Tag: afghanistan

New Book Claims Biden Doesn’t Think He Did Anything Wrong in Botched Withdrawal From Afghanistan

A new book claims that behind closed doors, Biden doesn’t think he did anything wrong in his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, that left 13 service members dead and saw Afghans clinging to the wheel wells of departing American airplanes.

This is an excellent reminder of just how detached from reality Biden is right now. His poll numbers cratered after the withdrawal and have never recovered.

Americans across the country were horrified by how the withdrawal was handled and outraged by the deaths and the amount of equipment that was left behind in the process.

FOX News reports:

Biden privately defiant that he didn’t botch Afghanistan withdrawal: book

Behind closed doors, President Biden strongly believes that he made the right decisions on the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal that led in part to the deaths of 13 American soldiers, according to an upcoming book.

An excerpt from “The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump,” obtained by Axios, suggests that Biden remains defiant that the history books will look favorably on his decision to leave Afghanistan after American troops spent 20 years fighting the nation’s longest war.

Following the withdrawal, “no one offered to resign, in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy,” author Alexander Ward writes.

Biden allegedly told his top aides, including White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, that they had done their best given the situation and vowed to stand by them.

“There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up,” a White House official told Ward.

The author claims that Biden knew he was making promises to get people out of Afghanistan that he could not keep as confusion and chaos unfolded at the Kabul airport.

You can see the exact moment the withdrawal unfolded in Biden’s approval polls.

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Watchdog: Afghanistan Has Received $11 Billion In Aid From US Since Withdrawal

A new watchdog report reveals that the country of Afghanistan has received a staggering $11 billion in foreign aid from the United States since the country’s collapse in August of 2021.

As Breitbart reports, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John Sopko, issued his report on Monday.

Sopko says that the U.S. and its allies have been sending “cash shipments” of about $80 million to Afghanistan “every 10-14 days” since the Taliban took over the country shortly before the withdrawal of all American forces.

Sopko said that the United Nations has assured him that all of the money has been “placed in designated U.N. accounts in a private bank,” and is not being “deposited in the central bank or provided to the Taliban.”

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) similarly claimed that all of the cash shipments are being “carefully monitored, audited, inspected, and vetted in accordance with U.N. financial rules and processes.”

Despite these claims, Sopko’s report noted that the Taliban has stolen foreign aid before, and has also been able to prevent the poorest elements of a foreign population from receiving aid that has been designated for them; some of the Taliban’s methods for stealing foreign aid include “siphoning cash from U.N. shipments, or collecting royalties, or charging fees on cash shipments.”

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Afghanistan: UK special forces ‘killed 9 people in their beds’

UK special forces killed nine people “in their beds” during an Afghanistan night raid, an independent inquiry has heard.

Family members say the victims were unarmed civilians. The SAS had claimed they acted in self-defence.

Senior officers suspected troops of carrying out a policy of executing “fighting age” men even if they posed no threat.

The government announced the inquiry after BBC Panorama revealed an SAS squadron killed 54 people in suspicious circumstances on one six-month tour.

As substantive hearings got under way at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Monday, UK special forces were accused of “abusing” night raids in order to commit “numerous” extra-judicial killings – which were allegedly later covered up.

Hundreds of deliberate detention operations were carried out by special forces between 2010 and 2013.

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Weapons left by the US in Afghanistan reached the hands of Palestinian militants, says Israel

A high-ranking Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commander said that US weapons left in Afghanistan were found in the hands of Palestinian groups active in the Gaza Strip.

The commander told Newsweek that Israel is concerned over the risks of weapons provided by the United States and other Western nations to Ukraine ending up in the hands of Israel’s foes in the Middle East, including Iran.

This Israeli commander added that some of the US small arms left in Afghanistan have already been seen in the hands of Palestinian groups active in the Gaza Strip.

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U.S. Weapons from Afghanistan Ended up with Palestinian Groups Operating in the Gaza Strip

A claim in a news report that American weapons seized in Afghanistan have ended up in the hands of Palestinian groups operating in the Gaza Strip has taken on renewed significance after Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, launched an attack on Israel on Saturday.

According to a Newsweek report published in June, an Israeli commander said some of the US. small arms seized in Afghanistan have already been observed in the hands of Palestinian groups operating in the Gaza Strip.

The report began recirculating on social media, amid accusations that the Biden administration funded Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel by releasing $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran, the main backer of Hamas.

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Taliban weighs using U.S. mass surveillance plan, met with China’s Huawei

The Taliban are creating a large-scale camera surveillance network for Afghan cities that could involve repurposing a plan crafted by the Americans before their 2021 pullout, an interior ministry spokesman told Reuters, as authorities seek to supplement thousands of cameras already across the capital, Kabul.

The Taliban administration — which has publicly said it is focused on restoring security and clamping down on Islamic State, which has claimed many major attacks in Afghan cities — has also consulted with Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei about potential cooperation, the spokesman said.

Preventing attacks by international militant groups – including prominent organisations such as Islamic State – is at the heart of the interaction between the Taliban and many foreign nations, including the U.S. and China, according to readouts from those meetings. But some analysts question the cash-strapped regime’s ability to fund the program, and rights groups have expressed concern that any resources will be used to crackdown on protesters.

Details of how the Taliban intend to expand and manage mass surveillance, including obtaining the U.S. plan, have not been previously reported.

