BIDEN'S HAITIAN DISASTER

 

[Published in Newsmax]

Once again, the Biden administration is proving incapable of protecting Americans.

As Haiti descends into violent anarchy, Biden’s State Department is telling Americans they are on their own. State Department spokespersons keep saying they are "exploring options" for bringing Americans to safety.

This is a replay of Afghanistan, where the U.S. abandoned Central Asia’s largest and most fortified military base while the embassy shuttered, leaving thousands to fight their way through mobs to the civilian airport. Thousands more were left behind or unaccounted.

This is a potentially tragic abdication of a fundamental responsibility.

The State Department’s website is filled with extensive guidance on how Americans will be evacuated during emergencies as "conditions in a country degrade."

This is a well-established moral and legal mandate.

Diplomatic and military personnel have extensive experience evacuating Americans, including just a year ago from Haiti (in July of 2023).

One of the largest evacuations, 15,000 U.S. citizens, took place in Lebanon during July 2006. A year later, the General Accountability Office (GAO) provided a detailed narrative and assessment of how things are supposed to work.

A key element in saving American lives was the requirement of the U.S. Embassy to develop and maintain an Emergency Action Plan (EAP) for evacuating U.S. citizens.

The EAP is required of every U.S. Embassy in the world.

I participated in the development and management of the EAP during my tenure as Director of the U.S. Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa during the mid-1980s.

The EAP was designed to evacuate all identified U.S. citizens within 48 hours of a crisis in the host country. In my case, this included the 75 Peace Corps Volunteers who were posted throughout Malawi.

I was required to maintain an up-to-date accounting of volunteer locations to the Embassy monthly. Contingency planning for communicating an impending crisis, notifying every volunteer of initiating the EAP, and accounting for all volunteers being safely evacuated was a critical part of my responsibility as Peace Corps Director.

Overlaying my program was the American Embassy’s EAP process.

Every month, the Embassy Team, which included top staff reporting to the Ambassador and heads of each U.S. Agency in the country (such as the Agency for International Development – USAID), were required to update the list of evacuees.

Quarterly, the Embassy Team met in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) to validate the EAP.

At these meetings, we also assessed the current situation relating to Malawi and the region.

This was important because southern Malawi was surrounded by Mozambique, which was in a civil war.

The warring factions would regularly traverse southern Malawi as a short cut and forage for food. Volunteers in the south encountered combatants, and in one case had mortar rounds explode near them.

Meetings with Mozambique and South African officials helped prevent similar incidents.

The Embassy maintained a master list of U.S. citizens working for Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), including missionaries.

The Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) and Chief Counselor Officer were responsible for managing an accurate list and conducting EAP outreach.

To further enhance in-country tracking, every U.S. Embassy began maintaining lists of all American registered under the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP), established in 2011.

Americans travelling to a foreign country may register to receive alerts (including EAP initiation) and be part of the accounting of evacuees should the need arise. 

During the 1980s, every Wednesday morning, the Malawi Embassy Team tested emergency communications with a wake-up call from the Embassy’s Defense Communications Office to each home. Peace Corps Volunteers were informed about the EAP and crisis communications through ongoing site visits to their project sites.

As Chair of the Malawi Volunteer Council, I conducted quarterly meetings with leaders from the counterpart programs of Canada, Japan, Sweden, and the UK to share “best practices” on volunteer operations, including respective EAPs and emergency communications.

Thankfully, the Malawi EAP was never activated. Had such a situation arose, the thoroughness of all involved and their dedication to citizen safety would have prevailed.

The failure in evacuating Afghanistan, and now the callous disregard in Haiti, sadly displays a deterioration of the professionalism that once was the pride of America’s diplomatic operations.

AFGHANISTAN's TRAGIC LEGACY

 

[Published in the Sunday Guardian of India - 9/11’s prologue and epilogue - The Sunday Guardian Live]

For those old enough to remember, 11 September 2001, 9.03 a.m. is burned into our collective memory. It was at that moment that United Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.

For the first time since the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Americans were collectively experiencing horrifying carnage from a coordinated attack on their soil.

The final accounting was devastating: 2,977 killed and over 25,000 injured. The death toll continues to climb as first responders and building survivors perish from respiratory conditions caused by inhaling the chemical-laden smoke. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in human history.

The 911 attacks were central to Osama bin Laden’s goal of luring infidel governments into “long wars of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender”. Bin Laden believed this would lead to economic collapse of the infidels, by “bleeding” them dry. Bin Laden outlined his strategy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” in a 2004 tape released through Al Jazeera.

The driving force behind Bin Laden’s strategy was Wahhabism, a strict, anti-Western version of Sunni Islam.

