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16 Aug, 49 tweets, 28 min read
The #US has lost control of the airport in Kabul because desperate people flooded the airfield to try to avoid being abandoned to the Taliban by the US. #Afghanistan
The messaging from this administration and its surrogates would be laughable if it wasn't being used to kill thousands of people and rebirth a jihadist regime that threatens us all
Amrullah Saleh, whatever else we have to say about him, consistently tried to get the world to understand that what was happening in his country was a foreign attack from #Pakistan. And he has remained in #Afghanistan, incidentally, whether that is wise
The video and images of Afghans falling from departing US planes are going to end up being as "iconic" as the helicopter leaving the Embassy for what #Biden has done with #Afghanistan. Such a needless, awful disaster.
The administration's talking point that "this is just what a withdrawal looks like" has found more traction with journalist and analysts that it has any right to. It's not just partisanship, either: many are invested in the idea that this carnage is preferable to staying.
#Uzbekistan says it has shot down an Afghan plane on the border
A distillation of this administration's messaging capacity, which in fairness is a reflection of the policy itself: a total shitshow from start to finish
If the army is still at a stage of needing Western logistics and airpower, which you not only remove, but then give legitimacy to their jihadist enemies and actually release thousands of jihadist prisoners, morale does tend to take a dent.
The Taliban's Night Letters have begun, threatening the small Christian population in Kabul
More footage from the airport
The ability of the Biden people to present abandoning #Afghanistan as separate to, and indeed a gain for, #US "great power competition" relied on people wanting to believe for political reasons. Was always plain it was complete nonsense.
Talibanization proceeding very quickly: the jihadists have moved to suppress the playing of music, even breaking into private homes to confiscate instruments.
Kadyrov believes the game is afoot, he just has not worked out which game or in which direction
Again, no "intelligence failure"; it's a policy failure:

"numerous U.S. officials tell ABC News ... that key intelligence assessments had consistently informed policymakers that the Taliban could overwhelm the country and take the capital within weeks" abcnews.go.com/US/afghanistan…
#HAMAS yesterday congratulated the #Taliban on their victory. #HTS in Syria did, too.
#Biden was most concerned that his abandonment of #Afghanistan not look like the closing scenes in #Vietnam, but the problem with this is ...
... #Afghanistan is #Vietnam, down to the desperate people falling from planes
Among the options the #US is now considering is abandoning all of the #Afghans at the air field
#Britain's Defence Secretary Ben Wallace was visibly upset when asked about #Afghanistan and what is happening to the people who worked with us because "the West has done what it's done" in abandoning the country.
#Taliban setting about disarming the population in Kabul
#Taliban preparing for the mass murder of everyone involved with the fallen government and anyone in any way connected to NATO
#Taliban making positive noises about #Turkey.
"The idea of Afghanistan as a remote, ignorable place is what led us to abandoning Afghanistan to Pakistan after the Soviets were out in the 1980s. At the end of that policy road was 9/11, which drew us back in. We have learned nothing."

Me in @Telegraph telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/1…
Be interesting if this is what comes to pass: would underline that the major difference between the #Taliban now vs. pre-2001 is not its ideology or practice, but its somewhat diversified external support (#Iran, #China, #Russia added to #Pakistan)
One final humiliation: begging the Taliban not to fire on those departing
Good God, as if the Afghans were not in enough trouble: the United Nations has turned its attention on the country
There was no reason for this to happen. Even if the US was to abandon #Afghanistan, there is no excuse for the failure to evacuate the people who helped the West. This is not "just how withdrawals" are; it's a wilful decision.
At least some people have reached safety.
Horrible
This is from the civilian leader of #Pakistan - the allegedly respectable face of the junta - saying that the #US/allies supporting the republican government of #Afghanistan was slavery and the #Taliban's rule is liberation.
Morbidly curious to see what #Biden can possibly say about the #Afghanistan situation.
To add to #HAMAS and #HTS, the grand mufti of #Oman congratulates the #Taliban on their clear victory over the aggressor occupiers, a fulfilment of god's promise for the whole umma (Islamic community).
CNN's anchor before and after the Taliban conquest of Afghanistan

[Picture via @OrientNews]
The International Union of Muslim Scholars, the #Qatar-based outfit originally led by the influential Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has, of course, welcomed the #Taliban victory in Afghanistan.
The immediate issue is people threatened with murder getting to safety but very soon #Afghanistan will be facing the problem of its entire financial system and economy having collapsed.
This utter fiasco of a withdrawal has required more #US troops to be sent to #Afghanistan than were there to hold together the republican government and keep the jihadists suppressed.

Doing nothing would literally have been better than the #Biden policy.
Very murky and grim situation at the airport
The Khost Protection Force (#KPF), a #CIA-backed unit, has surrendered to the #Taliban and been disbanded.

