Month: October 2021

First there was “critical race theory.” Then came the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

America’s top generals are fighting on terrain they’ve never war-gamed for: congressional hearings where Republicans are calling for their heads and questioning the wisdom of the Pentagon like never before.

Over the past two days, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin were hauled before Senate and House committees to answer for the way they’ve led the military under President Joe Biden and advised him on leaving Afghanistan a month ago, when more than 120,000 people were evacuated and 13 service members killed before the Taliban raised its flag over Kabul on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

The hostile questioning from Republicans underscored that, while America’s longest war is now over, the fight for the 2022 midterms is just getting started. Afghanistan has become a top issue in conservative media and a rallying cry for Republican candidates eager to make the demoralizing exit a referendum on Biden as his poll numbers fall. And if the Pentagon’s reputation becomes collateral damage in the process, so be it.

“It’s not about Afghanistan. It’s about incompetence,” said Curt Anderson, a GOP strategist who advises senators such as Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Florida’s Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“Democrats and some people in the press are peddling this idea that this will go away,” Anderson said. “But that is a joke, the idea that, ‘oh, this happened. The commander in chief and everyone under him are completely incompetent, and voters will forget about that.’ What? Under what rock are you hiding?”

Democrats, however, point to polling that shows domestic issues are more important to voters, who supported withdrawing from Afghanistan — although they thought it should have been better handled. They also argue that Republicans are being hypocrites in blaming Biden for ending an occupation begun by a Republican president, George W. Bush, and for proceeding with the withdrawal masterminded months before by predecessor Donald Trump.

It was Trump, Democrats also note, who appointed Milley as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the first place. Milley earned the left’s ire when he participated in a controversial photo-op with Trump in summer 2020 after protesters were cleared from a park near the White House. When Milley said later that he was unwittingly used as a prop, Trump and the right turned on the general.

But Biden kept Milley on, and the attacks from the right intensified in a June congressional hearing in which he parried a question about critical race theory with a lengthy, viral-ready soliloquy about the military’s need to better understand all theories, and pushed back against GOP criticism that the armed forces had become too “woke.”

The twin issues — the war in Afghanistan and the culture war at home — collided on Wednesday when Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) attacked Milley for both incidents, as well as for admitting he was a source for at least three recent books that portrayed Trump as an erratic and dangerous leader who mused about improperly using the military to interfere with the 2020 election that he lost.

“Perhaps we would not have had 13 members and hundreds of Afghans killed and service members wounded and citizens abandoned if you had been focused on duty to this country instead of pandering to the Biden administration’s woke social experiment with the U.S. military, doing book interviews and colluding with officials,” Jackson said, calling on Milley to resign.

After an exasperated sigh, Milley responded: “I serve at the pleasure of the president, Mr. Jackson.”

The day before, in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Hawley (R-Mo.) namechecked the new book “Peril” by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, positing that participating in the effort had “distracted” the general from the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

“General, I think you should resign,” Hawley said.

In another fiery exchange, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) accused Milley of leaking “private conversations with the president” to Woodward and other authors — a claim Milley rejected, to no avail.

“I think what you did with making time to talk to these authors, burnishing your image, building that bluster, but then not putting the focus on Afghanistan … is disappointing to people that have served with you or under you, under your command, and it does not serve our nation well,” Blackburn said.

Biden has made clear he is standing behind Milley, saying earlier this month that he has “great confidence” in the general after the Woodward revelations first came to light. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki also defended the Pentagon leaders for their approach to the Afghanistan withdrawal.

“They gave their advice, as they should, and then they implemented the president’s decision,” she said.

During the hearings, Democrats defended Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and the military’s evacuation effort, which flew 120,000 Afghan allies and American citizens out of Kabul after the Taliban takeover. On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) applauded the Pentagon for conducting “the largest human airlift in history,” and said that staying in Afghanistan was not worth the price the U.S. would pay in money and lives.

The day before, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a fierce critic of the military industrial complex, stressed how the failure in Afghanistan traces back 20 years. She accused Republicans of double-talk, noting that they were “far less interested in this topic” during the Trump administration “as the Afghan government and the Afghan army racked up one failure after another.”

“The Republicans’ sudden interest in Afghanistan is plain old politics,” she said.

With Democrats on defense for Milley and Biden, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) barraged Milley with leading questions and lacerated the general for his previous assessment that the Taliban would not be able to readily defeat the Afghan military.

“You really blew that call, didn’t you, general?” Gaetz said.

