#withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan

[planetofsnarfs]

Following are remarks Friday of the foreign minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, at the United Nations Security Council.

* * *

I’m amazed at the tone and the content of the presentation by the Russian ambassador.

And I thought I could be useful by correcting the record. Ambassador Nebenzya has called Kyiv a client of the West. Actually, Kyiv is fighting to be independent of anybody.

He calls them a criminal Kyiv regime. In fact, Ukraine has a democratically elected government.

He calls them Nazis. Well, the president is Jewish, the defense minister is Muslim, and they have no political prisoners.

He said that Ukraine was wallowing in corruption. Well, Alexei Navalny documented how honest and full of probity his own country is.

He blamed the war on U.S. neo-colonialism. In fact, Russia was trying to exterminate Ukraine in the 19th century, again under Bolsheviks, and now it is the third attempt.

He said we are prisoners of Russophobia. “Phobia” means irrational fear. Yet, we are being threatened almost every day by the former president of Russia and Putin’s propagandists with nuclear annihilation. I put it to you that it is not irrational — when Russia threatens us, we trust them.

He said that we are denying Russia’s security interests. Not true. We only started rearming ourselves when Russia started invading her neighbors.

He even said that Poland attacked Russia during World War II. What is he talking about? It was the Soviet Union that attacked Poland together with Nazi Germany on the 17th of September 1939. They even held a joint victory parade on the 27th of September.

He says that Russia has always only beaten back aggression. Well, what were then Russian troops doing at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920? They were on a topographic excursion? The truth is that for every time Russia was invaded, she has invaded ten times.

He says that it is a perfidious proxy war by the West. My advice is – don’t fall into the Western trap. Withdraw your troops to international borders and avoid this Western plot.

He also says that there was an illegal coup in Kyiv in 2014. I was there. There was no coup. President Yanukovych murdered a hundred of his compatriots and was removed from office by a democratically elected Ukrainian parliament, including by his own party, the Party of Regions.

And finally he is saying that we the West are somehow trying to persuade that Russia can never be beaten. Well, Russia did not win the Crimean War, it didn’t win the Russo-Japanese war, it didn’t win World War I, it didn’t win the battle of Warsaw, it didn’t win in Afghanistan, and it didn’t win the Cold War.

But there’s good news. After each failure there were reforms.

Such demagoguery is unworthy of a member on a permanent basis of the Security Council. But what the ambassador has achieved is to remind us why we resisted Soviet domination and what Ukraine is resisting now.

They failed to subjugate us then. They’ll fail to subjugate Ukraine and us now.

[simply-ivanka]

Kamala Harris on the Afghanistan Withdrawal

Three years later, she calls Biden’s decision ‘courageous and right.’

By The Editorial Board Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris is working hard to hide her policy views from the public, but now and then she opens a window on her worldview, and it isn’t reassuring. One example came Monday on the third anniversary of the terrorist bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 Americans trying to defend the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Vice President praised the dead servicemen and women. “Today and everyday, I mourn and honor them,” she said in a statement.

But if she has any regrets about President Biden’s policy, she isn’t sharing them. “As I have said,” Ms. Harris noted, “President Biden made the courageous and right decision to end America’s longest war.”

It’s good to know what she thinks, but it doesn’t reflect well on her judgment as a potential Commander in Chief. The withdrawal decision was arguably the worst of Mr. Biden’s Presidency, as he ignored the advice of nearly all of his advisers that a date-certain, total retreat would likely result in the collapse of the Afghan government and a Taliban takeover. Keeping a few thousand troops in support of the Afghan forces could have prevented the catastrophe and its consequences.

Listen to retired Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, who was in charge of Central Command at the time of the Afghan fiasco, speaking recently on the School of War podcast:

Host Aaron MacLean: “What do you think the consequences are broadly of the collapse and us not being there?”

Gen. McKenzie: “Well, I think on several levels, I think [Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was directly driven by this. I think the Chinese were emboldened as a result of it. I think that more operationally, I think ISIS-K flourishes now in Afghanistan. The attack in Moscow just a few months ago is only a sign of things to come.

“Our ability to actually look into Afghanistan, understand what goes on in Afghanistan, is such a small percentage of what it used to be that it is effectively zero. So we predicted these things will happen, these things are happening. Our ability to, again, apply leverage here is quite limited.”

Mr. Biden was indeed warned about all of this—and so was Ms. Harris if she was in the White House Situation Room as she likes to say she has been for all of this Administration’s major security decisions. The needless deaths of those 13 Americans were the worst result, but the withdrawal also marked the end of Mr. Biden’s ability to deter adversaries around the world.

That Ms. Harris now embraces this failure suggests more of the same ahead if she wins in November.

Appeared in the August 27, 2024, print edition as 'Kamala on the Afghan Withdrawal'.

[zvaigzdelasas]

The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly voted down a bill 11-86 that would have required President Joe Biden to withdraw U.S. troops from Niger.[...]

The State Department formally declared a coup in Niger earlier this month, suspending most U.S. assistance. However, the U.S. still has roughly 1,100 troops stationed in Niger. U.S. Africa Command in September repositioned assets and personnel away from the capital Niamey to Agadez, a drone base roughly 570 miles away. The U.S. first stationed troops in Niger in 2013 as part of its counterterrorism mission across Africa, citing as the legal justification the 2001 military authorization Congress passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to target al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Four presidents have used the 2001 military authorization to justify more than 40 military operations in at least 19 countries across the globe, including Niger.

But Paul’s resolution, which the Senate voted down, stated the 2001 military authorization does not apply to Niger.

26 Oct 23

[deadpresidents]

Random question, but something I've wondered for the last few years: concerning Afghanistan, should the US have considered leaving a few thousand troops in Kabul indefinitely while withdrawing troops from the rest of the country?

