American Military Announces US Left Afghanistan After 20 Years of War.

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8-30-2021

American military announces US has left Afghanistan
after 20 years of war.

The war in Afghanistan ended on Monday
after 2,461 U.S. service members were killed
and over 20,000 injured.

"I'm here to announce the completion of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of the military mission to evacuate American citizens,
third country nationals, and vulnerable Afghans,"
Gen. Kenneth McKenzie said on Monday.

"The last C-17 lifted off from Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 30, this afternoon,
at 3:29 p.m. East Coast time and the last manned aircraft
is clearing the airspace above Afghanistan," he announced.

The war, which began in October of 2001, lasted nearly
twenty years — making it the longest war
in United States history.

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The last American soldier to leave Afghanistan:
Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commanding general of the
82ndABNDiv.
Boards an usairforce C-17 on August 30th, 2021,
Ending the U.S. mission in Kabul.

American Military Announces US Left Afghanistan After 20 Years of War. E-E8l87X0AAwbsT?format=jpg

American Military Announces US Left Afghanistan After 20 Years of War. E-E8l87X0AAwbsT?format=jpg

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8-31-2021

Why are some Americans still in Afghanistan? It's complicated.

The number of people left in Afghanistan who hold American passports is small,
but it led Republicans
to allege that President Joe Biden has abandoned
or stranded them.

This has led many Americans to ask:
Who would want to stay? What possible reason
would someone have to remain in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan?
The reality is a little more nuanced.

The remaining citizens are most "nuanced and complicated cases:
individuals with dual citizenship and deep roots in Afghanistan;
those with large extended families including non-citizens or
those who waited until very late in the process to express their interest
in leaving."

There are NGOs still on the ground in the country desperately trying
to help the people there as they struggle through another transition.

President Joe Biden made it clear that the U.S. will
do whatever it takes to get people out who want to escape.
The next steps for that mission will be more complicated than the past month.

Officials on the ground described the past few weeks as
a "rolling, 24/7 operation" to find the Americans who said
they wanted to leave.

They made 55,000 phone calls,
sent 33,000 emails.
According to those familiar with the process,
they asked three questions:
Where are you?
Do you want to leave now?
And do you need help getting to the airport?

It was revealed that the U.S. military even created
a secret gate in the airport so that Americans
could get there without attacks by ISIS.

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8-31-2021

No US Military Dogs Were Left Behind in Afghanistan, DOD Says.

Pentagon officials say the caged dogs in viral photos aren’t military working dogs, all of which were evacuated.

While animal rescue groups across the globe race
to get dogs out of Afghanistan, Pentagon officials want to be very clear: The U.S. military did not
leave any of its working dogs behind.

Viral photos purporting to show dogs locked in cages at Hamid Karzai International Airport have raised the hackles of U.S. lawmakers and dog lovers alike.
But the photos are not of military working dogs, as the American Humane Society and others have suggested.

“To correct erroneous reports, the U.S. military did not leave any dogs in cages at Hamid Karzai International Airport, to include the reported ‘military working dogs.’
Photos circulating online were animals under the care of the Kabul Small Animal Rescue,” Kirby told Defense One.

Kabul Small Animal Rescue is a veterinary clinic and animal rescue organization that has operated for years in Afghanistan. “Currently we are working to help anyone who wants to evacuate their animals do so,” the group wrote on their Facebook page.

Dogs before all Americans??

Pathetic.

As Taliban Shows Off New US Equipment, Biden Admin Scrubs Records of $83 Billion Given to Afghanistan
September 2, 2021

Over the past few weeks, the Taliban has upgraded from your standard-issue insurgent Toyota pickup trucks to military-grade Humvees. And armored personnel carriers. And Black Hawk helicopters.

How long they can keep these all going without trained maintenance and parts support is anyone’s guess — but the point is that they have them and that the American taxpayer covered the cost.

Not that President Joe Biden wants you to know this. As the Taliban paraded the captured equipment through the streets of Kandahar on Wednesday, the Biden administration was busy scrubbing public records of how much we paid for it.

