And it’s a very big one: the virus was over when Trump left office.
Hey, he convinced tens of millions of people that his landslide loss was actually a landslide win. I think he can probably convince them that he personally eradicated the virus and Joe Biden came along and re-introduced it into the country. They want to believe it:
It could be another Dunkirk situation. If so, that’s good. There was a happy ending to that one. Trump must have fallen asleep half way through.
This thread from an Afghanistan banking official is fascinating. It sounds as though the Taliban doesn’t really understand how international finance works:
This thread is to clarify the location of DAB (Central Bank of Afghanistan) international reserves
I am writing this because I have been told Taliban are asking DAB staff about location of assets
If this is true – it is clear they urgently need to add an economist on their team
First, total DAB reserves were approximately $9.0 billion as of last week.
But this does not mean that DAB held $9.0 billion physically in our vault.
As per international standards, most assets are held in safe, liquid assets such as Treasuries and gold
The major investment categories include the following assets (all figures in billions)
(1) Federal Reserve = $7.0
– U.S. bills/bonds: $3.1
– WB RAMP assets: $2.4
– Gold: $1.2
– Cash accounts: $0.3(2) International accounts = 1.3
(3) BIS = $0.7
Interesting note was that the IMF had approved a SDR650 billion allocation recently.
DAB was set to receive approximately $340 million on August 23rd.
Not sure if that allocation will now proceed with respect to Afghanistan
Given Afghanistan’s large current account deficit, DAB was reliant on obtaining physical shipments of cash every few weeks.
The amount of such cash remaining is close to zero due a stoppage of shipments as the security situation deteriorated, especially during the last few days
On Friday morning, I received a call notifying me that there would be no further USD shipments (we were expecting one on Sunday, the day Kabul fell)
On Saturday, banks placed very large USD bids as customer withdrawals accelerated.
For the first time, I therefore had to limit USD access to both banks and dollar auctions to conserve remaining DAB dollars.
We also put out a circular placing maximum withdrawal limits per customer
During the day, afghani depreciated from 81 to almost 100 and then back to 86
On Saturday at noon, I met with President Ghani to explain that the expected Sunday dollar shipment would not arrive.
On Saturday evening, President Ghani spoke with Secretary Blinken to request dollar shipments to resume. In principle it was approved.
Again, seems ridiculous in retrospect, but did not expect Kabul to fall by Sunday evening.
In any case, the next shipment never arrived. Seems like our partners had good intelligence as to what was going to happen.
Please note that in no way were Afghanistan’s international reserves ever compromised.
Assets are all held at Fed, BIS, RAMP, or other bank accounts. Easily audited
We had a program with both IMF and Treasury that monitored assets. No money was stolen from any reserve account.
Given that the Taliban are still on international sanction lists, it is expected (confirmed?) that such assets will be frozen and not accessible to Taliban.
I can’t imagine a scenario where Treasury/OFAC would given Taliban access to such funds
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/08/17/treasury-taliban-money-afghanistan/
Therefore, we can say the accessible funds to the Taliban are perhaps 0.1-0.2% of Afghanistan’s total international reserves. Not much
Without Treasury approval, it is also unlikely that any donors would support the Taliban Government.
I believe local banks have told customers that they cannot return their dollars – because DAB has not supplied banks with dollars
This is true. Not because funds have been stolen or being held in vault, but because all dollars are in international accounts that have been frozen
Taliban should note this was in no way the decision of DAB or its professional staff.
It is a direct result of US sanctions policy implemented by OFAC. Taliban and their backers should have foreseen this result
Taliban won militarily – but now have to govern. It is not easy.
Therefore, my base case would be the following:
– Treasury freezes assets
– Taliban have to implement capital controls and limit dollar access
– Currency will depreciate
– Inflation will rise as currency pass through is very high
– This will hurt the poor as food prices increaseOriginally tweeted by Ajmal Ahmady (@aahmady) on August 18, 2021.
It sounds as though the Americans weren’t the only ones who didn’t anticipate all the possible contingencies. This is the sort of thing that should give both parties something to take to the negotiating table as they try to work through the challenges of this withdrawal. It seems to me that this offers the Americans an opportunity to get their people out and deal with the refugees. And, in the end, it may end up benefiting the ordinary Afghans who remain by averting an economic disaster.
