Jane Horton, who has visited Afghanistan six times following her Army husband’s death in 2011, tells ‘America Reports’ she’s ‘completely defeated’ by the collapse of Afghanistan.
The South Carolina senator took aim at Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman’s performance during Wednesday’s press conference, saying he couldn’t “believe” his ears when Sherman “went through all of her efforts to improve the lives of Afghan women going back to 1997 and now believes that those words matter.”
“The Biden Administration has abandoned Afghan women!” Graham tweeted. “The fate that awaits Afghan women, at the hands of the Taliban, is a direct result of the Biden Administration’s failure to adequately plan for an ill-conceived withdrawal.”
Graham called Sherman’s words touting “how much she cares for Afghan women” amid the controversy surrounding the Biden administration for their botched troop withdrawal “beyond shameless” and said it was time for a shake-up at the Department of State.
“The best thing that can happen for Afghan women is if those in charge of this debacle at the State Department resign and be replaced by more competent individuals,” Graham tweeted.
The senator’s words come as some of his colleagues question the president’s fitness for office amid the fallout from the fall of Afghanistan.
Florida Sen. Rick Scott told Fox News that it’s time to “ask the serious question of whether Joe Biden is fit to lead our nation as commander in chief,” while Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson said that the Afghanistan debacle is further evidence that Biden is “unfit for office.”
Scott told Fox News in a statement Wednesday that Biden’s “massive failure of leadership cannot be ignored” and that it is “unconscionable” that the president would withdraw troops without “ensuring the safe evacuation of Americans and our allies.”
Joe Biden has suggested there was no way for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan “without chaos ensuing”, and said US troops may stay past a 31 August deadline to evacuate Americans there.
As critics in the US and abroad questioned his handling of the withdrawal, the president said in his first on-camera interview since the Taliban took Kabul that troops would stay in the country to get American citizens out.
“If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay until we get them all out,” Biden told ABC News, implying that he would listen to US lawmakers who had pressed him to extend the 31 August deadline he had set for a final pullout.
At the same time, Biden defended his administration’s handling of the withdrawal. Asked if he thought it could have gone better, Biden said: “No.”
“We’re gonna go back in hindsight and look … but the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
The sentiment contradicts what Biden had said weeks back, when he insisted that the “likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely”.
Biden told ABC the Taliban were cooperating in helping get Americans out of the country, but admitted “we’re having some more difficulty” in evacuating US-aligned Afghan citizens.
He said: “They’re cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera, but they’re having … we’re having some more difficulty having those who helped us when we were in there.”
The speed with which Taliban forces retook Afghanistan, as US and other foreign forces withdrew, has led to chaotic scenes at the airport with diplomats, foreign citizens and Afghans trying to flee. They are being impeded by crowds and Taliban checkpoints.
The US said it has evacuated 3,200 people from Afghanistan but thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans who want to leave the country remain.
Biden appeared dismissive of images that emerged on Monday of packed US military planes taking off from Kabul airport as people clung to their sides. At least two people apparently fell to their deaths from the undercarriage soon after takeoff.
Stephanopoulos said: “We’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed in a C-17. We’ve seen Afghans falling … ”
Biden interrupted and said: “That was four days ago, five days ago!”
The president was asked what he thought when he first saw those pictures.
Biden replied: “What I thought was: we have to gain control of this. We have to move this more quickly. We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport. And we did.”
The president was also asked whether what happened in Afghanistan over the past week was a “failure of intelligence, planning, execution or judgment”.
Biden said: “Look, it was a simple choice, George. When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, get in a plane and taking off and going to another country; when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off – that was, you know, I’m not, that’s what happened. That’s simply what happened.”
Latest: The United States and other countries operated military evacuation flights from Afghanistan into Wednesday, though not all those seeking to leave the country were able to reach Kabul airport. The Taliban erected checkpoints throughout the capital and near the airport’s entrance, beating some Afghans who attempted to cross and intimidating others, according to reports and an eyewitness account.
Former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani surfaced in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday, the Persian Gulf nation’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. In a video streamed on his official Facebook page, Ghani denied fleeing the country with huge sums of cash.
The winding, narrow road from Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul to its Panjshir Valley 40 miles away has always been a journey from chaos to calm.
But that sentiment has never rung so true as now.
The small, picturesque province of Panjshir – meaning “five lions” – at the foot of the lush Hindu Kush mountain range has become the last bulwark against Taliban fighters, who have seized the country at breakneck speed after America’s pullout.
For decades, thousands of mostly ethnic Tajiks have protected Panjshir’s prized oasis of emerald rivers and rolling hills. Snipers loyal to the province are always hidden in its ranges, which serve as Nature’s garrison, while the gates of Panjshir’s valley are fiercely guarded by another dedicated band of locals.
Should the Taliban choose to turn its guns and heavy armor on the country’s last remaining oasis, it is safe to say that there will be no dropping guns and dashing by Panjshir’s residents.
“We will be resisting, not surrendering. We will never surrender,” vowed Ahmad Muslem Hayat, a former Afghan Embassy defense attache in London, security expert and Panjshiri native, to The Post. “People in Panjshir will never surrender to terrorists — we will all die before that happens.”
Afghan security forces have mobilized in Panjshir after Taliban fighters took over Kabul. AFP via Getty Images
In the immediate aftermath of Kabul’s fall to the insurgents Sunday, high-ranking Afghanistan government officials immediately directed helicopters and armored vehicles to be sent to Panjshir before the equipment could be seized by the Taliban.
A number of Afghan Special Forces and security personnel who rebuffed orders to put down their weapons and accede to the Taliban also took the bumpy road into the province before the Taliban could seal the city’s entries and exits.
