AFGHAN NEWS
CRONY CAPITALI$M
Ashraf Ghani fled with cars and helicopter full of cash: Russia
Reuters
Published August 17, 2021 -
This file photo shows Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. — AP/File
GOSH HE LOOKS LIKE THE OTHER PRES.
MOSCOW: Russia’s embassy in Kabul said on Monday that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in, the RIA news agency reported.
Ghani, whose current whereabouts are unknown, said he left Afghanistan on Sunday as the Taliban entered Kabul virtually unopposed. He said he wanted to avoid bloodshed.
Russia has said it will retain a diplomatic presence in Kabul and hopes to develop ties with the Taliban even as it says it is no rush to recognise them as the country’s rulers and will closely observe their behaviour.
“As for the collapse of the (outgoing) regime, it is most eloquently characterised by the way Ghani fled Afghanistan,” Nikita Ishchenko, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Kabul, was quoted as saying by RIA.
“Four cars were full of money, they tried to stuff another part of the money into a helicopter, but not all of it fit. And some of the money was left lying on the tarmac,” he was quoted as saying.
Ischenko, the Russian embassy spokesman, confirmed his comments to this news agency.
President Vladimir Putin’s special representative on Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov said earlier it was unclear how much money the fleeing government would leave behind.
Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2021
Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
1 of 3
FALL OF SAIGON, FALL OF CAMBODIA DEJA VU
Hundreds of people run alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane, some climbing on the plane, as it moves down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug.16. 2021. Thousands of Afghans have rushed onto the tarmac at the airport, some so desperate to escape the Taliban capture of their country that they held onto the American military jet as it took off and plunged to death.
Much of the data below is from Linda Bilmes of Harvard University’s Kennedy School and from the Brown University Costs of War project. Because the United States between 2003 and 2011 fought the Afghanistan and Iraq wars simultaneously, and many American troops served tours in both wars, some figures as noted cover both post-9/11 U.S. wars.
THE LONGEST WAR:
Percentage of U.S. population born since the 2001 attacks plotted by al-Qaida leaders who were sheltering in Afghanistan: Roughly one out of every four.
THE HUMAN COST:
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.
Afghan civilians: 47,245.
Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191.
Aid workers: 444.
Journalists: 72.
AFGHANISTAN AFTER NEARLY 20 YEARS OF U.S. OCCUPATION:
Percentage drop in infant mortality rate since U.S., Afghan and other allied forces overthrew the Taliban government, which had sought to restrict women and girls to the home: About 50.
Percentage of Afghan teenage girls able to read today: 37.
OVERSIGHT BY CONGRESS:
Date Congress authorized U.S. forces to go after culprits in Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Sept. 18, 2001.
Number of times U.S. lawmakers have voted to declare war in Afghanistan: 0.
ADVERTISEMENT
Number of times lawmakers on Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee addressed costs of Vietnam War, during that conflict: 42
Number of times lawmakers in same subcommittee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars, through mid-summer 2021: 5.
Number of times lawmakers on Senate Finance Committee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars since Sept. 11, 2001, through mid-summer 2021: 1.
PAYING FOR A WAR ON CREDIT, NOT IN CASH:
Amount President Harry Truman temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Korean War: 92%.
Amount President Lyndon Johnson temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Vietnam War: 77%.
Amount President George W. Bush cut tax rates for the wealthiest, rather than raise them, at outset of Afghanistan and Iraq wars: At least 8%.
Estimated amount of direct Afghanistan and Iraq war costs that the United States has debt-financed as of 2020: $2 trillion.
Estimated interest costs by 2050: Up to $6.5 trillion.
THE WARS END. THE COSTS DON’T:
Amount Bilmes estimates the United States has committed to pay in health care, disability, burial and other costs for roughly 4 million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans: more than $2 trillion.
Period those costs will peak: after 2048.
Billions spent on Afghan army ultimately benefited Taliban
By ROBERT BURN
1 of 3
Taliban fighters stand guard in front of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. Thousands of people packed into the Afghan capital's airport on Monday, rushing the tarmac and pushing onto planes in desperate attempts to flee the country after the Taliban overthrew the Western-backed government. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.
The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.
