Tag Archives: Afghanistan

The Very Latest on Afghanistan

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From Crooked Media’s political newsletter:

Monday’s harrowing scenes out of Karzai airport in Kabul have given way to less-sensational, logistical challenges to completing the evacuation from Afghanistan by August 31, and the media’s verdict is clear: Can’t it still be Monday?

At a White House press conference Friday, President Biden offered a comprehensive update on the withdrawal effort, which he noted has evacuated 13,000 citizens, allied Afghans, and others since the airlift began on August 14. Biden said he still believes the U.S. can complete the evacuation by August 31, notwithstanding operational setbacks. He acknowledged that though the Taliban has committed to allowing U.S. citizens through checkpoints into the airport, many have been stuck in bottlenecks of would-be refugees outside the gates, and that service members have thus pulled over 100 of them in over the airport walls. He also acknowledged that he can’t promise the evacuation will end without loss of life. 

The U.S. had to pause evacuation flights out of Kabul on Friday, not because too many evacuees are stranded outside the airport, but because pilots had nowhere to fly them, after Qatar refused to accept more refugees and asylum seekers. That touched off a multi-hour effort to find new destinations and clear evacuees past transit points, after which the airlift operation resumed. All of these challenges have raised questions about why we couldn’t fly non-Americans to U.S. territory, and house them there while screening them, just as we did for Vietnamese and Iraqi Kurdish refugees. 

There are other reasons 10,000-or-so people are awaiting departure. The Trump administration all but halted processing Special Immigrant Visas, creating a paperwork bottleneck when the Biden administration ramped the processing back up. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reports further that when now-ousted Afghan President Ashraf Ghani visited the White House in June, he asked Biden to slow the departure of American-allied Afghans “to avoid the destabilizing appearance of a rush for the exit.” Lastly, existing law required evacuees to pay for evacuation assistance (essentially airfare), but the government has now reportedly waived that requirement.

Facing such a big challenge on a compressed time frame, many national political reporters want to know why Biden didn’t do a better job predicting the future.

A diplomatic cable sent through the State Department’s internal dissent channel, and which reportedly reached Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, warned “of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the U.S.’s Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story. Astute readers will note that it is currently August 20, meaning that even those who believed the Afghan government would fall very quickly didn’t anticipate that it would actually collapse in mid-August, while the evacuation was ongoing. 

Nevertheless, journalists primed to join the pile-on over the ensuing crisis characterized the report as if it showed the Biden administration had clear warning that Kabul might fall before the evacuation was complete. The Journal reported that the memo “undercut[] the notion that the speed of the collapse caught the administration by surprise. Politico opined that the cable “cast perhaps the harshest light yet on the administration’s performance.”

In their haste to prove they can be tough on “both sides,” many journalists have misplaced their reading comprehension, but so far nothing we’ve learned has contradicted what we initially understood: The Afghan government collapsed faster than anticipated, requiring the ongoing evacuation to occur under Taliban control of the country. We should all hope it continues without violence and that the U.S. makes good on its obligation to those who risked their lives to help us.

Ignore the Bullshit Regarding Afghanistan

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Politico describes how the Biden administration responded:

By the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 11, the Afghan government’s already brittle control of the war-torn country was quickly unraveling in the face of a swift Taliban offensive coinciding with the nearly complete withdrawal of U.S. troops that President JOE BIDEN ordered in April.

Most of America’s top diplomats and generals were still operating under the assumption that they had ample time to prepare for a Taliban takeover of the country — it might even be a couple of years until the group was in a position to regain power, many thought. Though some military officials and intelligence agencies had stepped up their warnings about the possibility of a government collapse, officials felt confident about the Afghan security forces’ strategy of consolidating in the cities to defend the urban population centers.

The president and his top aides still had one more meeting scheduled for Wednesday evening — a pre-planned session on a classified national security matter. As word of the deteriorating situation flowed into the Oval Office that morning, Biden ordered that the early evening meeting should focus on Afghanistan.

Sitting in the Situation Room were [the Vice President, Secretary of Defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the National Security Adviser; the Director of National Intelligence; the Deputy CIA Director and others. Other officials, including the Secretary of State, participated by phone].

Events were growing so dire that the president ordered [Sec. of Defense] Austin and [General] Milley to prepare a plan for deploying additional troops to the region, where they would reinforce those put on standby months earlier to evacuate American personnel.

