we’re going to do what’s right” and ordered his team to stick with the deadline and find a way to make the best of the difficult situation in Kabul.

Joy Neumeyer: How Afghanistan changed a superpower

The Biden administration nimbly adapted its plans, ramping up the airlift and sending additional troops into the country to aid crisis teams and to enhance security. Around-the-clock flights came into and went out of Afghanistan. Giant cargo planes departed, a number of them packed with as many as 600 occupants. Senior administration officials convened regular meetings with U.S. allies to find destinations for those planes to land and places for the refugees to stay. The State Department tracked down Americans in the country, as well as Afghans who had worked with the U.S., to arrange their passage to the airport. The Special Immigrant Visa program that the Trump administration had slowed down was kicked into high gear. Despite years of fighting, the administration and the military spoke with the Taliban many times to coordinate passage of those seeking to depart to the airport, to mitigate risks as best as possible, to discuss their shared interest in meeting the August 31 deadline.

The process was relentless and imperfect and, as we all have seen in the most horrific way, not without huge risks for those staying behind to help. On August 26, a suicide bomber associated with ISIS-K killed more than 150 Afghans and 13 American service members who were gathered outside the airport. However, even that heinous act didn’t deter the military. In a 24-hour period from Thursday to Friday, 12,500 people were airlifted out of the country and the president recommitted to meeting the August 31 deadline. And he did so even as his critics again sought to capitalize on tragedy for their own political gain: Republicans called for the impeachment of Biden and of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Within hours of the attack at the airport, America struck back, killing two terrorists and injuring another with a missile launched from a drone. A separate drone strike targeted a vehicle full of explosives on Sunday. In doing so, Biden countered the argument that America might lack the intelligence or military resources we would need to defend ourselves against violent extremists now that our troops are leaving.

The very last chapter of America’s benighted stay in Afghanistan should be seen as one of accomplishment on the part of the military and its civilian leadership. Once again the courage and unique capabilities of the U.S. armed services have been made clear.  And, in a stark change from recent years, an American leader has done the hard thing, the right thing: set aside politics and put both America’s interests and values first.

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As US military leaves Kabul, many Americans, Afghans remain

As US military leaves Kabul, many Americans, Afghans remain

Lolita C. Baldor and Matthew Lee              

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — As the final five U.S. military transport aircraft lifted off out of Afghanistan Monday, they left behind up to 200 Americans and thousands of desperate Afghans who couldn’t get out and now must rely on the Taliban to allow their departure.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. will continue to try to get Americans and Afghans out of the country, and will work with Afghanistan’s neighbors to secure their departure either over land or by charter flight once the Kabul airport reopens.

“We have no illusion that any of this will be easy, or rapid,” said Blinken, adding that the total number of Americans who are in Afghanistan and still want to leave may be closer to 100.

Speaking shortly after the Pentagon announced the completion of the U.S. military pullout Monday, Blinken said the U.S. Embassy in Kabul will remain shuttered and vacant for the foreseeable future. American diplomats, he said, will be based in Doha, Qatar.

“We will continue our relentless efforts to help Americans, foreign nationals and Afghans leave Afghanistan if they choose,” Blinken said in an address from the State Department. “Our commitment to them holds no deadline.”

Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told reporters the U.S. military was able to get as many as 1,500 Afghans out in the final hours of the American evacuation mission. But now it will be up to the State Department working with the Taliban to get any more people out.

McKenzie said there were no citizens left stranded at the airport and none were on the final few military flights out. He said the U.S. military maintained the ability to get Americans out right up until just before the end, but “none of them made it to the airport.”

“There’s a lot of heartbreak associated with this departure,” said McKenzie. “We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out. But I think if we’d stayed another 10 days we wouldn’t have gotten everybody out that we wanted to get out.”

McKenzie and other officials painted a vivid picture of the final hours U.S. troops were on the ground, and the preparations they took to ensure that the Taliban and Islamic State group militants did not get functioning U.S. military weapons systems and other equipment.

The terror threat remains a major problem in Afghanistan, with at least 2,000 “hard core” members of the Islamic State group who remain in the country, including many released from prisons as the Taliban swept to control.

Underscoring the ongoing security threats, the weapon systems used just hours earlier to counter IS rockets launched toward the airport were kept operational until “the very last minute” as the final U.S. military aircraft flew out, officials said. One of the last things U.S. troops did was to make the so-called C-RAMS (Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar System) inoperable.

McKenzie said they “demilitarized” the system so it can never be used again. Officials said troops did not blow up equipment in order to ensure they left the airport workable for future flights, once those begin again. In addition, McKenzie said the U.S. also disabled 27 Humvees and 73 aircraft so they can never be used again.