A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.
The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.
“Money can’t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,” John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.
Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.
“The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide materiel, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.”
By contrast, Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.
“If we wouldn’t have used hope as a course of action, ... we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.
Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement set the final collapse in motion.
“The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up — a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,” Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”
The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism.
Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military’s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.”
“Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,” Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: “Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”
Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners, according to Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Afghanistan war analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming.
Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.
The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.
In his book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that U.S. trainers tried to force Western ways on Afghan recruits and gave scant thought to whether U.S. taxpayers dollars were investing in a truly viable army.
“Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army’s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government,” he wrote.
___
Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant, Lorne Cook in Brussels and James LaPorta in Boca Raton, Florida, contributed to this report.
3 of 3
Pakistan soldiers check documents of travelers crossing the border to Afghanistan through a crossing point in Chaman, Pakistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. A special flight of Pakistan’s national airline PIA has arrived in Islamabad carrying 329 passengers from Kabul, and another carrying 170 people will arrive later today. A spokesman for the airline said Saturday that the airline will operate three flights tomorrow to transport Pakistanis and other nationalities looking to leave Kabul. (AP Photo/Jafar Khan)
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
1 of 3
FALL OF SAIGON, FALL OF CAMBODIA DEJA VU
Hundreds of people run alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane, some climbing on the plane, as it moves down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug.16. 2021. Thousands of Afghans have rushed onto the tarmac at the airport, some so desperate to escape the Taliban capture of their country that they held onto the American military jet as it took off and plunged to death.
(Verified UGC via AP)
At just short of 20 years, the now-ending U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan was America’s longest war. Ordinary Americans tended to forget about it, and it received measurably less oversight from Congress than the Vietnam War did. But its death toll is in the many tens of thousands. And because the U.S. borrowed most of the money to pay for it, generations of Americans will be burdened by the cost of paying it off.
Here’s a look at the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, by the numbers, as the Taliban in a lightning offensive take over much of the country before the United States’ Aug. 31 deadline for ending its combat role and as the U.S. speeds up American and Afghan evacuations.
At just short of 20 years, the now-ending U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan was America’s longest war. Ordinary Americans tended to forget about it, and it received measurably less oversight from Congress than the Vietnam War did. But its death toll is in the many tens of thousands. And because the U.S. borrowed most of the money to pay for it, generations of Americans will be burdened by the cost of paying it off.
Here’s a look at the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, by the numbers, as the Taliban in a lightning offensive take over much of the country before the United States’ Aug. 31 deadline for ending its combat role and as the U.S. speeds up American and Afghan evacuations.
Much of the data below is from Linda Bilmes of Harvard University’s Kennedy School and from the Brown University Costs of War project. Because the United States between 2003 and 2011 fought the Afghanistan and Iraq wars simultaneously, and many American troops served tours in both wars, some figures as noted cover both post-9/11 U.S. wars.
THE LONGEST WAR:
Percentage of U.S. population born since the 2001 attacks plotted by al-Qaida leaders who were sheltering in Afghanistan: Roughly one out of every four.
THE HUMAN COST:
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.
Afghan civilians: 47,245.
Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191.
Aid workers: 444.
Journalists: 72.
AFGHANISTAN AFTER NEARLY 20 YEARS OF U.S. OCCUPATION:
Percentage drop in infant mortality rate since U.S., Afghan and other allied forces overthrew the Taliban government, which had sought to restrict women and girls to the home: About 50.
Percentage of Afghan teenage girls able to read today: 37.
OVERSIGHT BY CONGRESS:
Date Congress authorized U.S. forces to go after culprits in Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Sept. 18, 2001.
Number of times U.S. lawmakers have voted to declare war in Afghanistan: 0.
ADVERTISEMENT
Number of times lawmakers on Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee addressed costs of Vietnam War, during that conflict: 42
Number of times lawmakers in same subcommittee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars, through mid-summer 2021: 5.
Number of times lawmakers on Senate Finance Committee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars since Sept. 11, 2001, through mid-summer 2021: 1.
PAYING FOR A WAR ON CREDIT, NOT IN CASH:
Amount President Harry Truman temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Korean War: 92%.
