On Afghanistan, White House and Pentagon Offer Secrecy, Inconsistency As Bombs Fall
Reactions to the situation on the ground have become rife with doublespeak and misinformation.
A deadly attack struck Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on Thursday. In the aftermath, secrecy, contradiction, and even misinformation have dominated updates from the White House and Pentagon.
Consider the attack itself: on one hand, the death count has ticked higher, with new figures indicating over 170 Afghans and 13 American service members have perished from the incident. But on the other hand, the number of reported explosions — and therefore the putative number of suicide bombers involved in the attack — has decreased.
Contrary to all accounts on Thursday, Army Major General William Taylor confirmed on Friday that a single suicide bomber is now associated with the attack in Kabul:
A deadly attack in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul on Thursday was carried out by a single suicide bomber at a gate to the airport and there was no second explosion at a nearby hotel, the Pentagon said on Friday.
A strange reversal.
Also curious and telling was a divergence between official accounts — that our “mission” in Afghanistan will either end or be “complete” on the troop withdrawal deadline of Aug. 31 — and statements from multiple officials that made oblique suggestions to the contrary.
Here’s what President Biden said at one point during prepared remarks on the Kabul attack (emphasis to follow will be mine):
Here is what you need to know: These ISIS terrorists will not win. We will rescue the Americans who are there. We will get out our Afghan allies out [sic], and our mission will go on.
At another point, Biden added details and heightened the ambiguity:
[BIDEN]: I’ve instructed the military, whatever they need — if they need additional force — I will grant it. . . .
And with regard to finding, tracking down the ISIS leaders who ordered this, we have some reason to believe we know who they are — not certain — and we will find ways of our choosing, without large military operations, to get them.
[NBC’S KELLY O’DONNEL]: Inside Afghanistan, Mr. President?
[BIDEN]: Wherever they are.
Notice that Biden won’t rule out military operations per se. Nor will he preclude them from occurring in Afghanistan. Continued presence in the region for other purposes also seems on the table:
We will complete our mission. And we will continue, after our troops have withdrawn, to find means by which we [can find] any American who wishes to get out of Afghanistan. We will find them and we will get them out.
How exactly we will “find” them remains a mystery for now. But the continued presence of special operations and intelligence operatives, as I discuss in a prior piece on Afghanistan, seems by far the most obvious and likely route.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby reinforced this notion with his own carefully chosen and ambiguous remarks during a press conference on Friday:
. . . the U.S. government will pursue a variety of ways to help any Americans who want to get out after our military presence at the airport has ended to be able to help them get out. While Afghanistan is a unique case, it’s not completely separated from the larger effort that the United States government pursues all over the world.
When we know that Americans are at special risk, we do what we can to get them out, and that doesn’t necessarily involve the United States military. I certainly wouldn’t speculate one way or another about what's going to happen after this particular mission ends, but I would not envision a significant military role in that effort going forward.
Again, nothing definitive is offered. But the recurrent use of words such as “large” and “significant” to downplay potential military action beyond Aug. 31 raises red flags. We should question why the Pentagon has chosen to err so strictly on the side of informational caution here.
Elsewhere in his comments, Kirby got explicit about the Pentagon’s wish to shroud ongoing military operations in secrecy:
. . . I want to take the opportunity to convey to all of you that as we did before, when we began a retrograde, a withdrawal, back in April, we were very judicious about the detail that we were putting out.
And I just want to level set with all of you that you’re going to see us become more judicious now, going forward, as we get closer to the end of the month, about what information we’re giving you in terms of how many troops on the ground. I would not expect us to be giving that number out going forward, and what the capabilities are, and where they are and what they’re doing. We’re going to be very, very mindful of the operational security element of this.
Security concerns are understandable, but this lack of transparency will keep U.S. citizens in the dark about the military forces they in some sense fund and are supposed to direct. And when it comes to who our military intends to pursue beyond the, now all but meaningless, end-of-the-war deadline, we are getting a mixed bag of answers.
For the most part, official discussion has placed all emphasis on the Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), a group whose prominence on the world stage seemed to spawn ex nihilo in about a week. Kirby, however, refused to rule out Taliban involvement in the attack when pressed:
[REPORTER]: John, how can you say with such certainty and how can general McKenzie say with such certainty that the Taliban were not involved in the suicide bombing? I understand that you’re reliant on them for protection around the airport, but are you ruling out them being involved because you’re so dependent on the Taliban right now?
[KIRBY]: Actually, I didn’t hear General McKenzie put it that way, Jen. . . . [The] General said, “Of course there was a failure somewhere obviously.” And he even alluded to the fact that it could have been at a Taliban checkpoint. We’ve not been certain about that at all. There’ll be an investigation. We’ll try to learn as much as we can about what happened. And I really don’t want to get ahead of that process.
And yet despite this ambivalence, we have already begun bombing IS-K targets with unmanned drones. An account from CNN feels worth quoting at length:
“U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan,” spokesman Capt. Bill Urban said Friday. “Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties.”
The identity of the person targeted in the US airstrike has not yet been confirmed.
A defense official told CNN that the target of the drone strike who was killed was believed to be “associated with potential future attacks at the airport.” The US had located him and “we had sufficient eyes on and sufficient knowledge” to strike, the official said. “He was a known entity.”
The official said the US was not calling the person a “senior” ISIS-K operative.
One knows things have gotten weird when even CNN has started to highlight suspicious elements in the security state’s informational flows:
ISIS in Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, has claimed that an ISIS militant carried out Thursday’s suicide attack at an airport gate, but provided no evidence to support the claim.
To recap, officials are not ruling out Taliban collusion — either real or U.S.-fabricated — in Thursday’s attack, and we have started blowing up rank-and-file IS-K. We have no evidence authenticating IS-K’s claim to responsibility for an outright slaughter of innocents and U.S. troops.
But still, we are bombing various people in the extremist group while possessing limited means even to confirm who exactly has been killed. We are reporting these attacks in international media. And moreover, we are doing this before we get a huge number of additional civilians and troops out of the crowded airport in Kabul.
If we don’t want to provoke another attack, this appears to be exactly how not to do it.
The situation is a communications breakdown. One U.S. official leaked to CNN that our evacuation mission would be aborted early, sometime this weekend, but that report was quickly refuted. Other conflicting stories include claims from the Taliban that its forces already control much of Kabul’s airport, a claim the Pentagon denies. Only one thing is clear amid the din.
The clock is ticking on more violence. And we should stop attacks and end our culpability.