cards

war merchants

JACK KEANE HAS had a busy week.

The retired four-star general has been making the cable news rounds, offering scathing criticism of the White House in wake of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, he appeared on Fox News, where he told host Harris Faulkner that the administration “made a terrible mistake in pulling our troops out and giving the Taliban the opportunity to take the country over.”

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a June 16 summit meeting with President Biden, objected to any role for American forces in Central Asian countries, senior U.S. and Russian officials said, undercutting the U.S. military’s efforts to act against new terrorist dangers after its Afghanistan withdrawal. 

no escape...

Curfews, more mask rules, and limits to exercising — the NSW government has introduced a raft of new restrictions as the state's COVID-19 outbreak continues to balloon.

Most of the new rules will come into effect at 12:01am on Monday, August 23.

fried

Australia’s unemployment rate has fallen to 4.6% in July, down from 4.9%, defying expectations the economy would lose jobs due to the greater Sydney lockdown.

In July the Australian economy added 2,200 jobs and the number of unemployed people fell by 39,900, but the Australian Bureau of Statistics has warned the falling unemployment rate is not a sign of a strong jobs market.

Most of the improvement in unemployment was driven by a decrease in the participation rate from 62.2% to 62%, as people dropped out of the labour market.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Taliban have agreed to allow “safe passage” from Afghanistan for civilians hoping to join a U.S.-directed airlift from the capital, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser said Tuesday, although a timetable for completing the evacuation of Americans, Afghan allies and possibly other civilians has yet to be worked out with the country’s new rulers.

Watch the news briefing in the video player (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1v-kiYdKQQ&t=1s).

horrible

‘Too little, too late’ is one of the Morrison Government’s defining characteristics.

From an abject lack of preparation for Australia’s worst bushfire season despite repeated warnings; failure to build dedicated quarantine facilities recommended by Morrison’s appointed adviser Jane Halton; being stingy in securing a diverse range of vaccines when other countries were doing so; and dragging its feet on responding to climate change and the biggest transformation in energy and transport in 100 years; the Morrison Government is perpetually caught flat footed on every major policy challenge.

see nothing

lithium

When Taliban fighters entered Kabul on Aug. 15, they didn’t just seize control of the Afghan government. They also gained the ability to control access to huge deposits of minerals that are crucial to the global clean energy economy.

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Investigative journalist Azmat Khan, who has reported extensively in Afghanistan, says President Joe Biden has not yet addressed the chaos unleashed by the collapse of the Afghan government. In remarks on Monday, Biden “really focused on the decision to end the war” and ignored criticism about chaos at the Kabul airport and the abandonment of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. over the last 20 years.

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Tonight (18/08/2021), Leigh Sales on the Seven Thirty report (7:30) on ABC-TV interviewed John Howard who of course is still fondly enamoured with "the National Interest" and his decision to go to war blah blah blah... I suppose you can see that pathetic little man wriggles out of seeing the damage done while pouring glory upon himself at: https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/former-prime-minister-john-howard-speaks-to-7.30/13501812

zb

In view of the sad news in Afghanistan, we [Les Crises] stand out from this important interview of 1998, which it is fascinating to see that it has had no impact in our collective memory.

Recall that Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Carter's adviser on security affairs - and that Barack Obama appointed him foreign affairs adviser during his presidential campaign ... See also this post on his famous book The Grand Chessboard.

Interview:

mugs

How do empires end? The answer seems to be what Mike Campbell says in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when he’s asked how he went bankrupt: “gradually, then suddenly.”

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The scenes at Kabul airport are reminiscent of the chaos in Saigon in 1975 when pro-American Vietnamese desperately tried to flee before the arrival of communist forces. So how does the US’s campaign in Afghanistan compare with the Vietnam war?

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a US broadcaster at the weekend: "This is not Saigon."

But military historians might beg to differ.