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22 Aug, 49 tweets, 21 min read
The security situation remains poor in Kabul this morning, and to the extent any order is being brought it is by the Haqqani Network, a component of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
There really is no excuse: Biden was warned for months and months, right out in public. It needed no intelligence assessment.
The administration's adoption of existentialist vocabulary when asked why they're so awful at their jobs doesn't seem to be just a coping strategy; it's an indication they're lying again, in this instance about staying as long as needed to get everyone out
Parody and satire are no longer required in this world
The #Taliban is an instrument of #Pakistan's deep state kyleorton.co.uk/2021/08/17/pak…
As I say, parody and satire totally unnecessary at this stage
These horrendous closing scenes in Afghanistan, made all the worse by the fact its completely unnecessary; this did not have to happen.
The #British forces in Kabul are universally agreed to have performed magnificently in this crisis - capable and humane, beyond anything they could have reasonably been expected to do.
An answer to a question some have asked in good faith, and some have not
It's just incredible: the Biden administration is not only wildly incoherent in its political messaging; it cannot even transmit basic security information on whether or not to go to the airport in Kabul.
Has taken this vast private effort because the US administration has been so wilfully hesitant about rescuing the Afghans who worked with us.

It is worth someone digging into why because Biden's footdragging was a really determined policy
I'm sure the source will rankle some, but Blair is correct
Perhaps it will be the use of black face that has our "anti-imperialist" friends decide that the Taliban is, in fact, bad
Thread 👇🏻
The copium is hitting hard in some quarters
#Taliban has taken the children of members of the resistance hostage to try to force their surrender
The economic argument against the War on Terror just does not meet the basic tests of mathematics.
Chaos in the #Taliban-held areas, which suits #Pakistan's purposes: a strong, stable Afghanistan would have ideas of its own; it is in manipulating a chaotic Afghanistan that the ISI thrives
The "new" #Taliban just sent all female government workers home - because of the "security situation", of course, which was the formal reasoning the last time, from 1996 to 2001.
Horrifying situation, with the US still being unclear about the fate of those who fought alongside it
Taliban have destroyed the economy in general, but have managed to assist one sector
Gul Agha Sherzai, an early CIA ally during the invasion in 2001 and someone hated by the jihadists for his work against Al-Qaeda ever since, has pledged allegiance to the Taliban.
Have to see how this develops, whether Dostum can link up with Panjshir
Saudi outlet Asharq al-Awsat has accompanied Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Masud for an interview
Even non-NATO #Ukraine doing its part in Kabul.
At least twenty people have died around the airport in this melee.
The head of #Pakistan's ISI Faiz Hameed praying with his #Taliban minions
#Russia interceding on the #Taliban's behalf
In #Afghanistan, journalists converged on Kabul to try to get out of the country, but now the #Taliban occupies the city and the #Americans have lost control, so the journalists have had to go into hiding and the jihadists are deliberately hunting them
#Taliban giving an exclusive interview to #Al_Jazeera, a surprise choice of outlet to be sure. It's in English, incidentally.
This report published before the collapse of #Afghanistan does a good job disproving the "nobody saw this coming" talking point, as well as the evil role of #Pakistan, #Iran, and the #American ideology of "ending forever wars" in this cataclysm. eeradicalization.com/afghanistan-re…
The #Biden gamble that this needless withdrawal in #Afghanistan was a political winner does not seem to be working.
This is what makes Biden's "I must, as leader, follow the masses" argument so ridiculous: to the extent "public opinion" exists, it is very malleable, and if a President explains the security needs and low costs of a mission, people will stay with it
Americans taking up the slack left by their government
"Must"! The Taliban "must" let Americans through, despite the fact they have not been, which means either the US never insisted very hard on this before or the US is pleading with violent jihadists - criminal negligence in either case.
Austin has not asked Biden for an extension of the deadline yet:
Some better news
This 👇🏻
#IS says the #Taliban takeover in #Afghanistan is b/c of a conspiracy with #America, which "realised the failure of the model of the apostate [Muslim] Brotherhood to take over the great ideological war against the Islamic State" and so selected a new one kyleorton.co.uk/2021/08/22/isl…
The #Taliban seems set to begin an offensive against the final pocket of resistance in #Panjshir:
Suspect this is true, and Al-Qaeda is laying low, for now, in coordination with ISI/Taliban. Time will tell, of course.
Americans: not fans of being humiliated, it turns out
Blinken was asked if President Biden would like to visit reality, and said "no"
The concentration of lies from Blinken here is quite stunning, whether it's on getting the Afghans who helped us to safety or the U.S. actions as part of their fake peace process to cover the unconditional withdrawal that mortally wounded the Afghan state
The Orange Lunatic broke some people. Sadly they're people with real influence.
Carter needs to be prevented from doing any more interviews on this; the last one really was bad enough, but this is far worse.
The legal president of #Afghanistan says the #Taliban has arrived at the gates of the final pocket of resistance in #Panjshir
All #Democrats are alarmed by #Biden's rank incompetence when it comes to #Afghanistan, and there is then a split between those who are substantively alarmed that Mr. Empathy is a sociopath, and those who are alarmed that he has showed everybody he is. nytimes.com/2021/08/22/us/…
Deserves proper recognition and credit

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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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