Kabul Airport Bomber Was ISIS-K, Released by the Taliban

Who negotiated with the Taliban for the safety of US soldiers as we left Afghanistan?

When President Trump took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Eighteen months later, after introducing more than 3,000 additional troops just to maintain the stalemate, President Trump ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting with our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government at the negotiating table. In September 2019, President Trump emboldened the Taliban by publicly considering inviting them to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. In February 2020, the United States and the Taliban reached a deal, known as the Doha Agreement, under which the United States agreed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. In return, the Taliban agreed to participate in a peace process and refrain from attacking U.S. troops and threatening Afghanistan's major cities - but only as long as the United States remained committed to withdraw by the agreement's deadline. As part of the deal, President Trump also pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, including senior war commanders, without securing the release of the only American hostage known to be held by the Taliban.

Over his last 11 months in office, President Trump ordered a series of drawdowns of U.S. troops. By June 2020, President Trump reduced U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 8,600. In September 2020, he directed a further draw down to 4,500. A month later, President Trump tweeted, to the surprise of military advisors, that the remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan should be "home by Christmas!" On September 28, 2021, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley testified that, on November 11, he had received an unclassified signed order directing the U.S. military to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan no later than January 15, 2021. One week later, that order was rescinded and replaced with one to draw down to 2,500 troops by the same date.

During the transition from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration, the outgoing Administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies. Indeed, there were no such plans in place when President Biden came into office, even with the agreed upon full withdrawal just over three months away.

www.whitehouse.gov

#Biden'sFault With Trump, it always comes back to the Big Lie. Because of the Big Lie, Trump refused to extend the usual transition access and courtesies to Biden's incoming crew, leaving them to deal with whatever Trump left in their lap. On top of that, Trump left no plans for a withdrawal he tried to accomplish before he left office. And one only needs to imagine how this scenario would have played out if the protagonists were reversed. Republicans would have rushed to impeach Joe Biden after he left office had he done to Trump what Trump did to him. Of that, I have no doubt.

#2

She touched on it but she didn't go as deeply as she could. Both you and I know it would have come as a complete shock to 95% of last night's audience if Kamala had directly tied the suicide bomber to the Taliban releasing him from prison right before we pulled out. Because the army Trump depended upon to at least defend Kabul turned tail and ran, which allowed the Taliban to release an ISIS-K terrorist who promptly attacked our withdrawal.

And even deeper, the US military indeed had intel on this guy and our security forces were actively scanning the crowds looking for him. Trump simply didn't leave enough troops in Afghanistan before he left office to provide the level of security we needed, and Biden wasn't going to reintroduce troops back into Afghanistan for a withdrawal.

Trump rolled the dice and Biden was left to play the numbers as best he could with the resources and manpower available in country.

From the beginning, President Biden directed that preparations for a potential U.S. withdrawal include planning for all contingencies - including a rapid deterioration of the security situation - even though intelligence at the time deemed this situation unlikely. In March, before he had made his final decision, the President directed his top national security officials -including the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Director for National Intelligence - to begin withdrawal planning and account for a full range of contingencies. Once the President made his final decision, national security teams accelerated the planning that was already underway. Throughout the spring and summer, the National Security Council (NSC) staff hosted dozens of high-level planning meetings, formal rehearsals of the withdrawal, and tabletop exercises to explore scenarios for an evacuation as part of responsible planning for a range of contingencies, even those that were actually worse than the worst-case predictions.

Throughout this period, a Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) was treated as a distinct possibility and the national security team started planning for it. In March, departments and agencies were tasked with outlining plans for multiple scenarios, including a security environment that would require the departure of all U.S. personnel from Afghanistan. In April, departments and agencies were specifically tasked with updating the NEO planning documents. In May, NSC staff held a senior interagency meeting that included a discussion of several specific complex issues related to a NEO, including timing, evacuee destination sites, processing, vetting, and transport logistics.

President Biden took the advice of his military commanders on the tactical decisions regarding the operational retrograde of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, including the dates they closed facilities, and he regularly asked them if there was anything else they needed.

It was agreed that - because of the extreme complexity and careful planning required - a dedicated group of interagency experts would regularly convene to conduct NEO planning. In a meeting of national security leadership that same month, departments and agencies were tasked with ensuring relocation plans were ready in the event of a significant deterioration in the security situation. In line with that planning, in early summer, President Biden directed military assets to be prepositioned in the region to be able to help with an evacuation on short notice. It was this decision that later enabled the United States to respond and deploy quickly enough to facilitate the successful evacuation of over 124,000 American citizens, permanent
residents, Afghan partners, and allies.

Here's how the right wing lizard brain works.

1) US troops suffer a suicide bombing while trying to pull out of Afghanistan that cost 13 American lives and injured others out of 2500 troops then in country.

2) Since the bombing happened, it's the fault of the President who gave the orders. And it's also articulated that the said President was obviously derelict in his responsibility to protect American troops during any military action, as though the troops never knew what was coming at them.

3) Continue to drive the political narrative calling the President reckless and personally responsible for the deaths by bringing grieving families into the political process for your own benefit.

4) Refuse to even consider any actual facts and chronologies of the events leading up to said bombing, showing that the President and military did all due diligence in their planning - including worst case/emergency scenarios - but it simply wasn't enough this time.

And the most revealing fact that the Administration's and military's plans were more sound than questionable is that all the other troops out of the 2500 left in country were safely returned home!

It's tragic to lose any Americans to war. But a known bomber - freshly released from prison after the Taliban overran the allied government that simply fled from the inevitable - succeeded our best efforts to stop him in a massive hoard of desperate Afghanis trying to flee the Taliban. All of this happened as the end result of an agreement entered into by the former President effectively tying his successor's hands and limiting his options, where every single one ends in the Taliban re-engaging attacks on American troops unless we leave the country.

And then that President has the audacity and lack of character to politically place full blame upon his successor in a wholly mendacious manner, insinuating the bombing should have been stopped, without offering a shred of detail as to how that could have been done under the then-existent circumstances.

Republicans only care when it's politically convenient.

I'm surprised that no one in the media has yet focused on the fact Trump and his campaign are literal ghouls for using the tragic deaths of soldiers and others to forward their political agenda of blaming Biden for every tragedy that happened while he was President, ignoring that over 45 military were killed under Trump's presidency and he neither mentions nor grieves for any of them.

It's truly reprehensible, as the young father in Springfield publicly noted days ago when he called for right wingers to stop using his child's death in their anti-immigrant frenzied rantings.