Amount President Lyndon Johnson temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Vietnam War: 77%.
Amount President George W. Bush cut tax rates for the wealthiest, rather than raise them, at outset of Afghanistan and Iraq wars: At least 8%.
Estimated amount of direct Afghanistan and Iraq war costs that the United States has debt-financed as of 2020: $2 trillion.
Estimated interest costs by 2050: Up to $6.5 trillion.
THE WARS END. THE COSTS DON’T:
Amount Bilmes estimates the United States has committed to pay in health care, disability, burial and other costs for roughly 4 million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans: more than $2 trillion.
Period those costs will peak: after 2048.
Billions spent on Afghan army ultimately benefited Taliban
By ROBERT BURN
1 of 3
Taliban fighters stand guard in front of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. Thousands of people packed into the Afghan capital's airport on Monday, rushing the tarmac and pushing onto planes in desperate attempts to flee the country after the Taliban overthrew the Western-backed government. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.
The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.
A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.
The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.
“Money can’t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,” John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.
Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.
“The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide materiel, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.”
By contrast, Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.
“If we wouldn’t have used hope as a course of action, ... we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.
Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement set the final collapse in motion.
“The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up — a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,” Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”
The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism.
Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military’s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.”
“Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,” Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: “Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”
Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners, according to Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Afghanistan war analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming.
Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.
The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.
In his book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that U.S. trainers tried to force Western ways on Afghan recruits and gave scant thought to whether U.S. taxpayers dollars were investing in a truly viable army.
“Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army’s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government,” he wrote.
___
Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant, Lorne Cook in Brussels and James LaPorta in Boca Raton, Florida, contributed to this report.
3 of 3
Pakistan soldiers check documents of travelers crossing the border to Afghanistan through a crossing point in Chaman, Pakistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. A special flight of Pakistan’s national airline PIA has arrived in Islamabad carrying 329 passengers from Kabul, and another carrying 170 people will arrive later today. A spokesman for the airline said Saturday that the airline will operate three flights tomorrow to transport Pakistanis and other nationalities looking to leave Kabul. (AP Photo/Jafar Khan)
SLIPPERY SNAKE
Afghan president was isolated before slipping into exile
By KATHY GANNON
Afghan president was isolated before slipping into exile
By KATHY GANNON
August 15, 2021
FILE - In this March 6, 2021 file photo, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, center, inspects an honor guard during the opening ceremony of the new legislative session of the Parliament, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani slipped out of his country Sunday in the same way he had led it in recent years — a lonely and isolated figure.
Ghani quietly left the sprawling presidential palace with a small coterie of confidants — and didn’t even tell other political leaders who had been negotiating a peaceful transition of power with the Taliban that he was heading for the exit.
Abdullah Abdullah, his long-time rival who had twice buried his animosity to partner with Ghani in government, said that “God will hold him accountable” for abandoning the capital.
Ghani’s destination was not immediately known. In a social media post from an unknown location, he wrote that he left to save lives. “If I had stayed, countless of my countrymen would be martyred and Kabul would face destruction and turn into ruins that could result to a human catastrophe for its six million residents” Ghani wrote.
Abdullah, as well as former President Hamid Karzai, who had beaten a path to Ghani’s door on numerous occasions to plead with him to put compromise above retaining power, were blindsided by the hasty departure. They said they had still been hoping to negotiate a peaceful transition with the Taliban, said Saad Mohseni, the owner of Afghanistan’s popular TOLO TV.
“He left them in them lurch,” he said. Earlier Sunday, Karzai had posted a message to the nation on his Facebook page, surrounded by his three daughters, to reassure Kabul residents that the leadership had a plan and was negotiating with the Taliban.
Just hours later, he discovered the presidential palace had been abandoned.
“Ghani’s inability to unite the country and his proclivity to surround himself with his cadre of Western-educated intellectuals brought Afghanistan to this point,” said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based research institute. “As Afghanistan collapsed, he refused to deal with the problems and further isolated himself from the power brokers he needed to deal with the problem, and the Afghan people as well.”
Ghani’s style of rule was often characterized as cantankerous and arrogant, rarely heeding the advice of his government and often publicly berating those who challenged him.