He also accused the chair of having spent more time in conversations with Woodward than “analyzing the very likely prospect that the Afghanistan government was going to fall immediately to the Taliban.” Gaetz emphasized his point by brandishing a copy of the book.

“If we didn’t have a president that was so addled, you all would be fired,” Gaetz told the panel, “because that is what you deserve.”

Milley vigorously defended himself during both hearings, preempting lawmakers’ questions about the Woodward book by directly addressing them in his opening statement. He said that his two phone calls with Gen. Li Zuocheng during the final tumultuous months of the Trump administration were intended to reassure the Chinese that the U.S. would not launch an attack.

The first call, in October, was made at the behest of then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper; the second, just days before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was done at the request of the Chinese and coordinated with then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, Milley said.

The general stressed that the calls were part of his regular duties to “deconflict military actions, manage crisis and prevent war between great powers armed with nuclear weapons.”

He also fired back at lawmakers asking why he had not resigned in protest after Biden dismissed his advice to leave troops in Afghanistan, arguing that such a move would have been “an incredible act of political defiance.”

“This country doesn’t want generals figuring out what orders we are going to accept and do or not. That’s not our job,” he said.

Gaetz and Milley first clashed in June when the Florida Republican brought up critical race theory and tried to draw Austin, who is Black, into the discussion. Austin demurred. But Milley didn’t and incensed the right in June during an impassioned exchange with the lawmakers.

“I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military … of being ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there,” Milley said.

“I’ve read Mao Tse Tung. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” Milley continued. “So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”

Gaetz later called Milley “the chairman of the woketopia,” and Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson said the general is “not just a pig, he’s stupid.” Former President Trump himself called on Milley to resign over the remarks in June, calling them “sad” and “pathetic.”

The brutal back-and-forth has surprised even veteran Pentagon officials, who are accustomed to Republicans being more deferential to the military — although less so during Democratic administrations — and who worry that the military could become just another institution that’s dragged into partisan warfare.

“My concern is that the military will be seen politically and that the trust in the military will be affected by it,” said David Lapan, a former spokesperson for the Pentagon and, most recently, the Department of Homeland Security under Trump. “The military has been one of the most-trusted institutions in the United States, but the worry is people will start to doubt the military’s allegiance to the country.”

Mary Kaszynski, a spokesperson for the Democratic-aligned VoteVets group, said American voters “are sophisticated,” were able to see that Trump tried to misuse the military for his own ends and that Republicans are being “hypocrites” for their vociferous criticisms of the withdrawal.

“Foreign policy is never voters’ No. 1 issue. And it’s very unlikely to be the No. 1 issue a year from now,” she said, pointing to polling done by the group last month. “We’re in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic. There’s the economy. People are worried about jobs, health care and climate. Even among veterans, a community that skews right, there’s strong two-to-one support to end the war.”

While Democrats believe Afghanistan will fade, Republicans have signaled they’ll keep the pressure on in Congress, the campaign trail and in media. The ongoing resettlement of tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees also promises to keep the issue alive in the coming months.

Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, a Marine Corps veteran, acknowledged that Afghanistan by itself won’t be a central issue of the midterms, but Republicans say it will be part of a broader narrative they want to tell about Democrats’ foreign policy, not unlike the aftermath of the 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

“Afghanistan is not Dunkirk. It’s more of a Benghazi multiplied by 10,” he said.

On a rainy day in early May, weeks after President Joe Biden announced the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, senior leaders from across the government gathered in the basement of the Pentagon for a broad interagency drill to rehearse the withdrawal plan.

During the exercise, top Pentagon leaders including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley stressed the need for American troops to get out of the country as quickly as possible to protect against renewed Taliban attacks.

Their plan called for the military to draw down to zero within 60 days of Biden’s official order, or roughly mid- to late-June — far sooner than the Sept. 11 deadline the president originally set. One of the most crucial decisions involved handing over Bagram Air Base to the Afghans as the last step of the withdrawal once U.S. forces were so depleted that they could no longer reasonably secure what had been the hub of the American military effort there for the past 20 years.

“All of them made the same argument,” said one defense official, who was in attendance at the drill on May 8, and whose account includes previously unreported details. “Speed equals safety,” the person said, referring to the message conveyed by the military leaders.

The military brass had done a remarkable 180. For the first four months of 2021, as the White House reviewed the withdrawal timeline inherited from the Trump administration, Austin and Milley, as well as senior military commanders, urged Biden to leave a few thousand troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. Both were overruled. Once that happened, the Pentagon embraced as quick a withdrawal as possible, including from Bagram. And the Pentagon stuck to that approach through the beginning of July, regardless of the conditions on the ground.

