Tag Archives: Taliban

International news

Deadline may be extended

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President Biden’s plate of critical decisions is piling up and spilling onto his lap.

Here’s another one that looks more imminent each passing day: The Aug. 31 deadline for pulling out of Afghanistan might be delayed a while longer. Why? Because the president has promised to get every American and Afghan ally who who wants out of the country safe passage to freedom.

My strong hunch is that the project won’t be completed by Aug. 31.

Does that mean our troops who have been sent back to help with the evacuation will remain permanently? Hardly. It means that Joe Biden’s pledge to end our involvement in an Afghan civil war will have be set back until we can get everyone out of there.

Congressional Republicans are threatening impeachment if Biden leaves anyone behind. Frankly, that is the rhetoric of tinhorns. Yes, our withdrawal has gone badly. President Biden is seeking to correct it and we are sending an accelerated number of evacuees out of the country each day.

But the deadline for an end is a week away. Can we finish the job in that short span of time? I doubt it. Keep the troops on call, Mr. President, until the mission is accomplished.

International news

Do we stay or do we go?

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Public opinion polls have had their hands full in the past few days.

They are scurrying around the country asking Americans whether the Afghan War was worth the fight. A significant majority of Americans are telling them “no,” it wasn’t worth it.

And yet …

Congressional Republicans continue to pound President Biden over his decision to bring our troops — all of them — off the battlefield. A consequence has been the Taliban takeover of a country our forces fought to protect against the terrorists’ retaking control of the country.

I want to reiterate a key point. President Biden ended what his immediate predecessor started, which was a negotiated settlement to end our fight. That fact has been lost on GOP critics of Joe Biden, one of them being U.S. Rep. Van Taylor, my congressman, who said this in a statement: “Reminiscent of Saigon, President Biden naively chose to conduct an ill-advised and poorly planned withdrawal from Afghanistan despite warnings from national security experts and continuous violations from the Taliban.”

Huh? Eh? Taylor said Biden should have done “nothing.” His decision to end the fight, Taylor said, leaves “America and Americans worse off for it.” He calls this one of the president’s “reckless decisions.”

Hmm. I will disagree respectfully with the congressman.

Americans didn’t want to keep fighting an unwinnable war. POTUS No. 45 sought to negotiate a deal with the Taliban, remember? Do you also recall how he invited the Taliban to Camp David — on a date commemorating the 9/11 attack on our nation?

I agree that the withdrawal should have been planned better. Then again, there should have been an end-game strategy on the day we launched the Afghan War after 9/11. There wasn’t.

By my way of thinking, “doing nothing” about Afghanistan was not an option. President Biden had two choices: staying or leaving. He made the right call.

International news

Historical perspective in order

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

While we waste our breath, our emotional energy and valuable time bashing President Biden over the end of the Afghan War, I want to offer this bit of perspective for y’all to ponder.

Al-Qaeda terrorists attacked us on 9/11. They had safe haven in Afghanistan. The Taliban sheltered them and kept them hidden from view. President Bush then led a united country into war in Afghanistan.

It was a conflict doomed more than likely from the very beginning.

For 20 years we fought the Taliban. Our special forces killed the 9/11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, who we found hiding in Pakistan. Yet the fight continued. It was going to go on forever had we allowed it to happen.

President Biden said, in effect, “Enough of this!” He ended the war. Just as he said he would do.

Let’s understand that Joe Biden took control of our military as it was drawing down its presence in Afghanistan. He merely finished an unwinnable task begun two decades ago by George W. Bush.

Let’s also be clear. The war did produce some victories for our side. We degraded al-Qaeda, killing many of the organization’s leaders. Our national attention was yanked away from the Afghan fight when we went to war in Iraq for reasons that stand as an example of supreme deception.

The Afghan War had to end. President Biden ended a conflict that President Bush launched.

International news

No repeat of Vietnam?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

U..S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said today that the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is “manifestly not like Saigon” in 1975 after the North Vietnamese army took control of the country where more than 58,000 Americans died in battle.

I beg to differ.

The image of Taliban fighters pouring into Kabul reminds many of us precisely of what happened in Vietnam. President Biden said that it would be “highly unlikely” that the Taliban would control everything. Hmm. It didn’t work out that way, Mr. President.

Now comes the remaking of a government in the mold of a harsh regime run by men with a dastardly history of subjugating women. The Taliban, you’ll remember, gave safe haven to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

I happen to believe it was time to end our battlefield involvement in Afghanistan. To that end, President Biden made the correct policy decision. The implementation of that decision, though, leaves plenty of questions to answer.

