{"id":56777,"date":"2021-08-30T06:00:59","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T10:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=56777"},"modified":"2021-08-27T13:49:16","modified_gmt":"2021-08-27T17:49:16","slug":"we-provided-the-taliban-with-kill-lists-other-outrages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2021\/08\/we-provided-the-taliban-with-kill-lists-other-outrages\/","title":{"rendered":"We Provided the Taliban with Kill Lists, & Other Outrages"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Our government gave the Taliban<\/a> the names of American citizens and Afghans who helped us.<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,\u201d said a defense official quoted by Politico<\/a>, which broke the story.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The thought apparently was that the Taliban would then help us to evacuate these people.<\/p>\n

Such naivet\u00e9 (did our officials really think the Taliban would help us?), foolishness (didn\u2019t they foresee the likely consequences?), heartlessness (didn\u2019t they care how this would endanger our people?),\u00a0 and incompetence (why would anyone think to do this?) are staggering.<\/p>\n

Further reporting<\/a> gives more detail and tells how this worked in practice:<\/p>\n

A senior source on Capitol Hill told Fox News that the list was not \u201cevery single person in country\u201d but rather a set of names \u201cwhenever they wanted a specific group to come through.\u201d The source said that this created problems with the Taliban both blocking people it knew were going to the airport and denying entry to others who were qualified \u201cbecause they knew that those people were not a priority for the U.S.\u201d Those people, the source said, were \u201cessentially doomed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This doesn\u2019t make ratting out our own people to the Taliban, which is already roaming through the city murdering people on their \u201ckill lists,\u201d<\/a> any easier to take.<\/p>\n

But, according to President Biden\u2019s talking points, getting out of Afghanistan was going to be messy however it took place, and the American people do not support those kinds of \u201cforever wars\u201d and want our troops brought home.<\/p>\n

Well, before President Biden gave the pullout order, we had 2,500 troops<\/a> in the country, which was enough to buck up the Afghan army, fend off the Taliban, and hold the country together.\u00a0 After he pulled them out, we has sent\u00a05,000 troops<\/a> back in, in order to help with the evacuation.<\/p>\n

So we now have more troops<\/em> in Afghanistan than we did before Biden pulled them out!<\/strong><\/p>\n

These 5,000 troops are not allowed to engage in combat, though.\u00a0 Despite being there to help with the evacuation, they are not allowed to establish a corridor for safe passage to the airport, nor are they rescuing our people from their homes or hiding places.\u00a0 They are mainly being used to keep desperate Afghanis out<\/em> of the airport, for fear that they will over-run the facilities.<\/p>\n

As a result, those troops are sitting ducks.\u00a0 And, indeed, a suicide bomber<\/a> plunged into the crowd of people trying to get through the gates and set himself off, killing, as of the last count, 13 Americans and 79 Afghanis, with other reports putting the number of Afghani dead at 170 and wounding hundreds more.<\/p>\n

This is the largest number of Americans who died in Afghanistan in one action since 2011.<\/a>\u00a0 And these are the only<\/em> Americans who died in Afghanistan since February 2020.<\/a><\/p>\n

So we now have more<\/em> of our troops dying in Afghanistan than we did before Biden pulled them out!<\/strong><\/p>\n

The suicide bombing attack was organized by ISIS, which has reconstituted<\/a> itself in Afghanistan, as has Al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n

The more we learn, the worse it gets.\u00a0 Another puzzler is why we abandoned our military air base in Bagram so that we have to depend on the Kabul airport for our evacuations.\u00a0 The civilian airport in Kabul has only one runway and is in the middle of the city, whereas the Bagram air base has multiple runways and modern facilities, allowing for much bigger capacity and much better security.<\/p>\n

It turns out<\/a> that our military brass chose to abandon the air base in Bagram in favor of working out of the Kabul airport because the former would require more personnel to operate it.\u00a0 President Biden insisted that no more than 600 or 700 military personnel be left to oversee the evacuation, so our generals had to accommodate the Commander-in-Chief in making a quick, complete, and orderly evacuation impossible.<\/p>\n

\u201cMakes you feel unclean.\u201d\u00a0 Sinful and unclean.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Photo: \u201cMarines guarding an evacuation checkpoint at Kabul Airport on 20 August 2021\u201d by Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla \u2013 https:\/\/www.dvidshub.net\/image\/6795412\/evacuation-hamid-karzai-international-airport, Public Domain, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=109032225<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our government gave the Taliban the names of American citizens and Afghans who helped us. And now more American troops are in Afghanistan than there were before Biden pulled them out. And more of them have been killed in one action since 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":56786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,49],"tags":[98,11092,11089,11059],"class_list":["post-56777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","category-war-2","tag-afghanistan-war","tag-afghanistan-withdrawal","tag-president-biden-and-afghanistan","tag-taliban-victory-in-afghanistan"],"yoast_head":"\nWe Provided the Taliban with Kill Lists, & Other Outrages<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Our government gave the Taliban the names of American citizens and Afghans who helped us. 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