According to Forbes, federal agencies are wiping information about the $83 billion the U.S. invested in Afghanistan’s armed forces from their websites, ostensibly to protect our Afghan allies from retribution by the Taliban.

In recent days, documents have been disappearing from the website of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a government watchdog.

“This is in line with actions taken by other U.S. federal agencies and is out of an abundance of caution.”

This “abundance of caution” is sure felicitous for an administration that doesn’t want lasting reminders of how much military equipment was left behind for terrorists when we scooted out of Afghanistan.

https://www.westernjournal.com/taliban-shows-off-new-us-equipment-biden-admin-scrubs-records-83-billion-given-afghanistan/

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9-2-2021

AFGHANISTAN

Hundreds of U.S. citizens, Afghan commandos successfully evacuated through secret CIA base
The clandestine operation resulted in the successful evacuation
of hundreds of American citizens and vulnerable Afghans.

As the Biden administration scrambled to conduct a massive evacuation effort from Afghanistan, American officials quietly instructed U.S. citizens and at-risk Afghans, including Afghan commandos, to head to a secret CIA base outside Kabul to secure safe passage to the U.S. amid increased risks of a terrorist attack on the capital city’s main airport.

The clandestine operation, which took place over several weeks
in August, resulted in the successful evacuation of hundreds of American citizens and vulnerable Afghans, including members of the elite Afghan special forces and their family members. At least 1,000 Afghan commandos and their family members were evacuated in the overall U.S. effort.

The details of the operation are based on documents provided to POLITICO and conversations with a senior administration official, a defense official and a congressional official, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

A U.S. official confirmed the CIA’s involvement in the evacuation, noting that the agency “worked closely with other agencies to facilitate in various ways access to the airport for American citizens and Afghans at risk.”

The New York Times first reported that the U.S used the base for evacuations. The full scope of the operation in the final days of the evacuation effort, however, has not been previously reported. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment on the operation.

At least some of the evacuees were taken by air from the secret compound, known as Eagle Base, to the airport in order to bypass the chaotic crowds and terror threat around the gates. Several helicopter flights operated by a U.S. company flew from an area around Eagle Base to the Kabul airport beginning on Aug. 15, when the Taliban took control of the city, according to flight data obtained by POLITICO.

Flight data suggests some of the evacuees were flown to Germany. During that same time period, aircraft owned by a U.S. government contractor flew from the Kabul airport to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

The effort was coordinated with U.S. diplomats and staff who were relocated from the embassy to Hamid Karzai International Airport after the Taliban took control of Kabul.
The diplomats had been communicating directly with American citizens who were trying to leave Afghanistan but feared for their safety — especially after the embassy publicly urged Americans not to travel to the airport last week amid threats of an attack from the ISIS-K terror group.

The Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command was also helping reach out to hundreds of American citizens inside Kabul and around the country.

The House Intelligence Committee was briefed about the operation in August, two of the sources said,
as lawmakers from both parties were seeking details from the Biden administration about efforts to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan.
A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment.

Eagle Base, the sprawling CIA compound located
less than three miles north of the airport, has a controversial history. Established early in the Afghanistan conflict at a former brick factory, the base was used by the CIA from 2002 to 2004
for “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects.
The CIA also used it to train Afghan counterterrorism units.

But during the rush to leave Kabul in recent weeks, the compound provided a crucial staging base for evacuees hoping to get out of Afghanistan before it was demolished on Aug. 27 as part of the effort to ensure that no sensitive equipment or intelligence information would fall into the hands of the Taliban.

As the overall evacuation effort continued, the threat from ISIS-K terrorists to specific gates of the airport was growing. American officials began instructing U.S. citizens to head to different gates to gain entry into the airport for evacuation.

As the threat shifted, officials were “constantly mixing it up,” the defense official said — one day instructing people to head to one gate, and the next day telling them to meet at another location.