It seems like the capital city would've been relatively easy for American troops to defend, and their presence there could have blocked the Taliban from fully returning to power. A singular focus on protecting Kabul might've been one way to prevent the worst possible outcome.

When President Trump left office and President Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, there were only 2,500 American troops left in Afghanistan. The Trump Administration had made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw all American troops by May 2021, and Biden pushed that back by a few months, but if the U.S. wanted to defend Kabul we almost certainly would have had to commit to another surge of American troops and that simply wasn't going to happen. It would have required a bigger fight against the Taliban because we would have been pulling out of the deal that the Trump Administration negotiated and the Taliban was already in the process of rapidly regaining control of the country by that time.

Even when he was Vice President, Joe Biden strongly believed that the United States needed to get out of Afghanistan because the only other option was to be there forever. Twenty years of training and equipping Afghan troops still hadn't resulted in a national force that could stand on its own, so Biden had argued against troop surges since the earliest days of the Obama Administration. There was no way that Biden was going to surge the number of troops once he became President, and Trump was so determined to withdraw all the troops from Afghanistan before the end of his term that his Defense Department had to beg him to pump the brakes.

Just to defend Kabul would have required much more than those 2,500 American troops left in the country on the day Biden was inaugurated. And the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani was an unreliable partner that was corrupt and often seemed oblivious to what was actually happening throughout the country. You used the word "indefinitely" and that's exactly what Biden (and Trump, to be fair) wanted to avoid. We had already been in Afghanistan for 20 years, and things weren't heading in the right direction.

I certainly don't agree that we should have been there indefinitely. I think we probably should have bolstered the American forces in Kabul for a short and specific amount of time in order to ensure that the withdrawal was less chaotic. But it was always going to be an ugly end. There was never going to be a victory in Afghanistan, and I supported the decision to withdraw American troops. I wish we would have done a far better job at protecting the Afghan people who worked for ISAF/NATO and ended up left behind to fend for themselves as the Taliban took over once again. It's a tragedy that those final days were such a mess, but one of our leaders was going to have to make the difficult decision to definitively end the neverending war that we were never going to win, and I think history will eventually see President Biden's decisive action in a different light, much like President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon is understood differently today.

[mariacallous]

It’s telling that the first question I saw raised in the media after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed when his helicopter crashed in the country’s mountainous northeast on his return from Azerbaijan in May was whether the United States had a hand in it. In that same regard, among the questions raised concerning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent travel to Pyongyang, apart from its impact on the simmering tensions across Asia, was what opportunities his willingness to venture farther from the Kremlin offers. Namely, should the United States and its allies seek to depose Putin by enabling a coup in his absence, or assassinating him during such travels? The answer lies in assessing the risk versus gain.

What would be gained by killing Putin? If the bar was juxtaposing the status quo with the consequences of Putin’s violent removal, would Russia’s threat to the United States and its allies be degraded? Would Russian troops withdraw from Ukraine and cease posing a threat to NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe? Or might Russian intentions become even more hostile and less predictable? Despite Putin’s obsession with intrigue, denial and deception, and smoke and mirrors, he’s fairly predictable. Indeed, the United States, with Britain leaning in the same direction, was the exception among its NATO allies, not to mention Ukraine itself, in forecasting with high confidence Putin’s plans to attack.

Would the United States do it? The record shows that the U.S. sanctioned violence in sponsoring the overthrow of democratically elected antagonist regimes in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, while the Church committee investigations documented multiple CIA attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

More recently, the United States made no pretense in concealing its hand in killing Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Commander Qassem Suleimani in January 2020, an action that historic precedent would suggest was an act of war. Since 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism strategy has in practice been predicated on assassination. The mantra “find, fix, finish” is the other euphemism for preemptively hunting down and killing terrorists abroad before they might strike the U.S. homeland.

Left: Iranians tear up a U.S. flag during a demonstration following the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Gen. Qassem Suleimani, in Tehran on Jan. 3, 2020. Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images   Right: The statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is toppled at al-Fardous square in Baghdad, Iraq, on April 9, 2003. Wathiq Khuzaie /Getty Images

While these episodes collectively demonstrate the U.S. government’s willingness to undertake consequential, lethal actions in the name of national security, when separated from transnational terrorist targets, only the strike against Suleimani occurred while he was abroad. Operations to depose Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, Salvador Allende in Chile, and Castro in Cuba depended rather on internal elements to facilitate the plots.

Apart from these episodes and a possible hand in others,  U.S. governments have arguably favored the status quo of a predictable adversary. Regime change has not worked out well for U.S. interests. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was no small factor in bringing about the Arab Spring, with effects that continue to reverberate across the Middle East as reflected by unresolved civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, as well as ongoing political instability in Egypt and Tunisia.

The U.S. occupation of Iraq also facilitated the rise of the Islamic State. And the Taliban ultimately outlasted the United States in Afghanistan by returning to power despite 20 years of American blood and treasure, and they now give sanctuary to insurgent groups threatening Pakistan, Iran, its Central Asian neighbors, and China.

The inclination to accept the known status quo is further strengthened when that country is armed with nuclear weapons. As regards Russia, even under the most ideal circumstances in which the U.S. government could remove Putin and conceal its hand in doing so, how confident is Washington that a stable and less hostile leadership would succeed him?

In Russia, like most autocracies, power rests with those who control the nation’s instruments of power—primarily the guns, but likewise the money, infrastructure, natural resources, connections, and knowledge of where the skeletons are to be found. That power is currently concentrated within a small circle of septuagenarians, almost all of whom have long ties to Putin, the Cold War-era KGB, and St. Petersburg. The Russian Armed Forces might have the numbers in terms of troops and tools, but under Putin, as it was in Soviet days, they are kept on a tight leash and closely monitored, with little discretionary authority for drawing weapons or coming out of their garrisons.