It all began with the Saudi Royal Family’s ties to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792). Wahhab envisioned a “pure” form of Islam that purged most worldly practices (heresies), oppressed women, and promoted violence against nonbelievers (infidels), including Muslims who differed with his sect. This extremely conservative and violent form of Islam might have died out in the sands of central Arabia were it not for a timely alliance with a local tribal leader, Muhammad bin Saud.

Bin Saud led a minor tribe, until he and Wahhab realized the power of merging Sunni fanaticism with armed warriors. Wahhab’s daughter married Saud’s son, merging their two blood lines to this day. The House of Saud and its warriors rapidly expanded throughout the Arabia Peninsula, fueled by Wahhabism.

In the early 20^th century, Saudi leader, Ibn Saud, consolidated his permanent hold over the Arabian Peninsula. Control of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest sites, gave the Saud family the power to promote Wahhabism as the dominant interpretation of Sunni Islam.

In the mid-1970s, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia used the flood of oil revenue to become the “McDonalds of Madrasas”.

Religious schools and new mosques popped up throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, designed to spread the cult of Wahhabism. Pakistan became a major hub for turning Wahhabi madrasa graduates into dedicated terrorists.

Wahhabi terrorists built a diffused terrorist network. Then some decided to exploit the perpetual bloodfest in Afghanistan.

In 1973, a military coup deposed the last king of Afghanistan. In 1978, Soviet-backed guerrillas killed the military leaders and seized control. This ignited an Afghan civil war, which pitted proxy forces against each other. These forces were backed by Pakistan, China, Islamists (known as the Mujahideen), and the Soviets.

During 1979, the Soviet puppet leader was assassinated and another installed. On 24 December 1979, the Soviet Union took direct action by invading Afghanistan, killing their most recent puppet President, and bringing over 100,000 military personnel into the country. A vicious war erupted between the Soviet military and various Afghan guerrilla factions. Over two million Afghans died.

The Reagan Administration supported the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgents, primarily aiding the secular pro-west Northern Alliance. Arab nations supported the Mujahideen. Osama bin Laden entered the insurgent caldera as a Mujahideen financier and fighter. The Soviets, realizing their occupation was failing, removed their troops and equipment in 1988, leaving behind another puppet government.

After the Soviet Union withdrawal, calls for reunifying Afghanistan by re-establishing the monarchy and strengthening regional leadership went unheeded. Installing a faction-ravaged parliamentary system only led to a new civil war.

By September 1994, the grisly chaos, and US ambivalence about Afghanistan, opened the door for the Taliban, graduates from Pakistan’s Wahhabi madrasas, to begin their crusade to take control of the country. By 1998, the Taliban controlled 90% of Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden, and his Al-Qaeda warriors, made Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan their new base of operations. In exchange, Bin Laden helped the Taliban eliminate their remaining opponents throughout Afghanistan. Bin Laden completed his end of the bargain on 9 September 2001, when Al-Qaeda suicide bombers disguised as a television camera crew blew up Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic, pro-West leader of the Northern Alliance.

Two days later, Bin Laden set his “lure”, with the hijacking of four planes and turning them into guided bombs headed to New York City and Washington, DC.

Osama bin Laden’s “lure” strategy worked. 911 pulled America into Afghanistan.

The recent horrors prove Bin Laden’s strategy continues to shape events.

AFGHAN ABANDONMENT

 

[Published on Newsmax]

America’s catastrophic retreat from Afghanistan did not need to happen.

It was not just a failure of commonsense. It was multiple violations of State and Defense Department regulations.

There are very clear and detailed procedures for evacuating embassy personnel, American citizens, and host country nationals linked to the mission. The Defense Department has its own very clear and detailed procedures. 

These evacuation procedures are institutionalized in the U.S. Code, Code of Federal Regulations, and Executive Orders.

In July 1998, there was a clear and detailed Memorandum of Understanding signed between the DOD and State on evacuation coordination “of U.S. Citizens and Nationals and Designated Other Persons from Threatened areas overseas.” 

Those responsible for ignoring and blatantly violating these longstanding rules must be held fully accountable and punished.

The lives already lost, and the many more lives still in danger, are a terrible price to pay for their criminal incompetence and negligence.

The other outrage is how this widespread malpractice, possibly malicious, violated the norms of protecting Americans and their allies dating back to our nation’s founding.

James Monroe, as ambassador to France, embodied the noblest values of America’s Foreign Service. He established a lasting set of values for those representing America abroad.

When the horrors of the French Revolution swept over Marquis de Lafayette and his family, Monroe and his wife, risked their own lives to save them. This was dangerous.

Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, had watched her grandmother, mother, and sister die on the guillotine. She languished in prison awaiting her own execution, while the Prussians imprisoned her husband.

Monroe’s wife, Elizabeth, braved mobs, and revolutionary guards, to enter the Hotel de La Force prison demanding to see Adrienne. Her display of resolve ended Adrienne’s two-year confinement.

