The war with radical Islam is ongoing
In the wake of Biden’s unmitigated catastrophe in Afghanistan, he has been attempting to assuage his incompetence by providing the public with the false choice between leaving and committing America to an endless war.
Even after we leave Afghanistan, we will still be engaged in an ongoing war, for the war with radical Islam does not take two parties. Radical Islam has been at continual war with the West since the hordes of Muslims emerged from the Arabian Peninsula and fought their way into Western Europe to be stopped in France by Charles Martel and centuries later by the Polish cavalry at the gates of Vienna.
Osama bin Laden demanded that Spain (Andalusia) be returned to Islam, for whatever is once Islam’s is always Islam’s, according to the terrorist who brought down the twin towers on September 11.
Even among Muslims who seek refuge in the West, there is a faction that seeks not to assimilate into Western culture but to replace Western democracy with a fundamentalist version of Islam. “To hell with your democracy,” reads signs that are held high by fundamentalist demonstrators on the streets of London.
Obviously, these people do not represent Islam in the West, but it only takes two or three radicalized people to foment a terrorist operation and cast a stain on an entire community.
Muslim communities, like all immigrant communities, are divided. The majority seek to go about their business and make a decent place for their families, but there is a segment that feels alienated from life in the old world and unable to surmount the cultural barriers to life in the new. There is a reason that Muslim would-be terrorists are disproportionately not foreign but homegrown, many are American citizens.
As long as there are Muslim societies extolling the virtues of terrorism as Islamic virtues, there will be alienated Muslim youth in Western society that will heed the call. Therefore, beyond the strategic consequences of the fall of Afghanistan to the fundamentalist Taliban, Afghanistan will present a signal to those who are susceptible to mobilization by fundamentalist ideology. The Biden administration has been oblivious to both the obvious strategic consequences of its debacle in Afghanistan and the impact a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan will have on mobilizing terrorists in the West.
What will become of the Afghans we resettle in America? Fremont, California holds the largest Afghan population in the Western world. The head of the local state university is himself an Afghan. Freemont also produced the celebrated author of The Kite Runner, a successful physician turned prominent novelist. They represent the successful members of the community, who have integrated into the fabric of American life.
But too many of the community are described as existing in a state of suspended animation between Afghanistan and America. They feel as if they belong to neither culture and are suspicious of outsiders. Every uptick in the war in Afghanistan leads them to question whether the people who gave them shelter are going to be responsible for the grotesque civilian casualties that the fighting has produced.
The lack of assimilation has been attributed to language difficulties. The early refugees were successful, highly educated professionals, who came in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. These people assimilated. Later, more rural people came, who did not share the same intellectual accomplishments of the first wave of immigrants. These people are the ones caught between two cultures as a function of access to English literacy because they were not highly literate in their own language.
But others have characterized the divisions in the Afghan community as one of a conflict of generations, with the second generation being more alienated, seeing themselves as a generation without a culture.
Discussions of the character of the community almost invariably fall on issues facing the Afghan community. There is almost no discussion of what the larger community can do to facilitate assimilation.
If we simply transport people out of harm’s way without attending to their emotional, cultural, and psychological needs, we will have placed into our midst people ripe for exploitation by radical ideology, if not in the first generation, then in the second.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati.
Image: بدر الإسلام
FLEECED! How aid billions were squandered in Afghanistan: £4 million on Tuscan goats for the cashmere trade, £120 million on Dubai villas for corrupt politicians and £400 million on aircraft left to rot
‘Stone Adulterers’: Islamist Hate Preacher Anjem Choudary Calls on Taliban to Enforce Strict Sharia
Radical Islamist hate preacher Anjem Choudary has called for the Taliban to go full throttle in imposing Sharia law in Afghanistan by imposing an “infidel tax” on foreigners and stoning adulterers, among other extreme forms of ‘justice’.
The UK’s most infamous hate cleric had his ban on public speaking lifted earlier this year, which was imposed on Choudary upon his release from prison. The notorious preachers hadserved less than half of his five-and-a-half-year sentence for supporting the so-called Islamic State.
While Choudary has been banned for hate speech by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp he has reportedly been using the encrypted Russian messaging app Telegram to spread his Islamist propaganda.
In a 3,500-word treatise entitled Sincere Advice To The Leadership Of The Taliban, Anjem Choudary called for thieves to have their hands chopped off, lashings for drinking alcohol, and the banning of music and mixing between the sexes.
In the essay, which was reportedly released on his Telegram channel, he wrote: “The penal code or Hudood is the right of Allah to cut the hand off the thief, stone the adulterer, implementing capital punishment upon the apostate and lashing those who drink alcohol (all after due court process and evidence) must be implemented without question and hesitation,” Choudary wrote per the Mail on Sunday.
“Having experienced decades of Islamic activism in Britain since the early 1990s until my incarceration in 2016, I can personally testify that fundamental values, liberties and rights which liberal democracies, such as the UK, have lauded and prided itself on have today been shredded by successive governments and are today in tatters,” the hate preacher added.
Choudary said that the Taliban regime should seek to purge all Western influence from the country and ban “useless pursuits such as music, drama and philosophy”.
In an apparent reference to the British and American forces still in Afghanistan, the Islamist hate preacher called on Taliban forces to point their guns at “occupying forces” as well as anyone who “stands in the way of implementing the rule of Allah”.
“Muslims around the world must assess whether this fledgling state is really implementing Islamic law or whether it is just another country choosing Islam to be part of its name that it wishes everyone to call it by,” he added.