The remnants of the U.S. military at Bagram left in the dead of night on July 1 handing off the base to Afghan commanders who complained they weren’t even notified of the departure.

“They just decided they lost the argument, and OK fine let’s get the heck out of dodge,” said one former senior defense official.

At every stage of the withdrawal, the White House went along with the Pentagon’s recommendations, accepting a timetable that ended up going faster than Biden laid out in the spring. When the Taliban started to sweep through northern Afghanistan in the summer, different plans were discussed but never altered. The priority for the Pentagon was to protect U.S. troops and pull them out, even as diplomats and Afghan allies stayed behind.

By early August, when it was clear Kabul would fall sooner than expected, the American military presence was down to fewer than 1,000 troops. It was too late to reverse course.

None of the civilian officials who were at the May 8 meeting at the Pentagon questioned the military’s rapid drawdown plan, according to multiple officials. Those attendees included national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy, Jon Finer; CIA Director William Burns; Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the ambassador to the United Nations. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was not present, but was represented by his deputy, Brian McKeon. Besides Austin and Milley, other Pentagon officials included Gens. Frank McKenzie and Austin Scott Miller, the commanding generals of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, respectively, who joined via secure video.

The internal withdrawal debates and plans are at the heart of the congressional inquiry into the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. The House and Senate armed services committees will question Austin, Milley and McKenzie in a series of hearings this week.

The call on Bagram looms especially large. The U.S. handover spooked the American-backed military and government, took away the main U.S. military air base before the pullout was complete and appeared to accelerate the collapse. Some officials say the lack of access to Bagram also made it harder for the U.S. and allies to carry out the evacuation mission in the days after Kabul fell. Reeling from the sudden collapse of the Afghan government and armed forces, the Biden administration made the decision to rapidly redeploy 4,000 troops to secure Hamid Karzai International Airport and assist in the frantic evacuation efforts; 13 were killed on Aug. 27 in a suicide bombing at one the airport’s gates.

This account of the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is based on interviews with 17 current and former officials — most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak candidly without fear of retribution. Their accounts shed new light on the Pentagon’s decision to hand over Bagram, and the back and forth between senior military leaders and the White House leading up to the American exit from Afghanistan.

Spokespeople for the National Security Council and the State Department declined to comment on the May drill.

Summer Spiral

The old Soviet air base at Bagram had been the center of American military operations in Afghanistan since the last Taliban government fell in 2001. Thousands of troops, American and other civilian contractors and Afghans lived and worked at Bagram. The base has two runways, compared to a single one at the civilian airport 35 miles away in Kabul.

The Pentagon pullout plan presented early in Biden’s term called for the base to be handed over to the Afghan military by late June or early July.

Miller, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, recommended handing over Bagram as part of the withdrawal plan he briefed to Austin as far back as March when the Pentagon chief made his first visit to Kabul, according to the first defense official.

The American commander, who had also initially advised senior leaders to keep a few thousand troops on the ground, stressed during the March meeting that American troops would be vulnerable to renewed Taliban attacks if they stayed in the country for an extended withdrawal. Miller was adamant on that point — he had months to think about the best way to pull out, as then-President Donald Trump had ordered the military to get out by May 1.

One senior administration official noted that the date-based withdrawal was inherited from the previous administration, and that the Taliban was clear that they would hold Washington to that agreement.

“General Miller made clear that speed mattered, and that if directed to withdraw, that his preference was to move as quickly as possible,” said the first defense official.

The military’s first priority was getting its troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible after the initial May 1 deadline, in case of renewed Taliban attack.

The proposal assumed that the Afghans would control the base for at least a few months after the American withdrawal, allowing the U.S. to use the base for an evacuation if needed, the official said.

But as the drawdown neared completion in June and early July, some military officials were concerned that it was moving too quickly. This was one reason brass pushed American contractors to leave the country early, rather than on the administration timeline, said the former senior defense official.

“The one-stars and two-stars.… They are very discouraged because I think it shows some serious flaws in our four-star leadership,” the person said. “To me that was a big mistake by our military: they didn’t have to get them out that fast and they could have kept open some other options.

“The military should’ve pushed back harder and not pulled their people out the minute they didn’t win the argument with Blinken and Biden.”

Second thoughts, briefly

In the weeks leading up to the fall of Kabul, and as the Taliban blitzed across the country, military commanders became increasingly concerned about the morale of the Afghan security forces.