Why didn’t the military apparatus we supposedly trained to defend the country resist more fervently? Why wasn’t there a strategy laid out for caring for the personnel who aided us during our nation’s longest war? How can we protect our interests against the Taliban terrorists who well might begin plotting to do harm to us? What will Afghanistan look like when the Taliban establish the government?

Secretary Blinken is an honorable man. However, what we have witnessed today is absolutely similar — indeed, it is virtually identical — to what occurred in Vietnam. He needs to change the narrative.

International news

Did we not prep the Afghan army well?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

As the world watches the Afghan War lurch forward to what looks like a tragic ending, I cannot get past a thought that has been troubling me since the Taliban began their march toward reasserting control over a country it ruled with ruthlessness and depravity.

My thought is this: What in the world did we do to prepare the Afghan armed forces to cope with the onslaught they are facing? 

We arrived on the battlefield not long after 9/11. President Bush ordered our forces into battle to rid the world of al-Qaeda. We succeeded in removing the Taliban from power then after the terror organization had given their fellow terrorists safe haven from which to attack the United States on 9/11.

President Bush left office in January 2009 and President Obama then ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda mastermind; the SEALs and CIA operatives did the deed on May 1,, 2011.

President Obama left office in January 2017 and Donald J. Trump took over. The fight continued.

Trump left office in January 2021 and now we have President Biden on the watch. Through all those previous administrations, there had been an understanding — or so many of us believed — that our forces were on call to do two things: to engage the enemy on the field and to train and equip the Afghans to take over the fight when we were finished.

Biden adds forces for Afghan evacuation, defends withdrawal decision (msn.com)

President Biden made the call to end our involvement there. We began pulling troops out. The Taliban went on the march. The Afghan military has done a terrible job of defending their country. Reports from the field suggest that regular army troops aren’t fighting, that the bulk of the resistance is coming from militia forces.

We spent tens of billions of dollars training these forces to do something that was expected of them. To defend their nation against a savage enemy. They appear to be failing in that mission.

Do we return in full force? No! We must not! I happen to endorse the decision to leave the Afghanistan battlefield. I am aghast at the slipshod way it is occurring. President Biden is deploying 5,000 additional U.S. troops to assist in the evacuation of Americans and our allies, to get out of harm’s way.

But … my goodness. I am troubled by the lack of effort reportedly being shown by the armed forces we supposedly prepared to defend their nation.

I want our young men and women to come home as much as the next person. However, it saddens me terribly to believe we spent two decades fighting and dying for a nation that is unable — or unwilling — to defend itself.

International news, military news

Confused and frightened

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The pending withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan has me confused and frightened.

The frightening aspect comes with the advance of Taliban forces that are taking city after city in their march toward reasserting control over a country we thought we had “liberated” when we invaded it shortly after 9/11 … which was nearly 20 years ago.

The Taliban are set to take control of Kabul, the capital city of the embattled nation perhaps in the next few weeks.

The Taliban is about as evil and vile as any group on Earth. Thus, it frightens me in the extreme to see what might happen to Afghanistan if the Taliban retake control of the country.

My confusion stems from the fact that we went through three presidential administrations overseeing our combat role in Afghanistan. From George W. Bush, to Barack H. Obama and then to Donald J. Trump our forces were thought to be helping prepare the Afghan forces to defend their country against the Taliban. Joe Biden took office in January and declared our intention to pull out before the 20th year commemorating the 9/11 attacks that precipitated our involvement in our longest war.

Did we waste all that time, money, effort and blood by failing to train and equip the Afghan forces adequately?

To be brutally candid, I am wondering if the Biden administration truly understood the gravity of the Taliban’s military capability when it decided to end our involvement in this drawn-out fight.

I want our troops to come home. I also had hoped we could leave Afghanistan in a position to defend itself. My first wish is about to come true. The second wish makes me wonder about the wisdom of what we were doing there in the first place.

International news

How can we declare victory?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Twenty years ago, the United States decided to retaliate against the monsters who attacked us on 9/11.

I recall asking back then: How will we be able to know when to end this war against international terrorism? I also wondered how we can declare victory in a war that might seem to have no end.

Well, one aspect of that war is coming to a conclusion. President Biden has ordered all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, which had given safe haven to the terrorists who hit us on 9/11.

