Your Friday Briefing: U.S. admits flaws in Afghanistan evacuation

April 7, 2023

By Daniel E. Slotnik

Metro Reporter

Good morning. We’re covering U.S. flaws in the evacuation of Afghanistan and calls from France and China for peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

Afghans trying to evacuate outside the Kabul airport in August 2021.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

U.S. admits flaws in Afghanistan evacuation

The U.S. acknowledged that at the end of the Afghanistan war, the government should have started evacuations from the country earlier, a reversal from previous Biden administration statements.

The finding was tucked in a 12-page summary of the government’s review of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which led to the swift collapse of the Afghan government as the Taliban seized control of the country.

As U.S. officials rushed to evacuate people from Kabul’s international airport, with Afghan allies hanging from airplanes amid a life-or-death scramble to escape the country, an Islamic State suicide bomber carried out an attack that killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 U.S. service members.

Details: The summary, produced by the National Security Council and characterized as part of an “independent review,” largely defended the actions of President Biden and his administration. It places heavy blame on actions taken by former President Donald Trump, including his deal with the Taliban to withdraw American troops by the spring of 2021 and his later failure to share relevant transition materials with his successor’s team.

Takeaway: The summary does not directly say that officials made mistakes as they discussed evacuating the country, but it says the government has changed policies to carry out such evacuations sooner when security conditions worsen.

Every detail of the elaborate reception offered by Xi Jinping to Emmanuel Macron seemed intended to flatter the French leader.Ng Han Guan/EPA, via Shutterstock

Xi and Macron call for peace talks

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, and Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, appealed for a rapid return to peace talks to end the war in Ukraine. But Xi did not indicate whether he would use his close relationship with Moscow to push Russia to negotiate.

Greeted with great pomp at the Great Hall of the People, Macron told Xi that he was counting on him “to bring Russia back to reason” on Ukraine. Xi later went some way toward responding positively, and added that China sought “the protection of civilians. Nuclear weapons must not be used, and nuclear war must be avoided.”

His statement marked some implicit distance from Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. But it left unclear whether Xi might put any pressure on Putin to negotiate, as Macron requested, or whether Xi would speak to Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, who said last month that China could be a “partner” in the quest for peace.

Context: There have been no known peace talks between Russia and Kyiv since last April, and both sides have expressed negotiating positions that are anathema to the other.

Taiwan: China condemned the president of Taiwan’s meeting with Kevin McCarthy, the U.S. speaker of the House, in California this week. But Beijing has so far avoided the kind of military escalation that accompanied a visit by Mr. McCarthy’s predecessor to Taiwan last summer.

The changes removed or shrank references to India’s long Muslim history.Noah Seelam/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

India purges textbooks

When Indian children began the school year this week, they were issued textbooks that either watered down or purged key details from India’s past — details that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party finds inconvenient to its Hindu nationalist vision for the country.

The changes took aim at references to the secular foundation of post-colonial India; the 2002 riots in Gujarat, where hundreds of Muslims were killed in days; and links between Hindu extremism and the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi.

Education officials in India said the changes were intended to avoid repetition and reduce the workload on children after the pandemic. Critics argued that the textbooks could give students a warped impression of India’s history.

Context: The textbook revisions follow other efforts by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to erase prominent Muslim influences on India’s history and politics, including the changing of street and city names from Muslim to Hindu.

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