Senior Pentagon officials said Wednesday the collapse of the Afghan government and its security forces in August could be traced to the 2020 US agreement with the Taliban signed in Doha that promised a complete troop withdrawal. Joe Biden has faced the biggest crisis of his presidency over the withdrawal in Afghanistan, drawing criticism from Republican US lawmakers.

This week, the US House and Senate started hearings of a congressional review on the troop pull-out in Afghanistan and the war itself. During its second day, General Frank McKenzie, the head of Central Command, told the House Armed Services Committee that once the US troop presence was pushed below 2,500, as part of President Joe Biden’s decision in April to complete a total withdrawal by September, the unravelling of the Washington-backed Afghan government accelerated.

“The signing of the Doha agreement had a really pernicious effect on the government of Afghanistan and on its military – psychological more than anything else, but we set a date-certain for when we were going to leave and when they could expect all assistance to end,” McKenzie said.

On February 29, 2020, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in which the US promised to fully withdraw its troops by May 2021, with the Taliban committing to several conditions, including stopping attacks on American and coalition forces. The stated objective was to promote peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Kabul, but that diplomatic effort never gained traction before Biden took office in January.

McKenzie had believed “for quite a while” that if the United States reduced the number of its military advisers in Afghanistan below 2,500, the Kabul government inevitably would collapse “and that the military would follow.” In addition to the morale-depleting effects of the Doha agreement, the troop reduction ordered by Biden in April was ”the other nail in the coffin” for the 20-year war effort, he added, because it blinded the US military to conditions inside the Afghan army: “our advisers were no longer down there with those units.”

Democrat Biden has faced the biggest crisis of his presidency over the war in Afghanistan, which he argued needed to be brought to a close after 20 years of stalemated fighting that had cost American lives, drained resources and distracted from greater strategic priorities.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, testifying alongside McKenzie, said he agreed with the analysis. The Doha agreement also committed the United States to ending airstrikes against the Taliban, “so the Taliban got stronger, they increased their offensive operations against the Afghan security forces, and the Afghans were losing a lot of people on a weekly basis,” he added.

War in Afghanistan ‘a strategic failure’

Wednesday’s hearing with Pentagon leaders was politically charged. Republicans sought to cast President Biden as wrongheaded on Afghanistan, and Democrats pointed to what they called ill-advised decisions during the Trump years.

The previous day, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a similar hearing in the Senate that the war in Afghanistan was a “strategic failure,” and he repeated that on Wednesday.

When pressed Tuesday, Milley also told the Senate committee that it had been his personal opinion that at least 2,500 American troops were needed to guard against a collapse of the Kabul government and a return to Taliban rule.

Defying US intelligence assessments, the Afghan government and its American-trained army collapsed on August 15, allowing the Taliban to capture Kabul with what Milley described as a couple of hundred men on motorcycles and without firing one shot. That triggered a frantic US effort to evacuate American civilians, Afghan allies and others from Kabul airport.

The Taliban had ruled the country from 1996 to 2001.

‘Plain old politics’

US House and Senate started hearings which could become an extended congressional review of the US failures in Afghanistan. This after years of limited congressional oversight of the war although hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were consumed.

“The Republicans’ sudden interest in Afghanistan is plain old politics,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, who supported Biden’s decision to end US involvement there.

Tuesday’s hearing also was contentious at times, as Republicans sought to portray Biden as having ignored advice from military officers and mischaracterised the military options with which he was presented last spring and summer.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton (Arkansas) asked why Milley did not choose to resign after his advice was rejected. The general, who was appointed to his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President Donald Trump and retained by Biden, said it was his responsibility to provide the commander in chief with his best advice.

“The president doesn’t have to agree with that advice,” Milley said. “He doesn’t have to make those decisions just because we are generals. And it would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to resign just because my advice was not taken.”

(FRANCE 24 with AP & REUTERS)

A former senior US Department of Homeland Security official has warned former Republican President Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House would result in “disaster” for the American intelligence community.