Possible? Maybe.
New polling from Data for Progress.
New polling from Data for Progress shows that voters still support President Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, even after learning that Taliban fighters have captured these cities. Voters support the decision to withdraw by a 14-point margin, including Democrats by a 51-point margin, Independents by a 13-point margin, and nearly a third of Republicans.
(Republicans are total hypocrites, of course.. What else is new?)
It’s interesting that 45% of Republicans want to give Afghans visas. Keep and eye on that. It could change very quickly.
Does everyone recall that Trump ran in 2016 on a policy of banning all Muslims from the US? His voters do:
After a few days of road-testing scattered messages, major players in the GOP and conservative media have started to coalesce around a unified message to Afghans seeking refuge in the United States: Stay the hell out of my country.
As President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan has unfolded with the Taliban quickly retaking power and an exploding refugee and humanitarian crisis, immigration advocates and human-rights groups have blasted the Biden administration for its failures to adequately prepare for the evacuation and resettlement of thousands of Afghans and their families. The leader of the GOP, former President Donald Trump, mocked his successor (and was sure to fundraise off of the chaos), issuing a statement on Monday saying, “Can anyone even imagine taking out our Military before evacuating civilians and others who have been good to our Country and who should be allowed to seek refuge?” and dubiously alleged, “Under my Administration, all civilians and equipment would have been removed.”
Trump’s spokeswoman did not provide comment following inquiries on whether the ex-president meant to advocate for resettlement in the U.S., or in third-party countries. But four people close to the president, including two former senior administration officials who worked directly with Trump on immigration and refugee policies, cast doubt that the ex-president was inviting Afghans to the homeland.
“That is not the Donald Trump I know,” one ex-official remarked.
On Tuesday night, Hannity aired a new interview with Trump, during which the former president riffed for a bit on the topic, before shuffling onto the next subject. “We have the military here and we take the military out before we took our civilians out, and before we took the interpreters and other, we want to try to help with, by the way I am America First,” Trump rambled to Fox News host (and his longtime friend and adviser) Sean Hannity. “The Americans come out first, but also we will help people that help us. We have to be very careful with the vetting because there’s some rough people in there, but we will help those people.”
If the former president’s message was muddled, Trump’s most visible supporters were happy to sharpen the tone.
Fox News, a vanguard of the MAGA movement, set the tone of opposition to resettling Afghans fleeing the Taliban. Starting late Monday night, the network’s primetime lineup responded to the images of refugees huddled in the cargo bay of a C-17 with a collective “not here.”
Primetime host Tucker Carlson moaned that Afghans had “invaded” the country and that “millions” of refugees would swarm the U.S., “probably in your neighborhood,” while Laura Ingraham wondered whether America’s promises to Afghan employees and soldiers were really valid in the face of “thousands of potentially unvetted refugees” entering the country. Both Fox News stars have for years been informal advisers to Trump, including by privately counseling him on policy matters during his presidency.
In Congress, House Republicans like Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) called reports of Afghans heading to the U.S. as “disturbing” and warned against “releasing tens of 1000’s of Afghans into our communities.” Montana’s Republican congressman Matt Rosendale warned that the Taliban’s takeover in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal was “not an excuse to flood our country with refugees from Afghanistan.” Mary Miller, a freshman congresswoman from Illinois, let her priorities be known on Twitter. “Refugees must be vetted. Keep America safe!”
On Tuesday morning, Steve Cortes, a Newsmax host and former Trump 2020 adviser, tweeted, “Not one Afghan should be coming to America. They should stay in [the] region. We have bases in Iraq and supposed allies in the Gulf — time for UAE, Saudi Arabia, India, [and] Israel to all step up.” The same day, fellow Newsmax personality Emerald Robinson posted, “We have 80,000 Afghan ‘allies’ who want to be evacuated to the US? That’s the same number as the Taliban. Tell those people to grab a rifle and fight for their country.”
