Covered by: Fox News, Greg Norman, Michael Ruiz, Peter Aitken, Adam Shaw, Lucas Tomlinson, Lucas Manfredi and Edmund DeMarche
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Monday acknowledged the security situation in Afghanistan “unfolded at unexpected speed,” while maintaining that President Biden stands by his decision to withdraw U.S. troops.
Heavily armed Taliban fighters swept into Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul on Sunday after the government collapsed, and the Afghani president fled the country, signaling the end of the United States’ 20-year effort to rebuild the nation after the withdrawal of the U.S. military from the region.
Sullivan, during an appearance on ABC News’ “Good Morning America” Monday, defended Biden’s decision to withdraw troops.
“The president did not think it was inevitable that the Taliban were going to take control of Afghanistan,” Sullivan said. “He thought the Afghan national security forces could step up and fight because we spent 20 years, tens of billions of dollars, training them, giving them the best equipment, giving them support of U.S. forces for 20 years.”
“When push came to shove, they decided not to step up and fight for their country,” Sullivan said, adding that the president was faced with the question of whether U.S. men and women should be “put in the middle of another country’s civil war when their own army won’t fight to defend them?”
“And his answer to the question was ‘no,’ and that is why he stands by this decision,” Sullivan said.
The Taliban is pushing to restore the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the formal name of the country under the Taliban rule before the militants were ousted by U.S-led forces in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which were orchestrated by Al Qaeda while it was being sheltered by the Taliban.
“A decade ago, we got Usama bin Laden, we degraded Al Qaeda, we stopped terrorist attacks against the United States from Afghanistan for 20 years,” Sullivan said. “What the president was not prepared to do was enter a third decade of conflict flowing in thousands more troops, which was his only other choice to fight in the middle of a civil war that the Afghan army wouldn’t fight for itself.”
He added: “He would not do that to America’s men and women or their families. And that is why he made the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan this year.”
OK. So let’s get a few things straightened out right off the bat.
With the recent events in Afghanistan, the media has been using the names Taliban and Al Qaeda almost as if they are the same group.
In fact, it was Al-Qaeda that planned and carried out the 11 September attacks in the United States. The terrorist network had its roots in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. But it is composed mostly of Arabs or Islamic militants from countries other than Afghanistan.
On the flip side, the Taliban is made up of ethnic Pashtun Afghans who grew up in refugee camps or religious boarding schools in Pakistan — called madrassas — during the Soviet occupation of their homeland.
So, think of it as Taliban local, Al Qaeda global.
Amnesty International UK
Afghanistan has a tumultuous recent past. In the last three decades, the country has been occupied by communist Soviet troops and US-led international forces, and in the years in between has been ruled by militant groups and the infamous oppressive Islamic Taliban.
Now folks, I have to tell you who the biggest losers in all this turmoil will be. The Afghan women.
That is what I find fascinating about Mr. Sullivan and the Biden Administrations position on all this.
How many times have we heard Biden, Pelosi, and people like AOC harp on the issue of women’s rights? Yet here they are putting millions of women in harms way.
Throughout the changing political landscape of Afghanistan in the last fifty years, women’s rights have been exploited by different groups for political gain, sometimes being improved but often being abused.
‘Afghan women were the ones who have lost the most from the war.’
Horia Mosadiq (pronounced ho ree a, like Gloria) was a young girl when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Horia states, Think of women in Afghanistan now, and you’ll probably recall pictures in the media of women in full-body burqas, perhaps the famous National Geographic photograph of ‘the Afghan girl’, or prominent figures murdered for visibly defending women’s rights. But it hasn’t always been this way.
She goes on to say, ‘As a girl, I remember my mother wearing miniskirts and taking us to the cinema. My aunt went to the university in Kabul.’
Until the conflict of the 1970s, the 20th Century had seen relatively steady progression for women’s rights in the country.
Afghan women were first eligible to vote in 1919 – only a year after women in the UK were given voting rights, and a year before the women in the United States were allowed to vote.
In the 1950s gendered separation was abolished; in the 1960s a new constitution brought equality to many areas of life, including political participation.
But during coups and Soviet occupation in the 1970s, through civil conflict between Mujahideen groups and government forces in the ’80s and ’90s, and then under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan had their rights increasingly rolled back.
The Taliban are now notorious for their human rights abuses. The group emerged in 1994 after years of conflict.
Many of their members were former Mujahideen fighters who had been trained in Pakistan during Afghanistan’s civil war in the ’80s and ’90s.
They came together with the aim of making Afghanistan an Islamic state. The Taliban ruled in Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001.
Under the Taliban, women and girls were discriminated against in many ways, for the ‘crime’ of being born a girl.
The Taliban enforced their version of Islamic Sharia law. Women and girls were:
- Banned from going to school or studying
- Banned from working
- Banned from leaving the house without a male chaperone
- Banned from showing their skin in public
- Banned from accessing healthcare delivered by men (with women forbidden from working, healthcare was virtually inaccessible)
- Banned from being involved in politics or speaking publicly.
