#- are then forced apart (publicly at least) for the sake of fontaine's future

[immobiliter]

there's so much to say about this conversation between furina & neuvillette in 4.2 and i think a lot of people try to use this line in particular to push them as a ship ( which is fine, you do you ), but personally? not how i feel about them at all and i want to take this in another direction for a minute. i don't think furina is implying anything about neuvillette here ( whether it's as a deflection or not ) and is in fact kinda insinuating the exact opposite lmao, but more on that in a moment. imo, she's not necessarily talking about "watching" her in a lurid or sexually charged way, she is talking about the act of being looked at. over five hundred years of pseudo-godhood, furina has literally made herself to be looked at — there are certainly sexual implications you could take from this more generally, especially with the marilyn monroe influences in her character, although i won't really be talking about this here, i feel like that is a topic all of its own — by others. she is the leading lady of fontaine, she must be centre stage, she must draw the audience's gaze and she must keep up the facade. i think, when this line is paired with this one from her SQ, too, it makes more sense in context~

in turning herself into something ( i say something instead of someone, because she doesn't really have a personhood and that is her greatest problem going forward following the AQ ) to be gazed at and marvelled at, she has also turned that gaze into her ultimate fear. she knows that people must look in order to believe in her apparent divinity but, as i've talked about before, furina is acutely aware of how fragile that facade still is and is obsessed with controlling how others perceive her, even all these centuries later, especially in the wake of the impending prophecy that she seemingly cannot stop. she cannot get close to people, she cannot allow people in, she cannot develop any meaningful relationships out of fear that the role of the divine starlet on high will shatter. as she says~

plenty is made in her character stories of how difficult she is to work with in a professional capacity as an actress over the years lmao, but there is one exception to this: neuvillette. she has had no choice but to work with him for four hundred years and, while i don't doubt that she is still a complete nuisance to work with at times ( thank you for your service, neuvillette ), the two of them still made it work. there's no way that furina could have worked alongside neuvillette for that long and not given him a glimpse behind the curtain — as he points out in the line before hers in the AQ, he knows that she has never been as superficial as she claims to be. but the point that i think furina is getting at here is that neuvillette has never weaponised that knowledge of her character against her like he does here. neuvillette knows her better than anyone ever could, he never needed to look or marvel at her from a safe distance as regular fontainians did, he would express a certain amount of impatience and tut at her i'm sure but — and this is the important thing — would still quietly fall back into their routine of running fontaine together. i think furina found a great deal of comfort in that relationship, as close to an equal partnership as she was capable of having. convincing him that she was focalors was a very different task to convincing fontaine that she was focalors ( given that he is the hydro sovereign ), and yet he had never verbally expressed any doubt to her until this moment — which is also why i think she becomes so defensive to him afterwards.

and as a small sidenote, i also just find it oddly poetic that the one character who was never that preoccupied with looking at her over all those years as everyone else was, is the one most glad to see furina's return to the stage in her SQ ( where, as we know, she receives her vision ).

[xtruss]

US Asks Taliban to ‘Spare’ Its Embassy, Sends 3,000 Troops to Evacuate It

“The Empire Down to Pleading, Begging, and Bribing”

— Empire Woes | Dave DeCamp | August 13, 2021

In the meantime Herat and Kandahar have fallen to Taliban

The US is sending about 3,000 troops to Afghanistan to help evacuate some personnel from the US embassy in Kabul as the Taliban is making rapid gains across the country.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the US is sending three infantry battalions that are due to arrive at the airport in Kabul within 48 hours. Additionally, an entire infantry brigade combat team is being sent to Kuwait to be put on stand by that could also be deployed to Afghanistan, and 1,000 troops are being deployed to Qatar to process visas for Afghan interpreters who worked for the US. In total, the US is deploying 8,000 troops to the Gulf and Afghanistan.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said the US would be “further reducing our civilian footprint in Kabul” but insisted that the embassy was not closing. He said there will be a “drawdown” of diplomatic personnel, but did not specify how many people are expected to leave. There are about 4,000 civilian personnel at the embassy, including 1,400 US citizens.

The US embassy in Kabul issued a warning to US citizens in Afghanistan on Thursday to leave the country immediately. “Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the embassy’s ability to assist US citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited even within Kabul,” a notice on the embassy’s website said.

— Source: Antiwar.com

As Afghanistan continues to fall apart at the seams, the Taliban invasion of Kabul appears imminent, and the odds of the Ghani government handling that attack are not good. This has the US considering what to do about its embassy there.

