The Morning Dispatch: America Leaves Afghanistan

Happy Tuesday! Scientists in South Africa said yesterday that they’ve identified yet another coronavirus variant—C.1.2.—that is “associated with increased transmissibility,” and we really didn’t need that energy to start the week.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, announced Monday afternoon that the U.S. military had completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan and ended its mission to evacuate American citizens and vulnerable Afghans.

• Tens of thousands of people in the South Lake Tahoe area are under a mandatory evacuation order as California’s Caldor Fire—only 14 percent contained—blazes across more than 177,000 acres.  

• Hurricane Ida weakened to a tropical depression on Monday as it traveled north and east through Louisiana and into Mississippi. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said yesterday that none of the state’s levee systems failed, but that the storm’s damage is still “catastrophic” and he expects the death toll to rise “considerably.” More than 1 million customers remained without power in Louisiana as of Monday night, and an Entergy Corp. executive said yesterday that more than 2,000 miles of transmission lines are out of service.

• The Biden administration’s Department of Education announced Monday it had opened investigations into Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah’s banning of mask mandates in schools, and whether those bans “discriminate against students with disabilities who are at heightened risk for severe illness from COVID-19 by preventing them from safely accessing in-person education.” 

• The Council of the European Union on Monday voted to recommend putting the United States back on the list of countries from which non-essential travel is barred, citing the high levels of COVID-19 circulating among its population. The EU had eased restrictions on fully vaccinated American travelers earlier this summer, but the United States, for the most part, had not reciprocated.

• A new University of Michigan/Kaiser Permanente Southern California study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the prevalence of childhood obesity increased significantly over the course of the pandemic.

America Leaves Afghanistan

After 20 years, 2,461 dead U.S. service members, and trillions of taxpayer dollars, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared on Monday that “a new chapter of America’s engagement with Afghanistan has begun.”

“It’s one in which we will lead with our diplomacy,” he said in remarks delivered from the State Department’s Treaty Room. “The military mission is over. A new diplomatic mission has begun.” Seconds later, Blinken announced that the United States had “suspended [its] diplomatic presence in Kabul” due to “the uncertain security environment and political situation in Afghanistan.”

Earlier in the day—in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Afghanistan time—five Boeing C-17s had departed from Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) carrying the last of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. Nearly 24 hours ahead of the Biden administration and Taliban’s agreed upon August 31 deadline, the Americans were gone. 

Taliban fighters fanned out in the streets of Kabul shortly thereafter, firing off guns to celebrate their hard-fought victory over the world’s strongest military. “The last five aircraft have left, it’s over!” a Taliban fighter told the Associated Press. “I cannot express my happiness in words. … Our 20 years of sacrifice worked.”

In a briefing Monday, CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie reported that a number of Americans—in the “very low hundreds”—remain in the country, as do tens of thousands of Afghan allies. 

“We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out,” McKenzie conceded.

The U.S. will now rely on negotiations with the Taliban to evacuate any remaining U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and Afghan partners on the ground. “The military phase is over, but our desire to bring these people out remains as intense as it was before,” McKenzie told reporters. “The weapons have just shifted, if you will, from the military realm to the diplomatic realm and the Department of State will now take the lead on that.”

Blinken said yesterday that the administration’s commitment to evacuating those who remain in Afghanistan has “no deadline.” But critics, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, point out that the United States now has little leverage over the Taliban without a military presence in the country.

Biden administration officials have argued international pressure will keep the Taliban at the bargaining table. “The Taliban has committed to let anyone with proper documents leave the country in a safe and orderly manner. They’ve said this privately and publicly many times,” Blinken noted yesterday. “More than half the world’s countries have joined us in insisting that the Taliban let people travel outside Afghanistan freely. As of today, more than 100 countries have said that they expect the Taliban to honor travel authorizations by our countries. And just a few hours ago, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that enshrines that responsibility—laying the groundwork to hold the Taliban accountable if they renege.”

Publicly, the Taliban is playing the part. “Neither there is any one under prosecution of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, nor there is a hit list to conduct door to door search,” Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen tweeted last week. “General amnesty has been granted, no accountability with anyone, rather we are focusing on future.”

But the group’s promises ring hollow. Reports of a campaign by the Taliban to root out Afghans who worked for the fallen Kabul government have already emerged, though the scale of the efforts and role of Taliban leadership remain unclear. Fawad Andarabi, an Afghan folk singer, was reportedly dragged from his home and shot in the head over the weekend. A Taliban spokesperson in recent days said “music is forbidden in Islam,” but that the group is “hoping that we can persuade people not to do such things, instead of pressuring them.”

Meanwhile, the threat of terror in Kabul and around its airport remains high. As U.S. forces began their final withdrawal on Monday, a U.S. missile defense system intercepted rockets aimed at HKIA. The Islamic State—which claimed responsibility for last week’s suicide bombings that killed at least 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members—is alleged to be behind the attacks.