Biden also directed the State Department to expand the evacuation of Afghan allies — those who had worked with the Americans and were now in mortal danger — to include the use of military aircraft, not just chartered civilian planes.

And he also asked his intelligence officials to prepare an up-to-date assessment on the situation in Afghanistan by the following morning. After the meeting broke up, a classified email was sent to pertinent staffers to convene at 7:30 a.m. the next day [August 12]. 

. . . The principals meeting kicked off with an intelligence briefing concluding that the situation was so “fluid” that the Afghan government’s seat of power in Kabul could fall “within weeks or days,” an official noted.

Austin recommended that Biden send in troops to evacuate the embassy and protect the main international airport in Kabul. [National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan asked each Cabinet member in the meeting to weigh in. They unanimously agreed.

That was the “Oh, shit” moment, said a U.S. official. It was now officially a crisis.

Sullivan walked into the Oval Office just before 10 a.m. [on August 12] to report to the president. Biden picked up the phone and told Austin to send troops to Kabul’s airport.

Some background from The Hill:

History will mark Aug. 15, 2021, as the date that the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban retook control over this troubled and war-torn country. But the real date that the Taliban’s victory was assured is Feb. 29, 2020, the day the T____ administration signed what it characterized as a “peace” deal with the Taliban. Once this agreement was signed — the tragic collapse we witnessed this weekend was inevitable. 

Of course, the agreement was not, and could not possibly have been, a “peace” deal since one of the parties currently at war — the Afghan government — was not a signatory. Rather, this was a “withdrawal” agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban that set the terms for the complete departure of American troops from Afghanistan by May 2021.

What did the United States gain in exchange for this withdrawal, for which the Taliban had been fighting for 20 years? Nothing but vague, unenforceable promises that the Taliban would not engage in hostilities against the departing U.S. troops and would “send a clear message” to al Qaeda that it “had no place” in Afghanistan. So eager T____ was to withdraw, we did not even hold out for a clear, firm commitment that the Taliban would not provide aid, safe harbor or weaponry to al Qaeda and like-minded groups. The agreement contained no enforcement mechanisms and included no penalties on the Taliban for failing to comply with its terms.  

Once the agreement was signed, the fate of the Afghan government was signed, sealed and delivered — the Taliban had practically won the war. There was no way that the government could possibly survive. 

The fact that the United States entered into negotiations and then an agreement with the Taliban, without even inviting the Afghan government to the table, undercut the power and legitimacy of the government. The citizenry, including those in the national armed services and police, could plainly see that its own government was being ignored, a helpless bystander in critical discussions about the country’s future. After we had cut the legs out from under this government and rendered it a paper tiger, it is no wonder that when those serving in the Afghan army and police were asked to fight, most said, “No, thanks.”

The agreement also did absolutely nothing to attempt to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war between the Afghan government and the Taliban. A genuine peace deal would have made our withdrawal contingent on the progress of peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. But it did not. T____ agreed unconditionally to bring down U.S. troop levels to 8,600 by mid-July 2020 and totally withdraw by May 2021. 

The agreement anticipated there would be peace negotiations, but in August, T____ voluntarily cut troop levels down to 4,500, even more quickly than required by the agreement, even though negotiations had not even begun. This was a clear signal there would be no linkage between withdrawals and peace, contrary to what U.S. diplomats were telling the parties. This signal was received loud and clear by the Taliban. They balked at starting negotiations until December, and even then, had zero incentive to make any concessions since T____ had already announced that there would be only 2,500 troops in Afghanistan by the time he left office, the smallest U.S. force in 20 years. It was clear to the Taliban that the Americans were quickly headed for the exits. . . . . 

To stem the Taliban’s momentum on the ground this spring, the Biden administration would have had to not only abrogate the T____ withdrawal agreement but also deploy more troops and get them more deeply involved in the fighting. This would have breached Biden’s campaign commitment to end the war in Afghanistan and ran against the strong bipartisan public support for withdrawal. 

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post explains why discussion of these events in the media has been so distorted:

As we have watched the rapid dissolution of the Afghan government, the takeover of the country by the Taliban and the desperate effort of so many Afghans to flee, the U.S. media have asked themselves a question: What do the people who were wrong about Afghanistan all along have to say about all this?

That’s not literally what TV bookers and journalists have said, of course. But if you’ve been watching the debate, it almost seems that way.

