The U.S. ambassador in Kabul has told staff there that four U.S. Marines were killed in an explosion at the city’s airport and three wounded, a U.S. official with knowledge of the briefing said. Two explosions ripped through crowds of Afghans trying to enter the airport on Thursday.
At least three U.S. troops were injured, a U.S. official said. Witnesses reported multiple fatalities among the Afghans, many of whom were trying to enter the airport because they had assisted U.S.-led coalition efforts and feared persecution by the Taliban.
CIA Director William J. Burns held a secret meeting Monday in Kabul with the Taliban’s de facto leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar, in the highest-level face-to-face encounter between the Taliban and the Biden administration since the militants seized the Afghan capital, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Biden is failing to adequately explain why he so badly failed to predict the swift collapse of the Afghan state. And his credibility has been sullied because his confident downplaying of the risks of the withdrawal has been repeatedly confounded by events. Seven months into his term, Biden no longer gets credit simply for not being Donald Trump.
The article continues:
The atmospherics around a White House that was on a roll have shifted in a matter of days. Just over a week ago, Biden was taking a victory lap for his unlikely feat of passing a bipartisan infrastructure deal in the Senate and also ramming a $3.5 trillion spending framework through the chamber. As the pandemic rebounds, his July Fourth partial declaration of independence over the virus looks like a “Mission Accomplished” moment, even if the reluctance of millions of Americans to get vaccinated has fueled its spread.
Today was a bad, bad day for President Joe Biden. But maybe worse for the United States.. and global stability..
The collapse of the Afghan government is the biggest foreign policy crisis of Biden’s presidency at this point..recalling setbacks for past presidents such as the withdrawal from Vietnam and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. The AP wrote in a fresh dispatch that the reverberations of the Taliban’s success were startling, endangering Afghan women and girls, posing new security threats and threatening to undercut global views of America’s reliability..
After Biden addressed the nation around 4pm, he flew back to Camp David again..
As he boarded Marine One, an image of him saluting appeared to featuring him covered in the late summer flies of August.
Other images showcased today are not pleasant.. they are actually graphic.
The fall of Saigon and Kabul are perfectly compared in this photo, chilling in similarities:
Other images were more harrowing.
People hanging on for dear life as a plane leaving the nation was swarmed with civilians attempting to escape for their lives… At least two died as they fell from the aircraft as it reached into the sky..
A war, 20 years in the making.. and an ending of the Taliban taking back over in just 20 hours …
Disturbing reports are already emerging from Afghanistan as the government collapsed and the Taliban seized power once again nearly 20 years after being driven out by the West.
There have already been reports throughout the advance of the Taliban of women being shot dead and girls as young as 12 being dragged from their homes to be “married”. Afghanistan’s descent into chaos has seen unverified reports emerge of thousands gathering to witness an execution in Kandahar at a sports stadium.
The media began to turn on Biden tonight in pure feeding frenzy style — even the fans at CNN and MSNBC questioned the Commander in Chief over decisions made in the past few days.
Decisions that included promises that the Taliban’s advance would NEVER be as fast it was..
Throughout the weekend, Biden had remained at the presidential retreat, receiving briefings on screens or over the phone while sitting alone at conference table. Advisers huddled separately to discuss when and how he should address the situation. When he returned to the White House midday Monday, many of his aides assumed he would at least spend the night. Yet almost as soon as Biden touched down in Washington, word went out that his stay at the executive mansion would be brief. After his 18-minute speech, Biden quickly decamped again for the mountains.
Meanwhile on Peacock: Former CIA Analyst and US veteran Matt Zeller said he was “appalled” by Joe Biden’s Afghanistan speech on Monday…
U.S. Army veteran Matt Zeller goes off on MSNBC about Biden’s remarks on Afghanistan:
Zeller: “I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled.” pic.twitter.com/eGC5tMBvy4
Those who made big pronouncements in 2001 when we invaded, all the while the smoke was still billowing out and embers were still smoldering at Ground Zero ….?
Bush? Cheney? Obama? Trump? Biden?
This war went on, and on, and on for 2 decades.
5 presidents
American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448.
U.S. contractors: 3,846.
Afghan national military and police: 66,000.
Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144.
We found a great video on YouTube that profile some of the news coverage from October 2001 when the United States lead invasion of Afghanistan began.
https://youtu.be/2ndbfr1qrkE
And now, nearly 20 years later, thousands of United States soldiers injured and dead, tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed. Trillion spent. And assurances from President Joe Biden in July that there would never be an immediate takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
Despite all that, despite the war, and 20 years of division, the Taliban took over the entire nation in Capitol, route it out translators who helped United States, began to enforce a Burka policy on women, and stops females from working in the banking industry. All in hours.Despite all that, despite the war, and 20 years of division, the Taliban took over the entire nation in Capitol, route it out translators who helped United States, began to enforce a Burka policy on women, and stops females from working in the banking industry. All in hours.
What are the war was a necessity or choice, and whether you feel it was successful as a venture or a failure, we know this: 20 years of military and tactical battle, all wiped out in 20 hours..
We have written about Mr. Leeds before. His name comes from the film LADY IN THE WATER. That movie was panned by critics and remains one of the most unpopular of the M. Night Shyamalan films–but we have always loved it. It’s a bed time story, a fable, and a beautiful tale about mundane lives of human beings that can become extraordinary when you least expect it. And characters who rise to an occasion as they are all equipped with hidden talents and deep purpose. True purpose..