Monroe’s Parisian apartment served as a sanctuary for American’s fleeing the Revolution, including Thomas Paine.

This timeless set of fundamental values was on full display during my tenure as U.S. Peace Corps Director in Malawi, East Africa.

As a member of the Embassy Executive Team, I was involved in evacuation simulations. We identified mustering points throughout Malawi for gathering evacuees and constantly refined ways to quickly move everyone from the official, and unofficial, American communities to safety.

We slept with walkie talkies by our beds, testing them every Wednesday morning.

Visits from NATO officials, and State Department physical security experts, guided us on improving site security and transportation options.

We all played a role in identifying and maintaining contact with Americans living and working throughout the country. These included Americans working with multi-national organizations, such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and WHO.

There was also an array of individuals and families tied to religious missions, NGOs and businesses.

My primary role was to keep the Peace Corps volunteers safe. In the mid-1980s landlines, radios and physical travel were the only means of communication.

This was supplemented by maintaining a seamless relationship with the American Embassy team and officials within the Malawi government at all levels. I visited all 28 districts, building relationships with district officials, mayors and tribal leaders.

This was intended to forge bonds so they would look out for my volunteers and other Americans scattered across the country.

There was also close coordination between the other volunteer networks from Japan, Sweden, Canada and the U.K. My tenure as chair of the Volunteer Council developed collaborative protocols for emergency communication and logistical support.

There were the volunteers themselves. A Peace Corps Volunteer Council served as an ongoing forum for improving the effectiveness and health of the volunteers. It also became an opportunity to coach its members on leadership, communication and problem-solving skills.

The most able became the informal regional leaders for supporting their colleagues in the field, and to serve as hubs for disseminating information, and possibly for mustering in an emergency.

Malawi was generally safe, but the lower third of the country was a peninsula surrounded by Mozambique. From 1977 until 1992 RENAMO, the Cuban and Soviet backed government, fought a vicious civil war with anti-Communist FRELIMO. On countless occasions, the competing forces would transit southern Malawi as a shortcut.

The obsession with safety and health permeated everything we did at the embassy and within the Peace Corps. This is what Americans should always expect from their overseas missions.

It is appalling and abhorrent that these time-honored, and legally binding responsibilities were so completely ignored in the rush to abandon Afghanistan.

THE ROAD TO 911

[Part of Constituting America’s 90 Day Study - Days that Shaped America]

For those old enough to remember, September 11, 2001, 9:03 a.m. is burned into our collective memory.  It was at that moment that United Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. 

Everyone was watching.  American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the North Tower seventeen minutes earlier.  For those few moments there was uncertainty whether the first crash was a tragic accident.  Then, on live television, the South Tower fire ball vividly announced to the world that America was under attack.

The nightmare continued.  As horrifying images of people trapped in the burning towers riveted the nation, news broke at 9:37 a.m. that American Flight 77 had ploughed into the Pentagon.

For the first time since the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Americans were collectively experiencing full scale carnage from a coordinated attack on their soil.

The horror continued as the twin towers collapsed, sending clouds of debris throughout lower Manhattan and igniting fires in adjoining buildings.  Questions filled the minds of government officials and every citizen:  How many more planes?  What were their targets? How many have died?  Who is doing this to us?

At 10:03 a.m., word came that United Flight 93 had crashed into a Pennsylvania field.  Speculation exploded as to what happened.  Later investigations revealed that Flight 93 passengers, alerted by cell phone calls of the earlier attacks, revolted causing the plane to crash.  Their heroism prevented this final hijacked plane from destroying the U.S. Capitol Building.

The final accounting was devastating: 2,977 killed and over 25,000 injured.  The death toll continues to climb to this day as first responders and building survivors perish from respiratory conditions caused by inhaling the chemical-laden smoke.  It was the deadliest terrorist attack in human history.

How this happened, why this happened, and what happened next compounds the tragedy.

Nineteen terrorists, most from Saudi Arabia, were part a radical Islamic terrorist organization called al-Qaeda “the Base”.  This was the name given the training camp for the radical Islamicists who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani, was the primary organizer of the attack. Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi, was the leader and financier. Their plan was based upon an earlier failed effort in the Philippines.  It was mapped out in late 1998.  Bin Laden personally recruited the team, drawn from experienced terrorists.  They insinuated themselves into the U.S., with several attending pilot training classes.  Five-man teams would board the four planes, overpower the pilots, and fly them as bombs into significant buildings. 

They banked on plane crews and passengers responding to decades of “normal” hijackings.  They would assume the plane would be commandeered, flown to a new location, demands would be made, and everyone would live.  This explains the passivity on the first three planes.  Flight 93 was different, because it was delayed in its departure, allowing time for passengers to learn about the fate of the other planes.  Last minute problems also reduced the Flight 93 hijacker team to only four.