The military briefly paused the drawdown from Bagram in June so the White House could get a better sense of what leaving the base would mean. As a part of the planning process, Sullivan and others from the interagency drilled down on the military’s plan to hand over Bagram in July. The Wall Street Journal first reported the episode, which POLITICO confirmed independently.

Sullivan was worried about the security situation in Afghanistan, and wanted to understand the military’s tactical plan for the drawdown. At the time, a large number of staff remained at the embassy in Kabul.

Ultimately, the president affirmed the Pentagon’s decision to leave Bagram on the original timeline.

Another factor in the planning was that by early July, when Bagram was handed over, the drawdown was already essentially complete. Any changes to the plan would have taken “a reversal of policy,” because the military would have had to bring combat capabilities and troops back into the country, according to a second defense official.

The 2,500 troops in the country when Biden took office had dwindled to fewer than 1,000, split between the international airport and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Officials have since argued that keeping Bagram would have required thousands of additional troops. They did not notify Afghan partners precisely when they were leaving due to concerns that the Taliban could target American forces leaving the base or the Afghans who remained, they said.

Flying in thousands of more troops to secure Bagram, as well as maintaining the necessary operations at the Karzai airport, made “zero sense,” the senior administration official said.

Within hours of the Americans leaving on July 1, looters descended on the base, grabbing gas canisters and some laptops. Afghan officials said the U.S. left behind millions of small items, including bottles of water and ready-made meals known as MREs, as well as thousands of civilian vehicles, hundreds of armored vehicles, and some small weapons and ammunition for the Afghan troops.

Critics say the perceived abandonment played into the hands of the Taliban insurgents and further eroded the morale of the Afghan forces.

“[T]hey lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” one Afghan soldier told the Associated Press at the time.

On Aug. 8, McKenzie sent Austin a new assessment about Kabul’s prospects: the city could be isolated within 30 days of the American withdrawal.

Just seven days later, the Taliban captured Bagram and released thousands of prisoners held there, including many with ties to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

The fallout

The Pentagon has defended the decision to give up Bagram, saying the administration’s cap of roughly 700 troops forced the military’s hand. With force levels dwindling due to the scheduled withdrawal, priority was given to securing the embassy over continuing operations at Bagram, Milley said in August.

“If we were to keep both Bagram and the embassy going, that would be a significant number of military forces that would have exceeded what we had,” Milley said. “So we had to collapse one or the other, and a decision was made.”

Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said that Austin is “comfortable with the degree to which senior defense and military leaders contributed to the policy-making process.”

Kirby also defended the decision to turn over Bagram near the end of the withdrawal process, noting that it was “in keeping with the mission the military had been assigned: to reduce our footprint to a level commensurate with protecting our diplomatic presence in Kabul.”

In the end, the Pentagon got the withdrawal senior leaders wanted. But the Taliban ultimately advanced faster than anyone anticipated, forcing the Biden administration to scramble to rush thousands of additional troops to Kabul to pull together a mass evacuation effort.

“I think [the administration] accepted risk to try to accomplish competing policy priorities, and unfortunately that risk was realized when the Taliban swept into Kabul,” said a senior defense official. “The result was a tragedy. It’s been hard for our people to process.”

Andrew Desiderio, Connor O’Brien and Bryan Bender contributed to this report.

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Photographer Aishy captured Tokyo and Osaka at night.

Aishy is a French Art Director, Photographer, and Video Director. In January 2020, he traveled from Tokyo to Osaka with the aim to explore both cities during nighttime. As a result, he produced an amazing cyberpunk-like photo series named ‘Hunt The Dark Neon’. All images were shot with a Canon 5D mark II and finished using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Below you can see the stunning images of the series. For more, please have a look at Aishy’s portfolio on Behance or follow this talented photographer on Instagram.

All images © by Aishy. Do not hesitate to browse through our Photography section to find more inspiring images.

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Hugo Pereira Arquitetos designed a single-family house on a plot of extraordinary morphological characteristics.

In 2020, Hugo Pereira Arquitetos completed the project of a single-family house on a plot of extraordinary morphological characteristics. The biggest challenge was to design a house that would affect the natural environment as little as possible. Due to the existence of several cork oak trees, the house is located in an area of ​​natural protection.

A close relationship between nature and architecture became an integral part of the project. The architects say: “The lightness of this construction is accentuated by the details and environments related to each other, and the mixture of green of the various trees and shrubs, a constant presence in any space of the house.”

Below you can see a selection of photographs shot by Ivo Tavares. Do not hesitate to visit his website to see more outstanding architectural photography.

All images © by Ivo Tavares. Feel free to browse through our Architecture, Interior Design, or Photography sections to find more inspiring projects.

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