The three organizations most capable of moving on Putin and the Kremlin are the Federal Security Service, or FSB; the Rosgvardia, or National Guard; and the Presidential Security Service within the Federal Protective Service, or FSO. The FSB is Russia’s internal security and intelligence arm through which Putin governs given its relatively massive and ubiquitous presence across all the country’s institutions. The FSB enforces Putin’s rule, monitors dissent, intimidates, punishes, and liaises with organized crime. The Rosgvardia is Putin’s brute force. It was established in 2016 from among the interior ministry’s militias variously responsible for internal order and border security to be Putin’s long red line against protests, uprisings, and armed organized coup attempts.

Alexander Bortnikov leads the FSB, having succeeded Nikolai Patrushev, who followed Putin and has served since as one of his chief lieutenants. Until recently, Patrushev served as Russian Security Council chief and was most likely the Kremlin’s no. 2, and might still be, despite having been made a presidential advisor for shipping. Bortnikov, like Patrushev, shares Putin’s world view, paranoia for the West, political philosophy, and glorification of the old Soviet empire.

Bortnikov is considered by Kremlinologists to be Putin’s most relied-upon and trusted subordinate, and in turn, the individual best positioned to overthrow him, should he desire. While Bortnikov maintains a relatively low profile, limited glimpses suggest some degree of humility and contained ambition, although uncorroborated rumors suggest health issues. His deputy, Sergei Borisovich Korolev, some 10 years younger, is regarded as effective, similarly ruthless, but perhaps too ambitious and ostentatious in his relationships with Russian organized crime. It’s likely that Putin sees a bright future for Korolev but has enough reservation to justify more seasoning and evaluation before having him succeed Bortnikov.

The roughly 300,000-strong Rosgvardia is commanded by longtime former Putin bodyguard Viktor Zolotov. Likewise a part of Putin’s septuagenarian St. Petersburg crowd, with extensive past ties to organized crime, Zolotov emerged somewhat from the shadows following then-Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s June 2023 revolt. Zolotov claimed credit for protecting Moscow and mused publicly at how his organization would likely grow and secure more resources to facilitate its critical responsibilities.

Zolotov might not be as educated or sophisticated as Putin’s traditional siloviki associates, all former Cold War-era KGB veterans, but making his way up the ladder as he did from a St. Petersburg street thug, he’s not averse to using force to achieve his aims.

Little is publicly known concerning Zolotov’s politics apart from loyalty to his boss, but there’s no evidence he might offer a progressive alternative less hostile to the West. As Putin has done for all of those in his inner circle to secure their loyalty, Zolotov’s family members have been awarded land, gifts, and key posts. Patrushev’s son, for example, is now a deputy prime minister.

The FSO includes the Presidential Security Service, some 50,000 troops, and is responsible for Putin’s close physical protection. Little is known about its director, Dmitry Viktorovich Kochnev, now 60, whose mysterious official bio indicates that he was born in Moscow, served in the military from 1982 to 1984, and then went into “the security agencies of the USSR and the Russian Federation” from 1984 to 2002, after which time he was officially assigned to the FSO.

If Kochnev wanted Putin dead, he’s had plenty of time to pursue that goal, but he is unlikely to have the means and network to go further on his own in seizing power. Kochnev would still need the FSB and the Rosgvardia to accomplish the mission so would likely be an accomplice, but he would not be at the forefront of such a plot.

There are likewise a handful of others close to Putin who might influence his succession, or be the face of it, such as Igor Sechin, former deputy prime minister and current Rosneft CEO; former KGB Col. Gen. Sergei Ivanov, also a former defense minister and first deputy prime minister; and former KGB Col. Gen. Viktor Ivanov, who also had a stint as the Federal Narcotics Service director. All are known to be ideologically in line with the Russian leader and seek a restored empire unwilling to subscribe to a world order and rules created by the West that they believe aim to keep Moscow weak and subservient.

If Putin were assassinated abroad, regardless of the evidence, the old guard would likely accuse the United States and use it as a lightning rod to consolidate power and rally the public. And sharing Putin’s paranoia over the West’s existential threat, the risk is credible that they would retaliate militarily, directly, and with uncertain restraint. Believing themselves insecure, they would likewise crack down at home in an indiscriminately ruthless manner that might unleash long-contained revolutionary vigor among the population, which would throw a large, nuclear-armed power into chaos.

But could the United States do it if it wanted to? History shows that foreign leaders are not immune to assassination, as we were reminded when Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico survived being shot at close range by a disgruntled citizen in May. Unlike in the movies, however, assassinations are complicated, particularly against well-protected and deliberately unpredictable targets in foreign environments over which one has no control.

According to leaked documents and the account of Gleb Karakulov, a former engineer and FSO captain, Putin is paranoid concerning his safety and health. Karakulov’s observations, Putin’s limited travel, and his proclivity to cloister himself from direct contact with but a small number of insiders for his safety makes him a hard target. Scrupulous care for his movements includes the intense vetting, quarantining, and close monitoring of those involved with his transportation and his personal routine as well as in securing the cars, trains, and planes he uses. Who can forget the flurry of photos and memes surrounding the 15-foot-long table Putin used when conducting personal meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic?

For any such operation to succeed, close target reconnaissance and good intelligence are required to determine patterns and vulnerabilities on which to construct a plan. But while foreign head-of-state visits follow certain protocols and have predictable events, there are no long-term patterns within which to easily identify vulnerabilities. Other considerations include a means to infiltrate and exfiltrate the various members executing the operation as well as their tools. North Korea is not an easy place to visit let alone operate in for a foreign intelligence service to clandestinely steal secrets or conduct an observable action such as an assassination.