Throughout the day, as the final C-17 transport planes prepared to take off, McKenzie said the U.S. kept “overwhelming U.S. airpower overhead” to deal with potential IS threats.

Back at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watched the final 90 minutes of the military departure in real time from an operations center in the basement.

According to a U.S. official, they sat in hushed silence as they watched troops make last-minute runway checks, make the key defense systems inoperable and climb aboard the C-17s. The official said you could hear a pin drop as the last aircraft lifted off, and leaders around the room breathed sighs of relief. Later, Austin phoned Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was coordinating the evacuation. Donahue and acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson were the last to board the final plane that left Kabul.

Officials spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details of military operations.

“Simply because we have left, that doesn’t mean the opportunities for both Americans that are in Afghanistan that want to leave and Afghans who want to leave, they will not be denied that opportunity,” said McKenzie.

The military left some equipment for the Taliban in order to run the airport, including two fire trucks, some front-end loaders and aircraft staircases.

Blinken said the U.S. will work with Turkey and Qatar to help them get the Kabul airport up and running again.

“This would enable a small number of daily charter flights, which is a key for anyone who wants to depart from Afghanistan moving forward,” he said.

The US military says it permanently disabled over 150 vehicles and aircraft before leaving Kabul so they can ‘never be used again’

The US military says it permanently disabled over 150 vehicles and aircraft before leaving Kabul so they can ‘never be used again’

The US military says it permanently disabled over 150 vehicles and aircraft before leaving Kabul so they can ‘never be used again’ 

Ryan Pickrell                    
A view of the C-17 Globemaster prepares to take off in the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, Aug. 29, 2021
A view of the C-17 Globemaster prepares to take off in the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, Aug. 29, 2021 MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES via Getty Images 
  • The last manned US military aircraft departed the airport in Kabul on Monday.
  • The US permanently disabled over 150 vehicles and aircraft when the military departed, a US general said Monday.
  • The Taliban captured an arsenal of operational US-made weapons when they defeated the Afghan army.

The last manned US military aircraft have departed Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, ending nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, the head of US Central Command, said Monday afternoon.

Asked about military equipment left behind at the airport, McKenzie said that some was brought out. Other systems, he said, were “demilitarized,” meaning US forces purposely broke them to prevent them from being used, CENTCOM clarified for Insider.

The counter rocket, artillery, and mortar (C-RAM) systems, which were used to fend off a rocket attack on the airport on Monday, were kept online until the last minute and then demilitarized.

“We demilitarized those systems so that they’ll never be used again,” McKenzie said. “We felt it more important to protect our forces than to bring those systems back.”

The general further explained that demilitarized equipment included 70 mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles “that will never again be used by anyone,” 27 Humvees “that will never be driven again,” and 73 aircraft that “will never fly again.” Many of the aircraft were not mission capable anyway.

“They’ll never be able to be operated by anyone again,” the CENTCOM commander said.

McKenzie added that some systems, such as fire trucks and front-end loaders, were left operational so that the airport could restart operations as soon as possible.

Even if the Taliban, which rapidly seized control of Afghanistan earlier this month in a sweeping offensive, is unable to use any of the systems the US military did not take with it when it departed the Kabul airport, the group has been able to get its hands on plenty of other working systems.

The Taliban managed to capture a substantial arsenal of American-made weapons, from rifles to military vehicles, when it overran the country and defeated the Afghan armed forces, which the US has spent billions of dollars arming and equipping.

The Biden administration, which has faced criticism for its handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, has acknowledged that US-funded combat capabilities fell to the Taliban.

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said a few days after the fall of the Afghan capital.

A New Breed of Crisis: War and Warming Collide in Afghanistan

A New Breed of Crisis: War and Warming Collide in Afghanistan

Somini Sengupta                      
Somalian refugees displaced by drought wait for rations in Dadaab, Kenya, July 14, 2011. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)
Somalian refugees displaced by drought wait for rations in Dadaab, Kenya, July 14, 2011. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

 

Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average. Spring rains have declined, most worryingly in some of the country’s most important farmland. Droughts are more frequent in vast swaths of the country, including a punishing dry spell now in the north and west, the second in three years.

Afghanistan embodies a new breed of international crisis, where the hazards of war collide with the hazards of climate change, creating a nightmarish feedback loop that punishes some of the world’s most vulnerable people and destroys their countries’ ability to cope.

And although it would be facile to attribute the conflict in Afghanistan to climate change, the impacts of warming act as what military analysts call threat multipliers, amplifying conflicts over water, putting people out of work in a nation whose people largely live off agriculture, while the conflict itself consumes attention and resources.

