Attention to the Unseen

Jon Lee Anderson writes: Watching Afghanistan’s cities fall to the Taliban in rapid succession, as the United States completes a hasty withdrawal from the country, is a surreal experience, laced with a sense of déjà vu. Twenty years ago, I reported from Afghanistan as the Taliban’s enemies took these same cities from them, in the short but decisive U.S.-backed military offensive that followed the 9/11 attacks. The war on terror had just been declared, and the unfolding American military action…

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The New York Times reports: How the Afghan military came to disintegrate first became apparent not last week but months ago in an accumulation of losses that started even before President Biden’s announcement that the United States would withdraw by Sept. 11. It began with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more…

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The Washington Post reports: Speaking from his home in Tucson, Army veteran John Whalen sighed as reports came in that Kandahar, the second-largest Afghan city, had fallen to the Taliban. “It’s just frustrating,” Whalen said over the phone. “We knew that this would happen. Now, all the people who went and served, are like, ‘Why did my friend die?’ ” “I ask that question, too,” Whalen said. Whalen said two of his friends were killed just a dozen miles from…

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The New York Times reports: American negotiators are trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if the extremist group takes over the country’s government and ever wants to receive foreign aid, three American officials said. The effort, led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, seeks to stave off a full evacuation of the embassy as they rapidly seize cities across Afghanistan. On Thursday, the…

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Jennifer Szalai writes: Spencer Ackerman’s barnburner of a new book, “Reign of Terror,” reminded me of that moment in 2015 (remember then?) when Donald J. Trump descended his golden escalator to announce his long-shot candidacy for the highest office. Instead of starting with the usual heartwarming clichés about the country’s better angels, Trump came out swinging, declaring that the United States was in trouble: “When was the last time the U.S. won at anything?” It certainly hadn’t been winning any…

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The New York Times reports: If the Taliban had seized three provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan a year ago, like they did on Sunday, the American response would most likely have been ferocious. Fighter jets and helicopter gunships would have responded in force, beating back the Islamist group or, at the very least, stalling its advance. But these are different times. What aircraft the U.S. military could muster from hundreds of miles away struck a cache of weapons far from…

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The New York Times reports: The Taliban seized the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, officials said. It is the first major city to be overtaken by the insurgents since they began their sweeping military offensive in May, and it happened just weeks before U.S. forces were set to complete a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was also the third provincial capital to be overtaken by Taliban in three days, and a major blow to the Afghan government….

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Taliban fighters seized the capital of northern Afghanistan’s Jowzjan province Saturday, the second such provincial center to fall to the insurgency in two days, as the U.S. Embassy advised American citizens to leave the country immediately. The fall of the city of Sheberghan is particularly important because Jowzjan has long been the traditional stronghold of ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of the country’s main anti-Taliban leaders who served as Afghanistan’s vice president until…

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CNN reports: China’s Foreign Minister met with senior leaders of the Taliban in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin on Wednesday in the latest sign of warming ties between Beijing and the resurgent Islamist group. During a meeting with Taliban’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who heads the group’s political committee, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the Taliban as an important military and political force in Afghanistan, and said he expected the Taliban to play an important role in…

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Danny Postel writes: The last decade has seen historic political upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa: a tsunami of popular uprisings that have brought down several dictators and led to momentous transformations in political consciousness, if not always to democratic outcomes. But the last decade has also seen a concomitant counter-revolutionary roll-back across the region: authoritarian regimes, entrenched elites, ruling classes, deep states, and reactionary forces have marshalled considerable resources to torpedo these movements from below. Saudi Arabia’s…

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The Daily Beast reports: As the U.S. exits Afghanistan, Beijing is preparing to swoop into the war-torn country and fill the vacuum left by the departed U.S. and NATO troops. China is poised to make an exclusive entry into post-U.S. Afghanistan with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source close to government officials in Afghanistan told The Daily Beast that Kabul authorities are growing more intensively engaged with China on an extension of the…

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The New York Times reports: The security blanket that the United States provided for two decades haunts the Afghan government’s actions, inactions and policies, fostering an atrophying of any proactive planning, in the view of some analysts. If there is a plan to counter the Taliban advance, it is not evident as the government’s hold on the countryside shrinks. Some intelligence assessments have said that the Afghan government could fall under pressure from the Taliban in from six months to…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. intelligence community concluded last week that the government of Afghanistan could collapse as soon as six months after the American military withdrawal from the country is completed, according to officials with knowledge of the new assessment. American intelligence agencies revised their previously more optimistic estimates as the Taliban swept through northern Afghanistan last week, seizing dozens of districts and surrounding major cities. Afghan security forces frequently surrendered without a fight, leaving their Humvees…

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