American officials were also directing citizens and at-risk Afghans, including commandos, to head to Eagle Base as
a safer way station on their way to
the airport.

During a call at 4 p.m. on Aug. 25 in Washington,
or 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 26 in Kabul, Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, estimated that roughly 1,000 out of 2,000 Afghan commandos slated for evacuation, along with a number of American citizens coming from Eagle Base, had been successfully routed to the airport.

These people got out just in time. Just hours later,
at roughly 6 p.m. in Kabul on Aug. 26, an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated an explosive device just outside the airport, killing 13 American service members and hundreds of Afghans.

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www.msn.com
The recent arrest of seven armed U.S. individuals who were attempting to make their way to Afghanistan via the United Arab Emirates is raising concerns among lawmakers, former officials, veterans and others about the prospect of rogue civilian operations attempting to extract U.S. or Afghan citizens from the Taliban-led nation after the U.S. military withdrawal.

News the left hates ..Patriots trying to help trapped Americans left behind to be murdered.

Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

9-12-2021

US Spent $21 Trillion on War and Militarization Since 9/11/

In a new report I co-authored with my colleagues
at the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies,
we found that the federal government has spent $21 trillion on war
and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the
past 20 years.
That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy.

Even while politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year,
they’ve said we can’t afford to address our most urgent issues.
No wonder these past 20 years have been rough on U.S. families and communities.

After strong growth from 1970 to 2000, household incomes have stagnated
for 20 years as Americans struggled through two recessions in the years
leading up to the pandemic. As pandemic eviction moratoriums end,
millions are at risk of homelessness.

Our public health systems have also been chronically underfunded, leaving the U.S. helpless to enact the testing, tracing, and quarantining that helped other
countries limit the pandemic’s damage. Over 650,000 Americans have
died from COVID-19 —
the equivalent of a 9/11 every day for over seven months.
The opioid epidemic claims another 50,000 lives a year.

Meanwhile extreme weather events like wildfires, hurricanes, and floods
have grown in frequency over the past 20 years. The U.S. hasn’t invested
nearly enough in either renewable energy or climate resiliency to deal
with the increasing effects climate change has on our communities.

In the face of all this suffering, it’s clear
that $21 trillion in spending hasn’t made us any safer.

Instead, the human costs have been staggering. Around the world,
the forever wars have
cost 900,000 lives and left 38 million homeless — and as the disastrous
withdrawal from Afghanistan has shown us, they were a massive failure.

Our militarized spending has helped deport 5 million people over
the past 20 years, often taking parents from their children.
The majority of those deported hadn’t committed any crime except for being here.

And it has paid for the government to listen in on our phone calls and target communities for harassment and surveillance without any evidence of crime or wrongdoing, eroding the civil liberties of all Americans.

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining: We’ve found that for just a fraction of what we’ve spent on militarization these last 20 years, we could start to make life much better.

For $4.5 trillion, we could build a renewable, upgraded energy grid for the whole country.
For $2.3 trillion, we could create 5 million $15-an-hour jobs with
benefits for 10 years.
For just $25 billion, we could vaccinate low-income countries against
COVID-19, saving lives and
stopping the march of new and more threatening virus variants.

We could do all that and more for less than half of what we’ve spent
on wars and militarization in the last 20 years. With communities
across the country
in dire need of investment, the case for avoiding
more pointless, deadly wars couldn’t be clearer.

The best time for those investments would have been during the past 20 years.
The next best time is now.

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9-19-2021

Largest evacuation flight under Taliban leaves Kabul for Qatar

A Qatar Airways charter flight carrying more than 200 Americans,
Afghan civilians, and others has left the Taliban-controlled
Kabul airport to Qatar, Reuters reported.

“Just now the 4th @qatarairways passengers flight took off from Kabul (HKIA) carrying more than 230 passengers,
including Afghans & Citizens from the US Germany Belgium
Ireland Canada France Italy UK Finland The Netherlands,”
Qatar Foreign Minister Lolwah Alkhater said on Sunday.