“The war has exacerbated climate change impacts. For 10 years, over 50% of the national budget goes to the war,” said Noor Ahmad Akhundzadah, a professor of hydrology at Kabul University, said by phone Thursday. “Now there is no government, and the future is unclear. Our current situation today is completely hopeless.”

A third of all Afghans face what the United Nations calls crisis levels of food insecurity. Because of the fighting, many people haven’t been able to plant their crops in time. Because of the drought, the harvest this year is certain to be poor. The World Food Program says 40% of crops are lost, the price of wheat has gone up by 25%, and the aid agency’s own food stock is due to run out by the end of September.

Afghanistan is not the only country to face such compounding misery. Of the world’s 25 nations most vulnerable to climate change, more than a dozen are impacted by conflict or civil unrest, according to an index developed by the University of Notre Dame.

In Somalia, pummeled by decades of conflict, there has been a threefold increase in extreme weather events since 1990, compared with the previous 20-year period, making it all but impossible for ordinary people to recover after each shock. In 2020, more than 1 million Somalis were displaced from their homes, about a third because of drought, according to the United Nations.

In Syria, a prolonged drought, made more likely by human-made climate change, according to researchers, drove people out of the countryside and fed simmering anti-government grievances that led to an uprising in 2011 and, ultimately, a full-blown civil war. This year again, drought looms over Syria, particularly its breadbasket region, the northeastern Hassakeh province.

In Mali, a violent insurgency has made it harder for farmers and herders to deal with a succession of droughts and flood, according to aid agencies.

Climate change cannot be blamed for any single war, and certainly not the one in Afghanistan. But rising temperatures, and the weather shocks that come with it, act as what Marshall Burke, a Stanford University professor, calls “a finger on the scale that makes underlying conflict worse.” That is particularly true, he argued, in places that have undergone a long conflict and where government institutions have all but dissolved.

“None of this means that climate is the only or the most important factor in conflict,” said Burke, co-author of a 2013 paper looking at the role of climate change in dozens of conflicts across many years. “But based on this evidence, the international community would be foolish to ignore the threat that a warming climate represents.”

The combination of war and warming compounds the risks facing some of the world’s most vulnerable people: According to the U.N. children’s agency, Afghanistan is the 15th-riskiest country in the world for children, because of climate hazards, including heat and drought, and a lack of essential services, including health care. Two million Afghan children are malnourished.

That is in sharp contrast to Afghanistan’s part in global warming. An average Afghan produces 0.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, compared with nearly 16 metric tons of the average American.

The collapse of the government has also made Afghanistan’s participation in the next international climate talks entirely uncertain, said one of its members, Ahmad Samim Hoshmand. “Now I don’t know. I’m not part of any government. What government I should represent?” he said.

Until recently, he had been the government official in charge of enforcing the country’s ban on ozone-depleting substances, including refrigerants used in old air-conditioners and that are banned by the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that Afghanistan had ratified. Just days before the Taliban seized Kabul, he fled to Tajikistan. The traders of illegal substances whom he helped arrest are now out of prison, keen to exact revenge. He says they will kill him if he returns.

Hoshmand is now scrambling to emigrate elsewhere. His visa in Tajikistan expires in a matter of weeks. “My only hope is the ozone community, the Montreal Protocol community, if they can support me,” he said.

Afghanistan’s geography is a study of extreme hazard, from the glacier-peaked Hindu Kush mountains in the north to its melon farms in the west to the arid south, stung by dust storms.

Climate data is sparse for Afghanistan. But a recent analysis based on what little data exists suggests that a decline in spring rains has already afflicted much of the country, but most acutely in the country’s north, where farmers and herders rely almost entirely on the rains to grow crops and water their flocks.

Over the past 60 years, average temperatures have risen sharply, by 1.8 degrees Celsius since 1950 in the country as a whole and by more than 2 degrees Celsius in the south.

“Climate change will make it extremely challenging to maintain — let alone increase — any economic and development gains achieved so far in Afghanistan,” the United Nations warned in a 2016 report. “Increasingly frequent and severe droughts and floods, accelerated desertification, and decreasing water flows in the country’s glacier-dependent rivers will all directly affect rural livelihoods — and therefore the national economy and the country’s ability to feed itself.”

This is the country’s biggest risk, Akhundzadah argued. Three-fourths of his compatriots work in agriculture, and any unpredictable weather can be calamitous, all the more so in a country where there hasn’t been a stable government and no safety net to speak of.

The Taliban, for their part, appear more exercised by the need to scrub women’s pictures from billboards than addressing climate hazards.

But climate change is a threat multiplier for the Taliban, too. Analysts say water management will be critical to its legitimacy with Afghan citizens, and it is likely to be one of the most important issues in the Taliban’s relations with its neighbors as well.