There are certainly additional risks when Putin or any foreign leader ventures beyond the layered, redundant, and tested security protocols enjoyed in their home cocoons. Visiting dignitaries must rely on the host government for a variety of resources and needs too numerous and costly to pack, and when doing so would offend the locals. And that extends to perimeter and route security, emergency medical support, and infrastructure integrity.

The threat to a foreign leader’s communications security, habits, health information, and that of their entourage is higher while in transit abroad—and therefore an attractive intelligence target. The multiple moving pieces and complicated logistics associated with such visits produce information that must be shared with the host governments and span agendas, itineraries, dietary requirements, flight and cargo manifests, communication frequencies, telephone numbers, email addresses, travelers’ biographic details, and weapons, to name a few.

In the era of ubiquitous technical surveillance, as the Israelis learned firsthand when Mossad agents assassinated Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in 2010, going undetected in any city is no small feat. Mabhouh’s killing was largely captured on CCTV. The Dubai investigation identified as many as 28 operatives who were involved, almost all of whom were revealed through technical means or the leads they generated.

Still, whoever assassinated Lebanese Hezbollah’s notorious international operations chief, Imad Mughniyah, in Damascus in February 2008 and al Qaeda deputy Abu Muhammad al-Masri in Tehran in 2020 managed to mount complex attacks in highly restrictive police states. Of course, neither moved about with a protective detail, let alone that which would surround a head of state.

Israel managed to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in November 2020 in Iran despite a protective detail—although it was an operation that might have been taken from a science fiction movie involving automated robotic machines guns controlled from afar.

Then again, even with the best-laid plans for protecting Putin, one weak link could be the Russian leader’s self-imposed vulnerability, depending on the aging and problematic Soviet-designed Ilyushin Il-96 series jets he uses, as he did in recent travels to North Korea and Vietnam. Even if Russia builds and updates the replacement parts, there is long-term structural fatigue and limitations when trying to reconfigure so old an airframe design.

While there’s arguably an element of Putin’s pride in wishing to use Russian equipment, I suspect his inclination is driven more by paranoia for what adversaries might implant on his transport that prevents him from adopting newer Western aircraft, as his country’s commercial airlines have.

There are also significant bureaucratic hurdles to lethal operations. For the moment, at least, the U.S. practice of covert action is dictated by the rule of law. These are primarily executive orders rather than public laws, like EO 12333, which ironically forbids assassination, and the various presidential memos issued by Barack Obama in 2013, Donald Trump in 2017, and Joe Biden in 2022 guiding the use of “direct action,” the euphemism for drone strikes and other kinetic operations, against terrorist targets outside of conflict zones. But while the United States killed Suleimani as a terrorist who fit these guidelines, killing foreign leaders based on credible intelligence reflecting their ongoing efforts to do harm to the United States would reasonably still meet the legal bar for preemptive self-defense.

When it comes to killing Putin or any prominent adversary, the biggest challenge is not necessarily if it can be done, but whether it should be done. Openly killing Suleimani posed risks, of course, but ultimately, Iran is not an existential threat. Its retaliation could have been more costly, had Tehran chosen escalation, but still manageable.

Russia, on the other hand, as Putin frequently reminds the West in his saber-rattling speeches threatening nuclear war, is another matter. What happens if you fail? As The Wire’s Omar Little said, paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, “When you come at the king, you best not miss.”

[acnews]

Vice President Kamala Harris continued to hide from unscripted public events on Monday and only issued a press release on the third anniversary of the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal that killed 13 U.S. troops........

[dertaglichedan]

Trump Honors Afghanistan Troops as ABC, CBS, NBC Morning Shows Ignore Anniversary

President Donald Trump paid his respects to the 13 U.S. troops who were killed three years ago during President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan — while the morning shows on the major networks ignored the anniversary.

Monday, August 26, 2024, marked three years since the day a suicide bomber affiliated with the local branch of the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) killed 13 American service members and wounded dozens more at Kabul’s airport — while also murdering roughly 170 local civilians who were trying to flee the country.

Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, laying a wreath alongside Marine Corporal Kelsee Lainhart, who was partially paralyzed by the blast.

NewsBusters.com noted that ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored the three-year anniversary on their Monday morning shows:

Monday marked three years since the deadly Islamic terror attack in Kabul, Afghanistan at Hamid Karzai International Airport that murdered 13 American soldiers, 170 Afghans, and left over 150 people wounded. Instead of even briefly acknowledging this painful day for American families in what became the symbol of the Biden-Harris’s administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, ABC, CBS, and NBC completely ignored it on their flagship morning news shows. To repeat: not a word from ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, and NBC’s Today about the sacrifice of the brave Americans standing guard at Abbey Gate. The networks shamefully adopted the mold of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in being radio silent (aside from paper statements released from their handlers). In contrast, cable news shows that aired during that same block — Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends, Newsmax’s Wake Up America, NewsNation’s Morning in America, and even CNN News Central — all mentioned it multiple times.

Neither President Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris visited Arlington, though both issued statements.

