That's it!

All right, let's get started here Saturday, 12.01 pm.

It is August 21, 2021, BK here coming at you guys from San Diego, yet one more week in a row.

Not going to lie the steel trap mind again, not too much sleep last night, but we're going to power through it.

Is that's what we do. Please follow me on social media. You can check out my Twitter at Bravo Kilo actual and check out my Instagram at Bravo Kilo actual.

And you know what I got to say right off the bat. This is one of the hardest weeks I ever had to try to find interesting stuff from around the world because right now everything is about Afghanistan, you know, and all the international news sources I check out.

It's just all Afghanistan. It did come up with some good stuff, but of course that is where we are going to start with the live updates and I'll run through those updates quick.

And then I'll kind of go through some of the articles that happened throughout the week that were of note. And of course tons and tons of audio clips for you guys.

So what is the latest on the Afghanistan situation? Well, the Taliban has arrived in Kabul for talks, the leader that is.

And that is Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and I have more about him a little bit later. He has arrived in Kabul to begin talks with former president, Hamid Karzai and other politicians and negotiations are going on right now.

One spokesman, the deputy of the Taliban's cultural affairs committee, God named Amadullah Wasek.

He said Taliban officials for now are largely talking among themselves in preparation for the negotiations.

And he went on to say quote, then we will talk with other parties to form an inclusive government, acceptable to all Afghans.

And he sounds just like that. Other Taliban leaders met on Saturday with Karzai. And this is all to discuss what life is going to be like under the Taliban and what it's going to look like going forward.

And as these talks got underway, those scenes of havoc are still playing out near the Kabul airport where thousands of Afghans are throwing trying to find a space on one of those evacuation flights.

Now since capturing Kabul, the Taliban you've probably seen have sought to rebrand themselves as more moderate, including urging women to join their government and pledging stability at home.

But a lot of people in Afghanistan and abroad are deeply skeptical of this supposed transformation.

They remember the Taliban when they governed in the late 1990s and that's when they won that civil war that ensued in the post-Russia vacuum.

And those people remember the Taliban's mode of governance and they imposed a harsh interpretation of Islam that deprived those women of basic rights like education and they had mass executions, floggings, amputations.

So remember the Taliban is calling their new country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And Baradar, one of the group's founders, he began making his way back to Afghanistan this week from Qatar.

And so he, if you don't know already, Baradar was a long time lieutenant to the Taliban's founding supreme leader, Mullah Omar. Remember him, his full name is Mullah Muhammad Omar.

Oh, excuse me, Mullah Mohammed Omar. And he's quite popular in the Taliban rank and file. Baradar also acted as chief negotiator in high level peace talks in Qatar.

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