My questions remain the same today as they were when I posed them back in 2001. President Biden has made what amounts to an executive decision. The time has come, he said, to end the war. How does he know that? Well, he hasn’t explained that to us in terms that I have heard.

As for a victory declaration … there won’t be anything of the sort. We will see no “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging across the White House portico.

Indeed, the decision carries plenty of risk. The Taliban are on the march in Afghanistan. The future of women and children in that country now become tenuous. Biden’s predecessor as POTUS sought to negotiate with the terrorists; it didn’t go well for either side.

To be honest, it has been a haphazard withdrawal. There is no clear plan to offer safety for the thousands of contractors who worked with our forces during the Afghan War. I will retain plenty of hope that the president will come up with a plan to provide refuge for the translators and others who assisted our men and women on the battlefield.

However, a war against international terror cannot possibly signal that we have defeated the terrorists, that we have eliminated the threat. Indeed, the threat was always there, always lurking just below the surface, just beyond our consciousness.

It will be there even as we exit the field of battle in Afghanistan.

Joe Biden

Give Putin the dickens, Mr. POTUS

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By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Vladimir Putin is in dire need of a stern lecture from the leader of the world’s remaining military superpower.

The Russian strongman is preparing no doubt for a summit meeting with President Biden, who has just commenced his first foreign trip as our commander in chief.

Biden has said in public that he plans to bring up at least three critical issues that his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, didn’t bother to broach with his strongman pal.

They include: interference in our elections, human rights concerns, the paying of bounties to Taliban terrorists who kill American service personnel on the Afghanistan battlefield.

President Biden has known Putin for many years, owing to his two terms as vice president and his time as a U.S. senator. He told Putin once that he looked into the Russian’s eyes and “did not see a soul,” which Putin reportedly responded that the men understood each other.

Whereas Trump coddled dictators, President Biden has expressed an intention to take an entirely different approach in dealing with Putin. Joe Biden now gets his chance to demonstrate that he means business and that he will make Putin answer for the behavior he has sanctioned while governing Russia.

My hope for Joe Biden is that he deals with Putin as the leader of the world’s most powerful and indispensable nation and that Putin no longer can act as though Russia is our equal. It isn’t.

International news

Biden to scold Putin?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The days of Vladimir Putin getting a pass from the president of the United States appear to be over.

That said, I would pay real American money if I could become a “fly on the wall” in the room where President Biden and the Russian strongman/spook/tyrant/dictator hold their first summit … when it occurs.

They don’t have one scheduled yet, but the wheels are turning to get the two men together to talk about, oh, differences over policy.

Putin got all snuggly with Donald Trump during Trump’s four years in the White House. He interfered in two of our elections, Trump said nothing. Putin reportedly paid Taliban terrorists bounties for every American they killed on the Afghan fields of battle, but again Trump said not a word. He has sought to subvert Ukraine in an ongoing war with the former Soviet republic, but Trump kept quiet about that, too.

Joe Biden wants to look into Putin’s flinty eyes and and give him the what-for, to which I say, “You go, Joe!”

If only I could eavesdrop. Dang!

International news

Tension with Russia, China mount? Imagine that

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Who would have thought that two nations competing with the United States of America are getting their dander up over the words coming from the new U.S. president?

Too bad … for them.

President Biden has acknowledged that Russian despot Vladimir Putin is a killer, prompting the Russians to call their U.S. ambassador back to the Kremlin. Biden also is working with our allies to get China to change the way it treats dissidents in its country, prompting the People’s Republic to stiffen its back as well.

I want there to be peaceful relations with both countries. I also want the United States to act like the powerhouse nation it is, not roll over and concede matters to Russia and China, which happened all too often during the Trump administration.

Biden has pledged to make Russia pay for interfering in our elections and for its assorted other misdeeds, such as reportedly paying bounties for Americans killed on the Afghanistan battlefield. Donald Trump never even brought that subject up with Putin, as Trump himself has admitted. That must change and by all accounts, it has done so.

Russia, China tensions rise with White House  | TheHill

As for China, I also want President Biden to talk openly about human rights abuses, which the PRC is infamous for committing against its citizens. If the leaders in Beijing don’t like it, well … that’s just too damn bad.

Russians might pull their envoy to the U.S.? | High Plains Blogger

The United States has sufficient alliances around the world with nations that are able to back us up and are capable enough to withstand challenges from Russia and China.

I welcome the tougher talk coming from President Biden. After all, we are big dog on the block.