Six on History: Afghanistan
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And it’s all over
For the unknown soldier
It’s all over
For the unknown soldier
The Doors, “The Unknown Soldier”The Taliban are on a roll. Earlier this week their PR arm was claiming they hold 218 Afghan districts out of 421 – capturing new ones every day. Tens of districts are contested. Entire Afghan provinces are basically lost to the government in Kabul, which has been de facto reduced to administer a few scattered cities under siege.
Already on July 1, the Taliban announced they controlled 80% of Afghan territory. That’s close to the situation 20 years ago, only a few weeks before 9/11, when Commander Ahmad Shah Masoud told me in the Panjshir valley , as he prepared a counter-offensive, that the Taliban were 85% dominant.
Mapmakers cannot upload updates fast enough. This is fast becoming a textbook case of the collapse of a 21st-century central government.
After capturing Panjwaj district, the Taliban are also a stone’s throw away from Kandahar, founded by Alexander the Great in 330 BC and the city where a certain mullah Omar – with a little help from his Pakistani ISI friends – started the Taliban adventure in 1994, leading to their Kabul power takeover in 1996.
The overwhelming majority of Badakhshan province – Tajik majority, not Pashtun – fell after only four days of negotiations, with a few skirmishes thrown in. The Taliban even captured a hilltop outpost very close to Faizabad, Badakhshan’s capital.
I tracked the Tajik-Afghan border in detail when I traveled the Pamir highway in late 2019. The Taliban, following mountain tracks on the Afghan side, could soon reach the legendary, desolate border with China’s Xinjiang in the Wakhan corridor.
The Taliban are also about to make a move on Hairaton, in Balkh province. Hairaton is at the Afghan-Uzbek border, the site of the historically important Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya, through which the Red Army departed Afghanistan in 1989.
ANA commanders swear the city is now protected from all sides by a five-kilometer security zone. Hairaton has already attracted tens of thousands of refugees. Tashkent does not want them to cross the border.
And it’s not only Central Asia; the Taliban have already advanced to the city limits of Islam Qilla, which borders Iran, in Herat province, and is the key checkpoint in the busy Mashhad to Herat corridor.
The Tajik puzzleThe extremely porous, geologically stunning Tajik-Afghan mountain borders remain the most sensitive case. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, after a serious phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, ordered the mobilization of 20,000 reservists and sent them to the border.
The Taliban, for their part, officially declared that the border is safe and they have no intention of invading Tajik territory. Earlier this week even the Kremlin cryptically announced that Moscow does not plan to send troops to Afghanistan.
The Taliban seem to be riding an irresistible momentum, especially when Afghans themselves were stunned to see how the imperial “protector,” after nearly two decades of de facto occupation, left Bagram airbase in the middle of the night.
Compare it to the evaluation of serious analysts such as Lester Grau, explaining the Soviet departure over three decades ago:
When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, they did so in a coordinated, deliberate, professional manner, leaving behind a functioning government, an improved military and an advisory and economic effort insuring the continued viability of the government. The withdrawal was based on a coordinated diplomatic, economic and military plan permitting Soviet forces to withdraw in good order and the Afghan government to survive.
The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) managed to hold on despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Only then, with the loss of Soviet support and the increased efforts by the Mujahideen (holy warriors) and Pakistan, did the DRA slide toward defeat in April 1992. The Soviet effort to withdraw in good order was well executed and can serve as a model for other disengagements from similar nations.
When it comes to the American empire, Tacitus once again applies: “They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… They are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor…. They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.”
In the wake of the hegemon, deserts called peace include in varying degrees Iraq, Libya, Syria – which happen to, geologically, harbor deserts – as well as the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan.
Still, it’s too early to tell whether what is being spun as the US “retreat” from Afghanistan reflects the definitive unraveling of the Empire of Chaos. That’s especially true because
this is not a “retreat” at all: it’s a repositioning – with added elements of privatization.At least 650 “US forces” will be protecting the sprawling embassy in Kabul. Add to that possibly 500 Turkish troops – which means NATO – to protect the airport, plus an undeclared number of “contractors,” aka mercenaries, and an unspecified number of special forces.