[dzthenerd490]

News Post

Palestine

Israel strikes five schools in week of ‘massacres’ | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

A Palestinian American raises more than $1 million to feed his family and others in Gaza : NPR

Pro-Palestine protesters call for the end of U.S. aid to Israel (statesman.com)

Clearing Gaza rubble could take 15 years, UN agency says | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

Ukraine

‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine’: what a JD Vance vice presidency could mean for the world (theconversation.com)

Russia conscripts 150,000 troops as Ukraine says it needs more (nbcnews.com)

Ukraine needs 25 Patriot air defense systems and more F-16 warplanes, President Zelenskyy says | AP News

Ukraine war latest: Russia withdrew its last patrol boat from occupied Crimea, Ukraine's navy says (kyivindependent.com)

Sudan

https://sudantribune.com/article288272/

UNICEF says 50,000 seek refuge in Sudan's Qadarif (yahoo.com)

Arab and African states warn of dire food situation in Sudan (thenationalnews.com)

Other

Israel in Talks Over Withdrawing From Egypt-Gaza Border, Officials Say - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Egypt arrests suspect over anti-Sisi billboards at Faisal Street (newarab.com)

As Rwanda votes, tensions with neighbouring DR Congo deepen over M23 | Armed Groups News | Al Jazeera

At least 40 die after heavy rains pound eastern Afghanistan, destroying houses and cutting power | AP News

[ritchiepage2001newaccount]

Project2025 #CorpMedia #Oligarchs #MegaBanks vs #Union #Occupy #NoDAPL #BLM #SDF #DACA #MeToo #Humanity #FeelTheBern

JinJiyanAzadi #BijiRojava Trump believes fight against DAESH achieved goal [UPDATES]

According to reports by Reuters and numerous American media, the US military troops are to be withdrawn from Syria…

RELATED UPDATE: Mattis resigns after clash with Trump over troop withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-announces-mattis-will-leave-as-defense-secretary-at-the-end-of-february/2018/12/20/e1a846ee-e147-11e8-ab2c-b31dcd53ca6b_story.html

RELATED UPDATE: Top U.S. envoy in the fight against ISIS resigns

RELATED UPDATE: Journalist Houda-Pepin: We betrayed the Kurds

RELATED UPDATE: Chief Pentagon spokeswoman announces resignation

RELATED UPDATE: Bolton’s visit to Ankara: Yellow vests, 944 and more

RELATED UPDATE: Trump Says ISIS Is Defeated. Reality Says Otherwise.

RELATED UPDATE: Report Warns ISIS is “Resurging” in Syria After Trump Ordered a Partial Troop Withdrawal

RELATED UPDATE: The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore

FURTHER READING:

[misfitwashere]

Friends,

What might otherwise be considered a minor error of judgment can blow up into a big issue in a political campaign when the error evokes a candidate’s deeper flaws. 

Yesterday, the U.S. Army issued a stern rebuke to the Trump campaign over his visit on Monday to the Arlington National Cemetery, where Trump sought to score political points by marking the third anniversary of a deadly attack on U.S. troops in Afghanistan as American forces withdrew from the country. Thirteen American service members were killed in the attack at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate.

A video of the visit posted by the Trump campaign on TikTok shows Trump visiting grave sites, with audio of him blasting Biden’s “disaster” of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

The Army said in its statement that participants in the ceremony “were made aware of federal laws” which “clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.” The statement also noted that an Arlington National Cemetery official “who attempted to ensure adherence” to these rules “was abruptly pushed aside.” 

Reportedly, when the cemetery official — a woman — tried to prevent Trump and his staff from entering the prohibited area, Trump’s staff verbally abused her and pushed her out of the way so Trump could enter. 

The Army statement went on to say: “It is unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”

The incident has blown up into a big issue, but not because the Trump campaign erroneously held a political event at the Arlington National Cemetery. 

It’s blown up because it’s a microcosm of Donald Trump’s moral squalor. 

Trump has repeatedly shown contempt for military heroism. He claimed that the late John McCain, who had been a prisoner of war, was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” 

When General Mark Milley invited a wounded, wheelchair-bound soldier to sing “God Bless America” at Milley’s welcoming ceremony as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump admonished him, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

On a trip to France in 2018, Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where more than 2,200 U.S. service members are buried. “Why should I go to that cemetery?” he asked staff members. “It’s filled with losers.” 

According to Trump’s then-chief of staff John Kelly, Trump called the Marines who died at Belleau Wood “suckers” for getting killed.

Trump recently said that the Congressional Medal of Freedom he’d awarded to Republican donor Miriam Adelson was “much better” than the Medal of Honor because Medal of Honor recipients are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”

It’s not only Trump’s disdain for military heroism that’s brought to mind by what happened at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s also Trump’s disdain for the law, suggesting other occasions when Trump and his henchmen have disregarded legal rules, including their attempt to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election. 

Verbally abusing and pushing the cemetery employee who was trying to enforce the law, after she notified Trump and his staff that it was illegal to stage political events at the ceremony, recalls other instances when Trump and gang have pushed people aside, using violence to try to get their way. Think January 6, 2021. 

That the employee in question is a woman brings to mind the multitude of ways Trump has employed violence against women, from grabbing their genitals to raping them to stirring up his followers to threaten them. She declined to press charges because, according to military officials, she feared retaliation by Trump supporters. 

The entire incident is also a microcosm of Trump’s utter disdain for morality, honor, and patriotism — the public virtues, the common good. The cemetery is a sacred, hallowed ground. It is considered to be a national shrine. Trump sullied it to achieve his personal goal of the moment: to get a news clip in which he could bash Biden and, indirectly, Kamala Harris. 

The incident rings the warning bells, rekindles the dark memories, revives the fears. 

What happened at Arlington National Cemetery earlier this week was much more than an erroneous photo op. It was Trump on full display.

***********************************************************************

It was a crime.

[darkmaga-retard]

We tend to think of war as a national army against a national army. But wars have changed dramatically since Iraq. Mercenaries are more powerful than most realize, which is a grave oversight. Those who assume they are cheap imitations of national armed forces do not have a clue about what is taking place. For-profit warriors are a wholly different species of fighter. Perhaps the first time anyone even heard about some private military company was Russia’s Wagner Group, which was more heavily armed than the traditional national military. They are fully armed multinational corporations, more so than the Marine Corps. Their employees are recruited from different countries, and profitability is everything. Patriotism is unimportant and sometimes a liability. Unsurprisingly, mercenaries do not fight conventionally, and traditional war strategies used against them often backfire.