Early in the day, officials talked openly about the idea that the embassy would be relocated to the Kabul Airport, to make it easier to evacuate outright if the security situation gets any worse. The situation getting worse seems inevitable.

Indeed, the Biden Administration is sending some 3,000 troops to Kabul to facilitate the evacuation, and is planning to remove all but the core staff . The troops are scheduled to arrive within 48 hours.

Even that may not be enough, however, and negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad is turning to the Taliban to try to prevail upon them to spare the US Embassy from attack if and when Kabul gets hit.

The exchange here is that the Taliban would promise not to attack the embassy, and that the US would keep open the possibility of giving foreign aid to the Taliban government in the future. The US, of course, did provide aid to the Taliban before the invasion and occupation.

That this is publicly being put on the table at all is interesting, as US officials talking about the possible evacuation earlier in the day were insisting that if the Taliban took over Afghanistan “with guns” they’d never be eligible for US aid.

That’s not a total shock, as the US historically throws aid around to almost everyone for the sake of influence. Still, holding it out publicly to the Taliban mid-takeover underscores how cynically they view the fall of Afghanistan for the sake of aid. US law would frown upon sending aid to the Taliban militants after the takeover, but as has been the case after recent coups in places like Egypt, what the law says doesn’t always impact policy.

— Source: Antiwar.com

“Not Our Tragedy”: The Taliban Are Coming Back, and America Is Still Leaving

President Biden made it very clear this week that we’re out of Afghanistan, no matter what.

Regarding Afghanistan, the Biden Administration seems to have calculated that the President will not suffer politically from leaving behind an unwinnable war.Photograph by Alex Wong / Getty

At least Joe Biden is owning it. “I do not regret my decision,” the President said this week, as provincial capital after provincial capital in Afghanistan fell to the Taliban while the Afghan government—propped up by two decades of U.S. support—looked soon to suffer its long-predicted post-American collapse. “Afghan leaders have to come together. We lost thousands—lost to death and injury—thousands of American personnel. They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” Biden said on Tuesday, making it as clear as he could that he would not revisit his decision to pull out. America is finally, definitively, done with the war in Afghanistan after two decades, never mind the consequences.

The words from the Biden Administration in the face of this unfolding disaster have been strikingly cold. Biden himself, normally the most empathetic of politicians, did not address the predictable and predicted human tragedy that his April decision to withdraw the roughly thirty-five hundred U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan has now unleashed. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, followed his comments by blaming the Afghan military, which the U.S. funded, trained, equipped, and built over twenty years, for its fate. “They have what they need,” she said. “What they need to determine is if they have the political will to fight back.” The State Department, for its part, put out the word that it was making a last-ditch diplomatic push to convince the Taliban that their government will be an international pariah if they take over the country by force. Does anyone think that will stop them?

There is, quite obviously, a calculation behind all this, which is that, after all this time and with more than enough blame to go around in both parties, Biden will not suffer politically from leaving behind an unwinnable war. Put bluntly, there is a strongly held belief in Washington that Americans simply do not care what happens in Afghanistan. Poll numbers back it up. Politicians in both parties, with notable exceptions, have generally supported Biden’s decision or at least have acquiesced to it, which leaves them either to second-guess Biden’s execution or simply to say nothing at all. (Cue the second-guesser himself, Donald Trump, whose exit deal with the Taliban Biden has largely stuck with, despite the Taliban’s failure to abide by its provisions. “It should have been done much better,” Trump said in a statement on Thursday, about the withdrawal. Of course he did.)

“The general sense seems to be, ‘Hey, look, we’ve spent a lot of blood and treasure there for twenty years, we’ve done a lot, there’s a limit to what any country can do,’ ” Richard Fontaine, a former foreign-policy adviser to the late Senator John McCain who now heads the Center for a New American Security, told me. “This is tragic, but it’s not our tragedy.” While Fontaine and I were talking on Thursday, the news came from the Associated Press that Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city and the gateway to the country’s west, had fallen to the Taliban. Hours later, Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the birthplace of the Taliban movement, had fallen as well. Kabul, the capital, will soon be encircled by the Taliban, who in a matter of weeks have taken control of twelve of the country’s thirty-four provincial capitals. By the time you read this, that number may well be higher. On Thursday afternoon, the State Department and Pentagon announced that the U.S. military is sending in some three thousand troops to help evacuate much of the U.S. Embassy staff from Kabul. Bitter irony of ironies—that was approximately the number of U.S. troops still deployed in Afghanistan when Biden decided to pull them out and perhaps insure the government falling to the Taliban in the first place.

