How Leaving Afghanistan Could Set India up for Chinese Invasion, Last Known American Hostage Abandoned to the Taliban, Former CDC Head "Threatened" Over COVID Research (The Five for 08/17/21)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
This is one of the most horrific and tragic weeks for U.S. foreign policy in my lifetime.
I’m assuming you’re up on the broad strokes of what’s happening in Afghanistan, so I’ll be covering the smaller stories here.
For $90, you can provide an Afghan refugee family with all the basic needs for life via a donation to Care Afghanistan. I hope you’ll consider doing what you can for the innocent people who have been abandoned by the American government.
[one]
Before we dive into the Afghanistan news, a major story that’s been largely overlooked due to the fall of Kabul.
A former CDC head says he was the recipient of threats for considering the possibility that COVID originated in a lab rather than jumped species from bats.
Robert Redfield, the ex-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said he was "sidelined" and "threatened" for saying that the coronavirus had escaped from a lab.
Back in March, he had told CNN he believed the virus originated in a lab in China, a point of view for which he was roundly criticized at the time, especially given the conclusion by the World Health Organization (WHO) that such a theory was "extremely unlikely."
The WHO report said COVID most likely started spreading between humans via animals and there could have been a direct spread from bats to humans, or that some secondary animal took the virus from bats to humans.
However, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admitted last month there had been a "premature push" to rule out the theory the virus might have escaped from a lab.
"I think I'm very disheartened when I have seen how the scientific community failed to approach both hypotheses with an open mind," he told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on Monday.
"I was very rapidly sidelined, threatened," said Redfield, "because somehow I believed as a virologist that this virus may have come from the laboratory."
Science, under the thumb of politics, isn’t.
[two]
Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist who fled to America, has been a knowledgeable and harsh critic of the Islamic Caliphate system that holds her home nation under oppression.
The same system of oppression officially opened up shop in Kabul yesterday.
Masih, who’s long covered the plight of women living in Islamic extremist regimes, shared the video of a young girl in Afghanistan who was
The unnamed teen laments:
We don’t count because we were born in Afghanistan.
I cannot help but crying. I have to wipe my tears to be able to film this video.
No one cares about us.
We’ll die slowly in history.
Isn’t it funny?
This girl, who may not survive the week, wasn’t alone in her belief that the only two options were to flee or be hurled into unmarked graves at the hands of the Taliban.
NPR shared cell phone footage of citizens attempting to climb onto the final Air Force jets leaving Kabul.
[three]
One of the under-covered aspects of the fall of Kabul is the terrorism India will now face, with Afghanistan as a the newly Taliban controlled nation will likely resume it’s old ways of launching attacks into neighboring India.
The fall of the Taliban in 2001 ended the use of Afghanistan as a terror base. That reality could now return to Afghanistan. Reports suggest that several British nationals had travelled to fight alongside the Taliban. The last time this happened was between 2014 and 2017 when a terrorist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) operating in Syria and Iraq, controlled a territory the size of Great Britain in both countries. ISIS actively solicited recruits from across the world and over 10,000 persons are thought to have travelled to its territories. The prospect of Afghanistan becoming another nursery for terrorist groups is what could cause serious worry in New Delhi. In 1999, four Pakistanis hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC 814 from Kathmandu and diverted it to Kandahar in Afghanistan. There, protected by the Taliban, the hijackers secured the release of terrorist leaders Maulana Masood Azhar, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar and Omar Saeed Sheikh in exchange for the 150 airline passengers.
Azhar went on to launch his terrorist outfit, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, responsible for sensational terrorist attacks, including the December 2001 attack on India’s Parliament. More recently, the JeM claimed responsibility for the February 14, 2019 suicide bombing at Pulwama in which 40 CRPF troopers were killed. On February 26, IAF jets bombed the JeM training camp in Balakot, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, in retaliation to the attack. The prospect of Pakistan moving its camps into Afghanistan—away from the range of retaliatory attacks by India--is one of the scenarios that cannot be wished away. There is also the danger of warehouses of sophisticated arms and ammunition the Taliban captured from the Afghan government forces being sold or diverted to India-specific militant groups. The prospect of battle-hardened foot soldiers being infiltrated to fight in India remains a distinct possibility.
The presence of the US in Pakistan and Afghanistan meant Indian agencies could access intelligence relating to these two countries. Indian intelligence agencies cooperated closely with their counterparts in Afghanistan’s external intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security. All that will come to an end now. A former Indian intelligence official compares the situation as akin to someone turning off the lights in those countries. These developments add a worrying new dimension for India’s war on Pakistan-based terror.
India, the world’s largest democracy and a vital ally to the U.S., is now boxed in between religious extremist nations Afghanistan and Pakistan on one side, and the aggression of the Chinese Communist government on the other.