He was accused by ethnic minorities of championing the ethnic Pashtuns, like himself, seeing himself as a counter to the Taliban, who are mostly from the same ethnic group. He alienated other ethnic minorities and the gap between Afghanistan’s ethnic groups grew ever wider.
As he campaigned for the presidency in 2014, Ghani was taking an anger management course. It seemed to have faltered as multiple tribal elders in meetings with the president have spoken of his verbal lashings.
Ghani’s critics say his heavy-handed leadership style is to blame, to some degree, for the rapid disintegration of the Afghan army and an anti-Taliban alliance of warlords who fled or surrendered to the insurgents rather than fight for a widely unpopular president.
“His downfall was his insistence on centralizing power at all costs and a stubborn refusal to bring more people under his tent,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center. “Later on, his inability to develop a clear strategy to address the Taliban insurgency and perceptions that he was obstructing the peace process hurt him as well.”
Ghani, 72, spent most of his career overseas as a student and academic before returning to Afghanistan in 2002.
He arrived with a powerful set of economic credentials. He was attractive to the West with his World Bank background and was seen as a possible solution to Afghanistan’s crumbling and corrupt economy. He was finance minister for two years until 2004. He survived cancer.
In 2014 he fought his first presidential race. It was criticized as deeply flawed and allegations of widespread fraud threatened to destabilize the still fragile nation. Both Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah claimed victory. In the end, the United States brokered a compromise and divided power between the two men and even created a new position of chief executive.
The next election in 2019 fared the same. Again, accusations swirled of deep corruption and both Ghani and Abdullah declared themselves president. They eventually ended months of bickering and Abdullah became head of the National Reconciliation Council that was to bring Afghanistan’s warlords and political leaders together to put a united face before the Taliban.
But Ghani’s belligerent operating style undermined him again.
“He worked with a very small circle of ‘yes’ men and got filtered news about the country from them,” said Torek Farhadi, a former adviser to the Afghan government. “Others didn’t dare talk truth to him. He replaced all experienced people in the army and the government with junior people beholden to him. In a traditional country, Ghani was the guy who governed upside down.”
As the Trump administration opened negotiations with the Taliban in 2016, Ghani was asked by U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to cobble together a strong united team __ one that could conduct tough negotiations with the Taliban. Efforts quickly faltered.
In April a frustrated U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Ghani to forge a united stand. He warned the president that he had to expand his circle and be inclusive.
“Unity and inclusivity .... I believe is essential for the difficult work ahead,” Blinken wrote.
“Even with the continuation of financial assistance to your forces from the United States after an American military withdrawal, I am concerned the security situation will worsen and that the Taliban could make rapid territorial gains,” Blinken warned.
Roggio, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said there are many reasons for the government’s collapse, but “Ghani was not the man to lead Afghanistan during its darkest hour.”
FILE - In this March 6, 2021 file photo, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, center, inspects an honor guard during the opening ceremony of the new legislative session of the Parliament, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani slipped out of his country Sunday in the same way he had led it in recent years — a lonely and isolated figure.
Ghani quietly left the sprawling presidential palace with a small coterie of confidants — and didn’t even tell other political leaders who had been negotiating a peaceful transition of power with the Taliban that he was heading for the exit.
Abdullah Abdullah, his long-time rival who had twice buried his animosity to partner with Ghani in government, said that “God will hold him accountable” for abandoning the capital.
Ghani’s destination was not immediately known. In a social media post from an unknown location, he wrote that he left to save lives. “If I had stayed, countless of my countrymen would be martyred and Kabul would face destruction and turn into ruins that could result to a human catastrophe for its six million residents” Ghani wrote.
Abdullah, as well as former President Hamid Karzai, who had beaten a path to Ghani’s door on numerous occasions to plead with him to put compromise above retaining power, were blindsided by the hasty departure. They said they had still been hoping to negotiate a peaceful transition with the Taliban, said Saad Mohseni, the owner of Afghanistan’s popular TOLO TV.
“He left them in them lurch,” he said. Earlier Sunday, Karzai had posted a message to the nation on his Facebook page, surrounded by his three daughters, to reassure Kabul residents that the leadership had a plan and was negotiating with the Taliban.
