When President Joe Biden declared in April that he intended to end the United States military presence in Afghanistan by the end of the month, he assumed he would have at least six months to ensure an orderly withdrawal of forces before the Taliban took over the country. But yesterday, when the group's fighters entered the capital, Kabul, the US found itself having to send helicopters to extract the last remaining American diplomats from its embassy.
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One doesn't have to look too hard to find the reasons for the collapse. The White House declaration in April that the US would withdraw by the end of August signaled to all the players that the die had been cast. There were mass desertions from the US-trained Afghan army. Some of the deserters rushed to join the Taliban camp. Military bases were abandoned. Bureaucrats and civil servants fled their places of work. More than thirty provinces across Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, one after the other, like dominoes, with no resistance.
Prior to their fall, Abdullah Abdullah, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani's representative to "peace talks" with the Taliban in Qatar, rushed back to Afghanistan to convince his boss that it was all over. He pleaded with Ghani to ask the Taliban to include representatives of the regime in any interim government. Yesterday, it transpired that it was too late.
The American failure to predict the speed at which the dramatic developments in Afghanistan would take place is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the failure of the Western approach. The concept, born in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that a massive military presence of forces and advisers, and an investment of two trillion dollars over a period of two decades, could establish in Afghanistan a democratic, egalitarian, pro-Western country with a modern army, shattered in the face of rigid and uncompromising religious frameworks, tribal traditions and backward governmental culture. Despite the claims that the Taliban is no longer what it used to be, Afghanistan is traveling backward in a time tunnel.
Even without executions and ISIS-style beheadings, the laws of Sharia have not changed. In all of the provinces captured by the Taliban, women have been required to leave their jobs and return home. That is just the start. The fear that Afghanistan will once again become a magnet for terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaida and ISIS is not unfounded.
Nevertheless, President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, a decision supported by the majority of the American people, was the right decision, although it may have come too late. Two decades ago, Biden argued that the chances of success in Afghanistan were minimal. It was, he said, a mission impossible. The ongoing presence of military forces in a country bogged down in a civil war, he said, would come at the intolerable cost of the lives of thousands of American servicemen.
At the same time, the message delivered by the withdrawal is a problematic one. Especially given that there are forces in America who support similar moves for the entire American military presence in the Middle East. American forces, deployed in not particularly large numbers in Iraq, the Gulf states, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere remain a crucial obstacle to Iran's destabilization of the region.
The Middle East is not Afghanistan and Iran is a far more dangerous enemy than the Taliban.
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