The number of Afghanistan/Iraq hawks — the ones who brought us those twin disasters in the first place — who have been called on by major media organizations to offer their sage assessment of the current situation is truly remarkable.

Whether it’s retired generals who now earn money in the weapons industry, former officials from the Bush, Obama and T____ administrations who in many cases are directly responsible for the mistakes of the past two decades, or war enthusiast pundits with an unblemished record of wrongness, we’re now hearing from the same people who two decades ago told us how great these wars would be, then spent years telling us victory was right around the corner, and are now explaining how somebody else is to blame for Afghanistan.

One name you almost never hear in all the “Why this is President Biden’s greatest failure” talk is one George W. Bush, who took us to Afghanistan and whose delusion that we could spread democracy at the point of a gun got this whole mess started. You’ll have to look far and wide for an interview with someone who objected to the Afghanistan war when it began, but if you want to hear one former Bush official interview another former Bush official about what a mess Biden made, just turn on your TV.

This isn’t something new. In fact, it has characterized the debate over the entirety of this period.

Back in the early 2000s, the term “Very Serious People” was coined to refer to those who were wrong about Iraq but nevertheless were treated with great deference and respect because they were mouthing conventional wisdom and taking a position that the media and the broader Washington culture treated as hardheaded and rational.

In contrast, the people who were right about Iraq — who said there was no real evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, or was about to attack the United States — were treated as silly, unserious and not worth listening to.

Then as now, the supposedly unserious people continued to be sidelined and ignored even after events proved them right.

It’s not just about who gets a platform in this debate. It’s also about what the limits of that debate are. As Matt Duss, a foreign policy expert and adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), told me, the debate is shaped by “a general hawkish interventionist framing you see in the media and the foreign policy establishment.” It presumes that the deployment of U.S. military power overseas is nearly always justified and likely to accomplish its goals.

In that framework, if things go wrong it must be because of some failure of planning or execution — and you can bet that if you bring a Bush, Obama or T____ official on your show, they’re going to say, “It wasn’t my fault — it must be Biden’s fault!”

What gets left out of that discussion? For starters, the fact that we spent 20 years trying to create and sustain the Afghan government, and it remained so plagued by corruption that it didn’t have legitimacy with the country’s population. . . .

But the problem went deeper. “Even focusing on the failures of the Afghan government lets us off the hook,” [Bernie Sanders adviser Matt Duss] told me. “When we’re talking about corruption, the biggest beneficiaries are U.S. multinationals.” Indeed, another recent government report found that between 2011 and 2019 we spent nearly $100 billion on private contractors in Afghanistan.

Do you think the corporations that have been feeding at that trough for 20 years were eager to have U.S. involvement end? And might we be skeptical of the opinions of people who serve on the boards of those companies?

Now there is a rush for accountability for the failures in Afghanistan — but only, it seems, the failures of the Biden administration. The urge is so powerful that three separate Senate committees led by Democrats are preparing to investigate the administration’s mistakes (though they might look as far back as last year, to the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban).

This comes after no one was prosecuted for the torture policy of the Bush administration, and no one was punished for the Iraq debacle. Instead, those most responsible for America’s worst moral and practical foreign policy failures are treated as though they are the possessors of great wisdom and insight to which we all should attend. . . .

Unquote.

There was never going to be a calm, orderly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Given everything we know about the former president, the withdrawal would have been even more painful if he was still in office. The good news is that competent, sensible people are in charge now and most of us who don’t appear on cable TV support Biden’s decision:

A poll — commissioned by the right-leaning, pro-restraint Concerned Veterans for America but conducted by YouGov — shows a combined 60 percent of respondents either “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the pullout, while 22 percent either “somewhat oppose” or “strongly oppose” Biden’s decision.

Hindsight on Afghanistan

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From The Washington Post:

Twenty years ago, when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were still smoldering, there was a sense among America’s warrior and diplomatic class that history was starting anew for the people of Afghanistan and much of the Muslim world.

“Every nation has a choice to make,” President George W. Bush said on the day that bombs began falling on Oct. 7, 2001. In private, senior U.S. diplomats were even more explicit. “For you and us, history starts today,” then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told his Pakistani counterparts.

Earlier this month, as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, retired Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey, a two-time veteran of the war, stumbled across Armitage’s words. To Dempsey, the sentiment was “the most American thing I’ve ever heard” and emblematic of the hubris and ignorance that he and so many others brought to the losing war.

