The Morning Dispatch: Afghanistan Crumbles

Happy Friday! Today’s the day, according to the MyPillow Guy, that Donald Trump is going to be reinstated as president. I guess we’ll see!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Taliban on Thursday captured the Afghan cities Kandahar and Herat (two of the country’s largest), as well as the strategic provincial capital of Ghazni, which is less than 100 miles from Kabul. In response, the Pentagon announced the deployment of several thousand Marines and soldiers tasked with evacuating all but a “core diplomatic presence” in the American Embassy in Kabul.

• The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday amended the emergency use authorizations for Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, allowing for certain immunocompromised individuals—including organ transplant recipients—to receive an additional dose. “Other individuals who are fully vaccinated are adequately protected and do not need an additional dose of COVID-19 vaccine at this time,” acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said.

• The U.S. government released more detailed data from the 2020 Census on Thursday that showed the United States’ population grew 7.4 percent since 2010—the second-slowest decade of growth in U.S. history—with the Sun Belt leading the way. The non-Hispanic white population shrank 2.6 percent in absolute terms over the past decade—its first such decline on record—and now makes up 57.8 percent of the country.

• Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra announced yesterday that the agency will require more than 25,000 of its health care workforce—patient-facing employees at the National Institutes of Health, Indian Health Service, and U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps—to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

• San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced Thursday that, beginning August 20, indoor restaurants, bars, gyms, and entertainment venues in the city must require all patrons over the age of 12 to provide proof of full vaccination against COVID-19. A similar mandate for employees will go into effect October 13 “to preserve jobs while giving time for compliance.”

• The Supreme Court issued an emergency order on Thursday blocking New York’s eviction ban. It’s an ominous sign for the fate of the CDC’s nationwide moratorium, though the two rely on different legal arguments.

• Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Thursday rejected an effort by eight students to knock down Indiana University’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement. Barrett oversees the federal appeals court in question, and rebuffed the request without comment.

• U.S. Customs and Border Protection released data for July yesterday showing more than 200,000 migrants were detained along the U.S.-Mexico border last month, a 13 percent increase from June and the largest monthly figure in 21 years. Last week, the Biden administration renewed the Trump administration’s Title 42 order, a pandemic-era policy that allows border agents to quickly expel most single adult migrants.

• Two of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—on Thursday articulated their thoughts on vaccine mandates for workers in schools. The NEA announced its support for “requirements that all educators receive a COVID-19 vaccination or submit to regular COVID-19 testing,” but the AFT stopped short, advocating for negotiations with employers over vaccination policies.

• Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid announced Thursday that Israel and Morocco are fully normalizing relations—a process that began back in December in a deal brokered by the Trump administration—opening embassies in each other’s countries within the next two months.

• Initial jobless claims decreased by 12,000 week-over-week to 375,000 last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday.

Afghanistan Crumbling Before the World’s Eyes

Speaking at the White House one month ago, President Joe Biden offered a reassuring prediction about the consequences of his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan: “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” 

Over the last week, thirteen of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals have fallen to the Taliban, solidifying the jihadists’ military dominance amid fruitless peace talks with the Afghan government in Doha, Qatar. Even as the Taliban has taken power with relative ease—district after district, and city after city—top Biden administration officials have stuck to talking points often at odds with the stark reality on the ground. Last week, as reports from Afghanistan featured details of the Taliban’s bloody conquests, State Department spokesman Ned Price claimed that the Taliban remain interested in a “durable” negotiated solution. The Taliban, White House press secretary Jen Psaki repeated Tuesday, will engage Afghan negotiators out of concern for its place in the international community—despite no indication that such a concern exists. And the Afghan government, President Biden insisted Tuesday, is sufficiently equipped to leverage an agreement through its U.S.-trained and supplied military—even as the government surrenders en masse across the country. Despite this stubborn insistence on negotiations, the Taliban’s end-goals—to overrun Kabul, unify the country, and restore the pre-9/11 Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—all fall outside the purview of diplomacy.

News from the State Department Thursday didn’t inspire much confidence in the U.S. happy talk. In a briefing, Price informed reporters of plans to draw down the Kabul embassy to a “core diplomatic presence” amid the country’s “deteriorating security situation.” 

“This is not an abandonment, this is not an evacuation, this is not the wholesale withdrawal,” Price added. 

In a press conference minutes later, Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby announced the movement of approximately 3,000 troops to facilitate the “removal” of American civilians from Kabul. One thousand additional service members will be deployed to Qatar and Afghanistan to process special immigrant visa (SIV) applicants, and roughly 3,500 more will be transferred to Kuwait as “a quick reaction force for security in Kabul if needed.” 

With the Taliban’s takeover of Ghazni, a city 80 miles southwest of Kabul, the Afghan government is in dire straits. Kandahar City and Herat City, Afghanistan’s second and fourth most populous cities, also fell into Taliban hands Thursday. Lashkar Gah and Mazar-i-Sharif were on the brink early Friday morning.

“What we see here is a clear message that the U.S. doesn’t have faith in the ability of the Afghan army or the Afghan government to maintain its own capital,” Jason Killmeyer, former Chief of Staff of Global Defense, Security & Justice at Deloitte, told The Dispatch. “The message being sent is that they’re on their own.” 

According to Axios, Biden administration officials were “stunned” by the “impressive speed and coordination” of the Taliban advance. But not all analysts were caught off guard. In The Dispatch’s Vital Interests newsletter, Thomas Joscelyn has long detailed the insurgents’ strategy of encircling urban centers by occupying surrounding rural areas. With the groundwork laid (particularly given the Biden team’s commitment to an unconditional retreat), the Taliban began its military offensive as soon as the Trump administration’s initial withdrawal date came and went. 