In the chaotic mess left behind by the Biden administration’s lack of planning, MAGA stalwarts instead saw a deviously clever strategy unfolding. Charlie Kirk, of TPUSA and a friend of the Trump family, speculated as such, echoing the premise of the white nationalist “replacement theory,” which holds that left-wing politicians are engaged in a conspiracy to replace white Americans with non-white immigrants. Biden, he said during a Monday podcast appearance, “wants a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently,” mirroring the premise of white-supremacist “replacement theory.”
Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota and frequent target of the right, came to the United States as a teenage refugee from Somalia.
Some prominent conservatives have coated their anti-refugee rhetoric with a flaccid veneer of compassion, suggesting that Afghans fleeing from the Taliban takeover of their country would be happier closer to home.
“Humane refugee policy emphasizes relocation as close to home as possible, maximizing finite resources & enabling possible return when conditions allow,” former Trump speechwriter and chief immigration adviser Stephen Miller tweeted, slightly ahead of the curve on Sunday, warning that the Biden administration would do to the United States “what Angela Merkel did to Germany” by giving refugees safe haven.
“Those rejecting regional resettlement strategies in favor of mass U.S. resettlement have a political, not humanitarian, objective,” he added.
But the suggestion that regional partners should take on the majority of refugees from Afghanistan ignores American culpability for the looming refugee crisis, advocates told The Daily Beast.
“Consideration should be given to the refugee caseload the countries in the region already bear,” said Aimee Ansari, executive director of Translators Without Borders, which provides translation services for humanitarian nonprofits. “People who cross international borders are refugees and, under the Refugee Convention, they have a right to have durable solutions.”
Refugee advocates on the ground say that those angling for countries like Pakistan, Qatar, and Kuwait to accept the tens of thousands of refugees who hope to leave Afghanistan are merely shifting humanitarian responsibility from the richer countries who caused the mess to poorer ones that are already struggling under the burden of longstanding regional instability.
“For years, many interpreters and their families have been moving around and living in hiding to avoid Taliban reprisals,” said Maya Hess, founder and CEO of Red T., a nonprofit that works to protect translators and interpreters in conflict zones. “To displace them again into a temporary situation is simply inhumane.”
But for people like Miller, Trump, and their congressional and media allies, the comfort and rights of fleeing Afghans is hardly the real concern. The same day the former president took time to issue a statement supposedly sympathizing with those who “seek refuge,” he also released a brief statement airing his true grievance and priority, as it relates to Biden’s policies—which is to say, spreading lies that he won the 2020 presidential election that Trump clearly lost.
“The corrupt Presidential Election of 2020 got us here. Never would have happened if I were President!” Trump complained in a two-sentence written statement on Monday.
I predict that Trump will be with them within days. He doesn’t lead on this sort of thing — he follows.
I think I’m with Norm Eisen on this one. I know the political reasons for it. Prosecuting a former president for what they did as president is not something that’s eve been done and they are reluctant to set a precedent. But Trump tried to overturn a legal election by pressuring his subordinates to lie and break the law. Do we just let that pass?
That seems like the more dangerous precedent to me. If Trump is found to have broken the law he should be prosecuted. In fact, he should be prosecuted on the basis of the Mueller Report alone — he obstructed justice, no doubt about it.
It seems like only yesterday that the President of the United States was standing on the pile of rubble of the World Trade Center with a bullhorn telling the world, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” That iconic image of President George W. Bush promising vengeance 20 years ago was America’s primal scream in the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the echoes of that scream still reverberate today.
But to watch the febrile pundits on TV and read the agitated screeds of hundreds of observers and experts over the past few days, you would never know that the Afghanistan “mission” came out of such a primitive war cry. The sad truth is the war was an act of revenge. The attacks of 9/11 were truly terrifying and wanting to hit back was a natural human response. But leaders are supposed to rise above such emotions and make rational decisions in the national interest. Clearly, that doesn’t always happen. For a variety of reasons, they instead start wars, which are the most irrational human activity of all. America has been acting irrationally about Afghanistan ever since.
Of course, they always have a reason and the Afghanistan war had a bunch of them. It was said that we needed to invade to find the villainous mastermind Osama bin Laden who had been sheltered there. President Bush famously said, in another of his primitive statements that everyone seemed to relish, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” But he rejected an offer by the Taliban to hand over bin Laden in exchange for the U.S. to stop bombing their country. He wanted that war.
