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comments, ephemera, speculation, etc. (protected political speech and personal opinion) - If this is your 1st visit to this page, please start at the bottom - 2021- 2021-08-18 g MODERNA INSANITY (Remember this article when it becomes common knowledge that mRNA spike protein gene therapy shots have gone awry.) "Moderna 1.0, and life in the caves, came to a close in 2013, according to company lore." Ego, ambition, and turmoil:
Inside one of biotech’s most secretive
startups
At first glance, Moderna Therapeutics looks like the most enviable biotech startup in the world. It has smashed fundraising records and teamed up with pharmaceutical giants as it pursues a radical plan to revolutionize medicine by transforming human cells into drug factories. But the reality is more complicated. A STAT investigation found that the company’s caustic work environment has for years driven away top talent and that behind its obsession with secrecy, there are signs Moderna has run into roadblocks with its most ambitious projects. At the center of it all is Stéphane Bancel, a first-time biotech CEO with an unwavering belief that Moderna’s science will work — and that employees who don’t “live the mission” have no place in the company. Confident and intense, Bancel told STAT that Moderna’s science is on track and, when it is finally made public, that it will meet the brash goal he himself has set: The new drugs will change the world. But interviews with more than 20 current and former employees and associates suggest Bancel has hampered progress at Moderna because of his ego, his need to assert control and his impatience with the setbacks that are an inevitable part of science. Moderna is worth more than any other private biotech in the US, and former employees said they felt that Bancel prized the company’s ever-increasing valuation, now approaching $5 billion, over its science. As he pursued a complex and risky strategy for drug development, Bancel built a culture of recrimination at Moderna, former employees said. Failed experiments have been met with reprimands and even on-the-spot firings. They recalled abusive emails, dressings down at company meetings, exceedingly long hours, and unexplained terminations. At least a dozen highly placed executives have quit in the past four years, including heads of finance, technology, manufacturing, and science. In just the past 12 months, respected leaders of Moderna’s cancer and rare disease programs both resigned, even though the company’s remarkable fundraising had put ample resources at their disposal. Each had been at the company less than 18 months, and the positions have yet to be filled. Lower-ranking employees, meanwhile, said they’ve been disappointed and confused by Moderna’s pivot to less ambitious — and less transformative — treatments. Moderna has pushed off projects meant to upend the drug industry to focus first on the less daunting (and most likely, far less lucrative) field of vaccines — though it is years behind competitors in that arena. The company has published no data supporting its vaunted technology, and it’s so secretive that some job candidates have to sign nondisclosure agreements before they come in to interview. Outside venture capitalists said Moderna has so many investors clamoring to get in that it can afford to turn away any who ask too many questions. Some small players have been given only a peek at Moderna’s data before committing millions to the company, according to people familiar with the matter. “It’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes,” said a former Moderna scientist. “They’re running an investment firm, and then hopefully it also develops a drug that’s successful.” Like many employees and former employees, the scientist requested anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement. Others would not permit their names to be published out of fear that speaking candidly about big players in the industry would hurt their job prospects down the road. Moderna just moved its first two potential treatments — both vaccines — into human trials. In keeping with the culture of secrecy, though, executives won’t say which diseases the vaccines target, and they have not listed the studies on the public federal registry, ClinicalTrials.gov. Listing is optional for Phase 1 trials, which are meant to determine if a drug is safe, but most companies voluntarily disclose their work. Investors say it’ll be worth the wait when the company finally lifts the veil. “We think that when the world does get to see Moderna, they’re going to see something far larger in its scope than anybody’s seen before,” said Peter Kolchinsky, whose RA Capital Management owns a stake in the company. Bancel, meanwhile, said he is aware of the criticism of him and has taken some steps to address it. After scathing anonymous comments about Moderna’s management began showing up online, Bancel went to Silicon Valley to get tips on employee retention from the human resources departments of Facebook, Google, and Netflix. But he makes no apologies for tumult past or present, pointing to the thousands of patients who might be saved by Moderna’s technology. “You want to be the guy who’s going to fail them? I don’t,” he said in an interview from his glassy third-floor office. “So was it an intense place? It was. And do I feel sorry about it? No.” An ambitious CEO dreams big Bancel, 44, had no experience running a drug development operation when one of biotech’s most successful venture capitalists tapped him to lead Moderna. He’d spent most of his career in sales and operations, not science. But he had made no secret of his ambition. A native of France, Bancel earned a master’s in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Harvard in 2000. As Harvard Business School classmates rushed to cash in on the dot-com boom, Bancel laid out a plan to play “chess, not checkers.” “I was always thinking, one day, somebody will have to make a decision about me getting a CEO job,” he told an audience at his alma mater in April. “… How do I make sure I’m not the bridesmaid? How do I make sure that I’m not always the person who’s almost selected but doesn’t get the role?” He went into sales and rose through the operational ranks at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, eventually leading the company’s Belgian operation. And in 2007, at just 34, he achieved his goal, stepping in as CEO of the French diagnostics firm bioMérieux, which employs roughly 6,000 people. The company improved its margins under Bancel’s tenure, and he developed a reputation as a stern manager who got results, according to an equities analyst who covered bioMérieux at the time. “He doesn’t suffer fools lightly,” the analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity to comply with company policy. “I think if you’re underperforming, you’ll probably find yourself looking for another job.” Bancel’s rise caught the eye of the biotech investment firm Flagship Ventures, based here in Cambridge. Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan repeatedly tried to entice him to take over one of the firm’s many startups, Bancel said. But he rejected one prospect after another because the startups seemed too narrow in scope. Moderna was different. The company’s core idea was seductively simple: cut out the middleman in biotech. For decades, companies have endeavored to craft better and better protein therapies, leading to new treatments for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and rare diseases. Such therapies are costly to produce and have many limitations, but they’ve given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry. The anti-inflammatory Humira, the world’s top drug at $14 billion in sales a year, is a shining example of protein therapy. Moderna’s technology promised to subvert the whole field, creating therapeutic proteins inside the body instead of in manufacturing plants. The key: harnessing messenger RNA, or mRNA. In nature, mRNA molecules function like recipe books, directing cellular machinery to make specific proteins. Moderna believes it can play that system to its advantage by using synthetic mRNA to compel cells to produce whichever proteins it chooses. In effect, the mRNA would turn cells into tiny drug factories. It’s highly risky. Big pharma companies had tried similar work and abandoned it because it’s exceedingly hard to get RNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects. But if Moderna can get it to work, the process could be used to treat scores of diseases, including cancers and rare diseases that can be death sentences for children. Bancel was intrigued. He knew it was a gamble, he told STAT, “but if I don’t do it, and it works, I’m just going to kick myself every morning.” And so he became the company’s CEO — and soon developed an almost messianic reverence for the mRNA technology. Despite having never worked with RNA before, Bancel said he sat around the table with his core team in the early days of the company, dreaming up experiments. As a result, he is listed as a co-inventor on more than 100 of Moderna’s early patent applications, unusual for a CEO who is not a PhD scientist. Though he’s been here several years now, Bancel stands out in the freewheeling startup hub of Kendall Square. He prefers tailored suits over the industry’s fleece-heavy wardrobe, and he doesn’t shy away from sweeping promises that might trouble CEOs more concerned with managing expectations. Under Bancel, Moderna has been loath to publish its work in Science or Nature, but enthusiastic to herald its potential on CNBC and CNN, taking part in segments on the world’s most disruptive companies and the potential “cure for cancer.” Bancel lays out those grand ambitions in an accent that bends his own company’s name into something more akin to the Italian city. In conversation, Bancel has a salesman’s skill of making complex concepts seem simple, but with an earnestness that keeps his spiel from feeling like a con. He peppers his speech with Silicon Valley buzzwords, many of which are scrawled on a giant whiteboard in his spacious office. Messenger RNA “is like software,” he explained: If it works in one disease, it should work for thousands. Most biotech startups focus on one or two leading drug candidates at first, pushing them through human trials before turning to another target. Moderna, by contrast, has nearly 100 projects going at once. With mRNA, “you can just turn the crank and get a lot of products going into development,” Bancel explained, flashing a smile as though he himself was bemused by the idea’s simplicity. Resignations,
dismissals, and churn
From the beginning, Bancel made clear that Moderna’s science simply had to work. And that anyone who couldn’t make it work didn’t belong. The early Moderna was a chaotic, unpredictable workplace, according to former employees. One recalls finding himself out of a job when a quick-turnaround experiment failed to pan out. Another helped train a group of new hires only to realize they were his replacements. “There was a kind of Jack Welch-ian, ‘We fire the bottom 10 percent’ from the very beginning,” said a former Moderna manager. “That’s probably the biggest HR difference between Moderna and virtually any other biotech, where they talk so much about developing their people.” Moderna went through two heads of chemistry in a single year, according to former employees, and its chief scientific officer and head of manufacturing left shortly thereafter. Those who fell out of favor with Bancel would find themselves excluded from key meetings, pushed aside until they resigned or ultimately got dismissed, employees said. Most stunning to employees was the abrupt departure of Joseph Bolen, who came aboard in 2013 to lead Moderna’s R&D efforts. Bolen was a big-name hire in biotech circles, an experienced chief scientific officer who had guided Millennium Pharmaceuticals to FDA approval for a blockbuster cancer drug. He’d been profiled in The Scientist, which dubbed him “the people’s CSO” for his ability to keep morale high and research focused. Landing him was a coup. But two years into his tenure at Moderna, he abruptly stepped down last October, making no public statement save for changing his LinkedIn status to “resigned.” “No scientist in his right mind would leave that job unless there was something wrong with the science or the personnel,” said a person close to the company at the time. Insiders said Bancel had effectively pushed Bolen out, hiring parallel executives until Bolen was in charge of just “a postage stamp” worth of territory, as one former Moderna manager put it. Bolen declined to comment. For his part, Bancel acknowledged the changes that limited Bolen’s power but insisted the parting was friendly. Bancel said he tried to convince Bolen to stay, but the scientist “voted himself off the island.” Bolen wasn’t alone. Chief Information Officer John Reynders joined in 2013 to make Moderna what he called the world’s “first fully digital biotech,” only to step down a year later. Michael Morin, brought in to lead Moderna’s scientific efforts in cancer in 2014, lasted less than 18 months. As did Greg Licholai, hired in 2015 to direct the company’s projects in rare diseases. The latter two key leadership positions remain unfilled. “You wonder,” influential biotech blogger Derek Lowe wrote last year, “if Moderna really is a rocket ship getting ready to launch and spray a formation of new drugs across the sky, then why are these people leaving?” The company has a simple explanation: Moderna lives in dog years compared with other biotechs. “We force everyone to grow with the company at unprecedented speed,” Moderna Chief Financial Officer Lorence Kim said. “Some people grow with the company; others don’t.” Bancel is sprightly in describing the company’s future, but his tone hardens on the topic of its formative years — Moderna 1.0, as he calls it. “The people in the 1.0 team who did not really live the mission ended up either leaving or being asked to leave because they were not accomplishing what we needed them to accomplish,” he said. Moderna’s internal turmoil came spilling messily into public view starting in late 2012, as more than a dozen harsh critiques popped up on Glassdoor, a website that allows a company’s employees — or anyone, for that matter — to write anonymous reviews of management and workplace culture. The posts, full of invective for company leaders, eventually came to the attention of the board. “And you’d be lying to say it didn’t affect you emotionally,” said the company’s president, Dr. Stephen Hoge, a former emergency medicine physician whose tendency for self-deprecation cuts a disarming contrast to Bancel’s intensity. “Like, what if my dad sees that?” The company sought to improve its workplace, and Hoge said the once-high turnover rate has fallen to within industry standards, though he declined to disclose specifics. Moderna — which now offers Silicon Valley-style perks like a daily catered lunch and iPhones for all employees — has roughly doubled in size each year, meaning most of the company’s current workforce of about 450 has joined since 2013. They’re spread out among three locations, and many are siloed off from top executives. Survey data from such junior employees helped vault Moderna to Science magazine’s list of top employers of 2015. Those who buy in are all in: Some employees speak with respect bordering on awe about Moderna’s promise, with one likening the technology to “magic.” The two current employees put forward by the company to talk with STAT sounded a note of pride at Moderna’s reputation for driving its staff hard. “In a way, it’s a blessing in disguise,” said Edward Miracco, a senior scientist who started at Moderna in 2014. “It separates the wheat from the chaff.” Not everyone is cut out to work at Moderna, where “things change daily, hourly,” said Dan Brock, an associate director who joined the company in February. “Everyone who comes here already kind of gets it.” But the recent departures and vacancies suggest that turmoil continues in the top ranks — those who most closely deal with upper management, including Bancel. “He believes in a bigger stick than carrot,” a former manager said. “Moderna has some growing up to do, no question about it.” A gold