For now (no guarantee of this lasting), it seems the KPF operatives have not been harmed
The last pocket of resistance in #Afghanistan:
#China clearly very pleased with the #US withdrawal from #Afghanistan and the questions it raises for #Taiwan about exactly what an American security guarantee is worth.
Unbelievable
Further confirmation the #Taliban is planning to slaughter everyone who worked with us who gets left behind.
#Pakistan celebrating its victory in #Afghanistan over #NATO. That the ISI/military feel comfortable for their civilian puppet to do this tells you about the mood in Islamabad right now.
#Britain has 900 troops in #Afghanistan
Slight spanner in the narrative of "Shia #Iran" being hostile to the #Taliban ... won't stop it, of course; ten years and more of evidence couldn't do that.
The mineral wealth of #Afghanistan is not an immediate issue; extracting and marketing has gotten almost nowhere. That said, having a #Pakistan proxy regime in the country means #China's access will be greater, so over the medium-term it could be a factor.
"The [Defense] Department will provide protection, air transportation, and processing of up to 30,000 at-risk individuals from Kabul. This total includes embassy personnel, US citizens, Afghan SIV applicants and other[s]". abcnews.go.com/Politics/live-…
Every. Little. Thing. A disaster all the way down.

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More from @KyleWOrton

Kyle Orton Profile picture
15 Sep
In Sept. 1971, the KGB's Oleg Lyalin defected from the London Embassy and told the British government about the really alarming (and some quite bizarre) "special actions" the Soviets had been planning on the West, precipitating the mass expulsion Soviet spies in Operation FOOT.
The interesting thing is that this meant the West was quite well aware, from near the beginning of Andropov's renewed campaign, that Soviet terrorism was a very real phenomenon, and yet down to the end most in the West considered it a "conspiracy theory"
The KGB recruitment of Wadi Haddad of the PFLP in 1970 was the turning point: his Palestinian group was given weapons that even Eastern Bloc states hadn't received and given tasks as various as kidnapping CIA officers and assassinating Soviet defectors.
Read 7 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
15 Sep
#Pakistan's claim to be a victim of terrorism rests on groups like #TTP ("Pakistani Taliban"), but it was the Army/ISI who created the jihadist emirate in North Waziristan where this group was formed, with the active and ongoing assistance of the ISI's loyal Haqqani Network. ImageImage
#pt: "The Foutainhead of Jihad", pp. 164-5.
The #Haqqani-run enclave in North Waziristan, operating with the full backing of #Pakistan's ISI, not only nurtured the #TTP the Pakistanis would later portray as a mortal foe, it of course supported the "Afghan" #Taliban and was where #Al_Qaeda organised many post-9/11 plots. ImageImage
Read 9 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
14 Sep
#IS established itself in "Af-Pak" by building off the Afghan Salafist community that took root in eastern areas via the Arab presence there beginning many decades ago. The Salafis had some second thoughts, but the #Taliban is now pressuring them, too. trtworld.com/opinion/the-dy…
#pt: The Taliban made an approach to IS-Centre in 2015 to ask that ISKP not be used to open another jihadist front, since this would distract from the war with the West. No dice. IS didn't even bother to reply.
#pt: The original Pakistani, mostly TTP, leadership of #ISKP was killed off quite quickly and replaced with Afghan Salafis. The current leader, though, Dr. Shahab al-Muhajir, seems to be a former Haqqani Network operative, and has peeled away other parts of that network.
Read 4 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
13 Sep
The lengths the #KGB went to in trying to destroy #Solzhenitsyn even after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union are extraordinary, and not entirely irrational: they understood the danger he posed to them.

<Mini thread drawn from "The Sword and the Shield", pp. 312, 317-21>
Andropov first tried to expel Solzhenitsyn in autumn 1971, but Brezhnev listened to interior minister Nikolai Shchelokov, who said the great writer should be co-opted rather than persecuted. Andropov did not forget this, and later witch-hunted Shchelokov until he killed himself.
In late 1973, after Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov wrote an open letter that encouraged Congress to override the Nixon-Kissinger administration by passing Jackson-Vanik that linked Soviet trade privileges to human rights, Brezhnev said the KGB should have cracked down from the start.
Read 9 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
9 Sep
#Pakistan's ruler from 1999 to 2008, General Pervez Musharraf, wrote in his memoir: "It is true that we had assisted in the rise of the #Taliban after the Soviet Union withdrew from #Afghanistan" (p. 202). Image
Even after #Pakistan's General Musharraf disparages the "obscurantist" nature of the #Taliban and the "peace of the graveyard" they brought, he writes: "Nevertheless, we still supported them, for geostrategic reasons", to minimise Indian influence in #Afghanistan (p. 203).
Musharraf tries to create a narrative where #Pakistan was not engaged with the #Taliban at inception, even though the Saudis and UAE were (p. 201-11), which is absurd, and that the ISI had lost its "leverage" over the Taliban after it came to power (pp. 203, 209), equally absurd.
Read 9 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
5 Sep
"Though Mr. Biden reversed other Trump policies, he was inclined to go through with the Afghan [withdrawal] ... The military argued for keeping 2,500 troops ... Bagram air base was central to the military's plans" for drones and special forces. wsj.com/articles/insid…
On 8 May, "The Pentagon wanted a discussion on an emergency evacuation of the embassy and how to plan to remove Afghans at risk, but White House officials asked that those issues be removed from the agenda"

Again, Biden cannot say he didn't know. Biden chose to leave the Afghans
Even Jake Sullivan thought closing Bagram Airbase was a bad idea, and in June there was a pause for four days. But Biden insisted on doing all this with 650 troops in Kabul, so the Pentagon could only protect either Bagram or HKIA, and Biden went with the latter.
Read 7 tweets

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