There goes Afghanistan

Really?  Just yesterday NPR was playing an audio file of him saying he was going to remain in Kabul and fight for his people.  And also reporting that thousands of desperate people were bringing minimum belongings into the city to escape the Taliban.  

Taliban fighters entered the outskirts of the Afghan capital on Sunday and said they were awaiting a "peaceful transfer" of the city after promising not to take it by force, but panicked residents raced to the leave, with workers fleeing government offices and helicopters landing at the U.S. Embassy. In a nationwide offensive that has taken just over a week, the Taliban has defeated, co-opted or sent Afghan security forces fleeing from wide swaths of the country, even though they had some air support from the U.S. military.

[...]

US Embassy staff are being evacuated from Kabul. There are images of helicopters shuttling staff to the airport to flee as the Taliban enter the Afghan Capital. It is all unfolding much quicker than the Biden administration expected.

  NPR

Saigon again. Only this time, we're not even taking the Afghans with us.

Afghans who worked With the U.S. fear retaliation now. That's not just military but also aid groups and military. They can now apply to come to the U.S. but they have to get out of the country on their own.

Nice.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken [is] working the phones and he's on television this morning saying the US really had no other choice but to leave b/c of the deal that the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban.

I'd be blaming it on Trump if I were him, too.

He said the U.S. is going to keep in place a capacity to deal with any terrorist.

Yer killin' me.

I wonder when foreign governments are going to stop trying to take Afghanistan.  France and Russia both got run out.  I can imagine the talks among Double Bush and his generals:  "We'll show 'em how it's done!"

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Explaining the cancelled Taliban meeting

So the excuse Trump gave made no sense, and here's the real reason he cancelled the meeting:  No one was going to come.

Among the concerns of administration officials who opposed the meeting was that it might take place around the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the officials and people familiar with the matter said. Pence argued at one point that such a meeting could send the wrong message to members of the U.S. military who have fought — and been killed by — the Taliban for years, one senior administration official said.

There also was concern among some U.S. officials that Ghani would not show up for such a meeting, and they argued it was better for the president to cancel first than be stood up, the officials and people familiar with the matter said.

There has been broad skepticism within the national security team, even among those supporting the deal, that it would hold even if finalized, they said. The view was that the Taliban couldn’t be trusted to live up to its commitments and that a deal would very quickly collapse once the Afghan government was brought into the talks.

[...]

A senior Taliban leader told NBC News Monday that Trump appears to have cancelled the negotiations after the group refused to travel to Camp David to hold direct talks with the Afghan leadership.

"We have informed Zalmay Khalilzad a number of times that we don’t consider Ashraf Ghani and his administration as a legitimate government and therefore we refused to hold direct talks with them,” the Taliban leader based in Qatar said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Declining the invitation “apparently provoked the president and he suspended peace talks in reaction,” he added.

[...]

Pompeo said Sunday that the Afghanistan peace talks were dead for now, but he left the door open for negotiations to resume.

  NBC

UPDATE: Mr. Too Busy to Watch TV:





UPDATE:




You've got to get pretty low to kiss Old Lardass's saggy ass, but Pence can do it!

A Change of Hats

Hamid Karzai refused to deal with the US as desired, so it was time for him to go. Democratically, of course.  I'll miss his hat.  But, the new one is pretty good, too.

Afghanistan has inaugurated its first new president in a decade, swearing in Ashraf Ghani to head a power-sharing government. Joining him on stage Monday was Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s new vice president. Dostum is one of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, once described by Ghani himself as a "known killer." Dostum’s rise to the vice presidency comes despite his involvement in a 2001 massacre that killed up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war. The victims were allegedly shot to death or suffocated in sealed metal truck containers after they surrendered to Dostum and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. The dead prisoners — some of whom had been tortured — were then buried in the northern Afghan desert. Dostum, who was on the CIA payroll, has been widely accused of orchestrating the massacre and tampering with evidence of the mass killing. For more than a decade, human rights groups have called on the United States to conduct a full investigation into the massacre including the role of U.S. special forces and CIA operatives.

  Democracy Now!

And they’ll keep calling. But they won’t get an answer.

Ghani, who was an American citizen working for the World Bank before renouncing and grooming to run for president in Afghanistan, has promised to restore good dealings.  Dostum, on the other hand, has reason to keep dealing.  "Was" on the CIA payroll?

Also...

Mr. Ghani is taking office under a cloud, dogged by electoral fraud allegations.

[...]

Mr. Ghani was pressured to accept a power-sharing arrangement with [his opponent] Mr. Abdullah [appointed as chief executive officer, sharing the inaugural stage].

Further, that deal very nearly collapsed at the last minute, as Mr.Abdullah threatened on Sunday to pull out of the inauguration ceremony over a series of disputes, including an unseemly fight over office space in the presidential palace. Mr. Abdullah’s followers squabbled with supporters of Mr. Ghani’s first vice president, the influential but controversial power broker Abdul Rashid Dostum, over offices that Mr. Abdullah had expected to get.

[...]

[Afghanistan] is ravaged by violence, sick with corruption, and seething with frustration. The government is struggling against a Taliban insurgency that has turned much of the country into a no-go zone.

[...]

Afghanistan has been the biggest source of asylum seekers year after year, although in the last year it was surpassed by Syria.

The recent presence of many of Mr. Dostum’s followers on the streets of Kabul, in civilian clothes or unofficial uniforms and heavily armed, has been a cause of concern to many residents of the capital. It is technically illegal for anyone other than government security forces to publicly carry weapons, but the police have been reluctant to challenge the gunmen.

  NYT

Off to a great start.