Already on the Afghan battlefield, as in many battlefields throughout history, water has been an important currency. The Taliban, in their bid for Herat, a strategic city in the west, repeatedly attacked a dam that is critical for drinking water, agriculture and electricity for the people of the region. Likewise, in Kandahar province in the south, one of the Taliban’s most critical victories was to seize control of a dam that holds water for drinking and irrigation.

Climate change also stands to complicate the Taliban’s ability to fulfill a key promise: the elimination of opium poppy cultivation. Poppies require far less water than, say, wheat or melons, and they are far more profitable. Poppy farming employs an estimated 120,000 Afghans and brings in an estimated $300 million to $400 million a year, according to the United Nations, and has, in turn, enriched the Taliban.

Areas under poppy cultivation grew sharply in 2020.

Analysts said the Taliban would seek to use a poppy ban to gain legitimacy from foreign powers, such as Qatar and China. But it is likely to face pushback from growers who have few alternatives as the rains become less reliable.

“It’s going to be a gigantic political flashpoint,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, who studies the region at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

The last drought, in 2018, left 4 million Afghans in need of food aid and forced 371,000 people to leave their homes, many of whom haven’t returned.

“The effects of the severe drought are compounded by conflict and the COVID-19 pandemic in a context where half the population were already in need of aid,” U.N. humanitarian coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov said by email from Kabul on Thursday. “With little financial reserves, people are forced to resort to child labor, child marriage, risky irregular migration exposing them to trafficking and other protection risks. Many are taking on catastrophic levels of debt and selling their assets.”

Akhundzadah, a father of four, is hoping to emigrate, too. But like his fellow academics, he said he has not worked for foreign governments and has no way to be evacuated from the country. The university is closed. Banks are closed. He is looking for research jobs abroad. For now, there are no commercial flights out of the country.

“Till now, I’m OK,” he said on the phone. “The future is unclear. It will be difficult to live here.”

California Marine Nicole Gee, 23, who cradled baby at Kabul airport, killed in Afghanistan attack

California Marine Nicole Gee, 23, who cradled baby at Kabul airport, killed in Afghanistan attack

Bill Keveney, USA TODAY                     

 

Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee celebrated the joy of service just days before she was one of 13 U.S. service members killed in Thursday’s suicide bombing attack near Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

A week ago, Gee, 23, posted a photo on Instagram that showed her holding a baby at that airport. She added a simple, profound comment: “I love my job.” The same photo was posted by the Department of Defense on Aug. 21.

Gee, from Sacramento, California, served as a maintenance technician with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. On her Instagram page, she described herself as a “positive mental attitude advocate.” The locations listed on her page include California, North Carolina and “somewhere overseas.”

Another photo on Gee’s Instagram page shows her earlier in the week, on duty with her rifle next to a line of people waiting to board a transport plane. She described her assignment as “escorting evacuees onto the bird.”

Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, seen holding a baby at Kabul's airport, was one of the 13 U.S. service members killed in the Aug. 26 bombing in Afghanistan.
Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, seen holding a baby at Kabul’s airport, was one of the 13 U.S. service members killed in the Aug. 26 bombing in Afghanistan.

 

Other recent Instagram photos show Gee with friends in Spain, where they shared a toast, and Greece. Other pictures show the Marine riding a camel in Saudi Arabia and receiving her promotion to sergeant.

“Never would have imagined having my Sergeant promotion meritoriously in Kuwait,” she wrote of the promotion in a post shared three weeks ago.

A Facebook post by the city of Roseville, California, which calls Gee “a hometown hero,” says she graduated in 2016 from the city’s Oakmont High School and enlisted in the Marines a year later. It says her husband, Jarod Gee, also is an Oakmont graduate and a Marine.

Gee was remembered by Sgt. Mallory Harrison, a fellow Marine who roomed with her for more than three years, in a Facebook post accompanied by more than a dozen photos.

“Her car is parked in our lot. It’s so mundane. Simple. But it’s there,” she began the post. “My very best friend, my person, my sister forever. My other half. We were boots together, Corporals together, & then Sergeants together. Roommates for over 3 years now, from the barracks at MOS school to our house here. We’ve been attached at the hip from the beginning.

“I can’t quite describe the feeling I get when I force myself to come back to reality & think about how I’m never going to see her again. How her last breath was taken doing what she loved — helping people — at HKIA in Afghanistan. Then there was an explosion. And just like that, she’s gone.”

She said the war stories told by older Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are “not so distant anymore.”

Harrison concluded: “My best friend. 23 years old. Gone. I find peace knowing that she left this world doing what she loved. She was a Marine’s Marine. She cared about people. She loved fiercely. She was a light in this dark world. She was my person. … Til Valhalla, Sergeant Nicole Gee. I can’t wait to see you & your Momma up there. I love you forever & ever.”

