Christy Turlington
In America, we celebrate the mystique, beauty and intelligence of our women.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban obliterates…
In Kabul This Week, Painting Over the Posters of a Women’s Fashion Store
George Packer at The Atlantic:
Biden has inherited a set of nearly impossible choices in Afghanistan. He has a complex history there. In 2004, he told me the story of his first trip to the country, soon after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. He toured a new school in Kabul—bitter cold, plastic sheeting over the windows, one light bulb hanging from the ceiling—where a girl stood up at her desk and said, “You cannot leave. They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. America must stay.” As Biden explained it, the girl was saying, in effect: “Don’t f*ck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You’d better not leave me now.” He described meeting the girl as “a catalytic event for me.” For a while he was a leading proponent of nation building in Afghanistan.
By the time Biden became vice president in 2009, the disastrous war in Iraq, the endemic corruption of the Afghan government, and the return of the Taliban had made him a deep skeptic of the American commitment. He became the Obama administration’s strongest voice for getting out of Afghanistan. In 2010, he told Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the U.S. had to leave Afghanistan regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else. According to Holbrooke’s diary, when he asked about American obligations to Afghans like the girl in the Kabul school, Biden replied with a history lesson from the final U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia in 1973: “F*ck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
and this with the following headline,
Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy
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All of this was foreseeable—all of it was foreseen. For months, members of Congress and advocates in refugee, veteran, and human-rights organizations have been urging the Biden administration to evacuate America’s Afghan allies on an emergency basis. For months, dire warnings have appeared in the press. The administration’s answers were never adequate: We’re waiting for Congress to streamline the application process. Half the interpreters we’ve given visas don’t want to leave. We don’t want to panic the Afghan people and cause the government in Kabul to collapse. Evacuation to a U.S. territory like Guam could lead to legal problems, so we’re looking for third-country hosts in the region. Most of the interpreters are in Kabul, and Kabul won’t fall for at least six months.
Some of these answers might have been sincere. All of them were irrelevant, self-deceiving, or flat-out false. While some officials in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House itself pushed quietly for more urgent measures that might have averted catastrophe, Biden resisted—as if he wouldn’t allow Afghanistan to interfere with his priorities, as if he were done with Afghanistan the minute he announced the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. forces. This hardness is perplexing in a president who spent years in the Senate working on behalf of genocide victims and war refugees; who once promised an Afghan schoolgirl that he would make sure the U.S. didn’t abandon her; who cares intensely about the welfare of American troops.
This catastrophe was not a giant rolling clusterf**k of bureaucratic morass. It was a focused, deliberate policy originating from the Oval Office in the White House. It was brutal, mean and nasty. There were voices even from State and the Pentagon pushing back, but Joe Biden was adamant about the departure from Afghanistan. This is entirely his blame to bear, every damned bit and piece of it.
Don’t let anyone tell you differently and, oh, the following is just brilliant.