Two Afghan evacuees charged with crimes at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin
Kaelan Deese, Washington Examiner
Wed, September 22, 2021, 8:11 PM

Two Afghan evacuees were charged with crimes at Fort McCoy, an Army installation in Wisconsin, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Bahrullah Noori, 20, was charged with attempting to engage in sexual acts with a minor using force and three counts of engaging in a sexual act with a minor, with one count alleging the use of force, according to a statement.

The alleged victims were under the age of 16 and were at least four years younger than the defendant, according to the indictment.

Mohammad Haroon Imaad, a 32-year-old evacuee, is charged with assaulting his spouse by "strangling and suffocating her," the DOJ added. The indictment alleges the assault happened on Sept. 7.

Imaad and Noori were charged in previous complaints filed in U.S. District Court, the Justice Department noted.

The pair made appearances in Madison on Sept. 16 and are being held in the Dane County Jail. Imaad and Noori are slated for arraignment on Thursday at 10:15 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., respectively, before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker.

If convicted, Noori faces a mandatory minimum penalty of 30 years and a maximum of life in federal prison on the charges alleging use of force and a maximum penalty of 15 years on the other two charges. Imaad faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if convicted.

The charges are a result of investigations by the FBI and the Fort McCoy Police Department, the DOJ said.

The U.S. and coalition forces evacuated more than 110,000 civilians during the final weeks of August, according to the Pentagon, which took place as the Taliban overthrew the Western-backed Afghan government and retook control of the country.

Nearly 60,000 Afghan evacuees have reportedly landed in the United States since Aug. 17.

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9-29-2021

Biden's defense secretary says Trump administration didn't hand over plans for Afghanistan withdrawal, despite it making deal with Taliban.

Defense Secretary Austin told lawmakers he
didn't get Trump officials' Afghanistan-withdrawal plans.
"There was no handoff to me of any plans for a withdrawal," Austin said.
The Trump administration made a deal with the Taliban to pull out all US troops by May 1.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday told House lawmakers that Trump officials did not hand over any plans to him for the Afghanistan withdrawal.

The Trump administration set the stage for the pullout via a February 2020 deal with the Taliban, which included a pledge to withdraw US troops by May 1.

"There was no handoff to me of any plans for a withdrawal," Austin said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Austin added that he was "confident" Gen. Austin Miller, who stepped down as the top US commander in Afghanistan in July, was "making plans" for a pullout.

"But in terms of handoff from administration to administration, secretary to secretary, there was
no handoff to me," Austin said.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a similar point in a House hearing earlier this month.

"We inherited a deadline.
We did not inherit a plan,"
Blinken said.

Ultimately, the Afghan government fell in concert
with the US departure and Taliban takeover, which prompted scenes of mass chaos at the Kabul airport.

Austin said the evacuation of thousands of people
in August amounted to the
__"largest airlift conducted in US history."

President Joe Biden came into office with the drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan already underway.

A blueprint for the next steps in the withdrawal from the administration that initiated the pullout could've made the process smoother.

The Trump administration's February 2020 deal
with the Taliban — known as the Doha Agreement — called for the US to pull out all troops by May.

Trump's agreement, meetings for which the US-backed Afghan government was excluded from,
set up a 14-month timetable for the withdrawal
of "all military forces of the US, its allies,
and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel."

Biden largely upheld the agreement, though he extended the deadline for the withdrawal.

Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, told both Senate and House lawmakers this week that the Taliban failed to live up to nearly any
of the commitments the militant group made under the [Trump] deal.
The Taliban did not attack US forces after the agreement, but Milley said the militant Islamists "never renounced al-Qaida or broke its affiliation
with them."

Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the commander
of US Central Command, told lawmakers the Doha Agreement was detrimental to morale among Afghan forces.

The Biden administration has faced rampant criticism over its handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
But Republicans who've gone after the administration over the pullout have often ignored the fact that the Trump administration paved the way for the withdrawal by making a deal with the Taliban.

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