And while the Taliban have claimed Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar to be the embattled nation’s rightful leader, First Vice-President (FVP) of Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh relocated to Panjshir on Sunday and declared himself the president. Citing the country’s constitution, he reiterated in a statement that “in the event of escape, resignation or death of the President, the FVP becomes the caretaker President.
Panjshiri native Ahmad Muslem Hayat says community members “will never surrender” to Taliban insurgents compared to other provinces. AFP via Getty Images
“I am currently inside my country and am the legitimate caretaker President. I am reaching out to all leaders to secure their support and consensus,” Saleh said — after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country under siege Sunday.
According to Hayat, several other high-ranking government leaders – including its minister of defense and some provincial commanders – are in Panjshir, too, to mobilize assets and prepare to defend the mosaic of land as the region makes what could be its last stand against the Taliban.
The treasured area is now presided over by 32-year-old, British-educated Ahmad Massoud, who commands thousands of deeply dedicated fighters to protect the parcel and is the son of late national hero and anti-Soviet resistance fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Amrullah Saleh, former First Vice-President of Afghanistan, declared himself as the “legitimate caretaker president,” of the country. AFP via Getty Images
Dubbed the “Lion of Panjshir,” Massoud, a prominent mujahadeen and Northern Alliance chieftain, developed tight ties with the West, only to be assassinated by al-Qaeda operatives two days before planes assailed the Twin Towers n Sept. 11, 2001.
But while the battle-hardened and deeply proud Panjshiris are mobilized and ready for battle to keep their province safe, some fear that the Taliban’s strategy is to squeeze them in other ways.
“Right now, things are quiet. But the worry is that the Taliban will form a blockade around Panjshir and force our hand in not being able to bring in food and urgent supplies,” Hayat explained. “This is the problem. We need support from the international community.”
Afghan security forces patrol a road in Bazarak, a town of the Panjshir province on Aug. 17, 2021. AFP via Getty Images
Another Panjshir-based official said the fertile and self-sustaining province had enough food and medical supplies to sustain itself through the notoriously harsh winter.
“This location is very important, and we can survive for a while,” he said, speaking on background. “If we can keep resisting there, it will be a big headache for all terrorists groups there.”
But after that, times could be tough.
Panjshir officials declined to give precise figures as to how many fighters they have in the area, but it is believed to be in excess of 6,000. It is believed that they really need are heavy weapons and support, something they say they never received from the Ghani-led administration.
Ahmad Massoud, son of late mujahadeen leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, commands soldiers to protect the Panjshir province from the Taliban. AFP via Getty Images
Several Panjshiris also expressed concern about revenge killings, given their long and bloody history with the Taliban, although the militant organization’s leadership has pledged not to retaliate against such Afghans.
The Panjshir Valley remains the only parcel of Afghan soil that has never succumb to Taliban control, including during the militant group’s previous reign from 1996 to 2001.
And throughout much of the US-led occupation of Afghanistan, which saw blood stain most of the landlocked country, Panjshir remained largely untouched as a result of its same devoted force of locals.
But because the hidden valley also was not subject to conflict and calamity, it was often left off the budget of US humanitarian programs and rarely the recipient of the aid funds allocated to other areas.
Today, much of the Panjshir Valley does not have running water and electricity, with most residents relying on generators for a few hours per day. But the area also is beautifully reflective of a time long ago – featuring mud huts carved from the earth and fringed by mulberry and stone fruit trees and donkey carts moving through the swirls of morning mist.
Submerged beneath its earth and into its rocks lies one of the world’s largest untouched arsenals of emeralds, ripe for extraction should there ever be a business boom there.
Meanwhile, there also remains a symbol of how the province previously beat back invaders: remnants of destroyed Soviet tanks and machine guns dotting its landscape and languishing in its gushing waters.
Afghanistan government officials ordered military equipment to be sent to Panjshir to prevent Taliban forces from seizing assets. AFP via Getty ImagesHumvee vehicles from the Afghan Security Forces are parked by a stadium in the Panjshir province on Aug. 16. AFP via Getty Images
While the future of this oasis carved into the middle of madness remains uncertain, its inhabitants’ will to fight is staunchly in place.
“Twenty years, and the US now has a Terrorstan,” Hayat said, referring to an infamous nickname for the country. “Panjshiris will not, will never, accept this.”
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The board of trustees for a public school district in Texas changed its dress code to include face masks in a bid to get around Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on face mask mandates.
“The Board of Trustees is concerned about the health and safety of its students and employees. The Board believes the dress code can be used to mitigate communicable health issues, and therefore has amended the PISD dress code to protect our students and employees,” the Paris Independent School District said in a statement Tuesday.
The district added that Abbott does not have the authority “to usurp” the board’s “exclusive power and duty to govern and oversee the management of the public schools of the district.”
“Nothing in the Governor’s Executive Order 38 states he has suspended Chapter 11 of the Texas Education Code, and therefore the Board has elected to amend its dress code consistent with its statutory authority,” the district continued.
Abbott signed an executive order last month banning mask mandates or COVID-19 vaccine requirements from government agencies and schools.
“To further ensure that no governmental entity can mandate masks, the following requirement shall continue to apply: No governmental entity, including a county, city, school district, and public health authority, and no governmental official may require any person to wear a face-covering or to mandate that other person wear a covering,” the executive order read.
“Today’s executive order will provide clarity and uniformity in the Lone Star State’s continued fight against COVID-19,” Abbott said of the order last month.
Abbott’s press secretary Renae Eze told Fox News later on Wednesday of the Paris Independent School District’s move: “We are all working to protect Texas children and those most vulnerable among us, but violating the Governor’s executive orders—and violating parental rights—is not the way to do it.”