Choudary said that the Taliban should open its borders to all Muslims and change its name to the Islamic State in order to forge a new “Khilafah caliphate”.
The former leader of the now-banned Al-Muhajiroun group in Britain has been linked to a number of fatal Islamist attacks, including London Bridge terrorist Khuram Butt, suspected executioner “new Jihadi John” Siddhartha Dhar, and Usman Khan, a convicted jihadist automatically released from prison on licence halfway through his term, who stabbed five people on the London Bridge, killing two.
Asked if he would personally travel to Afghanistan, Choudary said that he is unable due to terrorism restrictions that prohibit him from leaving the country. However, he said: “As a Muslim, we believe in Islam and the sharia, so it is a natural thing to live there. Why do Jews gravitate towards Israel?”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
Liberal Lawyer Freed Taliban Commando on Frontlines of Kabul Surge
Rebecca Dick won acclaim for defending terrorists at Guantanamo Bay
Afghan national Gholan Ruhani maintained his innocence after coalition forces captured him alongside a drug-trafficking militia commander and tossed him in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ruhani, represented by white shoe lawyer Rebecca Dick, said he was "a simple shopkeeper who helped Americans."
Not quite. Days ago, Al Jazeera news captured Ruhani with fellow Taliban militants in the presidential palace in Kabul, as they announced the formation of an Islamic emirate. Ruhani, who cradled a machine gun, recited from the Quran and spoke of his time at Guantanamo.
Dick, then a top-flight attorney at Dechert LLP, represented Ruhani and advocated for his repatriation to Afghanistan. She said in a 2008 interview that her clients were not extremists.
"None expresses any interest in harming the U.S.," she said. "Most affirmatively express support for the Karzai government; the others simply do not want to think about or discuss politics."
Her statements were squarely at odds with Defense Departments assessments, which were vindicated by Ruhani's role in the collapse of the Ghani government. Government reports connected Ruhani to the Taliban's intelligence outfit, highlighted his familial ties to senior Taliban leaders, and correctly anticipated that he would join terrorist groups if released.
Now retired, Dick represented Ruhani and seven other Guantanamo detainees from Dechert's Washington offices. Dechert also represented the Iranian-American businessman and Quincy Institute fellow Amir Handjani and threatened to sue the Washington Free Beacon for defamation over its coverage of Handjani’s role as an adviser to the authoritarian sheikh who rules one of the seven United Arab Emirates with an iron fist.
There are obvious inconsistencies between Ruhani's accounts and the body of evidence assembled against him by the Defense Department. For example, he admitted to performing certain menial tasks for the Taliban intelligence unit in Kabul. But he insisted his primary occupation was with his family's electronics store in Ghazni, a city almost 100 miles southeast of the capital.
He also told interrogators he did not have ties to the regime's intelligence chief, Qari Ahmadullah. Ahmadullah is Ruhani's brother-in-law.
A 2007 Defense Department report concluded that Ruhani worked in the operations department of the Taliban's intelligence arm. It assessed that that he could share information about the Taliban's intelligence infrastructure, operational methods, and communications with intelligence officials. The report anticipated that Ruhani "would probably join [anti-coalition militia] groups dedicated to attacking US and coalition forces in Afghanistan if released."
Lawyering on behalf of Guantanamo detainees was a cause célèbre for much of the legal establishment during the War on Terror. Dick is one of numerous corporate lawyers, scholars, and monied industry groups, including the American Bar Association, that counseled and advocated for the detainees.
The praise they accepted for that work makes a striking contrast with Sunday's scene in Kabul. Both Dick and Dechert declined to comment for this story.
Dick was on hand at the Washington, D.C., Ritz Carlton in 2007 to accept a Beacon of Justice Award from the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, given in recognition of Dechert's work on behalf of prisoners at Guantanamo. Dechert highlighted the award in a press release, noting the association selected firms for "providing representation to individuals, despite public criticism." Dechert grossed over $1 billion in revenue in 2020, according to the National Law Journal, making it one of the 50 highest-grossing firms in the world.
The Center for Constitutional Rights cited Dick for "unflagging commitment" to her Guantanamo clients. The center describes itself as a cause-lawyering organization dedicated to "the creative use of law as a positive force for social change."
Dechert itself honored Dick and other colleagues in 2008 at a firm-wide reception that showcased its pro bono accomplishments. She was one of several recipients of the firm's Samuel E. Klein Pro Bono Award. Pictures of the event in a firm newsletter show attendees munching on hors d'oeuvres and drinking champagne.
The Drooling Class
If you ever doubted that the country was in the hands of some very stupid and corrupt people, this week should have thoroughly disabused you of that fantasy. In one fell swoop, the administration left billions of dollars of military equipment in the hands of the barbarous anti-American Taliban; broke the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance by bugging out without warning to its members who were in Afghanistan in support of our mission there; left as many as 50,000 Americans and tens of thousands more of our Afghan allies to the not so tender mercies of the enemy; and on Friday Biden lied about it all.
It’s not that most of us wanted this Afghan Mission Impossible to continue forever. It’s just that there’s a right way to do it. President Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo had a well-conceived plan. It included preconditions on the Taliban and the removal of all U.S. military equipment and civilians before any group withdrawal. The administration in its wisdom did it backward: troops first, civilians left to their own devices (we’re even charging those who make it through the Taliban blockade around the one remaining airport $2,000 a head to be evacuated), abandoning Bagram’s well-fortified and equipped airbase, and an incredible array of military equipment for the taking, a taking that makes the entire world very unsafe.