The consequences for Afghanistan’s civilian population are hard to exaggerate, particularly for the thousands of men, women, and children uniquely imperiled for their connections to American forces. A feasible plan for their mass evacuation over the next few weeks has not yet been articulated by the administration, though Price alluded to one in his briefing yesterday.

But beyond Washington’s moral obligations to the Afghan people, a Taliban-occupied Afghanistan would undermine America’s regional standing and national security. As David pointed out in his latest French Press, an American presence in Afghanistan has deterred a “significant terror attack for twenty consecutive years”—an achievement most would have found inconceivable in the aftermath of 9/11.

But according to Killmeyer, our current backsliding in the region bears an alarming resemblance to the late ’90s. “Large-scale, physical terrorist safe havens equal complex terrorist attacks. Until that formula changes, the navel-gazing of our internal debates do not matter,” he said. “And what we know right now is that reports suggest that al-Qaeda has a presence in at least 15 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.”

“The reality is, at the very time that the situation will become the most volatile and friendly to terrorist groups is the very time that our intelligence picture will become dimmer and darker,” Killmeyer added.

Evidence suggests that al-Qaeda—the driving force behind the U.S.’s invasion of Afghanistan two decades ago—provided decisive military support to the Taliban as it swept through the country’s northern provinces. As Joscelyn has written more than once, the two jihadist groups retain close ties through intermarriage, shared leadership, and mutual objectives.

Lieutenant General (ret.) H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, warned of this threat during a briefing yesterday with Wilson Center president and former U.S. Ambassador Mark Green. “We are facing the growth, now, of a multigenerational problem of jihadist terrorism, and disengaging from it is not the answer because it cedes the initiative and resources to our determined, brutal, murderous enemies,” McMaster said. “Challenges to our security that develop abroad can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores.”

The seeming inevitably of the Taliban’s coming military triumph in Afghanistan was reflected in the Biden administration’s pleas for the safety of U.S. diplomatic personnel as the violence persists. ​​Nearly twenty years after the 9/11 attacks were carried out by a jihadist group long given safe haven and support by the Taliban in Afghanistan, U.S. officials are dangling U.S. financial support for the Taliban in exchange for security guarantees. According to the New York Times, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad “is hoping to convince Taliban leaders that the embassy must remain open, and secure, if the group hopes to receive American financial aid and other assistance as part of a future Afghan government.”

Worth Your Time

• In a piece for Reason, Matt Welch argues that no “self-respecting American” should aspire to Hungarian-style nationalism. Viktor Orbán, the country’s prime minister, “whets the power appetites of American conservatives who no longer have patience for due process, individual autonomy, and limited government,” Welch writes. “By aspiring to Orbán’s strategic and proudly anti-liberal wielding of consolidated state power against perceived internal enemies, the Hungaro-cons are threatening to sink deeper into the conservative rut of anti-factual paranoia, enemy-scapegoating, and egg-breaking, swapping out even the pretense of philosophical governing principle for a transparent will to power. … It’s Flight 93s all the way down, then, only this time hijacked by a Hungarian. Perhaps one day the American right will regain its faith in America.”

• The Atlantic’s Ed Yong has consistently provided some of the best COVID-19 coverage over the past year and half, and his latest piece—on how the pandemic will end—is no different. “Vaccines are now here, uptake has plateaued, and the first surge of the vaccine era is ongoing. What, now, is the point of masking, distancing, and other precautions?” he asks. “The answer, as before, is to buy time—for protecting hospitals, keeping schools open, reaching unvaccinated people, and more. Most people will meet the virus eventually; we want to ensure that as many people as possible do so with two doses of vaccine in them, and that everyone else does so over as much time as possible. The pandemic isn’t over, but it will be: The goal is still to reach the endgame with as little damage, death, and disability as possible. COVID-19 sent the world into freefall, and although vaccines have slowed our descent, we’d still be wise to steer around the trees standing between us and solid ground.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• For more on the Afghanistan story, tune in to today’s Dispatch Podcast. Steve sits down with Thomas Joscelyn—who writes our Vital Interests newsletter—to discuss how long it will take for the Taliban to seize control of the entire country. Plus, a conversation with GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy on the bipartisan infrastructure deal.

• On Thursday’s Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah discuss vaccine passports on cruise ships, the eviction moratorium and the Third Amendment, and the failed attempt by leaders of the Stop the Steal movement to dismiss Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against them.

• National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke returned to The Remnant yesterday for a discussion of Ron DeSantis’ symbiotic relationship with the mainstream media, the right’s newfound fascination with Hungary, the imperial presidency, and Americans’ conflicting foreign policy views.

• In a piece for the site today, Paul D. Miller, who served as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the national security council staff under Presidents Bush and Obama, argues against what he calls the comfortable myths that are causing many to meet the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan with a shrug—that collapse was inevitable, that the U.S. presence was unsustainable, that nation-building is always and only a fool’s errand. “These myths function as an ex post facto explanation that we—the most powerful nation in the world—were actually powerless all along,” Miller writes. “Critics may complain that ‘we can’t stay forever.’ Perhaps, but we could have stayed long enough for the military presence to evolve, very gradually, into a near-peacetime deployment. Again, the military presence was small, low-risk, and relatively low-cost.” 

Let Us Know

Were you in favor of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan when President Biden announced it back in April? Have the events of the past few months changed your thinking at all?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).