The Biden administration carried out two operations over the weekend targeting the group. A drone strike in the Nangarhar province killed two ISIS-K fighters “who were known to be responsible for planning and facilitation activities within the organization,” the Defense Department said Saturday. 

A day later, the U.S. also conducted a preemptive airstrike on what U.S. officials purported to be an ISIS-K vehicle containing explosives that created an “imminent” threat to the airport. The operation, however, reportedly also killed at least 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, an aid worker for an American charity organization, and a U.S. military contractor. Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesman for CENTCOM, attributed the potential loss of civilian life to large secondary explosions.

“No military on the face of the earth works harder to avoid civilian casualties than the United States military,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in reference to the strike. “We take it very, very seriously. And when we know that we have caused innocent life to be lost in the conduct of our operations, we’re transparent about it.”

“Nobody wants to see that happen,” he continued. “But you know what else we didn’t want to see happen? We didn’t want to see happen what we believe to be a very real, a very specific and a very imminent threat to the Hamid Karzai International Airport and to our troops operating at that airport, as well as civilians around it.”

The threat of terror emanating from the country is growing in the aftermath of the U.S. departure. Jihadist groups in Afghanistan and beyond celebrated the Taliban’s victory and many are using it to boost recruitment. Al-Qaeda, which had operatives in Afghanistan throughout the entire 20-year U.S. presence, will have increased operational freedom and a terrorist-friendly militant group running the country. Thousands of jihadists detained by the former Afghan government were freed by the Taliban in its march to Kabul, including many of the estimated 2,000 Islamic State operatives currently on the ground. Dr. Amin al-Haq, a top al-Qaeda security official under Osama bin Laden, came out of hiding and returned to his home in the Nangarhar province alongside an armed Taliban escort Monday. 

“There’s a political slogan, ‘end endless wars.’ That doesn’t translate into a serious policy decision, and the real policy is this: You can’t, as one party, end a war. It takes two parties to end a war,” Sen. Mitt Romney told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “The Taliban and the radical violent jihadists in the world haven’t stopped fighting. They’re going to continue to fight us. The war is not over.”

Worth Your Time

• The Supreme Court’s conservative majority last week blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to implement yet another eviction moratorium through the CDC. But in their dissent, Justices Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor signed onto an interpretation of the law that would have far-reaching effects within the administrative state. “In effect, [Breyer] and his two liberal colleagues claim that, unless Congress has expressly enumerated that which executive agencies are not allowed to do in a crisis, almost anything else could be considered within their purview,” Noah Rothman writes in Commentary. “Breyer’s logic would subordinate the text of the law and the country’s constitutional order to the urgency of the moment—and the moment is always urgent for someone. His is a prescription for adhocracy.”

• In his New York Times newsletter, Jay Caspian Kang revisits the origins of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” phenomenon—and the mass media’s recalibration in response to it—asking whether the formulation needs to be reexamined in a post-2020 world. “In 1968, the turn in opinion came mostly at the expense of Black radicals and young protesters in favor of what was largely then assumed to be white working-class voters,” he writes. “Today’s silent majority certainly does include white voters, but this time, recent coverage suggests that the media is reproaching itself for a somewhat different failing: neglecting the perspective of more-moderate voters of color. … It may be correct to say that within the new, diverse ‘silent majority,’ attitudes about the police and protest might be much less uniform than what many in the mass media led you to believe in the summer of 2020.”

• In this newsletter and elsewhere, we have made clear where many Dispatch writers  stand on the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the Biden administration’s botched execution of the policy. But part of what we try to do in this “Worth Your Time” section is provide a diverse array of perspectives on important issues, and Matt Yglesias offers a different view of the Afghanistan withdrawal in his latest Slow Boring post. He argues that Biden made a difficult decision to “do the right thing” and end the United States’ presence in Afghanistan when he easily could have returned to the pre-Trump status quo and paid no political price for it. “You’d probably have had to send in reinforcements and you’d have to deal with some American casualties,” Yglesias writes, of returning to that status quo. “But it wouldn’t have been a lot of American forces, and it wouldn’t have been a lot of American casualties either. … Going back to that early-Trump approach would not have fixed anything, and it would have earned Biden some criticism (including from me) on the merits. But Afghanistan would not have been a major news story, and there’s little reason to think it would have hurt his numbers. This is the can-kicking logic that led to Obama’s incomplete withdrawal and that governed Trump’s decision-making until he was a lame duck.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• On Monday’s Advisory Opinions, Sarah is joined by … singer/songwriter Ben Folds? The two discuss the songwriting process, how Folds’ song about the Mueller investigation is a great jumping off point for the law-curious, and more.

Let Us Know

In 10 or 15 years, do you think the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan will look better or worse than it does right now?

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