“I think it would be a disaster,” Brian Murphy said of Trump’s possible 2024 presidential campaign in an interview on Sunday.

“He puts out disinformation and that’s an existential threat to democracy, and he is one of the best at putting it out and hurting this country,” Murphy said.

He added that such disinformation “polarizes us.”

“Political polarization in this country is at the worst it’s ever been,” Murphy said.

He then went on to say that disinformation and polarization are considered leading threats to the US intelligence community, which is a coalition of 17 agencies and organizations, including the ODNI, and CIA.

This comes despite the fact that Pulitzer Prize winner American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has revealed in a recent article that an axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied wing of the corporate media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

“Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands,” Greenwald wrote.

“But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden,” he added.

Meanwhile, Trump has said that only a doctor’s call could prevent him from participating in the 2024 presidential race.

In an interview on Friday, the 75-year-old businessman said that only “a bad call from a doctor or something” could stop him from running.

“Things happen, through God, they happen,” he said. “But I feel so good.”

Trump has alleged that the 2020 election was “the greatest Election Hoax in history.”

Trump believes that the election was rigged by the Washington establishment in favor of Joe Biden, the current US president.

Source: Presstv

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hung onto power on Monday as his main rival conceded defeat, but his Liberals fell short of his goal for a majority win.

Trudeau, in power since 2015 and governing with a minority of House of Commons seats since 2019, decided to gamble on an early vote and capitalise on his government’s handling of the pandemic, which included massive spending to support individuals and businesses and a push for high vaccination rates.

Instead, he will end up where he started after an unexpectedly tight election race characterised by a lacklustre campaign and voter anger at an election during a pandemic.

“You (Canadians) are sending us back to work with a clear mandate to get through this pandemic into brighter days ahead,” Trudeau said, flanked by his wife Sophie Gregoire and their children on stage at a victory gala in the early hours of Tuesday. “That’s exactly what we are ready to do,” he said.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, whose party placed second, conceded defeat as results trickled in late into the night.

Erin O’Toole is closer to becoming Canada’s next prime minister than any Conservative Party leader has been since 2015, when rockstar candidate Justin Trudeau swept a dour three-term incumbent into the history books under a wave of Trudeaumania. O’Toole is no rockstar – his vibe is closer to affable-roadie-turned-band-manager. But a tone-deaf act of hubris by Canada’s flashy frontman could yet score O’Toole the top gig.

When Liberal Party leader Trudeau called these snap September 20 legislative elections back in August, the task looked simple on paper. Reliant on making nice with other factions in the House of Commons since losing his majority (not least due to an embarrassing blackface photo scandal) in 2019 – way back in the Before Times – Trudeau hoped to parlay widespread approval of his handling of Canada’s Covid-19 crisis into votes, a stable majority and a fresh five-year term coming out of the pandemic.

After all, Canada has enjoyed a G7-leading vaccine rollout, escaped abject disaster with the second-lowest Covid-19 fatality rate among G7 nations, and has so far recouped some 95 percent of the jobs lost during the pandemic, outshining its basket-case neighbours to the south on all counts. And through it all, Trudeau was there at the mic – relatably shaggy, bearded and working from home – providing regular updates on the pandemic in progress. (Meanwhile, the hot-button nitty-gritty was being hashed out elsewhere: Healthcare and schools are provincial responsibilities in Canada, not federal ones.)

So as a leader just 15 seats short of a majority in Canada’s 338-seat lower house, why not brazenly call an election two years early? With Monday’s election now strikingly tight, Canada’s political observers have been counting the ways why not.

The consensus suggests Trudeau miscalculated: 1) how little appetite there was (particularly among his own Liberal supporters) for a pandemic election amid a Delta-fuelled fourth wave; 2) progressives’ impatience with lofty Trudeau promises after six years in power, with his ethics woes still close to mind and a creeping suspicion (even among Liberals) that the feminist, Pride-parading modern leader they elected is a cynic at heart; 3) the single-minded loathing Trudeau inspires on the right; 4) the indelicate optics of calling an election on August 15, the very day Kabul fell; and 5) just how primed his rivals were across the board to pull the plug on Trudeau.