Scores of videos have emerged of Taliban fighters rejoicing near abandoned American helicopters, carrying U.S.-supplied M24 sniper rifles and M18 assault weapons, stacking other small arms and materiel in unending piles and driving Humvees and other U.S.-made military trucks.
The Taliban have seized airplanes, tanks and artillery from Afghan outposts and from evacuating U.S. personnel, revealing one of the heavier costs of a U.S. troop withdrawal amid a collapse of Afghanistan’s government and army.
We often are critical of CNN and with good reason, but this week its chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward has been doing the most incredible coverage from Kabul. Every second she’s on the air from Kabul she puts paid to the administration’s fantastical accounts.
The British Parliament (both houses of it) condemned Biden in special sessions. Why wouldn’t they? Albert Nardelli of Bloomberg explained that Biden had explicitly told key allies that we’d maintain enough of a security presence after the main troop withdrawal so they could continue embassy operations in Kabul. We did not, leaving diplomatic personnel there unprotected and NATO nation civilians at great risk. U.K. Prime 
Minister Boris Johnson tried repeatedly to discuss this by phone with Biden who did not take the calls. We, in one ill-considered move, betrayed the Afghans who worked with us and the allies who are fighting alongside us there.
The last reports I saw say British and French special operation outfits have been transported to Kabul to aid in getting their nationals to the airport for evacuation. When they can, they are also aiding Americans trapped in this mess. Our troops are confined to the airport and apparently not happy that our allies are doing the job which should be done by them:
I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.
Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army's 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.[snip]I understand that the SAS has conducted operations to bring American citizens, as well as British citizens and at-risk personnel, through checkpoints and to the airport. This is not an indictment on U.S. capabilities or special operations intent, but rather, it's a reflection of political-military authorities. In part, this difference is understandable. Large-scale U.S. military operations beyond the Kabul airport perimeter would entail significant risk absent prior Taliban approval. But there is a sense, at least by allies, that the U.S. military could be doing more to leverage the Taliban into providing greater ease of access to the airport for those most at risk.
CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward said Friday while reporting from the Kabul airport that despite promises from President Joe Biden of a full evacuation, during a period of eight hours, she did not see any U.S. flights evacuate people.
Ward said, “I’m sitting here, for 12 hours in the airport, eight hours on the airfield, and I haven’t seen a single U.S. plane take off. How on earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks. It just, it can’t happen.”[/quote]
A bureaucratic tug of war between the State Department, Pentagon, and White House is also disrupting evacuation operations out of Kabul. This is aggravating British, French, and other Kabul-present military authorities. I understand that these governments have been further aggravated by the failure of the White House and Pentagon to communicate adequately, or in some cases, to communicate at all, on their intentions and actions. All these allies admit, however, that only the U.S. military could provide the airfield defense and air traffic control capabilities now on display.
The claim that the rapid Taliban advance which the administration had assumed falsely would take 90 days was unexpected, is also nonsense. The tangled lines of communication and the diffusion into a Babel of authorization to act is the key, not the rapid Taliban movement.
Officials on the ground had warned on July 13 that Kabul would collapse soon, that the Taliban’s “advance was imminent “ and the Afghan military unlikely to stop it.
In the meantime, the advance, as you certainly would expect, was accompanied by targeted killings, atrocities, and Afghani flights to the exits. (Both Greece and Turkey are fortifying their borders to prevent an onrushing torrent of Afghan asylum seekers.) We have apparently distributed visa forms for anyone in Afghanistan and are transporting those who make it through the Taliban phalanx at the airport, but with records of those who helped us being destroyed by our embassy officials and by the document holders themselves for protection who knows who we are taking in? Afghan history and culture give me every reason to believe that the reason the Taliban has given us a hard deadline to get our civilians out of there at the same time they are making the exits impossible, presage horrid mass murders of those stuck there or a dreadful hostage situation involving tens of thousands of Americans.
After hiding out at Camp David, providing only a video of him sitting alone at a huge conference table in front of a telescreen which seems to have been made in February (given the erroneous time shown on the telescreen), Biden finally showed up briefly on Friday in the Capitol an hour late to read a statement and respond to a handful of questions, clearly handed up in advance by the reporters he called on. Even this song and dance was a joke. He stumbled and lied throughout.
How bad was Biden’s misinformation to the American public? Dreadful. The best assessment comes from Jennifer Griffin, a very experienced Pentagon reporter who spent years in Afghanistan. She said couldn’t fact-check the misstatements fast enough in real time. There were just so many falsehoods. She’s a thorough-going professional, but you could see her genuine anger burning through as she said that.
Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker -- in the pithy way my native state speakers communicate -- said it well:
If Joe Biden knew, he should be impeached.
If he wasn’t told, the Secretary of State should be fired.
If he doesn’t remember, they should invoke the 25th amendment.
It’s not just Biden. To look at his team of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Chief of Staff General Mark Milley is to understand Shel Silverstein’s “the lights are on, but nobody’s home.”
Biden announced on Friday that he would return to Delaware. He said he needed to because he "wasn’t sleeping well." I’ll bet he isn’t. On Saturday, he was apparently overruled and remained in the Capitol. For how long, even he probably doesn't know. The lid seems indefinite.
Joe Biden, Sinking into the Sand
In his sonnet "Ozymandias," poet Percy Bysshe Shelley tells of a traveler who comes upon a desert ruin that was once an ancient empire. All that is left of it are "two vast and trunkless legs of stone" and a sneering imperial stone "visage" half-buried in the sand. Etched on a pedestal are the words: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair."