None of this was a surprise, despite Biden’s embarrassing comment just last month that it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would soon be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country.” Senior U.S. government officials knew what was coming, even if they hoped for better, or at least for more time until the Taliban onslaught—akin to the “decent interval” Richard Nixon sought between his own withdrawal from Vietnam and the inevitable victory of the North over the South. They were neither “clueless” nor “delusional,” as a person who has recently spoken with Biden’s advisers about Afghanistan put it to me. To those who were paying attention, there was a grim inevitability to the week’s events. The Pentagon has warned every one of the last four Presidents that an abrupt U.S. withdrawal would lead to some version of the Afghan military debacle we are seeing this week.

Still, in the four months since Biden’s decision was announced, I have been surprised by the lack of concrete debate and discussion about what the real consequences are of the pullout. Why? It’s hard to say for sure. Political calculation by both parties is part of it, undoubtedly, as well as the all-too-pressing problem of too much else terrible going on, with American democracy in crisis and a horrible summer coronavirus surge. But events on the ground do not wait for Washington, and this is the week that the consequences have started to reveal themselves. So, the question must be, and is starting to be, asked: What will come next from this disaster?

It is much easier to neither ask nor answer that question; it is easier to keep litigating the question of who is to blame for twenty years’ and two trillion dollars’ worth of war. Over two decades, there have been many, many rounds of this: George W. Bush botching Afghanistan because he decided to invade Iraq instead. Barack Obama botching Afghanistan because he decided to surge troops but then told the Taliban exactly when he would pull them back out. By the time Trump, eager to end the war but endlessly equivocating about how to do so, made what by most accounts was a terrible deal with the Taliban, in February of 2020, the multiple crises inside the United States meant that the deal received little to no attention in a capital consumed by impeachment, a pandemic, and economic collapse.

Biden himself was long a skeptic of what could be accomplished in Afghanistan, and when Obama debated the surge in 2009, Biden was on the losing side against it. This time, he made clear to his team that he would not bow to the generals. He even kept Trump’s Taliban negotiator, the former Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, in place. In April, overriding the Pentagon recommendations and the fears of some of his advisers, Biden took the politically expedient course of declaring the “Forever War” ended on his watch. It is surely on Biden as much as on Trump how the pullout appears to have been organized: so rapidly that there were no plans in place to evacuate the twenty thousand Afghan interpreters who worked for the U.S., and without agreements secured in advance for regional bases from which to conduct the counterterrorism mission that the U.S. says it will continue. U.S. forces completed their withdrawal without major incident, but now come the urgent unanswered questions: Will the Taliban take Kabul by force? Will they march in before the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which were planned and launched by Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, and which prompted the U.S. war there in the first place? Is there any realistic chance remaining of a negotiated settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban to prevent such an outcome?

When I spoke with a senior Biden Administration official late Thursday, those were the questions the White House was focussing on, after a day of grim news that made clear only bad scenarios remain. “There is a totally credible possibility of some kind of deal cut here. And I think there is a totally credible possibility that the Taliban, riding high on adrenaline and momentum and whatever else they’re on, enter the city violently,” the senior official told me. “Those are both credible possibilities, and we need to be prepared for both and operating effectively on both tracks. That’s what we’re doing with our deployment, and that’s what we’re doing with our diplomacy.”

When I spoke on Thursday with experts who have decades of Afghan experience between them about the week’s events, they were contemplating even more apocalyptic scenarios for what may come. “Is this going to be Biden’s Rwanda?” asked one longtime acquaintance, whom I met in Kabul in the spring of 2002, full of determination to build a modern, functioning state out of the post-Taliban, post-9/11 rubble. Or, perhaps, “Al Qaeda/isis 3.0”? The possibilities, from large-scale human-rights atrocities to a new center for international jihadist terrorism, are bloodcurdling.

I mentioned the fear of an “Al Qaeda/isis 3.0” to Peter Bergen, the journalist and author who has just released “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” Bergen, who interviewed bin Laden in the nineteen-nineties in Afghanistan and whom I met there when I was sent by the Washington Post to cover the war in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, told me that he thought the catastrophe in Afghanistan was very similar to the isis blitzkrieg into Iraq that followed the U.S.’s 2011 withdrawal. “The movie is exactly the same movie,” he said. “It’s basically the isis playbook.” Whether and when the Taliban roll into Kabul, it’s already clear that we are looking at a renewed and violent civil war. In short, he added, “It’s a fucking mess.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty fair epitaph for this whole sorry affair.

— The New Yorker | August 13, 2021