There were many other ways their rights were denied to them. Women were essentially invisible in public life and imprisoned in their homes.
In Kabul, residents were ordered to cover their ground and first-floor windows so women inside could not be seen from the street.
If a woman left the house, it was in a full body veil (burqa), accompanied by a male relative: she had no independence.
If she disobeyed these discriminatory laws, punishments were harsh. A woman could be flogged for showing an inch or two of skin under her full-body burqa, beaten for attempting to study, stoned to death if she was found guilty of adultery.
Rape and violence against women and girls was commonplace.
Afghan women were brutalized in the law and in nearly every aspect of their daily life. In 1996, a woman in Kabul had the end of her thumb cut off for wearing nail polish.
According to a fifteen year-old girl in Kabul, “In 1995, they shot my father right in front of me. It was nine o’clock at night. They came to our house and told him they had orders to kill him because he allowed me to go to school.
The Mujahideen had already stopped me from going to school, but that was not enough. I cannot describe what they did to me after killing my father…”
The US led an international military campaign intervening in Afghanistan immediately following the attacks on September 11 2001.
World leaders, including those from the UK and USA, regularly cited the need to improve Afghan women’s rights as part of the justification for the intervention.
The Taliban were ousted from power by the end of 2001.
In the years following international intervention, many schools opened their doors to girls and women went back to work. There was progress towards equality: a new constitution in 2003 enshrined women’s rights in it, and in 2009 Afghanistan adopted the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law.
But the Taliban and other highly conservative insurgent groups still controlled some parts of Afghanistan, and violence and discrimination against women and girls continued – all over Afghanistan.
In 2011 it was named ‘the most dangerous country’ to be a woman.
So now let’s review a little history about Afghanistan.
CIA World Factbook
Ahmad Shah DURRANI unified the Pashtun tribes and founded Afghanistan in 1747.
The country served as a buffer between the British and Russian Empires until it won independence from national British control in 1919
A brief experiment in democracy ended in a 1973 coup and a 1978 Communist counter-coup.
The Soviet Union invaded in 1979 to support the tottering Afghan Communist regime, touching off a long and destructive war.
The USSR withdrew in 1989 under relentless pressure by internationally supported anti-Communist mujahedin rebels.
(Yes folks, we supported the Taliban while they were fighting the Soviet Union)
A series of subsequent civil wars saw Kabul finally fall in 1996 to the Taliban, a hardline Pakistani-sponsored movement that emerged in 1994 to end the country’s civil war and anarchy.
Sept. 2001 After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush gave the Taliban an ultimatum to hand over Osama bin Laden.
The Taliban refused and in October the U.S. led a campaign that drove the Taliban out of major Afghan cities by the end of the year.
The UN-sponsored Bonn Conference in 2001 established a process for political reconstruction that included the adoption of a new constitution, a presidential election in 2004, and National Assembly elections in 2005.
In 2002, Hamid Karzai became interim president of Afghanistan. The Taliban continued to wage guerrilla warfare near the border with Pakistan.
In December 2004, Hamid KARZAI became the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan and the National Assembly was inaugurated the following December.
In Feb. 2009 President Obama ordered 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
In Aug. 2009 President Karzai won re-election in a vote marred by fraud.
In Dec. 2009 President Obama issued orders to send 30,000 troops in 2010, bringing the total American force to about 100,000.
Now a couple of other interesting things to think about.
Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium.
The Taliban and other antigovernment groups participate in and profit from the opiate trade, which is a key source of revenue for the Taliban inside Afghanistan.
Widespread corruption and instability impede counterdrug efforts and most of the heroin consumed in Europe and asia is derived from Afghan opium. So, the Taliban has plenty of money to carry on their conflict.
Also, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is congratulating the Taliban for their recent takeover of Afghanistan.
In a statement, the militants say they welcome “the defeat of the American occupation on all Afghan land” and praised the Taliban’s “courageous leadership on this victory, which was the culmination of its long struggle over the past 20 years,” according to the AP.
Finally, in June, the Pentagon’s top leaders said an extremist group like Al Qaeda may be able to regenerate in Afghanistan and pose a threat to the U.S. homeland within two years of the American military’s withdrawal from the country.
Two decades after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban harbored Al Qaeda leaders, experts say the Taliban and Al Qaeda remain aligned, and other violent groups could also find safe haven under the new regime.
Based on the evolving situation, officials now believe terror groups like Al Qaeda may be able to grow much faster than expected.
So there you have it folks. I, just like you, have a lot of questions?
Did we do the right thing by pulling out of Afghanistan?
Did we just make a bad situation much worse?
What about the plight of the Afghan women and men who supported us during the conflict? Do we just turn our backs on them?
Have we now established a safe haven for future terrorist groups with plans to attack the United states?