Pentagon head Lloyd Austin has come up with the new deal. The militarized embassy is referred to as Forces Afghanistan-Forward. These forces will be “supported” by a new, special Afghan office in Qatar.
The key provision is that the special privilege to bomb Afghanistan whenever the US feels like it remains intact. The difference is in the chain of command. Instead of General Scott Miller, so far the top US commander in Afghanistan, the bomber-in-chief will be General Frank McKenzie, the head of CENTCOM.
So future bombing will come essentially from the Persian Gulf – what the Pentagon lovingly describes as “over the horizon capability.” Crucially, Pakistan has officially refused to be part of it although, in the case of drone attacks, they will have to fly over Pakistani territory in Balochistan.
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan also refused to host American bases.
The Taliban, for their part, are unfazed. Spokesman Suhail Shaheen was adamant that any foreign troops that are not out by the 9/11 deadline will be regarded as – what else? – occupiers.
Whether the Taliban will be able to establish dominance is not an issue; it’s just a matter of when. And that leads us to the two really important questions:
- 1. Will the CIA be able to maintain what Seymour Hersh initially, and later myself, described as the Afghan heroin ratline that finances their black ops?
- 2. And if the CIA cannot continue to supervise opium poppy field production in Afghanistan as well as coordinate the subsequent stages of the heroin business, where will it move to?
Every thinking mind across Central and South Asia knows that the Empire of Chaos, for two long decades, was never interested in defeating the Taliban or fighting for “the freedom of the Afghan people.”
The key motives were
- to keep a crucial, strategic forward base in the underbelly of “existential threats” China and Russia as well as intractable Iran – all part of the New Great Game;
- to be conveniently positioned to later exploit Afghanistan’s enormous mineral wealth;
- and to process opium into heroin to fund CIA ops. Opium was a major factor in the rise of the British empire, and heroin remains one of the world’s top dirty businesses funding shady intel ops.
Now compare all of the above with the Chinese approach.
Unlike Think Tank Row in DC, Chinese counterparts seem to have done their homework. They understood that the USSR did not invade Afghanistan in 1979 to impose “popular democracy” – the jargon then – but was in fact invited by the quite progressive UN-recognized Kabul government at the time, which essentially wanted roads, electricity, medical care, telecommunications and education.
As these staples of modernity would not be provided by Western institutions, the solution would have to come from Soviet socialism. That would imply a social revolution – a convoluted affair in a deeply pious Islamic nation – and, crucially, the end of feudalism.
“Grand Chessboard” Zbignew Brzezinski’s imperial counterpunch worked because it manipulated Afghan feudal lords and their regimentation capacity – bolstered by immense funds (CIA, Saudis, Pakistani intel) – to give the USSR its Vietnam.
None of these feudal lords were interested in the abolition of poverty and economic development in Afghanistan.
China is now picking up where the USSR left. Beijing, in close contact with the Taliban since early 2020, essentially wants to extend the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – one of the Belt and Road Initiative flagship projects – to Afghanistan.
The first, crucial step will be the construction of the Kabul-Peshawar motorway – through the Khyber Pass and the current border at Torkham. That will mean Afghanistan de facto becoming part of CPEC.
It’s all about regional integration at work. Kabul-Peshawar will be one extra CPEC node that already includes the construction of the ultra-strategic Tashkurgan airport on the Karakoram highway in Xinjiang, only 50 kilometers away from the Pakistani border and also close to Afghanistan, as well as to Gwadar port in Balochistan.
The Chinese gameplay is clear: the Americans should not be able to exert influence over the new Kabul arrangement. It’s all about the strategic Afghan importance for Belt and Road – and that is intertwined with discussions inside the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), incidentally founded 20 years ago, and which for years has advocated for an “Asian solution” for the Afghan drama.
The discussions inside the SCO regard the NATO projection of the new Afghanistan as a jihadi paradise controlled by Islamabad as not more than wishful thinking nonsense.
It will be fascinating to watch how China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and even India will fill the vacuum in the post-Forever Wars era in Afghanistan. It’s very important to remember that all these actors, plus the Central Asians, are full SCO members (or observers, in the case of Iran).
