02-06-2022, 04:01 PM
(02-03-2022, 02:31 PM)masonbengals fan Wrote: An eye opening article & one well worth reading.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/03/biden-afghanistan-exit-american-allies-abandoned/621307/
Glad to see you are reading the Atlantic, Mason.
Two passages really jumped out at me:
1. Toward the end of 2019, Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, visited the U.S. embassy in Kabul and found a skeletal staff working on visas only part-time. “This was no accident, by the way,” Crow told me. “This was a long-term Stephen Miller project to destroy the SIV program and basically shut it off.” Miller, the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim Trump adviser, along with allies throughout the executive branch, added so many new requirements that amid the pandemic the program nearly came to a halt. By the time Biden gave his speech, at least 18,000 desperate Afghans and tens of thousands of family members stood in a line that was barely moving. Many feared that the Americans would now leave without them.
2. In late 2010, Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, came into Vice President Biden’s office to talk about the situation of Afghan women. According to an audio diary Holbrooke kept, Biden insisted, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights.” (Biden’s son Beau, a member of the Delaware National Guard, had recently been deployed to Iraq for a year.) He wanted every American troop out of Afghanistan, regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else. When Holbrooke asked about the obligation to people who had trusted the U.S. government, Biden said, “**** that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.” During the 2020 campaign, an interviewer repeated some of these quotes to Biden and asked if he believed he would bear responsibility for harm to Afghan women after a troop withdrawal and the return of the Taliban. Biden bristled and his eyes narrowed. “No, I don’t!” he snapped, and put his thumb and index finger together. “Zero responsibility.”
![[Image: 4CV0TeR.png]](https://i.imgur.com/4CV0TeR.png)