Enter stage right, Erin O’Toole.

In the year or so since O’Toole won the Conservative Party leadership, the burly 48-year-old father of two reportedly shed 35 pounds by lacing on his running shoes daily. But he has also shed a significant number of the hardline “blue Tory” stances that won him that Conservative primary, successively dropping pledges against a carbon tax and an assault-weapon ban, to take a run at Trudeau’s job.

Born in Montreal in 1973, O’Toole moved as an infant to Bowmanville, Ontario, now a far-flung suburb in Toronto’s eastern sprawl, after his father took a manager’s job at the General Motors plant nearby. Erin and his two younger sisters lost their mother to breast cancer when he was nine. O’Toole credits his mother’s work sponsoring a family of Vietnamese refugees, thousands of whom were welcomed to Canada in 1979 under Conservative prime minister Joe Clark, with instilling in him a sense of service.

O’Toole doesn’t have the spectacular political pedigree of Trudeau – who was born in 1971 to a sitting prime minister, the charismatic Liberal iconoclast Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and grew up in the limelight.

But the senior O’Toole, too, introduced his son to the heady buzz of the campaign trail, holding local office before serving five terms as a Conservative in Ontario’s provincial legislature.

At 18, O’Toole enrolled at military college and became an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force four years later, flying as a tactical navigator on workhorse Sea King military search and rescue helicopters and rising to captain. He has quipped about his teen dreams of Top Gun and ultimately settling for the wingman role. “I walked into the recruiting centre thinking I was going to be Maverick. And not only was I not Maverick, I was Goose. And I was on an old, antiquated helicopter,” O’Toole told Canadian newsmagazine Macleans last year.

O’Toole, who is younger than Trudeau but looks older with his thinning white hairline, has leaned on his armed forces service to drive home his party’s character message about Trudeau. “When Mr. Trudeau was partying – and we’ve all seen the photos – I was doing search and rescue missions in the military,” O’Toole told a crowd as a chippy last week of campaigning began. “Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives – privileged, entitled and always looking out for number one,” he went on. “He’ll say anything to get elected, regardless of the damage it does to our country.”

Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper has noted that if elected O’Toole would be the country’s first prime minister in more than 50 years with military experience. He served in the regular forces of a peacetime military until 2000, when he moved to the reserves to study law in Halifax. He worked as a corporate lawyer in Toronto, notably for Procter & Gamble, and founded a charity for veterans called True Patriot Love, after a lyric in Canada’s national anthem.

When a Conservative federal legislative seat opened up on his old stomping grounds in 2012, O’Toole leapt at the opportunity and won the by-election. Re-elected three times as MP, he would serve briefly as veterans affairs’ minister in 2015, three years as shadow foreign affairs minister, and stand twice for the Conservative leadership before winning on his third try last year.

In his bid to update his party and bring Conservatives back to power in Ottawa, O’Toole has torn a page from the playbooks that brought success to his conservative contemporaries in Britain and the United States. He’s been vocal in his pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ views, echoing compassionate conservatism à la David Cameron. He’s made a play for working-class votes, mining for disillusioned Liberals like Boris Johnson poached support from old Labour Party bastions. And he’s engaged in sloganeering – “Canada First”, “Take back Canada” – that openly mirrors Donald Trump. O’Toole similarly lobbied to cancel “cancel culture”, mocking “woke” campaigns to re-dedicate public buildings named for founders of the notorious Residential Schools system that brutally oppressed generations of indigenous Canadians, before walking back his comments amid accusations of race-baiting.

Not that grassroots Conservatives are always along for O’Toole’s ride. At a party convention in March, the rookie leader backed a resolution to add “climate change is real” to the Conservative policy book. Delegates rejected it. When a Liberal bill to ban LGBTQ conversion therapy was tabled in the House of Commons in June, O’Toole backed it – but the Conservatives’ deputy leader voted against.