Tehran plausibly might interfere with potential imperial plans to bomb Afghanistan from the outside – whatever the motive. On another front, it’s unclear whether Islamabad or Moscow, for instance, would help the Taliban to take Bagram. What’s certain is that Russia will take the Taliban off its list of terrorist outfits.
Considering that the empire and NATO – via Turkey – will not be really leaving, a distinct future possibility is an SCO push, allied with the Taliban (Afghanistan is also a SCO observer), to secure the nation on their terms and concentrate on CPEC development projects. But the first step seems to be the hardest: how to form a real, solid, national coalition government in Kabul.
" ... America’s Own Big Lies
Of course, Germany in the aftermath of World War I is hardly a perfect analog for the United States in the aftermath of two decades of its disastrous but distant war on terror. And history is, at best, suggestive rather than duplicative. Yet we study it in part because the past provides insight into potential futures. Personalities and events change, but human nature remains much the same, which is why military officers still read the work of Athenian general and historian Thucydides with profit, despite the fact that his wars ended more than two millennia ago.
So, let’s return to the two big lies that, in retrospect, were fatal to Weimar Germany’s democracy. How might they apply to the U.S. today? Since 9/11, our military has prosecuted two big wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as numerous smaller conflicts in places like Libya, Syria, and Somalia. That same military has lost both of those big wars, while creating or exacerbating ongoing humanitarian crises and disasters in the “smaller” ones across the Greater Middle East and Africa.
Yet, in the American “homeland” (as it came to be known after the 9/11 attacks), it’s remarkable how seldom anyone notes how badly that same military has bungled all those wars. Indeed, it’s generally celebrated in most of the country and certainly in Washington as the finest military force in the world, perhaps even in world history. Its budget continues to rise as if in response to victories everywhere and therefore deserving of the lion’s share of taxpayer dollars. Its retired generals and admirals are celebrated and rewarded with healthy pensions and even healthier pay and benefits if they so choose (and many do) to speed through the revolving door that links them to highly profitable war corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.
Top officers will avoid a pension cut that Congress applied to other military retirees.
In essence, Americans have been sold on the idea that “their” military has been undefeated in the field, or, if “defeated” in the sense of suffering setbacks, not responsible for them. But if America’s troops are the best of us and their losing commanders generally good enough to be eternally rewarded, who is to blame for America’s loss in Iraq? In Afghanistan? Not them, obviously, not if you believe polling results which show that Americans have more “confidence” in the military than most other U.S. institutions (though those figures, still high, have been dropping recently).
If responsibility for defeat is not to be assigned either to the troops or their military commanders, and if we Americans most certainly can’t imagine that an enemy like the Taliban is capable of defeating our mighty forces, who is to blame? An enemy within! Someone in the homeland who’s stabbing America’s noble heroes in the back. But, if so, who exactly?
Senior leaders in the U.S. military are already complaining that Joe Biden’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan may yet sow the seeds of defeat in that country (as if nearly 20 years of waging a disastrous war there had somehow set the stage for success). Republicans, as is their custom, have their knives out, too. They seem to be preparing to stab Democrats for being weak on defense and appeasers of “dictators” like the leaders of Iran and China.
And if you’re thinking about a future “enemy within” narrative, don’t forget the recent letter signed by 124 of our retired generals and admirals who seek to blame the decline of democracy in this country not on Trump and his lackeys, but on the spread of progressivism, socialism, even Marxism. That they might bear the slightest responsibility for the situation America finds itself in today would never occur to that company-sized gaggle of losers posing as self-appointed prophets.
But the truth is far harsher than those flag-rank opportunists are prepared to admit. Incessant war, insidious militarism, and our failure to face it all should be considered the real enemies within. And those “enemies” are helping to kill democracy in America, as James Madison, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, warned us about decades, even centuries, ago.