In the film, Mr. Leeds plays an important role.. Played by actor Bill Irwin, Leeds is one of the tenants in the apartment building where a magical fairy tale will soon ensue.. but until it does, he is busy daily watching his television set of the latest scenes of chaos, strife, warfare and murder across the planet.
Shyamalan presents him as a stoic man, someone who watches chilling news broadcasts play out 24/7 in his living room in a silent agony.
So often through the years, when big news occurred, I pictured Mr. Leeds continuing to watch developments with his expressionless face–but taking it all in and craving for peace and love to take over the planet.
During LADY IN THE WATER, Leeds questions whether humanity should be saved in his dialogue in the film. He goes on to inspire the main character of the film at the most crucial time. And it leads to redemption–redemption of the entire group of apartment misfits that never realized the power of humanity to work as one.
2020 TO THE ‘NORMAL’
During the 2020 presidential race and COVID pandemic, we were reminded by the media and purveyors of clickbait on the socials that everything was wrong. Upside down. Abnormal..
The kind of life that even had Mr. Leeds contemplating throwing in the towel.
After the tumultuous election and eventual Inauguration of Joe Biden, Mr. Leeds and all of us watched the media portray the new presidency as a return to “normal.” A return to the mundane.. the life that Mr. Leeds had previously gotten used to. Sure 2020 threw a number of wrenches into his life, but he wanted his typical 6 o’clock news back.
So as 2021 took flight, we were ready to get back into normal!
Back to work! Offices reopening.. businesses back! Vaccines rolling out and sleeves rolling up.
Until Delta. Until Lambda.. And until a brand new variant took hold across the southern United States, including Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and even beginning in some vaccinated Northern states..
What about normal?
THE ABNORMAL NORMAL
Mr. Leeds had become very used to warfare on his newscasts. Reports of battle lines, reports of casualties and coffins draped with American flags were his normal in LADY IN THE WATER.
But now a new normal is playing out. Mr. Leeds feels right back at home again as war begins to become the top story…
President Joe Biden on Saturday doubled down on his previous decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan despite the Taliban’s rapid advances. However he pledged to send more troops to evacuate civilians and warned the insurgents not to threaten that mission.
After consultations with his national security team, Biden said a total of “approximately 5,000” US soldiers — up from 3,000 — will now help organize evacuations and the end of the US mission after 20 years on the ground.
He warned the Taliban that any action “that puts US personnel or our mission at risk there, will be met with a swift and strong US military response.”
“When I came to office,” Biden wrote, “I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500.”
Biden faced a choice as his presidency began, to either follow through on the deal, “or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.”
“I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats,” he concluded. “I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”
The working assumption in Biden’s inner circle had been that Kabul could hold for the short term, allowing the U.S. to stay diplomatically engaged and help Afghan women secure their rights beyond the U.S. withdrawal.
Some who read this today were not alive like us, and Mr. Leeds, in 1993.
During that year, when Bill Clinton launched a hasty withdrawal of troops (Bush put them there to feed the hungry and do a ‘humanitarian mission’ in 1992), things got out of control, as illustrated by this TIME magazine cover in October 1993:
Pictures on the cover: Michael Durant. He was held prisoner for 11 days..
The images can still be found today. Media had them at the time but immediately stopped showing.
But Mr. Leeds saw them.. It affected him greatly. It taught him the horrors of war, and the evils of humanity… He doesn’t forget.
And that, my friends, is why Mr. Leeds today is a little worried. A little concerned about what will occur in Afghanistan.
He is torn..
20 years in this nation, and for what?
For the same towns once liberated of the Taliban to be taken over by the Taliban two decades after 9/11..
Officially the Pentagon says there are about 2,500 American troops serving in Afghanistan as part of an advise-and-assist mission to help Afghan security forces. However, U.S. officials have acknowledged the number is higher as U.S. counterterrorism forces are not counted in the official training mission number.
As the Taliban takes hold, inch by inch, women are back in Burqas. Where are the Woke Crowds to lament? People are back in fear.. Mr. Leeds knows that we cannot be nation builders. But what is the right way to withdraw vs. the wrong way..? What is worse?
A new book is revealing information that Dick Cheney came much closer to being killed in 2007 than ever previously reported..
In an excerpt from “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” Craig Whitlock details how the Bush administration hid the truth about an attack targeting Dick Cheney, amid fears it was losing the war.
In the eastern suburbs of Damascus, a region called Eastern Ghouta, nearly 500 people have been killed in a deadly escalation by the Syrian government that began Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told The Associated Press. More than 120 of the dead are children, the group says. “Airstrikes, artillery shells and barrels filled with TNT are being dropped on neighborhoods that are heavily populated by civilians who have no way to escape,” NPR’s Lama Al-Arian reports. “They’re being forced into bunkers, and many of them can’t even find the time to bury their dead.”
MORE:
“I am deeply saddened by the terrible suffering of the civilian population in Eastern Ghouta — 400,000 people that live in hell on earth,” he said to the U.N. Security Council. “I don’t think we can let things go on happening in this horrendous way. “ Syrian state media said rebel factions had fired shells at the Old City of Damascus on Saturday, Reuters reported.