Just hours later, he discovered the presidential palace had been abandoned.
“Ghani’s inability to unite the country and his proclivity to surround himself with his cadre of Western-educated intellectuals brought Afghanistan to this point,” said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based research institute. “As Afghanistan collapsed, he refused to deal with the problems and further isolated himself from the power brokers he needed to deal with the problem, and the Afghan people as well.”
Ghani’s style of rule was often characterized as cantankerous and arrogant, rarely heeding the advice of his government and often publicly berating those who challenged him.
He was accused by ethnic minorities of championing the ethnic Pashtuns, like himself, seeing himself as a counter to the Taliban, who are mostly from the same ethnic group. He alienated other ethnic minorities and the gap between Afghanistan’s ethnic groups grew ever wider.
As he campaigned for the presidency in 2014, Ghani was taking an anger management course. It seemed to have faltered as multiple tribal elders in meetings with the president have spoken of his verbal lashings.
 |
| HEY, I GOT MINE; OK |
Ghani’s critics say his heavy-handed leadership style is to blame, to some degree, for the rapid disintegration of the Afghan army and an anti-Taliban alliance of warlords who fled or surrendered to the insurgents rather than fight for a widely unpopular president.
“His downfall was his insistence on centralizing power at all costs and a stubborn refusal to bring more people under his tent,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center. “Later on, his inability to develop a clear strategy to address the Taliban insurgency and perceptions that he was obstructing the peace process hurt him as well.”
Ghani, 72, spent most of his career overseas as a student and academic before returning to Afghanistan in 2002.
He arrived with a powerful set of economic credentials. He was attractive to the West with his World Bank background and was seen as a possible solution to Afghanistan’s crumbling and corrupt economy. He was finance minister for two years until 2004. He survived cancer.
In 2014 he fought his first presidential race. It was criticized as deeply flawed and allegations of widespread fraud threatened to destabilize the still fragile nation. Both Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah claimed victory. In the end, the United States brokered a compromise and divided power between the two men and even created a new position of chief executive.
The next election in 2019 fared the same. Again, accusations swirled of deep corruption and both Ghani and Abdullah declared themselves president. They eventually ended months of bickering and Abdullah became head of the National Reconciliation Council that was to bring Afghanistan’s warlords and political leaders together to put a united face before the Taliban.
But Ghani’s belligerent operating style undermined him again.
“He worked with a very small circle of ‘yes’ men and got filtered news about the country from them,” said Torek Farhadi, a former adviser to the Afghan government. “Others didn’t dare talk truth to him. He replaced all experienced people in the army and the government with junior people beholden to him. In a traditional country, Ghani was the guy who governed upside down.”
As the Trump administration opened negotiations with the Taliban in 2016, Ghani was asked by U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to cobble together a strong united team __ one that could conduct tough negotiations with the Taliban. Efforts quickly faltered.
In April a frustrated U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Ghani to forge a united stand. He warned the president that he had to expand his circle and be inclusive.
“Unity and inclusivity .... I believe is essential for the difficult work ahead,” Blinken wrote.
“Even with the continuation of financial assistance to your forces from the United States after an American military withdrawal, I am concerned the security situation will worsen and that the Taliban could make rapid territorial gains,” Blinken warned.
Roggio, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said there are many reasons for the government’s collapse, but “Ghani was not the man to lead Afghanistan during its darkest hour.”
TRUMP HOPES NO ONE REMEMBERS HE PUSHED FOR A FULL AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL IN JUNE
The 45th president is desperately trying to rewrite his own Afghanistan history.
BY BESS LEVIN
Or that someone on his team decided to delete from his website an April statement in which he said, “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” chastising Biden for not doing it sooner than September 11.
In related news, the Republican Party, whose members have been trashing Biden around the clock and going so far as to suggest he should be removed from office via 25th Amendment, have similarly been in damage control mode.