O’Toole, who tested positive for Covid-19 last year, has himself been vaccinated against the coronavirus. But while Trudeau required Liberal candidates to get the jab before campaigning, O’Toole declined to mandate vaccines for his own candidates, even as they knocked on voter doors and visited senior care homes. The Conservative said he preferred rapid testing and calls health decisions a matter of personal choice. As a result, Trudeau, who is seeking to mandate vaccines for public servants and domestic travel, has painted O’Toole as beholden to anti-vaxxers and unequipped to lead a party within which more radical views appear to thrive.

“He can’t even convince his own candidates to get vaccinated,” goaded Trudeau during a televised debate this month. “Mr. O’Toole can’t even convince his party that climate change is real.”

“I’m driving the bus,” O’Toole shot back.

Smiling in button-down shirts and sneakers on the trail, O’Toole hasn’t looked the part of the stuffy humourless Tory leader of old. His pledge to deploy more than $50 billion in new spending over five years, too, is a far cry from Conservative doctrine. Pandemic spending has seen Trudeau run Canada’s highest budget deficit since World War II, easy pickings for a fiscal conservative. But O’Toole’s platform only pledges to balance the budget within ten years and “without cuts”.

“We’re not your dad’s Conservative party anymore,” O’Toole told voters during a campaign stop on Wednesday.

Statistical tie

Down the home stretch, pollsters say Trudeau and O’Toole are in a statistical tie ahead of Monday’s vote. Canada being a parliamentary democracy, there are practical limitations to popular vote polling. The election isn’t a one-horse race – it’s 338 horse races, one in each district – and Trudeau’s and O’Toole’s names only feature on ballots in their own Montreal and greater Toronto ridings, respectively. In 2019, Conservative candidate Andrew Scheer won the popular vote yet still fell 36 seats short of Trudeau’s Liberals. But this time, pollsters say, it’s different.

Under O’Toole’s big-tent rejig, the Conservatives are losing some support in Western Canada, but they can afford to shed votes there and still retain their seats. Meanwhile, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, the TikTok-savvy 42-year-old progressive who has pointedly claimed the sunny hopey-changey mantle from Trudeau after keeping his minority government afloat, looks to be plying key votes away from the Liberals in key Ontario battlegrounds. Trudeau’s fate is squeezed between the two.

“The consensus (seat projection) seems to be a Liberal minority, because of the more efficient distribution of Liberal support compared to Conservatives’ support (which has big wins in the West),” Nanos Research founder Nik Nanos told FRANCE 24. “For the Liberals to win a majority, we would need NDP support to switch to the Liberals in the close of the campaign. It is still possible but unlikely today,” added Nanos, the Ottawa-based firm’s chief data scientist.

Others are more circumspect. In Toronto, Ipsos Global Affairs CEO Darrell Bricker says a majority appears off the table for any party. But as to who will lead Canada’s next minority government, “It’s true suspense,” Bricker told FRANCE 24. “I will genuinely say, on the record and off, I don’t know.”

When Trudeau called the election in August, Bricker said, “I think most political observers couldn’t believe he was doing it.” Ipsos polling showed 56 percent of voters didn’t want an election, with Liberal voters those least in favour. “I don’t know how he missed that… The only people who wanted an election were opposition voters, particularly Conservatives,” he said. Trudeau “didn’t understand how Canadians would view the Machiavellian aspects of this – and his position with Canadians, from being this beacon of goodness and light into being just another politician, and potentially even more cynical than other politicians,” Bricker said. Trudeau’s unwelcome election call “kind of played into all that. It just blew up on him and exploded. And he hasn’t been able to shake it.”Trudeau criticized at debate for calling Canadian election

If the election call itself made the election a referendum on Trudeau, Conservatives were happy to oblige. And the social conservatives among them, at least for now, seem happy enough to look the other way to oust a long-loathed nemesis.

“O’Toole is only rising because people are so upset with Justin Trudeau. So he’s going up basically as the alternate choice,” said Bricker. “He hasn’t offended anybody. He’s become an acceptable option, as opposed to… building any momentum like Trudeau did in 2015.”