Joe Biden is a latter-day Ozymandias, with a tremendous thirst for power and a misplaced sense of invulnerability. But unlike the ancient royal ruler, it will not take eons for Biden's power to erode. Even as his smirk remains, he is diminishing before our very eyes.
Put bluntly, Biden is not as advertised. He was supposed to bring a divided nation together. He promised to govern not with an iron fist, but with a velvet glove. Now that hand has trouble finding his mask. Joe represented himself as a serious candidate, well versed in affairs of state. Instead, we are saddled with a cipher in the White House, a compromised head of state who takes in teleprompter content through his beady eyes and drones it out through his thin lips.
In many U.S. states, there are "lemon laws" that provide a remedy for purchases of cars and other consumer goods to compensate for products that fail to meet standards of quality and performance. If the home you buy comes with unhappy surprises, there are legal remedies. The Federal Trade Commission enforces truth in adverting laws. Nothing like this applies to politicians who disappoint.
After Trump's victory over Hillary in 2016, one of my college classmates wrote to her like-minded liberal friends, "How can we have let this happen?" I suspect that a similar query is being voiced by deluded Biden-supporters whose judgment at the ballot box was blinded by their irrational hatred for the Orange Tweeter.
Despite the sizable lineup of candidates in their primaries, Democrats eventually opted for old Uncle Joe Biden. If he didn't seem all that good in the debates, at least he looked promising on paper. His résumé was long, if not impressive. He was Barack's buddy, supposedly tapped for his wide experience with international issues. He had name recognition. And surely, one can't spend almost a half-century in the swamp and not learn the dangers of bucking the tide.
Over his long political career that began in 1973, Biden faced few challenges — and fewer challengers. He was re-elected to the Senate six times. He glad-handed folks, securing their loyalty through longevity and privilege. He became a familiar face in Washington, not because he did so much, but because he did so little for so long. As a result, he became impervious to criticism. He found it easy enough to weasel out of unpopular actions, such as the 1994 legislation he authored and pushed, intending to reduce crime but resulting, instead, in massive incarceration, particularly of blacks.
Biden kept a rather low profile during his years as "second in command" in the Obama administration. That's how "Barack" liked it: an older "yes man" rather than a vital competitor to the charismatic president. Biden knew how to bulldoze his way through the Washingtonian corridors of power. And more importantly, he knew where the bodies were buried.
Joe made three runs for the presidency. The third time was the charm — but not for America. He might have been the "real deal" in Dover, but he didn't particularly resonate with voters beyond his home turf. In the first campaign, he was forced to drop out after being caught plagiarizing. On his second try, he garnered about 3% of the primary vote. It was only when the veneer of Obama's popularity rubbed off on him that Biden was more or less taken seriously by the country at large.
Obama once remarked that Old Joe didn't have a mean bone in his body. What he neglected to point out, however, is that Biden's backbone has gone missing. The perennial bureaucrat went giddily with the flow, as long as its course led to personal enrichment for himself and his family. In his years in Washington, Joe became very wealthy, and so did his siblings and younger son, Hunter.
Biden turned the tiny Diamond State of Delaware into an attractive tax haven for corporations, and they loved him for it. Once entrenched in office, Joe breezed through his re-election campaigns. Voters felt understandably sorry for the horrific loss of his first wife and daughter. And he made political hay over the fact that he Amtrak-ed back and forth between home and capital, fulfilling his dual obligations to his sons and constituents. It is ironic that a man who personally suffered such loss seems humdrum about his role in causing the collective grief of so many other families in Afghanistan.
Biden may seem grandfatherly and low-key, but he exhibits a scathingly short temper toward those whose opinions differ from his own, such as Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork, distinguished candidates for the Supreme Court. He humiliated Thomas, a black jurist who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps from an impoverished Southern family.
As for Bork, Joe ironically opposed him because he feared that the conservative judge was racist — a concern in sharp contrast to his longtime friendship with powerful West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, a onetime muckety-muck in the Ku Klux Klan. From then on, all conservative high court applicants have been "Borked."
Fortunately for Biden, his contradictions, outbursts, flubs, and gaffes were rarely taken any more seriously than he was. Even some of my Republican friends excused his missteps as just "Joe being Joe." Would the NeverTrumps tolerate forgiveness because Trump was just being Trump?
Now that Joe is president, the chickens of his sketchy political past are coming home to roost. Accustomed to coasting through his career without much criticism, Biden seems now to have landed in a place that befuddles him. His speechwriters may insert Harry Truman's famous phrase, "the buck stops here," but don't expect Joe to put that plaque on his desk in the Oval Office anytime soon.
Still, Biden is fond of boasting, "I am the president of the United States," and "This is America, for God's sake," as though presumably anything is possible with him at the helm. His current shortfall is exacerbated by creeping dementia. He finds it hard to play the role because somewhere along the line, he lost the script. He was never one to lead the pack, and at this point, he seems unable to do so. The effects of his impairment may vary from day to day, but the condition never goes away. It only gets worse with time.
Unfortunately, Biden's confusion and inability to deal with problems spell big trouble for our country. Over his years in office, he had come to expect immunity for his misbehavior, as was the case with his quid quo threat against the Ukrainian government. He has grown accustomed to weaseling out of sticky situations — such as inappropriately fondling women and young girls. And an accommodating press has been covering up his son Hunter's various scandals.
