US Troop Draw Down in Afghanistan by 2021

In Afghanistan’s war-torn countryside, America’s exit means one thing: Peace

At a tiny, two-pump gas station off the two-lane highway running through Afghanistan’s Logar province, Mohammad Farooq, the attendant, was unequivocal in his view of the United States.

“Thank God the Americans went away,” Farooq said one recent morning, smiling.

“Since they left, we don’t see ambulances every day. We don’t see fighting or people injured. It’s very good now”...

U.S. pledges to pay relatives of innocent Afghans killed in drone strike

The U.S. Defense Department said Friday that it was working to provide condolence payments to relatives of 10 innocent Afghans killed in a mistaken drone strike and to help relocate some of them to the United States.

The payments were discussed in a virtual meeting Thursday between Dr. Colin Kahl, undersecretary of Defense for policy, and Steven Kwon, founder and president of the nonprofit group Nutrition & Education International. The Pasadena charity had employed Zemari Ahmadi, who was mistaken for a terrorist and killed in the Aug. 29 strike on the family compound...

Taliban wins backing for aid at Moscow talks, with regional powers saying US and allies should pay

Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers won backing from 10 regional powers at talks in Moscow on Wednesday for the idea of a United Nations donor conference to help the country stave off economic collapse and a humanitarian catastrophe.

Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Iran and five formerly Soviet Central Asian states joined the Taliban in calling for the UN to convene such a conference as soon as possible to help rebuild the country...

Washington chose not to attend the talks, citing technical reasons, but has said it may join future rounds...

ISIS in Afghanistan Could Attack U.S. Within 6 Months: U.S. Intelligence

The Islamic State group's affiliate in Afghanistan is poised to develop the capability to launch attacks against the U.S. in as soon as six months, U.S. intelligence agencies believe.

One of the Pentagon's top civilian officials revealed that assessment at a Senate hearing Tuesday morning, seemingly surprising some members on the dais at a time of widespread scrutiny into whether the Biden administration made the right decision to withdraw fully from its longest war zone.

"It's precisely that threat that we need to remain vigilant, and disrupt," Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday morning – the latest hearing into the calamitous U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. "We actually are fairly certain they have the intention to do so"...

U.S. Intelligence Agencies Did Not Predict Taliban’s Rapid Takeover Of Kabul, Report Says

The extensive reports produced by U.S. intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the country’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan did not predict the speed with which the Taliban would take over the capital city of Kabul, according to a Wall Street Journal review of these materials...

The Journal obtained summaries of nearly two dozen intelligence reports produced by four key agencies: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the State Department’s Intelligence bureau.

In a report on their findings published Thursday, the newspaper said many predicted the Taliban would take over Kabul, but did not anticipate it would happen in mid-August, when U.S. forces were still on the ground...

THE ONCE AND FUTURE DEFEAT IN AFGHANISTAN

“Everyone is failing us.” These were the first words that Ashraf Ghani uttered — not as he fled the advancing Taliban on Aug. 15, 2021, but in March 2002 as we sat down to dinner on a chilly and wet night on my first post-9/11 visit to Kabul. I had known him since 1984, first as an academic colleague and then as a World Bank official. We had collaborated as informal advisors to U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi during his first assignment from 1997 to 1999, and then as part of the United Nations team in 2001, when the two of us served as Brahimi’s advisors during the Bonn Conference that set the framework for the post-Taliban government...

Afghanistan needs a political settlement as much today as it did on Aug. 14, 2021. If the Taliban persist in doing something that they themselves, in their more lucid moments, have said is impossible — imposing the rule of one group over Afghanistan — their “Islamic Emirate” will meet the same fate as its predecessors.

Over a late-night dinner in the fall of 2009, Holbrooke commented that the United States was using the same programs in Afghanistan as it had in Vietnam, where he had started his career in the early 1960s. It had changed the names, but what hadn’t changed, he said, is that they still didn’t work. The Taliban, too, may change the names of all their government’s programs and operations. They may even change the name of the state, but the victims will remain the same.

No misconduct in deadly US drone attack in Kabul: Pentagon review

A United States drone attack that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, in the Afghan capital Kabul in August did not violate the laws of war, an internal Pentagon review has concluded.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday, US Air Force Lieutenant General Sami Said said “execution errors”, including “confirmation bias” and “communication breakdowns”, contributed to the deadly attack.

But Said, who acts as inspector general of the US Air Force, said it was not a violation of the law of war or a result of negligence.

“It was an honest mistake,” Said said. “But it’s not criminal conduct, random conduct, negligence...”

Military Can’t Find ISIS Safe House That Prompted Kabul Drone Strike

The U.S. military has not located a suspected Islamic State safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan, that officials initially said led to an American drone strike on Aug. 29 that mistakenly killed 10 civilians, including seven children, according to two senior military officials.

Two days before the drone strike, military officials said they had determined through electronic intercepts, aerial surveillance and informants that ISIS planners were using a compound about three miles northwest of the Kabul airport to facilitate future attacks involving rockets, suicide explosive vests and car bombs.

But an inquiry into the drone strike by the Air Force’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, said that was wrong. “We have not found any particular safe house,” he said in a telephone interview after making his findings public last week...

US worried about rise in ISIS-K attacks in Afghanistan, official says

The United States is worried about an uptick in attacks by Islamic State's affiliate in Afghanistan and remains deeply concerned about al Qaeda's ongoing presence there, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Tom West said on Monday...

U.S. officials believe that ISIS-K could develop the ability to strike outside of Afghanistan within six to 12 months and that al Qaeda could do the same within one to two years...

Every US citizen who wants out of Afghanistan offered departure, State Department says

The State Department has arranged a means out of Afghanistan for the last remaining U.S. citizens who are seeking help departing, a senior State Department official told ABC News.

It is an important milestone for the State Department, nearly three months after President Joe Biden ended the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and the unprecedented, chaotic evacuation operation.

But the situation on the ground has shifted rapidly and repeatedly, making this "milestone" a moving target...