Stephen Miller's Role In The Afghan Immigration Mess

 

 

Amid the Republican- wired mainstream media's persistent narrative blaming the Biden Administration for the slow processing of Special Immigrant Visas for Afghan nationals, here's a fact that they'll never focus on or will quickly memory hole:

As the United States potentially abandons tens of thousands of Afghans who helped two decades of military and diplomatic efforts there to the mercies of the Taliban, a single person may deserve more credit than any other: top Trump White House aide and immigration foe Stephen Miller.

Miller, who worked for all four years as former President Donald Trump’s immigration adviser pushing restrictive policies across the board, was instrumental in slowing down the processing of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) for Afghan interpreters, embassy staff and others who are now top targets for Taliban assassination, according to both refugee advocates and those who have worked with him.

“The seeds of the insanity that we’re seeing right now were planted in Stephen Miller‘s brain,” said Matt Zeller, a former Army officer who served in Afghanistan and co-founded the group No One Left Behind, adding that Miller is as much to blame for the deaths of interpreters and others as the Taliban themselves. “He’s complicit in their murders ... He’s brilliant at how evil he is.”  (our emphasis)

Yes, skeevy racist Stephen Miller, who had his hand in every decision involving immigration in the malignant former guy's assministration, including the children in cages policy. As the article notes, Miller is still engaged in whipping up anti- immigrant fear, claiming an influx of Afghan refugees resulting from the malignant former guy's pact with the Taliban would be dangerous for America (and that they don't deserve to be here anyway):

... [O]n Monday, he claimed that most of the Afghans arriving do not deserve the opportunity. “The vast majority of those being evacuated had no role in the U.S. war effort,” he wrote. “As I warned from the outset, Biden is using his disastrous Afghanistan exit — and a gullible media — as the pretext for large-scale resettlement of unvetted Afghan refugees throughout the U.S.”

Of course, the pathological liar must know that the refugees will be vetted before they arrive in the U.S. The critical need is to get as many, if not all, of the Afghans who must leave their country out now. Those that can be admitted to the U.S. are arriving, and those that await further processing are being housed abroad.

But, it all comes back to what former Army cavalry officer Spencer Sullivan said about Miller's role in jamming up the SIV program:

“My guess is that is in line with Stephen Miller’s policy of keeping brown people out of the country.”

Good guess. 

 

The New Keyboard Commandos

 

Daniel Marans has a lead article in the HuffPo on the press' new belligerence regarding Afghanistan after years of benign neglect. If you've been watching the hair-on-fire coverage of the chaotic situation in Kabul or President Biden's news conferences, you'll know what Marans is talking about, as he describes here:

"As President Joe Biden ended his news conference on Friday afternoon about the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reporter called out an especially bellicose question.

'Why do you continue to trust the Taliban, Mr. President?' the reporter said.

Notwithstanding the militant group’s poor human rights record and ultra-conservative Islamist ideology, multiple U.S. administrations have successfully negotiated with the Taliban. The Taliban have complex interests. As Biden noted on Friday, the organization is at war with the faction of the self-declared Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which is competing for power in Afghanistan.

But the reporter’s criticism-masquerading-as-query was the culmination of a week’s worth of dramatic finger-pointing and fretting from a Washington press corps that usually prides itself on neutrality."  (our emphasis)

After four plus years of brutal treatment by the former guy and his minions, in which their reputations not to mention their freedom was threatened, one would think the "both sides" impulses of the Beltway media would have subsided. One would be wrong. Marans continues: 

"Although the White House’s failure to foresee the rapid fall of the Afghan government and prepare accordingly has exacerbated the chaos of the U.S. withdrawal, Biden and his allies are furious with what they see as reporters’ and pundits’ unduly hawkish coverage of the exit.