Here’s the simple truth of it: America’s wars since 9/11 were never this country’s to win. They were pointless conflicts of opportunity, profiting the Pentagon (and its ever-rising budget). They were tainted by a need for vengeance and badly mismanaged by some of the same flag-rank officers who signed that letter. Honest self-reflection would require a serious course correction within that military and most certainly a wholesale rejection of militarism and military adventurism. And this is undoubtedly why so many in the military-industrial-congressional complex prefer the comfort of big lies.
We’ve seen versions of this before. Ronald Reagan reinterpreted a criminal war in Southeast Asia as “a noble cause.” George H.W. Bush referred to a rational and reasoned reluctance to fight needless overseas wars as “the Vietnam syndrome,” claiming the U.S. had finally “kicked it” with its ephemeral victory over Saddam Hussein in the Desert Storm campaign of 1991. The Rambo myth in popular culture reinforced the notion that American warriors had won the war in Vietnam, only to be stabbed in the back by duplicitous politicians and antiwar protestors who also spit on the returning troops. (They didn’t.) Together such myths worked to shelter the U.S. military from radical reforms, ensuring an ongoing business-as-usual attitude at the Pentagon until, after 9/11, its true “mission (un)accomplished” years arrived.
Tough Truths Are the Antidote to Big Lies
Americans need a day of reckoning that shows no sign of coming. After all, we’re talking about a Congress that can’t even agree to form a joint commission to investigate the January 6th storming of the Capitol. Still, a guy can dream, can’t he? My own dream would involve the formation of a truth commission to hold senior leaders, military and civilian, accountable not only for their lies about America’s many wars but for the decisions to launch them and the pathetic performances that followed, as they did their unprincipled best to absolve themselves of responsibility.
Allow me to dream as well about what such an exercise in truth-telling and true accountability would involve:
- Bipartisan Congressional investigations into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including sworn testimony by presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, as well as vice presidents Cheney, Biden, and Pence, and those failed former commanding generals of ours.
- Bipartisan Congressional investigations into the military’s endless lies about progress in its wars, coupled with war crimes inquiries as needed.
- Major reductions in military spending by Congress to curb present and future military adventurism.
- An end to military adulation, a rejection of militarism, and a recommitment to democracy and truth-telling.
- No future wars overseas without a Congressional declaration of the same, followed by mandatory conscription that would begin with the sons and daughters of members of Congress.
Through big lies and its allegiance to them, the United States today may be following a path already violently trod by Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Celebrating the military despite its defeats is a recipe for perpetual war and perpetual dishonesty. Equating democratic forces within America with divisiveness and sedition is a recipe not only for unrest but for a potentially harsher, far more violent future.
Here history teaches a disturbing lesson. What finally forced most Germans to face harsh truths, to reject militarism and megalomaniacal dreams of world empire, was catastrophic defeat in World War II. What, if anything, will force Americans to face similar harsh truths? Humanity can’t afford yet another world war, not one in which a president has the power to unleash a thousand holocausts via an eternally “modernized” nuclear arsenal.
Just remember: Big lies do have consequences."
"Anglo-Americans have sponsored "East Turkistan" separatism and radical Islamist terrorism, manipulated the Uyghur diaspora for their own geopolitical interests, said a special report recently released by a political group in Australia.
"Since China has recently been practically the sole engine of world economic growth, while cultivating scientific optimism in its education policies and a commitment to promoting classical culture, a strategic posture that exploits the Uygurs of Xinjiang to attack China is insane," said the report by the Australian Citizens Party (ACP).
It also revealed that Anglo-American intelligence agencies have manipulated overseas Uygurs for decades, including those operating under the banner of "human rights" like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Nowadays, the NED plays the part of the Cold War Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and promotes "East Turkistan" separatism.
Pan-Turkism, or the Pan-Turkist ideology, seeks a Turkic-ethnic belt from the Mediterranean to Xinjiang, including a Uygur entity, said the report, adding that it stems from a long history of Venetian [?] and British Intelligence meddling in Turkey and Central Asia.
After World War II, the CIA used extreme Turkish nationalists, with radical Pan-Turkist views, as assets in the Cold War, according to the report.
In 1979, The United States decided to strike at the Soviet Union's "soft underbelly" in Central Asia by backing the Afghanistan mujaheddin against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, which the CIA considered a success and could be replicated against China.
Establishment strategists began to probe ethnic tensions in Xinjiang as a vulnerability, the report pointed out. Around 1990, Uyghur Islamist radicals in Xinjiang, some of them veterans of Afghanistan, launched disturbances and terrorism.
Uyghur separatist terrorism sharply escalated in China in 1996-97 and again in 2014, which prompted China to initiate tough anti-terror programs.
Anglo-American strategists then seized on China's counterterror measures, which included mandatory deracialization programs and increased surveillance alongside huge investment in the economic betterment of Xinjiang, to drive a narrative of indiscriminate oppression of the Uyghur population, the report noted."
More than 60 people, mostly girls, are now known to have died in the attack that hit students as they left class.
The Afghan government blamed Taliban militants for the attack, but the group denied involvement.
The neighbourhood in western Kabul where the blasts occurred is home to many from the Hazara minority community, who are of Mongolian and Central Asian descent and are mainly Shia Muslims.
Almost exactly a year ago, a maternity unit at the local hospital was attacked, leaving 24 women, children and babies dead. ...
"We call for an immediate end to violence and the senseless targeting of innocent civilians," it said.
The European Union's mission in Afghanistan said on Twitter that "targeting primarily students in a girls' school, makes this an attack on the future of Afghanistan".
As of yet, there's been no claim for the attack on Saturday. However, IS continues to carry out assassinations and bombings in Kabul and the city of Jalalabad, despite having recently lost much of the territory it once controlled in the east of the country."
"For four decades, Afghanistan has been the theater of the world’s most brutal proxy wars, involving the U.S., Russia (and formerly the Soviet Union), Pakistan, Iran, India and China.
Last week, a new actor entered that already crowded field: Turkey.
At their meeting on the margins of the NATO summit in Brussels on June 21, President Joe Biden and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, agreed that Ankara will take charge of securing Kabul’s international airport after the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan in September. The Hamid Karzai International Airport is the principal point of entry for foreign visitors coming to the landlocked country. To America, this deal represents a get-out-of-jail-free card. But it’s also the foothold in Afghanistan that Erdoğan has been searching for.
He has already turned Turkey into a base for mediation between warring Afghan groups and the international community. Ankara plans to host a U.S.-backed international conference on the Afghan peace process soon. It has carefully cultivated relations with key domestic stakeholders in Turkey, including the Taliban and warlords opposed to the militant Sunni group.
How Biden reconciles those two conflicting interests could tell us how he will handle similar dilemmas with other useful but increasingly authoritarian leaders, from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. And that, in turn, could determine Biden’s global legacy — as the rosary-carrying moral leader he pitches himself as, or as someone willing to accept Faustian bargains to achieve immediate goals.
Erdoğan has in recent years tried to project himself as the new savior of Muslims around the world — while cracking down on mostly Muslim political opposition at home and staying silent against China’s brutal internment of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs. In 2019, when the Indian government revoked the special semi-autonomous status that Muslim-majority Kashmir had enjoyed for seven decades, Erdoğan publicly took on New Delhi. Last year, his regime converted the historic Hagia Sophia monument that was serving as a museum into a mosque. Erdoğan publicly led the first prayers there. And in May, his government inaugurated a controversial new mosque at Taksim Square, previously a symbol of the country’s secular constitution.
Beyond the symbolism, he has also injected Tukey’s interests more directly than before into the Middle East’s volatile cauldron of tensions. In 2019, Turkish troops entered Syria and battled government forces with the blessings of then U.S. President Donald Trump. Erdoğan has also built a de facto alliance with Qatar and a working relationship with Iran as a regional front against Saudi Arabia.
And it’s not just Turkey’s immediate neighborhood. Erdoğan’s Turkey has begun to call itself an Afro-Eurasian state. That’s part of a major outreach to Africa, where Turkey has ramped up investments. By 2019, Turkey had embassies in 42 of Africa’s 54 nations, up from just 11 a decade earlier. It operates its largest overseas base from Somalia.
Thousands of miles away in Latin America, Turkish soap operas are beaming into living rooms from Chile to Mexico. That soft power is catalyzing a surge in bilateral trade, which almost tripled between 2006 and 2019.
This rapid global expansion of Erdoğan’s influence should be a matter of concern for the Biden administration if it wants to reverse the erosion of America’s credibility as a supporter of democratic values around the world. The current Turkish regime has arrested thousands of opposition figures, judges, teachers and journalists critical of Erdoğan. But if you’re America and have announced that you’re pulling out of Afghanistan’s endless war by September, you’re happy if someone else offers to fill the security vacuum you’re leaving behind.
Therein lies the dilemma — one that Biden is already experiencing with other leaders too. When Israel and Hamas were busy firing missiles and rockets at each other last month, the U.S. eventually turned to Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to broker a cease-fire. El-Sissi came to power through a military coup against the democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi and has since entrenched his authority through fraudulent elections. Yet Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Cairo to thank el-Sissi for mediating the peace deal.
Meanwhile, Biden’s team is consorting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as New Delhi remains a key player in America’s plans to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region.
There are no easy answers for Biden. But the more he concedes to Erdoğan, the more other authoritarian leaders will conclude that they too can get a free pass if they offer their services for America to outsource.
And his own words will return to haunt him: “The days of cozying up to dictators” would end if he came to power, he told the Democratic National Convention last August. Ten months later, Biden risks handing over the keys to peace in some of the world’s most troubled hot spots to autocrats — democracy be damned."
"As U.S. troops head toward the exit in Afghanistan, the menu of policy options to prevent another ruinous civil war is depressingly meager. And vignettes from across the country offer a glimpse of the torment ahead.
In northern Afghanistan, residents of shelters for battered or homeless women are fleeing in advance of the fighting between the Taliban and the government, says Annie Pforzheimer, a retired U.S. diplomat who served two tours in Kabul and is now a director of a group called Women for Afghan Women. She won’t discuss where the women are heading, for fear it could endanger them.
In the Afghan military, “the mood toward the U.S. is souring by the hour,” as they watch the rapid retreat of American troops and contractors, says David Sedney, who spent much of the past two decades as a Pentagon official dealing with Afghanistan. “As the full implications of the U.S. abandonment sink in, dynamics are in motion that could lead in many directions, almost all of them bad.”
President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops after two decades of war is understandable, however dispiriting it is to these Afghans. What’s harder for the Afghans to fathom is why Biden pulled the plug so quickly, with so little apparent planning for what’s next. Leaving the modest remaining force of 2,500 U.S. troops there a while longer would have been a low-cost way of sustaining the shaky status quo.
Biden has a last chance to salvage some of this wreckage when President Ashraf Ghani visits Washington on Friday. He can’t offer Ghani U.S. military muscle — it’s too late for that. But he can pledge financial and diplomatic support that, perhaps, could allow Ghani’s government to avert total collapse. And he can mobilize the international consensus — which includes Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran — against a Taliban military takeover in Kabul.
Biden had hoped for an intra-Afghan peace agreement before U.S. troops departed. He won’t get that, largely because the triumphal Taliban have dragged their feet. Resolution of the conflict — on the battlefield or in negotiations — won’t come until after U.S. troops have left. The Taliban appear startled by the speed of their advance; they have begun privately messaging Americans about the mundane realities of governing, such as operating dams or maintaining a power grid, U.S. officials say.
Although Pentagon civilian and military leaders widely opposed Biden’s decision, they have moved to implement it quickly and decisively. They don’t want scenes of last-minute chaos, with Taliban flags atop captured U.S. Army vehicles or American helicopters lifting desperate stragglers from rooftops.
Every week, U.S. Central Command sends out a news release, as reliable as the Grim Reaper, counting the drawdown. As of Tuesday, the Pentagon had removed the equivalent of 763 C-17 loads of materiel and disposed of 14,790 pieces of equipment.
Americans grew tired of this war, but they won’t like scenes of our departure, either. What Biden owes Afghanistan and America both is a frank explanation of what he’s doing — and how he plans to keep faith with the Afghan people to provide as honorable a retreat as possible. But for Afghanistan, and perhaps Biden, too, this will be a summer of pain."
