Some SIV Questions

A Just the News piece centered on plans to temporarily house 10,000 Afghan refugees at Ft. Bliss (assuming President Joe Biden (D) will deign move to help them escape in the first place) also had some information on how what requirements Afghanis must satisfy in order to be eligible for the Special Immigrant Visas that would allow them to enter the US.

  • worked with US military or through the Chief of Mission authority as translators or interpreters in Iraq or Afghanistan
  • provide a picture ID
  • proof of a US military background check
  • letter of recommendation
  • filing fee of $435
  • go through in-person interview at a US embassy or consulate

In the chaos of the collapse of Biden’s effort in Afghanistan—a chaos he’s said in plain terms that he knew would occur—and the parallel (!) collapse of Afghanistan, how will these Afghanis satisfy any of those criteria?

Where will they get the picture ID that having one of on their person puts them at immediate risk of butchery by Taliban thugs?

In what way will they prove the existence of a background check—especially in the face of the precipitous nature of Biden’s “retrograde?”

Where will they get those USD435—AFN37,500 and rising (as of 19 Aug) in the face of the Biden Retrograde?

At what US embassy or consulate will a prospective Afghani undergo his in-person interview?

What is Biden doing to reduce the already existing backlog of 10s of thousands of SIV applications already in his State Department’s pipeline?

What is Biden doing to streamline this cumbersome—even were all the pieces easily accessible—process?

It’s certainly critical that Afghan refugees be successfully sorted out from terrorists masquerading themselves as Afghan refugees before anyone is allowed into our nation, but it’s also clear that neither Biden nor anyone else in his Executive Branch (particularly his State and Defense Departments) are prepared to deal with this situation, or even are serious about catching up with their Afghan refugee crisis, much less their Afghanistan nation crisis.

The Biden/Harris Failure

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has most of the right of the matter. Never mind that she speaks from one side of the aisle, the truth of her remarks on this item is independent of that.

Biden has betrayed our allies and our own military in the wake of his failure. Thousands of translators and Afghan Special Forces who bravely fought alongside American troops now risk being executed in the streets. And the sacrifices made by our military men and women—who have fought, been wounded, and died in Afghanistan for decades—have been disrespected beyond measure.

I wrote that McDaniel has mostly right. She actually has understated the matter.

President Joe Biden (D) also has betrayed the United States, all of us citizens, and especially those Americans still in Afghanistan.

National security officials in the Biden administration told a bipartisan group of Senate staffers on Tuesday that about 10,000 to 15,000 US citizens remain in Afghanistan, according to two Senate aides.

According to the aides, the administration officials—from the State and Defense departments, as well as the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—also told the assembled Senate staffers that there is no plan to evacuate Americans who are outside Kabul, as they do not have a way of getting through the Taliban checkpoints outside the Afghan capital.

Not even a matter of no plan for their evacuation. No interest at all in going and getting them. They’re on their own, abandoned by the Biden/Harris administration (Joe’s required designation).

But Biden gets his vacation. The Biden/Harris administration’s Vice President Kamala Harris, also a Progressive-Democrat, gets her disappearance.

Does Biden’s perfidy—or Harris’—have any bottom at all?

America Last Again

In the collapse of the US presence in Afghanistan and the collapse of the Afghan “army” and so of that pseudo-nation, there is a wholly justified effort to help Afghan refugees escape from the coming destruction and slaughter.

However.

This is what our President Biden/Harris and their Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin are doing about that:

[Department of Defense Press Secretary Admiral (Ret) John] Kirby says American citizens will not be given priority evacuation over Afghan SIV [Special Immigrant Visa] applicants.

In Biden/Harris’ and Austin’s own words, recited by Kirby:

We’re going to focus on getting people out of the country, then sorting it out at the next stop. It’s not going to be just Americans first, then SIV applicants. We’re going to focus on getting as many folks out as we can.

It’s not going to be just Americans first.

Wow.

Not even in this administration’s present failure are these folks putting Americans anywhere but the back of the metaphorical bus.

Oblivious

President Joe Biden’s (D) Secretary of State Antony Blinken, just a few days ago in the depths of the Afghan collapse:

We’ve known all along: the Taliban are at their strongest since 2001.