Contributing: Associated Press

Afghanistan, The Great Game of Smashing Countries

Afghanistan Feature photo
CROCODILE TEARS

 

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked. “Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal reported that “150,000 persons … marched to honor the new flag …the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a program of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

“Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked … We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday … it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning … these were the people the West supported.”

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet-backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs: “We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.”

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorized a $500 million “covert action” program to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government.  This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

“Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it … Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.”

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York – within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilize and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicized. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly.  The US was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by warlords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorized rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me, “We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know ….”

In1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898, “upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11. “The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”

On Afghanistan, he added this: “We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.”

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering … “

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognize as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a US oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the US and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

“Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

John Pilger’s 2003 film, Breaking the Silence, is available to view 

Ed Asner (1929-2021)

Greg Palast – Investigative Journalism

Ed Asner (1929-2021)

A Lion in Underpants – By Greg Palast               

The death squads had just executed Maryknoll nuns, bullets to the back of the head.

It was the Reagan-sponsored war on “communists” in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Afghanistan.

Ed Asner, an actor who wasn’t particularly political, agreed to attend a press conference denouncing the killing of the nuns.

Within short order, his network canceled Lou Grant, the number one show on American TV, in fact, #1 worldwide.

Ed once told me he could’ve kissed the network’s ass, promised to be a good on-stage puppet, an off-stage mute, and save his career which was now on the new Black List.

But he couldn’t. Couldn’t stay silent. Instead, Ed grew louder.

And unstoppable.  At dinner this week, Ed told me he was preparing to open in three new one-act plays.

But my wife didn’t think so. She said, “This is the last time we’ll see Ed, isn’t it?”

I wish she weren’t always right.

I remember when we were about to film Ed in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. I deliberately hadn’t revealed his lines to him, nor his costume: a ridiculous Santa suit.

Ed was a good sport about it.  And a “one-take” wonder. But, we needed several takes, a bit too long for his 80-something’s bladder. So, rather than halt the production, he said, “The heck with it!”, let go, then simply dropped his soaking pants and continued the shoot in his boxers.

So, that’s how we shot the next scene: Ed Asner in a top hat and underpants. Absolutely brilliant. Take a look.

For inspiration at the shoot, Ed asked our Executive Producer Leni Badpenny if he could think of her naked. Hey, he only said what every guy thinks. Her response was to sit on his somewhat damp lap. (By the way, he was thrilled when he learned we married.)

Ed Asner and Leni Badpenny at The Best Democracy Money Can Buy premiere 2016

And take a listen to learn why Asner was recognized as the best voice actor on the planet. This is his reading of my investigation of Wal-mart, “What Price a Storegasm?”

And here, the Network soliloquy that Ed gamely voiced to a techno dance beat for Armed Madhouse.

Asner was an actor of great talent because he was a man of great feeling.  He would allow nothing to get between his emotions and the words he would express. It was true fearlessness, a courage and inner power that came through even in a sitcom or in a Santa suit.

There’s no guessing where it came from.  A working class Jewish kid from Kansas City, child of the Depression and the incipient Holocaust which most Americans, Left and Right, were happy to ignore, and a fierce union man from early on. Ed only became an actor, he told me, because he lost his job in the steel mills.

Before I got the call that Ed was gone, it was already a lousy morning.

I was deeply upset about the people of Afghanistan whom we’d just abandoned to the Islamists executioners, the very killers Reagan had unleashed alongside the death squads of El Salvador.

And, frankly, I’ve been afraid that I’d be shunned by progressive friends and editors who are breaking out the party hats to celebrate the end of the “forever war.”

But I just can’t join the party.  Should I say something?  Death squads, Nazis, Taliban. Which victims am I allowed to speak for?

I’m an operational atheist.
I can’t turn to the Lord for advice.
But I can ask, What would Lou Grant do?

You’ll have my answer this week.

Alev ha-shalom, my friend.

Producer David Ambrose (left), Ed Asner (center), Greg Palast (right)
at The Best Democracy Money Can Buy premiere 2016

13 U.S. service members killed in Kabul attack: Pentagon

13 U.S. service members killed in Kabul attack: Pentagon

 

A “complex attack” involving at least two explosions outside the airport in Kabul on Thursday killed 13 U.S. service members and injured at least 15 others, the Pentagon said.

The attack also killed and wounded a number of Afghan civilians. An Afghan official told Associated Press that at least 60 Afghans were killed and 143 others were injured in the attack.

“Let me be clear: While we’re saddened by the loss of life, both U.S. and Afghan [lives], we’re continuing to execute the mission,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, said at a press briefing on Thursday.

