- James Golby served as a special advisor in the office of Vice President Mike Pence.
- He spent 20 years in the US Army and deployed twice in Iraq.
- Last fall, he said Donald Trump was leaving behind "an unsustainable presence in
Afghanistan ."
A Trump administration advisor warned late last year that President Donald Trump's decision to leave just 2,500 troops in Afghanistan - and his telegraphed desire to get out whether or not the Taliban chose to abide by its agreement with the US - would leave American forces vulnerable to an attack.
"Perhaps by design, perhaps by incompetence, perhaps out of sheer spite or arrogance, Trump has created the circumstances for another Bay of Pigs, Black Hawk Down, or Benghazi," James Golby, who served as a special advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, wrote in a $4 for
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On Thursday, more than 60 Afghans were killed in suicide attacks outside Hamid Karzai
Golby, a US Army veteran who is a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, took issue with $4 because, he wrote, he would be "leaving behind an unsustainable presence in Afghanistan, a crisis for the Afghan people, and a mess for the Biden-Harris administration."
-Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) $4
More than 5,000 Afghan civilians were killed or injured in the first half of 2021 - the most since records started being kept in 2009, $4, with anti-government forces accounting for 64% of the bloodshed. In May, a terrorist attack in Kabul outside a secondary killed more than 50 people, mostly young girls, $4.
President
Though Biden does not bear responsibility for the large $4 of Special Immigrant Visa applicants created by his predecessor, refugee advocates had $4 - four months before the fall of Kabul - $4 for the administration to begin mass airlifts of vulnerable Afghans, using his power to grant humanitarian "parole" to bypass the State Department bureaucracy.
Biden elected not to do that until after Kabul fell, though he did authorize a modest surge of US forces just before the collapse, approving the $4. In part, $4, those calls were rejected because the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani requested that he hold off so as to not harm morale and to avoid deploying more troops ahead of the complete withdrawal - but also, $4, because he was wary of the "political impact" posed by a "large number of Afghan refugees flowing into the United States."
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