In fact, until now, Biden has not been taken to task by most of the mainstream media. Not for side-stepping the border crisis. Not for putting mandated masks above mayhem here and abroad. Not for his craven capitulation to the far left of his party, even concurring that the United States is "systemically racist." He has even been given leeway to point his bony finger of blame at everyone but himself.
This pattern of scapegoating others for his own shortcomings has badly damaged Biden. More importantly, it will likely damage America for years to come. Recently, his growing petulance and irrational rants were on full display during a televised ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos.
Clearly, Biden has no business being president of the United States. During his unimpressive campaign, he failed to inform Americans about his mental decline. If he did not know about it, surely his doctor and family did. Failure to fully disclose his condition should be grounds for his resignation or impeachment.
During the Vietnam war era, opponents gathered outside the White House, chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" Maybe it is time to descend on the White House, shouting, "Joe, Joe, you gotta go!" (That is, if he hasn't already gone...off to Camp David or his home in Wilmington, Del.)
There is a lesson to be learned from Shelley's poem. If Biden and his buddies continue in power, our country could — with unimaginable speed — become a shadow of its former self. We must not underestimate such an eventuality the way Biden did with the swift advance of the Taliban. Without a course correction, America could hopelessly find itself sinking into the sands of oblivion.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
FLEECED! How aid billions were squandered in Afghanistan: £4 million on Tuscan goats for the cashmere trade, £120 million on Dubai villas for corrupt politicians and £400 million on aircraft left to rot
- Tuscan goats flown in as part of £4.4m plan to create jobs in the cashmere trade
- The International Monetary Fund blocked the latest £330 million tranche of aid
- Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to the region, warned a decade ago that corruption was destroying efforts to create a fledgling democracy
mments
If you want to understand the horrifying return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, you could delve into the history of a mountain nation that repeatedly repels foreign invaders.
Or you could consider the saga of nine Italian goats.
These animals from Tuscany were airlifted into the country as part of a £4.4 million scheme planned by the Pentagon to help the Afghan cashmere industry and create thousands of jobs.
The blond billy goats were sent to breed with darker females to boost the yield and quality of the luxury wool from nine million local goats.
But several fell sick, their newly designed home was too small, huge food costs made the plans unsustainable, the intended Afghan partner pulled out, and the project chief quit in dismay.
Those in charge could not even tell if the unfortunate goats ended up in a cooking pot. ‘We don’t know,’ said John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. ‘This was so poorly managed.’
This farcical scheme perfectly symbolises the costly and corrosive folly of Western attempts to build a new society in Afghanistan, based on arrogance, arms and vast flows of aid.
Tony Blair declared it our ‘duty’ to rebuild Afghanistan as a ‘stable and democratic’ nation.
But despite some advances in education, female empowerment and prosperity, naive foreign interventions played a damaging role in fuelling corruption, furthering divisions and fostering a mafia state, thereby assisting the return of the Taliban.
Squandered: A profligate £4.4million was spent on importing nine Italian goats to try to boost the Afghan cashmere industry (Pictured: Herd of goats near Bagram Airfield)
The International Monetary Fund may have blocked the latest £330 million tranche of aid from failing into their hands, but how much have they already pocketed?
For the waste of taxpayers’ money was astonishing, with ‘ghost’ schools and military forces, counter-narcotic efforts that backfired, dodgy construction and fuel deals siphoning off billions, and cash and gold smuggled out through Kabul airport.
US diplomatic cables revealed one Afghan vice-president flew to Dubai with £38 million in cash, and that drug-traffickers and corrupt officials were shifting £170 million a week out of a country where average incomes were scarcely £430 a year.
The West’s plans were so naive, controls so weak, spending so vast, and changes in personnel and strategy so frequent, that this now serves as a textbook study in how not to build a better and democratic state.
It shows the lethal impact of pouring aid into a fragile, conflict-riven country – while the two-decade debacle, backed by floods of donor cash at times bigger than the entire Afghan economy, helped transform the aid sector into a greedy, pernicious and self-serving industry filled with fat-cats.
Sadly, all the warning signs were ignored. More than a decade ago, Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to the region, said corruption was destroying efforts to create a fledgling democracy. He called it the Taliban’s ‘No 1 recruiting tool’.
Now the legacy is clear, with heartbreaking scenes of fundamentalist bigots seizing control.
No surprise that President Ashraf Ghani fled last week, reportedly in a helicopter stuffed with stolen cash.
Yet the West turned a blind eye not just to corruption, electoral fraud and creation of a mafia state but even to the trafficking of boys into sex slavery.
For the waste of taxpayers’ money was astonishing, with ‘ghost’ schools and military forces, counter-narcotic efforts that backfired, dodgy construction and fuel deals siphoning off billions, and cash and gold smuggled out through Kabul airport
The UN warned more than a decade ago that Afghan security forces were ‘recruiting boys, sometimes with sexual exploitation as a motivating factor’.
Yet last year the US State Department admitted there was still a ‘pattern of sexual slavery in government compounds’, with high-ranking officials involved in bacha bazi (a tradition of rich older men recruiting boys for entertainment, including to dance for them dressed as girls, and rape) yet routinely avoiding prosecution.
In the first years after the 2001 invasion, budgets were comparatively tight, as the focus was on stifling terrorism.
The US promised to build or refurbish 1,000 schools and clinics by the end of 2004, but managed to achieve barely a tenth of that number. Then the money taps were turned on as focus shifted to ‘nation-building’.