McKenzie confirmed earlier reports that a suicide bomb exploded outside one of the main gates at Hamid Karzai International Airport. He said another bomb went off in the vicinity of the Baron Hotel, which is near the airport and is often frequented by Americans in Kabul.

Smoke rises from explosion outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021. The explosion went off outside Kabul's airport, where thousands of people have flocked as they try to flee the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. (Wali Sabawoon/AP)
Smoke rises from an explosion outside the airport in Kabul on Thursday. (Wali Sabawoon/AP)

 

McKenzie also confirmed that ISIS-K, an affiliate of the Islamic State terrorist group in Afghanistan, is believed to be responsible for the attacks. He said U.S. officials believe it is the group’s “desire to continue those attacks, and we expect those attacks to continue.” ISIS-K is also an enemy of the Taliban.

Asked whether the U.S. would take military action against those responsible, McKenzie said, “Yes. If we can find who is associated with this, we will go after them.”

On Thursday evening, President Biden, speaking somberly from the White House, vowed to “hunt down” those who carried out the attack.

“We will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay,” he said.

Biden added that officials “have some reason to believe we know who [the ISIS-K leaders] are, and we will find ways of our choosing, without large military operations, to get them.”

(Yahoo News)
Yahoo News

 

The Hamid Karzai airport has been the site of a massive airlift operation by the U.S. military to evacuate tens of thousands of Americans, at-risk Afghans and citizens of allied nations out of Afghanistan following the Taliban’s takeover of the country less than two weeks ago.

McKenzie told reporters that the suicide bomber likely made it past Taliban checkpoint outside the airport and was being screened by U.S. Marines for entry at the gate when the attack occurred, highlighting the threats to U.S. troops who are facilitating the airlift.

“We don’t want to let somebody on an airplane with a bomb,” McKenzie said. “Ultimately, Americans have got to be endangered to do these searches, there’s really no other way to do it.”

McKenzie said he doesn’t think there’s any reason to believe the Taliban intentionally let the attack happen.

“Clearly, if they were able to get up to the Marines at the entry point of the base, there’s a failure somewhere,” he said. Still, McKenzie said, U.S. officials have asked Taliban leaders for help providing additional security around the airport, given threats of another possible attack.

“They have a practical reason for wanting us to get out of here by Aug. 31,” McKenzie said of the Taliban, who, he said, want to reclaim control of the Kabul airfield. “As long as we kept our common purpose aligned, they’ve been useful to work with.”

Biden to ISIS-K: ‘We will hunt you down and make you pay’

President Biden addressed the nation Thursday evening following two bombing attacks outside the Kabul airport that killed 12 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghans. Biden blamed Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, for the attack and vowed to avenge those deaths.

Biden reiterated this point on Thursday, saying that “no one trusts” the Taliban, but that U.S. officials are counting on the group’s “self-interest.”

“It’s not a matter of trust,” Biden said, “it is a matter of mutual self-interest.”

The U.S. has been racing to evacuate as many people from Afghanistan as possible before Aug. 31, when the last American troops are scheduled to withdraw from the country. Earlier this week, Biden confirmed that he intends to stick with that withdrawal deadline, despite calls to extend it. He cited the growing threat that ISIS-K poses to U.S. troops on the ground in Kabul.

“Every day we’re on the ground is another day we know ISIS-K is seeking to target the airport,” Biden said Tuesday. “The sooner we can finish, the better.”

As of Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that more than 4,500 American citizens and their immediate family members had been evacuated from Afghanistan, and that up to 1,500 others were still waiting to leave.

At the Pentagon on Thursday, McKenzie said that before the attack, 104,000 people had been airlifted out of the Kabul airport.

Medical and hospital staff bring an injured man on a stretcher for treatment after two blasts outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday. (Photo by Wakil Koshar/AFP via Getty Images)
Medical staff bring an injured man on a stretcher for treatment after the explosions on Thursday. (Wakil Koshar/AFP via Getty Images)

The Real Winner of the Afghan War? It’s Not Who You Think.

The Real Winner of the Afghan War? It’s Not Who You Think.

Jane Perlez                        
Pakistani police officers stand guard outside the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 5, 2011. (Warrick Page/The New York Times)
Pakistani police officers stand guard outside the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 5, 2011. (Warrick Page/The New York Times)

Just days after the Taliban took Kabul, their flag was flying high above a central mosque in Pakistan’s capital. It was an in-your-face gesture intended to spite the defeated Americans. But it was also a sign of the real victors in the 20-year Afghan war.

Pakistan was ostensibly America’s partner in the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban. Its military won tens of billions of dollars in American aid over the last two decades, even as Washington acknowledged that much of the money disappeared into unaccounted sinkholes.

