Refugees Will Have to Deal With the Rising American Taliban
There were a jillion hot takes on the Taliban’s swift takeover of Afghanistan. Everybody (almost) agrees that we need to get those that want to leave out of there. It's one thing to get them out. It's another to resettle them. Remember, our State Department and Immigration services were all but decimated by the Former Guy.
So-called experts spent Monday blaming anybody they could think of for what I think we all would agree was a disastrous change of governments.
There was, in fact, an all-but-done deal allowing for transition of power between the Taliban and the former Afghan government, which fell apart after then-president Ashraf Ghani snuck out of the country without informing his negotiating team, according to the Associated Press.
President Biden appeared at the White House shortly after midday (Pacific time) and said he stood by his decision to pull troops out.
Yet the president said the rapid end of the Afghan government only vindicated his decision, noting how the Afghan army surrendered to the Taliban.
“American troops cannot and should not be fighting the war, and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” Biden said.
Biden, who is viewed as an experienced foreign policy hand dating to his decades-long career in the Senate, including as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, expressed confidence in his decision and said he was prepared to take the heat.
It was refreshing to see a president not play a blame game.
Personally, I think MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace hit the nail on the head:
“95% of the American people will agree with everything [President Biden] just said. 95% of the press covering this White House will disagree."
Obviously, there remains much to be done in terms of getting refugees out of Afghanistan and resettled around the world. All those folks who’ve been wringing their hands over how this situation compares to the fall of Saigon need to be reminded that the post war resettlement of Vietnamese was ultimately a successful endeavor.
We have done this before, and, while far from perfect, it worked out for just about all parties concerned.
The Refugee Act of 1980 created a legal framework for admitting a large number of refugees in response to the second wave of refugees. It defined the roles and responsibilities of various federal agencies involved in the process, and created the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program in order to expedite the process and to help secure employment. ...If we only hadn't of shut down most of our refugee bureaucracies in the name of keeping America White Enough for Stephen Miller.
https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1427425230146916352?s=20
I think the biggest problem Afghan refugees will face will be the American equivalent of the Taliban. People from that part of the world look different, are coming from a place with distinct customs, and will be -gasp!- not wealthy.
Everyday garden variety racism has been and remains a challenge to previous waves of immigrants, and now that it’s fashionable in some circles to be openly white nationalist, we can expect some tough times ahead.
In a larger sense, what’s terrifying --or should be-- to everyday Americans is the open embrace of the Afghan Taliban’s social perspectives by elements of the domestic alt-right. Thus far, the silence from their brethren in the respectable side of the Republican Party has been deafening.
https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1427391226643456006?s=20
Here's Ben Makuch, writing at Vice about the far right celebrating the Taliban:
While much of the world has watched in horror at the swift Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, far-right internet hordes and extremists linked to neo-Nazi terror groups are applauding the fundamentalist insurgents.
“I think Islam is poisonous,” posted an account linked to a former Proud Boys network on Telegram, an encrypted app widely used by the far right. “BUT, these farmers and minimally trained men fought to take their nation back from [world governments]. They took back their national religion as law, and executed dissenters. Hard not to respect that.”
Many of these posts were blatantly antisemitic and celebrated the Taliban’s resistance to a global Jewish cabal, a racist and inaccurate trope commonly cited on Telegram.
“If white men in the West had the same courage as the Taliban, we would not be ruled by Jews currently,” said the same Proud Boys-linked post, viewed close to 2,500 times.
It gets even worse as one ventures into the social media sewers inhabited by the right’s “influencers.”
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So, have we as a nation become that which we said was a stain upon humanity and fought a forever war over?
Or are we willing to commit to a better planet?
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https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1426985523512545280?s=20
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