Sensing that it was important to provide some reasoning that wasn’t quite as crude, it didn’t take long for other rationales to quickly become part of the marketing for the war. There was also the long-held dream of such neoconservative think tanks as the Project for a New American Century of a Pax Americana, a grandiose plan to bring Jeffersonian democracy to the world at the hands of the mighty U.S. military. Where Bush had once promised a “humble” foreign policy, he now backed the idea that wreaking revenge by invading Afghanistan would be very good for Afghanistan.
But perhaps the most cynical of all the rationales they offered in those early days before they pivoted to Iraq and pretty much put Afghanistan on cruise control was the unctuous, insincere, marketing campaign they launched to convince the American people that they were fighting the war on behalf of Afghan women. On November 17, 2001, just a few weeks after the attacks, they sent out First Lady Laura Bush to make a speech about the repressive Taliban regime’s treatment of women, all of which was true but was clearly designed to make the war into something nobler than the crude act of vengeance it really was. After all, feminists and others had been speaking out about Taliban oppression of women for years. A year and a half before the attacks, the New York Times had featured a hair-raising interview with two sisters by Katha Pollitt, chronicling the truly brave work by RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, called “Tearing the Veil.” American feminists had been agitating for Afghan women’s rights for some time. There was zero interest in the issue on the right until the Bush administration decided to make it a central rationale for the war in Afghanistan.
This was reportedly the bright idea of Karen Hughes, the Bush senior adviser and supposed communications expert who, as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy a few years later, went on a “listening tour” of the women of the middle east and made quite a fool of herself. By that time, the Bush administration had made women’s rights in the region one of their main cover stories for the wars they were waging in the region.
But let’s not kid ourselves. It was propaganda, not unlike the infamous “babies killed in incubators” stories that Bush senior’s administration had put out before the first Gulf War. Only this time the stories were true. The Taliban really were monstrous toward women, it’s just that nobody in authority cared until it became convenient to use it to justify their actions.
To be sure, there is plenty of blame to go around on this one.
President Obama foolishly escalated Bush’s war, buying the myth that America could nation-build its way out of the problem. Trump then invited the Taliban to come to Camp David for what was essentially a U.S. surrender ceremony but was talked out of it at the last moment. His blathering on the subject was incoherent as always. And now Biden appears to have stubbornly clung to Trump’s negotiated timetable when he probably should have shown more flexibility in order to execute the withdrawal efficiently. They are all responsible for what’s happening there now and what will happen there in the months to come.
But it’s George W. Bush who bears the most responsibility for the mess in Afghanistan. He was the man who started that war to fulfill America’s hunger to hit back and set the U.S. and Afghanistan on the road to two long decades of losses in blood and treasure that accomplished almost nothing in the end.
Beyond reportedly saying “that was weird” at Trump’s inauguration, Bush was very, very quiet when the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban the timeline for withdrawal last year. He had to know that meant that the U.S. had ceded power to them and was assuming they would be back in power sooner or later. Yet he is now very concerned once again with the plight of women in Afghanistan.
“Laura and I have been watching the tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan with deep sadness,” the former president said this week. “Our hearts are heavy for both the Afghan people who have suffered so much and for the Americans and NATO allies who have sacrificed so much.”
Forgive me for being cynical but this song has gotten very stale coming from him. At what point will he ever take his share of responsibility for what happened there for the last 20 years? These lugubrious paeans to the Afghan people don’t make up for the fact that he and his crew used them as pawns in his administration’s global ambitions.
And, by the way, the American people know it.
According to a Business Insider poll this week, more Americans blame Bush for U.S. failure in Afghanistan than all the presidents that succeeded him. Whether the media keeps showing him as the nice old guy who cares about the Afghan women or not, he will always be that guy with the bullhorn — and that isn’t such a feel-good moment 20 years later.
The original John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act needed a little tweaking in the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions. So Terri Sewell of Alabama helped do just that, writes New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore:
Alabama congresswoman Terri Sewell on Tuesday introduced in the House the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act aimed at restoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to how it existed before the Supreme Court gutted its key enforcement provision in 2013. Standing in front of the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where Lewis and other civil-rights activists were brutally attacked by Alabama state troopers as the whole world watched, a moment that inspired the passage of the original VRA, Sewell hailed the “personal sacrifices of amazing foot soldiers, many known and unknown, right here on this bridge in my hometown 56 years ago.”
