I guess the days of ‘never negotiate with terrorists’ are over.
It’s being reported this morning that Biden sent his CIA Director to secretly meet with the head of the Taliban in Kabul yesterday:
JUST IN ? CIA Director Bill Burns held a secret meeting with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar in Kabul, the highest-level face-to-face encounter between the Taliban and Biden administration since the militants seized the Afghan capital – WaPo
— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) August 24, 2021
Here’s more from Daily Mail:
Joe Biden’s CIA Director William Burns went to Kabul on Monday for a secret meeting with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The discussions, the Tuesday report notes, likely involved the August 31 deadline for all U.S. military presence to be out of Afghanistan – including ending the evacuation of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies.
Burns was dispatched to the capital city of Afghanistan as the administration continues to grapple with a chaotic scene at the airport and struggles to evacuate Americans from Kabul.
Baradar is now playing the role of the Taliban’s counterpart to Burns 11 years after he was arrested in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation, which put him in prison for eight years.
The president will join other G7 leaders on a virtual call Tuesday morning for an emergency meeting on Afghanistan after NATO begged Biden to re-think his plan to avert a humanitarian disaster.
He will then provide an update in remarks Tuesday afternoon and is expected to decide within the next 24 hours whether he will keep the military in Afghanistan beyond the deadline.
I’m sure it was a secret meeting and for good reason, given the dangers of sending your top CIA head into a terrorist controlled country. Whether Burns was able to buy Biden more time to get our people and our allies out of the country remains to be seen.
What happened in the meeting, however, is unknown. I’m sure they asked the Taliban nicely.. like “pretty please, with sugar on top” to let all of the Americans out.
In a related bit of good news, the US has actually evacuated over 21,000 people from Afghanistan in the last 24 hours:
Washington pulled off its biggest haul of evacuations since the crisis started over the last 24 hours to early Tuesday morning, with 37 military jets evacuating 21,600 people from Kabul, the White House announced.
But they still don’t know the number of American citizens and Afghan allies stranded on the ground that need evacuating.
‘Since August 14, the U.S. has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of approximately 58,700 people. Since the end of July, we have re-located approximately 63,900 people,’ a White House official said.
From Sunday to early Monday morning, 28 military jets rescued around 10,400 people. The latest numbers reveal that over half of the total evacuations from Afghanistan have taken place in the last two days.
The president is still hesitant, however, to deploy troops outside the Kabul airport because he doesn’t want a Black Hawk Down-style incident, he told commanders last week of the incident where 18 Americans were killed in 1993 during the Somali Civil War.
Biden needs to stop letting his fears control him and let our troops do what they do best. He needs to send them into Kabul to get our people out who are trapped. Period. End of story. If other countries can do it, we sure as hell can do it.
