What’s being obscured in the Afghanistan debate
Charlatans have breathlessly praised former President Donald Trump for years, hanging their hat on “no new wars,” but somehow have forgotten about the thousands slain in the surge of Trump’s barbaric, bigoted air wars.
Anyone discussing President Joe Biden’s bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan without reporting that Trump set the trap by setting 5,000 Taliban terrorists free, is a hack. Afghanistan was the culmination of 20 years of failed war across four presidencies, demonstrated most notably by former GOP Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, in fact the deadliest years for civilians was in 2003 and 2017.
Business Insider’s Charles Davis reported: But the Airwars report, released Monday, illustrates that pivoting away from boots on the ground does not necessarily mean fewer civilians being killed. Drawing on US military data, media reports of civilian harm, and its own researchers, the UK-based monitor found that since 2001 “US actions likely killed at least 22,679 civilians, with that number potentially as high as 48,308.”
Now we can move onto criticisms of Biden and how some have covered it. This is not about scapegoating Biden, but holding him to account for the immediate failure of the botched withdrawal, and to be fair drone strikes are at an all-time low.
Eric Boehlert’s Press Run articles and tweets on Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal are wildly misleading and at times plainly false — putting ‘crisis’ in air quotes is not only false but cruel to the seven Afghan people who were trampled to death trying to flee Kabul airport.
Bizarrely titled: The media’s summer of discontent — waging war on Biden, Boehlert obnoxiously attacks the media by denying — or simply not caring enough to know that a climate change-driven humanitarian disaster is occurring in Afghanistan, compounded by Biden’s botched troop withdrawal.
“Thankfully, the dire picture that the press painted over the weekend of the widespread death and destruction that the Taliban would soon unleash on Kabul has not materialized,” Boehlert claimed, despite images of panic and suffering at the airport transmitting across the world — you might even remember Afghans falling to their deaths after clinging to C-17 jets .
Boehlert laments that the Beltway media covered the Afghanistan story with “an unrestrained frenzy that outweighs that facts,” but never reports that Biden administration officials wrongly thought that they had enough time to evacuate everyone, that military commanders miscalculated Afghan forces’ ability to fend off the Taliban themselves, as The New York Times reported.
According to United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the troop withdrawal coincides with “a particularly sharp increase in killings and injuries since May when international military forces began their withdrawal and the fighting intensified following the Taliban’s offensive.”
UNAMA also reports:
Deborah Lyons, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan implored “the Taliban and Afghan leaders to take heed of the conflict’s grim and chilling trajectory and its devastating impact on civilians.”
Boehlert claimed that the evacuation was a “stunning success,” in a press run article titled: “Committed to doomsday narrative, media downplay evacuation triumph.”
An August 28 tweet from him declared that “100k Afghans are starting new lives,” leaving out that Biden was only allowing Afghan refugees into the US on “this rarely used parole,” effectively denying them desperately-needed financial benefits.
Moreover, Biden procrastinated on mass evacuations for months, as Business Insider reported: In April, refugee resettlement agencies called on the Biden administration to circumvent the immigration bureaucracy — a backlog of some 17,000 Special Immigrant Visa applications — and allow vulnerable Afghans to apply for “humanitarian parole;” they also called for immediately airlifting them out of the country.
It was only until after Kabul was taken over by the Taliban that the administration listened to advice, as Business Insider reported:
Even a Politico piece reported it was moronic to abandon Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, (a land-locked country) noting that defense officials proposed retaking Bagram airbase, after they had initially been warned not to abandon it.
From Politico: In order to speed the evacuation effort, defense officials in recent days proposed retaking Bagram airbase, the military’s main hub for the American war effort until it was handed over to the Afghans in July as part of the withdrawal. Using Bagram as an additional location for flights out of the country would help ease the backlog at Kabul, some argued. But the proposal was nixed because the White House and some Pentagon officials worried it would require deploying a large number of additional forces and could spark a conflict with the Taliban. […] Asked about the proposal to retake Bagram after Kabul fell, the National Security Council pointed to Sullivan’s comments on “Meet The Press” Sunday in response to a question about why the U.S. abandoned Bagram instead of trying to hold it. The “best military advice” the White House received was that Bagram would be “difficult to secure over time and put our troops at risk,” Sullivan said.