But it was a relationship riven by duplicity and divided interests from its very start after 9/11. Not least, the Afghan Taliban the Americans were fighting are, in large part, a creation of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, which through the course of the war nurtured and protected Taliban assets inside Pakistan.

In the last three months as the Taliban swept across Afghanistan, the Pakistani military waved a surge of new fighters across the border from sanctuaries inside Pakistan, tribal leaders have said. It was a final coup de grâce to the American-trained Afghan security forces.

“The Pakistanis and the ISI think they have won in Afghanistan,” said Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan. But, he warned, the Pakistanis should watch what they wish for. “If the Afghan Taliban become leaders of a pariah state, which is likely, Pakistan will find itself tethered to them.”

Pakistan’s already shaky reputation in the West is likely to plummet now, as the Taliban take over Afghanistan. Calls to sanction Pakistan have already circulated on social media. Absent foreign financing, Pakistan faces reliance on a jihadi drug trade encouraged by the new rulers in Kabul. A Taliban-run state on its border will no doubt embolden Taliban and other Islamist militants in Pakistan itself.

Not least, relations with the United States, already on the downslope, will unravel further. Aside from maintaining the stability of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the Americans now have less incentive to deal with Pakistan.

So the question for the Pakistanis is what will they do with the broken country that is their prize? Already Pakistan, along with Russia and China, is helping fill the space the Americans have vacated. The embassies of the three nations have remained open since the Taliban seized Kabul.

A Pakistani protégé, Khalil Haqqani, a Taliban leader who was a regular visitor to Pakistan’s military headquarters in Rawalpindi, is one of the new rulers of Afghanistan.

Known to U.S. intelligence as the Taliban emissary to al-Qaida, Haqqani showed up in Kabul last week as their new chief of security, brazenly armed with an American-made M4 rifle, with a protection squad dressed in American combat gear.

“Governing a war-ravaged country will be the real test and imposing challenge especially as the Taliban have been a warring force, not one adept at governing,” Maleeha Lohdi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in a column in The Dawn newspaper this week.

During the war the Americans tolerated Pakistan’s duplicitous game because they saw little choice, preferring to fight a chaotic war in Afghanistan to warring with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Moreover, Pakistan’s ports and airfields provided the main entry points and supply lines for American military equipment needed in Afghanistan.

Pakistan did that, even as its spy agency provided planning assistance, training expertise and sometimes on the ground advice to the Taliban all through the war, American officials said.

Though Pakistan was supposed to be an American ally, it always worked toward its own interests, as nations do. Those interests did not include a large American military presence on its border, an autonomous Afghanistan with a democratic government it could not control or a strong and centralized military.

Rather, Pakistan’s goal in Afghanistan was to create a sphere of influence to block its archnemesis, India. The Pakistanis insist that India uses separatist groups like the Balochistan Liberation Army, operating from havens in Afghanistan, to stir dissent in Pakistan.

“The Pakistani Army believes Afghanistan provides strategic depth against India, which is their obsession,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia adviser to the Bush and Obama administrations. “The U.S. encouraged India to support the American-backed Afghan government after 2001, fueling the army’s paranoia.”

The Pakistanis were incensed that former President Barack Obama visited India in 2015 but conspicuously boycotted Pakistan, he said.

During a visit to Washington this spring, Moeed Yusuf, the national security adviser to Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, stressed the need to eliminate the Indian presence in Afghanistan, Americans who met him said.

Yusuf is considered a moderate on the Pakistani political spectrum, and the Americans said they were struck by his vehemence on India’s role in Afghanistan.

When Indian diplomats were among the first foreigners to evacuate from Kabul, their departure was played in the Pakistani press as a singular victory.

The nexus between the Pakistanis and the victorious Haqqani was indisputable and indispensable to the Taliban victory, said Douglas London, a former CIA counterterrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia.

The head of the Pakistani Army, Qamar Javed Bajwa, and the head of the ISI, Hameed Faiz, met with Haqqani on a “recurring basis,” London said. The extended Haqqani family has long been known to live in the largely ungoverned areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border.

“All the time Bajwa was pressed by the U.S. to give up Khalil Haqqani and two other Haqqani leaders, and all the time, Bajwa would say, ‘Tell us where they are,’” said London, who has written an upcoming memoir of his CIA years, “The Recruiter.” “My favorite quote was when Bajwa said: ‘You just have to come to my office and we will go in a helicopter and we will go and pick them up.’”

Pakistan’s help, he said, encompassed a gamut of services. Safe havens in the borderlands of Pakistan, particularly in the city of Quetta, sheltered Afghan Taliban fighters and their families. Medical services treated wounded fighters, sometimes in hospitals in the major cities, Karachi and Peshawar. Free rein for the Haqqanis to run lucrative real estate, smuggling and other businesses in Pakistan kept their war machine churning.