rush for Moderna
Hoge, who joined the company in 2012, describes the early days of Moderna as “when we were living in the caves.” The company often had only enough cash to keep the lights on for six months at a time, he said. “The strategy was just to survive.” Moderna 1.0, and life in the caves, came to a close in 2013, according to company lore. That’s when Moderna — which had just 25 employees — signed a staggering $240 million partnership with UK pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. It was the most money pharma had ever spent on drugs that had not yet been tested in humans. The agreement is commemorated in one of Moderna’s offices by a framed clipping from the New York Times. Page B7 of the March 21, 2013 edition: “AstraZeneca Makes a Bet On an Untested Technique.” For AstraZeneca, the unprecedented deal came at a time of uncertainty. A series of clinical failures had led the firm to fire its head of research and lay off 1,600 scientists. Pascal Soriot, just six months into his tenure as CEO, was under pressure from investors to chart a new course. And Moderna, with its brash ambition to bring 100 drugs to clinical trials within a decade, gave Soriot a way forward. The rich deal started a gold rush for Moderna. Everyone, it seemed, wanted in. Before the end of 2013, Moderna would turn heads again with a $110 million investment round, followed by a high-dollar partnership with biotech giant Alexion. In early 2015, Moderna disclosed a $450 million financing round, the largest ever for a private biotech company. This month, the company broke its own record, raising another $474 million. The run-up was “biotech fervor to the extreme,” according to a venture capitalist not involved with the company, requesting anonymity to speak candidly. While bigger investors got to see all the company’s data from animal experiments, some of Moderna’s smaller investors put in funds based on just a peek, according to people familiar with the process. Moderna’s fundraising success had created a seller’s market: Why deal with the questions of one potential investor when it had 10 more lined up? Afeyan, Moderna’s chairman and cofounder, insists the company’s investors have done their homework. To say they bought in without due diligence “would be a bit of an insult to these people,” he said. Though it has yet to reveal data from a single clinical trial, Moderna is now valued at $4.7 billion, according to Pitchbook. That’s twice as much as Spark Therapeutics, the company widely expected to market the United States’ first gene therapy, which has shown signs in clinical trials that it can reverse blindness caused by a rare genetic disorder. Moderna is also worth billions more than Juno Therapeutics and Kite Pharma, startups developing novel treatments for cancer that have demonstrated promising results in early human trials. Moderna has long shaken off rumors that it is soon to market its shares on Wall Street, with Hoge likening the company to a child star: “You don’t want to go through your adolescence publicly,” he told STAT. But that’s about to change. Moderna’s next planned step is an initial public offering, according to a person close to the company. Bancel declined to say just when Moderna might go public, but the company has already prepared: In its latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Moderna changed its business structure from an LLC to a C corporation, completing a necessary step before mounting an IPO. A
strategic shift to less ambitious
targets
With a public listing come required disclosures, and many are eager to see what Moderna’s been keeping under wraps all these years. Outsiders and competitors, looking only at Moderna’s public statements, have noted a shift in strategy that might signal undisclosed setbacks. From the start, Moderna heralded its ability to produce proteins within cells, which could open up a world of therapeutic targets unreachable by conventional drugs. The most revolutionary treatments, which could challenge the multibillion-dollar market for protein therapy, would involve repeated doses of mRNA over many years, so a patient’s body continued to produce proteins to keep disease at bay. But Moderna’s first human trials aren’t so ambitious, focusing instead on the crowded field of vaccines, where the company has only been working since 2014. First are the two vaccine trials for undisclosed infectious diseases. Coming next is a one-time treatment for heart failure, developed in partnership with AstraZeneca, followed by another experimental vaccine, for Zika virus, which several other pharma companies are also working to develop. And after that, Moderna is planning a human trial of a personalized cancer vaccine using mRNA, something it just came up with last year. The choice to prioritize vaccines came as a disappointment to many in the company, according to a former manager. The plan had been to radically disrupt the biotech industry, the manager said, so “why would you start with a clinical program that has very limited upside and lots of competition?” The answer could be the challenge of ensuring drug safety, outsiders said. Delivery — actually getting RNA into cells — has long bedeviled the whole field. On their own, RNA molecules have a hard time reaching their targets. They work better if they’re wrapped up in a delivery mechanism, such as nanoparticles made of lipids. But those nanoparticles can lead to dangerous side effects, especially if a patient has to take repeated doses over months or years. Novartis abandoned the related realm of RNA interference over concerns about toxicity, as did Merck and Roche. [Editor's Note: However, Uncle Sam grants vaccine makers total immunity.] Moderna’s most advanced competitors, CureVac and BioNTech, have acknowledged the same challenge with mRNA. Each is principally focused on vaccines for infectious disease and cancer, which the companies believe can be attacked with just a few doses of mRNA. And each has already tested its technology on hundreds of patients. “I would say that mRNA is better suited for diseases where treatment for short duration is sufficiently curative, so the toxicities caused by delivery materials are less likely to occur,” said Katalin Karikó, a pioneer in the field who serves as a vice president at BioNTech. That makes vaccines the lowest hanging fruit in mRNA, said Franz-Werner Haas, CureVac’s chief corporate officer. “From our point of view, it’s obvious why [Moderna] started there,” he said. Moderna said it prioritized vaccines because they presented the fastest path to human trials, not because of setbacks with other projects. “The notion that [Moderna] ran into difficulties isn’t borne in reality,” said Afeyan. But this is where Moderna’s secrecy comes into play: Until there’s published data, only the company and its partners know what the data show. Everyone outside is left guessing — and, in some cases, worrying that Moderna won’t live up to its hype. “Frankly, I hope that there’s real substance and I hope they solve those challenges, because it’s not going to be good for the broader biotech industry in general if this thing implodes,” said one investor not involved with Moderna. And it could still go either way, former employees said. If Moderna’s promises come to fruition, it could be a pillar of the biotech industry. If they don’t, it could find a place among a short list of companies that have cast a shadow over the entire industry and left investors disillusioned. “Either we’ll be talking about it as the next Genentech,” a former Moderna manager said, “or we’ll think, ‘Well, back then, first there was Turing, then there was Valeant, and then there was Moderna.” Enough
cash to absorb some setbacks
Moderna’s management and its investors are keeping the faith, pointing to the company’s pipeline of 11 drug candidates and more than 90 preclinical projects. And with Moderna’s huge cash reserves — estimated at $1.5 billion — it can afford a few setbacks, proponents said. The company said it’s pouring money into its manufacturing operation, planning to spend $100 million this year on a new plant. Moderna has pioneered an automated system modeled on the software Tesla uses to manage orders, Bancel said: Scientists simply enter the protein they want a cell to express, and testable mRNA arrives within weeks. “If we have a bump in the road in the clinic, we will not have to wait years to go back to the drawing board,” Bancel said. That has always been part of the plan, former employees said, pointing to Bancel’s fascination with the tech industry. Uber and Amazon were not the first to come up with their respective business ideas, but they were the ones that built enough scale to ward off competition. And Moderna is positioning itself to do the same in mRNA. “Now, as we’re going to human [trials], it’s pretty clear no one else is going to catch us,” said Dr. Kenneth Chien, a professor at Karolinska Institutet working with Moderna and AstraZeneca. Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, promises that the company will soon break its silence on the publishing front. He said next year Moderna will disclose the animal data that helped get its two vaccines into the clinic. The company has also committed to publishing full results from all of its human trials, starting with the vaccine studies next year. Moderna’s reticence to share data earlier is “not because we decided to be secret,” Zaks said. “This is the natural evolution of a platform. As we go into the clinic, we will be very transparent.” For all the tumult at Moderna these past few years, Bancel said the company remains true to its mission statement: “Deliver on the promise of mRNA science to create a new generation of transformative medicines for patients.” The message, which adorns the walls of Moderna’s offices, was first to be printed on posters, but Bancel insisted it be inscribed in paint. “Because that,” he said, pointing to the first word, “is not ever going to change.” (read more) 2021-08-18 f KIWI INSANITY (Ardern the Autocrat exemplifies the Safety Cult on steroids.) New Zealand is on nationwide lockdown due to 1 single case of COVID-19 “Don’t talk to your
neighbors. Please, keep to your bubbles,” Prime
Minister Jacinda Ardern — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) August 18, 2021 See also: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/virus-free-new-zealand-investigating-new-community-covid-19-case-2021-08-17/ 2021-08-18 e CENSORSHIP INSANITY (Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, comes out of his cave to scold Facebook censors.) The
Taliban spokesman just criticized Facebook for
censorship in a public press conference. — Nahal Toosi (@nahaltoosi) August 17, 2021 *The Taliban spokesman
got a question about freedom of speech and he said
the question
should be asked to US companies like Facebook who claim to promote it while still censoring pic.twitter.com/woXd5RRCWK — Liam McCollum (@MLiamMcCollum) August 17, 2021 2021-08-18 d STATE DEPARTMENT INSANITY (Idiotic Biden appointee comes out of his cave to scold un-Woke Taliban that behead homosexuals and throw stones at adulterers.) The State Department calls on the Taliban to form an “inclusive and representative government.” This is not a Babylon Bee skit. It’s a real thing that just happened. — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 16, 2021 * The month
of June is recognized as (LGBTI) Pride Month. The
United States respects — U.S. Embassy Kabul (@USEmbassyKabul) June 2, 2021 2021-08-18 c MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-CONGRESSIONAL INSANITY (This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IV, Number 2 (Summer 2020): 107–17.) Data-Driven Defeat:
Information versus Interests in Afghanistan
