Afghanistan: Stranger and Stranger
The Arbitration Committee has authorized Discretionary Sanctions for this Topic Area
There is still so much unknown about the situation in Afghanistan. After my brief comments on Friday, August 13, here is a blog post about a few things that may be known.
Ariana Afghan Airways is an airline based in Afghanistan1. Every day at 1240 local time, a flight operated by Ariana departing from Herat is scheduled to land at Kabul International Airport. There is no record of it operating after August 10; on that day it was operated by an Airbus A310 identified as YA-CAV. In the late evening of the 15th, the US military declared Kabul airport closed to all commercial traffic.
The staff at the US Embassy, in one last attempt to embarrass the Biden administration, chose to take a helicopter from the US Embassy to the airport during daytime hours of Sunday the 15th, rather than simply driving there on Friday or Saturday. Or at least something to that effect was claimed on Twitter.
The Biden administration, in an attempt to help the evacuation process, has decided to send full troop transports instead of empty ones. Another thousand troops were authorized to deploy on Saturday.
On Monday the 16th, US forces tried to maintain law and order at Kabul International Airport (currently still known as Hamid Karzai International Airport). Despite there being no Taliban presence, these efforts were still ineffective. US troops fired shots into the air but were unable to prevent crowds from rushing the runways and climbing onto departing planes.
Certainly Biden’s press conference from early July will become infamous:
What happened? And why?
My assessment of the timeline is as follows:
The 2020 Doha Agreement was signed on 2020 February 29. The parties of the treaty were {the first party: the United States} and {the second party: a group identified by the name of “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban”}. Wikisource provides the text as a reference.
My analysis is that the primary intent of the treaty is that of a Letter of Accreditation: the United States recognized the second party as the government of Afghanistan.
As part of the agreement, the United States agreed to withdraw all military troops from Afghanistan within a period of 14 months - with a deadline of 2021 May 1. Joe Biden, presumably using legal rationales not known to me, changed the date several times. Eventually, Bagram AFB was evacuated on or around July 1. A large contingent remained in Kabul, generally under the legal fiction of being Embassy staff.
After the US left Bagram AFB, Biden announced on July 5 that the war would “end” on August 31. On July 8, Biden made the comments above: claiming that a Taliban takeover was not inevitable, and claiming that the US intelligence community had not assessed that the Ghani government would likely collapse.
By the end of July, a variety of military preparations had been made by the Taliban. This included a few open battles against forces from the Ghani government, and the killing of at least one military commander.
The Taliban announced the capture of the city of Zaranj on August 6. On August 15, they completed the capture of Kabul and, with it, the entire country.
The record must note that at 9PM Central Time on August 15, CNN aired a regularly-scheduled documentary about the history of Jerusalem. FOX aired what appears to be a paid infomercial about “Critical Race Theory”. Because apparently nothing requiring news coverage was happening in the world.
The first question that must be asked: was Biden lying to the public on July 8, or did he believe what he said to be the truth? Neither option is politically easy, but one of them is surely true, and we must find out which.
The second question that must be asked: did none of Trump’s best and brightest negotiators think that “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban” is a ridiculous name to repeat throughout a legal treaty? Or was that phrase a Trump ad-lib?
The third question that must be asked: did helicopters land at the embassy? If so, who broke the military chain of command to allow a helicopter to go to the embassy? If not, why did every major news outlet claim that they did? A CNN video shows helicopters over the city, but the commentary claims the video was taken after the embassy had already been evacuated.
A different apologist (Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan) makes the absurd claim that “the helicopter has been the mode of transport from our embassy to the airport for the last 20 years”. Potentially true, but absurd. Couldn’t they have taken a cab?
What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it? Just because somebody gives you a link like https://www.flyariana.com/ doesn’t mean you should click it. It doesn’t mean the airline exists, and it also doesn’t mean that the website is operated by the airline.