The ISI usually kept its operatives out of the actual conflict, fearful that they might be captured in Afghanistan, delivering a smoking gun to the Americans, London said.

The ISI also provided the Taliban with assets that elevated their international status. The Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar traveled on a Pakistani passport to attend peace talks in Doha, Qatar, and to meet in Tianjin, China, with Wang Yi, the foreign minister.

“The Afghan Taliban would not be where they are without the assistance of the Pakistanis,” London said.

Washington’s relationship with Pakistan cooled after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 at a safe house located near a Pakistani military academy. Top American officials stopped visiting Pakistan and assistance was reduced.

But the Obama administration never said publicly what it suspected: that the Pakistani military knew all along that bin Laden was living with his extended family in Abbottabad, one of Pakistan’s best-known garrison towns.

If Washington had declared that Pakistan was harboring bin Laden, then Pakistan would have legally been a state sponsor of terrorism, and subject to mandatory sanctions like Iran, said Riedel, the former South Asia adviser to the Bush and Obama administrations.

That would have forced the Americans to end its support for Pakistan and that in turn, would have led Pakistan to stop American war supplies from transiting Pakistan, increasing the cost of the war.

The bin Laden raid played into long-standing fears within the Pakistani military that the Americans wanted to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and would violate Pakistani territory to do it.

Despite the strained relations, the U.S. continues to work with Pakistan through the Department of Energy to help provide security for the weapons, and fissile material, said Toby Dalton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment.

But Pakistan is also agile in its alliances. China, a longtime patron of Pakistan — they call each other as “close as lips and teeth” — is investing heavily in Pakistani infrastructure.

Publicly, China says it is cheered to see the Americans exit Afghanistan, and is ready to step into the void, expanding its Belt and Road initiative into Afghanistan, where it hopes to extract minerals.

But privately, the Chinese are wary. Chinese workers in Pakistan have been killed in terrorist attacks, which could presage a rough ride in Afghanistan. And the Taliban prefer isolation to roads and dams that could serve to loosen their control on the population.

China is counting on Pakistan to serve as its facilitator in Afghanistan, said Sajjan Gohel, International Security Director of the Asia-Pacific Foundation in London.

“The Chinese appear confident that they will be able to secure more security guarantees from the Taliban,” Gohel said, “because of their mutual ties with Pakistan.”

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton says it’s ‘impossible’ for Mike Pompeo to ‘rewrite history’ on his negotiations with the Taliban

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton says it’s ‘impossible’ for Mike Pompeo to ‘rewrite history’ on his negotiations with the Taliban

Oma Seddiq                           
Donald Trump Mike Pompeo John Bolton.JPG
John Bolton, right, Mike Pompeo, center, and President Donald Trump, left. REUTERS/Leah Millis 

  • Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton slammed Mike Pompeo over his negotiations with the Taliban.
  • Bolton said it was “impossible” to “rewrite history” about the Trump administration’s role in the Afghanistan pullout.
  • Pompeo and Trump have come under attack over their deal with the Taliban in February 2020.

Donald Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton criticized former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who negotiated a deal with the Taliban in February 2020, for distancing himself from the Afghanistan withdrawal.

“Trying to extricate yourself from this withdrawal is I think difficult if not impossible to do, especially to rewrite history about what actually happened,” Bolton told Politico in a report published Thursday. “I think that’s a prescription for Democratic attack ads that would be fatal to someone’s credibility.”

Pompeo and Trump have come under attack over their agreement with the Taliban, which stipulated that US troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan within 14 months on the condition that the militant group not turn the country into a terrorist base. At the signing ceremony in Qatar, Pompeo posed for photos alongside the Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is anticipated to head the next Taliban government in Afghanistan.

At the time, critics blasted the Trump administration for excluding the Afghan government, saying it undercut its legitimacy. That criticism has been renewed amid the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government on August 15.

Read more: We identified the 125 people and institutions most responsible for Donald Trump’s rise to power and his norm-busting behavior that tested the boundaries of the US government

Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor from 2018 to 2019, has said both the Trump administration and President Joe Biden are responsible for the chaotic, ongoing removal of US troops from Afghanistan.

Other Republicans who have criticized Trump and Biden over the pullout include Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security advisor from 2017 to 2018, denounced Trump’s Taliban deal as a “surrender agreement.”

Pompeo and Trump have attempted to absolve themselves of the situation in Afghanistan and blamed Biden for the fallout.

“I hope this Administration comes to understand that apologizing, placating, appeasing, being weak, only presents risks to American security,” Pompeo tweeted on Thursday.