In the Spring of 2012, my battalion arrived in western Afghanistan as the Obama troop surge, meant to break the Taliban, drew to a close. The Taliban remained unbroken, but our new mission was training and assisting the Afghan security forces. Like all supposed changes in policy for Afghanistan, this one amounted to less than advertised. Our “train-and-assist” phase of the war coexisted with a decade of nation-building programs, counter-terrorist operations, ongoing counterinsurgency efforts, and assorted other State Department and government-backed nonprofit initiatives—which, together, pulled in many directions and arrived nowhere. The state of confusion ate at me for months until, finally, I had a eureka moment when we started getting orders to locate equipment left behind by other units and pack it off to shipping yards. Then I understood: the generals’ metrics of success for the Afghan security forces we were assigned to train were only aspirational. The Afghans would never meet them; that was why we were leaving. In the meantime, we could buy a bit of time and space assisting our Afghan partners while doing some cleanup before the inevitable transition of authority set the stage for the final exit. Not long after that realization, our deployment was cut short, and our battalion loaded up again on C-17s and flew back to the states. I got home in the fall of 2012, believing that the war was in its final days. Standard accounts of America’s longest war simply cannot explain why it still continues in its eighteenth year. More than 2,300 American service members have lost their lives in Afghanistan, and over 20,000 have been wounded there. An estimated 65,000 Afghan soldiers and police, and thirty thousand civilians, have been killed since 2001. The United States has spent nearly a trillion dollars on the war with few concrete accomplishments to show for it. The Taliban controls more of the country today than it did a decade ago, despite enormous investments in Afghanistan’s security forces. Clearly, more U.S. backing is not the secret ingredient that will turn the Afghan military into an effective proxy for American interests. And if the war is only a cover for policy directed at another regional threat, like Pakistan’s nuclear program, then why have we invested so much on road networks, women’s empowerment programs, and educational initiatives in Afghanistan? Where official explanations broke down, the Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers,” published last December, suggested an alternative theory of the war. In a series of articles based on previously unseen transcripts of closed-door interviews with key decision makers, numerous U.S. officials privately acknowledged believing that the war was unwinnable. “Your job was not to win; it was to not lose,” one former member of the National Security Council staff said in 2014. Numerous officials described how the war’s all-important “metrics” of success were systematically falsified. The Afghanistan Papers are damning, but they don’t substantively alter the picture of the war available from the public record. Evidence of fraud, deception, and waste has been trickling out steadily for more than a decade—much of it in reports from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the government watchdog group that the Post had to sue in order to gain access to the interview transcripts that form the core of the Afghanistan Papers. The Papers’ greatest value is to provide an impressionistic portrait of the generational worldview and shaping illusions of an American elite—Democrats and Republicans alike on both sides of the civilian-military divide—who responded to a long public record of defeats, blunders and missed opportunities in Afghanistan by doubling down. In an interview with SIGAR, a retired Navy SEAL who served in the White House under both Bush and Obama reflected, “collectively the system is incapable of taking a step back to question basic assumptions.” That “system” is best understood, not simply as a military or foreign policy body, but as a euphemism for the habits and institutions of an American ruling class that has exhibited an almost limitless collective capacity for deflecting the costs of failure. This class in general, and the people in charge of the war in Afghanistan in particular, believed in informational and management solutions to existential problems. They elevated data points and statistical indices to avoid choosing prudent goals and organizing the proper strategies to achieve them. They believed in their own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures. They believed that generating a vast machinery of lethal power, surveillance, and administration to impose order in places far outside the United States was better than devising means to manage instability in a way that would protect America’s direct interests. Many did not believe in American interests at all, a formulation that thinking people of both parties found crude and sinister through both the Bush and Obama years. Consequently, liberals and conservatives alike believed, until very recently, in defining the resolution of an American war in terms of the conditions of civil society in Afghanistan. They believed that classical concepts like beginning and end, victory and defeat, were obsolete and no longer governed the modern world. They mistook war as a matter of process, when its nature is ruled by paradox. Means versus Ends
“We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave. Help!” wrote Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, in a memo to his staff unearthed by the Washington Post. Those were the days when America was winning the war with a smart combination of air power and special operations. Yet the seeds of protracted failure were already planted. Was Rumsfeld prescient? Only if he can be credited for predicting the outcomes that his own administration’s policies made inevitable. Conditioning the end of the war on a vague state of stability in Afghan society was not a strategy to achieve a victory that restores peace—the classical aim of warfare—it was the avoidance of a strategy, a stalling tactic in what was confidently designed to be a long war until a deus ex machina answered the defense secretary’s plea for there to be “something going on.” From the outset, the war’s leaders, already distracted by the planned invasion of Iraq, advanced the idea that the internal stability of Afghanistan was essential to American security. A stable country, they reasoned, was one where al-Qaeda would not be able to launch attacks on America. Perhaps, but while many countries are unstable, only a minuscule number have provided a base for international jihadist plots. Furthermore, they measured stability not only by an absence of violence, or a rough equilibrium of countervailing power, but by advances in forms of governance and social arrangements imported from the United States. American policy after the invasion amounted to a forced modernization. It attempted to leverage local elites to create a government in Kabul capable of administering state services over the patchwork of ethnic and tribal formations through which Afghans form their real substate identities. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan,” said three-star Army general Douglas Lute in 2015. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” By necessity, then, most of the lies told about Afghanistan involved self-deceit. In another Rumsfeld memo from 2003, the defense secretary wrote, “Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.” It would have been more accurate to say that Bush, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the war’s strategic planners lacked the wisdom and political will to enunciate a theory of winning aside from the continued expansion of the multiagency apparatus of the “war on terror.” In the absence of such a policy and the strategy to support it, there was a constant, desperate search for more data and raw information to fuel the administrative apparatus. In 2006, as he was preparing to leave his post, Rumsfeld reflected on the state of the war. “During the active combat or conventional phase of any war, there are clear signs of progress: battles won, key strategic points taken, enemy forces captured or killed,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. “In the post-battle phase, however, the measure of progress is not as clear.” Despite the lack of clarity, he identified an ambitious goal: “Success requires a strong and capable Afghan government that can provide services and opportunities for all its people.” Rumsfeld, a vocal and, in his own mind, sincere opponent of nation-building who once reportedly threatened to fire anyone who made such plans for Iraq, was aware of the challenges: “Building a new nation is never a straight, steady climb upward,” he remarked. Pursuing nebulous, open-ended concepts like stability in the course of “building a new nation” in Afghanistan proved a poor substitute for older ideas like victory. It did, however, create a lot of jobs through an expanding military-government-corporate-NGO administrative complex that employed many tens of thousands of people whose best intentions, funded out of the war’s trillion-dollar budget, blurred the natural borders of warfare and contributed to a state of indefinite imperial occupation. This was the war the Obama administration inherited. The initial military campaign had forced most of al-Qaeda’s operations, along with much of the Taliban’s leadership, over the border into Pakistan’s loosely governed western frontier. There, the Taliban had used its haven in Pakistan—along with material support and guidance from the Pakistani ISI intelligence service—to create a shadow government, the Quetta Shura, and reconstitute its power. In 2006, the resurgent Taliban launched an offensive that recaptured much of Afghanistan’s Pashtun heartland in the country’s south and along its eastern border with Pakistan. The limits of Taliban control also marked out the ethnic dimensions of the conflict. “Devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan,” as one general put it, America played blind kingmaker in Afghanistan’s fractious civil war. Already at this stage, it was clear that any war against the Taliban also involved a complicated game of indirect conflict with Pakistan, our nominal ally, whose government and military we subsidized as insurance against their nuclear program, and so they would keep a lid on the Taliban, our enemy, whom they funded. While the United States attempted to build up an independent government, and made ending the war dependent on Kabul’s ability to effectively block a Taliban takeover of the country, Pakistan continually sought to undermine the Afghan state. Pakistani policy reflected the country’s central security rivalry with India. An American-sponsored government in Kabul that was not explicitly aligned with Islamabad created the potential for an Indian sphere of influence on Pakistan’s doorstep—an existential risk in the view of Pakistan’s military and political leaders. The Obama people looked with understandable horror at what the Bush administration had wrought across the Middle East and vowed to do the opposite. Where Bush focused on Iraq and allowed Afghanistan to deteriorate, Obama campaigned on pulling American forces out of Iraq while recommitting them to what he cast as the good, necessary war in Afghanistan. Almost immediately after taking office, President Obama sent an additional seventeen thousand troops to Afghanistan. By the end of 2009, after a long period of strategic review, and following the putative success of the surge in Iraq, Obama approved a similar policy for Afghanistan. He committed another thirty thousand soldiers for a new counterinsurgency campaign, bringing the total number of troops in the country to around a hundred thousand. The surge aimed to deprive the Taliban of its strongholds, and sufficiently weaken the group so that the Afghan government and security forces, financed and trained by America, could take over responsibility and finally ensure stability. It was, in every essential sense, a continuation of the same national security and foreign policy doctrines that had governed the Bush era. Crucially, it upheld the reliance on internal conditions in Afghanistan as the criteria for American success, while mandating deadlines for the withdrawal of American forces. “Going forward we will not blindly stay the course. Instead, we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable,” Obama said, announcing his new Afghan strategy in 2009. Of course, the metrics were better for signifying progress than for measuring it. “There was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary,” recalls a National Security Council official quoted by the Post. “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Army colonel and senior counterinsurgency adviser Bob Crowley in a 2016 interview with SIGAR. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.” Surveys and data points are the language of corporate managers and educated professionals. They can be useful when treated instrumentally to answer questions with clear parameters, but when they creep into higher-level thinking as ends in themselves, it indicates the absence of real purpose. “Metrics” were a hallmark of the war in Vietnam. In that war, the search for quantifiable ways to measure progress in a struggle aimed at hearts and minds settled on kill counts and reflected a counterinsurgency cut off from a sound strategy. The Afghanistan war accelerated the development of state-of-the-art digital systems of technocratic management. Data analytics tools at the fingertips of anyone with access to an operations center or situation room seemed to promise the imminent convergence of map and territory. U.S. forces could measure thousands of different things that we couldn’t understand. To compensate for the lack of understanding, we measured them down to ever finer degrees and displayed them in high-speed heat maps and other cutting-edge infographics. In an update to Vietnam, the metrics of the new digital platforms were combined with the pseudo-sophistication of Human Terrain Teams and other departments in the military’s expanding school of social science. Attempting to bring the insights of anthropology and sociology to bear on the war, these programs tended to miss the forest for the trees in an environment already drowning in information but lacking the ordering clarity of judicious goals. The result was a thoroughly opaque and fraudulent decision-making matrix that obscured the obvious gap between U.S. policies and Afghan realities. It’s a difficult and intensive process to train a foreign military, but it can be a valuable investment if the foreign force’s self-determined goals align with America’s strategic objectives. We had far more ambitious designs for Afghanistan. Our train-and-assist models were ostensibly intended to provide a specific set of skills and logistical needs, but to succeed they required the Afghans to internalize America’s desires and strategic ends as their own. The Blob