Earlier this year, Chinese and Indian forces clashed, killing 20. Today, both nations patrol their shared border with tanks and helicopters, operating just below open warfare.
With the recent alliance between the Taliban and China, India has a right to be concerned about an open military invasion coming simultaneously from the east and west.
What is happening in Afghanistan now is horrific, but it’s not even the worst case scenario.
The worst case scenario is rushing back in to defend India from a Taliban/Chinese invasion.
And I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that could be the start of WWIII.
For the record, I’m not saying this will happen. Or that it’s likely.
Just that the table is set for a global conflict if India is invaded.
Maybe that never happens. Or, maybe the U.S. doesn’t rush to the aid of our ally, choosing an isolationist foreign policy.
But it’s worth comparing today’s global map to 20 years ago, when:
China’s economy, economic power and sheer military size were much smaller.
Russia hadn’t tested out invading smaller countries and/or trying to overthrow governments via black ops (read the Reuters report here)
The main threat was small groups of terrorists who could do big damage (bombs, 9/11 attacks, chemical and biological weapons, etc), but not hold territory. Now, those terrorist groups are in control of nations, including Afghanistan, currently, and a large part of the Middle East, 2014-2017 or so (ISIS controlled enough land to be considered an independent nation in 2017).
Things look a lot more like WWI than WWII out there. Rather than a singular wave of an overwhelming army Germany’s blitzkrieg campaign into Poland), various factions of seemingly disparate empires and ideologies (like anti-religion Communist China and fundamentalist terrorist dictators the Taliban and Iran’s caliphate) are getting really buddy buddy.
That doesn’t mean the fire of war will break out.
But there’s too much dry kindling laying around right now, and all it takes is a spark.
[four]
Mark Frerichs is the last known American hostage being held by the Taliban. In all likelihood, the fall of Afghanistan means he’ll never come home.
This one feels a little more personal, as Frerichs resided just minutes from where I had previously lived in suburban Chicago.
Frerichs, 58, is a civil engineer from suburban Lombard. In January 2020, he was kidnapped in the capital city of Kabul, likely by the Taliban’s Haqqani network, which in the past has kidnapped other American and British citizens for ransom or prisoner swaps.
The Trump administration failed to make Frerichs’ release a condition, or even a bargaining chip, when negotiating with the Taliban for the withdrawal of American troops. Now the Biden administration, while committed in principle to working to gain the release of any American hostages, has done little in public support of Frerichs.
Time is running out. That is the problem. What little negotiating leverage the United States has to secure Frerichs’ freedom will become next to nothing once our nation’s military presence ends in Afghanistan. It also will become more difficult for the U.S. to generate the intelligence needed to find Americans and conduct rescue operations.
A nation’s foreign policy cannot turn on the fate of just one person. The notion that the U.S. should continue in a failed war in Afghanistan indefinitely unless Frerichs — or another hostage, the American writer Paul Overby, who disappeared in Afghanistan in 2014 — is set free is difficult to argue.
Yet there’s no doubt the Trump administration missed its chance; it failed Frerichs, a veteran of the U.S. Navy. And we fear the Biden administration is doing the same, rushing toward unilateral withdrawal with blinkers on, failing to pull out all diplomatic stops to bring Frerichs home, too.
This article, from July, fails to mention until the very last paragraph…that Donald Trump is not the President.
It’s disheartening to learn of the Trump administration’s failure here, but the article the reporting irresponsibly waits until the final paragraph to mention that junior Senator Tammy Duckworth (herself a combat vet in Afghanistan who lost both legs when her helicopter was hit by a rocket) has been lobbying President Biden for the release of Frerichs.
Two administrations failed March Frerichs.
I agree with the Sun-Times article’s point that foreign policy “cannot turn on the fate of just one person.”
But we didn’t need to get here.
Until this weekend, we had (at least some) leverage for the release of Frerichs.
Now that the Taliban controls the Afghanistan capital of Kabul?
Hey, at least America can’t be called racist.
We’ve treated a Caucasian American civilian the same way we treated our 90% of our Arab Afghani allies who applied for refugee status.
Both have been equally abandoned to torture and death at the hands of the Taliban.
[five]
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) run Global Times issued an open threat to the independent democracy of Taiwan in the wake of the U.S. surrendering Afghanistan to the Taliban.
The most disturbing wording is “once a war breaks out,” rather than “if a war breaks out.”
Again, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to point out that leaving Afghanistan puts the world a step closer to global conflict.
[epilogue]
The photo on the left is the U.S. Diplomat being extracted from Kabul, Afghanistan in an emergency evacuation in 2021, due to the city being surrounded by the Taliban.
The photo on the right is the U.S. Diplomat being extracted from Saigon, Vietnam in 1975, due to the city being overrun by Viet Cong.
History just repeated itself, down to the visuals.
With a heavy heart,
-sth