The pollster explains that in Canadian politics of late, progressives need to adore a candidate. “They need to feel that they’re voting for hope, they need to plug into emotion around a political leader. The right doesn’t,” Bricker explained. “For the left, it’s like American Idol (or Canadian Idol or Eurovision). For the right it’s like a job interview…. If you look like you can do the job, you’re okay.” The upshot is that, for now at least, O’Toole equivocating on policy doesn’t matter. “Because it’s not about him.”

“The Conservative vote is about one thing right now and that’s Justin Trudeau gone,” Bricker said. “So they are willing to put a lot of stuff away for that,” he said, adding the data shows the biggest motivation for fully half of Conservative voters is removing Trudeau. “I’ve never seen that before,” the pollster said.

Nanos, for his part, says the Conservatives pivoted to casting the ballot question as one of character. “This has been more about O’Toole exceeding very low expectations,” the data scientist said, downplaying the effect of the Conservative’s fluctuating policy. “His steady performance and more progressive and spending platform compared to previous Conservative campaigns has helped inoculate him and the Conservatives from Liberal fear-mongering,” Nanos said.

Caught between a rockstar and a hard place?

Now comes the tense wait. After polls close across Canada’s six time zones on Monday, counting an unusually high number of mail-in ballots requested amid the pandemic could delay the final calls in tight races.

Much of what follows is down to convention. If Trudeau’s Liberals don’t win the highest number of seats on Election Day, he is within his rights as the incumbent to delay conceding the race while he tries to form a government. If Trudeau does make good on late projections and salvage his minority government with a plurality of seats, he may yet emerge a wounded leader, his rivals left and right given a proverbial shot in the arm by a vote of the Liberal’s own making that spun out of his grip.

And what if the rookie O’Toole ekes out a win? “O’Toole’s problem is that he’s got a party that doesn’t necessarily agree with him,” said Bricker, making the business of heading a minority government a particular challenge. The Conservative “sugar high” of ousting Trudeau, as he called it, would be short-lived with a pandemic to manage. From O’Toole’s perspective, Bricker quipped, “the old analogy is the dog that caught the car: ‘I’ve got it. What am I going to do with it?’

Source: France 24

A week after Colonel Mamady Doumbouya seized power in Guinea, France is still unsure how to respond to the crisis unfolding in its former West African colony. For now, it seems content to let multilateral bodies such as the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States try and find a resolution.

They are unlikely to get very far. The AU has suspended Guinea’s membership, and Ecowas has held a “positive” meeting with the coup leader in Conakry, the country’s capital on the Atlantic coast. But there is little hope for a speedy restoration of a civilian government.

The most likely outcome is a junta led by Doumbouya, and the promise of a democratic transition somewhere down the line. That was the compromise formula that followed coups in two other Francophone countries, Mali and Chad, earlier this summer.

That arrangement suited French President Emmanuel Macron just fine. He had offered only muted criticism of the coup in Bamako and endorsed the appointment of the junta in N’Djamena. The promise of democracy in the future allayed the embarrassment of doing business with tyrants for the time being.

But France’s speedy accommodation of military strongmen was bound to inspire other wannabes in Francophone Africa. Doumbouya was among those paying careful attention.

It is not yet known how much time he spent with his fellow Colonel, Mali’s Assimi Goita, when the two men participated in a 2019 U.S.-led military exercise in Burkina Faso. But it can hardly have escaped the Guinean’s attention that Goita was able thereafter to lead two coups — ousting President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August 2020, and then transitional President Bah N’Daw in May — with little more than desultory disapproval from Macron. France suspended joint operations with the Malian military for barely a month.

Ironically, the man Doumbouya ousted was also counting on Macron’s hypocrisy. President Alpha Conde won reelection last year after having forced through a constitutional amendment to allow himself a third term. When the French leader blasted him for this power grab, Conde reckoned forgiveness would follow. After all, Macron had no qualms about congratulating the Ivory Coast’s Alassane Ouattara for having secured a third term with the help of some constitutional jiggery-pokery.