The catastrophic illusions of the Bush era about America’s role as a transformative agent of world-historical progress led directly to the brain-melting arrogance of the Obama foreign policy clique, who railed against a national security establishment “blob” from which they were inseparable—nowhere more so than in Afghanistan. The blob was not just Bush and the dreaded neocons. It was larger, even, than the overlapping consensus that unites establishment Republicans and liberal interventionists. What the Obama people called the blob—a cliquish world of D.C. policy wonks, think tankers, staffers, journalists, and political flacks, who had first championed the Iraq war and then, as it collapsed, closed ranks to ensure that no one could be held accountable for its failure—was not just a creature of bad ideas about politics and national security. It reflected deeper trans‑partisan assumptions about who had a right to rule in America and by what means. The blob was a self-protecting vehicle for the ambitions of an American ruling class cut off from the consequences of its own policies, whether it came to wars or decades of offshoring‑driven wage stagnation on behalf of woke capital. Evidence of failure often led to bitter intra-class recriminations along partisan lines, but it did not shake the broadly shared faith in this class’s right to rule by grand design. A theological substrate in American foreign policy unites nominal enemies like the Bush and Obama administrations in their shared belief in America’s calling to redeem the world. Bush’s early speeches to the Muslim world and Obama’s famous “Cairo Address” form a single contrapuntal arrangement. Just as Bush offered reassurances about the true nature of Islam and his faith that “the peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation,” Obama promised the world a new beginning and pledged the “President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear [even if they were true].” Strategic confusion was inherent in the Bush era rhetoric about an indefinite “post-battle” phase of war. Obama added to this by echoing an idea popular among the media and foreign policy elite that victory was an outmoded concept and no longer the aim of modern warfare. “I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to [Douglas] MacArthur,” the president told an interviewer in 2009, at the beginning of his own Afghanistan campaign. When it came to fighting a group like al-Qaeda, Obama said, success would result from “assisting the Afghan people and improving their security situation, stabilizing their government, providing help on economic development.” After initially signaling that he would end the war before leaving office, Obama instead reduced the number of American forces in Afghanistan and tightened the parameters of their mission, nominally ending their combat role. By the time he left office in 2016, around 8,400 troops remained in Afghanistan—a little less than are there now. It was a significant reduction, but not at all the same as “ending the war,” as the former president has claimed in interviews. Like his predecessor, President Trump got elected by campaigning against the legacy of the president who came before him and promised to get America out of wars in the Middle East. Afghanistan was his first real test. In January 2017, General John Nicholson, the top American commander in Afghanistan, called the war a “stalemate.” In June of that year, former Marine general James Mattis, newly appointed as Trump’s secretary of defense, told Congress, “We are not winning in Afghanistan right now.” Both Mattis and Nicholson offered their assessments as reasons for the U.S. to stay the course. “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts,” Trump said in August 2017, reportedly following the counsel of military officials like Mattis. The new Trump plan amounted to a discount copy of the Bush-Obama playbook: a mini troop surge to bring the total forces in Afghanistan to just under fifteen thousand, combined with a more aggressive air war. By 2019, however, Mattis was out as secretary of defense, a departure triggered partly by disagreements over what he viewed as Trump’s reckless efforts to extract American forces from the Middle East. In February 2019, the president floated a plan to get out of Syria and Afghanistan. Immediately, a bipartisan majority formed in Congress to oppose the move. From the Senate floor, majority leader Mitch McConnell warned of “the dangers of a precipitous withdrawal,” shoring up Congress’s two-decade-long record as a bulwark against precipitous moves in Afghanistan. McConnell’s amendment, rejecting Trump’s plan in favor of continued stalemate, passed with an easy 70–26 majority. McConnell’s demand for “diplomatic engagement and political solutions to the underlying conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan” belied his real objective—an endorsement of the [profitable] status quo [for the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex]. In fact, Trump plenipotentiaries and the president himself held repeated meetings throughout 2019 with Pakistani officials and leaders of the Taliban. “Pakistan’s going to help us out to extricate ourselves,” Trump said in July 2019, after meeting with Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. “We’re like policemen. We’re not fighting a war. If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. But I don’t want to kill ten million people. Afghanistan could be wiped off the face of the Earth. I don’t want to go that route.” After months of talks with Taliban leaders, on February 29 of this year, at a meeting in Doha, the United States signed a conditional peace deal with the Taliban. The framework agreement commits the United States to a prisoner release and a withdrawal of American forces over the next fourteen months. The terms are dependent on the Taliban’s fulfillment of its own obligations. Already there have been complications, resulting in a U.S. airstrike and threats to suspend funding to the Afghan government. But the deal is still alive for now. As soon as it was announced, Trump’s plan was met with a swift and ecumenical round of condemnations. Former Trump national security adviser[, and rabid neocon,] John Bolton declared it an “unacceptable risk” and derided it as an “Obama-style deal.” Obama’s former national security adviser Susan Rice shot back on Twitter: “Except we never agreed to a deal that excluded the Afghan Govt, subcontracted our counter-terrorism efforts to the Taliban, released 5k Taliban prisoners in exchange for 7 days of reduced violence, and sold out Afghan women. A Republican named Trump did.” The shrill partisan bickering added up to a harmonious chorus. Trump is supposed to be the reality show, pro-wrestling heel. But here were the serious people of Washington jumping off the top ropes in a bit of kayfabe while doing a tag team to discredit a plan to end the war in Afghanistan. In 2018, Rice, whose own administration chose not to end the war after two terms in office, lamented that Trump had “signed us up for an indefinite commitment” in Afghanistan. The war “will not end on the battlefield,” Rice wrote in the New York Times. “It can be resolved only at the negotiating table. So, the bold offer last month from President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan to negotiate with the Taliban ‘without preconditions’ is a welcome initiative.” But here is Rice again in March of this year, responding to the Doha agreement with another New York Times op-ed: “In the long run, the fundamental weaknesses of the U.S.-Taliban agreement will most likely endanger America’s national security and doom prospects for a just and lasting peace in Afghanistan.” She continued, “Under President Trump, the United States is widely seen to be committed to withdrawing from Afghanistan under almost any circumstances.” Just when you think that you have the blob beaten, it turns out that all along the blob was you. It is not my interest here to litigate the details of the Trump peace deal, but I offer the following observations: America must accept instability as a consequence of ending the war just as we have spent the past eighteen years accepting instability as a consequence of our decision to stay in Afghanistan. Instability is not always the worst outcome. Pakistan is the key to any peace deal, but India has a role to play as well. None of the other major stakeholders in Afghanistan—Iran, China, India, and Russia—want to see the country devolve into a level of chaos that could spill over into their borders and preclude the management of their local interests. The United States has been targeting al-Qaeda in Somalia and Yemen for many years without committing to open-ended wars in those countries. The Next Chapter
Let’s not kid ourselves: whatever the nominal terms of a deal, the United States will keep some contingent of special operations forces and intelligence assets in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. This is fine and good in the near term, as long as the chapter of the war as an open-ended commitment is drawn to a close. A broad consensus among the D.C. foreign policy establishment has held that America’s success in Afghanistan should be determined by the internal conditions of Afghan institutions. This has been a fatal mistake. American citizens have no reliable frame of reference to evaluate how incremental developments in Afghan civil society relate to their national security. Neither, for that matter, do American policymakers. The long duration of the Afghan war does not prove that it is vital to U.S. interests. It goes on sputtering at low frequency because of a misalignment between its perceived symbolism, its actual importance, and its cost, which has been unbearably high for a small percentage of Americans with direct ties to the professional military, and imperceptible to the vast majority. Stuck between a sunk-cost fallacy and this low-cost reality, no president has yet felt it necessary to end the war when it could instead be managed indefinitely. In their ancient starkness, ideas like victory and defeat provide cardinal directions to navigate through the fog of war. Without them we drift, not only due to our illusions, but because reality itself is strange and disorienting. It is not the failure to win the war in Afghanistan that has precluded its end. Paradoxically, it was the inability of the American ruling class to choose clear ends connected to the security of Americans within their own country that precluded the possibility of “winning.” Trump may be a fool, but if he ends the war in Afghanistan in the service of protecting Americans, he will be a wiser fool than the presidents who came before him. (read more) 2021-08-18 b INVASION INSANITY Getting Some Perspective on
Afghanistan after 20 Years of War
The numbers tell the story. After 20 years in Afghanistan a total of 2448 members of the U.S. military were killed in action. I know those losses are incalculable for the families who lost a son, daughter, husband or wife. But that equals the number of U.S. soldiers who died on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. Now, let’s look at how many Americans were murdered in 2019 and 2020 in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago – 2916. In other words, your son or daughter–especially if black or Latino–would have been safer in Afghanistan on military deployment than walking the streets of the three large American urban nightmares. I want to be clear that I am not questioning nor disparaging the blood, limbs and sanity that the American military veterans and their families have shed over the last 20 years in our so-called “war” in Afghanistan. There is no denying that a civil war has ravaged the mountains, valleys and deserts of Afghanistan, but the United States has not fought a sustained war. Look at the following graph. It was only during the reign of Barack Obama that our troop levels soared from 30,000 to over 100,000.  Yet, that level of military activity was not sustained. This was sold to the American public as a “counter insurgency” campaign, but we were not about “winning.” (And I am not trying to advance the argument that if only we had deployed 500,000 troops we could have “won.”) Here is the ugly truth–Afghanistan was an excuse to justify a bloated Defense Department budget and a guaranteed payday for hordes of politically connected contractors that now infest the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Because we were not fighting a real war, with the massive casualties that normally accompany such an endeavor, we could pretend we were fighting for a worthy cause but did not have to pay attention or worry about waning public support. But this half-assed approach to combat operations allowed a generation of incompetent officers to earn promotions and advance in rank. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley are prominent examples of this dysfunction. While the Austins and Milleys worked on raking in cash, the average frontline soldier and Marine suffered. While the number killed and wounded is low compared to the carnage of Vietnam or Korea or WW II, I wonder if the number of returning veterans who have wrestled with [soul-crushing guilt over atrocities they committed or] PTSD and committed suicide exceeds the total we lost in “combat” in Afghanistan. There needs to be an accounting and the leaders, both military and political, responsible for this debacle need to be judged. (read more) 2021-08-18 a BIDEN'S INSANITY USAAPAY.com EDITORIAL
AFGHAN COLLABORATORS MADE A MISTAKE Afghans who collaborated
with the U.S. invaders were not dragooned nor
pressed into service. They collaborated willingly.
They decided to accept high wages knowing there were
risks. Some Afghan collaborators have been killed
because of their decisions.