An earlier version of the bill passed in the House in 2019, but it was updated in part to reduce its vulnerability to another court challenge on the grounds of having outdated data on discriminatory voting practices, which was the basis for the 2013 Supreme Court decision. The revised bill was also worded to address a more recent SCOTUS decision that made the use of lawsuits against election officials under Section 2 of the VRA more difficult.
As amended, the bill would not address the laundry list of abuses in the original, such as partisan gerrymandering, campaign finance matters, etc. But it would, Kilgore writes, “in the covered jurisdictions, stop any changes in law and policy governing voting and elections (including redistricting maps) until they can be reviewed for possible dilution of minority voting opportunities or representation.” That would at least restore the Voting Rights Act status quo destroyed by the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision in 2013. It would again inhibit, if not prevent passage of, the the kinds of anti-democratic bills Republican legislatures issued in a flood after Shelby, and passed more and faster after Donald Trump’s loss in 2020.
Kilgore concludes:
Unfortunately, the John Lewis Act has the same political problem as the For the People Act: a lack of the Republican support necessary to overcome a certain filibuster in the Senate. When Manchin made his version of the John Lewis Act the centerpiece of an attempted grand compromise voting-rights bill, Republican senators other than Lisa Murkowski shot it down quickly. But precisely because it simply reestablishes what was once the near-universally supported law of the land, it is likely a better vehicle than S. 1 to shame the GOP and rally stronger long-term support for enforceable democracy.
Better but not sufficient. The GOP gave up shame for Lent and then gave up Lent.
Greg Sargent wonders why Democrats are not relentlessly hammering Republicans on the Jan. 6th insurrection. “Democrats” is perhaps overly broad. One Democrat is building a campaign around it: Abby Finkenauer. The former congresswoman is running for U.S. Senate in Iowa against 87-year-old Chuck Grassley:
Finkenauer regularly discusses the Capitol riot in highly personal terms. As she told the Des Moines Register, on Jan. 6 she watched her “former colleagues and my friends get attacked,” with the result that “the world changed and so did I.” And during her announcement video, she ripped Republicans: “Since the Capitol was attacked, they turned their backs on democracy, and on us.”
The collapse of Afghanistan allows Republicans to turn their back on their failed domestic insurrection, too. There’s nothing the GOP enjoys more than a twofer. The Taliban sweep of Afghanistan allows Republicans to blame Joe Biden for the messy situation overseas while stoking the hot fires of their base’s xenophobia at home. Wait. It’s a threefer. The human tragedy in Afghanistan has virtually obliterated talk of the Trump/MAGA coup attempt in January, speaking of overthrowing governments.
If nothing else, the takeover of the Afghan government should remind us of what a successful insurrection by fundamentalists looks like. In fact, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan should sound a warning klaxon for Americans. The Taliban minority hate democracy and pluralism the way Republicans and their fundamentalists allies do here. The religions are different; the fundamentalism is the same. Fundamentalism is the same everywhere. As are bullies with guns.
Ponder, American women, what a fundamentalist takeover of our government might mean for your constitutional rights and bodily autonomy. (I don’t have to paint a picture.)
Ponder, American minorities, what restoring Republican control of Congress will mean for your being treated, even in theory, as political equals with a voice in your destiny. Not to mention what it means for your holding any political power to back that up that voice.
Ponder, Americans not in thrall to Trumpism, the further erosion of control over your schools and your cities when authoritarians have gerrymandered not just Congress, but state governments to lock in their rule the way Confederates did for 100 years after losing the Civil War.
Wrapped in the stars and stripes, forces that have already rejected democracy in the world’s most enduring one find inspiration in the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. That should give us all pause and set our jaws firmly to see the American Taliban soundly defeated.
“Not too many Democrats have talked about the violence and its rupturing of our illusions about democracy in such human terms,” Sargent writes of Finkenauer. “You’d think Democrats could make them pay a political price for it.”
If Democrats don’t, the Trump insurrection will disappear down the memory hole, and perhaps this democracy, too, will “die slowly in history.”