He added that “it didn’t logistically make sense from an evacuation perspective because it is located outside of Kabul. And both American diplomats, American citizens, and most of the Afghans at risk lived inside of Kabul.”
On Twitter, Boehlert coldly repeated the Biden White House‘s talking points that no Americans have died and claimed that “the press is broken.”
But days later, 13 US soldiers and more than 70 Afghans, including 28 Taliban members, had been killed in two attacks at Kabul’s airport.
AlJazeera reported: “It is believed to be the most US troops killed in Afghanistan in a single incident since 30 personnel died when a helicopter was shot down in August 2011.”
On August 16, Boehlert made an unwarranted extrapolation about the media, accusing them of relishing the idea of finally dinging Biden, adding that it “seems oddly personal for them.”
That day, Boehlert drew a false equivalency between DC press and the GOP.
Boehlert dismissed the Taliban taking over Afghanistan as a calamity, despite the BBC reporting that poverty in Afghanistan had been amplified by rising food and fuel prices which the Taliban imposed, including some government employees who have lost their jobs while others are still waiting to be paid for the last few months.
From the BBC: While female medical staff have been allowed to work, he said many other women weren’t being allowed to continue with their jobs and were left wondering what lies ahead.
The Times reported that Taliban fighters viciously beat women in Kabul protesting for their rights and protections and also reported: More than half of all Afghan women reported physical abuse and 17 percent reported sexual violence, while almost 60 percent were in forced marriages as opposed to arranged marriages, according to studies cited by the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs — and underreporting is rampant.
Honor killings, child marriages, the payment of a bride price for a woman, and the practice of baad — the trading of young girls to pay the debts of the elders, which is tantamount to selling a child into slavery — still occur in rural areas. Everywhere, harassment of women in workplaces and in public is a constant, as is psychological abuse, according to recent studies.
Boehlert attacked Politico for “hyping as [a] scandal story that US shared w/ Taliban names of Americans and Afghans to be evacuated,” but the Washington Post also reported on this, with one anonymous defense official saying: “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list. It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”
President Biden dubiously claims the war in Afghanistan is over, but his revenge-driven drone strikes murdered an entire family who were exiting a car in their modest driveway when the strike hit a nearby vehicle.
Following the withdrawal of some 8,500 troops from Afghanistan, that had served as the lifeblood and morale for the Afghan government — who naturally fled after being abandoned by their purported allies — Biden vowed vengeance on the suicide bombers who killed 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghans at Kabul airport: “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
The Biden administration launched a Hellfire missile at around 4:50 p.m. at Zemari Ahmadi’s vehicle based on the Islamophobic assumption that he had a connection to ISIS.
But a New York Times video investigation — and multiple interviews of of the driver’s co-workers and family members in Kabul have debunked the U.S. narrative, reporting that military officials baselessly claimed that Ahmadi “possibly visited an ISIS safe house and, at one point, loaded what they thought could be explosives into the car.”
Evidence shows that Ahmadi was merely taking colleagues to and from work. And the footage captures Ahmadi and a colleague putting canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.
The US military lied that the drone strike may have killed three when it had murdered 10, seven of whom were children.
The Biden administration murdered an innocent family based on the paranoid, Islamophobic assumption that Zemari Ahmadi had a connection to ISIS. He didn’t.
Zemari Ahmadi, who the US alleged was suspicious despite just being an aid worker for a company in California who financially provided for his entire extended family.
Matthieu Aikins reported on Twitter that Zemari Ahmadi’s oldest son, Zamir, was 20, writing, “He, like his mother and siblings, were included in Zemari’s refugee resettlement case, sponsored by his company, Nutrition and Education International. They hoped to escape to America.”
But an examination of the scene of the strike, conducted by the Times visual investigations team and a Times reporter the morning afterward, and followed up with a second visit four days later, found no evidence of a second, more powerful explosion.