But Doumbouya’s coup comes at an especially awkward moment for the French president, who is limbering up for a reelection run of his own even as his party tries to recover from a humiliating defeat in June’s regional vote. As Macron hits the hustings, his foreign policy record is coming under especially close scrutiny, amid rumblings of disquiet among professional diplomats, who say he is more show than substance.

Improving relations with Francophone African countries, in the face of the growing Chinese, Turkish and Russian influence, has been one of Macron’s priorities. The region has provided him with opportunities to burnish his international stature, including a much-publicized summit earlier this summer. Perhaps more important, the cooperation of former French colonies is crucial to the president’s counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel, the belt of countries south of the Sahara.

These factors may explain why he is leery of antagonizing the new rulers of Mali, Chad and now Guinea. But by handing out yet another free pass to a military strongman, Macron is in effect inviting others to take advantage of his weak hand. Several other leaders in the region will now be looking nervously over their shoulders: Ouattara of the Ivory Coast, Faure Gnassingbe of Togo, Paul Biya of Cameroon and Patrice Talon of Benin.

Even if there are no more coups between now and the French presidential election next April, the democratic retrenchment in Africa will at the very least be a source of embarrassment for Macron. He will only have himself to blame.

Source: Bloomberg L.P.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday defended his decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan, saying it was in the US national interest.

 “We no longer had a clear purpose in an open-ended mission in Afghanistan,” he said a day after the final withdrawal.

 “This is the right decision. A wise decision. And the best decision for America,” he said.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday accused China of coercion and intimidation to back unlawful claims in the South China Sea, in her most pointed comments on China on a visit to Southeast Asia, a region she said was critical to U.S. security.

Harris’s seven-day trip to Singapore and Vietnam is aimed at standing up to China’s growing security and economic influence globally and addressing concerns about China’s claims to disputed parts of the South China Sea.

Diverting attention and resources to the region has become a centrepiece of President Joe Biden’s administration, as it turns away from old security preoccupations with the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

The U.S. administration has called rivalry with China “the biggest geopolitical test” of the century and Southeast Asia has seen a series of high-profile visits by top administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

“We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea,” Harris said in a speech in Singapore.

“These unlawful claims have been rejected by the 2016 arbitral tribunal decision, and Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations,” she said, referring to an international tribunal’s ruling over China’s claims in The Hague.

China rejected the ruling and has stood by its claim to most of the waters within a so-called Nine Dash Line on its maps, parts of which Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam also claim.

China has established military outposts on artificial islands in the waters, which are crossed by vital shipping lanes and also contain gas fields and rich fishing grounds.

The U.S. Navy regularly conducts “freedom of navigation” operations through the disputed waters, which China objects to, saying they do not help promote peace or stability.

On board the USS Tulsa, a U.S. combat ship at the Changi Naval base in Singapore on Monday, Harris told U.S. sailors “a big part of the history of the 21st century will be written about this very region” and their work defending it was pivotal.

On Monday, Harris began her trip by meeting Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

They discussed the importance of upholding a rules-based international order and freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region, expanded cybersecurity cooperation and efforts to shore up critical supply chains between their countries. “Our partnerships in Singapore, in Southeast Asia and throughout the Indo-Pacific are a top priority for the United States,” Harris said on Tuesday, adding the region was “critically important to our nation’s security and prosperity”.

A top Chinese diplomat last month accused the United States of creating an “imaginary enemy” to divert attention from domestic problems and to suppress China.

Part of her task during the trip will be convincing leaders in the region that the U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia is firm and not a parallel to Afghanistan.

Biden has faced criticism over his handling of the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the chaotic evacuation after the lightning takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

Harris said the United States was “laser focused” on the task of “safely evacuating American citizens, international partners, Afghans who worked side by side with us, and other Afghans at risk”.

She also said that the United States had put itself forward to host a meeting of the Asia-Pacific trade group APEC in 2023, which includes the United States, China and Japan.