We accept risks every day. Despite the bleatings of the Safety Cult, not all risks can be eliminated or mitigated. Americans are not responsible for the decisions made by Afghan collaborators. They have received their inflated salaries. They deserve no other reward. It is immoral and even criminal to flood the U.S.A. with Afghan collaborators at a time of high unemployment and under-employment. The needs of Americans must come first. America has no more room for "refugees" who made bad decisions. Again, American taxpayers are not responsible. The Afghan collaborators should have stayed to defend their country. They are running like cowards. The Afghan collaborators and the Afghan Army had superior weapons and training. They outnumbered the ragtag Taliban. They folded like a cheap chair. As a "severance package," Afghan collaborators could be flown to Dubai or Qatar, given a hotel room for one month, thanked for their service and left to their own devices. That is more than they deserve. America must not make room for cowards who did not defend their country. * We are not
obligated to take 80,000 refugees into *our* country
just because they fought — Tim Swain (@SwainForSenate) August 17, 2021 *800 people evacuated and only 165 of them were Americans? Not one Afghan should be
coming to America. They should stay in region. — Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) August 17, 2021 2021-08-17 f THIS IS NOT A LIE President
Trump On Hannity Tonight: “It was a horrible
decision going into the Middle East. — The Columbia Bugle (@ColumbiaBugle) August 18, 2021 2021-08-17 e HERE LIES AN AMERICAN CITIZEN ABANDONED BY HIS GOVERNMENT Biden
Administration spokesman John Kirby told CNN this
morning that the — House Republicans (@HouseGOP) August 17, 2021 *A
congressional aide tells @CBSNews we have no partners
left in Afghanistan to — Sara Cook (@saraecook) August 17, 2021 2021-08-17 d DID THE FBI LIE? In the Governor Whitmer kidnapping case – Here is the text message
from an FBI Agent to their informant telling him to
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) August 17, 2021 2021-08-17 c BIG CLIMATE LIES relative
quantities of greenhouse gases
 water vapor is
95% of atmospheric greenhouse gasescarbon dioxide is 3.6% of atmospheric greenhouse gases nitrous oxide is 0.9% of atmospheric greenhouse gases methane is 0.3% of atmospheric greenhouse gases aerosols are about 0.07% of atmospheric greenhouse gases approximately 0.9% of CO2 (carbon dioxide) is caused by human activity CO2 (carbon dioxide) is 1/25th of one percent of the total atmosphere So, why exactly must we reduce CO2 emissions? Please show me the science. 2021-08-17 b BIG LIES Editor's Note: 1. Every American life or limb lost in Afghanistan was wasted; utterly wasted. 2. From now on, we the people are fully justified to call every major, colonel or general who served in Afghanistan a liar. Sure, some of them told us in private what was really going on, but they lied in public. They are NOT honorable men. 3. Why would anyone ever again volunteer to join the U.S. military? The U.S. Government Lied For
Two Decades About Afghanistan
Using the same deceitful tactics they pioneered in Vietnam, U.S. political and military officials repeatedly misled the country about the prospects for success in Afghanistan. “The Taliban regime is coming to an end,” announced President George W. Bush at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on December 12, 2001 — almost twenty years ago today. Five months later, Bush vowed: “In the United States of America, the terrorists have chosen a foe unlike they have faced before. . . . We will stay until the mission is done.” Four years after that, in August of 2006, Bush announced: “Al Qaeda and the Taliban lost a coveted base in Afghanistan and they know they will never reclaim it when democracy succeeds. . . . The days of the Taliban are over. The future of Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan.” For two decades, the message Americans heard from their political and military leaders about the country’s longest war was the same. America is winning. The Taliban is on the verge of permanent obliteration. The U.S. is fortifying the Afghan security forces, which are close to being able to stand on their own and defend the government and the country. Just five weeks ago, on July 8, President Biden stood in the East Room of the White House and insisted that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was not inevitable because, while their willingness to do so might be in doubt, “the Afghan government and leadership . . . clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.” Biden then vehemently denied the accuracy of a reporter’s assertion that “your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.” Biden snapped: “That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.” Biden continued his assurances by insisting that “the likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely.” He went further: “the likelihood that there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” And then, in an exchange that will likely assume historic importance in terms of its sheer falsity from a presidential podium, Biden issued this decree: Q. Mr.
President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of
their experience in this withdrawal in
Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels
between this withdrawal and what happened in
Vietnam, with some people feeling —
THE PRESIDENT: None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken. The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable. When asked about the Taliban being stronger than ever after twenty years of U.S. warfare there, Biden claimed: “Relative to the training and capacity of the [Afghan National Security Forces} and the training of the federal police, they’re not even close in terms of their capacity.” On July 21 — just three weeks ago — Gen. Mark Milley, Biden’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded that “there’s a possibility of a complete Taliban takeover, or the possibility of any number of other scenario,” yet insisted: “the Afghan Security Forces have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country.” Similar assurances have been given by the U.S. Government and military leadership to the American people since the start of the war. “Are we losing this war?,” Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, asked rhetorically in a news briefing from Afghanistan in 2008, answering it this way: “Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way.” On September 4, 2013, then-Lt. Gen. Milley — now Biden’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — complained that the media was not giving enough credit to the progress they had made in building up the Afghan national security forces: “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Gen. Milley insisted. None of this was true. It was always a lie, designed first to justify the U.S’s endless occupation of that country and, then, once the U.S. was poised to withdraw, to concoct a pleasing fairy tale about why the prior twenty years were not, at best, an utter waste. That these claims were false cannot be reasonably disputed as the world watches the Taliban take over all of Afghanistan as if the vaunted “Afghan national security forces” were china dolls using paper weapons. But how do we know that these statements made over the course of two decades were actual lies rather than just wildly wrong claims delivered with sincerity? To begin with, we have seen these tactics from U.S. officials — lying to the American public about wars to justify both their initiation and continuation — over and over. The Vietnam War, like the Iraq War, was begun with a complete fabrication disseminated by the intelligence community and endorsed by corporate media outlets: that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. In 2011, President Obama, who ultimately ignored a Congressional vote against authorization of his involvement in the war in Libya to topple Muammar Qaddafi, justified the NATO war by denying that regime change was the goal: “our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives . . . broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” Even as Obama issued those false assurances, The New York Times reported that “the American military has been carrying out an expansive and increasingly potent air campaign to compel the Libyan Army to turn against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.” Just as they did for the war in Afghanistan, U.S. political and military leaders lied for years to the American public about the prospects for winning in Vietnam. On June 13, 1971, The New York Times published reports about thousands of pages of top secret documents from military planners that came to be known as “The Pentagon Papers.” Provided by former RAND official Daniel Ellsberg, who said he could not in good conscience allow official lies about the Vietnam War to continue, the documents revealed that U.S. officials in secret were far more pessimistic about the prospects for defeating the North Vietnamese than their boastful public statements suggested. In 2021, The New York Times recalled some of the lies that were demonstrated by that archive on the 50th Anniversary of its publication: Brandishing a captured
Chinese machine gun, Secretary of Defense Robert
S. McNamara appeared at a televised news
conference in the spring of 1965. The United
States had just sent its first combat troops to
South Vietnam, and the new push, he boasted, was
further wearing down the beleaguered Vietcong.
“In the past four and one-half years, the Vietcong, the Communists, have lost 89,000 men,” he said. “You can see the heavy drain.” That was a lie. From confidential reports, McNamara knew the situation was “bad and deteriorating” in the South. “The VC have the initiative,” the information said. “Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers.” Lies like McNamara’s were the rule, not the exception, throughout America’s involvement in Vietnam. The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press. The real story might have remained unknown if, in 1967, McNamara had not commissioned a secret history based on classified documents — which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. By then, he knew that even with nearly 500,000 U.S. troops in theater, the war was at a stalemate. The pattern of lying was virtually identical throughout several administrations when it came to Afghanistan. In 2019, The Washington Post — obviously with a nod to the Pentagon Papers — published a report about secret documents it dubbed “The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war.” Under the headline “AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH,” The Post summarized its findings: “U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.” They explained: Year
after year, U.S. generals have said in public they
are making steady progress on the central plank of
their strategy: to train a robust Afghan army and
national police force that can defend the country
without foreign help.
In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.” None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable. As the Post explained, “the documents contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.” Those documents dispel any doubt about whether these falsehoods were intentional: Several of those
interviewed described explicit and sustained
efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately
mislead the public. They said it was common at
military headquarters in Kabul — and at the
White House — to distort statistics to make it
appear the United States was winning the war
when that was not the case.
“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.” John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.” Last month, the independent journalist Michael Tracey, writing at Substack, interviewed a U.S. veteran of the war in Afghanistan. The former soldier, whose job was to work in training programs for the Afghan police and also participated in training briefings for the Afghan military, described in detail why the program to train Afghan security forces was such an obvious failure and even a farce. “I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment,” he said. In sum, “as far as the US military presence there — I just viewed it as a big money funneling operation”: an endless money pit for U.S. security contractors and Afghan warlords, all of whom knew that no real progress was being made, just sucking up as much U.S. taxpayer money as they could before the inevitable withdraw and takeover by the Taliban. In light of all this, it is simply inconceivable that Biden’s false statements last month about the readiness of the Afghan military and police force were anything but intentional. That is particularly true given how heavily the U.S. had Afghanistan under every conceivable kind of electronic surveillance for more than a decade. A significant portion of the archive provided to me by Edward Snowden detailed the extensive surveillance the NSA had imposed on all of Afghanistan. In accordance with the guidelines he required, we never published most of those documents about U.S. surveillance in Afghanistan on the ground that it could endanger people without adding to the public interest, but some of the reporting gave a glimpse into just how comprehensively monitored the country was by U.S. security services. In 2014, I reported along with Laura Poitras and another journalist that the NSA had developed the capacity, under the codenamed SOMALGET, that empowered them to be “secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation” in at least five countries. At any time, they could listen to the stored conversations of any calls conducted by cell phone throughout the entire country. Though we published the names of four countries in which the program had been implemented, we withheld, after extensive internal debate at The Intercept, the identity of the fifth — Afghanistan — because the NSA had convinced some editors that publishing it would enable the Taliban to know where the program was located and it could endanger the lives of the military and private-sector employees working on it (in general, at Snowden’s request, we withheld publication of documents about NSA activities in active war zones unless they revealed illegality or other deceit). But WikiLeaks subsequently revealed, accurately, that the one country whose identity we withheld where this program was implemented was Afghanistan. There was virtually nothing that could happen in Afghanistan without the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge. There is simply no way that they got everything so completely wrong while innocently and sincerely trying to tell Americans the truth about what was happening there. In sum, U.S. political and military leaders have been lying to the American public for two decades about the prospects for success in Afghanistan generally, and the strength and capacity of the Afghan security forces in particular — up through five weeks ago when Biden angrily dismissed the notion that U.S. withdrawal would result in a quick and complete Taliban takeover. Numerous documents, largely ignored by the public, proved that U.S. officials knew what they were saying was false — just as happened so many times in prior wars — and even deliberately doctored information to enable their lies. Any residual doubt about the falsity of those two decades of optimistic claims has been obliterated by the easy and lightning-fast blitzkrieg whereby the Taliban took back control of Afghanistan as if the vaunted Afghan military did not even exist, as if it were August, 2001 all over again. It is vital not just to take note of how easily and frequently U.S. leaders lie to the public about its wars, once those lies are revealed at the end of those wars, but also to remember this vital lesson the next time U.S. leaders propose a new war using the same tactics of manipulation, lies, and deceit. (read more) Reader Comment: In my deployments to Afghanistan, the
uselessness of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the
Afghan National Police (ANP) was broadly known - it
was an in the open secret. The ANA were buffoonish,
more closely identified with Keystone Cops then as a
classic military organization. Organizing them was
like herding cats. Posting them on perimeter would
have them watching out for about three minutes before
they’d look inside to see what we were doing. And the
ANP were corrupt as well, possibly more useless, if
it’s possible, then the ANA. The one organization that
performed were the ANSF. Those guys were serious. But
so few.