If we look at the Iraq War, the US Department of Defense employed 155,826 private contractors in Iraq. In 2016, 1 in 4 U.S. armed personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan was a private contractor. This meant that the war was being outsourced, and neither scholars nor the media seemed to pay attention. Looking at the stats provides an interesting perspective. Between 2006 and 2016, we do not even know how many private contractors/mercenaries perished in Iraq. Looking at who does this work reveals that they are predominantly white man in their 40s. Most are veterans with significant military experience who were former officers, and about half of them are Special Forces veterans. They are more likely to have a college degree than their active-duty counterparts but less likely than their fellow veterans in the general population.

This degree of privatization of military troops is unprecedented in modern warfare. The Neocons used Biden to circumvent Congress to create World War III, deploying private armies to negate Congressional approval. If they are private contractors, then the Neocons can tell them to invade Russia or even New York City since they are NOT actually official military personnel.

In terms of Biden signing private contracts, one federal department reigned supreme. In 2020, the Department of Defense awarded more money in federal contracts than all other government agencies combined. And one study found that nearly half of defense spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan went to private contractors. President Joe Biden signed a record-shattering military budget in 2021, topping 2020. Even after America’s complicated withdrawal from Afghanistan, congress approved the biggest defense spending bill in history. Why if we pulled out? Ah – Ukraine!

[septembriseur]

“In August 2021, the world watched with dread as the Taliban swiftly regained control of Afghanistan while U.S. forces exited the country. In those early days, it became clear that an ominous fate awaited America’s most committed Afghan allies. Women and men who fought shoulder to shoulder alongside U.S. troops were left facing inevitable retribution from the Taliban. As the challenges of the U.S.-led operation to evacuate vulnerable Afghan allies became painfully clear, it also became obvious to many of us that some of the most at-risk Afghans were likely to be left behind.

In fact, despite the large number of Afghans evacuated during the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, a report from the Association of Wartime Allies (AWA) in February 2022, showed that of the estimated 81,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants in Afghanistan that had visa applications pending as of Aug. 15, 2021 — the day Kabul fell — some 78,000 were not evacuated in this effort. At least 96 percent of the SIV population remained in Afghanistan and in grave danger of reprisal by the Taliban.

…As with most government programs, the Afghan SIV program is complicated and requires oversight and maintenance. Most acutely, the program does not have an unlimited number of visas available and relies on congressional reauthorization of visas to allow America to continue to bring those left behind in Afghanistan to the safer shores of the U.S. Based on the rate of issuance, there are likely less than 7,000 visas remaining available for Afghan allies, with some 140,000+ SIV applicants waiting to receive one. At the current pace, this supply of visas will be exhausted as early as mid-August of this year.”

[lepartidelamort]

AP Finally Reports Israel is Losing the War, So This is Now a Big News Story

Andrew Anglin

The way the Western media functions is super bizarre. Basically, we have all of these different sources of information now – social media and foreign media – but Western society acts like something isn’t true until there is a big report from a legacy media outlet.

We’ve been reporting that Hamas still exists and hasn’t really been deterred at all by Israel, despite the fact that Israel has destroyed most residential buildings in northern Gaza. We’ve been reporting that Hamas is actually moving back to positions they’d abandoned in northern Gaza – positions that are good for firing rockets into Israel.

This information was all widely available and not any type of secret. But the media wasn’t reporting it widely, so no one was talking about it. Then, this week, the Associated Press prints a big thing about “actually, Hamas is doing pretty well,” and then all of a sudden this is a big story.

AP:

Diminished but not deterred, Hamas is still putting up a fight after seven brutal months of war with Israel, regrouping in some of the hardest-hit areas in northern Gaza and resuming rocket attacks into nearby Israeli communities. Israel initially made tactical advances against Hamas after a devastating aerial bombardment paved the way for its ground troops. But those early gains have given way to a grinding struggle against an adaptable insurgency — and a growing feeling among many Israelis that their military faces only bad options, drawing comparisons with U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the subtext of a rebellion in recent days by two members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s three-man War Cabinet — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival — who demanded that he come up with detailed postwar plans. They supported Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, including one of the heaviest bombing campaigns in recent history, ground operations that obliterated entire neighborhoods and border restrictions that the U.N.’s World Food Program says pushed parts of the territory into famine.

It’s not “one of the heaviest bombing campaigns in recent history,” it’s “the single heaviest bombing campaign since World War II.” Gaza is obviously a small area, but inch for inch, it’s worse than the bombings of Dresden or Japan, meaning that it would actually be accurate to call it “the heaviest bombing campaign in all of history.”