(REUTERS)

US President Joe Biden on Monday defended his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, noting there was no good time to withdraw from America’s longest war while waiting for Afghan troops to be able and willing to confront the Taliban. “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he said.

President Joe Biden said on Monday he stood “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan despite searing images of chaos in Kabul that exposed the limits of U.S. power and plunged him into the worst crisis of his presidency.

Breaking his silence on the U.S. pullout after scenes of bedlam dominated television news channels for days, Biden blamed the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan on Afghan political leaders who fled the country and the unwillingness of the U.S.-trained Afghan army to fight the militant group.

He warned Taliban leaders they would face “devastating force” should they interfere with the U.S. pullout. Biden was forced to send U.S. troop reinforcements to Kabul to ensure a safe withdrawal of American diplomatic personnel and civilians as well as Afghan citizens who worked with the United States and could face reprisals.

The panicked evacuation, coming weeks after Biden predicted the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan was not inevitable, has dented America’s image on the global stage just as Biden has sought to emphasize to world leaders that “America is back” after former President Donald Trump’s tumultuous four years.

The pullout has also raised fears that militant groups like al Qaeda could reconstitute under Taliban rule.

Biden, rejecting harsh criticism of his Afghan policy from Republican and Democratic lawmakers, some former generals and human rights groups, was resolute in defending his withdrawal from a 20-year war that endured through four presidencies.

We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11, 2001—and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.

We did that—a decade ago.

Our mission was never supposed to be nation building.

“I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said in a televised speech at the White House. “After 20 years I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That’s why we’re still there.”

Biden said he found some of the scenes of chaos in Kabul “gut-wrenching” but that he did not start moving out evacuees sooner because Afghan President Ashraf Ghani did not want a mass exodus.

Political Risks Unclear

He acknowledged that the Taliban’s speed in retaking the country was unexpected. The rapid advance stunned American officials who predicted that the Afghan army would either repel the militants or hold them off for months.

“The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military gave up, sometimes without trying to fight,” Biden said.

He also doled out criticism to his Republican predecessor, Trump, whose administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban that Biden said left the group “in the strongest position militarily since 2001.”

Critics of Biden have focused on the way the U.S. withdrawal is being carried out, as video showed Afghans flooding runways at the Kabul airport and desperately trying to grab the fuselage of a U.S. plane rolling on the tarmac.

“The president’s failure to acknowledge his disastrous withdrawal provides no comfort to Americans or our Afghan partners whose lives hang in the balance,” Republican Senator Mitt Romney said in a tweet.

Biden singled out for criticism the two main Afghan leaders, Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, head of the country’s High Council for National Reconciliation, saying they had “flatly refused” his advice to seek a political settlement with the Taliban.

“How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghans – Afghanistan’s civil war, when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives – American lives – is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery?” Biden asked.

On Monday night, Biden on Monday authorized up to $500 million from an emergency fund to meet “unexpected urgent” refugee needs stemming from the situation in Afghanistan, including for Afghan special immigration visa applicants, the White House said.

The United States is preparing to begin evacuating thousands of Afghan applicants for special immigration visas (SIVs) who risk retaliation from Taliban insurgents because they worked for the U.S. government.

Whether Biden will face a long-term political risk for Afghanistan is unclear. Foreign policy does not typically play a major role in U.S. elections. Many Americans have expressed support for Trump’s and Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan, America’s longest war. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/americas-longest-war-20-years-missteps-afghanistan-2021-08-16

But Republican Representative Mike McCaul signaled his party might try to frame the Afghan chaos as a national security issue that makes the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

“I think it is going to taint this presidency, to a large degree, on national security,” he said.

The United States and allies invaded Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington and toppled the Taliban, who had hosted al Qaeda militants responsible for the attack.

Biden also said his decision was a result of the commitment he made to American troops that he was not going to ask them to continue to risk their lives for a war that should have ended long ago.

“Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as (a) young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan,” he said. “I know my decision will be criticized but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president.”