“We assumed the rest of the world saw us as we saw ourselves,” he said. “And we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.” Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong.

The near-collapse of the Afghan army in the space of just a few stunning weeks is prompting the military and Washington’s policymakers to reflect on their failures over the course of nearly two decades. To many, the roots of the disaster go back to the war’s earliest days, when the Taliban were first driven from power and the United States, still reeling from the shock of the 9/11 attacks, set about building a government in Kabul.

The Afghanistan Papers: Afghan security forces, despite years of training, were dogged by incompetence and corruption

Some two dozen prominent Afghans met in Bonn, Germany, with officials from the U.S. government, NATO and the United Nations to form a new Afghan government crafted in the image of the United States and its European allies.

“You look at the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and it was trying to create a Western democracy,” said Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010. “In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.”

Flournoy acknowledged in hindsight that the mistake was compounded across Republican and Democratic administrations, which continued with almost equal fervor to pursue goals that ran counter to decades — if not centuries — of the Afghan experience.

By 2009, when Obama took office, it was clear to just about everyone that the United States was losing the war.

To reverse Taliban momentum and give U.S. officials a chance to build up the Afghan government and security forces, Obama signed off on a surge of troops that more than doubled the size of the American force in Afghanistan.

Flournoy said she was initially hopeful that the plan could work. On trips to Afghanistan, she met frequently with young Afghans, including women’s groups, who shared America’s vision for the country. They wanted to send their daughters to school, serve in government, start businesses and nonprofits. They wanted women to be full participants in society and craved a predictable political and legal system. “We found all kinds of allies,” she said.

But those individuals were no match for the rot that had permeated the Afghan government. She and other U.S. officials understood that with all the U.S. money floating around in Afghanistan, there would be “petty corruption,” she said. What U.S. officials discovered in 2010, after the surge was already underway, was a corruption that ran far deeper than they had previously understood and that jeopardized their strategy, which depended on building the legitimacy of the Afghan government.

“We realized that this is not going to work,” Flournoy said. “We had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten.”

Now, as Taliban fighters race toward Kabul and the Afghan military crumbles, Flournoy said her thoughts often turn to the Americans who sacrificed for the mission and to those “wonderful allies” who shared the U.S. hopes for a democratic Afghanistan. “That’s what makes me so sick to my stomach,” she said. “We invested in this whole generation that is about to suffer through this very horrible chapter.”

As Taliban widens its grip, Afghans reckon with life under militant rule

Meanwhile, current and former U.S. officials are trying to make sense of why a government and security forces built over two decades at a cost of more than $100 billion dollars are collapsing so quickly.

Carter Malkasian, a longtime adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, has pegged the weakness of the Afghan forces on their lack of a unifying cause that resonates with Afghans, as well as their heavy dependence on the United States. By contrast, the Taliban were fighting for their culture and Islam. They “exemplified something that inspired, something that made them powerful in battle, something closely tied to what it meant to be an Afghan,” Malkasian writes in his new book, “The American War in Afghanistan.”

It’s an observation that speaks to the limits of American power and raises the broader question of how the catastrophic and embarrassing failure in Afghanistan might constrain U.S. foreign policy moving forward.

“We know what happens when we fall to imperial hubris. What does one do with imperial heartbreak?” asked John Gans, who served as a civilian in the Pentagon during the Obama administration.

So many of today’s rising military commanders and foreign policy experts were drawn into government service by the 9/11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan. After the relatively low-stakes peacekeeping missions of the 1990s, America and U.S. foreign policy suddenly seemed to be at the center of the world in the years after 2001. A whole generation of leaders driven “by ambition, ego and a desire to shape world events” ran toward the action, Gans said. . . .

It seems certain that in coming years the use of military force will be informed by this searing experience. U.S. foreign policy will be guided by more modest ambitions, especially when weighing the use of military power. Flournoy imagines a future in which military force is limited to more sharply defined objectives and informed by far greater humility when it comes to spreading democracy or changing societies.

In many cases, it’s a vision in which force is used to manage chronic problems, rather than solve them.

Another possibility is a U.S. foreign policy that is increasingly focused more on issues such as pandemics or climate change, which require U.S. leadership and a global response. Gans noted that more than 600,000 Americans have died of covid-19, far more than the number of U.S. lives lost to terrorism and war over the past 20 years.