Bottom line, everyone, right down to privates in the army knew that what we’re seeing now was inevitable, 10, 20, 50 or 100 years of occupation and training didn’t matter. It was and has always been a playground for up and coming generals to earn their bones and their next position. I mean, what sort of officer hasn’t commanded men in combat, right? Can’t be the next Patton if you don’t have a war. They all knew. Milley knew for sure because he’s detestable, more so then most generals, a very small minority of which are actually dedicated to the art of war instead of self aggrandizement. It’s all coming to head now. The Taliban's super fast takeover is surprising, but not by that much. The house of cards that the elites have built are all falling down. Trump, was elected and even if you rightly claim he was a turd, his administration looks as well run as FDRs in WWII compared to eight months of Biden’s dream team of heavily credentialed morons. Didn’t Milley say that our biggest threat was climate change? Good thing that asshat had his eye on the ball, right? COVID, Climate Change, Afghanistan, the border, have all exposed our pedigreed elites as likely the most incompetent boobs on this great earth. Dare I say we could randomly pick from the whole of the adult population regular folks that would do much better. But you wouldn’t know it because the media is acting as the arm of government and SM ensures that the Tik Tok generation stays focused on practicing tomorrow’s dance moves - as someone said here on Substack - LARPING their way through life. When ol' Ike Eisenhower left office he read a speech to the poker and warned us all about the power the government was about to create to fight the Soviets. He warned us then, in 1961, that there was a good chance the bureaucracy, science, and private industries would grow so powerful as to supplant civilian control of government. Indeed, Ike. Indeed. 2021-08-17 a "The less people know,
the more stubbornly they know it."
— Osho 2021-08-16 f HOW POTEMKIN REGIMES COLLAPSE III As only the San
Francisco columnist Arthur Hoppe has pointed
out, this dissolution of States also confirms
the insight of political theorists from Étienne
de La Boétie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises
that, in the final analysis, all States, whether
"democratic" or dictatorial, rest for their
continued existence on the majority support of
their subjects. Once that support is finally
destroyed, the State—seemingly mighty and
all-powerful only weeks before—disintegrates and
dies.
—Murray Rothbard, Viewpoint: The Death of a State 2021-08-16 e HOW POTEMKIN REGIMES COLLAPSE II Strange
Days Ahead
I guess we had to find out the hard way that Afghanistan is not like Nebraska. Let others be cruel about it (and there’s plenty of that right now, elsewhere). The last ostensible hegemon who tried occupying the place before us was the Soviet Union, which discovered painfully that Afghanistan was not much like its Kemerovo Oblast, either, and shortly after it withdrew its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union commenced to collapse — which prompts one to wonder: How much is the USA of 2021 like the Soviet Union of those years? Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise — e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.” The USA is running on fumes economically as the Soviets were. Our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy. Is it our turn to collapse? Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of signal weakness. No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well? I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken! Of course, the domestic situation in our land has not been so fraught and overwrought since 1861. Everything is politicized, which is to say: used as a truncheon to beat-up adversaries and, let’s face it, mostly in the sense of Left against Right. This is especially true for the Covid-19 soap opera, which more and more pits the sanctimoniously vaccinated “progressives” against the recalcitrant conservative no-vax free-choicers — that is, coercive government trying to force supposedly free citizens to accept a pretty dubious experimental medical treatment. Since when did the American Left become so pro-tyranny, and how’d that even happen? I have friends and relatives — I’m sure you do, too — who knocked themselves out in the 1960s protesting against the war, the government, the FBI, and the CIA… who fought in the streets for free speech and raged against official propaganda — and today they can’t get enough of coercing, punishing, brain-washing, and cancelling their fellow citizens. They’re going so far now as to engineer their vicious narrative to brand their opponents as “domestic terrorists.” Think that’s going to work? I doubt it. And the fall of Afghanistan is sure to spark a resentful reaction among the many ex-soldiers who paid a heavy price pulling tours of duty in that hapless venture over twenty years. There’s a lot of them out there in Red America, and they were already pissed-off about the pernicious nonsense being jammed down their throats by the minions of Wokesterism: the race-and-gender hustles, the off-the-charts rise of violent crime, the wide-open border, the off-shoring of jobs, the Covid lockdowns and wrecking of small business, the MMT experiment launching inflation, and the new pussification of the armed forces they served and suffered in. They’ve laid rather low through years of this, just watching the scene in wonder and nausea, but you may see them turn more active now. And consider: they’ve been well-trained in weaponry and tactics. Unsettling discoveries are in the offing going forward. The Wall Street Journal lately detected signs of life in the John Durham investigation, reporting that matters have gone to a grand jury. That means crimes are being prosecuted. We may soon become reacquainted with names that almost slipped down the memory-hole — the likes of Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Pete Strzok… who else…? This may also lead to a catastrophic discrediting of the mainstream news media — who were fully in on the RussiaGate con — to the degree that some companies end up utterly wrecked and with many careers washed up. Hard information about what actually went down in the 2020 election is also coming out, and not to the credit of the ruling regime that purportedly triumphed in that contest. Some of that info may redound to the issue of China’s involvement in our affairs, and beyond mere election meddling to the wholesale buying-off of the US political class. The pathetic thing is we already know several very prominent figures on-the-take from China, including Eric Swalwell, Dianne Feinstein, and most conspicuously, Hunter Biden (and family), but the ranks of the known-to-be bought-off could swell dramatically. Finally, there’s the fate of President “Joe Biden.” As Kabul falls this morning, he remains in his Camp David gopher hole. Observers conjecture that he’s had a few “bad days” lately, meaning he is not presentable. There is a rising clamor, even among his own partisans, for him to come out and say something, anything… for Gawdsake… just do more than pretend to be the leader of the free world! It could be curtains for Ol’ White Joe… resignation-time. Never before has a US president faced such a daunting loss of legitimacy, and hardly just on account of Afghanistan. And then consider who’s next-in-line for that position. (Did you shudder?) Sometimes, Vlad Lenin observed, events take decades, and sometimes years happen in weeks. This looks like one of those times for the USA. Heads will soon be spinning like the little girl’s in The Exorcist, releasing a pea-soup spewage of shocking revelation. The old narratives will fall apart before our eyes. Minds will have to get right. Prepare for a whole lot of strange days rolling out. (read more) 2021-08-16 d HOW POTEMKIN REGIMES COLLAPSE I At this point, at
least half the country now distrusts and
disbelieves the incoherent messages emanating
from “Joe Biden’s” government about this
Covid-19 problem and any attempt to force
vaccinations on the “hesitant” public will pull
the pin out of the national grenade that has
been waiting to go off. The “insurrection” next
time will be the real thing, not Nancy Pelosi’s
faked-up soap opera.
It’s also possible that the hyped “delta surge,” and all the threats prompted by it, are just a manufactured distraction from the slow-moving train-wreck of “the most secure election in US history” narrative as actual proof emerges of, yes, widespread fraud in 2020. Who would be surprised, by the way, if our friendly, local Intel Community wasn’t somehow behind all of that, both the election fraud and the distractions — and especially the management of the news about it that people get from TV-land and the remaining major newspapers? All the pieces in the story are flying apart: the virus, the election, the border debacle, the Woke race hustle, the fiscal lunacy, the contrived sexual derangement, the captive news media…. All recent US history is starting to look like one big comprehensive fraud by forces seeking to wreck the country. The tension arising from that startling state-of-affairs is finally primed to begin resolving itself. The release could be dangerous. — James Howard Kunstler 2021-08-16 c KABUL CHRONOLOGY II The Kabul
embassy staff have begun destroying classified
documents and equipment. — John Hudson
(@John_Hudson) August 13, 2021 Two Mi-17
helicopters captured by Taliban forces at Shindand
air base. — ***Joker*** (@beterbocekkkk) August 13, 2021 *Extraordinary
scenes of #Afghanistan’s military fleeing to #Iran with advanced
equipment, — Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) August 14, 2021 *Pride comes before the fall * The “President” of Afghanistan has fled to Tajikistan. Kabul is falling NOW. The US Ambassador evacuated the Embassy. This was the TOP military advisor to Biden just days ago. Is it time General
Milley retire to spend more time with his White
Rage? — Matt Gaetz
(@mattgaetz) August 15, 2021 * To confirm Fox reporting – We asked Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki for comment about Afghanistan. Here the actual automated response: "I will be out of the office from August 15th-August 22nd." pic.twitter.com/PCi8gDqhwL — Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) August 16, 2021 *Yesterday’s
Saigon, today’s #Afghanistan, and tomorrow’s #Taiwan?” read some — Global Times (@globaltimesnews) August 16, 2021 * The United States’ top military leaders on Wednesday touted Afghanistan’s abilities to prevent the Taliban from taking over as the militant terrorist group has made territorial advances amid the United States’ withdrawal from the war-torn country. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters during a press conference with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that despite the narrative that the Taliban is winning, the Afghan Security Forces “have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country.” “A negative outcome, a Taliban automatic military takeover, is not a foregone conclusion,” he said. “We will continue to monitor the situation closely and make adjustments as necessary.” *This is a
damning image for the Biden administration, and
underscores the magnitude Mr. President – Do your job and address the nation. pic.twitter.com/tTreEIgL3Y — Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) August 16, 2021 *I will be addressing the nation on Afghanistan at 3:45 PM ET today. * According
to the CNN reporter, Taliban is so cute and
friendly, even when they are * The moment
when several people in Afghanistan fell from the
plane because they * President
Biden arrives at Fort McNair en route to the White
House to address Americans He took no questions. pic.twitter.com/uQjYXxMpmn — The Recount (@therecount) August 16, 2021 2021-08-16 b THE ALZHEIMER IN CHIEF Would you buy a
used car from China Joe?