Many schemes were absurd. Take the spending of £32 million on a single natural gas fuel station – 140 times more than a similar one in Pakistan – only to discover it cost more than the average annual income for Afghans to convert their cars to drive on natural gas, so there was little use.
A string of official reports – many deleted last week from US government sites due, apparently, to ‘ongoing security concerns’ – showed how a corrupt elite ran the government for personal gain while committing crimes with impunity, alienating ordinary people and driving many into the arms of the insurgency.
Christopher Kolenda, a colonel who advised three US commanders in Afghanistan, said that by 2006 the government had ‘self-organised into a kleptocracy’.
Politicians paid to be given official posts, then recouped costs ‘from assistance programmes, selling uniforms or ammunition on the black market, drug-trafficking or kidnapping’.
US diplomatic cables revealed one Afghan vice-president flew to Dubai with £38 million in cash, and that drug-traffickers and corrupt officials were shifting £170 million a week out of a country where average incomes were scarcely £430 a year.(Pictured: The Palm Islands of Dubai)
Little wonder the £6.6 billion British-led efforts to stop the opium trade flopped as poppy cultivation boomed. One governor was found with nine tons in his office – when, unusually, he was sacked, he joined the Taliban with his 3,000 men.
By 2010, a US diplomatic cable quoted the Afghan national security adviser saying ‘corruption is not just a problem for the system of governance in Afghanistan – it is the system of governance’.
But the West’s money kept flowing as shameless politicians spoke about stability: almost a trillion dollars spent by the US over two decades and £30 billion by Britain, including £3.3 billion on aid, in a country of 38 million people.
If all the international aid spent had simply been divided up among Afghans, each citizen could have become an instant millionaire.
Instead, the poverty rate has soared in recent years to engulf more than half the population.
The big beneficiaries were the crooks in charge and the Dubai property market, where many stashed their stolen wealth.
One powerbroker at a Kabul bank used a web of fake firms to make fraudulent loans to ministers, officials and warlords, leading to losses equivalent to one-twelfth of the size of the country’s economy.
The bank also spent £117 million on 35 luxury villas on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah island complex, which it used for entertaining.
The slow-burn catastrophe was charted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, an unusually pugnacious official body, with quarterly reports and probing investigations.
British Ministers driving up aid budgets, such as Andrew Mitchell, spoke of ‘endemic’ corruption and parliamentary reports exposed blurred focus, weak scrutiny, lack of data and ‘leakage’ of funds.
‘People ignored the corruption because it was easier than trying to fix it,’ said a British contractor who assessed UK schemes.
More than a decade ago, Richard Holbrooke (pictured), US special envoy to the region, said corruption was destroying efforts to create a fledgling democracy. He called it the Taliban’s ‘No 1 recruiting tool’
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‘I was told not to go there when evaluating, since they might have to stop the programmes.’
This veteran aid worker said Whitehall officials pretended to oversee ‘acceptable’ losses of up to 2.5 per cent on projects when, in reality, up to half the funds went missing.
Three years ago, the reconstruction inspectorate revealed that £11.4 billion of the £38 billion spent on rebuilding projects was wasted, stolen or failed, while almost £3.7 billion spent on ‘stabilisation programmes’ was ‘largely unsuccessful’ in building state institutions.
The watchdog concluded the West spent so much that it achieved the opposite of what was intended – for the cash ‘often exacerbated conflicts, enabled corruption, and bolstered support for insurgents’.
In too many cases, it added, the amount of money spent ‘became the main metric for success’.
In attempting to foster democracy, donors spent £1 billion on elections, yet an analyst concluded that reforms led to a ‘tug-of-war over who controls the electoral bodies and through them, the outcome’.
The last presidential election, in 2019, was deemed the most corrupt yet.
One British aid worker involved in several elections said he and colleagues complained about fraud to their UN bosses during the first post-invasion presidential vote in 2004. ‘They ignored us,’ he said.
At one point, the US Congress estimated £3.3 billion – equal to 22 per cent of Afghanistan’s GDP – was being smuggled out of the country, with two-thirds of this illegally earned.
But government ministers and airport bosses frustrated efforts to thwart this destructive capital flight. Four years ago there was a US-led seminar on how to spot fraud.
Afghans gather on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul, hoping to flee the country
One person attending said he knew of a person due to travel that day to Dubai with a hoard of loot, who was apprehended at Kabul airport with 92 lb of gold bars worth £1.5 million.
Meanwhile, scores of schools were built to Western standards, five times more costly than those put up by charities.
But cranes could not be used to install the heavy roof designs in much of the mountainous terrain and lighter replacements sometimes collapsed in heavy winter snowfalls.
The US spent £800 million on these schools, yet half had insufficient tables or chairs. Others that did not exist received funding, while some teachers were forging attendance lists.
A power plant cost £246 million, ten times more than planned, then delivered less than one per cent of intended capacity since Afghan officials could not afford the fuel. Even a £62 million loan for a hotel opposite the US embassy disappeared, leaving an empty shell.
Police advisers watched TV cop shows to learn about policing while, over the past decade, the Pentagon spent almost £3 billion on fuel for Afghan defence forces but half was stolen. Security bases were built but never used.
Weapons went missing and a £403 million fleet of transport planes left to rot on a runway before being sold as scrap for £29,550.
Gert Berthold, an accountant who helped analyse 3,000 contracts worth £78 billion, concluded that four in every ten dollars ended up in the pockets of corrupt officials, gangsters or insurgents.
In Helmand, centre of British operations, a new police chief five years ago found about half of 26,000 security personnel assigned to the province ‘did not exist when we asked for help’.
One Afghan contractor, paid to cover flood culverts under roads to prevent bomb attacks on military vehicles, faked photos of the work submitted with his invoices – and two soldiers died as a result of his duplicity.
Washington tripled the number of civilians to accompany the troop surge that started in 2009, spending almost £1.5 billion. It turned out later the average cost of each civilian deployment was between £300,000 and £420,000.
Meanwhile, £110 million was spent in four years on food, security and villas for a management team of fewer than ten people.
One frustrated US official argued it was better to let Afghan warlords skim off 20 per cent than to hire outside experts who would spend almost all the funds on overheads, salaries and profits.
US troops walk off a helicopter on the runway at Camp Bost in Helmand Province back in 2017
Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia during George W. Bush’s administration, conceded that even though the money ‘would go through five layers of corrupt officials’, more of it might trickle through to reach needy villagers.
Unsurprisingly, a British aid contractor told me his firm earned more in Afghanistan than at any other point in his career.
Significantly, another said the cascade of foreign cash to Afghanistan marked a turning point for the aid industry.
‘It was the start of people working in aid not to do good but because they were chasing the money,’ said Simon Parry, who spent almost three decades in troublespots across the world.
Westerners repeatedly pushed their own systems – of governance, finance and justice – but they floundered in face of the local culture ‘without sufficient regard for what was practical or possible’, in the words of the reconstruction watchdog’s most recent report.
This damning indictment of aid and nation-building concluded that Afghanistan’s power-brokers co-opted funds and ‘rather than reform and improve… worsened the problems these programmes were meant to address’.
The report said aid chiefs asked for the removal from the report of the word ‘mafia’ to describe ‘the web of corruption at high levels of the Afghan government’, before warning that ‘trying to design and assess programming without even acknowledging, much less grappling with, the realities that term referred to is a recipe for failure’.
Douglas Lute, who co-ordinated Afghan strategy for the National Security Council for six years, said they lacked a fundamental understanding of the country.
‘We didn’t know what we were doing,’ he said. ‘We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. It’s really much worse than you think.’
So as those Italian goats showed, we were fleeced. And far worse, the Afghan people were dismally failed – with disastrous consequences for them and the world.
IT IS REPORTED THAT THE FLEEING DICTATOR OF AFGHANISTAN TOOK WITH HIM $150 MILLION U.S. DOLLARS IN BAGS EVEN AS HE COULD NOT PAY HIS SOLDIERS TO KEEP THESE HAIRY APES BACK IN THEIR CAVES.
The Taliban, a radical Islamist terrorist organization, seized leadership of the country on Sunday after surrounding the nation’s capital, Kabul, prompting former President Ashraf Ghani to flee. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan until 2001, when the United States invaded the country, and established a brutal regime that regularly persecuted political dissidents, religious minorities, women, and anyone considered to be violating Islamic law, or sharia.
Taliban Commander Vows Jihad Against the Whole World
What I’ve been trying to tell you for twenty years.
As the Taliban moved into Kabul and demanded the unconditional surrender of the central government, Taliban commander Muhammed Arif Mustafa told CNN: “It’s our belief that one day, mujahedin will have victory, and Islamic law will come not to just Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day.”
The CNN “journalist,” demonstrating yet again the network's spectacular misunderstanding of the conflict (which, of course, is shared by the U.S. foreign policy establishment), followed that with “It’s a chilling admission from a group that claims it wants peace.”
The Taliban does indeed want peace. It wants the peace that will follow the world’s submission to the hegemony of Islamic law.
Muhammed Arif Mustafa was stating plainly what the U.S. State Department steadfastly ignored for twenty years: the fact that the Taliban views itself as the exponents in 21st-century Afghanistan of a fourteen-hundred-year-old conflict, one that is as old as Islam itself. The History of Jihad details how Muslims in Afghanistan and the world over have waged this jihad without any interruption throughout that entire period, with the goal that the Taliban commander enunciated: to establish the rule of Islamic law anywhere and everywhere possible.
This imperative was often energized by grievances, but was never, contrary to State’s assumption, built on grievances alone. The Qur’an commands: “And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah.” (8:39) Some might think that because the Taliban is ending what they perceive as “persecution” – that is, the American presence – in Afghanistan, it will lay down its arms. This is once again a fundamental misunderstanding. The Taliban, and other groups like it, will fight on “until religion is all for Allah.” Within Afghanistan, this will take the form of a ferocious and merciless persecution of women who do not obey Islam’s veiling laws, and of anyone else who dares to violate the strictures of Islam in any way. And outside Afghanistan, the Taliban will do all it can to aid jihad groups elsewhere, as it aided al-Qaeda to prepare for the jihad attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
No one in Washington or among American forces in Afghanistan ever showed any sign of understanding of this. In an interview with ABC News back in 2010, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time, Gen. David Petraeus, “conceded that a successful counterinsurgency campaign could take up to 10 more years, but said he intended to stick to the 2011 drawdown date.”
Give Petraeus credit: he was close. The successful counterinsurgency campaign took eleven more years, not ten, but he was only off by one year, and by thinking that the success would be that of the United States, rather than the Taliban. For Petraeus ever to have thought that jihadis could be decisively defeated within ten years demonstrated a spectacular case of willful ignorance. When one believes that one is fighting a struggle that has gone on for fourteen hundred years, a struggle that one inherited from one’s father and will pass on to one’s sons, a setback here or there doesn’t matter. As Muhammad Arif Mustafa told CNN, “We are not in a hurry.”