For now, though, it seems unlikely that these threats will take center stage in U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon, with its $740 billion budget, still sucks up a larger share of discretionary spending than any other government agency. Meanwhile, the foreign policy establishment has shifted its focus increasingly to the competition with the likes of Russia and China.

“After 9/11 everyone raced to become a Middle East or counterterrorism expert,” said Gans. “After covid, you don’t see many foreign policy people racing to become global health experts.”

On one subject most foreign policy experts agree: America needs to temper its faith in its armed forces. “We had so much faith in our military that we were inevitably going to overstep,” said Dempsey, the Afghanistan veteran. “A military bureaucracy unchecked never yields good outcomes.”

Too Long in Afghanistan

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A Twitter thread about the U.S. and Afghanistan from David Rothkopf, a political scientist, etc.:

US policy in Afghanistan has been 20 yrs of bad decisions & bad execution in the face of an insoluble challenge. Our local allies were very flawed, our enemy was resolute & the last 3 US presidents have wanted out & knew what’s happening now would happen. But sure, it’s on Biden. 

The original sin and greatest blame goes to George W. Bush who got us involved in a protracted mission when the only right mission was to go in, get Al Qaeda & leave. That was compounded by the catastrophic decision to enter Iraq–an enormous distraction. 

Obama and T____ compounded the problem by failing to find a way to exit. Why didn’t they? Because their advisors knew that the center (the Afghan gov’t and forces) couldn’t hold and that ultimately collapse would follow the exit. Those advisors were right. 

Those who recommended staying indefinitely did so in the full knowledge that 20 years of massive expense and effort could not produce a stable central government or a secure Afghanistan. There is zero evidence any outside force ever could do that. None ever has. 

There are profound human rights issues–particularly women’s rights issues–that should be of great concern and a priority for the international community. But the answer is not a costly U.S. & allied military Band-Aid. 

The military is not the only tool in what Madeleine Albright would call our diplomatic toolbox. Moreover it is one that has proven wholly ineffective to produce lasting change in Afghanistan. We must shift to other tools–at the top of the list being multilateral diplomacy. 

Bringing together all the major powers with a stake in Afghanistan and institutions to communicate to the effective leaders of the country that if they respect the rights of women they will benefit and if they do not they will be severely penalized. 

Letting them know that they will be subject to military strikes if they harbor terrorists is also fair. The notion that the only path is continuing to do what hasn’t worked to date is ridiculous. And the costs & pitfalls of alternative paths aren’t worse than what hasn’t worked. 

Some suggest that Biden could have planned this better. First, Bush, Obama and T____ could have and should have planned and executed this better. Next, there is plenty to suggest that whenever the US decided to leave, what is happening would happen. 

The Taliban want to embarrass us and claim victory. They have known all along they would not get much resistance in most of the country from the central government. This was so predictable everyone predicted it–and no one, no one offered a viable alternative solution. 

Only one president has had the courage to do the right thing in Afghanistan. It is the same man who advised we do this in 2009 when he was Vice President. It takes courage because he knows that he will receive the critiques his opponents are heaping on him now. 

But doing the right thing even when it is likely to be politically controversial and even when it reveals uncomfortable realities is what strong leadership is about. 

Biden & his team have already committed to using other means to advance US interests in Afghanistan-as we should have done long, long ago. It’s fascinating that so many who opposed nation building, who do not believe the US should be the world’s sheriff are now criticizing Biden. 

America’s war in Afghanistan will rank alongside Vietnam as one of our great modern failures of strategy and execution. Many are to blame for that. Whatever arguments might be made that the US departure could have been better executed, one thing is absolutely clear. 

The bulk of the responsibility for that failure lies with past administrations and with the leadership in Kabul (and to some extent with Taliban enablers beyond the country’s borders). Biden is doing what is right and what must be done. It is time to turn the page. 

None of This Adds Up To Anything Good

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Susan Rice is a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and National Security Advisor to the president. She wrote this for The New York Times:

Since at least February, and [according to a new report] possibly as early as March 2019, the United States has had compelling intelligence that a committed adversary, Russia, paid bounties to Taliban-linked fighters to kill American troops in Afghanistan. American service members were reportedly killed as a result.

To this day, the president of the United States has done nothing about it.

Instead, President Txxxx dismissed the intelligence as not “credible” and “possibly another fabricated Russia hoax, maybe by the Fake News” that is “wanting to make Republicans look bad!!!”