(REUTERS)

US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin square up on Wednesday for their first meeting since Biden took office with deep disagreements likely and expectations low for any breakthroughs.

Both have said they hope their talks in a lakeside Geneva villa can lead to more stable and predictable relations, even though they remain at odds over everything from arms control and cyber-hacking to election interference and Ukraine.

“We’re not expecting a big set of deliverables out of this meeting,” a senior US official told reporters aboard Air Force One as Biden flew to Geneva, saying the two are expected to talk for four or five hours starting at around 1.30pm CET (1130 GMT).

“I’m not sure that any agreements will be reached,” said Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov.

Relations have deteriorated for years, notably with Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, its 2015 intervention in Syria and US charges – denied by Moscow – of its meddling in the 2016 election that brought Donald Trump to the White House.

They sank further in March when Biden said he thought Putin was a “killer”, prompting Russia to recall its ambassador to Washington for consultations. The United States recalled its ambassador in April.

The senior US official said the United States aimed for a set of “taskings” – Washington jargon for assigning aides to work on specific issues – “about areas where working together can advance our national interests and make the world safer”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said whether or not to send back ambassadors would be decided by the two presidents. “Today the presidents will need to determine how to proceed with the heads of the diplomatic missions,” Peskov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

While the issues may be vexing, the surroundings will be serene when the presidents meet in Villa La Grange, an elegant mansion set in a 30-hectare (nearly 75-acre) park overlooking Lake Geneva.

‘Very little hope of progress’

FRANCE 24’s Gulliver Cragg confirmed the mood in Geneva, saying there is “very little hope on progress on any of the really big dossiers that could be on the table. But I think what they’re hoping for is to put the ‘table back together’”.

Cragg said the tit-for-tat expulsions have really soured the relations between Washington and Moscow, resulting in very little diplomatic contact between the two, but that “both sides seem to be willing to put those back together”.

He added that although such an rapprochement is usually referred to as a “reset” in the diplomacy world, “Biden absolutely doesn’t want it to be called a ‘reset’, he doesn’t want to use that term – that was the strategy that he, as vice president and Barack Obama as president, employed towards Vladimir Putin a little more than a decade ago and it is seen as not having been a success”.

Cragg said that although interest in the Geneva summit is extremely high, it “surpasses by a very long way the likelihood of anything really being achieved”.

Lockdown

On Wednesday, the summit perimeter was under a tight lockdown with heavy police presence. Following a their bilateral meeting, Biden and Putin will continue on to their discussions with broader US and Russian delegations including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, along with interpreters.

Arms control is one domain where progress has historically been possible despite wider disagreements.

In February, Russia and the United States extended for five years the New START treaty, which caps their deployed strategic nuclear warheads and limits the land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.

The senior US official said Biden would also define areas of vital national interest where Russian misconduct would bring a response. Biden signed an executive order in April giving Washington wide latitude to impose sanctions on Moscow.

In a sign of the strained ties, the talks will not include any meals and Putin and Biden are expected to hold separate news conferences rather than a joint one.

“No breaking of bread,” said the senior US official.

Vladimir Frolov, a former Russian diplomat, told Reuters that Putin wanted respectful ties and to be treated like members of the Soviet Politburo were in the 1960s-1980s, with “a symbolic recognition of Russia’s geopolitical parity with the US”.

“In exchange, they (Moscow) would be willing to cut back on some of the loony stuff,” Frolov said, saying he meant “no poisonings, no physical violence, no arrests/kidnappings of US and Russian nationals. No interference in domestic politics”.

Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, set the bar for Wednesday’s talks low.

“The principal takeaway, in the positive sense, from the Geneva meeting would be making sure that the United States and Russia did not come to blows physically, so that a military collision is averted,” he said.

In contrast to Trump, whose 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki included a meeting accompanied only by interpreters, Biden and Putin are not expected to have any solo dealings.

Standing beside Putin in Helsinki, Trump refused to blame the Russian leader for meddling in the 2016 US election, casting doubt on the findings of his own intelligence agencies and sparking a storm of domestic criticism.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)