Remarks by [Illegitimate] President Biden on the Drawdown of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan July 08, 2021 [...] Together, with our NATO Allies and partners, we have trained and equipped over three hu- — nearly 300,000 current serving members of the military — of the Afghan National Security Force, and many beyond that who are no longer serving. Add to that, hundreds of thousands more Afghan National Defense and Security Forces trained over the last two decades. We provided our Afghan partners with all the tools — let me emphasize: all the tools, training, and equipment of any modern military. We provided advanced weaponry. And we’re going to continue to provide funding and equipment. And we’ll ensure they have the capacity to maintain their air force. But most critically, as I stressed in my meeting just two weeks ago with President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah, Afghan leaders have to come together and drive toward a future that the Afghan people want and they deserve. In our meeting, I also assured Ghani that U.S. support for the people of Afghanistan will endure. We will continue to provide civilian and humanitarian assistance, including speaking out for the rights of women and girls. I intend to maintain our diplomatic presedence [presence] in Afghanistan, and we are coordinating closely with our international partners in order to continue to secure the international airport. And we’re going to engage in a determined diplomacy to pursue peace and a peace agreement that will end this senseless violence. I’ve asked Secretary of State Blinken and our Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation to work vigorously with the parties in Afghanistan, as well as the regional and international stakeholders to support a negotiated solution. To be clear — to be clear: Countries in the region have an essential role to play in supporting a peaceful settlement. We’ll work with them, and they should help step up their efforts as well. We’re going to continue to work for the release of detained Americans, including Mark — excuse me — Fre– Frerichs — I want to pronounce the name correctly; I mis- — I misspoke — so that he can return to his family safely. We’re also going to continue to make sure that we take on the Afghan nationals who work side-by-side with U.S. forces, including interpreters and translators — since we’re no longer going to have military there after this; we’re not going to need them and they have no jobs — who are also going to be vital to our efforts so they — and they’ve been very vital — and so their families are not exposed to danger as well. We’ve already dramatically accelerated the procedure time for Special Immigrant Visas to bring them to the United States. [...] After 20 years — a trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, 2,448 Americans killed, 20,722 more wounded, and untold thousands coming home with unseen trauma to their mental health — I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome. The United States cannot afford to remain tethered to policies creating a response to a world as it was 20 years ago. We need to meet the threats where they are today. [...] Q Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable? THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not. Q Why? THE PRESIDENT: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable. Q Do you trust the Taliban, Mr. President? Do you trust the Taliban, sir? THE PRESIDENT: You — is that a serious question? Q It is absolutely a serious question. Do you trust the Taliban? THE PRESIDENT: No, I do not. Q Do you trust handing over the country to the Taliban? THE PRESIDENT: No, I do not trust the Taliban. Q So why are you handing the country over? Q Mr. President, is the U.S. responsible for the deaths of Afghans after you leave the country? Q Mr. President, will you amplify that question, please? Will you amplify your answer, please — why you don’t trust the Taliban? THE PRESIDENT: It’s a — it’s a silly question. Do I trust the Taliban? No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war. [...] Q Mr. President, thank you very much. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse. THE PRESIDENT: That is not true. Q Is it — can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not? THE PRESIDENT: That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion. Q So what is the level of confidence that they have that it will not collapse? THE PRESIDENT: The Afghan government and leadership has to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place. The question is: Will they generate the kind of cohesion to do it? It’s not a question of whether they have the capacity. They have the capacity. They have the forces. They have the equipment. The question is: Will they do it? And I want to make clear what I made clear to Ghani: that we are not going just sus- — walk away and not sustain their ability to maintain that force. We are. We’re going to also work to make sure we help them in terms of everything from food necessities and other things in — in the region. But — but, there’s not a conclusion that, in fact, they cannot defeat the Taliban. I believe the only way there’s going to be — this is now Joe Biden, not the intelligence community — the only way there’s ultimately going to be peace and security in Afghanistan is that they work out a modus vivendi with the Taliban and they make a judgment as to how they can make peace. And the likelihood there’s going to be one unified government in Afghanistan controlling the whole country is highly unlikely. Q Mr. President, thank you. But we have talked to your own top general in Afghanistan, General Scott Miller. He told ABC News the conditions are so concerning at this point that it could result in a civil war. So, if Kabul falls to the Taliban, what will the United States do about it? THE PRESIDENT: Look, you’ve said two things — one, that if it could result in a civil war — that’s different than the Taliban succeeding, number one. Number two, the question of what will be done is going to be implicated — is going to implicate the entire region as well. There’s a number of countries who have a grave concern about what’s going to happen in Afghanistan relative to their security. The question is: How much of a threat to the United States of America and to our allies is whatever results in terms of a government or an agreement? That’s when that judgement will be made. Q Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling — THE PRESIDENT: None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken. The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable. [...] Q Mr. President, how serious was the corruption among the Afghanistan government to this mission failing there? THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, the mission hasn’t failed, yet. There is in Afghanistan — in all parties, there’s been corruption. The question is, can there be an agreement on unity of purpose? What is the objective? For example, it started off — there were going to be negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan National Security Forces and the Afghan government. That — that of — it didn’t come to — it didn’t come to fruition. So the question now is, where do they go from here? That — the jury is still out. But the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely. (read more) 2021-08-16 a KABUL CHRONOLOGY I Taliban have
announced that although they earlier ordered
their fighters to not
enter Kabul but the Ex-regime's troops/police in the city have abandoned posts, so they have now ordered their advance units to move in to preempt anarchy & riots. #Afghanistan #Kabul — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 15, 2021 * Taliban
units have been seen heading to the
presidential palace and according to
some reports, they are already inside. The war is over! — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 15, 2021 * As
Ashraf Ghani abandoned Afghanistan without
formally handing over power &
left a vacuum. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Hamid Karzai & Gulbadin Hekmatyar have formed a coordination committee to assist with the transition. #Kabul #Afghanistan — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 15, 2021 * (Northern Leaders, Northern Alliance, Tajiks are alleged to be involved in opium/heroin trade.) Northern
leaders Ahmad Zia Massoud, Mir Rehman Rehmani,
Salah-ud-din Rabbani,
Yunus Qanooni, Karim Khalili, Ahmad Wali Massoud & Abdul Latif Pedram, have landed in Islamabad Before you guys go off on them, They are not anti-Pakistan ethno-nationalists but our guests #Afghanistan — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 15, 2021 * The
delegation is on a three-day visit to discuss
the future of political settlement in
Afghanistan
to facilitate & achieve permanent peace between the multiple different factions. They were received by Ambassador to Afghanistan Mansoor Ahmad Khan. #Afghanistan — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 15, 2021 * Ghani
& co fled to Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. Saw
their helicopters flew out of Arg at 3:20pm.
At Mohib’s residence in Arg, they left 3 land-cruisers full of dollars causing a fight among his guards while looting. I hope money is recovered. How much did they manage 2get away with? — Ershad Ahmadi @ErshadAhmadi August 15, 2021 * Told
you! Ashraf Ghan, in his final act of
treachery, robbed those people blind who he
claimed to represent. #Kabul — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 15, 2021 * Afghan
Pres Ashraf Ghani to me on May 17:
Q: Are there any other circumstances under which you would step down early? AG: No. Q: None at all? AG: If there is war — no. If there is war, I am the commander in chief. I will not abandon my people... I am willing to die for my country. — amna @IAmAmnaNawaz August 15, 2021 * So,
the Taliban are now the Afghan army &
security forces. #Afghanistan
— Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 15, 2021 * About
jail breaks and who got out:
Taliban opened all jails in their path. Nobody has counted how many got out and who it was. All related stories are fake news at this point. — Waqas @worqas August 16, 2021 * At
least three people have been killed by
Americans at #Kabul
airport.
One sided firing is not a "gunfight" Fixed it. — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 16, 2021 * One
last warcrime by the defeated invaders. #KabulAirport
— Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 16, 2021 * Not
even 24 hours have gone that the Kabul govt
ran away from AFG, and some people
have started whitewashing them already. They are more responsible for the chaos and loss of life at the Kabul Airport than anyone else. You're lying if you overlook their treachery & betrayal. — Nafees Ur Rehman Durrani @NafeesRehmanDr August 16, 2021 * At
least two people fell to their deaths when the
aircraft took off. #Kabul
— Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 16, 2021 * Fleeing
Afghan pilots crashed a 20 million dollar A-29
Super Tucano aircraft of the Afghan
airforce in Uzbekistan last night. — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 16, 2021 * Taliban
took over all of Afghanistan within 20 days
after the all-important strategic meeting
between Mohib and Ex-Ameer-ul-Momineen, Mandela reborn, his highness Muhammad Mian Nawaz sharif. Now they are both absconders, accused of fleeing the country after robbing it. #Manhoos — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 16, 2021 * "Conquering
the world on horseback is easy; it is
dismounting and governing that is hard"
Genghis Khan — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 16, 2021 *  Americans
evacuated their military dogs but shot,
killed, and abandoned the Afghans
who had helped their occupation for two decades. Sums up the grim relationship between the 'benevolent occupiers' and 'local allies'. #Kabul #Afghanistan — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 16, 2021 * Were
these female Afghan commandos ever deployed or
was that entire unit raised
for photo ops only? #Afghanistan — Asfandyar Bhittani @BhittaniKhannnn August 16, 2021 2021-08-15 o THE FALL OF KABUL  Saigon and Kabul #BREAKING: Taliban in a fresh
statement says it has decided to enter Kabul even — Aditya Raj Kaul (@AdityaRajKaul) August 15, 2021 *Adding to
confusion, US Embassy sends out revised alert that
removes warnings about — Dion Nissenbaum (@DionNissenbaum) August 15, 2021 *American CH-47s over Kabul now, doing shuttle runs between US embassy and airport. pic.twitter.com/jMOcchjT2Y — Kern Hendricks (@kernhendricks) August 15, 2021 *Multiple
columns of smoke over US embassy Kabul. Staff
burning sensitive documents — Asfandyar Bhittani
(@BhittaniKhannnn) August 15, 2021 The Taliban, which took control of Mazar-i Sharif, seized many planes and helicopters. At least 20 Mi-17V-5s,
UH-60A+ BlackHawks, MD-530F(G) helicopters, as well
as Cessna — Su-57 5th Gen Fighter (@5thSu) August 15, 2021 *“I see
people crying, they are not sure whether their
flight will happen.” The chop of U.S. — The Associated Press (@AP) August 15, 2021 *Capital
Kabul right now, Traffic blocked, everyone is in a
hurry and are rushing to their — Obaidullah Rahimi Mashwani (@IamObaidRahimi) August 15, 2021 *Gunfire rings in the air as thousands stream into Kabul’s international airport in Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/xZYPZBiBSl — Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 15, 2021 *Prisoners leaving Kabul jail after being broken out by Taliban. pic.twitter.com/B84F2UrtEA — Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) August 15, 2021 *#Afghanistan's new de facto leader
Mullah Baradar issues congratulatory message to his
— Yannis Koutsomitis (@YanniKouts) August 15, 2021 *CNN: “There are many who are asking, ‘where’s the president?'” “There are no
indications that President Biden is going to address
the nation.” — RNC Research
(@RNCResearch) August 15, 2021 This
morning, the President and Vice President met with
their national security team — The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 15, 2021 2021-08-15 n OMEN? Live at
the Lincoln Memorial. Lightning hits Washington
monument. — Travis Nix (@tnix113) August 15, 2021 2021-08-15 m PELOSI FIDDLES WHILE KABUL BURNS - COMMENDS THE ALZHEIMER IN CHIEF [Delusional] Pelosi Statement
on Afghanistan
August 14, 2021 | Press Release San Francisco — Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued this statement on the situation in Afghanistan: “The
President is to be commended for the clarity of
purpose of his statement on Afghanistan and the
actions he has taken.