The driving force behind the attack was Wahhabism, a highly strict, anti-Western version of Sunni Islam.  

The Saudi Royal Family owes its rise to power to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792).  He envisioned a “pure” form of Islam that purged most worldly practices (heresies), oppressed women, and endorsed violence against nonbelievers (infidels), including Muslims who differed with his sect.  This extremely conservative and violent form of Islam might have died out in the sands of central Arabia were in not for a timely alliance with a local tribal leader, Muhammad bin Saud.

The House of Saud was just another minor tribe, until the two Muhammads realized the power of merging Sunni fanaticism with armed warriors.  Wahhab’s daughter married Saud’s son, merging their two blood lines to this day.  The House of Saud and its warriors rapidly expanded throughout the Arabia Peninsul fueled by Wahhabi fanaticism.  These various conflicts always included destruction of holy sites of rival sects and tribes.  While done in the name of “purification”, the result was erasing the physical touchstones of rival cultures and governments.

In the early 20^th Century, Saudi leader, ibn Saud, expertly exploited the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and alliances with European Powers, to consolidate his permanent hold over the Arabian Peninsula.  Control of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest sites, gave the House of Saud the power to promote Wahhabism as the dominant interpretation of Sunni Islam.  This included internally contradictory components of calling for eradicating infidels while growing rich from Christian consumption of oil and pursuing lavish hedonism when not in public view.

In the mid-1970s Saudi Arabia used the flood of oil revenue to become the “McDonalds of Madrassas”.  Religious schools and new Mosques popped up throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.  This building boom had nothing to do with education and everything to do with spreading the cult of Wahhabism.  Pakistan became a major hub for turning Wahhabi madrassas graduates into dedicated terrorists.

Wahhabism may have remained a violent, dangerous, but diffused movement, except it found fertile soil in Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan was called the graveyard of empires as its rugged terrain and fierce tribal warriors thwarted potential conquerors for centuries.  In 1973, the last king of Afghanistan was deposed leading to years of instability.  In April 1978, the opposition Communist Party seized control in a bloody coup. The communist tried to brutally consolidate power, which ignited a civil war among factions supported by Pakistan, China, Islamists (known as the Mujahideen), and the Soviet Union.  Amidst the chaos, U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubbs was killed on February 14, 1979.

On December 24, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, killing their ineffectual puppet President, and ultimately bringing over 100,000 military personnel into the country.  What followed was a vicious war between the Soviet military and various Afghan guerrilla factions.  Over 2 million Afghans died.

The Reagan Administration covertly supported the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgents, primarily aiding the secular pro-west Northern Alliance.  Arab nations supported the Mujahideen.  Bin Laden entered the insurgent caldera as a Mujahideen financier and fighter.  By 1988, the Soviets realized their occupation had failed.  They removed their troops, leaving behind another puppet government and Soviet trained military.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Afghanistan was finally free.  Unfortunately, calls for reunifying the country by reestablishing the monarchy and strengthening regional leadership went unheeded.  Attempts at recreating the pre-invasion faction ravaged parliamentary system only led to new rounds of civil war. 

In September 1994, the weak U.S. response opened the door for the Taliban, graduates from Pakistan’s Wahhabi madrassas, to launch their crusade to take control of Afghanistan.  By 1998, the Taliban controlled 90% of the country. 

Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda warriors made Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan their new base of operations.  In exchange, Bin Laden helped the Taliban eliminate their remaining opponents.  This was accomplished on September 9, 2001, when suicide bombers disguised as a television camera crew blew-up Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic, pro-west leader of the Northern Alliance.

Two days later, Bin Laden’s plan to establish al-Qaeda as the global leader of Islamic terrorism was implemented with hijacking four planes and turning them into guided bombs.

The 9-11 attacks, along with the earlier support against the Soviets in Afghanistan, was part of Bin Laden’s goal to lure infidel governments into “long wars of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender”. He believed this would lead to economic collapse of the infidels, by "bleeding" them dry.  Bin Laden outlined his strategy of "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy" in a 2004 tape released through Al Jazeera.

On September 14, amidst the World Trade Center rubble, President George W. Bush addressed those recovering bodies and extinguishing fires using a bullhorn:

“The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens”

A rescue worker yelled, “I can't hear you!”

President Bush spontaneously responded: “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

Twenty-three days later, on October 7, 2001, American and British warplanes, supplemented by cruise missiles fired from naval vessels, began destroying Taliban operations in Afghanistan.

U.S. Special forces entered Afghanistan.  Working the Northern Alliance, they defeated major Taliban units. They occupied Kabul, the Afghan Capital on November 13, 2001.

On May 2, 2011, U.S. Special Forces raided an al-Qaeda compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing Osama bin Laden.