But now the two retired generals fear a prolonged, costly re-occupation of Gaza, from which Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers in 2005. They are also opposed to a withdrawal that would leave Hamas in control or lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Instead, they have put forth alternatives that many Israelis see as wildly unrealistic. Hamas, meanwhile, has proposed its own postwar plan. Here’s a look at four ways this war might end. FULL-SCALE MILITARY OCCUPATION Netanyahu has promised a “total victory” that would remove Hamas from power, dismantle its military capabilities and return the scores of hostages it still holds from the attack that triggered the war. He has said victory could come within weeks if Israel launches a full-scale invasion of Rafah, which Israel portrays as the last Hamas stronghold. Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general and former deputy commander of the Gaza division, says that’s only the beginning. He said Israel would need to remain in control to prevent Hamas from regrouping. … A LIGHTER OCCUPATION, AIDED BY ‘UNICORNS’ Netanyahu has said Israel will maintain security control over Gaza but delegate civilian administration to local Palestinians unaffiliated with Hamas or the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank. He has suggested that Arab and other countries assist with governance and rebuilding. But so far, none have shown interest. … A GRAND BARGAIN Instead, Arab states have coalesced around a U.S. proposal aimed at resolving the decades-old conflict and transforming the Middle East. Under this plan, a reformed Palestinian Authority would govern Gaza with the assistance of Arab and Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia, which would normalize relations with Israel in return for a U.S. defense pact and help in building a civilian nuclear program. But U.S. and Saudi officials say that hinges on Israel committing to a credible path to eventual Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu has ruled out such a scenario — as have Gallant and Gantz — saying it would reward Hamas and result in a militant-run state on Israel’s borders. … A DEAL WITH HAMAS Hamas has proposed a very different grand bargain — one that, ironically enough, might be more palatable to Israelis than the U.S.-Saudi deal. The militant group has proposed a phased agreement in which it would release all of the hostages in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners — including senior militants — as well as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, a lengthy cease-fire and reconstruction. That would almost certainly leave Hamas in control of Gaza and potentially allow it to rebuild its military capabilities. Hamas might even claim victory, despite the extensive death and destruction suffered by Palestinian civilians since Oct. 7. But thousands of Israeli protesters have taken to the streets in recent weeks calling on their leaders to take such a deal, because it’s probably the only way to get the hostages back.

They “might even claim victory”? What the hell kind of sentence is that?

Yeah, I think after a full Israeli surrender, Hamas would claim victory. I think, in fact, everyone in the world other than the American media would acknowledge this not only as a victory, but as the single greatest victory of a paramilitary resistance group in all of history.

“Yeah but we killed a lot of people though” is not the definition of a military victory. If that were the case, the US would be recorded as having won in both Vietnam and Afghanistan, where they for sure killed a whole lot of people before offering unconditional surrenders.

But it’s not going to happen that way in Gaza.

The only real option for Israel is to continue to escalate this campaign outside of Gaza to the point where people just sort of forget about Gaza. This is fine for the Jews, because that was always the plan in the first place.

[beardedmrbean]

NBC’s Kristen Welker "incorrectly implied" that Vice President Kamala Harris was in attendance at the dignified transfer of U.S. troops killed during the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., appeared on NBC’s "Meet the Press" Sunday and criticized President Biden and Harris for ignoring the families of the fallen soldiers. 

"Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — where were they? Joe Biden was sitting at a beach. Kamala Harris was sitting at her mansion in Washington, D.C. She was four miles away — ten minutes. She could've gone to the cemetery and honored the sacrifice of those young men and women, but she hasn't. She never has spoken to them or taken a meeting with them," Cotton told Welker. "It is because of her and Joe Biden's incompetence that those 13 Americans were killed in Afghanistan."

"They did meet them during the dignified transfer. They were with them at the dignified transfer," Welker interjected.

TRUMP SUPPORTERS, GOLD STAR FAMILIES FLOOD HARRIS' X ACCOUNT AFTER ARLINGTON ATTACK: ADMIN 'KILLED MY SON'

NBC posted a correction on the show's X account after the show. 

"On our broadcast this morning, we incorrectly implied that both President Biden and Vice President Harris attended the dignified transfer of 13 American service members killed during the Afghanistan withdrawal,"  NBC wrote on their "Meet the Press" X account.

"Biden was in attendance but Harris was not," the statement continued.

GOLD STAR FAMILIES SLAM KAMALA HARRIS FOR 'PLAYING POLITICS' OVER TRUMP'S VISIT TO ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

President Biden was at the event, photographed "repeatedly checking his watch" during the proceedings.

Former President Trump, who attended the Arlington National Cemetery at the request of Gold Star families, commemorated the third year anniversary of botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that left 13 U.S. service members killed. 

"The Trump team is very, very respectful and cognizant. They wanted to be respectful to everyone there," Christy Shamblin, mother of fallen U.S. Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, one of the Fallen 13 from Afghanistan, told "The Sacramento Bee." 

"The big news stories that the mainstream media covers about the [Fallen] 13 aren’t stories of honor and respect. It’s hard to understand why. There are always stories about some kind of conflict that didn’t happen... The Trump team worked diligently with us and with Arlington to make sure there weren’t any disruptions to services, or even to any school groups," Shamblin continued. 

Gee’s mother also went on to tell "The Bee" that she was "confident" that a second term for the Trump Administration would be "better for veterans and their families." 

The families of the 13 service-members have said they have yet to hear from Biden or Harris, despite having made attempts to reach out to the administration.

"At least Biden sent us a form letter," Shamblin added. "I think one of the most devastating parts of having the administration really just ignore this and not speak their names and speak to us, is that you start to feel like your loss is really in vain."

[zvaigzdelasas]

Major General John Kirk Singlaub (July 10, 1921 – January 29, 2022) was a major general in the United States Army, founding member of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a highly decorated officer in the former Office of Strategic Services (OSS). [...]

Singlaub headed CIA operations in postwar Manchuria during the Chinese Communist revolution, led troops in the Korean War, managed the secret war along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the Kingdom of Laos and Vietnam, worked with the Contras in Nicaragua, and Afghan resistance during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. [...]

In 1977, while Singlaub was chief of staff of U.S. forces in South Korea, he publicly criticized President Jimmy Carter's proposal to withdraw U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula. On May 21, 1977, Carter relieved him of duty for overstepping his bounds and failing to respect the President's authority as Commander-in-Chief.[7][8][9] [...]