This is not to say that jihadis have never been defeated, or can never be defeated. As The History of Jihad shows, after the jihad conquest of Spain, free people fought patiently and steadfastly for 700 years until they finally drove out the invaders. But it is highly questionable that Joe Biden’s America, in which any discussion of Islam’s jihad imperative earns one the sobriquet of “Islamophobe” and high-level vilification and deplatforming, has that kind of patience. It is good that we are getting out of Afghanistan, although Biden’s handlers have disastrously bungled the withdrawal, with consequences we will no doubt be suffering in the coming months, but State and Defense Department wonks should have a steady and sober regard for the fact that the jihad has not ended, and that jihadis will continue to come after the United States and American citizens.
Instead, they’re focused on chimerical “white supremacists” and enforcing wokeness in the military. People like Muhammed Arif Mustafa see that happening, and they see it as an opportunity, an opportunity they will most certainly exploit. The jihad will indeed not end, and America is not even close to seeing the last of it.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books, including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins―Revised and Expanded Edition. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Report: Taliban Killing People Found with Bibles on Their Phones
The Taliban is killing people in Afghanistan they find with copies of the Bible on their mobile phones, a Christian non-profit denounced on Tuesday.
The Taliban, a radical Islamist terrorist organization, seized leadership of the country on Sunday after surrounding the nation’s capital, Kabul, prompting former President Ashraf Ghani to flee. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan until 2001, when the United States invaded the country, and established a brutal regime that regularly persecuted political dissidents, religious minorities, women, and anyone considered to be violating Islamic law, or sharia.
According to SAT-7, an organization that broadcasts Christian programs to churches and Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, the Taliban is using “spies and informants” to persecute the Christian minority in the country.
“We’re hearing from reliable sources that the Taliban demand people’s phones, and if they find a downloaded Bible on your device, they will kill you immediately,” said SAT-7 North America President Dr. Rex Rogers told Religion News Service. “It’s incredibly dangerous right now for Afghans to have anything Christian on their phones. The Taliban have spies and informants everywhere.”
Other Christian nonprofits and ministries that specialize in assisting persecuted Christians around the world have been sounding the alarm as well, emphasizing the ruthless nature of Taliban leadership. A Christian contact of one Release International partner described the situation as “dire” in a report published Monday. Release International is a Christian ministry that also assists persecuted Christians around the world.
“Our brothers and sisters in Christ are telling us how afraid they are. In the areas that the Taliban now control girls are not allowed to go to school and women are not allowed to leave their homes without a male companion,” said Micah, a name assigned to him to protect his identity.
Even without the Taliban in power, Afghanistan was the second most dangerous place for Christians to practice their faith, behind North Korea, according to the 2021 version of Open Doors’ World Watch List. Open Doors is a non-profit that monitors Christian persecution and aids its victims. The U.S. State Department similarly described the now-former Afghan government as extremely hostile to Christians.
A Taliban fighter (R) searches the bags of people coming out of the Kabul airport in Kabul on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan’s 20-year war, as thousands of people mobbed the city’s airport trying to flee the group’s feared hardline brand of Islamist rule. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images)
In its 2020 Report on International Religious Freedom, the State Department documented widespread death threats against Christians — most commonly from family members — and from officials. Christians in Afghanistan were forced to practice their faith underground and meet with small groups to worship.
Christians also faced significant legal persecution under the U.S.-backed government. Apostacy, the “crime” of renouncing Islam for a different faith, was punishable by death, imprisonment, or confiscation of property. Anyone who preaches another religion is subject to the same punishment. After conversion to a different religion, an individual was given three days to recant before they face punishment for apostasy.
“According to Sunni Hanafi jurisprudence, which the constitution states shall apply ‘if there is no provision in the constitution or other laws about a case,’ beheading is appropriate for male apostates,” the report states, “while life imprisonment is appropriate for female apostates, unless the individual repents.”
The State Department estimated Christians and other minority religious groups made up 0.3 percent of the population, adding that no reliable estimates of the Christian community exist.
Now that the Taliban has seized power again after a 20-year war, Christians who were already being forced to conceal their beliefs for fear of retribution are reportedly being targeted and murdered for their faith.
Afghan university students torch an upside-down cross, along with U.S. and Israeli flags during a demonstration against Israel and the U.S. in Nangarhar province at Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on November 26, 2012. (Noorullah Shirzada/AFP via Getty Images)
“Secret believers in Afghanistan are especially vulnerable. Prior to Taliban rule, they already had a very difficult time living out their faith, as they had to keep it secret from their families for fear of being shunned, or worse, killed,” said Brother Samuel, Open Doors Field Director for Asia.
“Now that the Taliban is in power, their vulnerability increases tenfold. It would be almost impossible to be a follower of Jesus in this country,” Brother Samuel continued. “We are monitoring the situation, but this is the time for us to ask God to have mercy not only on His people but on this country as a whole.”
The Taliban is infamous for monitoring the social practices of local populations and imposing ruthless punishments based on their interpretation of Islamic Law, or what observers call a “parallel system of justice,” according to the U.S. Department of State’s 2020 Report on International Religious Freedom.
Open Doors noted that though the Taliban has promised a “more modern and reformed approach to government,” fear remains as to how it will impose sharia in the coming days and weeks.
“With the collapse of the government, the expansion of extremism, food shortages and the raging pandemic, Afghanistan needs urgent prayer from the global Church right now, more than ever,” the organization said.
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