'The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,' said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. 'They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.'” (our emphasis)

As we've pointed out on an almost daily basis (here, here and yesterday) since the fall of Kabul, the press overwhelmingly fails to provide any context to the current situation, perhaps because they were asleep at the switch when the former guy made his deal for withdrawal directly with the Taliban last year (which led to this crisis), or because they think their superficial, lazy, "tough on Biden" narrative will win back some "both sides" cred. It's that mentality that helped get us the former guy and where we are.

QOTD -- The Pentagon's Pravda

 

"... In recent days, much of the mainstream media has comported itself as the Pentagon’s Pravda. Reporters have indignantly asked the White House how it could say that America doesn’t have a vital national security interest in maintaining a military presence near Tajikistan. NBC’s Richard Engel has devoted his Twitter feed to scolding Biden for suggesting that America’s nation-building project in Afghanistan was always hopeless, and that the Kabul government was “basically a failed state.” CNN’s Jim Sciutto lamented on Twitter Wednesday, “Too many times, I’ve witnessed the US military attempt to dutifully carry out difficult & dangerous missions left to them by the miscalculations of civilian leaders.” This sentiment is disconcerting in the abstract, since it seems to suggest that civilian control of the military may be unwise. But it’s even stranger in context. As we learned just two years ago, American military leaders in Kabul systematically lied to the public about how well the war against the Taliban was going, so as to insulate their preferred foreign policy from democratic contestation." -- New York Magazine's Eric Levitz, in "The Media Is Helping Hawks Win the War Over Biden’s Withdrawal." Levitz critiques the actions of both the Biden Administration and the endless war proponents, many of whom can be found in the ranks of media who have become personally invested in the war in Afghanistan (looking at you, Engel, and you, too, Ian Pannell of ABC News).  Perhaps, in addition to their ire being directed solely at the actions of President Biden, they should direct some attention to the military leaders with whom they've become cozy, who lied to them for years about how the war was going.  We won't hold our breath, though.

Some Context On The Collapse In Afghanistan

Adam Silverman provides a reality check and some context as to the precipitous collapse of Afghan security forces, reality and context you won't get from the clickbait, Republican- wired media:

...[A] number of the commanders in the ANDSF, both military and police, were either selling everything they could to the Taliban to pay their Soldiers and police officers who were not actually being paid, were embezzling the money, and/or took a payout from the Taliban not to fight.

We have four documentable, verifiable reasons for why the Taliban were able to so quickly and easily retake Afghanistan and not a single one of them was the result of something the Biden administration did.

1. The Trump administration negotiated the US’s abject surrender to the Taliban
2. Ghani issued a stand down order to the ANDSF before fleeing Afghanistan to save his own hide
3. We paid to train, equip, and sustain a significant number of Afghan military and police personnel that didn’t exist anywhere except on the payroll
4. Because Ghani’s government wasn’t paying its soldiers or police, or because its senior military and police leadership were stealing the funding, some Afghan military and police leaders and personnel cut deals with the Taliban not to fight in exchange for money

I think it is important to stipulate that reasons 3 and 4 – the no shows on the payroll and the misappropriation of salaries – began when George W Bush was president and then continued until last week when we began the final withdrawal.

It is also important to recognize that things did not go smoothly last week through this past Monday. It is also important to recognize that things are going smoothly now.

Silverman provides more detail and documentation at the link.

In his interview with ABC News yesterday, President Biden said he didn't know how withdrawal from Afghanistan (negotiated by the Trump Assministration) could have happened without chaos ensuing.  Given the facts Silverman and others present, neither do we.  What matters now is staying put until we get the people out that need to get out, a process that, as Silverman notes, is going more smoothly now but needs the Administration's focus and top priority.

As an aside, the Administration and Democrats shouldn't stop playing the "blame game" (let's call it a "reality check," though) as long as the puerile media and their Republican talking- point- providers continue to do so without any context or memory beyond the past 30 days.  These folks are also happy to use Democrats critiquing the withdrawal chaos as their shield to attack Biden ("see, it's bipartisan!"). Rather than giving them this permission slip, maybe those Dems should just sit down and refrain from piling on until we know more facts and we finish the evacuations.