After retiring [sic] from the army, Singlaub, with John Rees and Democratic Congressman from Georgia, Larry McDonald founded the Western Goals Foundation. [...] it was intended to "blunt subversion, terrorism, and communism" by filling the gap "created by the disbanding of the House Un-American Activities Committee".[12] [...] Singlaub was founder in 1981 of the United States Council for World Freedom, the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The chapter became involved with the Iran–Contra affair,[13] with Associated Press reporting that, "Singlaub's private group became the public cover for the White House operation".[14] The WACL was described by former member Geoffrey Stewart-Smith as allegedly a "largely a collection of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers." Singlaub is credited with purging the organization of these types and making it respectable.[15]

U.S. Army General William Westmoreland described Singlaub as a "true military professional" and "a man of honest, patriotic conviction and courage."[citation needed][sic][...]

He personally knew William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence during the Reagan Administration, as well as Oliver North, and was involved in the Iran–Contra affair. Singlaub was President Reagan's administrative chief liaison in the Contra supply effort to oppose Moscow's and Fidel Castro's advances in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the Cold War and their support for armed Marxist revolutionary guerrilla movements. Through his chairmanship of the world Anti-Communist League (WACL) and its U.S. chapter, the U.S. Council for World Freedom (USCWF), he enlisted Members of the US Congress from both political parties, Washington, D.C. policymakers, retired U.S. military officials, paramilitary groups, foreign governments, and American think tanks and conservatives in the Contra cause. He often met on Capitol Hill with members of the U.S. Congress, including Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX) about U.S. support and funding for the Contras and anti-communist resistance forces in Afghanistan opposed to the Red Army invasion of Kabul in 1979 [...]

He was a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.[16] [...] In January 2020 Singlaub used the "America's Future" of Phyllis Schlafly to plead with Attorney General William Barr to "free Mike Flynn, drop the charges".[18] He turned 100 in July 2021, and died on January 29, 2022.[19][20]

[mariacallous]

Al Qaeda has set up nine new terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 2024, a sign of the Taliban’s increasing tolerance of terror groups in their backyard in spite of pledges to crack down, according to an Afghan resistance leader visiting Washington this week. 

“These are training centers; these are recruitment centers,” said Ali Maisam Nazary, the top diplomat for Afghanistan’s National Resistance Front (NRF) based in the country’s Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. “The Taliban have even allowed al Qaeda to build bases and munitions depots in the heart of the Panjshir Valley. [That’s] something unheard of, something impossible even in the 1990s for al Qaeda to have achieved.” 

Nazary said that since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021, just before the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, terror groups including al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have exploded in size and scope, as the country’s unguarded borders have allowed foreign fighters from Arab countries, Central Asian neighbors, and Europe to pour into Afghanistan. Nazary said that 21 known terror groups are currently operating inside the country.

“We’re seeing all the lights are blinking red,” said Doug Livermore, a former U.S. Navy official and a member of the Special Operations Association of America. The United Nations believes that al Qaeda has training camps in at least 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, even as the Taliban publicly deny that the terror group has a presence in the country. 

The movement of al Qaeda forces into the Panjshir Valley—long a stronghold of the NRF—has been a shock to the resistance, which still controls about 60 percent of the area to the Taliban’s 40 percent, according to Nazary.

Al Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel has explicitly called for foreign fighters to migrate to Afghanistan and prepare to attack the West. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a U.S. government watchdog group, said in a July report that though the Taliban have targeted the Islamic State and some other groups, the fundamentalist organization has tolerated the presence of al Qaeda and TTP. 

Terror groups control much—if not all—of Afghanistan’s border, Nazary said. “Al Qaeda didn’t have any presence in northern Afghanistan in 2001,” he said. “Today, al Qaeda has a presence throughout the country, and the other terrorist forces.” The country has become an “open black market” of leftover weapons, many of them American, he added. 

“The Taliban is having the same problem that we did for 20 years,” Livermore said. “You can control the core, you can control the ring road—to an extent. But then once you start looking out from there, particularly in the east and some of that rough terrain, that seems to be where they [the Islamic State] have managed to establish a pretty solid base of operations.” 

Nazary described the relationship between the Taliban and terror groups as “ironclad,” suggesting the group had even provided passports to allow foreign terrorist fighters into the country. The same U.N. report in July said that the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch has facilitators in both Afghanistan and Turkey who can move terrorist fighters into Europe to conduct attacks. 

But some experts are doubtful that the NRF’s message will resonate in Washington. “They are refusing to acknowledge that it’s not 2001 anymore,” said Michael Kugelman, the director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. “They don’t recognize that, quite frankly, the U.S. and other Western capitals are not interested in getting dragged into a conflict in Afghanistan. There’s no interest in providing arms or money to anti-Taliban groups.”

U.S. intelligence officials are skeptical—at least publicly—about the extent to which Afghanistan could become a terrorist launching pad. The CIA remains in contact with the Taliban in an effort to stanch terror activities, the agency’s deputy director, David Cohen, said at a conference in Maryland on Wednesday, and he said that U.S. intelligence was able to tip Austrian authorities to an Islamic State threat against a planned Taylor Swift concert in Vienna earlier this month. 

“We have been engaging with them, all throughout this period, in various ways, as they have taken on the effort to combat both al Qaeda and ISIS-K,” Cohen said of the U.S. contact with the Taliban, using a common acronym for the Islamic State’s Khorasan branch. “And so this isn’t a ‘mission accomplished’ sort of thing. But it is worth noting that in Afghanistan today, the dire predictions have not come to pass.”

Kugelman said the NRF is trying to leverage growing U.S. concerns about terrorism risks stemming from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s harsh crackdown on women’s rights and perceived political opponents. But, he said, it doesn’t have the power to challenge the Taliban head-on.

“I do think that the NRF might perhaps overstate the dangers in Afghanistan, particularly when it comes to terrorism risks, in order to make a stronger case for support,” he said. “I’d also argue that at the end of the day, the Taliban really does not face any threat at all to its political survival.”