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31 Aug, 45 tweets, 22 min read
It is good that #Britain is prepared to play its role against #IS in Afghanistan. It is, however, a mystery what intelligence stream is going to be used and how planes in the Gulf could ever use such a stream in time.
Horrible to leave the dogs behind, though hardly a choice given hundreds of American and tends of thousands of Afghan humans were left.
#Pakistan overtly occupying a chunk of #Afghanistan in the south, even as it occupies the rest through the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and the other jihadists.
An odd one
The #US does seem to have disabled many of these planes; whether the #Taliban can reverse that with help from, say, #China, we shall see.
When you've lost even MSNBC ...
CENTCOM has continued to stand by the Aug. 29 drone strike it took in Kabul as having disrupted an imminent #ISKP attack.
Alarming to think such attitudes had any input on policy; what a profound misunderstanding of the situation.
Seems #US drones at least dealt with some of the #ISKP jihadists the #Taliban released.
#Taliban on the, er, fluid situation at the border with #Pakistan.
Another story of what has been undone by this
Seems #Turkey and #Qatar have been deputised to deal with the #Taliban on getting the people left behind out.
#Iran, of course, pleased with the #US defeat
Incoming Al-Qaeda statement on Afghanistan. It is quite likely the group has been keeping quiet during the evacuation to enable the fiction of a distinction between itself and the Taliban.
The funny thing is that it is the #US driving the public narrative that obfuscates the fact that #Al_Qaeda is in power in #Afghanistan |
#Biden's statement delayed
Clashes between the #Taliban and the #Panjshir resistance
Al-Qaeda statement congratulating the Taliban
Becoming standard ...
#Biden in his speech, after opening by calling the evacuation an "extraordinary success", then mentions it was done under the threat of #ISKP, but bizarrely makes a point even in that context of calling it the "sworn enemy" of the #Taliban.
Ah, #Biden continues throwing all the blame on the Afghan government he collapsed.
#Biden: "90% of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave. And for those remaining Americans, there is no deadline*. We remain committed to get them out if they want to come out."

*Subject to the say-so of the Taliban/Al-Qaeda.
#Biden says a UN Security Council resolution told the Taliban they have to let people leave, and they made public commitments, so that's all okay. Panic over.
#Biden says the Aug. 31 deadline was not arbitrary: Trump made him do it.
#Biden is quite right that #Trump had released 5,000 jihadists, including some senior #Taliban commanders.
"Leaving or escalating", "not going to extend this forever war" or "forever exit". #Biden continues using #Trump's language, with the same truth quotient.
"I take full responsibility", says #Biden, after blaming Trump and his Generals. Also, he couldn't start the evacuations earlier because he'd caused a civil war and it would have caused a "breakdown in confidence" of the government; he needed jihadists to occupy the place first.
#Biden says there is "only one" vital national interest the #US has in #Afghanistan, to avoid threats from terrorist groups, and so to avoid that he has handed the government to #Al_Qaeda and left more space for #ISIS to operate.
#Biden: the US was in #Afghanistan to "prevent an attack on America's homeland and our friends. And that's true today."

Quite so. He doesn't seem to realise he's arguing that the troops held the line and prevented these things all this time.
#Biden's talking points are really stale: there's this weird hypothetical about if 9/11 had come from Yemen, the terror threat having "metastasised", "over-the-horizon capabilities", and so on.
"We are not done with you yet", #Biden says of #ISKP. "I firmly believe the best path to guard our safety and our security lies in a tough, unforgiving, targeted, precise strategy".

Guess the first stage in targeting is giving up access to intelligence streams 🤷🏼‍♂️
#Biden: "The world is changing. We're engaged in a serious competition with #China. We're dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with #Russia."

Best first move was definitely to humiliate #America and give these two states access to #Afghanistan and its resources.
#Biden: "This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It's about ending an era".

The most honest thing in the speech. This is all about ideology, and the hell with the actual consequences.
#Biden: "We'll continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy ... We'll continue to speak out for the basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls ... human rights will be the centre of our foreign policy".

lol
#Biden: "The war in Afghanistan is now over."

A flat-out lie.
Presumably the lack of CNN "fact-checking" on the #Biden speech is because the poor guy was overwhelmed by the lies and is in recovery somewhere before he writes the piece.
Despite the public promises of amnesty from the #Taliban, members of the former government have begun to "disappear" nytimes.com/2021/08/29/wor…
"Abdul-Ali says he does not know why he and his family would pose a risk in the UK and is urging the British government to reverse the decision before they are killed." news.sky.com/story/afghanis…
"Naderi is among at least hundreds of U.S. citizens and potentially thousands of green card holders who are stranded in Afghanistan" nytimes.com/2021/08/31/us/…
"The burgeoning trade relationship between Tehran and the #Taliban threatens to undermine key U.S. pressure campaigns against both." #Iran gets hard-currency dollars (which the Taliban largely has from #Pakistan) and the Taliban gets various imports: wsj.com/articles/talib…
"Biden plans to rely on the mercy of the Taliban to get the remaining people out on commercial or charter flights. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is already laying the groundwork for this American pleading" wsj.com/articles/last-…
"Afghan folk singer Fawad Andarabi was dragged from his home and killed by the Taliban [on Aug. 27] ... 'shot in the head' at the family's farm in the Andarab Valley in the northern Baghlan province." edition.cnn.com/2021/08/30/asi…
No kidding: "[Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said:] 'I want to make it clear that this is not our focus to share government with others'." voanews.com/us-afghanistan…
This will roll on and on, which makes it all the stranger that any messaging "strategy" the administration can be said to have had, terrible as it was, could only "work" (or be sold as working by compliant journalists) through news cycles up until Aug. 31.
"While certainly there is a lethality component", fear not! says the Pentagon spokesman when asked about all the weaponry handed over to the Taliban-Qaeda forces.

He wasn't joking, either. This was him genuinely trying to smother the story.

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More from @KyleWOrton

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 8 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
Kyle Orton Profile picture
4 Sep
#Pakistan's use of #Islamists to interfere in #Afghanistan does not begin in 1979—that jihad project had begun in 1973 and all the Mujahideen groups were formed before the Soviet invasion—but the origins go back to c. 1956 for a cluster of reasons. <Mini Thread>
#Pakistan inherited the #British concept of "strategic depth", i.e. the need for a buffer against the most dangerous imperial rival (#Russia), and thus from foundation sought to make #Afghanistan into a client state.

[@husainhaqqani, "Between Mosque and Military", pp. 164-6]
#pt: Pakistan's move to vassalise #Afghanistan began in earnest in 1956, after the creation of the Pakistani constitution, with its "Objectives Resolution", creating an Islamic Republic, which had impacts not only internally, allowing the state to define "Muslim", but externally.
Read 8 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
4 Sep
While #Pakistan's death squads were at work in #Afghanistan, its ambassador in the US, Asad Majeed Khan, told officials "[the Taliban] were not seeking retribution, and in fact were going home to home to assure Afghans that there will not be reprisals" politico.com/news/2021/09/0…
"The Biden administration has been unusually circumspect about revealing its contacts and discussions with Pakistan."

Presumably trying to figure out if the ISI and the Haqqani Network are separate entities. (Spoiler: they are not)
Quite the phrasing here from @Politico:

"Pakistan has been more helpful to the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, but even that cooperation has been questioned," given, you know, Bin Laden being sheltered near Pakistan's premier Army garrison
Read 4 tweets

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