“Governor Abbott has been clear that the time for mask mandates is over; now is the time for personal responsibility. Under Executive Order GA-38, no governmental entity or school district can require or mandate the wearing of masks. There is no loophole. While a school district cannot mandate or prohibit masks, parents and guardians have the right to decide whether their child will wear a mask or not. The best defense against this virus is the COVID vaccines, and we continue to strongly encourage all eligible Texans to get vaccinated,” the statement added.
The district’s move comes as other red states have banned mask requirements in schools, including in Florida, where the state board of education voted unanimously on Tuesday to sanction two public school districts that are mandating mask wearing in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s executive order.
A volatile wildfire burning in Northern California exploded overnight, razing homes in a small mountain town as dry fuels and high winds whipped the fire out of control.
The Caldor Fire more than doubled in size by Wednesday morning to cover more than 53,772 acres, burning through Grizzly Flats and leveling at least 50 homes in the hamlet of about 1,200 people east of Sacramento, according to the Associated Press. At least two civilians have been injured in the fire so far.
The El Dorado County sheriff’s office has ordered evacuations for residents on both sides of Highway 50, from Camino on the west to Ice House Road on the east. Those towns include Cedar Grove, Pollock Pines, Fresh Pond and Pacific House.
Weather officials meanwhile extended a Red Flag warning for the region through 8 p.m. Thursday, anticipating extremely dry humidity levels and big wind gusts. The warning covers much of Northern California and reaches down into the Bay Area’s North Bay mountains and East Bay hills.
Jennifer Whitmore sprays her home with water as the Caldor fire burns near White Hall, Calif., Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope) GRIZZLY FLATS, CA. – Aug. 17: Homes in Grizzly Flats, Calif., a community in El Dorado County, are left in ashes after being destroyed by the Caldor Fire, Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Fickle winds and smoke swirling above the flames have made it “very challenging” to predict the weather, said National Weather Service meteorologist Bill Rasch. Although southwesterly winds fanned the flames toward populated communities Tuesday, they switched directions and were largely expected to originate from the east Wednesday, he said.
Gusts were forecast to reach about 25 mph over the Caldor Fire itself, NWS said, but could top 50 mph along Northern California’s highest ridges and hilltops.
“It was making a run towards Highway 50, but the winds … changed the threat overnight and today,” Rasch said. “The winds are not as bad as they were yesterday — but we can’t really put a severity level on the Red Flag warning.”
The fire broke out Saturday and has expanded so ferociously that fire officials have struggled to estimate its size — let alone damage to homes and businesses — in real time. Cal Fire said “significant resources” had been ordered to join the firefight; just 242 people were assigned to the blaze as of Wednesday morning.
The damage to Grizzly Flats was the second blow to a small Northern California town in the past two weeks. In Plumas County, the state’s biggest wildfire of the year — the 635,000-acre Dixie Fire — destroyed most of the Gold Rush-era town of Greenville in just a few hours.
Across the Northern Hemisphere, wildfires are sweeping areas left unusually dry this summer by drought and extreme heat blamed on climate change. A wildfire burning near the French Riviera killed one person this week and injured at least 27. A blaze outside Athens is forcing villages to evacuate.
In California, utility giant PG&E Corp. cut power to about 51,000 homes and businesses in fire-prone areas to prevent electrical lines from sparking more blazes if they toppled from high winds. The company said it would black out customers in parts of 18 counties.
On Monday, California broke a milestone of 1 million acres burned, the earliest it has ever reached that mark. Crews are battling 13 large blazes, including the Dixie and Caldor fires.
OMO RANCH, CA – On a ridge above Omo Ranch in El Dorado County, the Caldor Fire is battled by bullldozer and aerial retardant, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Dixie is the second-largest in California’s history. It’s been burning for more than a month, growing to 635,728 acres Wednesday morning and destroying more than 1,200 structures, according to Cal Fire.
Across the Golden State, 6,540 fires this year have torched at least 1,800 structures. No deaths were reported through Tuesday.
As drastic as California’s fire season has been so far, it is still weeks away from its peak, when the Santa Ana and Diablo winds start to blow from the east. As summer weather patterns give way to fall, large high-pressure systems typically build over the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah, sending winds rushing from the east to low-pressure systems that often develop off the Pacific coast.
These winds dry out and heat up as they cross California’s mountain ranges, allowing them to fan any sparks they catch into major fires. Four of the state’s five most destructive fires occurred in October and November.
The danger often doesn’t pass until winter rain and snow squelch the flames. But the possibility of another La Nina event this fall and winter, the second in as many years, could bring California another dry winter.
Temperatures will range from the 70s to 90s through the rest of the week in the Sacramento area, Rasch said. Air quality alerts due to smoke pollution have spread across the West, including through California’s Central Valley and covering almost all of Idaho and Wyoming.
Although winds were expected to quiet down slightly through the end of the week, meteorologists are closely watching another weather pattern that could arrive over the weekend.
“Right now it doesn’t look nearly as bad as this,” Rasch said, meaning Tuesday’s dramatic flare-up, “but it looks like wind might pick up again Saturday.”
Bloomberg reporters Joe Ryan and Brian K. Sullivan contributed to this story.
RIVERTON, CA. – Aug. 17: The Caldor Fire burns on a ridge south of Riverton, Calif., Tuesday evening, Aug. 17, 2021., in a view from Ice House Road off of Highway 50. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) GRIZZLY FLATS, CA. – Aug. 17: A Volkswagen Bug sits in a forest blackened by the Caldor Fire in the El Dorado County community of Grizzly Flats, Calif., Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) GRIZZLY FLATS, CA. – Aug. 17: Homes in Grizzly Flats, Calif., a community in El Dorado County, are left in ashes after being destroyed by the Caldor Fire, Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) GRIZZLY FLATS, CA. – Aug. 17: Homes in the El Dorado County community of Grizzly Flats, Calif., are left in ashes by the Caldor Fire, Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
The small airport of Les Cayes, the main source of supplies for the earthquake zone, bustled on Tuesday with aid groups and foreign emergency workers. There was no sign of any government officials or airplanes.
Asked where to find state officials in the area, a prominent local political party boss and former senator, Hervé Fourcand — who had used his own seven-seat prop plane to fly grievously injured quake victims to Port-au-Prince on Sunday — briskly walked away from a New York Times reporter in silence.
The government said this week that it would centralize all aid delivery in Port-au-Prince through a new organization, The National Center for Emergency Operations, to avoid the mistakes made in the 2010 quake.
By Wednesday, however, it was unclear if the new agency was receiving or coordinating any supplies. The prime minister’s office directed questions about the relief effort to the interior minister, who wasn’t reachable for comment.
Some aid groups and donor governments say they have just started delivering the aid themselves, after having advised the authorities of their plans.
A health care worker displays a COVID-19 vaccination record card at a health center in Los Angeles earlier this month.
Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
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A health care worker displays a COVID-19 vaccination record card at a health center in Los Angeles earlier this month.
Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
A Chicago pharmacist has been charged with stealing official COVID-19 vaccination cards and selling them on eBay for roughly $10 each, federal prosecutors say.
Tangtang Zhao, 34, allegedly sold 125 authentic Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccination cards to 11 buyers in March and April.
“We take seriously, and will vigorously investigate, any criminal offense that contributes to the distrust around vaccines and vaccination status,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement.
“The Department of Justice and its law enforcement partners are committed to protecting the American people from these offenses during this national emergency,” he added.
A black market for blank vaccine cards has cropped up online in recent months, but federal officials say it is illegal to use one if you are unvaccinated. People who receive the COVID-19 vaccine, which is free, are issued a vaccine card.
According to court documents, Zhao worked as a licensed pharmacist for a pharmacy identified only as Company 1, which has locations across the country. Company 1 administered COVID-19 vaccines and issued vaccine cards to the recipients.
“Knowingly selling COVID vaccination cards to unvaccinated individuals puts millions of Americans at risk of serious injury or death,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Emmerson Buie Jr. from the Chicago field office.
Each count of theft of government property carries a potential maximum prison sentence of 10 years.
The Education secretary signaled that he could use the department’s Office for Civil Rights to prevent states from banning mask wearing in schools. | Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
President Joe Biden is directing the Education Department to “use all available tools” to combat Republican governors whose state policies prohibit Covid-19 mitigation strategies like masking in the classroom.
Biden, in a memo sent Wednesday to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, said the Education Department must take action to ensure governors and other officials are allowing a safe return to in-person learning and “not standing in the way of local leaders making such preparations.”
“Our priority must be the safety of students, families, educators, and staff in our school communities,” Biden wrote. “Nothing should interfere with this goal.”
Kirby also acknowledged the Pentagon was abreast of the reports on airport access, which has been complicated by a Taliban-imposed curfew in Kabul and checkpoints erected across the capital city, as well as confusing documentation requirements.
“This is one of the reasons why communication with the Taliban is so important. And what I can tell you is we’re not unaware that there has been issues out in town and harassment of individuals,” Kirby said. But he did not describe any specific plans by the U.S. military to help potential evacuees reach the airport safely.
Kirby said the Pentagon was aware that shots were fired overnight by U.S. troops on the perimeter of the airport near the facility’s gates — with at least some of the rounds intended as nonlethal “crowd control measures” — but that there had been no hostile engagements between U.S. troops and the Taliban at the airport thus far.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that U.S. officials believed the safe passage agreement with the Taliban could last until Aug. 31, President Joe Biden’s self-imposed deadline for the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. But Sullivan did not say whether evacuations would continue beyond the end of the month.
Kirby, too, declined to answer whether the evacuation mission would blow past the Aug. 31 end date, which a bipartisan group of 40 House lawmakers urged Biden to disregard Tuesday as the administration seeks to ramp up U.S. military flights out of Afghanistan.
“The mandate by the president is to complete this mission by the 31st of August, and that’s the target we’re shooting for,” Kirby said. “I won’t speculate about any possible different decisions going forward. That would have to be a decision made by the commander in chief.”
Kirby was similarly vague when it came to discussions with the Taliban about possibly lifting the curfew in Kabul. He said there is “constant communication with Taliban commanders outside the [air]field with respect to helping us with the flow,” and that U.S. officials “are talking to them about the effect that their curfew — and the limits that they’re putting on flow outside the airport — is having on our ability [to] accomplish the mission.”
As for the U.S. military potentially expanding its perimeter around the airport to allow easier access for potential evacuees, Kirby said he was “just not going to talk about potential future operations one way or the other.” And when asked whether the United States would work to ensure the safety of the hundreds of Afghan soldiers assisting American forces in securing the airport, Kirby said: “I don’t know. I couldn’t know that.”
The remarks from the Pentagon spokesperson came after 24 hours that saw the U.S. troop presence at the Hamid Karzai International Airport swell to roughly 4,500, with “a few hundred more” possibly arriving Wednesday, Kirby said. Biden has deployed up to 7,000 U.S. troops to Kabul in total.
During that same 24-hour period, 18 American C-17 transport planes departed from the airport carrying 2,000 passengers. Of that total, 325 were American citizens and the remainder consisted of Afghans and some NATO personnel. The number of incoming and outgoing U.S. aircraft is expected to remain relatively the same over the next 24 hours, Kirby said.
On Tuesday, Army Maj. Gen. William Taylor previewed that “the speed of evacuation will pick up,” with the U.S. military anticipating roughly “one aircraft per hour in and out” of the airport in Kabul. He predicted the Pentagon’s “best effort could look like 5,000 to 9,000 passengers departing per day.”
But Kirby appeared to temper those expectations Wednesday. He said the 5,000-9,000 figure “is not a goal,” but is “the max capacity that we think we’ll be able to reach when we’re at full throttle.” He later added: “It’s a capacity goal. We want to be able to have the capacity to flow that many out per day. … We believe that the capacity goals will get higher.”
Kirby also detailed an apparently new aspect of the U.S. military presence in Kabul, announcing that the Pentagon would be deploying “evacuation control teams” from the U.S. Marine Corps to help review the paperwork of Americans and Afghan allies seeking evacuation.
The Biden administration is moving to prevent the Taliban from accessing about $450 million in funds due to arrive next month from the International Monetary Fund.
The Treasury Department is taking steps to prevent the Taliban from accessing the IMF funds, a Treasury official told CNN on Wednesday.
They note this would “provide nearly half a billion dollars in unconditional liquidity to a regime with a history of supporting terrorist actions against the United States and her allies.”
The GOP lawmakers, which include Rep. French Hill of Arkansas, requested an update from Yellen by 5 pm ET on Thursday.
The Treasury secretary cannot unilaterally act here. It’s a matter for the broader membership of the IMF, which includes 190 member countries, including Russia, China and Iran.
The controversy surrounds a previously-scheduled allocation of the IMF’s own currency, known as Special Drawing Rights. SDRs can be exchanged for US dollars, euros, yen, Chinese yuan and sterling. The value of an SDR is set each day, based on a basket of currencies.
If no action is taken, SDRs valued at approximately $450 million are due to be allocated to Afghanistan as early as Monday, hitting bank accounts Tuesday or Wednesday.
Even the apparent head of Afghanistan’s central bank isn’t sure what will happen next.
“Not sure if that allocation will now proceed,” Adjmal Ahmady, the acting governor of the Central Bank of Afghanistan, said on Twitter on Wednesday. Ahmady said he fled the country on Sunday as the government collapsed.
Typically, when there is a dispute over who is in power in a nation set to receive SDRs, the IMF polls its members on how to proceed. In 2019, the IMF cut off Venezuela from $400 million in cash held at the funds after a majority of its members refused to recognize Nicolas Maduro’s government.
Since the collapse of the Afghan government, the United States, United Kingdom and Canada have been quick to say they are not recognizing the Taliban as the nation’s legitimate government. But it’s not clear where other key nations, including Russia and China, will stand on this.
Both the IMF and Treasury Department declined to comment.
The United States has already taken steps to prevent an even larger sum of cash from flowing to the Taliban. Officials told CNN earlier this week that the Treasury Department has essentially blocked assets held by the Afghan Central Bank from the reach of the Taliban.
Daniel Knowles, a foreign correspondent for the Economist magazine, noted on Twitter that such WhatsApp setups were common even before the Taliban took power. “I am slightly annoyed I didn’t write about these WhatsApp helplines ages ago,” he said after news of the hotline shutdown was reported. “But when I heard about them, they weren’t ‘helplines’. It was more just, your local Taliban were reachable by WhatsApp, and if you called, they would resolve disputes. It’s just how they govern.”
Aug 18 (Reuters) – Afghanistan may be governed by a ruling council now that the Taliban has taken over, while the Islamist militant movement’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, would likely remain in overall charge, a senior member of the group told Reuters.
The Taliban would also reach out to former pilots and soldiers from the Afghan armed forces to join its ranks, Waheedullah Hashimi, who has access to the group’s decision-making, added in an interview.
How successful that recruitment is remains to be seen. Thousands of soldiers have been killed by Taliban insurgents over the last 20 years, and recently the group targeted U.S.-trained Afghan pilots because of their pivotal role.
The power structure that Hashimi outlined would bear similarities to how Afghanistan was run the last time the Taliban were in power from 1996 to 2001. Then, supreme leader Mullah Omar remained in the shadows and left the day-to-day running of the country to a council.
Akhundzada would likely play a role above the head of the council, who would be akin to the country’s president, Hashimi added.
“Maybe his (Akhundzada’s) deputy will play the role of ‘president’,” Hashimi said, speaking in English.
The Taliban’s supreme leader has three deputies: Mawlavi Yaqoob, son of Mullah Omar, Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the powerful militant Haqqani network, and Abdul Ghani Baradar, who heads the Taliban’s political office in Doha and is one of the founding members of the group.
Many issues regarding how the Taliban would run Afghanistan have yet to be finalised, Hashimi explained, but Afghanistan would not be a democracy.
“There will be no democratic system at all because it does not have any base in our country,” he said. “We will not discuss what type of political system should we apply in Afghanistan because it is clear. It is sharia law and that is it.”
Hashimi said he would be joining a meeting of the Taliban leadership that would discuss issues of governance later this week.
On recruiting soldiers and pilots who fought for the ousted Afghan government, Hashimi said the Taliban planned to set up a new national force that would include its own members as well as government soldiers willing to join.
“Most of them have got training in Turkey and Germany and England. So we will talk to them to get back to their positions,” he said.
“Of course we will have some changes, to have some reforms in the army, but still we need them and will call them to join us.”
Hashimi said the Taliban especially needed pilots because they had none, while they had seized helicopters and other aircraft in various Afghan airfields during their lightning conquest of the country after foreign troops withdrew.
“We have contact with many pilots,” he said. “And we have asked them to come and join, join their brothers, their government. We called many of them and are in search of (others’) numbers to call them and invite them to their jobs.”
He said the Taliban expected neighbouring countries to return aircraft that had landed in their territory – an apparent reference to the 22 military planes, 24 helicopters and hundreds of Afghan soldiers who fled to Uzbekistan over the weekend.
A school district in Texas has found a loophole in Governor Greg Abbott‘s executive order preventing mask mandates in the state, amid rising COVID cases caused by the highly contagious Delta variant.
The Paris School District, located around 100 miles from Dallas announced on Tuesday that its board of trustees had voted to alter the dress code for its students to include the use of face masks, according to a press release seen by Newsweek.
In the release, the district housing around 4,000 students wrote: “The Texas Governor does not have the authority to usurp the Board of Trustees’ exclusive power and duty to govern and oversee the management of the public schools of the district.
“Nothing in the Governor’s Executive Order 38 states he has suspended Chapter 11 of the Texas Education Code, and therefore the Board has elected to amend its dress code consistent with its statutory authority.”
The district explained in a separate release on its website that “students will be given mask breaks throughout the day and will not be required to wear masks when they are able to social distance,” and confirmed that the “Board of Education will revisit the mask mandate at the September 9, 2021 regularly scheduled board meeting.”
Late July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its face mask recommendation to advise teachers, students and other staff members to wear face masks in schools, a turnaround from its advice earlier in the month.
The CDC argued that face masks will need to be worn by those in schools as the Delta variant spreads because children under the age of 12 aren’t yet eligible to get a vaccine.
Various school districts across the state have argued against Abbott’s ban, citing statistics that show children are increasingly impacted by the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID.
Texas has been one of several states badly affected by the spread of the Delta variant in recent weeks, and recorded 25,497 new COVID cases on Tuesday, with a seven-day average of 15,577. The state also saw 106 deaths on Tuesday, with a seven-day average of 99.
Before his positive test, Abbott defended the executive order banning mask mandates in the state in a tweet on Sunday, explaining that “the ban doesn’t prohibit using masks. Anyone who wants to wear a mask can do so, including in schools.”
Newsweek has contacted the Paris School District and Abbott’s office for comment.
Pupils, wearing face masks, learn during a summer project at the primary school ‘Sonnenschule’ in Beckum, western Germany, on July 6, 2021. A school district in Texas has found a loophole in Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order preventing mask mandates in the state, amid rising COVID cases due to the highly contagious Delta variant. Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images
Republicans hoping to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in the recall election focused their criticism on the Democratic governor and a leading replacement candidate who both declined to join them at a Tuesday debate, which included a moment of spectacle in which one hopeful was served with a subpoena on stage.
Just three of the 46 candidates running to replace Newsom in the Sept. 14 election participated in Tuesday’s debate at Sacramento’s Guild Theater, though seven were invited — former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, Rancho Santa Fe businessman John Cox and Assemblyman Kevin Kiley of Rocklin.
Larry Elder, the conservative radio talk show host who has topped recent polling, did not attend, nor did former Olympian and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner. A campaign spokesperson said she would be assessing wildfire damage in Plumas County this week instead since Newsom declined to participate in the debate. Former U.S. Rep. Doug Ose was slated to attend, but announced Tuesday he would drop out of the race after suffering a heart attack. Ose said he is expected to make a full recovery.
As in a previous debate among Republicans this month, the candidates used the platform to rail against Newsom and the Democratic policies they say hurt Californians. But the event also marked the first time front-runner Elder was targeted by the candidates from the debate stage.
Faulconer blasted Elder for past derogatory remarks on women, including those in a 2000 column for Capitalism Magazine in which Elder said Democrats had an advantage over Republicans because they were supported by women, and “women know less than men about political issues, economics and current events.” The former San Diego mayor called the comments “bullshit,” saying later that he used such strong language as the son of a mother who worked as a secretary while going to night school, the husband of a career woman and “a girl dad.”
“I feel strongly about it and I’m going to call it out,” he said, calling Elder’s remarks “indefensible.”
Elder’s previous remarks on eliminating the minimum wage also drew scrutiny during the debate. During an interview with McClatchy’s California-based editorial boards this month, Elder said “the ideal minimum wage is $0.”
Kiley said he doesn’t believe California should eliminate the minimum wage, but that the scale is currently “way off” and “probably needs to vary a bit more by region.” Kiley added that the state unemployment system has been so poorly managed that it’s become “economically irrational to go back to your jobs so small businesses continue to suffer.”
Faulconer said Elder’s position was “absolutely indefensible” and that he supported a minimum wage, while Cox said he believes there should be a federal minimum wage, but not a state minimum.
“Frankly, the minimum wage right now isn’t an issue because people are getting paid beaucoup bucks for doing things that used to get minimum wage because of a shortage of labor,” Cox said. “Certainly, the federal government can set a minimum wage so there isn’t sweatshops and things like that. That’s fine.”
The leading Republican candidate to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in the recall election has blocked access for one of the state’s biggest papers.
Hosted by the Sacramento Press Club, the Sacramento Bee and CapRadio, the debate came just as the first ballots were arriving in voters’ mailboxes across California. A recent poll by the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and cosponsored by The Times showed that the race is tight among likely voters, with 47% supporting the recall, compared with 50% who are opposed.
The result will ultimately come down to turnout, and whether conservative candidates can excite their base enough to remove the governor in a state where Democrats far outnumber Republicans in voter registration.
Newsom spent the evening in Santa Cruz County touring Big Basin Redwoods State Park a year after it was burned in the CZU Lightning Complex fire. The governor has largely ignored the contenders fighting for his position, advising voters to vote “no” on the recall and leave blank the second question to select his replacement should he be ousted.
Only recently did Newsom also begin taking jabs at Elder for his support of Trump and positions on climate change, abortion, the minimum wage and COVID-19 response.
The issue of mask mandates has been a key talking point of Republican candidates during the campaign, with each gubernatorial hopeful saying they would allow local school districts to determine whether to require masks. Students and teachers have returned to classrooms across the state with a statewide mandate that they wear masks indoors.
“I believe that’s a decision absolutely that should be made at the local level,” Faulconer said at the debate. “You’re sensing a theme I think tonight, which is we cannot have a top-down policy, because the facts on the ground are very different in virtually all parts of the state.”
Kiley, a former teacher in Los Angeles, noted that California is in the minority when it comes to states requiring kids to wear masks in schools. Added Cox: “The mask mandate is not the way to go.”
Earlier in the night, a spectacle interrupted the debate at the onset when a private investigator yelled that he was serving a subpoena to Cox and threw plastic wrapped court documents onstage before being asked to leave.
In February, San Diego Superior Court Judge Daniel F. Link ruled that the Cox campaign failed to pay Virginia-based GOP firm Sandler-Innocenzi nearly $55,000 for political ads and about $43,000 in attorney’s costs, interest and other fees from Cox’s unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in 2018.
Founding partner Jim Innocenzi told The Times in May that he paid the California-based cast and crew for the Cox campaign ads out of his own pocket and was never reimbursed though Cox, a multimillionaire, refunded himself more than $66,000.
Cox continued through his opening remarks, despite the interruption. After the debate, Cox called the incident “a garbage thing,” despite a judge ruling he should pay.
“It’s one creditor who didn’t get paid from the 2018 campaign because he didn’t deserve to be,” Cox said.
The three Republican gubernatorial hopefuls are scheduled to debate again at 7 p.m. Thursday in San Francisco in an event that will be televised on KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles.
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
To understand President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan against the advice of the US military establishment, you need to go back to a debate that played out more than a decade ago, during the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
In 2009, the new Obama administration debated whether to “surge” troop levels in Afghanistan after nearly eight years of war had failed to quell the insurgency from the overthrown Taliban forces. Top generals asked early that year for 17,000 more US troops and then, having gotten those, asked for an additional 40,000 to try to weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan government.
Then-Vice President Biden was consistently one of the biggest skeptics of the military’s recommendations. Throughout months of debate, he repeatedly raised the inconvenient point that the generals’ preferred strategy seemed extremely unlikely to lead to actual victory. “We have not thought through our strategic goals!” he shouted during the Obama administration’s first meeting on the war in Afghanistan.
Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton attend an Afghanistan policy review in the White House Situation Room on October 9, 2009.Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
All this was documented at the time in Bob Woodward’s deeply reported 2010 book Obama’s Wars. Biden did not actually support withdrawal at the time — he pushed for a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, accompanied by a smaller troop surge than the military wanted.
But his dark view of the long-term picture was clearly vindicated in the decade since. Now that Biden is president and has actually withdrawn from the war — leading to a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan — it’s worth revisiting that past debate, as outlined in Woodward’s book, to understand why his mind was so firmly made up.
What Biden argued in 2009
The US initially invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because its Taliban regime had sheltered Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group al-Qaeda; the military deposed the Taliban and sent bin Laden fleeing from the country by the end of that year.
After that, Americans became distracted by a separate war of choice in Iraq, while a Taliban insurgency brewed in Afghanistan and terrorist groups relocated to Pakistan and other countries.
So a grueling, months-long debate unfolded during Obama’s first year in office over what, exactly, the US’s goals should then be in Afghanistan, and whether many more troops were needed to accomplish them. Woodward chronicles this debate in Obama’s Wars in exhaustive detail. Military leaders wanted tens of thousands more troops to implement an expansive counterinsurgency mission in an effort to stabilize the country, as had just been done in Iraq.
Biden didn’t buy it. At every step, he tried to argue for less — for a more limited mission than the military was asking for. During meetings, this often made him the skunk at the garden party as he made a few noteworthy arguments:
Building a functioning nation-state in Afghanistan was impossible. Woodward writes that during one October meeting, Biden asked the generals, “If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?” He followed up with, “If a year from now there is no demonstrable progress in governance, what do we do?” He didn’t receive a convincing answer to either question.
Later on, he wrote memos to Obama arguing for “no full counterinsurgency” and “no nation-building.” He thought the military’s goals of strengthening Afghanistan’s military and police force were doomed. And he said the following at a meeting with National Security Council leaders, per Woodward:
Historically, [Biden] said, it’s been very difficult—impossible—for foreign interventions to prevail in Afghanistan. With tens of thousands of troops on the ground already, if we can’t do it with this number and we don’t have a reliable partner in the Afghanistan government, then it seems irresponsible to inject additional troops on top of that. We’re just prolonging failure at that point, he said.
The Afghan Taliban posed little threat to the US homeland. Biden wrote a six-page memo to Obama in which he questioned intelligence reports portraying the Taliban as a new al-Qaeda recruiting foreign fighters that posed a transnational terrorist threat. “Biden indicated that, based on the way he read the intelligence reports, the phenomenon was grossly exaggerated,” Woodward writes. “The vice president did not see evidence that the Pashtun Taliban projected a global jihadist ideology, let alone designs on the American homeland.”
At a meeting discussing the US strategy in Afghanistan, Biden asked, “Is there any evidence the Afghan Taliban advocates attacks outside of Afghanistan and on the U.S., or if it took over more of Afghanistan it would have more of an outward focus?” An intelligence official responded that there was no evidence.
The fall of Afghanistan’s government wouldn’t be so bad. Woodward describes a phone conversation between the president and vice president near the end of the review, during which Biden said, “it would not be that bad if the Karzai government fell.” The book does not elaborate on what exactly Biden meant by this, but Obama disagreed, arguing that “the downside was too great.”
But Biden didn’t argue for full withdrawal back then
Biden diagnosed the problems well, and he was likely the high-level official most skeptical of the Afghanistan war in the Obama administration. But though his logic arguably pointed toward a withdrawal of troops in the near future, he didn’t argue for that — it simply seemed too unpalatable. Officials were not ready to stomach the Taliban retaking the country.
Instead, Biden proposed a smaller surge of 20,000 troops rather than 40,000, with a mission of “counterterrorism” as opposed to counterinsurgency. (Think targeting terrorists rather than nation-building.) The military fired back that that would be insufficient. Obama ended up agreeing to send 30,000 troops and satisfy most of the military’s demands, in part because he did not want to “break with” then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Woodward writes.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden visits members of the Afghan National Army at a training center in Kabul on January 11, 2011.Shah Marai/AFP via Getty Images
After a few years with the heavily expanded troop presence that, as Biden predicted, did not result in Afghanistan becoming a functioning government or in security forces capable of defeating the Taliban, Obama began a troop drawdown in his second term. Since then, US policy has essentially been to kick the can down the road.
In 2015, then-Vox staffer Max Fisher wrote, “The war is already lost, and has been for years,” adding that the only remaining mission was “to temporarily stave off Afghanistan’s inevitable collapse, a few months at a time.”
Former President Donald Trump continued that can-kicking until 2020, when he reached a deal with the Taliban to end the war. It then fell on Biden to decide whether to stick with that arrangement. He did so — rejecting advice from his generals — and a Taliban takeover has now occurred. But his decision was no doubt grounded in the fact that he’s had these debates before.
Former Vice President Mike Pence claimed Tuesday that President Joe Biden reneged on the cease-fire deal his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, agreed with the Taliban in February 2020, setting the stage for what Pence called “a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.”
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Pence claimed that by the time the 45th president left office, “the Afghan government and the Taliban each controlled their respective territories, neither was mounting major offensives, and America had only 2,500 U.S. troops in the country—the smallest military presence since the war began in 2001.”
The key provisions of the agreement — described as “foolhardy” in the pages of The Post by Rich Lowry last month — included the US withdrawing all combat forces from Afghanistan by May of this year, the Taliban denying safe haven to terror groups, the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for 1,000 Afghan security forces held by the Taliban, and the beginning of comprehensive peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Western-backed Afghan government.
In Tuesday’s op-ed, Pence credited the agreement with the fact that the US “has not suffered a single combat casualty” in Afghanistan in 18 months.
The Taliban delegation to the peace talks enters to negotiate with the Afghan government and the Trump administration in Doha, Qatar.AFP via Getty Images
However, when Biden took office in January, Pence argued, he violated the agreement by announcing that US forces would remain in Afghanistan past the May 1 deadline “without a clear reason for doing so.”
“There was no plan to transport the billions of dollars worth of American equipment recently captured by the Taliban, or evacuate the thousands of Americans now scrambling to escape Kabul, or facilitate the regional resettlement of the thousands of Afghan refugees who will now be seeking asylum in the U.S. with little or no vetting,” Pence continued. “Rather, it seems that the president simply didn’t want to appear to be abiding by the terms of a deal negotiated by his predecessor.”
Critics of the Trump-brokered deal point out that the Taliban never complied with counterterrorism measures or held real talks with the Afghan government.AFP via Getty Images
After Biden broke the deal, in Pence’s telling, the Taliban launched their ultimate offensive because, as he put it, “[t]hey knew there was no credible threat of force under this president.”
“Weakness arouses evil—and the magnitude of evil now rising in Afghanistan speaks volumes about the weaknesses of Mr. Biden,” Pence warned.
“After 20 years, more than 2,400 American deaths, 20,000 Americans wounded, and over $2 trillion spent, the American people are ready to bring our troops home,” the former vice president concluded. “But the manner in which Mr. Biden has executed this withdrawal is a disgrace, unworthy of the courageous American service men and women whose blood still stains the soil of Afghanistan.”
Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, took issue with the op-ed, accusing Pence on Twitter of “major gaslighting.”
“The Taliban planned to begin its winning offensive for May 1, the withdrawal date enshrined in Trump’s deal,” Joscelyn argued in the first post of a Twitter thread. “The Taliban didn’t comply with the counterterrorism provisions or hold real talks with the Afghan government.”
Joscelyn went on to claim that in lieu of targeting Americans, the Taliban “turned all of its guns on the Afghans in a campaign to win the war” while Trump and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “portrayed the Taliban as America’s counterterrorism partner.”
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the situation in Afghanistan in the East Room of the White House on August 16th.The Washington Post via Getty Im
“Biden owns this chaotic withdrawal. The incompetence on display is obvious for all to see and deserves to be criticized,” Joscelyn summed up. “But Trump’s deal with the Taliban was rubbish – perhaps the weakest diplomacy in U.S. history. The Taliban was glad to watch the U.S. retreat.”
Pence has largely remained out of the political spotlight since leaving the vice presidency earlier this year. He published another op-ed in May, this one in National Review, criticizing Biden’s foreign policy in the midst of the most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas.
In June, he revealed that he has spoken “many times” with Trump since leaving office and admitted that he doesn’t know “if we’ll ever see eye to eye” on the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which erupted after Pence ignored Trump’s entreaties to throw out the result of the previous year’s presidential election.
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