Afghanistan has had internal rivalry for a long long time
U.S. exit will begin before May 1 and will be completed by Sept. 11 at the latest
By Jim W. Dean, Managing Editor
…from Politico
[ Editor’s Note: These troop withdrawals are now melodramatic, as everyone knows that it will be canceled if US forces are attacked before the September 11 date, something that is quite easy to arrange by a number of entities on both the US/NATO sides and Afghanistan.
But it makes Biden look good, and when attacks do happen, he has cover by being able to say he did the best he could, and that will probably be true.
As VT has covered over and over, and something that well funded geopolitical media is well aware of, there can be no peace in Afghanistan without an ‘arrangement’ for who is going to take over the $100 billion of heroin trade production inside the country.
Yours truly is waiting for review of the feasibility plan on how this control is to be taken away from those who have had control over it for a long time, without so much as a name being mentioned. I do not think they will be going ‘quietly into the night,’ as the saying goes.
Until we see some real public dialogue going on about the heroin black money aspect of the war, consider this effort to be one in the theatrical realm… Jim W. Dean ]
First published … April 13, 2021
President Joe Biden plans to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021, missing the May 1 deadline he inherited from the Trump administration, according to two congressional aides and a senior administration official briefed on the plans.
The decision, which Biden is expected to announce this week, will likely prompt the Taliban to renew attacks on the roughly 3,500 American troops there, which have largely halted since the February 2020 agreement between the Trump administration and Taliban officials.
…The Biden administration “has long known that military force would not solve Afghanistan’s internal political challenges, would not end Afghanistan’s internal conflict,” a senior administration official told a small group of reporters on Tuesday. “And so we are ending our military operations while we focus our efforts on supporting diplomatically the ongoing peace process.”
…”The president has judged that a conditions-based approach, which has been the approach of the past two decades, is a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever,” the official said, noting that the U.S. exit will begin before May 1 and will be completed by Sept. 11 at the latest.
…GOP hawks, on the other hand, were quick to deride the decision as premature and short-sighted and called on Biden to reconsider.
You can read the full article here.
