Tuesday, August 17, 2021
Monday, August 16, 2021
MisJudged...
The administration struggled to project order amid a race by American and other foreign personnel to evacuate Afghanistan as Taliban fighters entered Kabul.
The rapid fall of Afghanistan's national forces and government has come as a shock to Biden and senior members of his administration, who only last month believed it could take months before the civilian government in Kabul fell -- allowing a period of time after American troops left before the full consequences of the withdrawal were laid bare.
Now, months after his initial declaration that all 2,500 US troops would be out of Afghanistan by the end of the summer, a total of 6,000 troops are expected to help facilitate the evacuation.
Yet the chaotic scenes playing out as that war ends evoking the fall of Saigon in 1975, an image that haunted Biden as he weighed a withdrawal earlier this year -- are certain to trail Biden as the Taliban asserts control over large swaths of the country.
Already, some members of Congress are demanding more information from the administration on how its intelligence could have so badly misjudged the situation on the ground, or why more robust contingency plans for evacuating Americans and their allies weren't in place.
The war on Iraq, and its consequences was lables as MisJudged. Just a thought.
Sunday, August 15, 2021
Reap...
In 1986, CIA chief William Casey had stepped up the war against the Soviet Union by taking three significant, highly secret, measures. He had persuaded the US Congress to provide the Mujaheddin with American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down Soviet planes and provide US advisers to train the guerrillas.
The CIA, Britain’s MI6 and the ISI [Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence] also agreed on a provocative plan to launch guerrilla attacks into the Soviet Socialist Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the soft Muslim underbelly of the Soviet state from where Soviet troops in Afghanistan received their supplies.
In March 1987, small units crossed the Amu Darya river from bases in northern Afghanistan and launched their first rocket attacks against villages in Tajikistan.
Casey on his next secret trip to Pakistan crossed the border into Afghanistan to review the Mujaheddin groups.
Thirdly, Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin.
President Zia aimed to turn Pakistan into the leader of the Muslim world and foster an Islamic opposition in Central Asia.
Just a thought
Blame...
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the Biden administration has "failed" in its withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban is poised to retake control of the country as the U.S. is ending its nearly 20-year military presence there.
Pompeo also pushed back against President Biden's claim that he inherited a bad situation from his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
Biden has blamed the Trump administration for making a deal with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal. In 2019, Trump criticized the ongoing U.S. presence in Afghanistan, claiming that American forces had been serving as "policemen" for 19 years and should not be doing so anymore.
Twenty years or 50 Years are down the Darin. We don't know the culture, we don't know the people in Afghanistan.
Now we know the people, and now we know the culture.
Just a thought
Saturday, August 14, 2021
Hisitancy...
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was grilled on whether or not President Biden encouraged vaccine hesitancy with comments he made last year cautioning he did not "trust" former President Donald Trump as his administration worked to roll out vaccines.
"Has there been any thought given, looking back, to the possibility that [Biden] may have created some vaccine hesitancy? When last year, around this time, the previous administration was rushing to get a vaccine authorized, and how the president said, ‘I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don't trust Donald Trump,’" Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Psaki during the press briefing Wednesday.
"Well, I think it's safe to say he still doesn't trust Donald Trump so that hasn't changed. But he does trust scientists, he does trust data experts, And he does trust the people leading the CDC, the FDA, which is the gold standard of approval for vaccines," Psaki responded.
Rezone...
Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has voted against the controversial project at 960 Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights: two 34-story towers that would offer 50 percent affordable housing but also throw the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s greenhouses into shadow.
The vote, while purely advisory and not unexpected, is another ominous sign for the proposed development and came a little over a month after Adams’s office held a remote public hearing in which only two out of 105 people spoke in support of the project. (Both were union representatives; the project would be union-built and -staffed, which is unusual for a project with such a high percentage of affordability.)
Adams offered his disapproval of the project without conditions or modifications, writing that while he supported “the development of underutilized land for productive uses that address the city’s need for additional affordable housing,” the zoning requested by the developer would have “no precedent in Brooklyn.” He suggested, in so many words.
Rezoning NYC becomes a major problem in the city. The City that buckled down the minute Covid-19 appears with 60,000 Death and a Governor's career down the tube.
Quality of life is more important today with Climate change issues and viruses that can spread and kill thousand in no time through mass transport systems and condensed offices .
Just a thought..
Eviction...
The high court’s order on Thursday blocks part of New York’s COVID Emergency Eviction and Foreclosure Prevention Act, passed last year, that allows tenants to self-certify that they’re experiencing economic hardship because of the pandemic. If they do so, eviction proceedings are effectively shut down till the end of this month.
The court’s majority signaled that the New York law was likely unconstitutional because landlords had no way to challenge a tenant’s claim to have been hard hit by the pandemic.
“If a tenant self-certifies financial hardship, [the law] generally precludes a landlord from contesting that certification and denies the landlord a hearing,” the high court’s order said. “This scheme violates the Court’s longstanding teaching that ordinarily ‘no man can be a judge in his own case’ consistent with the Due Process Clause.”
It is a complex issue, to cancel eviction, with it to cancel mortgage, cancel heat cost, and cancel bank loans, which is destruction of everything. Just a thought.
Surprise...!!!
Is any body surprised here about what's happening in Afghnistan?
The surrenders seem to be happening as fast as the Taliban can travel.
In the past several days, the Afghan security forces have collapsed in more than 15 cities under the pressure of a Taliban advance that began in May.
The swift offensive has resulted in mass surrenders, captured helicopters and millions of dollars of American-supplied equipment paraded by the Taliban on grainy cellphone videos.
This implosion comes despite the United States having poured more than $83 billion in weapons, equipment and training into the country’s security forces over two decades.
Building the Afghan security apparatus was one of the key parts of the Obama administration’s strategy. These efforts produced an army modeled in the image of the United States’ military, an Afghan institution that was supposed to outlast the American war.
The United States’ 20-year endeavor to rebuild Afghanistan’s military into a robust and independent fighting force has failed, and that failure is now playing out in real time as the country slips into Taliban control.
Did anyone expected this to happen? I'll bet they all did in the State Department, Military officials and journalist who looked at the near history. Just a thought.
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