“The Taliban must know that the world is watching its actions. We are deeply concerned about reports regarding the Taliban’s brutal treatment of all Afghans, especially women and girls. The U.S., the international community and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban. “Any political settlement that the Afghans pursue to avert bloodshed must include having women at the table. The fate of women and girls in Afghanistan is critical to the future of Afghanistan. As we strive to assist women, we must recognize that their voices are important, and all must listen to them for solutions, respectful of their culture. There is bipartisan support to assist the women and girls of Afghanistan. One of the successes of U.S.- NATO cooperation in Afghanistan was the progress made by women and girls. We must all continue to work together to ensure that is not eroded. “Once again, I want to acknowledge the clarity of purpose of President Biden’s statement and the wisdom of his actions. Congress shares the President's concern for Afghans who have assisted U.S. efforts in country, and we passed Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) legislation to provide for their relocation on a strong, bipartisan basis. “Most of all, we join the President in acknowledging the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform and their families.” — Nancy Pelosi 2021-08-15 l THE STATE OF THE DISUNION XII * "Nurse, please change
the President's diaper."
 "Not again!" 2021-08-15 k THE STATE OF THE DISUNION XI (Are they Democrats or Demon-crats?) In the middle of the
night, Swamp sleaze ball Chuck Schumer tried to
sneak thru
legislation for a very dangerous federal takeover of elections. It was Ted Cruz who stopped it. — MARK SIMONE @MarkSimoneNY August 14, 2021 * In 15 minutes, Ted
Cruz blocks Texas Democrats' weeks-long effort to
pass voting
rights legislation — Houston Chronicle @HoustonChron August 14, 2021 2021-08-15 j THE STATE OF THE DISUNION X (WHAT A BABY) California Governor
Gavin Newsom (D) melted down during an interview
with the
Sacramento Bee editorial board. Newsom went on whiny, unhinged rant at the end of the interview, slamming his hand on the desk nearly 60 times, finger-wagging and arms flailing. Gavin Newsom Unhinged During Interview with Journalist — morphs into Captain Queeg https://t.co/rLJtWqcWEK #RecallGavinNewsom #WeveGotAStateToSave — Larry Elder (@larryelder) August 10, 2021 2021-08-15 i THE STATE OF THE DISUNION IX (Heck of a job, Joe. The U.S. military will find a way to note your achievement.) * We spent 88 billion dollars over 20
years training the afghan army ... it took about
a week
for them to be defeated by two hundred 1988 Toyota trucks with machine guns in the bed. — Catturd ™ (@catturd2) August 14, 2021 36 days ago, President
Biden told the American people that the Taliban
would not take * This may
become the most infamous — and devastating — press
conference ever held — BDW (@BryanDeanWright) August 15, 2021 * #Taliban inside presidential palace in #Kabul . pic.twitter.com/ztYX9Rj20q — Majd Khalifeh (@Majd_Khalifeh) August 15, 2021 * “I was detained in Guantanamo bay camp for several years”, says one of the Taliban leader inside the presidential palace in #Kabul. #Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/GK9QpIcNW7 — Majd Khalifeh (@Majd_Khalifeh) August 15, 2021 * Afghan president flees country as
Taliban move into Kabul
2021-08-15
hKABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, joining thousands of 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 the country. The Taliban fanned out across the capital, and an official with the militant group said it would soon announce the creation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the presidential palace in Kabul. That was the name of the country under Taliban rule before the militants were ousted by U.S.-led forces after the 9/11 attacks. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media. The Al-Jazeera news network later aired footage showing a group of Taliban fighters inside the presidential palace. The city was gripped by panic, with helicopters racing overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents, and the American flag was lowered. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out. Afghans fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor — who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital — remained in parks and open spaces throughout the city. Though the Taliban had promised a peaceful transition, the U.S. Embassy suspended operations and warned Americans late in the day to shelter in place and not try to get to the airport. Commercial flights were suspended after sporadic gunfire erupted at the airport, according to two senior U.S. military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations. Evacuations continued on military flights, but the halt to commercial traffic closed off one of the last routes available for Afghans fleeing the country. Still, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the U.S. pullout from Vietnam, as many watched in disbelief at the sight of helicopters landing in the embassy compound to take diplomats to a new outpost at Kabul International Airport. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” The American ambassador was among those evacuated, said officials who spoke condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing military operations. He was asking to return to the embassy, but it was not clear if he would be allowed to. As the insurgents closed in Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani flew out of the country. “The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation,” said Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council. “God should hold him accountable.” Ghani later posted on Facebook that he had chosen to leave the country to avert bloodshed in the capital, without saying where he had gone. As night fell, Taliban fighters deployed across Kabul, taking over abandoned police posts and pledging to maintain law and order during the transition. Residents reported looting in parts of the city, including in the upscale diplomatic district, and messages circulating on social media advised people to stay inside and lock their gates. In a
stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of
Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the
billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO
over nearly two decades to build up Afghan
security forces. Just days earlier, an
American military assessment estimated it would be a
month before the capital would come under insurgent
pressure. (read
more) THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VIII (Garbage Democrats in Chicago and San Francisco.) Loathsome
Mayor Lori Lightfoot Supports Decision to CANCEL
Bagpipes and Honor CPD Deputy Superintendent made the call: said we don't have time "for that sh-t" What a disgrace, officer
French deserved better.#ChicagoPD #Police — Julian Conradson (@JCConradson) August 13, 2021 * San
Francisco Rolls Out “Ridiculous” $20,000
Designer-Style Trash Cans July 24, 2021 #WallSt — The Political Hedge (@politicalHEDGE) August 7, 2021
* They
originally wanted to spend $20,000 per trash can,
they spend $800,000 annually — Ron Moore
(@IamBukowski) August 9, 2021 * So instead
of having just regular trashcans and spending money
on more affordable — Resistance is not futile (@crookedreviews) August 9, 2021 2021-08-15 g THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VII (Race-based goals do not stand up to scrutiny. They defy logic. They demand unequal treatment.) INCREDIBLE UNC j-school dean
explicitly saying contrarian points of view need to
be sidelined Never in a million years
did I expect to see a dean call for uniformity of
thought. — Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) August 9, 2021 2021-08-15 f THE STATE OF THE DISUNION VI (Biden is Making America Brown Again.) And yet Joe Biden and Kamala Harris
are the root cause. They have open borders:
Brought back catch and release Halted construction of the border wall Ended the Remain in Mexico policy #BidenBorderCrisis — Ted Cruz @tedcruz August 13, 2021 NEW: A source sent me
leaked audio of DHS Secretary Mayorkas meeting w/
Border
Patrol in the RGV on Thursday. Mayorkas privately said the current crisis is “unsustainable”, and that “if our borders are our first line of defense, we’re going to lose.” — Bill Melugin @BillFOXLA August 13, 2021 * More than 1 million people entered the U.S. illegally in first six months of 2021. That's enough people to create the 10th largest city in the U.S.https://t.co/Yw7kkBzsBA — Mary Vought (@MaryVought) August 9, 2021 * Biden said
in March that the migrant surge at the border was
merely "seasonal." 2021-08-15 e THE STATE OF THE DISUNION V The Obama variant is in full swing. 63 people in Martha's Vineyard
test positive for Covid since Obama's — Catturd ™ (@catturd2) August 13, 2021 * If you're
a politician, journalist, or on social media
pretending to care about the
Here's Dr. Osterholm
on CNN saying exactly the same thing that
@RandPaul
just got suspended from YouTube for saying: that cloth masks, as opposed to N95s, provide very, very little protection. Why can yo say this on CNN or PBS but not YouTube???? — Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald August 11, 2021 2021-08-15 d THE STATE OF THE DISUNION IV (China Joe begs to differ with you.) NOBODY should be
forced to choose between their career or taking
a vaccine.
This is NOT China, this is America! — Madison Cawthorn @CawthornforNC August 13, 2021 2021-08-15 c THE STATE OF THE DISUNION III  Hey Marxist, instead of spending your weekend attacking @WendyRogersAZ & me! Please fill us in on who ordered all the counting to be stopped in the swing states? Since you COMMUNISTS think you won, join us in the ordering a FORENSIC AUDIT OF ALL 50 STATES - Prove your innocence… — Johnny J. Nalbandian @Johnny_Congress August 14, 2021 2021-08-15 b THE STATE OF THE DISUNION II (The illegitimate Biden regime thinks MAGA means, "Make America Gag Again.") This is an actual video from inside the Biden White House. What depraved shit is going on in there? pic.twitter.com/WQ71GSSph5 — Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) August 9, 2021
* And
no it’s not just editing
trickery. This is apparently
some “comedy” the White House
cooked up with TikTok types — Raheem J. Kassam @RaheemKassam August 9, 2021 2021-08-15 a THE STATE OF THE DISUNION I (In today's story, more proof that Lloyd Austin is Massa Biden's house nigger. Massa Biden can count on Lloyd to empty the chamber pots without spilling a drop. We also learn that the Commandant of the Marine Corps has cojones. He won't sacrifice his men to the Covid Cult.) And so here we are: eight
months deep into a “Joe Biden” regime. Was ever so
bold an attempt to utterly wreck a nation carried on
in such plain sight? Who does not hear the “giant
sucking sound” as America whirls down the drain? In
the foreground, obscuring everything else, is the
fog around the Covid-19 melodrama. It can’t possibly
be about the vaxes, which, day by day, are
demonstrating their growing inefficacy and lethal
side-effects.
It appears to be much more about activating a Chinese model of social control. A great many citizens detect this and demur from vaxing-up. “Joe Biden’s” public health officers did not do a very good job convincing the “hesitant” to join in the vaccine orgy. It’s a hard sell while “Joe Biden’s” homeland security side shows a cavalier indifference to a million border-jumpers with a 40 percent Covid-19 infection rate not just walking into the country but being helpfully distributed hither-and-yon from sea to shining sea. Who is paying all those bus and plane fares? The regime is trying to soften up the public for mandatory vaxes now, using its propaganda arms to turn up the volume on pandemic fear and new variants, using phony statistics and threats to turn the unvaxed into social pariahs, including schoolchildren. The regime is playing with nitroglycerine there. How desperate and crazy are they, really? Is something wicked coming their way? I think so, and I think they know it’s so, and I think they have just about run out of tricks for avoiding it. A crack in the edifice of tyrannical coercion materialized a few days ago when SecDef Lloyd Austin declared his intention to vax-up the whole military. General David Berger, Commandant of the US Marine Corps, briskly told the SecDef, in effect, to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. What do you make of that? — James Howard Kunstler ______________________ Permission is hereby granted to any and all to copy and paste any entry on this page and convey it electronically along with its URL, http://www.usaapay.com/comm.html ______________________ 2021 ARCHIVE
2020 ARCHIVE
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