Mr. Txxxx also claimed that neither he nor Vice President Mike Pence was ever told about this critical intelligence before it was first reported in The New York Times. Setting aside for a moment the credulity of that claim, whenever the president learned of this deeply troubling intelligence, why did he not publicly condemn any Russian efforts to kill American soldiers and explore options for a swift and significant U.S. response?

None of this adds up.

As a former national security adviser, I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that no one told Mr. Txxxx about this intelligence.

It was reportedly contained in the president’s daily briefing, which is provided to all top-level national security officials. Even if Mr. Txxxx does not bother regularly to read the daily briefing, we must assume others do. If the president’s senior advisers — Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser; Richard Grenell, who stepped down in May as acting director of national intelligence; and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, among others — thought it was unnecessary to inform the commander in chief of this life-or- death matter, then they are not worthy of service.

White House officials claim that it would be improper to inform the president of such information until it is fully verified and options for the U.S. response had been prepared. Yet, the administration reportedly informed the British government, and the National Security Council convened an interagency meeting in March to discuss the intelligence and its implications.

Here’s what should have happened. Had I, as national security adviser, received even “raw” reporting that Russia was paying to kill U.S. service members, I would have walked straight into the Oval Office to brief the president.

Contrary to the spin-masters in the White House today, I would not have waited until we had absolute certainty. I would have said, “Mr. President, I want to make sure you are aware that we have troubling reporting that Russia is paying the Taliban to kill our forces in Afghanistan. I will work with the intelligence community to ensure the information is solid. In the meantime, I will convene the national security team to get you some options for how to respond to this apparent major escalation in Russia’s hostile actions.”

If later the president decided, as Mr. Txxxx did, that he wanted to talk with President Vladimir Putin of Russia at least six times over the next several weeks and invite him to join the Group of 7 summit over the objections of our allies, I would have thrown a red flag: “Mr. President, I want to remind you that we believe the Russians are killing American soldiers. This is not the time to hand Putin an olive branch. It’s the time to punish him.”

This is what would have happened in any prior administration of either political party.

That it apparently did not is deeply troubling and raises myriad questions. If Mr. Txxxx was told about Russian actions, why did he not respond? If he was not told, why not? Are his top advisers utterly incompetent? Are they too scared to deliver bad news to Mr. Txxxx, particularly about Russia? Is Mr. Txxxx running a rogue foreign policy utterly divorced from U.S. national interests? If so, why?

A perilous pattern persists that underscores Mr. Txxxx’s strange propensity to serve Russian interests above America’s. Recall that, during his 2016 campaign, Mr. Txxxx publicly urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and praised WikiLeaks for publishing stolen documents.

He denied and dismissed Russian interference in the 2016 election, then took Mr. Putin at his word at a Helsinki meeting while undercutting the U.S. intelligence community, and obstructed the Mueller investigation and distorted its findings. Mr. Txxxx recklessly removed U.S. troops from northern Syria and allowed Russian forces to take over American bases.

Next, Mr. Txxxx unilaterally invited Mr. Putin to attend the Group of 7 meeting, a move that apparently upended the organization’s annual summit. Subsequently, without any consultation, Mr. Txxxx announced his decision to remove nearly a third of U.S. troops from Germany — a sudden and inexplicable withdrawal that weakens the U.S.-German relationship and harms NATO, while benefiting Russia.

Most recently, we have learned that even Russian efforts to slaughter American troops in cold blood do not faze this president. Mr. Txxxx brushes off the information, evades responsibility and fails to take action — not even lodging a diplomatic protest. Now Mr. Putin knows he can kill Americans with impunity.

What must we conclude from all this? At best, our commander in chief is utterly derelict in his duties, presiding over a dangerously dysfunctional national security process that is putting our country and those who wear its uniform at great risk. At worst, the White House is being run by liars and wimps catering to a tyrannical president who is actively advancing our arch adversary’s nefarious interests.

Unquote.

The Times explains some of the evidence:

American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account, evidence that supported their conclusion that Russia covertly offered bounties for killing U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan, according to three officials familiar with the intelligence.

Charles Pierce of Esquire asks [with some assistance/interference from me]:

How many more shoes have to drop? Every time the administration* comes up with a new bogus alibi for the Russian bounty case, information appears almost immediately that utterly undermines it. What do they have to do? Find a picture of him dancing … in a furry hat while tossing hundred-dollar bills to a cheering crowd [in Red Square]?

Finally, mothers of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan are demanding answers. So is this veteran: