quote:

Originally posted by Bassamatic:
Over the last two days I have directly seen the Secretary of Defense, State Department, and now the Press Secretary contradict Biden. That's kind of a big deal.

Do they know something we don't?

quote:

Originally posted by kiwikurt:
Unfortunately, the conversation now has to include the consideration that loss of American lives may be a price that has to be paid (and, sadly, prudent to be paid) to prevent the technical exploitation of some of the equipment that remains.

quote:

Originally posted by Oat_Action_Man:
Possible outcomes:

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Originally posted by sdy:
https://www.breitbart.com/nati...ssed-in-kabul-chaos/

Taliban forces reportedly repeatedly rejected one man’s Australian passport, insisting it was “fake” or invalid. The Associated Press suggested “many of the Taliban fighters could not read the documents” they were rejecting.

57 % of Afghans can't read or write. It is so disgusting watching these taliban ignorant thugs beating people. and knowing worse is yet to come

quote:

"Takeover of Kabul Unlikely Before 9/11"

A Chronicle of German Failures in Afghanistan

German diplomats only found out by chance that their American counterparts were evacuating from Kabul and they were blindsided by the Taliban's rapid advance in the capital. But internal documents show that Berlin ignored urgent warnings.

By Matthias Gebauer, Konstantin von Hammerstein, Ralf Neukirch, Fidelius Schmid, Christoph Schult und Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt

20.08.2021, 17.56 Uhr

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas uttered a sentence early this summer that is now coming back to haunt the German government.

Responding to biting questions from the opposition about the situation in Afghanistan, Maas said on June 9: "All these questions are based on the assumption that the Taliban will hold the scepter of power in Afghanistan in a few weeks. That is not the assumption I am working from."

It was a fatal miscalculation on the part of the minister. Ultimately it would be a matter of days and not weeks before the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan.

A team of DER SPIEGEL reporters has reconstructed the omissions and mistakes that led to the dramatic events of the past few days. We spoke with government ministers, officials and diplomats and reviewed confidential minutes of meetings, emails and situation reports. The reporting shows how wrongly many of those responsible in Berlin assessed the situations – and how long they ignored the warning signs. It provides a chronicle of political failures.

The Germans Realize the Americans Are Withdrawing

It was rather by accident that diplomats at the German Embassy in Kabul took notice of the dramatic changes taking place in the city. On Saturday, August 14, while driving through the Green Zone, the secured government and diplomatic quarter in Kabul, they noticed that the Americans had quietly withdrawn their protective forces - hundreds of them.

Even the otherwise heavily guarded entrances to the political center of the city were no longer manned by U.S. soldiers, and their armored cars had disappeared. The Americans had even ceased protecting the roads to the airport.

Only after hectic calls did the German Embassy learned that the U.S. had withdrawn all its forces to its own embassy facility, from which helicopters were already flying American diplomats to the military section of the airport. That was when it became clear that the U.S. had begun evacuating its embassy. Ashraf Ghani’s Presidential Palace, also located in the Green Zone, was also more or less unprotected.

At 1:34 p.m. that day, the German mission in Kabul sent an emailed warning to Berlin that the security situation had deteriorated further due to the withdrawal of U.S. forces. It stated that the German Embassy was dependent entirely on the protection provided by the outer ring of security surrounding the Green Zone. For that reason, it said, they were considering taking refuge in the military part of the airport as well.

The next day, Germany’s deputy ambassador, Jan Hendrik van Thiel, cabled Berlin that the U.S. had asked other Western diplomats "to relocate immediately" to the Kabul airport. Since it was no longer possible to drive there, the U.S. Embassy recommended that other diplomats go immediately to NATO headquarters in the Green Zone.

At 10:34 a.m., van Thiel wrote: "We’re getting ready to leave! DO WE HAVE THE GREEN LIGHT?"

At 10:36, he wrote: "We will only be reachable by phone for now. We are destroying the IT. Have a nice Sunday, over."

Overtaken By Events

The deputy ambassador’s parting salute sounded a bit cynical. And no wonder given that no one in the German government had foreseen the sudden takeover of Kabul by the Taliban last weekend. Be it aid workers, military personnel or diplomats, all were caught off guard by the events. Even after spending so much money, energy and expertise in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, they lacked a sense for the dynamics of developments at the decisive moment.

Not even Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, could be relied upon in the end. To be sure, the service's experts had been warning for years that Afghanistan might collapse. They pointed out that neither the military nor the political apparatus were stable.

But sources in the security community say that neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Defense or Development ministries had been receptive to those warnings. Several people familiar with the proceedings over the years told DER SPIEGEL they had experienced "at times frustrating moments." Analysts at the BND painted a bleak picture last December, eight months before the fall of Kabul, when they predicted the Taliban would come to power in Afghanistan and establish an "Emirate 2.0.” But the agency’s warning had no effect.

When it came to assessing how quickly the Taliban would conquer the country, even the staff at the BND got it wrong.

Last Friday, two days before the remaining German diplomats fled to Kabul airport, a BND representative in the Berlin crisis team stated, according to the minutes of the meeting, that the Taliban leadership had "no interest in a military capture of Kabul." The BND assumed that the Taliban didn’t want a war because the Americans and Turks were still protecting Kabul.

A Negligent Failure

Instead, the intelligence agency anticipated that Taliban fighters would maintain the ring they had drawn around the capital until the government gave up.

But the intelligence official did qualify that statement. He noted that the influence of the Taliban leadership, meaning the political arm of the Islamists in Doha, Qatar, on the fighters is "not unlimited.” In addition, other factors could also accelerate the fall of Kabul, such as an expedited withdrawal of international soldiers from the Green Zone or defections of the Afghan elite.

The end of his presentation testified to the fact that the situation was already tense for the intelligence agency. Speaking to the assembled officials, the BND representative urgently requested that as many Afghan employees of the foreign intelligence agency as possible be placed in the protection program for local hires, so they could get out of Afghanistan quickly.

As surprising as the flight of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and the abandonment of the Green Zone by the Americans may have been, documents obtained by DER SPIEGEL back up one of the central accusations against the German government. It has negligently failed in its duty to take care of the thousands of Afghans and their families who have worked for the Germans as drivers, cooks, translators and experts over the past 20 years.

The government organs in question have known for years that these Afghan workers are in mortal danger. On April 29, representatives of the German Interior Ministry, the Development Aid Ministry and the Foreign Ministry met to discuss the "local hire procedures."

Two weeks earlier, U.S. President Joe Biden announced the withdrawal of American troops by Sept. 11. Because Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had promised an earlier date, the Taliban began issuing threats. The Islamists warned that the Americans bore responsibility for anything that might happen.

Critics Stall Action

According to the minutes of the meeting in Berlin, the crucial problems were all discussed. The Defense Ministry representative said they should expect visa requests from 1,500 local hires over the next two months. But a large number of them had no Afghan passports or other forms of identification. Without them, the Foreign Ministry explained, it would not be possible for them to travel on commercial flights.

Then, though, the doubters spoke up. In the months that would come, their arguments would ensure that as many local hires as possible were prevented from departing for Germany quickly and safely.

Gerd Müller, the head of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), was one of the first to slam on the brakes. Representatives of his ministry argued that there must be "no uncertainty" in the whole process in Afghanistan, because "otherwise a chain reaction could be triggered among local hires of the BMZ that could also have an international context." In other words: The ministry feared that many local aid workers would flee the country. But the agency was determined to continue its development work in Afghanistan – work that cannot be done without local staff.

[...]

In mid-June, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) asked Chancellor Angela Merkel for help. The rules currently held that only local hires who had worked for the German armed forces in the past two years would be allowed to move to Germany if they requested. She wanted to extend that to include all local hires going back to 2013.

Kramp-Karrenbauer has accused the Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry and, in particular, the Development Ministry of resisting that eligibility expansion. Development Minister Müller had written to Kramp-Karrenbauer to reject the idea as "highly problematic." In terms of development cooperation, they were dealing with "probably more than 50,000 people," Müller wrote. A decision like that could have an "enormous pull effect" and overload the "processing structures on the ground."

Müller apparently considered it possible to continue development work despite the Taliban's advance. It was necessary to "ensure that what has been achieved in the last 20 years is safeguarded for the Afghan people."

During a cabinet meeting on June 16, Merkel took the ministers in question aside and urged them to reach an agreement quickly. Pressure was also coming from elsewhere.

At a conference of the federal interior minister and his counterparts at the state level from June 16 to 18, some state interior ministers, in particular Boris Pistorius of the center-left SPD from Lower-Saxony, called on federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to act more decisively. The politician, a member of the center-right Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to the CDU, has a different recollection of the meeting. He denies that he opposed more generous rules for local hires being able to come to Germany. According to his ministry, it was the Foreign Ministry and the BMZ that had rejected flying local hires out earlier - in order to prevent destabilizing the Afghan government and sending the wrong message to the Taliban. But there was one thing that Seehofer’s people were still reciting like a mantra at that point: The local hires should pay for their own flights to Germany.

[...]

On August 6, the first provincial capital fell to the Taliban, and two days later they captured Kunduz in the north, where Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr, had maintained a base until 2013.

In a briefing by the intelligence services at Merkel’s Chancellery, the BND would not provide a prediction on the morning of August 10 as to when the fall of Kabul could be anticipated. But intelligence officials expected the city would be able to hold out for another three months.

Only a few hours later at the German Embassy in Kabul, news from the U.S. was causing great concern. The Washington Post had reported that the U.S. intelligence agencies had radically revised their assessment of the Taliban’s advance. According to the latest estimates, the capital of Kabul could fall in 30 to 90 days – and with it the government of President Ghani.

Deputy Ambassador van Thiel sat down at his office computer in Kabul. He wrote to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin that the new assessment was causing panic within the government in Kabul. Not only President Ghani, but also the security forces interpreted the assessment as the latest evidence that the U.S. was finally giving up on Afghanistan and would not intervene even if the Taliban invaded the capital.

Van Thiel urged that the staff of the German Embassy be immediately reduced to the absolute minimum. In addition, he wrote, efforts to evacuate Afghan local hires needed to be maximized. Van Thiel’s mail was very clear. The diplomat warned of a rapid deterioration of the security situation.

The next day, August 11, Horst Seehofer issued a temporary ban on deportations to Afghanistan.

On August 13, four more provincial capitals fell to the Taliban, including Kandahar and Herat.

At this point, Seehofer was pushing for swift action: "The situation in Afghanistan is becoming increasingly threatening. Whether charter flights or visa issuance after arrival in Germany: I support all measures that enable the rapid departure of our local hires and their families," he announced at a press release on the same day.

The crisis team at the Foreign Ministry then met to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. Deputy Ambassador van Thiel addressed the group from Kabul. He said the first countries, including Japan and Canada, had already evacuated their embassies near the German mission at the edge of the Green Zone. He said the Americans also planned to reduce their staff to a minimum by the end of the month, but would still be able to guarantee the security of the entire diplomatic quarter, with the soldiers stationed with them in a crisis.

A representative of the BND spoke after van Thiel. He said the "takeover of Kabul" by the Taliban was "rather unlikely before 9/11." He said officials there couldn’t imagine that the U.S. would allow the Taliban flag to fly over the Presidential Palace on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Only 48 hours later, the Taliban had seized control of the Afghan capital on Sunday, August 15.

[...]