Yet Biden chose to withdraw, completely and relatively suddenly, it turns out, at the height of the Afghan fighting season. When he, Blinken says, knew the Taliban were at their strongest. He chose not to wait until winter. He chose not to carry out former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal plan, even as he claimed he was trapped by it, both in his Saturday “statement” and Monday afternoon when he finally showed up for work—briefly; he hustled off the stage rather than take questions—to make his excuses for his everyone else’s failure in Afghanistan.

That speech came after he and Vice President Kamala Harris (D) both were absent from duty until after Kabul had fallen, together with our embassy; the Kabul airport was blocked from incoming/outgoing flights; and he’d surrendered Bagram Air Base north of the fallen capital.

This is a level of dereliction of duty that is amoral and seriously dangerous to our national security, to our nation itself.

A Thought on Afghanistan

First, a bit of background. Over 20 years ago, when President Bush the Younger first sent our troops into Afghanistan, the troops’ mission was to burn the Taliban to the ground for their role in al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on our homeland—housing them and their leader bin Laden.  Those forces did that in very short order. Mission Accomplished, and the men and women should have been brought home.

Then the mission drifted into getting bin Laden himself, as intelligence developed to identify his location with sufficient specificity. OK, that was mostly reasonable; we thought we knew where he was, so go get him. It turned out, given the terrain, we didn’t have enough specificity—which cave in a several-hundred square mile warren of caves was he? We couldn’t find him, and while the hunt should have continued (it did, and we got him somewhere else some years later), the troops should have been brought home. Both of those missions reached resolution within the first year.

But then the mission drifted again, this time into nation building—which we suck at—and into training and equipping the Afghan military. Even our successes in Germany, Italy, and Japan occurred only because those nations started out with a long history of Western concepts of freedom and governance. Japan had, if not the long history, an extended familiarity, and some practice with the concepts. Afghanistan, though, in the particular case, had no concept of anything beyond tribal and clan interaction; there was, and is, no understanding of Western concepts, except, perhaps intellectually (certainly not in their gut) on the part of a few elitists, but nothing at all in the general population—or in the Taliban and its popular supporters.

That last drift (frankly, facilitated by the first drift, even if that one was done for the Very Best Reasons) has provided the disaster that’s unfolding. I’ll leave aside, here, our own failure to continue fighting like we meant it, our own failure to continue fighting toward an actual, measurable victory under the new mission.

So why the Afghan failure now?

Here are a few questions, the answers to which will go some way to understanding our failure and—were our politicians to look beyond their own campaigns for their next election—preventing similar failures in the future, whether that prevention amounts to no more nation-building or to nation-building with an understanding of what’s involved, originating culture by originating culture.

What were we doing if 20 years of training has led to a military force that knows only how to run away when they don’t have Western troops beside them or in front of them or overhead?

What were we doing if 20 years of training has led to a military force that can’t maintain its own equipment—and no, lack of parts and manuals is no excuse. That lack hurts, but the Afghan military can’t use the parts and manuals they have.

What makes us think air power is the be all and end all, that we still need to stay to provide the Afghan forces “critical” close air support, air transport, air…? The Afghan army outnumbers the Taliban’s forces by 3:1 or more. The Taliban forces are still going through the Afghan army like Patton’s crap through a goose, when they can catch up with that running-away army—and the Taliban have no air power at all: no close air support, no air transport, no…. Although they’re gaining the makings of an air force as they capture all that abandoned Afghan equipment.

What were we doing if 20 years of working/training/cajoling the political side of Afghan has left the nation (and apparently, that’s a loosely defined term as it’s applied to Afghanistan) with a tribal/clan-oriented government whose members are more interested in their tribal and clan imperatives than they are their national imperatives? The nature of that fractiousness—far different from the Party fractiousness of the Western nation(s) we’ve been, sort of, trying to get the clans to emulate—is illuminated in the rolling out of the existential threat the Taliban is to the nation of Afghanistan. And given the nature of the Taliban, that also presents a soon-to-be-realized existential threat to the clans and tribes themselves.

The only Afghanis who recognize the benefits of some of the 20 years of our social training are the women who were able to go to school. There’re hints there, too—regarding treatment of women and regarding education in general—if we’re interested in learning from them.

The rate of collapse of the Afghan military, days after our withdrawal, and so of the nation it was supposed to be protecting, shows how thin the veneer of our training—military, governance, social.

If we don’t know what we’re doing, it would behoove us, and those we otherwise would purport to build up, to not try to do it until we figure it out.