The mass camera rollout, which will involve a focus on “important points” in Kabul and elsewhere, is part of a new security strategy that will take four years to be fully implemented, Ministry of Interior spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani told Reuters.

“At the present we are working on a Kabul security map, which is (being completed) by security experts and (is taking) lots of time,” he said. “We already have two maps, one which was made by U.S.A for the previous government and second by Turkey.”

He did not detail when the Turkish plan was made.

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A US soldier may have falsely reported a US raid in Afghanistan while attempting to secure the adoption of a baby he found in the rubble

The Afghan villager was afraid the American soldiers might come. And one cool night in fall, as his children lay asleep, helicopters roared overhead.

At the first sound of gunshots, he yelled for his wife and 10 children to take cover. His young daughter grabbed her sleeping infant sister off the bed. Their mud compound exploded, and a blast sent a huge shock through the home.

“My small sister fell away from my arms,” the girl, now a teenager, whispered, so quietly she could barely be heard above the breeze. “The wind blew her out of my hands.”

Today, what exactly happened that night is at the center of a bitter international custody dispute over an orphaned baby found amid the rubble. The high-profile legal battle pits an Afghan family against an American one, and has drawn responses from the White House and the Taliban.

The Afghan government and the International Committee of the Red Cross determined that the baby belonged to this Afghan villager. Friends and family say he was a farmer, not a militant. The Red Cross found surviving relatives and united her with them.

However, a US Marine attorney, Maj. Joshua Mast, believed he should get the girl instead. He insists that the child is the stateless orphan of foreign fighters who were living in an Al Qaeda compound, and convinced a rural Virginia judge to grant him an adoption from 7,000 miles away.

Were it not for this little girl, now 4 years old, the events that began on the night of September 5, 2019, in this remote, impoverished region might have remained locked away among clandestine stories of the thousands of raids the American and Afghan militaries carried out during the long war.

But once-secret documents, now filed in court records, reveal details that thrust this raid into an ongoing controversy over who the military killed when they blew down walls in the middle of the night in Afghanistan, if those people were fighters or civilians, and whether the military ever tried to find out.

The Mast family has submitted a summary of the raid in a federal court case, an account Mast helped create after he said he “personally read every page of the 150+ classified documents” on the operation. The summary describes how as many as six enemy fighters were killed and possibly one civilian. The only child the document mentions is the injured baby.

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How the CIA created Osama bin Laden

“Throughout the world … its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They’re doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America … [They are] freedom fighters.”

Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the “evil empire”, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities — the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 — bin Laden the “freedom fighter” is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a “terrorist mastermind” and an “evil-doer”.

Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt — and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.

The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

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MATT GAETZ’S LEGISLATIVE AIDE IS A CONVICTED WAR CRIMINAL

DERRICK MILLER, a former U.S. Army National Guard sergeant who spent eight years in prison for murdering an Afghan civilian in 2010, now serves as a legislative assistant covering military policy for Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.

While on a combat mission in Afghanistan’s Laghman province on September 26, 2010, Miller shot 27-year-old Atta Mohammed in the head during an interrogation. Miller has maintained that he was acting in self-defense, alleging that Mohammed, who had walked through a defensive perimeter established by Miller’s unit, could be a threat to his unit and that he had tried to grab Miller’s weapon during the interrogation. But another National Guard member testified he heard Miller threaten to kill Mohammed if he did not tell the truth; and then sat on top of him — Mohammed was lying prone — before shooting him in the head, killing him. According to the prosecutor, Miller then said, “I shot him. He was a liar.”

Mohammed’s body was left in a latrine, in violation of military standards.

Miller covers armed forces and national security, international affairs, and veterans affairs for Gaetz, according to the Congress-tracking website LegiStorm. Gaetz serves on the House Armed Services Committee.

“We proudly stand with our Military Legislative Assistant Derrick Miller,” Joel Valdez, a spokesperson for Gaetz, told The Intercept. “He was wrongfully convicted and served our country with honor.”

Miller did not respond to a request for comment.

“Over the course of nearly a decade, members of Congress, multiple advocacy groups, and over 16,000 individuals on a petition have all signaled their support for clearing his name and recognizing him as innocent of charges imposed by a weaponized military injustice system under President Obama,” the spokesperson continued. “Mr. Miller advises our office on many matters, including ways to make the military justice system consistent with our constitutional principles and values.”

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Taliban Releases Photos Of The U.S. Equipment They Seized From Biden’s Disastrous Pullout

Afghanistan’s extremist Taliban government released photographs late last week of some of the U.S. military equipment that it seized in the wake of President Joe Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

The photos come after Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 left up to a maximum of $24 billion worth of weapons and equipment in the hands of the Taliban.

“300 destroyed vehicles in the 205th Army Corps were restored,” Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense wrote on Twitter. “As many as (300) types of intermediate military vehicles that were destroyed and unusable were restored and ready for use by the technical team of the Abu Dojaneh Brigade of the Badr Army.”

“Repaired vehicles include 150 International Kamaz trucks,” the statement continued. “125 Arada Humvee, 2 assault tanks, 4 Aradeh Taylor, 10 Aradeh Purcliff, and 15 are Humvee ambulances.”

“It should be mentioned that hundreds of other vehicles have been restored due to the efforts of the engineering and technical teams of the Ministry of National Defense,” the statement said.

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