Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid on Thursday claimed Beijing was “ready to invest in and reconstruct” Afghanistan as he set out hopes that China would provide a gateway into global markets
Telegraph
The billionaire entrepreneur matched the heights of America’s tech legends but failed to heed warnings that Chinese leader Xi Jinping still called the shots
WSJ
Former British soldier, Ben Slater’s, mission to evacuate 400 Afghans via a third country has failed. His staff have been turned away at a land border. Slater called on the Foreign Office to help his staff escape after ‘complete disaster’ at border
The court’s order, which rejected an emergency request by clinics and abortion-rights advocates, marks a turning point in the legal battle over abortion rights and comes the day the Texas ban went into force. While not a final ruling on the measure’s constitutionality, the court’s action validates, at least temporarily, a novel attempt by Texas lawmakers to insulate antiabortion legislation from court challenge.
The unsigned order came on a 5-4 vote, with most of the conservative justices in the majority.
WSJ
The Taliban has mobilized a special unit, called Al Isha, to hunt down Afghans who helped US and allied forces — and it’s using US equipment and data to do it.
NY Post
“What gulag?” I said.
“The construction crew,” he said: the men in blue jumpsuits from China. Their barracks were straight out of a Russian novel, he said, puffing on a cigarette. Didn’t I know I was living smack in the middle of a huge story?
Politico
This is in keeping with the strategies of presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump of reducing U.S. forces in the Middle East in order to minimize risk. Trump, however, increased the United States’ air defense capabilities in the region after Iranian drones struck a Saudi oil facility in 2019. The Biden administration’s withdrawal appears to be driven by the need to deploy these weapons in other regions. Thus, the question is where are these weapons going, and has something happened to make the transfer necessary? It is difficult to believe that the transfer is designed for near-term threats, since the pending public transfer of significant defensive weapon systems might force a potential enemy to speed up the initiation of war, to get first strikes in before the weapons are installed.
George Friedman
Roger Simon writes:
In a sense, the current governor and the editor of the state’s most prominent paper are correct, this recall election is about values. But are they the values of a rich class ….
“And he’s still alive.”
In the call, Biden offered aid if Ghani could publicly project he had a plan to control the spiraling situation in Afghanistan. “We will continue to provide close air support, if we know what the plan is,” Biden said. Days before the call, the U.S. carried out air strikes to support Afghan security forces, a move the Taliban said was in violation of the Doha peace agreement.
Reuters
When Taliban fighters seized control of Kabul two weeks ago, the invading units made a beeline for two critical targets: the headquarters of the National Security Directorate and the Ministry of Communications.
Their aim — recounted by two Afghan officials who had been briefed separately on the raid — was to secure the files of intelligence officers and their informers, and to obtain the means of tracking the telephone numbers of Afghan citizens. That could be disastrous for hundreds of thousands of people who had been working to counter the Taliban threat.
NYT
But it also contains details on the individuals’ military specialty and career trajectory, as well as sensitive relational data such as the names of their father, uncles, and grandfathers, as well as the names of the two tribal elders per recruit who served as guarantors for their enlistment. This turns what was a simple digital catalogue into something far more dangerous, according to Ranjit Singh, a postdoctoral scholar at the nonprofit research group Data & Society who studies data infrastructures and public policy. He calls it a sort of “genealogy” of “community connections” that is “putting all of these people at risk.”
MIT Technology Review
On Saturday night I had just sat down to have a drink with a friend when he got a call. He apologized for having to take it, but it was urgent: it was about the Afghan women’s orchestra. They were stuck in Kabul and desperate to get out. He was involved in the effort to extract them.
Bari Weiss
Joe Biden “will remember” comments about his mental acuity emanating from senior figures in the UK, and will “bear a grudge” against Britain, sources told the Telegraph
Telegraph
President Joe Biden said Friday that China was withholding “critical information” on the origins of Covid-19 after the US intelligence community said it did not believe the virus was a bioweapon — but remained split on whether it escaped from a lab.
Yahoo
Pakistan, nominally a U.S. partner in the war, was the Afghan Taliban’s main patron, and sees the Taliban’s victory as its own. But now what does it do with its prize?
NYT
The US president has also reaffirmed the 31 August deadline for troops to leave Afghanistan and says forces will fly out as many people as possible before that date.
SBS
But with no “smoking gun” and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence … international scientists tasked with studying the virus’ origins warned Wednesday that another crucial window is “closing fast”: the shrinking opportunity for any thorough scientific study to be completed. As time wears on, potential evidence wanes, and tracing back biologic breadcrumbs will yield diminishing returns, said more than ten of the authors of a World Health Organization-led report that is urging action to “fast-track the follow-up scientific work required” for better answers by the WHO.
ABC News