Biden referenced the deal Trump struck with the Taliban—which the GOP hopes people will forget—in his statement over the weekend, saying: “When I came to office, 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. Therefore, when I became president, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, 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. I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”
BY BESS LEVIN
AUGUST 16, 2021
Outgoing US President Donald Trump waves as he boards Marine One at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2021.BY MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Biden administration’s decision to leave Afghanistan has become an unmitigated disaster thanks to the shocking speed with which the Taliban have taken control of the country. Obviously the situation isn’t solely the fault of Joe Biden; rather, it’s a 20-year scene in the making, started by a guy who would prefer to be associated with his painting career than with the deaths of thousands of Americans and two unending wars. As my colleague Eric Lutz noted earlier, though, it is the case that “what is happening in Afghanistan is precisely what Biden said, in no uncertain terms, would not happen,” from his insistence that the Afghan government would be able to hold the line against the Taliban to his claim that under no circumstances would we see “people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” which was almost exactly the case. Most heartbreaking, the administration had sworn it would protect Afghan nationals and other partners on the ground, but many have been left in a terrifying state of limbo.
Still, Biden’s three presidential predecessors aren’t exactly in a position to criticize. Of course, understanding why they should keep their thoughts on the matter to themselves at this time requires self-awareness—something Donald Trump was born without, hence his absurd call over the weekend for Biden to resign:
Former president Donald Trump Sunday called on President Biden to “resign in disgrace” over his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and other issues. “It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” the former president wrote in a statement.
Weirdly, Trump did not note in his statement that less than two months ago, he was bragging about how he started the Afghanistan-withdrawal process and claiming the Biden administration was powerless to stop it.
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Biden administration’s decision to leave Afghanistan has become an unmitigated disaster thanks to the shocking speed with which the Taliban have taken control of the country. Obviously the situation isn’t solely the fault of Joe Biden; rather, it’s a 20-year scene in the making, started by a guy who would prefer to be associated with his painting career than with the deaths of thousands of Americans and two unending wars. As my colleague Eric Lutz noted earlier, though, it is the case that “what is happening in Afghanistan is precisely what Biden said, in no uncertain terms, would not happen,” from his insistence that the Afghan government would be able to hold the line against the Taliban to his claim that under no circumstances would we see “people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” which was almost exactly the case. Most heartbreaking, the administration had sworn it would protect Afghan nationals and other partners on the ground, but many have been left in a terrifying state of limbo.
Still, Biden’s three presidential predecessors aren’t exactly in a position to criticize. Of course, understanding why they should keep their thoughts on the matter to themselves at this time requires self-awareness—something Donald Trump was born without, hence his absurd call over the weekend for Biden to resign:
Former president Donald Trump Sunday called on President Biden to “resign in disgrace” over his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and other issues. “It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” the former president wrote in a statement.
Weirdly, Trump did not note in his statement that less than two months ago, he was bragging about how he started the Afghanistan-withdrawal process and claiming the Biden administration was powerless to stop it.
Or that someone on his team decided to delete from his website an April statement in which he said, “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” chastising Biden for not doing it sooner than September 11.
In related news, the Republican Party, whose members have been trashing Biden around the clock and going so far as to suggest he should be removed from office via 25th Amendment, have similarly been in damage control mode.
Biden referenced the deal Trump struck with the Taliban—which the GOP hopes people will forget—in his statement over the weekend, saying: “When I came to office, 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. Therefore, when I became president, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, 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. I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”
Human remains found in landing gear of military flight from Kabul, says US Air Force
WASHINGTON (REUTERS) - The US Air Force said on Tuesday (Aug 17) that it was investigating the circumstances surrounding human remains that were found in the wheel well of one of its C-17s that flew out of Kabul amid the chaos of the Taleban taking over the Afghan capital.
Images circulated on social media earlier this week of Afghans desperate to leave Kabul rushing towards a C-17 and clinging to its side.
A separate video showed what appeared to be two people falling from a military plane as it flew out of Kabul.
In a statement, the Air Force said that a C-17 aircraft landed at Kabul’s airport on Monday and was surrounded by hundreds of Afghan civilians.
“Faced with a rapidly deteriorating security situation around the aircraft, the C-17 crew decided to depart the airfield as quickly as possible,” the statement said.
It added that the Air Force’s office of Special Investigation was reviewing information about the aircraft and the “loss of civilian lives- to include video documentation and the source of social media posts.
MEANWHILE THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE INSIDE FILLED WITH 700 REFUGEES
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